Spirit in Action
A Gay Childhood in Apartheid South Africa: The Jack Bank by Glen Retief
Glen Retief paints vivid pictures and addresses vital questions of identity & social justice in The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood. His stories deal with race, apartheid, homosexuality and homophobia, physical violence, sexual abuse - and much more - and he leads us on a journey of discovery and insight. And I learned that Post-Apartheid South Africa was the first country to protect the right of same-sex marriage.
- Broadcast on:
- 02 Sep 2012
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Before I introduce today's Spirit in Action guest, I want to mention some activities connected with the upcoming anniversary of 9/11, activities that I hope you'll want to be involved in. Here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, for example, we'll be standing together in Interfaith and Community Solidarity for Peace, Love, and Diversity. As the invitation from the local Unitarian Universalist Congregation says, "We will stand on the side of love of neighbor rather than hate, oppression, or fear on this important date of remembrance." We'll be doing that with music, talk, signs, and prayer. I'm sure you'll have your own happenings in your town, and one place you might be able to find or post them is on a site created by Journey to Understanding. The site is ProjectRememberance911.crowdmap.com. Again, ProjectRememberance911.crowdmap.com, and it's part of their brother-sister neighbor-friend campaign. I hope you use this anniversary to reach out in love and understanding. My guest today is the author of The Jack Bank. Glenn Rediff has written a memoir from his childhood and youth in South Africa in the days leading up to the end of apartheid. Glenn's story is complex and multidimensional, filled with vivid accounts of cultural violence by and between boys and adults, of sexual abuse, and of Glenn's own wrestling with his dawning gay identity. All of this on the incredible backdrop of the human community and natural world of South Africa. Glenn Rediff is Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Pennsylvania's Susquehanna University. Again, the book is The Jack Bank, and author Glenn Rediff joins us from his home in Pennsylvania. Glenn, I'm so pleased you could join me today for spirit in action. I'm sure to be here. Thank you, Mark. Could you give us an overview of your life, where and when, just so that we have the broad picture? Sure, I grew up in Kruger National Park. The first few years of my life, I lived in Durban, and then when I was about seven years old, my parents moved to Kruger National Park, which is a big game reserve in National Park, a wilderness area in the northeast of South Africa. It's about as big as Israel, and it's near Zimbabwe and Mozambique. My dad worked as an IT professional there, except in those days nobody talked about IT professionals. He was a computer programmer, or he was a quantitative biologist, they called him. But he helped the nature conservation researchers, the biologist, crunch numbers and developed databases for their studies. It was very informal, so he also helped out a lot with wildlife research projects, and early on in the book, I described being in the bush and camping and blind, killing a kurdoo right next to our tent. So we did a lot of that sort of stuff. When I was about 12 years old, I went to boarding school in a nearby farming town of Nalsprate. That's because there were no appropriate or legal high schools close to where I lived. This was in South Africa, it was during the apartheid years, so there was racial segregation. I would not have been allowed to attend a black school. So I went to a white-only boarding school in Nalsprate. Much of the book deals with boarding school craziness there, and it results. I went to college after that, after high school, at University of Cape Town, and then worked as a human rights researcher. After that, I decided to experience the world, and I ended up in New York City with a good friend of mine. I won a visa, a green card, in the annual visa lottery, which awards visas for diversity purposes to people from countries underrepresented in U.S. immigration flows. So I won one of those. My childhood dream had been to study creative writing or to do creative writing, and that was something that was easy to do in the United States. It existed as a field of study in the United States in a way that it didn't back in South Africa. So I ended up doing masters and fine arts at the University of Miami, a PhD at Florida State University in Tallahassee. I ended up specializing in creative nonfiction there, just because people were so fascinated by my true stories. They were more interested in my true stories than in my made-up ones. And then I lived in Miami for a few years again. I had done my masters there. So I moved back and I worked as a high school teacher before managing to get a college teaching job in creative writing, which was always my dream. Well, the Jackbank is some magnificent storytelling. You mentioned the lion's story there. I had the book sitting around the house and my wife started reading it as well, and she was totally captivated. She said, "Is the rest of the book as good as the start?" I mean, wow. So I do think people should read the book. It's filled with all kinds of interesting, exciting, thoughtful things that deserve reading. So I think they'll enjoy it as well as any novel, except that it's real. By the way, how do you feel about lions today considering what happened back around 10 or 9 or 7 or whatever? That's a by the way question that I could talk about it for quite a long time. In the book, I want to say it's almost right about wildlife. For me as the author, I know that readers get different experiences out of that. But for me as an author, what interests me about that wildlife chapter and why I started off with it is that it has to do with theology. It has to do with my first intimations of my own mortality