COFFEE BAY EVANGELISM
With high expectations I went over hundreds of murder-holes to see the mystical Transkei and its tender shoreline, where the Xhosa people live in peace and ancestors occasionally send their cows from under the sea to let them graze on the sweet hills and the most fertile ground of the country. What I was looking for was some kind of true African Ubuntu unity, something us Westerners have lost long ago.
Ten minutes after arrival in the muddy chaos of Port St. Johns our daughter Luzie summed it up: "You know it's not the best town if KFC is the nicest place around." We were watching a grim employee serving Street Wise 2s and 3s, but there was no wisdom on the streets, just wholesale, liquor and no vuvuzelas or smiles. No wonder Bafana Bafana lost that very evening.
I squeezed my family back in the bakkie that our friends, Andries and Coia, had taken up all the way to Durban to have their twins. (Truly adventurous at heart, they did not anticipate the bakkie would be too big for the hand luggage on their flight back.) Going to Coffee Bay meant 560 murder-hole bends to Umtatata, and then back again to the coast on an even worse road. The road was so bad Elke got depressed and wished she was in Germany or New York, the kids complained that the displays of their cell phones were shaking too much and I felt lost in paradise.
Yebo, the Transkei consists of beautiful curves like a sleeping beauty. Just hills and sea and cliffs and goats and rondavels painted in lots of left over swimming pool coating, a colour between snotty green and Curaçau liquor. And there were also people. Ubuntu people, far from tv and fast food, whispering poetry into the cattle's ears all day. That is how I hoped it would be.
The first person we met in Coffee Bay was a juvenile and shy car guard who insisted on watching our car next to us. The second was a very, very poor almost blind man selling two small fish he just caught. Then a youngster wanted to sing me the national anthem for some coins, and when I said “no”, he promised to wait for my return. His buddy, 20 metres on the other side of the dry river bed, offered me ganja weed to smoke. And when I laughed he just smiled and pointed to his eyes and then to me because he was sure I wanted some. Later in the dark coming back from a surf, a couple approached me selling fresh oysters and dagga, only to be followed by a man looking like a poisonous fish who offered me psychedelic mushrooms in a matchbox. "You need Jesus in your life man!" I said, exhausted. But he assured me that his mushrooms were first class.
Coffee Bay- some call it heaven on earth: a place of real Ubuntu, similar to shalom, peaceful satisfaction on all levels and between all people. And many had come with a dream like I did. “But what is real Ubuntu?” I asked myself later with a beer in my hand, watching a World Cup game on the screen. Did soccer really create a newer and better South Africa? I knew that hope had transformed the country. The murder rate dropped dramatically when South Africa was announced as the next host of the Soccer World Cup. And being a host to the world made many proud. But did it really change something?
We played pool billiard with the backpackers, sat around fires, chatted and watched more games. Besides the drugs, the backpackers got what was needed: a home, a drink, and a chat with a someone from the other side of the globe - who was as lonely as they. It was a lonely together. Gustavo from Brazil had been travelling for 3 years after leaving his family business. In his kind eyes was this longing to go home. Not to Brazil, but home, love, family, purpose. The two Canadians, Jack and John, the one just chatting along, the other so timid I wondered how he made a living. The girls from Finland. They looked like trolls with porcelain white faces and had come to Africa with an immense hunger for life. Like all of them. And yet they looked unsatisfied.
Why do we feel so alienated, never in true community and abundance in a world so rich and beautiful and wild? Why is hardly anyone exploring it, never satisfied? Some travel on and on, compromise, find a place, dream, do good, make a difference, but are never at peace. Like I used to be. The world stays broken, painful, cursed as we know. But that was a truth I always fought.
“Why”, I asked myself all my life, “Why can't we make the world better, whole and satisfying?” And to tell you the truth, there are wonderful and highly successful mentors and shapers in the world whose ideas and actions constantly transform society towards the better. Take the Grameen Bank Dr. Yunus started, a Muslim. Millions were uplifted out of their poverty and were helped to help themselves. And also the Backpackers we stayed in had amazing programs to help the local Xhosa community in Coffee Bay. Yet I didn't feel the true love.
Here I was, the old Sven telling Elisha that all was good, the city was pleasant, but the water was bad and therefore the land unfruitful. Why Elisha? Why was the water bitter? Were not all willing and trying their best, a bit chaotic, yes, messed up, but definitely with a heart for a prospering community? Did we people of the earth not share, love, give, care enough? But only when Elisha cleansed the well with salt, no death or miscarriage came from it anymore (2Kings 2:19). It was the very same well, but from now on it made the land fruitful.
I had to repent. I love Christ, but I was still so conformed to the world that I thought we humans can stick together and cope as we are. I believed that those who do not love Christ can make it somehow. Behind my righteous aversion to religion I was hiding the good old humanism I was brought up with. The slap-on-the-back-let's-tackle-it humanism that can save the world if we only try hard enough. It is truly difficult to get rid of the narratives of the world, the stories it tells to make sense of its nonsense. It is difficult sometimes to believe God's stories instead: that without him we are lost. That without the Father and the Son there is no family, no fruit, no life.
I asked my daughter Luzie to write on my arm what I was unable to say to all the nice and family-love-community-purpose seeking travellers: "Jesus is Lord" on the one side, and "I love Jesus!" on the other. It felt good to play pool billiard with it flexing the biceps with my confession on. Some looked, and others were just too drunk or too polite to comment.
"My mother believes in Jesus" said the Xhosa lady in the backpacker office when we left. I had forgotten Luzie's writing on my arm. "Jesus is real", I said and she looked unsure but then she smiled. "He really is, believe me."
"Thanks." She was from the area and knew about the needs. She was part of doing good and being cool and surrounded by fat Buddhas and funky music and individual freedom and sexy travellers. Yet when she mentioned Jesus, her smile was shy, as if her mother’s love had reminded her of the salt that cleanses us all and makes us true wells of living water for each other.
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