18 - Extending global solidarity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2021
Summary
We cannot be tourists, not in our own country nor anywhere on earth. We are supposed to see suffering and do something about it.
Ydalene CoetseeWhen Jaco and Ydalene Coetsee returned to South Africa from their tour of Europe in 1989, Jaco had faced ‘a void of identity’, vowing that he would leave the DRC Mission Church in Stellenbosch as soon as possible. The experience overseas – and especially an encounter with the South African minister Mpho Ntoane in Holland – had convinced him that his situation, as a white minister leading a black church, was untenable.
Jaco didn't change his situation. He changed himself. He and Ydalene remained in Stellenbosch. Jaco stayed with the same congregation, which became the URC Stellenbosch. He found a way to be a servant – and the inner struggle he went through to get there led him to a different kind of leadership. The story of Jaco and Ydalene's coming to terms with who they were and how they could be exemplifies the purpose of CFT – to enable people to fly away, to look back from a safe distance and to return with a clearer view of their own lives in relation to others. Jaco said:
I know I was on the verge of throwing in the towel and one of the crucial points was, how is it possible for a White Afrikaans-speaking nationalist to work in a Black community with its own history? In a certain sense I still sit with that but probably because I went through that personal wrenching, I realised after writing that report that I never thought of leaving the country and I never thought of using CFT contacts as an escape. I think I just dug in and lived through that phase. I just knew in my heart, Stay! Be a servant.
Coming from a resolute nationalist tradition, Jaco found himself compelled to question everything he was and came from.
I have never been a radical and I am not now. I was never like Beyers, I was just an ordinary minister doing Christian work every day but knowing which choices to make. I was never a public figure, an angry Afrikaner fighting the system … But my background had something that is useful even in a poor Coloured community and I kept offering that for what it was worth but from the stance of a servant.
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- The Secret ThreadPersonal Journeys Beyond Apartheid, pp. 303 - 328Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2018