and vulnerability, which for me is a very spiritual issue. Maybe the root of all spirituality is realizing that we're not God-like. And so I would say that African wildlife does mean that for me. African wildlife is a kind of a teaching for me. Unfortunately, for most people over 30, at least in the US, if they think about South Africa, they do think about apartheid. Of course, there's much more to the society and experience there than just that. I had the feeling from what you wrote in the book that your parents were not particularly on the same racist train that everybody else or that a lot of other people were traveling on. How strong was the discrimination in your family outside your family? Was there universal support among whites for apartheid? No, there wasn't universal support, but there was very strong support in the culture that I grew up in. So I grew up in a government village, as I say, in a national park. So everybody around me was in some way linked to the government. There was a government employee in the family. The town I grew up in was very rural, very conservative and very African. It was just one or two English families as I described in the book. So that wasn't the same as a Jewish immigrant neighborhood in a large city or a Greek neighborhood in Cape Town or something like that. It was a very distinctive place that I grew up in, and that's what I talk about in the book, and that's what I feel most qualified to answer, I think. In the community in which I grew up in, my dad was a little bit of an intellectual dissident, and he wasn't a very strong dissident. He didn't express strongly anti-apartheid opinions. He certainly didn't join any of the civil organizations that were fighting oppression and discrimination. There were no protest signs up on his lawn. He never wore a yellow ribbon in solidarity with the people who were detained with that child. There wasn't any kind of an activist, but he did listen to the BBC and Voice of America to get news that was banned by the government. And he did like to play devil's advocate in conversations with people, especially with me and with us kids. I sort of credit him with developing my critical thinking capacity that serves me in good state as a college professor today. But that wasn't a matter of him stating strong opposition to apartheid, it was more in questioning anything. So sometimes as a kid I would question the government's use of torture, and he would actually then play devil's advocate in the other direction and say, "Well, you know, is torture always wrong? What if there was a ticking bomb?" and that kind of thing. So I would describe him as an independent thinker. I would say that he and my mom voted against the government consistently. They voted for the liberal opposition party, the progressive federal party in the white-only parliament. So they were opposed to racism. They certainly taught me Catholic, what they perceived as Catholic humanist values. The Catholic Church in South Africa, the Catholic Research Conference strongly stated that racial discrimination was wrong, and that all people are children of God, and that there are no inferior or superior people in God's vision, which is what the dominant, the predominant, I should say, are for conscious churches that are formed and reformed church. That's what they taught, they taught that, and I might get this wrong because my Bible study isn't very strong, but they taught that whites were descended from the older of Noah's sons, and that blacks were descended from the younger sons, and that therefore blacks were naturally subservient to whites. So the Catholic Church completely rejected this, and so did my parents. And I grew up with a strong sense that it was wrong to insist on using different knives and forks than the black housekeeper, but that was dehumanizing. And I was told not to order the black housekeeper around, but the only person who could do that would be my mother, who was her employer, and even that was kind of done nicely and respectfully. My parents liked Western music, my dad subscribed to National Geographic and Time magazine, and so I was picked up by Osmosis as sort of a liberal anti-race with ethos from my parents, but they weren't chief anti-aposit activists or anything like that. I would say that my aunt and uncle, the other English speakers in the village were somewhat less liberal, somewhat more conservative than my parents, so a lot of family discussions that I remember about politics were my dad, in particular, arguing the liberal view, and then my aunt and uncle arguing a more sort of center-right, you know, by white South African standards, a center-right perspective. And then what I got taught in school by the Afrikaans' parents, again, there was a range, you know, there were moderate Afrikaans who supported reform, but not to the point of democracy. They believed in not locking up so many incidents, they would believe in maybe a separate house of a parliament for black people, and for consensus decision-making between all the different racial groups, but not a one person, one vote, democracy where whites could be out-voted, but maybe a kind of a democracy where all the different race groups would have equal sales, or maybe whites and then all the non-white race groups, mixed race, Indians, and so on. Everybody else would have the same amount of sales, white people, so they were all these different opinions, but they all had a kind of an apartheid flavor to them, if that makes any sense. They were sort of like apartheid, light, and then apartheid heavy. They went all the way to semi-genocidal views, saying that if blacks have Africans except white dominance and authority, then they should be expelled from the country, or nuclear weapons should be used against them, so there was really a range of opinions. I think it's a good thing, Glenn, that you didn't get to get in the Boy Scouts equivalent there. You tried pretty hard at one point. If you had gotten in, maybe you would have towed