Spirit in Action
Writing Creative Reality with Glen Retief
Glen Retief grew up in South Africa, a story he captured in his book The Jack Bank, and he writes periodically for the South African publication, The Daily Maverick.
- Duration:
- 55m
- Broadcast on:
- 26 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
[Music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat and each week we bring you visits and conversations with people doing healing work for this world, hearing what they're doing and what inspires them and supports them in doing it. Welcome to Spirit in Action. [Music] Glenn Redive grew up in South Africa, a story he captured in his book The Jack Bank, and he writes periodically for the South African publication The Daily Maverick. Glenn's perspective, a gay man poised between the US and South Africa, is eye-opening. In particular, his writings on historical events and landmarks that we are often blind to because of convenient ignorance. Glenn is an associate professor of nonfiction writing at Susquehanna University. Glenn joins us in person today as part of the Friends General Conference Gathering held this year at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Glenn, it's good to be back with you. It's been so long 2011 is when we last talked. Likewise, Mark. Have you done anything in the ensuing 13 years or you just been stasis? It depends on your definition of the word stasis. I've been very busy teaching, very busy being an administrator in the creative writing program in which I teach. I was director of the program for a while. As you'll hear in a moment, I did a two-year Fulbright. It was a year-long Fulbright which got extended to a year because of the pandemic. I was in South Africa and sort of helping the University of Portotti for two years in total. Still writing, I've written a novel that I'm trying to get published but hasn't been published yet and still writing a lot of essays and a lot of articles, so a lot of shorter pieces. So I've still been writing, publishing, researching, but then a lot of teaching, a lot of being a university administrator which of course takes time away from teaching and from writing. You know, I was following things with Peterson all along because we're running the programs from Citizens Climate Radio and everything, so every three months at least I was in touch with Peterson. And so I knew when you were heading over to South Africa, of course you grew up there had Peterson before Ben in South Africa. Yeah, he'd been on a couple of visits, one by himself before he met me and then he'd been with me a couple of times, maybe two or three, just for short visits. What was different about this was that we lived there for 18 months and this was the first time that he'd lived in South Africa and he loved it. We want to go back there someday. We're just not sure of the timeline. Do they have universal health insurance there? They do have universal health insurance. It's very under-resourced and middle-class people up out of it by getting private health insurance. So it really is state hospitals and state clinics for the poor and for the working class. You'll get treatment and usually you'll get the treatment that you need. You might need to wait a very long time. So, you know, if you go in with a fever like with malaria, you might go in at 8 a.m. when a doctor will see you at 5 p.m. or something like that. The system is very overburdened. They just passed something called National Health Insurance in South Africa. It's a new system. It's controversial but the government is saying that the legislation has been passed and they are implementing step by step a program whereby the government will pay, it's like Medicare for all. The government will be the only national health insurer for a certain core set of conditions and you won't be able to get it'll be illegal to provide private health insurance for those core conditions. And so then you'll be able to go to any hospital. Private or government or whatever, you know, whatever's convenient for you or closest for you but the government will pay the bills and it'll be fixed rates and so on. So it's kind of like what was proposed here by Sanders and Warren, Medicare for all. It's a similar system to that. I've known people in the US who say, you know, I want to retire to France or Japan, any of these places where they've got good medical coverage and it's like I was just talking to someone at lunch and they said retiring would like to come back to US but can't afford to because the medical situation here is so inferior to what so many nations have and it sounds like South Africa's reaching toward being on that tier. The middle of us health care is so much more affordable than it's equivalent in the US. It's just, yeah, for two or three hundred dollars a month, a couple can get excellent health care. There's no co-pays, there's no deductibles, there's no gaps. So, you know, and you just you get sort of world-class private hospital and clinic coverage. So I don't understand all the economics of it. Some of it has to do with currency and cost of living but, you know, that can't explain all of it. But it is just it's just much more accessible for people. With the end of apartheid, late 1980s, early 1990s, when that transition happened, you were involved in activism in South Africa where you grew up and have lived all your life. You were part of helping draft the new Constitution. You were one of the forces in that and one of the things that got written into there was marriage. You don't have to be the same X, X, X, Y, whatever you you anybody can marry, right? And how is that going in South Africa? Because, you know, since 2011 in the US, it's the national law, couples can marry, right? That doesn't mean it's easy everywhere and treatments, right? So how has it gone in South Africa? Right, so the portion, it was a very tiny portion of the South African Constitution. But the portion that I helped write was a sentence which said there shall be no discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. And I think if we had to write it today, we would say sexual orientation or gender identity. Luckily, the courts interpreted sexual orientation as inclusive of gender identity. So it is unconstitutional in South Africa to discriminate on the grounds of either sexual orientation or gender identity. And then the courts told Parliament they had to pass marriage equality legislation to be compliant with the Constitution or else the court would rewrite the