As a class, we are reading Alan Paton's "Cry, the Beloved Country" before we head off to South Africa. Just as a little bit of background, "Cry, the Beloved Country" was originally published in 1948, the year that the National Party was voted into office and began enacting apartheid laws. The story is about a Zulu minister and his family and how they live in the racial division that was prevalent before it was formally institutionalized.

One passage that stood out to me as I was reading, was this quote from Msimangu:

"The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again. The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief . . . this it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are the tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten."

I think there is a lot of truth to what he says. For South Africa, I don't think the dissolution of tribal structure was tragic. In fact, I think that it in and of itself could have been a good thing. For example, I think the tribal structure creates a mentality of us against them that was partly responsible, for much of the violence that occurred in South Africa both before and during apartheid. But what is tragic, as Msimangu said, is that the brokenness was not mended. There was no unification to replace the collapse of each individual structure as there should have been. What is tragic, is that the white man came in and destroyed the tribal system, not to unify the country, but to exploit the native people.

So many times, in every sector of life, we see that sometimes, things have to be bulldozed in order for something better to be built. At school, we learn simplified concepts that we can comprehend at a beginning level, and then as we progress, our teachers tell us "remember what the told you when ...? Well, that was a lie. This is how things really are," only to have the exact same thing happen the next year, until finally, we are able to understand things as they really, really are. On BYU campus, we have all watched as Heritage Halls--my freshman home, my mother's freshman home, and my grandmother's freshman home--has been torn down to make room for new freshman housing. Is it sad? Absolutely! There was so much history made in those buildings, so many good memories that I won't be able to share with my kids, but was the change necessary? When the main pipe lines are rusting away and leaking all over your stuff in the basement storage, I would say yes. Growing pains have to happen at some point. That's the way of life. But they should be able to happen ethically.

What will be interesting for me as I go to South Africa will be to see how these sentiments have evolved over the years. Do the Xhosa and Zulu still long for the way things were? Do they still blame the white man for how things happened? In the American South where I grew up, I saw a lot of black people that felt entitled to social privileges because of the history of their enslaved ancestors. While the white people have moved on, many of them have still not been able to. Why is this? Is that how things are in South Africa? If so, what are they waiting for in order to be satisfied? I think this is a sad concept, because what people like that don't realize, is that by waiting for satisfaction, they are only hurting themselves. In order to find that satisfaction, they have to look to themselves. Accept the past, and move on with their future. I think that even if material "satisfaction" were given, people still wouldn't be satisfied. Nothing material can repair such intensive hurts. People have to learn how to forgive and forget. As Msimangu says later, "there is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love."