a little bit closer to that line, what do you think? I don't know. Much of the book talks about the tension or the dialogue in my own head between sexuality and race. You know that some of the latest chapters when I'm in college, my feeling different as a gay man, but not being willing to call it there yet, or deal with it yet, sort of got chattelled into identifying with blacks off Africans and rejecting white South African culture, and with hindsight it seems to me that some of that rejection of white South African culture that I fiercely adopted in college, some of that had to do with rejecting apartheid values pertaining to sexuality, but at the time I couldn't admit that that was what I was trying to do, so I said that it only had to do with race, and with hindsight I would say that it did have to do with race, but it also had to do with sexuality. All of that's just a sort of a long-winded way of saying, I guess, that at some point I think what my childhood experiences with my parents, my sort of the liberalism of my parents, I think that would have weighed with me, and then also my being gay at some other point. If I'd gone down that route of slightly fascist Afrikana white nationalist organizing, I mean, I mean, most groups didn't black gay people at all, so at a certain point I would have had to deal with that, I would have had to trace the fact that I didn't really belong there, that I was having to hide a certain part of myself, and in South Africa I would have found a much warmer welcome in the human rights movement as a game iron than in the Afrikana nationalist movement. You know Glenn, even though this book is a memoir, and not some kind of issue-oriented position paper, you certainly provide some very unflinching looks at these major issues that you and your family lived through. Some of them include, of course, apartheid, but also sexual abuse, what I think is internalized oppression, male domination roles, there's certainly racism of different flavors, and of course all the issues around homosexuality, both on the part of the side end, internally on part of the individual. I'm sure there's more that I could list off that are all encapsulated in this wonderful story of the Jackbank. Do you want to add any more, and from your perspective now, did you want to comment on which of these issues more strongly ended up forming? Glenn Retif, both the young person and the adult you are now. That's a great question. It's true what you say. There's so much. There's patriarchy, there's heterosexism, there's racism. To some extent there's classism, although I think I probably don't deal with class. Although I do, you know, I deal with class differences between the rural, lower-middle class and the upper-class students in my university residence in Cape Town, and then I deal with class again with a group of Black South Africans becoming friends with, and they talk a lot about poverty and socialism versus capitalism. So it's all there. Family is there, longing to belong, longing to be part of our community, and violence is certainly a big theme. And I think religion, faith, what do I believe in? And at different parts of the book, I believe in different -- I have different faith systems, different systems of meaning. And then the book is kind of written in hindsight from an implicit position of today, where I signal to the reader that my faith identity, my religious identity today is different than it was even at the end of this book. So that's all in there, but I would say that that's hard for me. This is a story about trying to learn how to find a sense of belonging and meaning and peace in a world which is often violent and stable and confusing and just difficult. And I think that the insight that I reach towards the end of the book is that that comes for loving other people. The metaphor of the Jack Bank refers to a school prefect, a 17-year-old who was responsible for maintaining discipline among the younger boys in my boarding school, who meant the system where we could deposit beatings or punishments ahead of time, where they could earn interest, and then we could withdraw them if we did something wrong at a later date. And then the interests that we'd earned in the meantime would mean that we would experience less punishment than if we hadn't volunteered to deposit our beatings ahead of time. So in the book that's for me is a metaphor for how violent, evil, and hatred kind of feed upon themselves. They have their own dynamic. They sort of grow naturally, and if you feed them, they just get bigger. But the same is true of love and peace and caring and community, and I think that if you make deposits in that bank, then that can grow. I think that that's really the core message of this book, is that you can make deposits in things that nourish you and will bring you well-being, and that if you do that, too, can earn interest. I was hesitating whether to ask you any of the specifics about the Jackbank. That part of the book is so vivid, and watching what goes through your mind, and obviously the minds of the other young boys, who end up choosing to get beaten so that they could pre-purchase, get a discount on future beatings, and how the prefect manipulates everyone there with this offer. It's such a glimpse into the darker side of human mind, and the way that you ended up choosing when you talk about that to get beaten when you had been steadfastly refusing to do that. Did it make you feel dirty for the rest of your life? The fact that you said yes beat me after you had held out so well? I don't know. I think with hindsight, so much of telling a story like this is about finding the meaning in it all in hindsight. So when I teach memoir here at first behind the university, that's what I talk endlessly to my students about is retrospective, and then in the moment, perspective. So in the moment, I think at age 12, absolutely not. All I was upset about, and I tried to reflect this in the book, was that I lost my deposit. I thought I had all these