East London!

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From Grahamstown we began to travel down from the mountains and towards East London on the coast. Here we traveled through King Williams Town, which was established by the London Missionary Society in 1826. During the apartheid era it had been one of the major cities in the black homeland of Ciskei, and we could tell that this community was not as developed economically. The city was one of the centers for black resistance against apartheid and it is here that Steven Biko is buried. Biko was a young South African who was a spokesman for the Black Consciousness movement and urged blacks towards non-violence and to take responsibility for themselves and their future. Biko was beaten to death while in police custody in 1977.

While in East London we were guests of Bahram and Simin, a Persian couple that originally came from Canada. Bahram is a soft-spoken mechanical engineer and Simin, his wife, is a dentist. They have two grown daughters attending college, one in Canada and the other in South Africa. They have also adopted two younger children of color, a girl, Lethia and her younger brother, Alton. Both children have learning disabilities. Once again we were quite impressed by how active this couple are and their constant efforts to support the Faith and uplift people. Bahram is a teacher at Walter Sisulu University (WSU), but he also is developing a small business to recover solvents and prevent environmental contamination. Simin is part of a mobile public health caravan that brought dental care into the black townships and under anything but ideal conditions.

Bahram took off part of his workday to show us around East London. He took me to visit the engineering office of the local municipality (no opportunities there) and Bob to the art department at WSU. The main campus for WSU is in Umtata, but the art program is located in a converted department store in downtown East London. There we met the quite overworked head of that program, and we toured the ceramics lab. The South African schools we visited all have ceramics and print making facilities. One student in particular welcomed us and invited us to view his work. His large pieces were in the process of drying prior to being fired. They were a combination of skilled wheel and hand-built with richly textured surfaces. When we asked to see some his earlier work that had already been fired, he laughed and told us that there wasn’t any; this was his first year and these were his first pieces. The experience was a humbling one. This young man possessed talent that many artists could only dream of. Later that night, we kicked ourselves for not having gotten his name and for not having arranged to purchase one of his works when they were completed.

One our second day in East London, our hosts took us to a potluck gathering so we could meet many of the local Bahá’ís. At the event we were again filled with a variety of local and Persian foods and met many wonderful people. Later that night it occurred to us that there were many middle easterners (Persians), people of color (mixed race) and black Africans who attended this event; however, we were the only whites present. The fact that we are part of a very small minority (about 5% in south Africa) was obvious to us when we had first arrived, but we had reached a point where we had become less aware or perhaps more accepting of that fact.

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