Cry the Beloved Country

On a regular basis I come across new initiatives aimed at building and supporting a better and nicer South Africa. Sometimes these are government programmes, but as frequently they are initiatives taken by ordinary people, by non-government organisations, or by the private sector. A good example is the SATheGoodNews initiative (see their website on my recommended list). It is possible to subscribe to a weekly e-mail update from SATheGoodNews.

Another good example is the Stop Crime, Say Hello initiative. Like many other good ideas this is small and simple! Stop Crime, Say Hello encourages people to greet each other in the course of their daily interaction. It sounds simple, even naïve. In some ways it is troubling that we have to see this as important, but a small idea like this can be the first step in building a connected and connecting society. There are parts of the world where people avoid connecting and greeting each other – infamously the London Underground is a place where people do not greet even the person sitting next to them. This can be one of the first symptoms of a sick society – where we lose the opportunity to greet strangers.

A reluctance to greet a stranger can arise from fear – a fear of not wanting to know, of being afraid of what happens when we get to know people and share what is going on. So we retreat and let our fear take over. And fear starts to govern all our relationships. Alan Paton, in his Cry the Beloved Country, wrote about the fear of bondage and about the bondage of fear – we have known both in South Africa of course.

By staying in our fear, we victimise ourselves and disempower ourselves as people that can take responsibility for our future. So, how to liberate ourselves from fear. Three ideas are important here. One is to accept responsibility for our situation (we alone can change things). The second is to take the first steps to move away from our fear – and this is where the Stop Crime, Say Hello initiative is important – it encourages us to take some first steps to get to know each other, and to build bridges with strangers. This is the first step to building new social capital in society. The third idea is that we have to decide to trust. Trust ourselves and our ability to change ourselves and our situation.

If we embrace these three ideas we can liberate ourselves from our fear (of others, of our situation). Alan Paton acknowledged the cry of our beloved country “for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear". We have freed ourselves from the fear of tyranny, now we need to free ourselves from the tyranny of fear.