beatings stored up, and then as a result of my complaining to my parents, then the prefect got moved to another passage, and I lost all my money, so to speak, and that's absolutely outraged by that, and that's what sticks in my memory about the experience of the Jackbank. That is the clearest recollection I actually have, is of being so outraged at losing my deposit. So I think that was my perspective at age 12, and I think I write in the chapter about the sense of self-esteem that came from volunteering to be beaten, because it proved my toughness, my machismo, all of that, and again, I think that that's what I experienced in the moment, was, oh boy, you know, I'm as tough as the others. There isn't something wrong with me. I can cope with this too, and all the rest of it. And then I think later, through high school, maybe didn't think about it very much, wasn't really on my radar screen. I write in the book about the one memory that I have as a prefect myself of beating a younger boy, and I remember how upset that made me. I remember both that I was very violent in doing it. I remember just being so angry at him, and I remember kind of getting carried away and wanting to make sure that I teach him a lesson, and he'd obey me after that, and he wouldn't embarrass me by openly defying my authority. So I remember that, and then I remember just the shame and the self-disgust afterwards, and kind of realizing that I was becoming part of this system that already intellectually was approved of. So I remember that, but I'm not sure about feeling dirty. Maybe I felt dirty after actually beating the younger boy rather than for volunteering, for beating myself. But really, the sense of preoccupation and worry and meditating on the jackbank as an experience, as a metaphor, as sort of a symbol of my own collusion, and everybody that I knew and loved, our collective collusion with an evil political system. All of that comes from much later in life, and really it comes from moving to the United States. I lived in a very international kind of office commune in New York. I discovered that a little bit at the end of the book, full of interesting people from all over. And I remember just trading stories about our lives and about our childhood, and I clearly remember one day just telling this inner party of people, and it was a very diverse group. There were people there from Venezuela, from Brazil, from Europe, Switzerland, England, Jamaica, you know, it's quite an international range, sitting in the living room that evening in my Brooklyn Brownstone apartment. I remember telling them the story of the jackbank and of all of the beatings and corporal punishment at school, and everybody, no matter which continent they hailed from, going, "What? Is this happening at your school? Are you crazy? How on earth could this ever have occurred? How could this have been tolerated? How could the teachers have passively encouraged this?" And that's when I started to go, "Oh boy, there's a story here. Why did it happen?" I had assumed that it happened everywhere. I'd assumed that this was just high school. You know, everybody knows that high school is rough. Everybody knows that kids are cruel. So, well, of course, you know, this is the kind of thing that happens. But that universal disbelief about the extent to which that violence had just been a part of my boarding school and high school life, that made me think, "Oh, what did this mean? What did this mean that the corporal punishment was the absolute default punishment for almost everything? What did it mean that we were so programmed to want to be tough and to prove out toughness by volunteering for beatings? And then again, to prove out toughness by being willing to beat people who were weaker than ourselves." And it seemed at a certain point, like a no-brainer, that, of course, this had to do with growing up in a right-wing race of police state in the middle of a racial war. You know, of course, this was about preparing white boys to be the kind of rarely tough and vicious and ruthless soldiers who could maintain forceful authority over black majority that outnumbered us 8 or 10 to 1. If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, for this Northern Spirit radio production. Our website is northernspiritradio.org, and on it, you'll find all kinds of links to our guests, and you'll find place to put comments. And comments are so helpful. Please let me hear from you. My guest today is Glenn Retiff. He is the author of A Memoir Called The Jack Bank, A Memoir of a South African Childhood. It covers all kinds of really important issues, and he's got some really vivacious stories in it. There's a lot of living that's borne out through this book. I highly recommend that you pick it up and read it. You can find it via his website, glenretiff.com. That's G-L-E-N-R-E-T-I-E-F.com. And the easiest way to get there in case you're spelling impaired, like I am, is to go via northernspiritradio.org. Almost everyone can spell that one correctly. Again, we're speaking with Glenn Retiff, author of The Jack Bank. And Glenn, as I said earlier, there's so many issues that end up being touched in this book. One of them is the really sad affair of your sister's sexual abuse, how it was handled or maybe mishandled. I get the sense that your parents really strove to be loving in their response, and to step beyond the silent norms. You've already talked about how your father could do that, could be an independent thinker. But somehow there are efforts misfired in this case. What did you take away as lessons from this? Anything that might be useful to the rest of us? Who might someday find ourselves in your family's place? God forbid? Well, I think one very clear lesson is the value of truth. And to, explicit in Christian terms, Jesus said the truth will set you free. And I think where my parents went wrong was thinking that being loving meant lying. They thought that to be loving towards my grandmother meant hashing up what had happened and what her husband, my grandfather, had done to my sister. But all that did is make my sister feel that they didn't care that much, that they didn't experience a sense of injustice. It made her feel vulnerable and abandoned. I'm not even sure that it did any good whatsoever. