Title page

UNLEARNING

My Turbulent Journey with Western Institutional Church.

First published 2010

In terms of Copyright Act, No 98 of 1978, as amended, no part of this book may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the author.

Cover Photo: Sarah Howse

Cover Design: Sean Tucker

ISBN: 978-0-620-48477-0

For Uncle Les

A word of thanks to all those who helped shape this book, either through taking the time to be a sounding board for my crazy rants, or for the hard, tedious work of helping with edits. I appreciate it all.

Special thanks to:

Carole Tucker

Mark Tucker

Sarah Howse

Philen Naidu

Doug Place

Charles De Jongh

Chris Luyt

Eugene Erasmus

TABLE OF CONTENTS

01 Just Turned 30

02 First Contact

03 Standing Together

04 Changing Personality

05 Conservation

06 Becoming a Pharisee

07 Bohemian Troop

08 The Star of the Show

09 Three Guides

10 Iconoclast

11 Behave

12 Christian Voodoo

13 The Final Straw

14 A Persistent Creator

15 Missing the Point

16 Relearning

“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”

Antisthenes

Greek Philosopher of Athens

Disciple of Socrates, 360BC

“When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before.”

Henry David Thoreau

American Essayist, Poet and Philosopher, 1860

“The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those who cannot learn, unlearn, relearn.”

Alvin Toffler

American Sci-Fi Author, 1960

JUST TURNED 30

I’m sitting in a trendy little coffee shop over looking False Bay. Cape Town is beautiful this time of year. The skies are clear and the hot African sun beats down on white sands. Fortunately the heat is tempered by the cool breeze coming in off the cold Benguela current.

Outside the window the beach front is bustling with activity. I can see surfers clad in wetsuits ready to brave the freezing waters for the thrill of riding a wave, and the even greater thrill of swimming in waters which boast the greatest concentration of Great White Sharks in the world. There’s a guy flying past on a kind of off-road skateboard, propelled along by a big parachute-looking kite. Lucky sunbathers, who don’t have to be at work for whatever reason, are able to take advantage of the amazing weather. My focus drifts out to the expanse of the bay, flanked by mountains on either side, like some panoramic shot from Lord of the Rings. After a while, I’m not really looking any more as my mind’s eye flies out beyond the horizon to the vast and frigid expanse of water that stretches to Antarctica.

I just turned 30. Hooray for me! I feel like people have to take me seriously now. Of course I know they won’t, but it helps my flagging confidence to daydream that it may just be true. I’m no longer a 20-something. Apparently, it often happens at these “milestone birthdays” that you do a stock take of your life to this point. My mind has clicked into this mode and it’s been a bit unnerving. As I look back over my journey I get a flood of mixed emotions. I’m an adult, and I suppose at this point I should be gaining some momentum on my life-path, but I feel completely stalled.

On the one hand I feel positive about the fact that I seem to have done everything I wanted to. What I mean by that is that if my ‘17 year old self’ could see me sitting here in this coffee shop, and know where I have been and what I have done, I think he would be really impressed; his expectations exceeded, his dreams realised in flesh. I always wanted to be a Pastor, Priest, Minister or whatever you happen to call it. I have worked in 7 churches up until now and a number of other ministries. I’ve become quite a professional. I can preach, lead worship and do all that other churchy stuff well. People are always “very impressed”. I have studied and achieved two undergraduate degrees, which I think makes my Mom more proud than it does me. I have run events for teens here in South Africa that have been packed with hundreds of young people. I have led two bands which have been able to play for thousands of people, and I’ve recorded a demo CD with my own songs, which I still have to do something with. On top of it all I have been ordained and been accepted as a Pastor, so surely I have made it.

Done.

Check.

Now I just have to sit back and enjoy it.

I should feel happy.

But I don’t.

If I’m honest I feel sad. I feel really lonely and misunderstood. I feel disappointed, disillusioned, and I just want to run away. I’m confused. This is not what I thought it would be. It’s like I have given everything up to get into a room full of promise, only to eventually be allowed to walk through a door that leads to a dry, dusty ‘nowhere’; like I put all my eggs in one basket only to discover it’s a food blender. I definitely made my share of mistakes along the way, but I don’t think the rose-coloured glasses fell off because of anything I did. In short, I feel like I have had my eyes opened to what God really thinks is important, and what the Institutional Church thinks is important, and they just don’t line up.