law to make it compliant. So legally in South Africa, no discrimination is permissible. There's full marriage equality, there's full inclusion for LGBTQ plus people. If you have an LGBTQ plus group and they want to hire a whole, it doesn't matter what the personal beliefs are of the owners of the whole or the managers of the whole. You can't refuse to be a cake for them. You can't refuse to bake a cake. There's no like discrimination on the grounds of LGBTQ plus is as illegal as discrimination on the grounds of race. It's all illegal, or ability or there's a long list. So it's more progressive than here legally. But socially, there still is a lot of prejudice and also violence, particularly in the poorer areas and the more rural areas and the more conservative areas. So yeah, depending on I think if you're middle class or educated or urban in South Africa, it's a great place to be LGBTQ plus. But I think that if you're in a much more conservative area, it's still very very difficult. Is this true, the discrimination, the homophobia, those kind of forces? Is there any difference in terms of the sources of that in terms of the indigenous black people versus the European the colonizer descendants? Is there any difference in those communities in terms of homophobia? That's a very good and very difficult question to answer. Yeah, I didn't want you to have an easy thing. So the way I'll always put it is that it is that the discrimination is different depending on the culture, economic background and so on, of the community. You know, so I mean, it's well known that in much of Africa, there are strong laws and you can go to jail or in Uganda, you can be killed for being LGBTQ plus and that is justified as African culture, protecting African culture from the decadence of Western imperialism. Western countries want to impose LGBTQ+ equality on us and this is our standing up for ourselves and for our culture. We're rejecting that by persecuting LGBTQ+ people. And I would say that that is much less true in South Africa, but it would still be true that in a traditional, what we would call in South Africa, a tribal area or a traditional area, an area that is administered, you know, the community of property, it's a traditional cultural area that protected by the Constitution. So if you go to an area where there are tribal councils and it's still very traditional, you won't find acceptance of LGBTQ+ people as that's understood in the West. But you will have sanguomas who are shamans who will talk about almost being too spirited, a kind of a similar concept. They'll have a different spirit within themselves. Usually, I've found in my experience, usually somebody of a different gender. So a male sanguama will say, "I have a woman living inside me, it's my grandmother." Or, you know, vice versa, a woman, you know, a female sanguama might say, "I have a male spirit." You know, somebody from Central Africa, whatever. So they'll talk about having, being in an in-between kind of gender. There are, you know, there are- And that's accepted in a traditional, yeah. That's not thought of as LGBTQ. That's not thought of as trans. It's not thought of as gay. If it were, I think it would trigger some opposition because now it's something Western that somebody's trying to impose. But traditionally, there is a space for gender and sexual diversity. Including, you know, some female monarchs in the north of South Africa, you know, who had wives. So they were husbands, even though they were biologically female. So they were sent- We would call them same-sex marriages. But that's not how they were thought of, because they were thought of as, like, kings in women's bodies who had then wives. You know, so there's all of these traditions of diversity within African cultures. But it's not called LGBTQ plus. So I don't know whether to say that's more homophobia or less. It's a different cultural worldview. You know, something else I'm just aware that I haven't realized at all about South Africa. Of course, I know that the Dutch and the descendants, whatever the English that came in, they came from nations that were nominally Christian, right? So they bring in Christian religion with them. Where I lived in Togo, and where Petra, hi Petra, where Petra and I lived in Togo in West Africa, I looked up the information before I went there and it said it was 10 percent Christian, 10 percent Muslim, and 80 percent Animist. On the other hand, I visited since then Kenya and Rwanda and the Congo. And in those places, they're 80 plus Christian identified. What about South Africa? And I'm talking particularly about the indigenous people there. And South Africa is interesting. It's also very Christian. By far the largest Christian denomination there is called the Zion Christian church or African Zionist churches. So they have 18 million adherents in Southern Africa, not just South Africa, but Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and so on. This is a tradition that came out of, as I learned on doing some research in South Africa. It's a tradition that is connected to Zion, Illinois. Zion was a utopian community, religious community, founded on a belief in racial equality, and a belief in faith healing. It was founded just north of Chicago, and it was called Zion because it was named after Zion in the Bible. They sent out a missionary in around 1900 who converted locals in a town called Vakashthurim in what is today the Pumalanga province of South Africa, and did a baptism in the river. And the message of faith healing and of racial equality was extremely appealing in this area because they were under the yoke of racial inequality and oppression, very extreme racial inequality. And they also, they didn't have money for doctors, so they struggled to access Western healthcare or scientific healthcare. And so they believed in faith healing. They also were competing with the indigenous healer tradition that I described, the shame and Osangoma tradition, we would call it. This was a big hit, this combination of Christian faith healing with a belief in racial equality, and the faith just completely spread. They also broke from the white church, the white Zionist church quite early, so it became the first independent black or independent African churches in the country. That's the majority tradition. And depending on who you talk to, if you talk to, you know, Peterson and I went to Zion, Illinois and met with the descendants of that church. And they said, they called them the Amazioni, the, you