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it didn't do any good for my grandmother. I don't talk about this in the book. But when my grandmother was dying, she talked about having hallucinations or visions in her very last days of life. She had cancer, but it was affecting her mentally, or maybe the drugs were affecting her mentally. But she spoke about seeing heaven and seeing an angel striking a gong. And that the angel was striking the gong every time that a girl got raped or abused. And she just constantly talked about this for her last day or two of life. So part of her knew what had happened. And I think was haunted by that. And I think my parents' decision to lovingly protect her from a truth that they imagined would hurt her. In fact, ended up haunting her and gnawing at her unconsciously and then coming back right at the end of her life as something that she felt terrible about. So I think that wasn't good. I think it also is important to distinguish between love and love. Love can be fierce, heartfelt, strong, or it can be kind of fearful and obligatory. So I think when love starts to come mixed up with fear, as it was in this case, my parents were afraid of the exposure, what would come about if everybody knew what my father's father had done. As I say, they were afraid of what would happen to my grandmother. And then I think love then becomes dysfunctional, co-dependent. I think the truly loving thing to do in this situation would have been just focus on being there for my sister, protecting her, and being true to themselves. Not socializing casually with my father's parents, but really only doing so in a truthful way. I think love has to be honest. That would be my main lesson that I draw from it. And maybe you learned that also personally, Glenn, through your whole struggle to recognize your sexuality, that you were homosexual, that you're gay. And you stayed in, I don't know, either outward or inward denial of this for a pretty long time. How did you end up finding, did you maybe finally embrace the idea that it was important to be truthful? How is it that you finally were able to come out? And again, this is in this totalitarian state, this oppressive, violent state of South Africa. I would imagine that the fear was all the much greater because of that environment. I think so. By the late '80s, which is when I came out in the end of '89, the beginning of 1990, at that time things were starting to liberalize in large cities. And what once were the frequent raids on gay bars and the improvement of people just for being gay, that was coming to an end. So the stirrings of freedom were there when I came out. I could feel them, and I connected to them. And I always say to people casually, I came out of the closet, I told one of my best friends that I was gay, just a week or two before Nelson Mandela, and in fact, I lost my virginity too, just a week or two before, if only the clock announced the end of apartheid and the release of Nelson Mandela. So in a funny kind of way, I felt linked to my own country at this moment. I felt that my own freedom was inseparable from the way that my country was freeing itself. So it didn't feel completely total authoritarian and oppressive in the immediate years leading up to my coming out. I just got really tired. I got exhausted by pretending. Pretending took too much energy. A counselor was very important. I did call a counseling service in Cape Town, and they were very helpful in talking me through my beliefs that being gay was a very sad and destructive life, and they encouraged me to test that against reality, which I did by visiting gay clubs and talking to gay people. So that was good. I had supportive friends. But the main thing was social change, I think, and then just being tired of fighting with myself. You can only carry on with that for so long, and at a certain point, then you just have to admit the truth to yourself. Given the stereotypical picture that I think a lot of Americans at least have, South Africa as the evil home of apartheid, it's surprising maybe even stunning to many. I would think that that's the first country of the world to constitutionally protect people from discrimination based on their sexual orientation. Can you explain to me how that can be? It seems a little bit juggle and high-dish. How could that be? Oh, that's a beautiful way of describing South Africa, at least in my experience of it, and the way that I see my own culture and country. Jekyll Hyde is it perfectly, and particularly the South Africa that I grew up in. I think it's still true of South Africa, that it's a little bit larger than life as a country, and they feel very compelling. But when I was growing up in South Africa, and as a college student and all of that, boy, the two sides were there so strongly. The oppression, bigotry, prejudice, and violence was there. But then on the flip side, the idealism, the big dreaming, we knew that apartheid couldn't last forever, we knew that it was unjust, we knew that it had to be fought. So, without getting romantic about it, because everybody's human, and in the anti-profit struggle, there was as much human fallibility as anywhere else in the world. But, I mean, really, how wonderful, how many incredible leaders that movement produced, how many mandalas, how many tutors, what statesman-like political courage there was from F.W. Dakar, as well as from mandala, from all of the political parties in South Africa. There was something miraculous about that kind of leadership. South Africa is becoming the first country in the world to ban anti-gay discrimination, and that's bull of rights, is connected to that miracle. It's another kind of miracle, but it's no less or more miraculous. If you