The Very Rev Michael Weeder writes an open letter President Jacob Zuma.
Dear President Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, Thina sizwe. This song, as you know, laments the loss of land, Sikhalela izwe lethu (We cry for our land) and is an assertive protest: kumhlaba wethu (this land is ours). No one sings it as rousingly as you do.
You gathered, with the griot’s intuition, the ashes of memory from the columbarium of revolution, scattering it in song and raising it to life in the collective psyche of the nation. Freedom fighters remembered the forgotten whenever you sang the call not to rest: “Yinde lendlela esiyihambayo. Wash’* uMandela kubalandeli bakhe, wathi sodibana nge-Freedom Day,” (The road ahead is long. Mandela told his followers we will meet on Freedom Day).
Your first term as president and the theme of your administration, Working Together We Can Do Better, promised so much. You drew the multitudes, hungry for the basic things in life: Jobs, shelter, food on the table and the dignity that should crown all our lives.
On the Second Sunday in Advent, the season when we anticipate the celebration of the birth of the divine into human history, you attended a service of the Twelve Apostles’ Church in Christ in Durban. Chief apostle Professor Caesar Nongqunga preached about the virtue of forgiveness. He spoke of the absolving signifier of your presence in their midst:“If the president was really corrupt would he still be here among us?”
In your response you focused on your detractors in the faith community: “It is sad to see the church and church leaders getting mired into matters of politics instead of praying for leaders.” You urged us to pray for you and “for our people to stop the hatred”.
Mr President, we have prayed for your well-being for a long time. During apartheid our worship services were, in itself, sites of struggle.
At my seminary, St Paul’s, in Grahamstown in the 1980s, our white peers would pray for “our boys on the border”.
We black seminarians responded with prayers for our comrades on the other side of the border. We implored Qamata, the God of liberation, reminding him that he “lived as an exile in Egypt” and should “protect and comfort all refugees”.
On that Sunday in Durban, Msholozi, you reminded us, perhaps unwittingly, of the reason we pray and are mired in politics. It is because justice, as Cornell West underscores in his reflection on the downbeat side of life, “is what love looks like in public”.
It was the prayers and politicised discipleship of the faith community that helped to open the prison doors and enabled the exiles to return home.
When the Church is at its justice-focused best, it is able to hear the voice of God in the cry of the marginalised and down-pressed. We have not prayed enough it would seem.
We have abandoned the struggle and surrendered the political kingdom to you and all professional politicians. That is our sin of omission and neglect.
The followers of Jesus Christ have allowed you, President Zuma, and your confederates to betray the mandate the electorate gave you.
We have succumbed to the sophistry of the pampered elite; lamenting and lumming – in our Cape Flats patois this means doing absolutely nothing. Revolution has been reduced to an occasional hobby militated on in social media.
Yinde le ndlela. The road is still long and we will pray for you. And here is my prayer for the Church so we will find our way back into the trenches: O God, whose light shines forth in the darkest of times, enable us to proclaim insurrection and to share kindness and food.
Grant us the strength daily to clothe ourselves with a commitment to be your all – embracing arms so that we may stand in solidarity with the workers and the students and all who strive to build a new society.
Grant that we may be your hope to the poor, the woman and the child. And may you find us worthy to be your will and power to free our land from the greed and the iniquity of the privileged and the powerful. Amen.
* The Very Rev Michael Weeder is the current Dean of St George's Cathedral.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.