Berkley Center

Suffering is a universal issue. All people of all colors in all places have endured some type of hindrance to personal, professional, economic, or social success. Unfortunately, as South Africa continually shows, suffering is more disproportionate among the population, as inequities fall among racial and ethnic lines with those of a darker skin color falling on the disadvantaged side of those lines.

A central cause is apartheid, a word that quickly became synonymous with my pre-travel plans to Cape Town, automatically thinking about the physical disparities I would witness along with the underlying social disparities I would explore once I arrived. Coming upon my last month in the Rainbow Nation, I know that apartheid was much more than a superficial segregation of public spaces. It was formalized as a governmental policy in 1948, with legislative support both before and after that year, inspired by the racial discrimination and white supremacy that sought to divide and conquer the black and colored majority in order for the white minority to gain and keep power.

Fast forward to present-day 2009 and one can still witness the effects of laws that moved blacks and coloreds further away from the centers of commerce and politics, stripped them of enfranchisement and the lands their families owned for generations, and eliminated their access to adequate education, housing, health care, and employment. The status quo now involves a constitution that promises adequate housing to all citizens, while families live inside shacks of corrugated metal with no electricity and no plumbing, a country with 13 official languages but only two—English and Afrikaans—as the most prominent in government and businesses, some people taking two or more minibus taxis and possibly more transportation to get to work, and blacks as the highest percentage of the population having the lowest average monthly income per capita in the country.

With all the struggles of poverty, unemployment, and health disparities, along with the student struggles some of my friends have faced with inability to pay school fees and the prevalent issues of high HIV/AIDS rates and gendered violence, people consistently fight against inequality to reach the ideal of equal prosperity for all that the ‘new’ South Africa continues to promote. This struggle is often where faith comes in. Ascribing to the Christian faith, I have experienced many people appealing to God for his strength and will to supplant their own in all spheres of life, from school work to problems in family life, in my times at church services, fellowship events, and my connect group meetings. In all of these cases, I have heard people testify to God giving them focus to study when they could not persevere any further, to God healing a mother's brain bleed, and God giving them peace and answers about the next step professionally in their lives.

In particular, I remember at one 11 a.m. service, the head pastor praying for a healing of Cape Town, calling for God to intercede in prostitution, in HIV/AIDS cases, and in all instances of poverty. Both at my church and at various other congregations across the city, there is this appeal to a supernatural power identified as God to change what they cannot change in their own power, believing that he is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient in all situations to a degree that he can overcome all obstacles they face, and that he will give them strength during the difficulties to overcome. Along with an appeal for strength in the struggle, there is a conviction of better times ahead. To echo a popular favorite praise and worship song from service, “"Greater things are yet to come [and] greater things are still to be done in this city” of Cape Town." Essentially, we will overcome because God already overcame all things that come against us today like sickness, depression, and loneliness, and waiting for us after our victory is the glory and goodness of God's kingdom.

Outside of the Christian framework are other faith traditions, like those of the traditional/tribal African religions, that people follow just the same as a means to overcome. As I studied in my "Culture, Power, and Wealth" course, some citizens appeal to witchcraft and the occult in order for supernatural power to intercede on their behalf, defeating all threats that attempt to undermine their success. In one lecture, we examined different advertisements for traditional healers that claimed to heal problems like broken marriages, illness, and disease, and to solve issues in finances, court cases, and love lives. All of the advertisements sought to eradicate the anxieties that these issues can cause, which can interfere with effective productivity at work or school. For example, many of these ads suggest that the obstacles you may face in life are the source of your enemies putting a spell on you, bewitching you into destitution and frustration. If these obstacles come and persist and there is no logical explanation for them, these ads explain, then someone may have put a hex on you. Most notable about this is that many of these traditional healers have consistent clients, healing multiple people of their issues, being able to clear people of any spells and give them the lives they strongly desire and the success they envision for themselves, regardless of how larger society may seem such practices as primitive and ‘backward’. Within witchcraft and the occult is the similar appeal to that from Christians to God, an appeal to forces in the supernatural world to undo curses cast by witches from one's enemies or to undo inexplicable hindrances to personal and professional success. In these traditional faith religions, there is this sense that there is a world above our own that controls our paths, our struggles, the degree of our struggles, and when and how we will reach success. The traditional healers have access to that world through materials and powers, and they offer help to everyone to help them understand their issues and to lead them toward prosperity.

Just as God is the truth to Christians, the abilities of these traditional healers in traditional African religions are truth to their followers. Appealing to the supernatural in both traditions shows a decreased faith in the government and society to solve their issues, but also exhibits a quiet, solid, and unshakeable certainty in their faith tradition as their truth, as the only thing to bring them through, the only thing to help them endure. As widely different as these two examples are, they exemplify a universal truth among those who follow faith traditions. As much as we have control over all the things in this world, there is a supernatural world expanding beyond our world, with all the knowledge about our paths and all the abilities to change our circumstances. Both traditions believe that our strength is not infinite—we must appeal to that which knows all things and sees all things in order to comprehend our lives and to deal with the trials and tribulations inherent in them. In our limitations, God and the supernatural enter in infinite expanse, acting on our behalf to battle all enemies that we cannot defeat and freely affording us strength and peace in the times of chaos, disturbance, and confusion. We not only get our help from within but also from above.

Struggle and suffering are indeed permanent fixtures in any society, but it is the manner in which citizens endure and overcome struggle and suffering that will continually be transformed. Like South Africa's eternal and timeless figurehead Nelson Mandela stated, “"The greatest glory in living lies not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail."” With faith in God and the supernatural to help them overcome, many South Africans find the strength, the courage, and the agency to continually rise above the contradictions, above the inequity, above the poverty, and above all other obstacles to inhabit and abide within the great glory of life.