know, the African, they use the Zulu word for Zionists from Southern Africa. And they said, you know, the Amazioni are not Christians in our view because they are syncretic. They combine, they mix African animist or traditional religion. They mix that with Christianity. And many academics would say the same thing. You know, if you talk to the Amazioni themselves or to, you know, to bishops within the church, you're much more likely to hear, "No, we're most definitely not Sungomas. We have the true Sungoma, who is Jesus." So they see themselves as an alternative to traditional animist religion rather than being part of that. So you get a difference of opinions, but there definitely is a tradition of prophecy and a tradition of healing. So similar things that we associate with animists, and there's an, there's an honoring of ancestors. There's a communication with ancestors. Those things are part of that tradition. Which would be more indigenous versus most Catholic churches don't do that or whatever. Or maybe they don't do it so much. My mom's a Catholic and she talks to her ancestors every day. She talks to, you know, her parents who have passed down. She talks to her brother. Sure. You said about 18 million out of a population of? So the African has 50 million. Those 18 million come from neighboring countries as well. So not all 18 million are within, so. Within that 50th instrument. And I'm not sure what the combined population is of all of those countries. When I went in the Peace Corps back 77-79, I had choice of like seven different countries I could go to. And one of them was Lesotho. I could have, but I was vegetarian and they had a lot of meat there. So I decided not to go there. You were about to bring along a court. Lesotho gets pretty cold. Yeah. So the reason I'm asking you about this, I'm trying to get the characteristics in the back that involve you coming to United States and teaching creative writing and what's your official title at the university? Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing. And were you able to continue that while the 18 months, two years, you were living over in South Africa? Yes. So what I proposed as a Fulbright Project, and you're familiar with Fulbright, okay, was that I would help the University of Praetorian Memelody. This was something that they'd asked for, but I would help the University of Praetorian Memelody. So Memelody is like the Soweto of Praetoria. It's the Black Township kind of on the outskirts, the formerly segregated township. Still very, what Black, still very working class, the University of Praetoria, they have a branch in Memelody. And they had a university bridging program because there's a lot of struggles as in the US, but there's school struggles. Educational outcomes are very poor. The conditions under which students are studying are not conducive to learning. There's a lot of like, both parents have to work very long hours, multiple jobs. There's a lot of gangs on the streets and there's violence and there's like just a lot of distractions and sometimes there's hunger. I learned about all of this from my students. During COVID, a lot of people didn't have food to eat, a lot of them became homeless and had to live with family. I didn't have any private space. So in that context, the University of Praetoria started a bridging program for high school students who wanted to go to college and they would come in on a Saturday and get extra classes that would help prepare them for the transition. They've been finding that students who did that program ended up doing very well when they got to college. They thought that perhaps having their English classes become creative writing classes primarily rather than academic writing classes. So previously they'd all been academic writing classes, writing a term paper, writing a research paper. This is how you do APA formatting. This is how you do MLA formatting. This is how you cite a source and this is how you structure an argument. Students were not in love with that and they were finding it very hard and very alienating and it didn't look to them like it was effective. It wasn't helping the English communication skills and they needed English communication skills because that's the lingua franca of academia in South Africa. So they thought well what if we're creative writing could creative writing help these students and so they asked me to come and help them start a track in creative writing as part of this bridging program. So that's what I did is I taught creative writing every Saturday in multiple classes from ninth grade to eleventh grade. I taught high schoolers who wanted to go to college and we did a kind of a creative writing centric program not just creative writing they were also sort of ESL and grammar lessons and they were also reading lessons but we tried to give them popular writing that they would enjoy reading so that they would start to read for pleasure and we gave them assignments sort of group plays that they wrote little memoirs about their life that they would then share with others. We taught them peer critique so that they were showing it to each other and then giving each other feedback. I can explain all the research methodology. What we found with quite powerful evidence is that it was increasing both communication skills and academic motivation. So when we asked them what the effect of all of this was they said it makes us want to be here it makes us want to come here on a Saturday because we get to actually share our lives and we get to share it with people who are like us and they hear our stories we hear their stories and it makes us close which then makes us enjoy being in this bridging program together and potentially going on to college together. So both community and then what it also did we saw such dramatic improvements of writing. I mean I've never I've been teaching creative writing for almost 20 years now I've never seen improvement like that. It was just astonishing. It was from a kind of a low base in terms of sentence mechanic communication skills. You know that when you got the writing at the beginning of the year it had lots and lots of errors but students found their voice the errors kind of magically disappeared like the writing just filled with power the writing improvements were also seen in the other subjects so it was a very successful project. That's what I did for the Fulbright. You know I've been doing the Spirit and Action program for 19 years now and I interviewed you back in 