JONATHAN JANSEN | Worcester Shoprite bomber offers an alternative to the Nicole Barlows of this world

Stefaans Coetzee was responding to a question from my large class of undergraduate students when things went quiet, and I could sense the emotion in the room. “Every time I meet someone who is different from me,” said the lean and gentle-mannered man, “I believe God is showing me something more about Himself.”

This would be a moving statement for any South African to confess on a university campus; it was certainly a profound statement from a once avowed racist who as a teenager under the influence of older white supremacists would bomb the Checkers Shoprite in Worcester at the height of the Christmas season, sending black people to their deaths and seriously wounding others.

I was teaching a module titled “How racism is learnt and unlearnt” and thought it appropriate to share the lecturing platform with a young man who had turned around his life in prison under the influence of another condemned racist the media dubbed Prime Evil, one Eugene de Kock. It was a risky venture inviting Stefaans because I did not know how exactly the audience would respond to a man with blood on his hands. Yet the large gathering of students listened to Stefaans respectfully, if also warily, and applauded him warmly as he spoke openly about his racism and his gradual transformation from a life of racial arrogance to one of humble embrace.

When the story of Nicole Barlow broke a few days ago, elements in the white right aligned immediately with the white woman who insinuated on social media that we missed an opportunity to do a Hani (assassination) on minister Gwede Mantashe.

For people of faith, that revelation must be one of the most powerful to fall on human ears: when I meet people who are not like me or think differently from me, I get a closer glance of who God is. Yet you do not need to be religious to understand the profound connection being made here between a broken humanity and divine revelation.

It was with this story in mind that I accepted an invitation last Sunday to speak at the Vredelust Gemeente in Boston, a suburb of Bellville in the Cape. Please give us a title for your talk, asked the minister on email. He went quiet for a while after I sent the topic thinking they would surely disinvite me: why I left the church and decided to follow Jesus. The title was amended and off I went. To my surprise this former dyed-in-the-wool Dutch Reformed Church had by all measures transformed itself from a white church into one of the more diverse gatherings you would see on a Sunday morning. I was impressed, but thought to nevertheless press home the point about a more generous faith, one that comes to terms with what it means to live a life of openness and embrace towards those we regard as different from us.

Campuses, I told the worshippers, are for the most part racially desegregated but not socially integrated. The same is true for public places from restaurants to beaches to most of our schools. We live past each other, and on almost anything of significance we choose by tribe not by truth because of centuries of separation. I reminded the congregation that they might be shocked when they get to heaven that there are not separate mansions (John 14) for coloureds, Indians, whites and Africans. What a ridiculous idea, even these tribal classifications.

And yet 30 years after the legal end of apartheid most South Africans still live their lives past each other in almost every sphere of human occupation. When the story of Nicole Barlow broke a few days ago, elements in the white right aligned immediately with the white woman who insinuated on social media that we missed an opportunity to do a Hani (assassination) on minister Gwede Mantashe. Why, asked my colleague Thuli Madonsela, is there so little outrage against Barlow’s actions? I venture a guess. Most South Africans are exhausted by these routine, everyday outbursts by the vain and the vacuous, those citizens who are so hard-wired by their racism that they appear puzzled by the fuss over what they did.

Stefaans offers a refreshing alternative: the admission that he was a racist who paid for his horrific crime and the commitment to radically change his life. On Monday morning he left a moving voice note on my cellphone. Stefaans is giving up his job to work full-time with hundreds of white men who come through his church on the subject of racism. Put differently, he wants to teach them how to unlearn racism. How different this strategy from the racist act-public outrage routine that we now know changes nothing. And what better teacher to do this than one who walked this difficult road and, by his own estimate, still has a long way to go.

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