know more miraculous than just the peace that arrived in South Africa when the whole world was expecting a bloodbath, I think both streaks are there in South African culture. There's great pain and great suffering and great dysfunction as a result of South Africa's history, which continues today. South Africa has one of the highest crime rates. There are extreme acts of violence. There are shootings and rates and sadistic crimes in working class black townships and middle class areas. There's a very high level of aggression, of domestic violence. If you want to talk about homophobia and about sexism, South Africa has the world's highest rate of corrective rates against lesbians. And corrective rate means that men rape lesbian women in an attempt to force them to be heterosexual, and if they get forced to be heterosexual, then presumably they'll like it and become heterosexual. But really, it's just a way of punishing lesbians for being lesbian. So there's all of that in South Africa, and then there's all of these amazing civil rights, too, for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The same sex marriage, there's employment discrimination, there's government leaders talking about this is a social justice issue. There are major exhibits on homophobia at the apartheid museum on television and so on, that discourse is very pro-human rights. So the contradictions persist in South Africa. That Jekyll and Hyde condition is still there. I think every time I go back to South Africa, it does seem a little bit more of a normal country to me. And what that means is, for me, it's less bipolar, it's less of that intense idealism, twinned with intense oppression. And it starts to become a little bit more like every other place in the world, but it still isn't completely. It still is a very unique country with a very hard and tortured history, but also with some incredible natural beauty, enormous idealism, and a great sense of humor. Great resilience and kindness and a wonderful sense of community that you wouldn't expect after such a difficult history. And again listeners, I'm telling you that this is a book that you want to read. That's my opinion because it's really captivating in so many levels. You can find it, of course, if you go to Glenn's site, easy way to get there, northernspiritradio.org, or go to glenretiff.com. That's G-L-E-N-R-E-T-I-E-F.com. As you were talking about it there, Glenn, all of the bipolarness of the nation, I'm still thinking that you maybe left out something about how it was that this got written into this whole constitutional change that was going on in the nation. How did it get slipped in there? It sounds to me like the strategy was they're busy thinking about so many other bigger things if we slip it and now we can do it. Yeah, kind of. Although I think if it hadn't been for that human rights idealism that I was talking about a minute ago, I didn't think anything would have slipped in. I think they would have taken a five minute look at it and said, "Queer people are sick and unhealthy. This is not a human rights. This is a mental illness." Next, please, let's talk about disability. Let's talk about gender inequality. Let's talk about the environment. Part of it was that the country has lots of very big issues to deal with. There wasn't the lecture, if I can call it that, for the Christian right to sort of mobilize around the culture of war. Everybody would have looked at that and if the American Christian right has been in Uganda, or if an indigenous Christian right movement had arisen, saying that the main threat to the country is homosexuality, the way that Fred Phelps's church organizers, as they argue, that's why they protest that the US military funerals believe that the US military setbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq are because of the United States' tolerance of homosexuality. I mean, if somebody had tried to say that in South Africa in 1990 to 1992 when the new constitution was being developed, somebody tried to say that homosexuality is the biggest threat to a country with a 40% unemployment rate, with 13 armed groups fighting each other, with 300 years of racist colonial anguish, a country with international sanctions against it, which most political analysts in the world were predicting would slide down into a chaotic world pool of destruction. If anybody had said that homosexuality was the biggest threat to a nation like that in 1992, they would have been lost out of the door. So all of that is true. At the same time, I was involved as you know from reading the book in an organization called Organization of Lisbon and Gay Activists. This was an anti-apartheid group which was part of broad umbrella anti-apartheid movements and was tried to mobilize queer people against racism and tried to mobilize anti-apartheid activists against homophobia. So this group, there were a lot of people who were very respected in the liberation movements. They were Simon Serkel and Corley who had been detained as an activist in a major treatment trial and he'd come out of the closet during that trial and worked through this with his comrades and his comrades who had come to support his sexuality as a justice issue as well as what they were fighting for in terms of race and economic justice. They were Sheila Lipinski and the group that I was a part of, she'd been under house arrest for years. She was a friend of the very famous Black South African leader Steve Bickel. There was a long history of this conscientious object, those gay men refusing to go into the military. There were lots of individuals who were well known as gay or lesbian or bisexual in the liberation movement who were respected, worked with their comrades in helping them to see this as a justice issue. The anti-apartheid movements in Europe had lobbied the African National Congress abroad to come out with a pro-LGBT stance which they had in exile when they were looking for every ally they could get. So a lot of groundwork had been done and