2011 so that's 20 that's 13 years ago. I have not interviewed enough teachers. Spirit and Action is all about people doing world healing work and obviously you're doing that and I think I haven't named that sufficiently in my program since and I have to look forward to that in the next 20 years I'll be doing this and again folks we're speaking with Glenn Retiff. He that Retiff is spelled R-E-T-I-E-F. If you have any problems locating glennretiff.com come via northernspiritradio.org. On site I have all 19 years of our programs both Spirit and Action and Song of the Soul. We have links to our guests you can track them all down and there's riches there of activists and musicians and there's also a place for you to leave your comments make your suggestions. Who should we be talking to? Well who are the musicians whose music we need to raise up and we're trying to do that very explicitly with northern spirit radio programming. We're trying to raise up voices that otherwise couldn't get raised up so we don't need to talk to the you know Taylor Swift's of the world that's not necessary they've got enough microphone for themselves. We're trying to raise that up and you can help us by commenting on our site sharing your site or advocating that we be carried on your local community radio station. Right now we're carried on some 35 stations nationwide in the U.S. I wish we were carried on a station in South Africa. There's someone in Canada researching it right now and so on so you can help us that way. There's also a place to donate this is full-time work for me even though my wife has been subsidizing me for 19 years it'd be nice to release her from that obligation and so if you can do it we don't want to depend on government. We don't want to depend on corporations because they all come with strings attached. We would like to support you the listener so consider that when you visit northernspiritradio.org. Again Glen Radov is here and besides his website you can find links on there to his articles. He's written a lot for something called the daily maverick and so I have to ask when are you a maverick? That's a great question. I think I am. I think I am. I like coming up with a take that others haven't come up with or a take that is different from the received wisdom. It's not interesting to me to say what everybody else is saying or what is already very well-known and I particularly like finding out things that are not common wisdom or that are not well-known. I'm busy working on that or sort of starting to collect together a whole lot of shorter writing, developing them into longer and more consistent essays and I would say that the through line in all of this is the way I think about it is in an anti-apart date South African American thinks about history in both of his home countries. And so the idea for all of this started with the Fulbright that we mentioned and it was before the formal teaching part of it started. So Peterson and I were in a small town in a Pumalanga province in the northeast of South Africa and that was closer to my family. So when I was doing the actual physical teaching in Pretoria then we lived in Pretoria but then when we were doing other things when I was just kind of helping with the administration of the program or developing curriculum then we would be closer to my family in a Pumalanga province. But around this little town which was called Vodafol Buerfran we kept on running into these stone circles and they were very mysterious. So we would just go for a hike and there would be all of these stone circles and so then there was a stone circle museum in the town we were living and so one day we went along and had a guided tour which explained to us that these are very very ancient stone circles. They were built by aliens 300,000 years ago at the time that Homo sapiens was evolved and in fact the aliens who built the stone circles sort of bred Homo sapiens and that's how Homo sapiens came into existence. That was the message from the tour guide so I didn't believe them. It sounded a little unlikely to me. What a maverick you might say. And so then I looked into it and started to learn all about Bacconi civilization. So the Bacconi were one of the predecessors of some of the ancestors of today's sutu speaking. You mentioned that you thought of going to the sutu. So the Bacconi were sort of before the sutu. So from about 1300 to 1500 they moved progressively down the Southern African escarpment. So South Africa has a high plateau and then it has a Scotland that dips down quite quickly to the coastal plain and then it slopes down gently to the sea, that's the Indian Ocean in Mozambique. But all along the escarpment the Bacconi built homesteads in a circular form and then they built enclosures for cattle and then they built terraces. They built these passageways for their cattle to move from from A to B. And so then I just started to look around and suddenly all the hills that I had been living in and that I knew all my life, I'd run races for high school, you know, high school athletics in these towns. I'd visited friends along the escarpment. But suddenly I looked at the hills that I'd seen all my life and I noticed terraces. And suddenly I saw paths and then I would look at aerial photographs and see how massive and how beautiful and just gigantic we're talking hundreds of miles worth of buildings, of ruins. So then I ended up writing about that and then I ended up thinking well what else am I overlooking? What have I spent all my life not seeing? And so then I read a Peter Deelius, a South African academic, he has a book in Pumalanga history and heritage and in Pumalanga is my home region. And then, you know, I would just read those and I would just read a little statement. So for example, you know, he said we know that, or academics agree, researchers agree that the 18 million African Zionist tradition all originates in the small and Pumalanga town of Vakastra. I said what? This is like, you know, it's not quite the same as the Vatican or the same as Bethlehem, it's not as gigantic as that. But it's still, it's like 18 million people trace their religious heritage to one spot. And I've never heard of it even though it's where I grew up and I've never heard of it. So then Peterson and I went to this little town of Vakastra together and we met the local town historian and we looked at different candidates for the first African Zionist church. And we think we found it, you know, and we talked to the local kind of history buffs