Molly's reflections on her Easter experiences in Cape Town

Being abroad sometimes gives me this feeling of invincibility, as if I can do things here that I would be too afraid to do at home, and if things go wrong I can excuse myself because I’m an exchange student who just wants to learn more about the culture. One of the things I’m usually too afraid to do at home is go to services at churches I’m unfamiliar with. Going to new churches always makes me a little worried because I never know what to expect and standing out in a congregation can be awkward. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who wanted to visit St. George’s Cathedral, so a few of my coeducators and I went to St. George's Cathedral in downtown Cape Town on Easter Sunday. The Cathedral is well-known for being the home cathedral of former Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the same man who led the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The sight of European-looking churches next to palm trees is new and a bit uncomfortable to me; it reminds me of the colonialism that brought Christianity to tropical regions and it almost seems as if the church doesn’t belong and shouldn’t be there. With that being said, Christianity has been a positive motivating force for many of the people I’ve worked with here, and who am I to say it doesn’t belong? There’s a welcome sign at the entrance to the cathedral which invites people from all walks of life, regardless of job, race, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, handicaps, or any other aspect of life/identity you can think of, and that welcoming attitude seemed to be reflected in the congregation. Afrikaans, English, and Xhosa were all represented at different parts of the service, and the sermon compared Jesus's resurrection as only the beginning of the Christian struggle to the end of Apartheid being only the beginning of the struggle towards equality. I don’t get a lot of contact here with older white people who think that the struggle towards equality continues today, so it was refreshing to see a white reverend at a well-known church acknowledging it. In any case, it was better than the comparison between UConn men's basketball and Jesus’s resurrection that was made to the last Easter service I attended in the United States.

The Monday after Easter is Family Day in South Africa, so I spent most of the day with every single other white person in Cape Town at the Parklife Music Festival, a folk-pop festival that took place on a cricket club in Green Point. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen that many white people in one place at a time in Cape Town, and I hope I continue to be critical of the overt whiteness that will surround me when I go back to West Hartford Center or a Dave Matthews Band concert back in the US. Some of the music was very good, but I couldn’t help but cringe when a white artist named Xavier Rudd took time from his set to thank the ancestors for this land, or when a stoner band called Desmond and the Tutus (how is that okay? maybe Desmond Tutu has a better sense of humor than me) took the stage and started proclaiming their love for girls from Pretoria. We discussed the existence of white culture in class several weeks ago, so it was interesting to finally see white culture in Cape Town represented so dynamically through vintage clothing, folk-pop, and food trucks.