Over the course of my journey I have been at once the celebrity insider, and felt like an outsider in the church. I have been one of its leaders but often treated like a foreigner, and now it’s all over and I’m reeling from it all. I know well that this kind of story is nothing new. I’m a walking statistic which points to a burgeoning problem. Sadly stats are too easy to dismiss, so I’m offering my story to put an ordinary human face on the problems we face as institutional church, hoping it will make some kind of difference.

This is part an apology, to all those who won’t go near churches. It will unfortunately be an honest confirmation of many of your fears. But I hope I manage to convince you that ‘institutional church’ is not God. I have a family who aren’t church goers and one of my biggest fears is that my turbulent interaction with churches has muddied the waters as they think about God. The two are not the same thing. God is good and at work in the world, it’s just that those who claim to follow Him often do a terrible job of being a picture of what He is about.

It’s also a Prophetic rant, about where I believe the Church is missing it. I’m no spiritual giant, but I think I have jumped through enough hoops to write this. Someone has to say this stuff in the hope that we can be honest about our misgivings and get back to what we’re meant to be doing, and it might as well be me. I hope you don’t find a judgmental or arrogant attitude in these pages. You’ll see that I often only had myself to blame. I just feel I have to tell you what I see, and hopefully in the telling we can start to think about a way forward. After all ‘Church’, when done right, is still a brilliant idea, perhaps the best one we have.

So this is my thwarted journey to date.

Thanks for sitting with me as I try to work out what happened, and what it all means.

I could use the company.

SHROPSHIRE

ENGLAND

FIRST CONTACT

Green.

Forests of huge oak trees.

Knee-high expanses of fern.

Carpets of thick, lush, green grass.

And in the middle of all this was a stately 19th century English manor house. It was a dusty red colour with steel grey roofs and all its windows and door frames outlined in white. It came complete with rolling lawns and statued fountains all covered in weeds and lilies. The place made me feel very small indeed, but maybe it had more to do with the particular day.

I remember the crunch of the gravel under my feet as we made our way to the front door. I stumbled along on my 9 year-old, clumsy stick legs, wanting to put my hand in my Mom’s as she walked beside me, but feeling too conscious of the opinions of those through the doors ahead. We walked into the room and I was immediately hit by the deep musty smell of a building with history. The floors were a dark wood; heavily varnished. There was a grand fireplace to my right with a huge gold framed mirror above it. A grand piano to my left. The ceilings were a brilliant, hospital white with ornate swirls and flowery patterns breaking the monotony of the flat surface, as if a very vigorous garden was being grown on the first floor, threatening to burst the plaster and make its way into the foyer. The room was filled with the hubbub of chatter. Each set of parents were adorned with their own scared child, but I was sure none of theirs was as scared as the one my Mom boasted. After a time a man came down the big staircase at the other end of the hall and everyone rounded at the sound of the booming thump of his heavy shoes on the hollow wood. They all turned and the chatter died down, except for one young girl, too slow to realize what was happening to stop her protests about being there. The kind of awkward moment you would expect followed. As the sound of her whining echoed off the walls, the man on the stairs looked their way and smiled kindly, cracking some joke that only the adults in the room seemed to find funny. “Welcome to our school”, he began.

The speech felt long, but in my mind it could have gone on forever because I knew that after it was done my Mom would have to leave and the next time I would see her would be three months from then. The following day she would get on a plane and fly back to Africa and I would have to summon the courage to make it through this on my own.

The school building was a proper old Victorian residence. It had four floors, including the cellar. The top floor consisted of the boys dorms which were spacious enough to have 10 or 12 of us in each. Outside the windows there were very wide gutters which ran the outer edge of the roof, and even though the teachers told us many times not to go out there, they were wasting their breath. The Matrons used to patrol the halls after we went to bed, so sneaking out the window and crawling along the outside of the building, three stories up, to knock on your mates’ window a few dorms down was too tempting to resist. How there wasn’t a headline in the local paper about some child falling thirty feet to their death I don’t know.

The girls weren’t so lucky. Their dormitories were a set of converted stables down the end of a dirt track away from the main building. The jokes are too obvious to make now, but they weren’t when I was that age.

