Amahoro is a vision and an idea that literally means shalom – peace. But not just peace in the way our English language describes but restoration and wholeness of life, equal opportunities for all and a spirit of reconciliation.
So as I have come here to the Amahoro Africa conference in South Africa and I am encountering the most unique conference of my life. I have entered into an atmosphere of Amahoro among the very raw tensions of post apartheid South Africa. While there is a desire for Amahoro in the content, there is a very raw and real context into which that is spoken every time we gather together in the hall.
I feel privileged as an outside westerner to be able to observe what is going on here. There are 7 of us from Australia in the crowd of 200 or so. While there are representatives from Kenya, Rwanda, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda, Botswana, Swaziland, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, there are also people here from New Zealand, UK and USA. The most dominant presence here are the South Africans who make up about half of the group. The majority of those South Africans are white Africans. I tell you this to set a context for the space I find myself in as we understand the history and the current issues that particularly face the above mentioned African countries.
The hosts of Amahoro are Trevor (black South African from Soweto chairing the conference), Marius (white South African from Cape Town) and Rene (coloured South African from Cape Town)
I want to continue to set a context for a story I want to tell you. For the sake of breaking up long blogs, I’ll save it for the next one.
I see that you have added 2 Australians from the last blog. You are really wetting the appetite about what you will share. I have some Idea having been there:) and hearing a few stories from Sth Africans in particular.
Will be watching…
It’s good to see the blog posts about Amahoro beginning to pop up. It would be good if we could have some kind of list of them all, so that we can share everyone’s reactions and experiences.
Mark
As a South African I just want to check something. When referring to white Africans, do that include both the English and Afrikaans communities? Do you distinguish between the Afrikaner people and other white Africans, thus mainly English speaking white South Africans, when drawing the context?
You can find a list of blog posts on Amahoro at Notes from underground: Amahoro Gathering.
Please consider adding your Amahoro posts to the list. You can find out how to do that by clicking here.
In that way we can continue the convesation.
Interesting and thought provoking talk this morning Mark. Thanks. One of the things that does go through my mind about truth and reconciliation commissions (also tried in East Timor amongst others), is that killing one person will get you a lengthy jail term, or even a death penalty (depending on where you live). But killing 50, 000 will get you amnesty. I don’t pretend to have an answer on this, but I do wonder about it all sometimes. It does seem sometimes as if the best thing a terrorist or guerilla group can do, is to keep killing until they have killed enough people to be granted official forgiveness. We do tread a slippery slope sometimes.