Rejoicing in my ape ancestry

My first real job was teaching in a very rural school in the tiny University town of Roma in Lesotho. The learners were still called “pupils” in those days. It was a Roman Catholic school, run by monks and discipline was high.

I taught a miscellany of subjects, ranging from English to Biblical studies and the examining body, was Cambridge. Never mind the students, it was I who learned a huge amount! I was a naïve white boy. My contact with black people had been – up to that point - rather limited. And here I was, suddenly confronted with an entire class of children who were all of them, black. Or brown. Or a fairly uniform dark colour – or so it appeared to me.

But it soon became clear that black people saw things that I simply didn’t. When someone at the back of the class made a noise while I was writing on the board, I would round on the class and demand to know who was the culprit. “It was that black one at the back!” a chorus would shout. I would look at the back row and see a row of black kids – all of whom looked pretty much the same to me and be simply none the wiser.

Similarly, I realised that the boys in the school class didn’t see the kind of signifiers I saw in white people. A boy would come and tell me that someone had been looking for me. I would ask for more description. They would look blank. “She was white”, they would say. I would ask if she had dark hair or light hair? They would stare at me blankly. It was something they simply did not seem to notice. But the tiny differences in skin shade between themselves, that they would be acutely aware of.

The problem started when I was teaching them about the two creation narratives in the Genesis story – the first (and more recent one) from the Priestly source and the second and earlier one from another entirely different source, called “J” (or the Jahwist). They were two entirely different writers, writing in different contexts and with different objectives. Their stories differ from each other fairly seriously. It would be very difficult to see them as the same story, written by the same author. (Try reading from Genesis 2 vs4b and tell me it isn’t the start of an entirely new narrative, different from Genesis 1.1ff)!

I was teaching them, in the light of the genesis myths, the scientific view of the universe – of the slow march of evolution – where branches of ape-like creatures start to walk upright and whose brains start expanding and being used in artifacts and technology. They looked extremely puzzled. Was I saying we were descended from apes, they wanted to know?

Well, yes, in a way, I was. I talked about the various kinds of hominid which we knew about from the fossils, Paranthapus, Australopithecus, Homo Ergaster and so on. They listened intently, but I was getting nowhere. “:Look”, I said, getting creative and unbuttoning my shirt, “see how hairy I am!” – revealing my ample chest hair. “That comes directly from my ape ancestry!”

The children stared at me, horrified. “Well”, they said finally, “You might come from ape ancestry – but we certainly don’t!”

I found much the same kind of attitude with well-meaning (but ill-educated) religious people when I was running the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in Gauteng. They seemed to find it extremely hard to believe that Homo Sapiens Sapiens (which is what anatomically modern humans are) is just another formulation of ape, along a long and bushy chain of ancestry. Somehow, because we are now describing our species – we are wanting some special dispensation. Some unique quantifier that makes us special and different. There isn’t one. We are, quite simply, what we are. And what we are is because of where we come from. (Where we will journey to from here, is an entirely different matter!)

From our perspective then, two things seem to me to be extremely interesting. Firstly, the colour of our skins – an extremely recent development in our make-up - is the least important (from a genetic point of view) thing about us.

And secondly, the development of speech and language, and much later down the line, the development of symbol and religion is also something relatively extremely recent. It is neither helpful, nor accurate to imagine that these things were with us from the very beginning. They are latecomers in the slow millennial trudge of human development. (That trudge has now, of course, evolved into something close to the speed of light in this, the information and communication age, but it is all based on the same developmental linage).

I have this amazing thing in my possession - a stone tool. I picked it up amidst the huge earth-moving excavations which were being done, just outside of what is now called the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site - which is the project I used to work on.

A scientist told me that it was probably a "core" from which flakes were chipped off. Because of the excavations, it was completely displaced from where ever it would have originally been, and therefore not of worth much from a scientific point of view.

When I hold it in my hand, it fits extraordinarily snugly. And I can imagine, just dimly, that creature before me, working on it, some 2 million years ago, which held it in the hand as well. It is an extraordinary feeling, this link between me typing on a computer and that creature (probably Homo Habilis, a distant ancestor of modern humans known now as "the tool-maker").

