Listening to the silent majority

[4]

In 1982, Jabulani reached a point of no return. He went home to think. He reached the firm conclusion, that from then on he wanted to actively contribute to the struggle. ‘Why join the ANC?’ he thought. ‘They have opposed apartheid for more than 20 years and nothing has happened.’ He told me, ‘I looked for a political movement that was operating from within the system to overthrow apartheid. In 1983, there was an appeal from the UDF and I liked it. I did not regard them as necessarily a violent movement. Even now, I don't consider the UDF as such. Which does not mean to say, and I do not intend to deny, that there are perhaps some violent elements within the UDF. Any organisation can be infiltrated by anyone. In principle, the UDF is here to try to unify black people. So, I remained involved with the UDF from 1982 until early 1988.’

In the meantime, Jabulani Patose was admitted in 1986 to the Southern African School of Theology. He made it clear to me that he wanted to further develop his mind by trying, for instance, to find an acceptable answer to the meaning of God in his life. In this school, he met young men from all over the African continent, from big cities like Soweto as well as small towns in the South African homelands. The school was a multi-racial institution. But something was missing from his classes, what he calls ‘contextualization’. ‘I wanted to understand the concept of God,’ he said, ‘within the context of my own culture and my own style of living. God can have a meaning within your own immediate environment. The concept of God must be brought into harmony with Christian principles. One has to consider what one is doing in as broad a context as possible. However, our school was based exclusively on the Pentecostal Movement. They don't subscribe to my kind of thinking.’

So Jabulani and some of his friends began secretly attending lectures elsewhere, to test what they had learned with other paths of thought. They wanted to sharpen their minds as much as possible. When the School Board found out about their intellectual escapades, Jabu first received several warnings, but was subsequently expelled on a phoney

[p. 5]

charge of having met a girl in a manner not condoned by the school authorities. ‘All along I had been pretty independent in my thinking,’ he told me, ‘and had been raising money for students who lacked sufficient funds to pay for their tuition. I also supplied fellow students with outside information the school was deliberately withholding from them. The Board must have considered me to be uncontrollable.’