The floor below was one we saw little of. Apart from the Headmaster’s residence it was taken up by the staff room and a couple of offices. The place was basically out of bounds unless you were in trouble, or had to ask some uncomfortable question. Any child entering that floor seemed to do so with an odd slinking walk and drooped head.

The ground floor was taken up by the dining rooms, the foyer where we did our homework in the evenings, the library, the kitchens, the chapel, and a couple of common rooms. All of them had the same wooden floors, high ceilings and massive windows which looked out onto the grounds. I’m sure if I went back there today it would seem very small, but my child-sized mind saw a very grand set of rooms which made me feel dwarfed and nervous. In some places it seemed to be just a confusion of corridors as if the building had grown as a series of architectural afterthoughts. It made for great fun when chasing each other through the halls, which was of course strictly forbidden.

Down below were the cellars. You would descend a narrow stone staircase next to the kitchens into the dark bowels of the school. They had become the boys changing rooms and showers. I hated it down there because, let’s face it, most boys are scared of change rooms at that age. Save the few irritatingly confident jock-types, the rest of us are left struggling to use our towels as shields for our privacy whilst trying to change and not show our ‘bits’ to the world for the ridicule we were sure would come. The only cool thing about the place was that you would exit on the other side through a set of those big wooden double swing doors which lay almost parallel to the ground, like the kind you would see people rushing through to hide from the Nazi’s in those old World War 2 movies. I couldn’t seem to walk up those steps, I had to take them at a run for some reason, and after the awkwardness of the dark interior you would emerge into the sunlight, enjoying the sense of lightness freedom brings. Of course for this to work, I had to put out of my mind that I would be back there in a couple of hours for shower time, which would be even worse.

Most excitingly, the school was surrounded by stunning woodland which we were allowed to go off and explore during our free time. I loved the woods. If ever I had more than half an hour to myself I would run through them, jumping over streams and tearing through the trees, all the while imagining myself in hot pursuit of some evil villain who I would effortlessly vanquish. At one stage my friends and I put a substantial amount of effort into building an underground ‘fort’. We found a hole in the side of a mound which we widened over a few months, making it into a little room. When we found an old VW bug boot cover we thanked our lucky stars and used it as the grand door to our lair. We creatively called it ‘TBE’, which stood for ‘Tunnel Below Earth’. Ok, maybe it wasn’t that creative but I suppose we were only ten. We never spent that much time in it either thinking about it because it just ended up being four of us cramped into this tiny space with our elbows in each others faces, not being able to breath. But, to us, it was worth defending to the death. Other groups in the school soon heard about our enviable base, admittedly because we deliberately talked about it too loud whenever we could, and they were soon there to challenge us. We had some epic stick fight battles in the trees surrounding our makeshift home in the woods, and to our credit never lost possession of it.

In any boarding school it’s important to make some sort of name for yourself so you don’t end up just being one of those fringe people who always gets overlooked. I worked two claims to celebrity in the school which I milked for all they were worth. The first was that I was fearless on a BMX bike. I would set up bigger and bigger ramps and then announce at meal times that I was going to jump after we had finished eating. I often pulled crowds of 30-40 pupils eager to see me come clattering down in a cloud of dust, and maybe even break a bone. I didn’t mind. They were there to watch me and that’s all I cared about. I did, on one occasion, snap one of the wheels off its mounting when I landed too hard but I never did wipe out badly enough to hurt myself properly, just some cuts and scrapes. I was lucky.

My second claim to fame was that I was the kid from Africa. I was always treated with a bit more respect because if I could make it in Africa I must be tougher than I looked. Little did they know that I lived in a clean suburb in Maseru, in a house much like any of their’s, but there was no ways I was going to tell them that. I quickly realised they had some pretty naive assumptions about my home continent and they could be easily manipulated for both my amusement and my reputation. I made up some of the most ridiculous stuff. I told them that when I flew home for holidays the plane couldn’t make it that close to my village and so we had to land on a strip in the bush where people from my village had the elephants ready to ride the week’s trek, over the dangerous savannah, to my home. I told them how difficult it was to keep a mud hut clean, how I had fought a lion off with a stick once (which obviously gave me huge ‘forest cred’ for our wars in the woods). I have a scar on my left forearm from a botched TB injection I had in Botswana, but I let my friends know of the night I didn’t check my hammock for scorpions and how this scar showed the heavy price I paid. I also told them that I was being taught by a witch doctor to heal using medicinal plants. Anytime one of my friends had a cut or scrape from running around in the woods they would come to me and ask for help. I begin searching the ground nearby for ‘the right plant’ to heal my poor injured companion. I’m sure I inevitably just chose the nearest bush. I would then grab a handful of leaves, crush them in my palms, spit in the mess I was making, and then rub it on my friend’s cut saying something African sounding like, “Dis muti make you OK”. Of course it usually just served to make their cut go red and itch like crazy, but when they complained I just said that it was a sign they were healing fast.

