Do you ever have the sense that history is a grandmother holding out a box of precious treasures, asking, Please will you take these and make something of them in your life?
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This summer I visited places where I once lived in South Africa. One Saturday we returned to our favorite farmers’ market and stopped at a booth with tables piled high with used books. My son pointed to one and said, “That looks like it’s for you.”
The title read, THE BLACK PEOPLE and Whence They Came. The yellowed pages wafted a musty smell of library basements, and the first page informed me that this was the first book ever written in the Zulu language by a native speaker. The author, Magema Fuze, was over 80 years old when it was published, and on the last page he signs his name beside the place and date: Pietermaritzburg, 1922. In a strange twist of fortune, this was the very spot on the globe I had come to visit, exactly 100 years later.
It was as if Fuze himself had expected this moment would come. In his wrinkled octogenarian hand he writes in the final pages:
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I read the book in B&Bs and airports, but I could imagine myself sitting beside him listening in the shade of an acacia tree. He writes like a friend in conversation, interjecting playful comments to the reader like “Listen up now!” and “Hau!” (Zulu for “wow”).
There was laughter in the book, but also pain. He recounts the slow and painful destruction of his society by white invaders, how his people died “in heaps,” and how his king was sent into exile because “it had already been decided to destroy [their] government” because white colonists “feared.” He includes personal stories of discrimination—employers refusing to pay him and white doctors denying him treatment for a broken leg that left him with a permanent limp. But there is no complaining—it is as if his heart has been pounded and stretched so thin that he has no need to show emotion beyond the tenderness of an honest storyteller.
“It will be a good thing if even in the future our children gain knowledge about their past,” Fuze reminds us. This fall I am taking the Black History for a New Day course that has trained several thousand non-Black people in my city. This, too, is like receiving a box of memory held out as a gift, and like the best of gifts, it has value in ways I could not anticipate, but also responsibility.
What are you doing to receive the stories of history? Do you know from “whence your people came,” and what they did, and what good and difficult gifts they pass on to you?
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