So, when I hold in my hand, a stone tool that I picked up one day in modern Gauteng and I feel the weight of it, the cut of it and I know, the probable last creature to hold it lived 2 million years ago. I can see the direct line between that kind of ancient Oldowan technology tool-making and the computer on which I am typing this article, strange as that may be. It is a wonderful, extraordinary linage. The link is those elements of consciousness and ingenuity which makes us today what we are, and made them what they were.

That, and nothing else, needs to be the basis on which we exegete the creation narratives of Genesis 1 and 2 – and indeed, any other creation narratives which may be around! If we don’t – if we try to mask this obvious reality – we simply expose ourselves as intellectual clots.

The really important question.

Many years ago, when I was working as General Secretary for the Christian Council of Lesotho, there was a knock on the door and into my office walked two hippies. You could tell they were hippies, because of his shoes and her sandals. You could tell they were hippies, because she had her hair braided in a particular kind of way and wore a particular kind of dress. He had a particular kind of haircut and he carried himself in a non-macho kind of way.

They introduced themselves as Justin McCarthy and Amanda Heddon. They were newly arrived, back from New Zealand and they wanted to start a leather working outfit in Lesotho.

They explained that they would use local shrubs to extract tannins and they would use local leather and would teach Basotho how to do what they did and make what they made. They wanted to know if I was interested in partnership at all. I was more than interested. To what extent I could help, if at all, I can’t remember. And we kept up contact after that.

I remember being so utterly impressed with them. They were so purposeful. They had no airs and no graces. They seemed to be such good and honest and likable people. Over the many years that I continued to know them, I found out that they were, just plainly and simply, all that they appeared to be.

After a while, frustrated by the lack of interest of Basotho in their project, they decided to relocate to Curry’s Post, in Kwazulu-Natal and start afresh. And it was there that they set up the now hugely popular and internationally known “Groundcover” brand. Justin told me gleefully how he had seen a wood-and-iron house advertised in the press, on day and how he had bought it. And how it arrived in bits and pieces and how he had to fit it all together, like a Jigsaw puzzle.

I visited them both often in their wonderful house overlooking a green and peaceful valley. I would walk sometimes with him to their dam. He once stripped naked and jumped in, mid-sentence, just because he felt like it. Their children seemed to grow up carefree, integrated and wholesome. Their business thrived and the quality and attractiveness of their goods became renowned throughout the country.

It was, of course, deeply shocking to hear of Justin’s death some days ago. He was killed, entirely unnecessarily. He was on his mountain bike and a car overtook another on a blind rise. We have not been particularly close, for many years, but I know that if last week I had walked unannounced into their kitchen, it would feel as warm and as friendly as it always did.

On a long drive that I have just done, with nothing but spectacular scenery to keep me company, my thoughts wandered back over the many years I have known them. And about Justin himself and the gentle and lovely person he was and the fact that he is now dead.

Death is always so damn final. It is that full-stop at the end of a saga. It brings a silence. It does not allow for argument or negotiation. It says “that is the end of that”. And all you are left with, if you are lucky, is memory.
And what is sad, is not so much that death happens. What is new is that when I next walk into that kitchen, Justin won’t be there. That is just the way it is. His voice is now silent. We can only remember him now. We can only bring him into our living through piecing together the bits and pieces of residue and shadow that we have left. There will be echoes of him. But he will not be there. Not ever, and not again.

Some people fear death terribly. Like a child sometimes fears the dark, or being on their own. There is that terror of abandonment, that inner scream of utter loneliness.

But why should it be so? Why should death not be as basic as birth? As individually unnoticeable as passing from one age to another? And why should it not be so, no matter how it happens?

Unlike me, my father was a man of very few words. On his deathbed, he looked at my distraught sister and said, “Everybody has to die”. I have always marvelled at the simplicity and profundity of those words. Because in the end, we can spend our whole lives fearing that, or we can just get on with the business of living in the best way we can.

The real and difficult question for me has always been not “Is there life after death?” There is a real sense in which that is a useless question. A question with very little content. The really important question is, “Is there life before death?”