there and there's reasons for it that it has to do, you can still see where the cross was. But it's somebody's private garage, it's full of mason jars and cardboard boxes. And it's so, you know, so they don't treat it the same way as Jerusalem, do they? It's not quite the dome of the rock or, you know, it's like nobody knows and nobody talks about it and there's interesting reasons for that. I think that the history of the African Zionist movement falls between the cracks. It was not interesting to the apartheid historians because it was black. It was not, they were interested in white history, not black history. But then it's also was not that interesting to the liberation historians because the Zion Christian church and and its sort of brethren churches was politically neutral during the apartheid era. So these were not liberation churches, you know, they were not part of the movement against apartheid. So I think nobody's been interested in it as revolutionary history. So I think that, you know, as a result it just hasn't been on the radar screen of the movers and shakers of the country. So the ANC didn't recruit from those churches evidently? Oh, I think they had no objection to somebody from the churches joining. But the churches themselves said we are not of this world, we're not going to make political statements, we're not going to, you know, we're not going to get involved. So individual members would have joined the ANC and of course, you know, the majority in the ANC's top election they got more than 70% of the vote. So of course many Zionists voted for them, you know, but they weren't they weren't officially sort of part of that history. So you're writing this up. So is there a specific chapter about that experience, you know, learning in your backyard was the home church? Yep, and then I learned about that the third greatest concentration of rock paintings in the world is just, you know, 30 minutes from where I grew up. Rock painting, like what you see in southern France? Yeah, like that, like, you know, what they used to call bushmen but they don't use that word anymore. The San Rock paintings, about 1,200 years old, there's just hundreds and hundreds of them on these few hills in the southwestern corner of Kruger National Park. And Kruger National Park is where you grow up. Right. And so it just, you know, they just were discovered in the 1990s and they're part of a municipal game. What do you mean they were discovered? They're in caves or? Yeah, so obviously the San, you know, obviously the painters would have known where they were but they weren't known to academics or they weren't written about or they weren't like, you know, no tourists ever went there until a local ranger at this provincial nature as I've called them Ted Omusha, which borders on Kruger National Park. Until one day he was walking around and he just found paintings and then he looked around for more paintings and he found more paintings and more paintings and more paintings and eventually they realized this is the third largest concentration of San Rock paintings anywhere in the world. But where are the paintings hidden in caves on surface rocks looking up at the air? No. In caves, in shallow caves, along the edge and along, you know, the bottom of sloping rocks. So these are little rocky hillocks. So they're all, they're like in different nooks and canis. They might be two rocks next to each other and there's a little slot that you go into and along the sides of the rocks are these many, many paintings. Paintings are humans, animals, humans turning into animals, people moving between the dream world or the spirit world and the real world. There's different theories about what the paintings mean. But it's, you know, it's this artistic cultural treasure. There should be a UNESCO heritage site. Does this predate the arrival of the colonists in South Africa or how far back do they have dates on these things? Well, they estimate, they're very hard to estimate the dates. They estimate from about like about sort of 1,000 AD to about 1,200 AD. There's no guns and there's no cattle in these paintings. So that's the one reason that we think that they predate both the arrival of European colonists and even the arrival of cattle herding peoples. So, you know, around from about 1,000 AD, you know, from about 900 to about 1,100 AD or 1,200 AD, cattle herding people arrived in Southern Africa from Central Africa. Bunch of speaking migration. Right. And do they have paintings of colorful elephants like the one on your chest? Is that the color that elephants are in South Africa? No, this is, I think that this is an LGBT elephant because it has the entire rainbow, the entire rainbow. Is that a South African shirt or? I knew it. I knew it. That's wonderful. Some of them have bright colors but not as many. So, this is an example of the thing you write. I read another one that you wrote about your discovery. I mean, you mentioned at least I didn't read the actually article on it yet. People think we got to go to Machu Picchu. Yep. See that. But in the US, we got our own thing. Yes. Tell us about that. And why are we missing it, local? I would love, yeah, maybe you can help me understand that too. So, when I arrived back in the States, I thought, okay, so lots of things. I thought, you know, I don't know bird names. I knew all the bird names in South Africa. So, I think I should learn some bird names and some plant names. And then I thought, you know, like there were so many things that overlooked in South Africa but I know even less about the United States. So, let me read a book like I did in South Africa. I mean, I've read a bunch of books about history but I'm going to, you know, but the two main ones that I think were inferences on me with this. The American one was called Indigenous Continent by a Native American historian. He's Finnish but he focuses on Native American history. And then his name is Pika Himalayan at the University of Oxford. And I heard about the book. I read a review in The New Yorker by an Indigenous critic who just said this is the book that I wish I'd had when I was a teenager because it is a book about Native or Indigenous resistance to colonialism. And it shows that it was not just the tragic Indian, you know, it's got smallpox died and, you know, left the continent free for white people. Like there was there was a very, very long and intense struggle. So I thought, okay, this sounds like a very interesting book. And, you know, this is this incredible