then we prepared very careful lobbying documents when I read about this in the book where we argued this as a human rights issue and we looked at what the liberation movements all along had said they stand for. In terms of justice and freedom for everybody and that this was the vision of the South Africa that would replace the evil of apartheid and we argued to the liberation movements. Well, this is that kind of an issue. This is an issue of freedom and of justice and of equality. Kind of like Quakers, you and I are both members of the religious society of France, sort of like liberal Quakers from the 1960s onwards, Quakers had an equality testimony. So at a certain point it just became logical for many Quakers anyway to see LGBT issues or sexual justice issues as an issue of equality. The thinking was rare, it just needed to be extended into a new area. To the same history for the liberation movements in South Africa, they read these lobbying documents, they were involved in these discussions and at least the leadership went along with it. So it went into the Constitution. It is much easier to change a Constitution when a new country is being created than hundreds of years into it when it takes three quarters of all the states to vote in their legislatures or to hold referendums or whatever. You know, once a Constitution is entrenched, it's much harder to change it. But in South Africa in the early 90s, everything was up for grabs. Well, with this perspective, Glenn, of your time in South Africa working for the constitutional change they're seeing, this massive flip-flop in the cultural life of South Africa, how do you feel about such issues in the United States now? It was a major adjustment for me moving to the U.S. It's so much progress in so many areas. It seemed to come so slowly to me. You know, I'd been spoiled as a college actor, as a student activist, to see Paul's major political system change right in front of my eyes and to see all these human rights into the Constitution, to see such a radical social change happening rapidly. So when I moved here, it was very frustrating to see how slowly things moved. I don't think I talk about this in the book, but I did try to get involved in various activist movements, and in my early 20s, mid-20s, this was so frustrating to me. I became involved in harm reduction movement in New York, which was arguing for more effective HIV prevention for injecting drug users. I lobbied and organized against the drug war. I joined the Free Moomia Abu Jamal campaign, which was really just a way to get involved in racial justice issues, but that sometimes felt like knocking on locked doors. And I sort of took a little bit of a break from activism at a certain point. That's when I got more involved in creative writing, because I felt I could do something there, I could control outcomes, I could write a book and share it with the world. And I didn't have to wait for Washington DC to approve that. So it really was difficult. I do agree with Martin Luther King that the arc of history can be long, but that it moves towards justice. I think even the United States is moving slowly towards justice in all kinds of areas. There's been a lot of progress on LGBT rights under the Obama administration, Doug Austin Powell got repealed. There are new protections in a range of areas. There's a whole new different discourse. Public opinion is changing on same-sex marriage, and same-sex marriage has been passed in a whole lot of states that would never have dreamed about it just 10 years ago. So I'm optimistic about the long-term picture, but frustrated about how far behind the United States is. And I'm not just talking about issues of sexuality here, or even gender with equal rights amendments or with trans issues. One of the things that accepts me the most in the USA Today is the rate of imprisonment, which is, I think something like 10 times higher, what it is in the next industrialized country. That disproportionate members of African and American young Latino men who are being imprisoned, to me this recalls both the Soviet Gulag and the history of slavery and chain gangs and all of that. Just the grave injustices in some parts of American life as a very different life opportunities and horizons that people are able to see and impoverished in their cities. There's a lot of work to do here. The positive side of all of that is that I don't think there's any reason for Americans to feel that there's nothing to be done or this is a country that has it all figured out. I don't think there's any need to go to Africa to work on social justice issues. I think there's a lot to do right here. You've already mentioned some things, Glenn, about religious background, about the Dutch Reformed that I think was very present. There was a Dutch Reformed church very near where you lived as a boy. You're Catholic. You've migrated somehow become a Quaker in the United States. Can you give me some overall, maybe it's description, but also insights that you gathered along the way? What did you learn? Why did you make the changes? Why did one thing fit? Is there a reason that Dutch Reformed worked for this apartheid government? Gosh, Dutch Reformed church and Calvinist theology. There was something, I guess, in the Dutch Reformed Calvinist. Other people have written far more about this than me and would be much more knowledgeable to answer this question. I would say that there was something about the Calvinist theology of predestination that was a good fit with apartheid because if you think about what apartheid was, it was saying that you'll race predestined you. And if you were white, then you would have privilege. You'd have certain kinds of schools and universities, certain kinds of jobs. The minutes of education in the 1960s and the first works even said that blacks were predestined under apartheid to be heroes of words and gardeners and housekeepers and that kind of thing, servants. So I think that there was a parallel there between the theology