Terror and Courage

For the past few days, I have had someone staying with me who goes back well into my past. We were together in the underground in Lesotho, in the early 1980s and in Pietermaritzburg in the mid to late 1980s. Needless to say, these were extremely difficult times.

In Lesotho, there was continuously the threat of raids from the South African Defence Forces. They came across the border in 1983 and again in 1985. They killed at will. They targeted specific buildings and killed anyone inside those buildings. People were killed while they slept. One had her throat slashed, as she slept in a hotel room in the middle of Maseru. As it happens, they killed someone with absolutely nothing to do with the ANC. They had been given information that a particular cadre was staying in room “x” which was (say) three rooms to the left on the right hand side of the building on the third floor – they counted from the left hand side, instead of the right hand side, and that was the person that died. In the aftermath of the raid, I drove with two friends to the houses of those who had been killed. The horror still lives with me today.

In Pietermaritzburg, during what was called the “Seven day war” we saw yet more horror, as the state backed Inkatha and the ANC fought each other. (This was after Nelson Mandela had been released). We were living in the “black” township of Imbali and lecturing in the Federal Theological Seminary, at the time.

We were just remembering some of the moments which continue to haunt us. Bodies lying in the road. Bodies piled in the mortuary. Bodies found in the forest. Remembrance services held in the Lay Centre in an attempt to help people come to terms with the tremendous loss we were suffering.

I said to my friend, that when I think back on those days, the thing I struggle with is remembering my own cowardice – the extraordinary level of fear I had. And, she reminded me, it was not the way I behaved. People were not aware of that fear and that cowardice. I was glad to hear of things I did, which were not cowardly, but still I remember it being there. And it has made me somewhat less judgemental of cowards, I think.

Confession

The trip from Cairp Tahn to Johannesburg is usually a fairly gruelling 2 hour flight. I do it more times than I enjoy. The plane is usually full and passengers usually fairly bad tempered.

I am reading, at the moment, Wally Lamb's monumental, (and now 10 years old book) - I Know This Much Is True (Harper, London 1999). It is about identical twins, one a paranoid schitzophrenic. It is about love and hate; about love and resentment; about the person we think we are and the person we are made to be. It is the kind of book which takes in huge sweeps of world history, a snapshot of a particular paranoid moment in our collective past and examines the inner depths of a condition as only this man, the author, knows how. You cannot read the book without an extraordinary amount of introspection.

And, sitting on the plane from Cairp Tahn to Johannesburg, I found myself remembering the last time I made sacramental confession to a priest. For those who are not inside this tradition (and I have to say, neither was I at that point!) the whole idea of confessing "sins" to a priest and receiving absolution from God, through him or her, is destinctly peculiar and even mindlessly archaic in a world which is now dominated by psychologists.

When I went for my first confession, I was about to be made Deacon. In preparation for this, I was on a three day silent retreat in a very remote place called Masite, in the tiny Kingdom of Lesotho, where my wife and I had fled to avoid my being called up into the South African Army.

It was in the winter - and believe me - the winters in that tiny, landlocked, extremely mountainous Kingdom can be unbelievably cold. There is a retreat house at Masite, run by the Sisters of the Society of the Precious Blood - an Anglican order. The buildings are made of stone. There is (or at least there was) no electricity. The Chapel was freezing cold, but ethereal in its simple beauty. And on retreat, one arose in what seemed like the middle of the night, teeth chattering, to say the Office of Prime - the first of the liturgical services of the day.

The retreat itself was a silent one. You could read whatever you liked, but you were not allowed to speak. It was before the days of computers, the internet, cellphones and all the other electronic and cyber intrusions on one's thought processes. The point of the process was to focus on what you were doing, on who you were and where you were going - for three days. Food, of a very basic kind, was brought to you. You could go for walks every now and again and you were expected to attend the daily Mass and the other offices.

During this process, I made my confession to my spiritual advisor of the time. The first confession I had ever made. Before I did so, I needed to consider a range of things - what would I consider a "sin". What about those things which others considered sin, but I didn't - like, for instance, homosexual love? I was, after all, a married homosexual and did not then, and do not now, consider homosexual love to be sinful. I was, however, not only married and Gay, but also about to enter Holy Orders.

