Talk on Reconciliation Day at Garden’s Shul
Terry Lester
Reconciliation Day 2015
Good morning and thank you for the privilege of sharing my story and some thoughts with you on this Day of Reconciliation. I was born down the road at Somerset Hospital 55 years ago and we started our life together as a family in Strawberry Lane, Constantia where we grew cut flowers. Three of my grandparents hail from Genadendal and were raised as a Moravians. My Strawberry Lane grandmother was denied baptism as a child because her mother was unmarried and as she had refused to undergo the Church’s discipline, my grandmother was only baptised at her confirmation twelve years later. She left Genadendal at the age of 17 and made her way to Moravian Hill in District Six.
Here she met and entered into a customary marriage with a Muslim man and embraced his faith. One child was born of this marriage, but the marriage did not last and they parted ways – she continued to practice her new faith though. To support herself and her daughter, my grandmother ran a fruit and vegetable stall at the Fresh Produce Market here in Town where now the Good Hope Centre stands. It was here where she met and later married, Sebastian Lester, a white man and vegetable farmer from Diep River with whom she had three sons and a daughter. Sebastian’s brothers, also farmers in the valley had no dealing with him after he married a Malay woman but they did her with a deposit to buy the land!
My father with his siblings were eventually baptised at the local Anglican Church in Plumstead.
My grandmother supported herself and her children after Sebastian’s death by farming the land and doing washing for a few Jewish families who lived at Muizenberg. In 1965 she was forced to sell under the Group Areas Act and we moved to Grassy Park.
Around that same time a young white family moved into Stratford Way in Meadowridge – a new Garden Cities development for white families - with their baby daughter Colleen. Colleen remembers the Coloured families who lived at the end of her road and who mysteriously disappeared as she was growing up. I met and married Colleen at All Saint’s church in Plumstead in 1987 and we have three adult children.
Growing up I remember my father buying my clothing at Cohen Outfitters in Station Road Wynberg, our furniture was bought from Katz Brothers just up the road from Cohen and everything else from Rifkin and Miller on the corner of main and Stations Roads where you could by anything from a needle to an anchor! Our house doctor was Dr Zabow. I wasn’t quite sure why I was asked to speak at this place of worship with its proud history of faithfulness and service today but maybe it is that! But maybe there is another reason. In the Jewish Museum next door, my father-in-law, an Engineer, was responsible for building the suspended staircase in the centre of the museum – quite an Engineering feat for which he received a prize!
My story is as South African a story as Lion matches and Ouma rusks! But it is not a unique story as many streams make up our river collectively and individually and often those we view as so different and as having little or hardly anything in common with us are in fact not that far removed from us. At closer look, it is ourselves we see we just often fail to see that because we are looking from the corner into which we have been squeezed and that is never the best view! There are various levels of connectedness and the truth is, scientists tell us that genetically we are 99% the same! If anything not a lot trumps that level of connectedness!
I am an African and a South African at that and so is every member of my family. Over the decades we have laughed and cried we have celebrated with exuberant joy at our high moments and hung our collective head shame at our lowest as a nation at what some of our leaders have done and even continue to do. As people of faith and leaders in matters religious we have often misrepresented Him whose name we say we act in and whose will we claim to do.
On this Reconciliation day we may want to look at our individual story as we find it inviting us to reconcile with ourselves firstly. Our stories matter! And they form the fibres which gives strength to the tapestry which makes up our life as a nation. If reconciliation day is to mean anything we may want to start with ourselves.
We also do well to remember that the peace we take for granted and the democracy we enjoy is a direct result of a negotiated settlement and that those various groupings that make up our Ah so beautiful country chose the route of talking rather than annihilating each other! Having walked the high road of respect in as dignified a manner as we did, why would we want to go to that place of blame and shame and annihilation now? It took courage on the part of our leaders from across the spectrum to say, “We know what we want for our people and we are clear about what we don’t want.” That laid an important foundation and launch pad for our nation to build on. Why are we not building? Instead what we see and hear is a narrative that suggests that they settled for and handed to us far less than we deserve! “We were sold out, they got away with the lion’s share, nothing has changed, we were better off then, back then kings were treated much better!”
