It was my moment. That part in the romantic comedy where the couple slow motion runs towards each other at the bus stop and profess their love (probably just to break up a week later). That part in the song where the instruments cut out then shift into a cherubic key change. That part of your trip to Africa that every Anglo-Euro-merican pays for.
Our mission team had set up camp in Overcome Heights, one of the most violent townships in Cape Town’s notorious Cape Flats area. Some have (accurately) described the neighborhood as “an apartheid dumping ground,” a plot of earth so covered in shanties, garbage, and dog poop that it doesn’t even look like earth anymore. However, our team had plopped ourselves on top of the one discernible smudge of green in a sea of dirt-brown and concrete-gray.
The park—a word I use liberally—had no trappings of an American park. No swings floated ghostly in the winter winds and a patch of sand made for a makeshift sandbox in which kids dug for shattered glass instead of China (and not just because South Africa isn’t geographically polarized from China—I guess the kids could’ve been digging for the Atlantic Ocean). Resting from my breakout role as “Crowd Member” in the skits we performed for the kids, I leaned against a fence—another word I use liberally—and watched the frenetic buzz of children grin and zoom about the field. Girls flocked under the park’s one shade tree gossiping—or talking about my inspiring performance as “Crowd Member”—as the boys dribbled a soccer ball up and down the green-space. Now, soccer is just not my sport. I’m no Ann Coulter, but I just don’t understand why the sport is so freaking great. And I was tired and jet-lagged and also a non-fan of running. So I just leaned on the wooden post waiting for my save-the-world moment when “ta daaaaa…”
He stood in the middle of the sandpit, sluggishly sinking to the other side of the world. Wrapped in an oversized brown hoodie, he wore equally brown shorts and no shoes. Rays seeped from the heavens where angels sang a peerless rendition of “We are the World” just for me. It was my moment. My destiny as an upper-middle class white person to swoop down and save this barefoot-brown-baby. To impart my knowledge and rock-solid faith upon “the least of these.” To Instagram the crap out of this totally life changing and momentous occasion with a Scriptural and emoji-fraught caption.
So I swooped.
The two year-old had planted himself in the middle of the soccer match—a stubbron move with which my inner rebel could relate. He also played more at my pace, digging leisurely in the sand amidst the older boys running at break neck speed. I squatted next to the kid and introduced myself. The only response I got was a stone-faced grimace. Not exactly a college-essay-material beginning, but I would persist. I asked him his name and got the same look of disgruntled confusion. I still have no clue when babies start talking and if he was at that age yet, but I knew this kid needed me, or at least that’s what the lighting, the impoverished backdrop, and barefootedness were telling me.
So I sat down in the middle of the soccer game and dug along with my African child. However, the exotic allure Madonna saw in African babies was slowly waning. It’s not like I was getting much out of digging a hole in some rancid sand next to this kid. But the more we dug, the more he warmed up to me so I kept talking to my captive audience, which is something I’m used to. I gave him a thumbs up at one point of the conversation, and he thought that was the greatest. Finally! A positive response. He copied my foreign gesture and pressed his tiny thumb up to mine and we both beamed at our E.T. moment.
When face-painting time rolled around, I corralled my African child towards the fence where the activities were taking place. All along the way, I picked up every shard of beer bottle I could find as the shoeless kid toddled behind me. My paranoid suburban mother side was kicking in and I started internally freaking out about all the possible injuries that awaited a barefoot two year-old in that glass-shard minefield of a park. I nervously sat on the fence and stooped to collect the brambles from in front of me where the kid wandered in circles, giving me thumbs ups. I was so focused on “preparing the way” that I almost didn’t see the kid step on a huge briar that jammed itself in the sole of his foot. I paternally started to pounce, expecting tears and a tantrum—from both him and me—when the two year-old coolly looked down at his foot and pulled out the splinter with not even a whimper.
His stoicism stunned me to silence.
He didn’t need me. He didn’t need Madonna. He didn’t even need shoes.
The child was as resilient as his community, as durable as his continent. A continent with over twice the population of the US, as diverse and inventive as the US, just different. A continent whose metanarrative is the “sob story,” one perpetuated by the media and multiple well-intentioned NGOs. However, I don’t believe in the African sob story. While famine, genocide, and gangsterism plague Africa, I refuse to buy in to its image as a helpless, barefoot child, standing lost in the middle of a park. I refuse this image because I have sped down the streets of Cape Town in the open trunk of VW Chico.
Each morning in Capricorn, a neighborhood next to Overcome, our team and local workers would walk the streets of the shantytown, beating drums and singing to let kids know it was time for our morning “Club.” That morning, one of the local workers handed me a gargantuan bass drum and asked me to get into the popped trunk of his car. Not used to men forcing me into car trunks, I was hesitant at first but then embraced my uncomfortable perch in the VW Chico. As we drove at walking speed, kids, caught like moths to light, trickled from their shanties to beat the drum. Legs dangling in the dusty street, I was resituating myself when the local worker who was driving sped off once we had reached the main road. At 60 mph, I hugged the massive bass with one hand and with the other clawed at the Chico’s plush plastic interior. In a brief reprieve from panic, I looked straight ahead—but backwards—and watched dozens of children screaming after the vehicle, pulsing past the drug dealers and stray mutts, smiles splitting upon their raised faces. They faded into the golden dust of morning as we hung a right.
I do not believe in the African sob story because of what I saw from the back of a speeding car. Africa is not a photo op, but a home. Africans are not museum pieces; they are Africans and therefore people, and a people who tread among innumerable briars that they will step on and remove. Then, they will keep walking.
nick barnette 