voice and it's a it's a good publication in The New Yorker. Let me take a look at this book. So the book was a revelation for me in ensuring resistance to colonialism much more than I'd ever realized but that there was a long, long history and a very intense struggle. And what the argument that the book makes, which I found persuasive, I'm not sure that everybody would. The argument that the book makes is that rarely the struggle for North America could have gone either way. At a number of points, Europeans could have been kicked out and, you know, it could have remained an Indigenous continent. It was not guaranteed that the colonizers would win. That was interesting. But then, you know, I kept on reading this and I would just have to pinch myself. The book would say around 1000 AD, the Chaco Canyon, you know, the ancient Puebloan civilization arose in the area of Chaco Canyon and left some of the most spectacular ruins short of Machu Picchu. You know, at the scale of Machu Picchu or of the significance of Machu Picchu or Teotihuacan in Mexico. And I was like, what? There's a Machu Picchu in the in the United States. Can you imagine going to Peru? And, you know, so I won't speak for Americans, but I'll say I had been living in the United States off and on by that point for more than 20 years. And so somebody's been living in Lima for 20 years and has never heard of Machu Picchu. Very odd. What cave have you been in? So that was my question for myself. What cave have I been living in? Like, how did I miss this massive civilization, these ancient Puebloans? Now just that, then they talked about Cahokia and the Mississippian civilization and how they were vast trading networks and areas of cultural influence from Tennessee to Oklahoma and from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to Wisconsin. And I was like, okay, that's a very, very big area. And, you know, and so there's trade and then, you know, the book just talked about the similar cultural artifacts. There's evidence of a coherent culture of a state. It's extending in this entire area. And so what I've, you know, what I've been doing is I've been going to these places and learning about them. But, you know, the thing that just, I'm still, I still have to shake myself, is how could I live here for 20 years? And in the beginning, I was just like, I was sort of self-castigating and just saying, how could I have been so curious living here for 20 years that I never found out about some of the most important pre-colonial civilizations on earth in what is today the United States. But then, you know, what became clear to me, I would ask enough friends and say, oh, I'm going to Chukokania, where's that? I want to learn more about Cahokia, Cahokia, what? So then it's, okay, it's not just me. There's a kind of a cultural myopia here and arguably a deliberate effort that has been successful to make people forget these very important pre-colonial civilizations that existed in North America. Were you at the plenary last night here at the Friends General Conference where we're in Philadelphia area, right? And we have a speaker coming, he grew up in Minnesota, I live in Wisconsin, right? Even though I happen to be at Haverford College right now. There's this whole extermination that happened, he referred to it as an intifada, back in, I guess, 1862 or something like that, yeah? I didn't know about that. I know. And I just talked to someone at lunch who said, you know, she grew up in Minnesota, never heard of it. So that's interesting to me because that is a difference with South Africa. So, you know, when I was growing up in South Africa, I knew I was told about, I was taught about great Zimbabwe. I was taught that there was a big pre-colonial civilization centered on Zimbabwe in the 1200s. I was also taught that we don't know exactly who built the Zimbabwe ruins, not true. I was taught that there could have been the Phoenicians, and luckily no high school teacher taught me about aliens. But they said, you know, it might have been the Phoenicians, it might have been the Indians, it might have been traitors, Arab traitors. We're not really sure who built the roof. Maybe it was the shorter, you know, the indigenous inhabitants of Zimbabwe. But we don't know. So I was misinformed about it, but I wasn't not told about great Zimbabwe. And then different from up on Goobwe, it wasn't emphasized, but I didn't know about it. So, you know, even though I said, and it's true, that I had overlooked some of the meaning or some of the history of the landscape that I grew up in, it wasn't to this degree of completely not talking about pre-colonial civilizations. We learned about Chaka Zulu and about what some call the Zulu Empire, which I think is appropriate, given that it was a gigantic amount of land that was conquered by Chaka Zulu. So I knew about it. I was frequently misinformed. It was very much from a white apartheid perspective that I learned about it. But it wasn't forgotten about. And then what's been so strange to me in the US is talking to people now that I'm on this journey of learning, and just people don't know, it's just just not talked about. It reminds me a little bit. In Spain, after the Civil War, there was the agreement to be silent. Sorry, I said after the Civil War, after the Franco dictatorship, when democracy came in the mid 1970s, the different parties that negotiated the transition to democracy agreed to not discuss the Civil War or the dictatorship. That these people were part of the supporters of Franco, and the supporters of Franco negotiated with the opponents of Franco. These were also the dividing camps in the Spanish Civil War. And they agreed to forget. And the purpose of forgetting was to move forward with that conflict, and we're just not going to talk about it. On the other hand, in World War II after the Holocaust, Germans agreed to remember. And so when I went to some of the Holocaust memorials in Berlin, I went to the Anatomy of Terror, lots of specifics. On this date, there was this conference. Here's a speech. This is what happened. These were the different groups. These were the different deportations. These were the different death camps, and how many they executed, and what their method of execution was. So there were lots of specifics to the past. But how do you not vilify your neighbors when you do that in Germany? I don't know what they did. I've been aware that they've had a lot of education, so we don't repeat what happened. But in South Africa, when you find