What about homosexual acts? That, of course, was is and was a much more complicated question for the church - but in the end, it would not be something I would be confessing as a "sin". There were, in my life, much bigger things to consider. Acts of cowardice. Deceit. Integrity. Honesty. Acts where love and compassion were lacking. These were, and for me, remain much more serious concerns than genital ones.

And so I made my confession. It was a simple affair, of me and the priest seated facing away from each other in the chapel. He simply listened as I spoke. And when I was finished, he gave me counsel. It was not admonishment for the wrongs I had committed, but rather encouragement to move beyond. When he spoke the words of forgiveness, I felt able to forgive myself. That was the key - the permission to forgive myself for the things I had done, because I had heard words of forgiveness from someone else.

The non-schitzophrenic twin in Wally Lamb's story finds that act of self-forgiveness the most difficult. His acts of omission and his acts of commission against his "weaker" twin are indeed serious. It is also true that they are circumstantial. They haunt him and plague him and hunt him down. They confront him when he least expects them. They surprise him and terrorise him.

His "weaker" twin, on the contrary, never judged him. He loved him completely and with utter, childlike trust. He never saw the "sins" his brother committed against him. He never believed anything but the best of his brother. And his brother was not, by any stretch of the imagination, universally bad or universally cruel. But it was a relationship of the struggle of the inner self. Two opposite and contrasting poles of the same person, starkly evident in two people who look exactly the same but are confusingly and glaringly different.

I have not reached the end of the book yet, but I hope very much that the "stronger" twin reaches a place of forgiveness for himself. In my experience of life since my last confession, that is the one thing which I know is true - that forgiveness is not only possible, but necessary. And the most difficult person to forgive, is oneself.

My Friend Tito

I first met Tito Mboweni, the soon-to-be retired Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, in Lesotho, where we were both living in exile. The year must have been 1981. Our paths crossed in that strange, former British protectorate, which in the 1960s had achieved independence. It was, and is, a country completely surrounded by South Africa. It relies on South Africa for every bag of maize meal, every matchstick, every candle. And yet, because it was independent, it was a place where the then outlawed African National Congress (ANC) could operate.

I was there, having fled the country in order to avoid conscription into the Army. Tito was forced to flee the country because of political activism and was now in the underground ANC. We would, almost certainly, never have met in South Africa, and if we did, we would never have done so as equals. Because that is what apartheid was all about. It was about inequality. It was about keeping people apart and it was about ensuring that if people of different colours did meet, the one would be the master and the other the servant.

But there, in Lesotho, we met as equals. As comrades. Tito was my recruiter and controller, in relation to the ANC. We never spoke of it as such, but that is what brought us together. I did not realise then, that it was going to be the beginning of an incredible journey for both of us, in very different directions.

Tito was a young student, but honed in the fires of revolution. I was just a justice- minded white boy, who thought that apartheid was wrong and not worth defending. But more pertinently, I could quite easily have been a spy. So getting involved with me was a risky business for Tito.

My then wife, Jane, and I grew very close to him. We taught him how to drive in our little Volkswagen Beetle. We spoke long into the night, about “home” and about what the struggle was all about, and about our history and about the nature of oppression and revolution. Sometimes, it was about simpler things. Like how to roast a chicken, or to his incredulity, me explaining what the “Tube” is in London. Tito could not get over the weirdness of a train which travelled underground – until, of course, he saw one for himself.

That friendship changed my life. And for the better. I remember several years later, when both of us were in London or Zambia, how we would be homesick. Not for South Africa, but for Lesotho – where for the first time we were able to live and ordinary human beings together. Lesotho gave us back the humanity which apartheid had robbed us of .

There were times of terror which we experienced together. Like the raid in 1982 into Maseru, when the apartheid army entered the country and killed several sleeping comrades. I remember Jane and I hearing the news in the morning and leaping into the car to drive to Maseru. On the road, we found Tito and another friend Ngoako Ramalhodi hitching into the Capital. On the way in, they were speaking about the struggle – and how we needed now to pick up the fallen spear. There was no bitterness in what they were saying. There was no hatred of white people in general. We were together with them in this struggle. We were one of them. We were together in the struggle for peace and freedom in South Africa.

