Soweto Sunday
I hope you remember that wherever you read “Soweto” you may substitute “township”. Now that you are armed with that vital “how to read this blog” info, help me understand my latest situation. You have guessed it - I have once again been to the other side and have come back to msawawa all confused and bothered.
A friend invited me to his church. Technically, it is not his church, it is my church too because it is the same denomination, the only difference being the location. I kid you not, location has turned out to be more than what I have up to now cared to accept - especially where churches are concerned. The first thing I noticed with people at this suburban church is how casual people are - with everything. The clothes that they wear, the way that they talk to God (read pray) and even the way that they talk to God’s proxy - the priest. So, as you may have figured it out, I was grossly over-dressed. These people come to God’s house wearing shorts and sandals! This cannot be right, or can it? Do they have some kind of special dispensation that allows them not to dress to the nines when going to church? No wonder so few people pitch up for the church service. You see, back home in msawawa, in addition to the good word, the bread and the wine, there are the ladies all dressed up all smelling good and of course the brothers who are not be outdone. So the brothers come for the sisters and the sisters better be there if they are to catch any of the brothers. That is besides the good word, the wine and the bread, that is. Where else, other than the funeral and the wedding do you get to pick your prospective wife or husband but the big man’s house? Considering that the former two don’t come every weekend - well, the funeral maybe does - but you get my thinking, right?
Anyways, there I was in my Sunday’s best (there is a reason they are called Sunday’s best) among the under-dressed and the under-tanned, except my host and two others of course. I am no spring chicken myself but boy the folks in this church are old. I tell you the honest truth (yeah there is another kind) the church was full of old people - no young people! How does it work with white people? Only the kindergarten and the octagenarians go to church? The rest of the family? Excuse my obsession with this but you have to understand where I’m coming from. Long, long, long time ago, before the days of the missionaries and fibre optics, black folks were apparently minding their own business with no idea of the Sunday kind of God until the white folks with the smoke-coughing sticks and good book showed up. That’s how David Bullard would put it anyways.
Now come Sunday, Soweto is hussle and bussle with families (ok largely women and children) going to the various churches in the township. Here, you should arrive early or you do not find a seat and the services is long, anything up to 3 hours. The church is full; young people, old people - women and men in their Sunday best. These folks some 300 years or so ago would be elsewhere now they are crammed in a church. The people who introduced the whole church on Sunday thing hardly fill the pews of their magnificent churches.
How’s that?
