01.10.2006 – Lynnwood, Pretoria, South Africa

The trip across the Atlantic was uneventful, but very, very long. I had looked forward to the stopover at Cape Verde as a chance to get off the plane for short time and try to call home. But we were not permitted to get off the plane, meaning that the stopover provided no break at all. Some sort of mechanical problem (not with the plane itself) delayed our takeoff from Cape Verde for about an hour. This made the total time on the plane about 18½ hours from Atlanta to Jo’burg (as folks here call Johannesburg).

What made the trip bearable was the combination of thinking about how long such journeys took people by ship (any trip that can be measured in hours rather than months is not something we should be griping about) and the fact that the guy who was sitting next to me is a Peace Corps volunteer teaching high school English in Losotho. He lives in Los Angeles and went to college at the Nazarene college on Point Loma in San Diego. We had some good conversation, but not too much, giving me time to do some writing until my laptop batteries died and reading after that.

South African Airways is not as generous in dispensing food and drink on trans-oceanic flights as I have found such other carriers as British Airways, Qantas, and Korean Air to be. We got a pretty good lunch, then nothing for many hours until, well past when we should have had dinner, we were provided with a “snack” consisting of ham and yellow cheese on a roll. Finally, sixteen hours into the trip, we were given breakfast. No wine or liquor was offered, although it was available if you asked.

After waiting well over an hour for baggage to arrive at the airport and a bit of difficulty in connecting with my ride to the hotel, I got my first ground-level views of Africa. (We had passed over extremely barren and inhospitable-looking areas of Namibia on the plane.) The first thing that greeted me leaving the airport was a billboard saying: “End the War in Iraq.” It was an encouraging sign that made me feel at home. Aside from the eucalyptus trees and a few other trees, the countryside around Johannesburg and Pretoria looks much like that of eastern Pennsylvania.

When I reached my hotel, there was a message from Alan Storey, whom I was to meet so he could show me around. He arrived in the flesh about a minute after I checked in, so it was off to see the Voortrekker Monument. Ross Olivier had suggested that I visit this monument to begin to get an understanding of South Africa’s racial and religious past. I had no idea that it would turn out to be what it is.

The monument is a colossal building constructed to celebrate the 1838 victory of the Dutch descended Boer settlers on their Great Trek inland, taking land from indigenous Africans. The Boer victory in the Battle of Blood River consisted of a small contingent of Boers defeating the Zulu army without, at least according to the story told, the loss of a single Boer life The Voortrekkers took this victory as proof that God was on their side and had chosen them and given them the land. The similarities to the American concept of Manifest Destiny during roughly the same time period is obvious, as is the connection to the belief that God gave the Promised Land of Israel to His Chosen People. Seeing this monument, with all its religious overtones, a few days after Pat Robertson’s latest ludicrous, blasphemous statement—that God gave Ariel Sharon a stroke because Sharon was “giving away God’s land” to Palestinians, was especially interesting.

The monument sits atop a high hill and is constructed in such a way that on December 16, the anniversary of the Battle of Blood River and a few days before the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, the light of the sun shines directly through an opening in the dome on the roof of the monument, straight down to some revered objects hundreds of feet below. A frieze around the inside of the building depicts the events of the Great Trek in a way that is reminiscent of the Parthenon and of Napoleon’s Tomb in Paris, both of which also display religious veneration for victories in battle. I concluded that the Voortrekker Monument, which was built at the time the Nationalist party government was instituting apartheid in the late 1940s, tells as much about the Afrikanners as Napoleon’s Tomb does about the French.

When I got back to the hotel, I realized how tired I was, and that I wasn’t very hungry. I ate in the restaurant at the hotel and had smoked springbok on a salad. I read in Nisa about the !Kung killing a springbok. It turned out to be very good. When I sat down in the restaurant, an instrumental version of “Somewhere My Love” was playing and I thought about how much I wished the somewhere my love is was right here with me.

After 34 hours without sleep, I’m ready to call it a very long day.

RSM