How do we move on from this? One image that may be helpful in our sports mad country is of a huge stadium where we all pile into for the game of being a nation. One miracle is that it still stands and was not reduced to rubble in the ‘fight for freedom’! and the ‘war’ for justice – it was not destroyed, we don’t still have to build it! We can all enter, there is space for all to participate in the games, there are assistants and couches to help us perform better. Let’s play! We can renegotiate rules for we know that there are those whose struggle to survive to this point has knocked all their stuffing out – they were not expected to even get here as their paths were fraught by deliberate efforts to keep them from the game. Some will need special care to be even more motivated and encouraged to take part – we do need a particular mindfulness of them and their particular difficulties. Notwithstanding these and other challenges, let’s play!
On this Reconciliation Day, in our City, let us resolve not be too fixated on our own reality so that we lose sight of other realities for there is always more than one reality taking place in any given moment – the one is not better than or more important than the other, it just is different. In his book, ‘Conversations with Myself’ Mandela notes in his diary on August 19th 1986 that for his daily reflections he is reading The Reverend Peter Storey on ‘Forgiveness’. On 5th July 1989 there is a curious entry stating, “Meeting with very important person – no politics discussed.” He reveals though that in 1988 he was diagnosed with TB with his body weight dropping to below 70 kg and later that year he was diagnosed with Viral meningitis. How he made it through 1988 we do not know! A year later on 11th October 1989 there is a one line entry: Climbed Paarl rock. The thought of him climbing Paarl which as you know is towered over by the Taal Monument – maybe even providing him shade as he walked – that thought excites me! All this while our reality at the time was organising marches and protests! What a country! Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica!!
Terry Lester
Reconciliation Day 2015.
Terry Lester
Reconciliation Day 2015
Good morning and thank you for the privilege of sharing my story and some thoughts with you on this Day of Reconciliation. I was born down the road at Somerset Hospital 55 years ago and we started our life together as a family in Strawberry Lane, Constantia where we grew cut flowers. Three of my grandparents hail from Genadendal and were raised as a Moravians. My Strawberry Lane grandmother was denied baptism as a child because her mother was unmarried and as she had refused to undergo the Church’s discipline, my grandmother was only baptised at her confirmation twelve years later. She left Genadendal at the age of 17 and made her way to Moravian Hill in District Six.
Here she met and entered into a customary marriage with a Muslim man and embraced his faith. One child was born of this marriage, but the marriage did not last and they parted ways – she continued to practice her new faith though. To support herself and her daughter, my grandmother ran a fruit and vegetable stall at the Fresh Produce Market here in Town where now the Good Hope Centre stands. It was here where she met and later married, Sebastian Lester, a white man and vegetable farmer from Diep River with whom she had three sons and a daughter. Sebastian’s brothers, also farmers in the valley had no dealing with him after he married a Malay woman but they did her with a deposit to buy the land!
My father with his siblings were eventually baptised at the local Anglican Church in Plumstead.
My grandmother supported herself and her children after Sebastian’s death by farming the land and doing washing for a few Jewish families who lived at Muizenberg. In 1965 she was forced to sell under the Group Areas Act and we moved to Grassy Park.
Around that same time a young white family moved into Stratford Way in Meadowridge – a new Garden Cities development for white families - with their baby daughter Colleen. Colleen remembers the Coloured families who lived at the end of her road and who mysteriously disappeared as she was growing up. I met and married Colleen at All Saint’s church in Plumstead in 1987 and we have three adult children.