I was also a bit of a messed up kid. I’m not sure I knew it though. I remember my Mom sitting me down during one of my first trips back to Africa and telling me that my English teacher had written to her, asking her for my story because he was worried about me. I remember thinking it was an odd thing to ask, and suddenly I had the horrible feeling that I was the only one who didn’t know I was weird, and everyone else was just humouring me all the time. It took me a good few years to shake that feeling.

Anyway, my Mom wrote back to my teacher and explained to him that my father had left home a few years before and that it had hit me hard because he had been my hero. She told him how she had recently gotten remarried to a man who had told me to my face that he had no interest in being my father.

I was only nine. Not really old enough to process these big themes yet. I was in a school half way around the world from my family, and even when I was at home I had the sneaking suspicion I was part of a new family where I was more of an appendage than the center of attention, as I’m sure most kids do who are brought into a second marriage.

I felt very alone.

I think when the inner turmoil of this whole situation set in I went looking for some kind of connection. Every male teacher felt like a possible father version of a nicotine patch, but of course they all had to put the walls up with me before it became unhealthy for them, and that hurt every time. This phase didn’t last long and I quickly gave up on people and began to look for something more.

As I mentioned the school had a Chapel on the ground floor, right next to the library. I grew to like the Chapel. It was much like any of the other rooms actually with wooden floors, high ceilings and big windows. It just had rows of pews in it and an altar instead of the normal furniture you saw around the place. It was a Catholic school which meant that Mass was held early every morning, and rather than begrudge the obligation, I even started to like it. It felt special and significant to make the little cross on your forehead with the holy water as you entered. I even liked the little bow you made in front of the altar as you passed. Whoever or whatever this was for, must be very important. To this day I couldn’t tell you why the Chapel felt like the best and safest place to be, but it did. I would go in there during the day and just sit on my own, feeling the atmosphere. I think some rooms carry a sense of themselves if you sit long and quietly enough to notice, and I liked the sense this one carried.

As I sat through Mass after Mass, and listened to what people said, I formed a loose idea of this God they were on about, and I liked Him. Maybe He was the one who would show me how to get through this life. Maybe He was the companion and guide I had been looking for. This said, I was keenly aware, even at that age, that it was uncool to have an imaginary friend. I remember struggling often with this new found sense of a possible divinity. I flip-flopped between looking deprecatingly at those who were into the ‘God thing’ and my own longings for it to be true. But still I kept coming back to that Chapel just to be there.

One day a new Priest arrived, and everything changed. Father John was an elderly man who seemed perpetually grumpy. The first time we saw him was one morning when he came in and took Mass. We were introduced to this man who forced an obviously fake smile until the headmaster was done with his introduction. Once he had left the room though it fell away, never to be seen again. He shot through the Mass as if he considered the whole thing an irritation, like there was something on TV which he had to get to. He didn’t speak to us at any point, his message for the day just consisted of reading a long passage from the Bible in Thespian-sounding language which went straight over all our heads.

Despite this unfriendly newcomer, I still wanted to stay connected with whatever I had found here in this place. So I decided to become an Altar Boy. I approached the black-robed Father John one day after lunch and timidly asked if I could serve in the Mass. He gave me a suspicious look which made me question my own motives and had me feeling instantly guilty, much like when the police pull you over and make you start questioning whether you may somehow be guilty of stealing your own car. He agreed to meet with me one afternoon that week, so after soccer practice on the appointed day I went along to the chapel where he was waiting impatiently, even though I was early.