out, my neighbor here was part of this oppression of the indigenous, the black people. Do you name names? Do you do that in South Africa? They did. So it's a truth and reconciliation commission. The people came forward, and they said, "I committed these atrocities," and they described the atrocities. And in return for placing on the public record what they did, they received amnesty, and they knew they wouldn't be persecuted. But how do people deal with the trauma? It's like, "Oh yeah, you're the one who killed my family." Did the truth and reconciliation, how did that solve the trauma? How does that deal with that, not turn into retribution? Well, they're wiser than we are? No, I mean I kind of, yes and no. So I think there were not many cases of reparations, but they were a few. So the former Minister of Police, Adrian Flock, went to do work for, you know, like he helped build houses for, and gave money to, and made sort of public reparations to some of the families that had been wronged by orders that he'd given for members of their family to be assassinated. So there were reparations and there was reconciliation. Mostly there wasn't reconciliation. The truth and reconciliation commission was a bit of a misnomer. It was really a truth commission. And so the reconciliation was supposed to happen, and then it didn't. South Africans, I think, just have moved on and there still are a lot of unhealed wounds. But Mandela provided very strong leadership saying there shouldn't be retribution, there shouldn't be revenge. We need to move forward. I don't think that means that everybody's at peace or that there's been forgiveness or that everybody even feels that they're on the same page and fighting for the same kind of country. I don't think that's true. But I also don't think there's, there also hasn't been retribution because that was very much part of the ethos of the transition to democracy. That we want the truth to come at and we want to, we want to move forward. I've been remiss in mentioning repeatedly that I'm speaking with Glenn Rediff, his website, glennrediff.com. Rediff is R-E-T-I-E-F. I've got the link on northernspiritradio.org. He's joining us. Really, I guess we're talking about writing, creative writing of nonfiction is the biggest subject. But this is all built on the edifice of his having grown up in South Africa before moving to living in the United States, at least currently, for 20 years or something like that. So Glenn, there's one thread from before that I wanted to ask you about because you said you're going back. You were just there for 18 months or something like that in South Africa. There's these folks who are living in a black area. The schools are bad. You're going in and inspiring them and finding a way forward. You grew up in Kruger National Park where the only schools present were black schools and because it was under apartheid, you weren't allowed to go to school there. So you were the person who was exported to the white school outside of the black area. I'm just aware that there's kind of a symmetry in what you're talking about teaching there. That's interesting. So the village that I lived in was a white-only village inside Kruger Park. But all of the surrounding areas were white, were then called buntistuns at what today would be called triable or traditional areas. And so for elementary school, I went to a white-only elementary school inside the national park. And then for high school, I was not allowed to go to any of the nearby high schools because those were all in the buntistuns and they reserved for blacks only. And so then I called it bus one and a half hours to a government boarding school. I say I went to boarding school and in America, people think, "Oh, you know, extremely rich." It wasn't like that. It was a government boarding school. It was free. But it was so that I could go to a white school. And we should note that the book, the Jack Bank, has a very important part. The Jack Bank took place there at that school. Who in the audience here has read the Jack Bank? Okay. So Sandra, why didn't you read it when I had the copy? No. You want to get a hold of his book, the Jack Bank. At this point that's in the past, he's got a new book that'll be arriving any year now. That's Hobbesau, yeah. But it's in throwing stories and about being on the ground in South Africa. I try and gather wisdom from your experience in that book and your life has lived now to see where we might go in the United States and what we might do about that because I'm concerned about the future of the United States. I'm not sure when apartheid will arrive here. I'm not sure which kind of civil wars will happen and so on. But I'm sure you've learned all about them as you study it. It's so interesting that you get to see the US and the places that we don't know about ourselves because you come in with foreign open eyes. So tell us about some other things that you've written about or you're getting ready right about. Do you need information? We can provide it. Like I say, the book that I read, the main book that I read or the book that was most influential on me was about resistance to colonialism. And I learned about a Native American one-ponogue satrim called Metacom. Anybody heard of Metacom? Thought not. So I did because I read your article. I read my article. Okay. When the pilgrims arrived at Pilgrim Rock, they were welcomed to North America by Osama Khwin, who is Metacom's father. And they would have gone to the traditional throne or the traditional seat of the Wampano Confederacy, which was right near Providence, Rhode Island. It's on a little island just across from Providence. That was sort of the spot where, officially, the pilgrims would have been given permission to have a village there and to live side by side and where the alliance would have been negotiated. And then that's also where Metacom ended up looking at what was happening and how the English had broken the agreement. And they were just encroaching on Indigenous people's lands, not just the Wampano, but all of the nations of the area. And he had a long list of grievances among others that Wampano traditions and laws were not being respected and that English law was being imposed on Indigenous people. And he concluded that this was a disaster for Indigenous people having these colonists and that there was no hope of sorting it out, that they tried and tried and tried and tried. And so what he did is that he built a military alliance secretly. What he did is that he sold land to the English and then he used that money to buy weapons and get ready for war. He put together an amazing coalition of Indigenous peoples of New England. And I'm forgetting now exactly, I think it was the 1680s, I'm a little bit rusty, but the English got wind of the fact that some kind of a war was brewing. 