To protect or not. That is the question

When you get the newspapers delivered to your house in Cairp Tahn, they are always wrapped in plastic. It doesn’t matter what time of the year it is, sudden, tremendous and unexplained downpours are possible. If people could walk around wrapped in plastic all the time, it would be the preferable thing to do, for the same reason.

So, when I collected my Sunday newspapers from the driveway this morning, and tore off the standard plastic wrapper, there was nothing unusual about it. In fact, there is a kind of delayed gratification thing which happens – because you don’t get to see the headline, until you have done so. So, I tore off the plastic wrapping and ceremoniously opened the newspapers.
I could not really have been prepared for what I saw. A picture of a white man, with a hunting rifle, kneeling over what appeared to be a dead, black, child – as a hunting trophy.

I read the story, my head reeling. It appears that this lunatic has a Facebook page with this picture on it. He calls himself “Terrorblanche”. But he is not alone. He has some 590 friends, on Facebook. So, there are at least 590 people out there, who would actively press the befriend button, to link themselves with a person who would post this picture on his page.

I went to his page, to see what kind of a person this might be. He describes himself (I presume he is a he) as having matriculated at Krugersdorp High School. He is self-employed. He likes Bok van Blerk, Leon Shuster and Afrikanse Musiek, amongst other things. His activities are self-defence and close combat fighting. His lists “knifes”, firearms and weapons as his interests. He has a picture of the original Eugene Terreblanche riding a horse, with the flag of his right wing organisation unfurled. So, in all likelihood, the man is close to psychotic.

Now, the immediate problem we, as parents, needed to deal with was, what to do with the picture on the front page of the newspaper? Do we leave it lying around? Do we hide it? Do we leave it lying around in the hope that they would not see it? What would we say if they did see it?
On a recent holiday to the Devon, in the UK, we went one day to visit Exeter Cathedral. As we arrived, a memorial service for a child was just ending. There was a picture at the entrance of the child, who had drowned and the body had not yet been found. Our eldest child, Gabriel, was extremely interested. Who was the child? Why did he die? More and more questions. And they continued for the rest of the week, because each day, there were more pictures of the child on the front pages of the newspapers – until eventually the body was found.

Our child was clearly dealing with the reality of death. Not for the first time, but this time, it was the death of a child he was dealing with. We explained that death is as natural as birth. That yes, we all have to die sometime. That some people die younger than others. No, only a very few children die at a young age, and it is usually because of accidents, like this one. No, we as his parents are probably not going to die very soon.

These were normal worries and fears, which any child goes through – and especially for an adoptive child. We dealt with them, as best we know how. Honestly and un-emotively. Telling him the truth, without the embellishments of afterlife and religion and bargaining. The moment passed, as is right.

But this! This is a picture, (which is probably staged – but then how does one explain to a child why it is staged?), where it looks as though a black child has been shot by a white game hunter – for sport! It is on the front page of the Sunday newspaper. That, I am afraid, I simply can’t explain. So, for better or for worse, we hid the page, from our two black children.

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.