He showed me where the white robes were and made me try one on until I found one that fit. I had to look after it and make sure it got back to where it should be every time it was used. He showed me how to walk down the aisle in the procession that started and ended the Mass. When I got the pace wrong he would shout at me, telling me to “Slow down! Its not a race.” Trouble was that the pace I was going was already the slowest I had ever moved in my entire life and I couldn’t imagine it possible to move any slower. He showed me in the service book where I had to ring the bell, which I already knew from having sat through enough Masses. I was ready, or so I thought.

As he was packing things away he said to me, without turning around, “You’ve obviously been confirmed Catholic...” He turned to find me staring at him blankly having never even heard of the term before. He suddenly looked angry, and I searched my brain for what this thing could be and felt stupid for not knowing I had to have it... or be it... or whatever. He then said that I had to get my baptism certificate and he would organize someone to take me through Confirmation classes. When he saw another blank face settle onto my visage he hit the roof. “You’re not even Baptised! Then why are you wasting my time?” I walked off, flushed and hot, stifling the urge to cry. It wasn’t just that Father John was mad at me, but to me it also meant that God must have been angry with me. I didn’t want to whine about the fact that I didn’t know about this stuff because I didn’t think God would care, and so I just ran away.

It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that Father John came to me after a mealtime and said that he had made a plan. I think he felt bad for what had happened and this was his version of an apology. Either way I was grateful for the outcome. He had set the date for a group of candidates to be Confirmed and offered that he would Baptise me on the morning of my confirmation. I was back in. Maybe God wasn’t mad at me any more, but I definitely knew I had to pay more attention in the future.

The day came. The morning went well. I had some friends of my family and my grandparents who lived nearby, come through to the school for the big event. It was all over fairly quickly and I only had a damp forehead, and a slightly underwhelmed feeling to show for it. My Grandfather gave me a Bible, for which I was grateful, but knew I would never really read, and to be honest would have preferred a Nintendo console. But the big show was to be that evening’s confirmation service.

There were eight of us going to be confirmed that night. We had attended a couple of classes held on Sunday afternoons for the past few weeks, being taught not only what we should believe, but how we should answer in the service, how to walk in procession, and when to sit and stand. The school filed in while we dressed to one side in our white robes. Each of us held a candle in front of us and stood in a line arranged in order of height ready to file in ourselves. When the organ music began, we started our slower-than-humanly-possible march towards the altar at the front of the church.

As we neared the altar we were required to bow, as we did every time. Of course, this time, everyone was watching us, so in the mind of a girl named Zoe, in the front of our little procession, it had to be an extra holy-looking and impressive bow. She dramatically held her robe out to the side as if in a ballroom gown and gave a flowery bow towards the altar, pure showmanship. I think everyone would have been impressed if she hadn’t risen in an equally flowery manner and flicked her hair into the candle of the boy standing behind her. Now she was known around the school as someone who used a lot of hairspray, and that stuff and fire have a special relationship I hadn’t been aware of up to this point. Flames burst from her head, but she kept walking. The rest of the chapel stared with gasps and it seems she only realised something was wrong from reading the faces of those who stared back at her. Father John was the nearest to her up there at the front, and you could see him hesitate. He had a bowl of water right next to him, but this was ‘holy water’. Eventually he decided, and acted. He tipped the bowl over her head and with some frantic patting with his robe he managed to extinguish the flames. But now he was mad. He would have to fix everything, go and get more holy water, and I assumed apologize to God for using his stuff like that.

So we sat there for a good fifteen minutes with the organist droning on and everyone murmuring hushed commentary on the event they had just witnessed. Zoe sat and blubbered quietly while a couple of the girls around her tried to convince her that she was going to look great with short hair. When Father John finally returned we got back to the service, quickly making it through a fiasco which felt beyond redemption. My clearest memory of the day is how dreadful that smell of burnt hair was, which wasn’t really what I wanted to take away.

I got the job though, so to speak. I was now the cliched, blonde haired Altar Boy. But I was really nervous. I had begun to get the feeling that God is like a rich, stuck up relative who wants you to come visit but then gets upset when you touch anything of value around the house. I handled everything with such care for fear of His wrath. I would beat myself up in my head if the bell I was holding was put down too hard, if I rang it slightly out of time or if there were creases in my robe. That chapel began to change in feeling somehow. I no longer felt welcome and never went in there in my own time any more.