Moments like these are unforgettable. They change the way one thinks. They shift the way one understands one’s place in the universe. They come very rarely - if ever, for some people. I am one of the lucky ones.

I was Best Man at Tito’s and his then wife Mamokotlana’s wedding. I was amazed and honoured that he asked me to be his Best Man. The marriage ended, but my friendship with both Tito and Kotli has lasted through the years. Tito, on his return into a liberated country, was given a Cabinet post in the new government, and then went on to become Governor of the Reserve Bank. It was an orbit and a realm which I was, obviously, unable to keep up with. But through the years, we have kept in contact, through the occasional text message, a phone call late at night, a chance meeting. He has been at the launch of two of my books and he has done so happily and the feeling between us has been warm.

Now the tide has turned. New political realities have changed the landscape and, for whatever reason, Tito has decided not to be reappointed in the position of Governor of the Reserve Bank. It will be difficult for him, because it was a position he enjoyed. He enjoyed the power, the prestige, the sheer uniqueness of the job. He enjoyed the adulation of people and he certainly enjoyed obeisance. He had some really odd quirks – such as insisting on being called “Governor”, even by those close to him apparently - (something I could never do, and never did). He insisted on having his own photographer, and that only the photos taken by that photographer could be used in the media. These are conceits and affectations, which he has lived with for the past 10 years. I suspect they will be difficult things to give up.

I have heard it said by more than one person (and not only his political enemies) that he is arrogant. That is certainly true. He is. And the job he has held for the past while has allowed that arrogance to grow and perhaps to be unchecked. The arrogance is there, certainly, together with a lack of concern about people, which is sometimes difficult to justify. But I have also experienced something very different as well. I have experienced kindness, and gentleness and friendship and commitment. I have not minded the arrogance, because the other was there also, in good measure. He is a complex character.

I remember sitting in a car, in Roma, the little University village in Lesotho, some 30 minutes outside of Maseru, late at night talking to him. I said to him there was something I needed to tell him, because it may, perhaps, have security implications. I told him I was Gay.

His response was, firstly, surprise. Then he said this. He said “You know, in the struggle, you sometimes see really terrible things. You see necklaces (the terrible method which was used for a while, of placing a burning car tyre around the neck of a suspected spy). You see dead bodies. You see torture.” He went on, “In that spectrum, to find out that someone is Gay, is a very small thing indeed”.

I have always valued that comment, for putting things in a bit of perspective.

Suicide, assisted and otherwise - 2. Learning how to grieve

This is another of the articles I wrote, soon after the suicide of my partner, 10 years ago. The issue is, of course, not the people who kill themselves. That is a decision they have made, and they are dead. The issue is how do the people who are left behind cope with that decision.

Obviously there is a huge difference between coping with the death of someone who is terminally ill, or elderly, or who has at least discussed the matter with those whom s/he loved, (or are likely to find the body) - and that of the sudden shock of discovery of someone who gave no sign that they were planning to kill themselves.

This piece was written really about the journey I found myself on - of coming to terms with my partner's shocking, and to me, completely unexpected decision - and learning how to grieve properly.

Learning how to Grieve

There was a time, not so very long ago, before urban sprawl and megacities and afforestation, when it was expected, without very much qualification, for people who had lost someone close to them, to mourn for a fairly extended period of time. When I lived for a time in rural Lesotho, I was extremely interested to see how traditional Basotho dealt with death. If the man in the family had died, for instance, the woman would be placed on a mattress in a room. She would have two or three supporters, who would be with her constantly. She would be required to say nothing and to do nothing at all. She would just sit on the mattress and weep, or not weep, as she felt fit. Wave after wave of sympathisers would be ushered into the room. The story of how the man died, what had happened; who said what; when; how - all the questions would be dealt with and answered in the telling of the story. And the story would be told over and over and over and over gain - for a week!

This is not my culture, of course, but in many ways I wish it were. One of the things I found necessary, when my partner died by hanging himself was this constant re-telling of the story. People who knew Brian needed to hear it. And somehow, the re-telling of it over and over again dis seem to have something of a healing effect. But it was extremely emotionally exhausting and it would have been very nice if there was someone else to do it for me and I could just sit on a mattress somewhere listening or weeping as the case may be.

