BBC THOUGHT FOR THE DAY 24.10.12 - District 6 On United Nations' Day
24/10/2012
Today is United Nations Day so let me take you to District 6 a haunting, sacred space in the middle of beautiful Cape Town in South Africa. District 6 is a green gash in the middle of the city. It is a strange phenomenon with quite a story. If you walk across the this gaping hole it conjures ghosts. You find a slab where a house used to be... a street grown over but the tarmac and white lines still there, underneath. The story is that the Apartheid Government in South Africa declared District 6 a “whites only” area in 1966 and a wonderfully harmonious mix of all races, religions and colours on
the edge of the city centre, snuggled under Table Mountain saw the bulldozers come and level their community; flattening walls and gouging souls.
There is a District Six Museum in the building of an old Church nearby and it is a place where your soul shakes as it connects with the memories of other souls floating around the photographs, poems, and art. The story of streets, buildings and people at the mercy of unbelievable laws of government. The strange thing is that you feel good... not because of the evil that was... but because of the
redemption that has come... as you learn that some of the residents have started moving back. Apartheid was eventually knocked down and is now flatter than District 6.
If you lean in and listen to this Museum you can find yourself caught between the vision of the architects of apartheid and the vision of St. John recorded in the Book Of Revelation. As you read St. John’s vision of people from all races, languages and colours gathered around God’s throne, you find it clashing with these artefacts that tell you which colour is allowed or forbidden from sitting on “white only” summer seats. St. John’s vision is of rainbow colours and apartheid’s
was about black and white. St. John’s is about creating a new world order and apartheid’s is about destroying one. St. John’s is the gentle caress of organic love and apartheid’s is about cold sterile legal injustice. Apartheid is a loud clang and clash in the quietness of District 6. You can feel the pain of souls that once were crushed here... but now you can catch the little shards of heaven’s light as the vanquished are at last free and restored. Have a good United Nations Day!