Later, we had another teacher join our staff who I had heard it said was from one of those ‘weird churches’. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I instantly took to this guy. His name was Mr J. He was a youngish man with a mop of sandy hair and a kind face, who used to let me help him wash his MGB convertible on sunny weekend afternoons. He used to teach Religious Instruction and drama at the school and it seemed all the students liked him. But my first memory of him was his first, and what would be his last, time in the chapel. Some days a teacher would take the school for devotions in the chapel and it happened to be Mr J’s turn. He came in with a guitar, which got us all buzzing with excitement. At some point in the proceedings we usually had to say the ‘Our Father’, which we all droned through in automated monotone but today he said he wanted to do things ‘a little differently’. He took up his guitar and sang out the first line of the prayer getting us all to repeat it after him. Then he moved on to the next line, and the next. Soon we were all singing along with gusto, genuinely happy about the fresh change in format. Up until now Father John had been off elsewhere, but at this point he obviously heard what was going on and came crashing through the doors at the back of the chapel. We all watched in stunned, gobsmacked silence as he stormed down the center aisle, yelling about ‘singing like that in the House of God’, and then proceeded to manhandle the teacher out of the room using his shirt collar as a handle.

We all felt instantly ashamed, like we had done something terrible. We never found out what happened after that but Mr J didn’t came back to chapel again.

I think I went through a briefly confused patch when it came to God. I knew that I liked Mr J. I knew I didn’t really like Father John. I knew Father John didn’t like Mr J, which must mean God didn’t like him either. But then Mr J seemed to carry on talking about God as if he were unaffected by the old priest’s opinion of him. He spoke of chatting to God everyday and just acted like everything was ok. If I had to choose, I preferred Mr J’s God but then he didn’t have a chapel, so he couldn’t have been real, could he?

The revelation point came for me on a day that was otherwise awful. We had taken a class trip north to the ruins of Hadrian’s wall. This was an impressive structure built by the ancient Romans to keep the northern tribes out of occupied England. We had come to a place called “Limestone Corner” where the Romans had chiselled great blocks of the stuff out of the earth and piled them on top of each other to build this wall that ran for hundreds of miles. Of course the Great Emperor Hadrian couldn’t have known that as he ordered his troops to build a great wall across the neck of Great Britain to keep out the marauding Scots, that thousands of years later a small eleven year old boy would be walking behind his class mates and trip over one of the limestone blocks to break his arm. It was such a stupid thing really. I had been jumping out of trees every weekend. I had ramped my BMX over chairs and other obstacles. But this day I was just walking along and I tripped. I put my arms out to stop me from landing on my face, as you do, and once on the floor I lay there for a few seconds to check if anyone had seen.

They hadn’t.

So I got up, dusted myself off, and started walking behind everyone again. As I rearranged myself it felt like my watch was really tight, so without looking down I loosened it a notch. Still felt tight, so I took it off. It still felt tight. Something was obviously wrong. I looked down to see my hand joined to the rest of my forearm by a contorted S-shaped wrist. I immediately felt sick. The pain hadn’t hit yet but shock was settling in and the weird taste in my mouth made me want to throw up. I walked forward to Mr J in a daze and wordlessly held up my arm to show him. “Oh shit,” he said, over pronouncing each syllable as his own mind reacted to what he was seeing.

In the moment I just wanted to laugh because he’d said a naughty word, but the situation didn’t really allow for that. I was driven to the hospital on the 60 seater tour bus while all the other pupils waited in the cold for them to come back and take them to the youth hostel where we were staying. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to feel bad though. I cradled my broken arm in the makeshift sling I had been made and tried to think of anything else as the pain began to wash in.

I was taken into surgery straight away to have my arm set and when I came to I was mortified to find that I had to endure a sponge bath from one of the nurses. She was going to see my ‘bits’ and there was nothing I could do about it. It was almost worse than breaking an arm.

The next day Mr J came to the hospital to see how I was doing. He chatted for a little while about what everyone else was up to for the day and assured me that I wasn’t missing much. Then, on impulse, I reminded him of the ‘naughty word’ he had used the previous day. He smiled and said he just got a shock. I asked him if he thought saying that kind of thing was wrong. He replied, “I don’t think its very polite, but I don’t think God minds.”