Then there is the business of how we actually deal with the dead. The woman who worked for me then wanted badly to come to the funeral. She was originally from Malawi. She eventually plucked up enough courage to ask me why I had simply left Brian lying in the crematorium. She found this to be the strangest thing in the world. I explained to her the whole business about cremation and scattering the ashes, but she still looked at me more than a little incredulously. I could see us peering at each other across a very wide cultural gorge. It is not that she didn’t accept what I had done, it was simply that it didn’t in any way comply with the steps she understood to be necessary for the grieving process. “You have to see the person buried”, she said. Who knows, maybe she is right. I hadn’t really given the matter much thought before then.

When I was working as a priest in Manchester many years ago, one of the real difficulties of the job was the extraordinary amount of funerals I was required to do. It verged, sometimes, on 8 or 10 a week! The difficulty was that I very often had no idea of who it was that I was burying. Frequently, it was me, the undertaker and the coffin at the funeral. I often was left to ponder the tragedy of a long life, now over, with no-one to mourn its passing. I was often left to wonder about a society so compartmentalised, so lacking in community, that here could be the lonely sight of a body, a priest and an undertaker with not a single interested soul beyond them. That must be the saddest thing.

But I also frequently had no idea of what the person looked like that I was burying. In Britain, there was never any filing past the open coffin, as is frequently the case here in Africa. I once found myself in a very strange situation. I was informed by the undertaker that a woman, some way up the street where I lived, had died. Now, I lived in a street which was just two very long rows of front doors with windows on either side. It was difficult enough to get onto speaking terms with the next door neighbour, let alone someone down the road. Anyway, this woman had died and she didn’t have any relatives living with her, so it would have been useless to go to the house. I tried to picture where she lived and who she was. Ah yes! I remembered her. I often used to wave at her and sometimes used to exchange pleasantries on my way to work. She was an old lady with callipers who walked with some difficulty and she liked sitting in the sun outside her front door.

So I spoke at the funeral about the difficulties she had faced so bravely. I spoke about her lovely little garden that she seemed to be so proud of - and then rambled on in a very general sort of way about conversations we had had and that sort of thing. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I saw her sitting the next day outside her front door, soaking up the sun! I had buried the wrong person. I have no idea what the family made of what I had to say. In a strange, very British sort of way, it didn’t seem to make very much difference.

To get back to my point, I don’t think we white western types know how to grieve very well at all. It all seems to be tied up with nonsense about stiff upper lips and “just getting on with things” and “pulling oneself together” and “putting the past behind us”. Of course, all of this is true. And it is certainly not that people don’t care or that there is a lack of support. It is just that there is a sense in which we often tend to deal with grief as an inconvenience rather than a necessity. What I have come to see, which I did not see before as clearly as I do now, is that the only grief which does not end, is the grief which has not been fully faced. That can happen in a number of ways: By idealising the deceased person; or by suppressing one’s grief; or, conversely, by hanging onto feelings of sorrow and failing to resume one’s life fully at some point after the death. There will be some who see perpetual sorrow as a testimony to their love. Consequently it is easy to get stuck in time, believing that by holding onto the pain, you are holding onto the memories. What is true, though, is that sadness is a natural part of life, but self-pity immobilises.
The psychological boffins tell us that there are basically three stages to the grieving process and it doesn’t really matter what cultural persuasion one comes from. The first stage is basically shock. The second is a period of suffering and disorganisation. The third is a period of reorganisation. It does not really matter how long it takes to move from the first to the last, but it is critically important that there is movement. After the trauma of the second stage, with its sense of numbness; its preoccupations with last encounters and unfinished business; its feelings of abandonment and guilt and anger and blame, it is important to move on. Or even if one cannot do that immediately, at least it is important to know that this is the direction in which one should be moving.

What I learnt over the few months after the death was that it is crucial to experience all the feelings which the death has brought about for me, but it is equally crucial to say goodbye and to resume my life. That does not mean the end of the love or the memories. It does mean that I did learn to accept the death and in time, the pain and the sorrow lessened as well. And eventually (and this I do believe), in the words of Mother Julian of Norwich, “All things will be well, and all manner of thing will be well”.