1670s. Okay, there you go. You looked it up. No, I just remember. You just remembered. Okay. So 1670s, the English governor came across and got given a speech by Metacom about why, you know, why this just wasn't working and why the English had disrespected the treaty. And then Metacom, according to the accounts that I've read, almost managed to throw the English out of New England, which would have ended English colonialism. The colonies were almost not sustainable after this tremendous war. And the English used genocide to win that war. They would surround native villages and they would set them alight and then they would shoot people as they were trying to escape. So it was scorched earth or genocidal policies that permitted the colonies to win that, but they almost didn't win. When they shot Metacom, they put his head on on a spike in Plymouth and cut him in four pieces and hang the pieces from the trees. And the traitor who turned him in shot him in the heart, I think, right? Got his hand. Got his hand. That's right. That's right. So anyway, so I don't know. I think, you know, the seat from which the pilgrims were welcomed to North America, the seat of the Confederacy, the seat of government where they would have been welcomed, and then also the seat from which they were almost kicked out of North America, I would think historically important. You would think. I would think. So, you know, Peterson and I go along. We pull up to a little wedding, like a farm where they do weddings and Brown University subcontracts to this little farm to issue permits for people to go. So we get a little permit and we drive across. We walked, there was one little rock. We sort of set off into the swamp where Metacom was killed, Metacom lived, metacom ruled, and a stomach went as well. And, you know, there's one little rock with an arrow pointing saying Metacom's seat. And then we kind of follow it. And then I recognize the rocks from photographs that I'd see. When you say seat, it's thrown. We were thinking, but it's just rocks. It's a hollow in the rock where the satiums would sit and from where they would govern, and they would have councils of state there. And, you know, if the pilgrims had visited, it likely would have been there. So, but that was the sort of the seat of government. That's where people sat. So there's no there's no construction there. It's rocks. But it's known that that was the place where those meetings happened. There's no plaque. There's nothing. And what's that rock? Is that is, I know, not as burial place. The recognition of where he was, the rock that's on the ground with the name. So that's a little bit off to the side. That was in the 19th century that they put down a tiny little plaque saying this is where this is where Metacom was shot. And that's it. There's nobody goes there. Nobody knows about it. It's, you know, so these things, it's sort of stunning to me. I'd like to challenge you, Glenn, to become part of a movement to teach this specifically on what we call Thanksgiving Day. Because it's so we think of Thanksgiving is when look at we were peaceful. We were welcomed. They were friends and so on. And then we ignore the fact that within the generation, the retribution comes. Metacom said, and again, I'm going from memory here. You read my article more recently than what I wrote it. But Metacom said, when you arrived, you were like children, and we looked after you. And this is how you've repaid us. You've been taking everything from us. And so I think that sounds about right. You know, at the beginning, the pilgrims really did need Indigenous people to help them. They wouldn't have made it with that Indigenous help. They didn't repay that kindly. I'm assuming you're going to write about the evils that Quakers did too. Now, Quakers admittedly did it a little bit less vialy. But they did some things. William Penn is known for having the agreements with the Indians and the welcoming. And there was what was called the walking purchase. Oh, yeah. And the walking purchase is okay. As far as you can walk in a day, that much land is traded to you for this. We're doing that. And then his William Penn sons decide they want more. So then they, instead of just doing the walking purchase like you should, they clear and they get a professional walker runner to do the path so that they can increase it by at least four times. That's right. Yeah. And how many of us know about that kind of thing? It's our own history. And it's something we have to know and see in order to move forward. We need the Truth and Reconciliation Act in the United States. And you should be appointed head of the commission. I don't know that I'm eligible. And folks, Glenn Rediff is excellent at his writing. You can read his book, The Jack Bank. Where do they get it? Yeah, all the regular places, exactly. All right. So I'll have links on nordonspiritradio.org. If you go by his site, glennrediff.com, Rediff is R-E-T-I-E-F. Glenn is only one in. The link, again, is on nordonspiritradio.org. We'll follow you. We'll lead you to his book. We'll lead you to his writings also with the Daily Maverick. And he's got some of those linked by his site. And you could go directly to the Daily Maverick website and get it too. But we'll have those links on nordonspiritradio.org. Thank you so much, Glenn, for writing, pursuing, for teaching, uplifting people, transforming lives in South America, in South Africa, and in Pennsylvania. And for being here today, for Spirit in Action. Thank you so much for having me. It's been so delightful. And again, the links are on nordonspiritradio.org. We'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. [Applause] The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. Check out all things Spirit in Action on nordonspiritradio.org. Guests, links, stations, and a place for your feedback, suggestions, and support. Thanks for listening. I'm Mark Helpsmeet. And I hope you find deep roots to support you to grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our evening.
Glen Retief grew up in South Africa, a story he captured in his book The Jack Bank, and he writes periodically for the South African publication, The Daily Maverick.