It was decided.

I liked Mr J’s God.

It felt like He actually understood, and even liked people.

I’m aware that to pick and choose which bits of God we like isn’t much better than building your own “Mr-Potato-Head” style, imaginary friend, but I had the sense, even then, that he was right.

KWAZULU NATAL

MIDLANDS

STANDING TOGETHER

13 years old now.

I’m a skinny, shy, blonde kid sitting on the waterfront of a dam in South Africa. My school is on an ‘SCA camp’, whatever that is. I only came because the girl I’m interested in decided she was keen to go. It’s a bright sunny afternoon on the first day and being the vivacious, spontaneous thing she is, she decided to take one of the four-man canoes out onto the dam, and so I made sure I was along for the ride.

I’m not happy though. I’m back from the trip already, feeling pretty stupid. I am nursing a profusely bleeding cut above my right eye from a wayward oar swing by none other than the girl I’m chasing. I had hoped to at least milk some sympathy from it, but I seem to be getting laughed at more than anything else, and my ego is in a shocking state of disrepair.

After Primary School in the UK my Mom asked me where I would like to go to High School. There was no question in my mind that I wanted to be back in Africa. Those of you who have been there, know that there is something about that Continent that gets into your blood stream. My family had just moved to Swaziland at the time which doesn’t have the best schools. The country itself is actually engulfed within South Africa; a country within a country. It was still very underdeveloped when we lived there. In fact to this day it’s a country where the king picks a new wife annually in a traditional ceremony, which means he has built up a healthy sized harem over his years in power. There is very little outside of it’s two major ‘cities’, which are actually ‘towns’ at best, and so I was sent over the border into the more developed country of South Africa, which was at the waning tail end of the Apartheid era and on the verge of true democracy. In fact, the year I began High School was the same year Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

I was sent to a School in the Kwa-Zulu Natal Midlands, where beautiful green rolling hills stretch out from the towering basalt walls of the Drakensberg mountains towards the tropical shorelines of the Indian Ocean. The local lovers of the old British Empire affectionately call it the ‘Last Outpost’. The locals who lived under the boot of the Empire obviously don’t feel as affectionately about the nickname.

My start at this school was a rough one.

Before I get there though I should say that I had been sent to a school nearby for a couple of months the previous year. UK schools finish in July, but South African schools only start in January, and my parents decided to send me to school straight away. It was a disaster. I was a weedy, pale thing with a very pronounced British accent trying to make his way into a group of boarders, who had already established their friendships months before, and were bright-eyed with the prospect of a target for their energies. It was never going to work. I was bullied mercilessly for the two months I was there.

Rotten fruit squashed into my bed every night.

Hung out of third story windows upside down.

Humiliated and laughed at in the showers.

Flipped on a blanket by the whole dorm until I was smacking against the ceiling.

Wrapped into a duvet and beaten with shoes.

When I finally had the guts to tell someone what was going on I was pulled from the school.

Needless to say I wanted to put the whole fiasco behind me and get off to a good start at this new school. I remember the first day, dropping my trunk off in the dorm and watching my Mom drive away. It didn’t really sting that much any more because, by now, I was used to the ‘boarding thing’. In fact I comforted myself with the thought that I was probably one of the most experienced borders to arrive at the school. I made my way around the dorm awkwardly trying to be included in conversations as people introduced themselves, all the while trying to disguise my accent with something that at least sounded sort-of South African. The afternoon passed with all of us unpacking and making chit chat about where we were from and what sports we were good at. When we were done we walked across the school grounds together to get supper. In the dining room the head master introduced himself and welcomed us to the school saying that, “This experience will be what YOU make it”. The new guys from our house ate together at the same table, loosening up with each other by moaning about the quality of the food (which is something you’re just supposed to do at boarding school whether it’s good or not). I found myself walking back to dorm surrounded by this group of guys thinking that maybe this was going to work out.

Little did I know it was just the calm before the storm.

