February Just Post

Mad and Jen have just put up this month’s Just Posts. And for this month, I decided I would nominate a post. It seems even more appropriate this month, given that the Thinking Bloggers Award was making its rounds. And while it is true that my nomination for the Just Post honors the person who sent that award my way, it is a testament to the fact that she makes me think too.

When I was in school, somewhere around age 12, I had a classmate who had lived in South Africa for a while. One story he told has particularly stayed with me. He had a black friend who would come and play at his house from time to time. On one particular occasion, his friend forgot his papers when he left to go back home. He was picked up and detained. Even when my classmate and his family took the forgotten papers to the authorities and explained what had happened, his friend was not immediately released.

Then in high school, I had a friend whose mother had grown up in South Africa. She always struck me as a very proper, British woman, which is where most of her family was. But then I found out that she had been involved in the anti-apartheid movement and, in fact, had known Steve Biko, though she left South Africa for the US before the height of protests.

Recently, Cinnamon Gurl over at Write About Here wrote about her travels in South Africa. Her posts introduced me to the country itself, though politics were not entirely absent. One post in particular stood out: Langa means sun. With Sugar Daddy and Swee’pea, she took a township tour which mixed history with the present. As I read all of this, I got a different view of apartheid’s effects than I had ever had before. And it also made me realize how far there is to go—policy and theory are one thing, reality and action are another. What struck me even more is how Sin accomplished this: through simple observations and narration. No lecturing, no sermonizing. But completely thought provoking.