Three Key Themes Revisited

Earlier this year, C4L launched three blogsites, on three themes that seemed distinct, important, and recurrent in our bulletins and prayer letters over 7 years.  The trilogy includes:

1. Altruism, philanthropy and missions
2. Leadership (which frequently raises related questions around non-racialism)
3. Youth

Well, today’s Sunday Independent just made it too easy for me!  I simply cannot resist sharing with you some tasty and nourishing morsels from it…

On Leadership                                                                       www.trilogy-leaders.blogspot.com

Young Msusi Maimane is the new parliamentary leader of the Loyal Opposition.  He wrote a public response to comments about him, that an ANC stalwart was forced to retract in parliament.  Here are some excerpts:

Sisulu commented that I was nothing more than a “hired native” or “black commodity” who was in Parliament to do “someone else’s bidding”.  These attacks are in line with the ANC’s narrative of racial mobilization and an abandonment of former president Nelson Mandela’s project of non-racialism.

Here I am: a young, black South African who grew up in Dobsonville, Soweto, surrounded by the struggle.  In many ways, my life is also a model of everything that the ANC fought for – except one: I am the parliamentary leader of the Democratic Alliance.

The comments made by Sisulu espouse the same attitudes as the former NP (Editorial note: the ruling party during the apartheid era).  It is an attitude that as a free black South African, I owe everything – my background, my education, my freedom – to the ANC.  Therefore, my politics must also be aligned to the ANC.  That is not freedom.  True freedom means that I am free to choose either the ANC or the DA.

My personal choices are not a betrayal of the freedoms which the ANC fought for, but rather the exercising of those freedoms.