all Africans
John Matshikiza : WITH THE LID OFF
The taxi driver is from Yugoslavia. He rails against the politicians and religious orthodoxies that have torn his country apart, but says he is now quite happy in South Africa. He drops me at the airport and wishes me a pleasant flight.
My ticket says Air Afrique. The aircraft says Air Europe, although there’s a small Air Afrique logo hastily stuck on the side.
The crew, from captain to cabin attendant, is 100% Italian.
What is happening to Africa? I ask myself. The last time I flew this route, the airline was proud to boast a fully African crew on all its routes. Now, it seems, economies of scale have put paid to all of that.
Raki is a Muslim. He comes from Benin. He is normally a flight attendant on this route, but his job has been usurped by the Italians. So he is flying home. He joins us in the passenger cabin as we head north- west at 30 000 feet and talk about this and that.
“Why are you people in South Africa so xenophobic?” he asks. “You attack your brothers from other parts of Africa in the streets, lynch them, round them up and deport them. Why are you such cruel people?”
We distance ourselves from the cruelty of others and the conversation moves to other matters, especially religion.
Being a nominally Christian country, I venture, hasn’t made South Africans particularly loving towards one another, let alone to foreigners. Perhaps this is because Christianity has so many opposing denominations, whereas in Islam, the other great imported religion of Africa, there cannot be such schisms – “there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet …”
I should have known better than to expose my limited knowledge. But it sure starts a good debate.
“Yes, on the surface Islam unites,” says my fellow South African, Suleman, himself a Muslim. “But is even Islam strong enough to cross divides in South Africa? For example, outside the walls of the mosque, do Indian and coloured Muslims still regard their black co-religionists as brothers?”
“But listen,” Raki interrupts. “You don’t need lots of people around you to be able to practise your religion. You don’t even need to go to the mosque or the church, the Qur’an doesn’t instruct you to do so. If your faith is strong, you only need yourself and your faith in order to be able to perform your observances. In that sense Islam is more practical.”
Suleman rejoins: “But there is another point I want to make against my own religion. How is it that a person who has the capacity to carry my life inside her for the first nine months of my existence is not permitted to accompany my corpse to the cemetery?”
Raki starts tearing up safety cards, sick bags and in-flight magazines, drawing diagrams on the bits of paper to illustrate his point.
“Woman,” he opens, “is not equal to man.”
Suleman and I both let off a roar of re- constructed protest, but Raki silences us with an even louder roar of triumph. “I didn’t say inferior!” he cries, jabbing his pencil in my face. “I said `not equal’. Women are different! A woman menstruates once a month. This is a cleansing process during which impurities are driven out of the body, and when you are burying somebody, God demands that you be pure.”
“I know all that,” says Suleman, “but why can a woman not be trusted to stay away at her own discretion if she is in that `impure’ state?”
“Of the hundreds of women who might attend a funeral, how can you be sure that every single one of them can be trusted in this regard?” asks Raki.
“Of the hundreds of men at the same funeral,” I say, “how can you be sure that every single one of them has properly performed his ablutions, and is therefore pure enough to bury the dead?”
“You are both right, of course,” sighs Raki, “but it is not as simple as that. Custom. Things change their meaning as the centuries fall away. The Prophet Mohammed himself …” He is back to form and returns to one of his earlier diagrams. “The prophet,” he taps the circle that represents the prophet, “he, for example, married a woman who was not only older than him, but much richer than him. But she deferred to him as her master, and as head of the household. That was the custom at the time. Today,” he smiles mildly at us, “maybe things would be different.”
The taxi driver on the ground in Abidjan the same night has a smiling face that is covered with tribal scars. “Ouch,” I say to myself, thinking about the terrible mutilations people can lay on their children in the name of belief. But he is looking at my pathetically unmarked face with his own curiosity.
“Where do you come from?” he asks.
“South Africa.”
“Ah,” he grins even wider, “Africa is immense, isn’t it? God is indeed great. Imagine, if it wasn’t for the white man, we would never have got to know each other!”
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