Growing up I remember my father buying my clothing at Cohen Outfitters in Station Road Wynberg, our furniture was bought from Katz Brothers just up the road from Cohen and everything else from Rifkin and Miller on the corner of main and Stations Roads where you could by anything from a needle to an anchor! Our house doctor was Dr Zabow. I wasn’t quite sure why I was asked to speak at this place of worship with its proud history of faithfulness and service today but maybe it is that! But maybe there is another reason. In the Jewish Museum next door, my father-in-law, an Engineer, was responsible for building the suspended staircase in the centre of the museum – quite an Engineering feat for which he received a prize!
My story is as South African a story as Lion matches and Ouma rusks! But it is not a unique story as many streams make up our river collectively and individually and often those we view as so different and as having little or hardly anything in common with us are in fact not that far removed from us. At closer look, it is ourselves we see we just often fail to see that because we are looking from the corner into which we have been squeezed and that is never the best view! There are various levels of connectedness and the truth is, scientists tell us that genetically we are 99% the same! If anything not a lot trumps that level of connectedness!
I am an African and a South African at that and so is every member of my family. Over the decades we have laughed and cried we have celebrated with exuberant joy at our high moments and hung our collective head shame at our lowest as a nation at what some of our leaders have done and even continue to do. As people of faith and leaders in matters religious we have often misrepresented Him whose name we say we act in and whose will we claim to do.
On this Reconciliation day we may want to look at our individual story as we find it inviting us to reconcile with ourselves firstly. Our stories matter! And they form the fibres which gives strength to the tapestry which makes up our life as a nation. If reconciliation day is to mean anything we may want to start with ourselves.
We also do well to remember that the peace we take for granted and the democracy we enjoy is a direct result of a negotiated settlement and that those various groupings that make up our Ah so beautiful country chose the route of talking rather than annihilating each other! Having walked the high road of respect in as dignified a manner as we did, why would we want to go to that place of blame and shame and annihilation now? It took courage on the part of our leaders from across the spectrum to say, “We know what we want for our people and we are clear about what we don’t want.” That laid an important foundation and launch pad for our nation to build on. Why are we not building? Instead what we see and hear is a narrative that suggests that they settled for and handed to us far less than we deserve! “We were sold out, they got away with the lion’s share, nothing has changed, we were better off then, back then kings were treated much better!”
How do we move on from this? One image that may be helpful in our sports mad country is of a huge stadium where we all pile into for the game of being a nation. One miracle is that it still stands and was not reduced to rubble in the ‘fight for freedom’! and the ‘war’ for justice – it was not destroyed, we don’t still have to build it! We can all enter, there is space for all to participate in the games, there are assistants and couches to help us perform better. Let’s play! We can renegotiate rules for we know that there are those whose struggle to survive to this point has knocked all their stuffing out – they were not expected to even get here as their paths were fraught by deliberate efforts to keep them from the game. Some will need special care to be even more motivated and encouraged to take part – we do need a particular mindfulness of them and their particular difficulties. Notwithstanding these and other challenges, let’s play!
On this Reconciliation Day, in our City, let us resolve not be too fixated on our own reality so that we lose sight of other realities for there is always more than one reality taking place in any given moment – the one is not better than or more important than the other, it just is different. In his book, ‘Conversations with Myself’ Mandela notes in his diary on August 19th 1986 that for his daily reflections he is reading The Reverend Peter Storey on ‘Forgiveness’. On 5th July 1989 there is a curious entry stating, “Meeting with very important person – no politics discussed.” He reveals though that in 1988 he was diagnosed with TB with his body weight dropping to below 70 kg and later that year he was diagnosed with Viral meningitis. How he made it through 1988 we do not know! A year later on 11th October 1989 there is a one line entry: Climbed Paarl rock. The thought of him climbing Paarl which as you know is towered over by the Taal Monument – maybe even providing him shade as he walked – that thought excites me! All this while our reality at the time was organising marches and protests! What a country! Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica!!
Terry Lester
Reconciliation Day 2015.