When we arrived back, all 18 of us were herded into the common room for a ‘meeting’. All the Matrics (which is the South African term for final year students) stood in front of us, none of them smiling. We came in still chatting away about this and that girl we had seen in the dining hall until one of the Matrics yelled, “Why are you smiling? Shut up! This isn’t your Mom’s house! Sit down!” Feel free to insert your own colourful expletives at this point, because they were all present that night. Everything had changed in an instant. I looked around at shocked faces. Strangely, after the previous school, this tension actually felt more familiar to me. We were made to sit in 3 rows of six, cross-legged, facing dead ahead, never looking off to either side. We were yelled at for a good half an hour about how we were ‘nothing... scum.... worse-than-scum’ and other more creative, but less savoury descriptors. We were each assigned a Matric who we would ‘serve’ in any way he required. We were ‘kaks’, which sounds like the Afrikaans word for ‘crap’. Walking poo is what we were.

Then the ‘games’ began. We were marched down to our dorm, which was made up of a central corridor flanked by little ‘sections’ with two beds in each. We were ordered to stand in a straight line down the center of the corridor, hands at the seams of our pants and eyes forward staring at the back of the collar of the person in front of us. You couldn’t move. Anytime, day or night, one of the Matrics would yell “Aandag” (which means ‘Attention’ in Afrikaans), we would have to rush to get into this position. If we took too long, there would be ‘consequences’. If we moved, there would be ‘consequences’. The Matrics marched the line giving us little jabs in the ribs to see if we would move, and if we flinched we would be screamed at until they were satisfied we were ashamed enough.

After this exercise was ‘explained’ on that first night, we were ordered into our full school uniforms with ties and blazers, shirts, pants and smart shoes. It was time for ‘Wet and Dry’. This was to become a familiar exercise. We were told that we had seven minutes to run from the ‘Aandag’ position to our sections, to strip naked, run to the showers, get ourselves completely wet, run back, get dressed again in full school uniform with clothes straight and hair brushed to be inspected while standing in the ‘aandag’ position. If we didn’t make it, there would be, you guessed it: ‘consequences’.

One of them screamed ‘Go!’ and we all took off to the cacophony of screamed insults from our seniors. We stripped and ran up the stairs to find the rest of the Matrics had gone ahead of us and had soaked the concrete passageway to the showers with water and soap. They shouted, “Slide, slide!” We had to dive down the corridor and slide along on our stomachs across the slick concrete. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the particular anatomical problems with this exercise. We then got to the showers, which were already on and we were ordered to stop running and walk slowly through the line of gushing tap heads. “No running!” We quickly discovered they had put one full cold, followed by one scalding hot, and so on down the line. After this we ran back out the bathrooms, to again slide back down the corridor, down the stairs, to get dressed as quickly as we could. Fear coursed through us as we shouted the time to each other and encouraged each other to ‘hurry up or we would all be punished’. Those of us who finished first helped the others untie shoe laces and find socks. At just under seven minutes we stood panting, staring at the collar in front of us as the last straggler from our group got into position.

We waited.

One of the Matrics stepped up. “Ok, six minutes and thirty seconds. Go!”

We didn’t get to bed that night until very late. After we were done with ‘Wet and Dry’ we had to run around the courtyard with bricks held above our heads. Many of us cried as we ran, from the sheer exhaustion, and we all collapsed into bed that night to sleep fitfully, wondering what we had just stepped into.

And this was just our first night.

Things escalated from there.

On one occasion our tormentors made up a game called, ‘Red light, Green light’. Our common room had a balcony where ‘the kaks’ would have to sit and watch TV so we were out of sight. One particular Saturday the house watched a movie which featured a group of D-day paratroopers from the Second World War. The image of a company of scared soldiers lining up to jump out of a plane to the shouts of their superiors seemed to captivate one matric’s imagination. When the movie credits rolled he jumped up and stood in the middle of the room and looked up at the balcony. “Ok Maggots!”, he yelled in his best American accent. “Red light! Green light!” No one moved. “You”, he pointed at one of us. “Step up to the edge.” He shuffled close to the drop. “Red light! Green light! Jump!” He jumped onto the floor below, trying to roll, but landing awkwardly. We could tell it hurt. “The rest of you, line up!” We obeyed. “Red light! Green light! Jump, jump, jump!” One after another we jumped down from the balcony, trying to roll and absorb the shock and not land on each other. As soon as we hit the ground we were herded back up the stairs by other guys who joined in on the fun to create a continuous lemming-like loop of us ascending the stairs and jumping off the balcony. The game didn’t stop until one of us broke an ankle.