and the politics. You know, theology and interpretations of the Bible show off on our convenience for us, aren't they? We look for what we want to see in our sacred books. I don't know which comes first, biblical interpretation or political need, but I suspect that it's the latter. I know that you find in the Bible the support for what you need to maintain your privilege, not vice versa. I started off Catholic feeling very different to the debt reform majority in my village. I would say that for a long time Catholicism worked very well for me and it really fed me spiritually. Catholicism was wonderfully mystical from being a very young child, my earliest memories, maybe had something to do with my ending up as a writer. I used to run around and tell stories I used to get left in my imagination. So as a child, I loved storytelling, obviously, but I also loved mysticism. I felt very close to God. I loved deep and meaningful, emotional and spiritual experiences. And Catholicism provided that wonderfully with retreats, with the mysticism of the mass itself, with the tradition of silence. As a teenager, I was interested for a while in becoming a Jesuit and I read the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius. And there were so many of those those mystics that were part of the Catholic tradition and who meant a lot to me, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Theresa. I loved all of that Catholicism also worked for me in terms of my personal values to do with racism because the Catholic churches are, say, took a strong stand against apartheid. And as a teenager, my first experiences of cross-cultural contact were through the Catholic Church. The youth group that I was a part of met with black youth groups and we just had socials and chats and we talked about some of the issues facing the country. They weren't major experiences so that they made it into the book. They went as a formative to me as what I described at university and later. But when I was 16 or 17, they were they were important. All of them stopped working for me when I went to college. I described some of that and there was an intellectual as well as an emotional component. The intellectual component was being in comparative religion class at age 17 and just learning about critical, biblical reading about different religious traditions and how they influenced each other, being exposed to associate historical analysis of religious tradition. And that, just intellectually, I couldn't sustain my naive, literalist faith. What I see today is my naive, literalist faith. Saint Paul in Corinthians says that when I was a child, I thought like a child. Now that I'm a man, I think like a man. So, you know, at age 17, I wasn't able to think like a child anymore. I wouldn't yet know, I would say, how to think as an adult about issues of faith. But part of it, I think, was also emotional in that I sensed already then that I might be gay or that at least my sexuality and my sense of being as a gay person didn't fit in with the Catholic Church. So, with hindsight, although I wouldn't have, I would never have said so at the time, with hindsight, it seems to me that that was another part of leaving Catholicism at that age was sort of getting myself ready to come out of the closet. So, I abandoned faith. Except I sort of didn't because I became involved in social justice politics, as I say. And then that became a kind of a faith. And it was a faith in a better South Africa, a faith in a better world. It was a sort of a secular commitment to truth and justice and love. And it wasn't grounded in a spiritual practice or in a belief in a supernatural being. But it was still there, I don't think it ever went away. Then in my 30s, living in the United States, I really, at a certain point, started some religious and spiritual practice. And this religious community, I mean, I had a wonderful informal sense of community just with friends, when colleagues, and romantic partners, or whoever, just people that I knew. I had a great sense of community just living as an individual person. But I wasn't involved anymore in anything to create conscious community. And I had had that in Catholicism, and I missed that. And I also just missed mystical and reflective experiences. I had something like that through doing creative writing. Creative writing provided a place for me to think about my life, to try to give shape to my experience, to put it in words, to try to draw meaning out of my memories. But it wasn't the same as being on a silent retreat in a monastery. It didn't reach exactly the same kinds of depths, or didn't ask exactly the same kinds of questions. And I wanted to be asking those questions again, and I wanted to be on that kind of spiritual journey again. So I took a little online quiz, I think it was called belief-almatic. So I plugged in what I believed and what I wanted, and generated two answers, Unitarian Universalists, or FGC affiliated liberal Quakers and program Quaker meetings. First place I went was the Unitarian Church in Fort Lauderdale. And I didn't like it there because I felt that there was a superficial cycling between different religious traditions. And if it was Yom Kippur, then there'd be a little bit of Judaism, and a week later there'd be a little bit of Buddhism. That particular UU community didn't seem to work for me spiritually. It didn't seem to go deep enough into any particular tradition. And then I went to Fort Lauderdale friend meeting and just felt an instant sense of belonging and happiness there. And it just felt like a good fit, both in its social justice commitments and in the silent contemplation, the tradition of egalitarian spirituality. They're listening to the voice within, and then also the concept of every Quaker being a minister and speaking to the group. So I didn't really look back. I attended there for a year or two, attended for ten months in Kentucky when I had a visiting academic appointment, founded a Quaker worship group when I first moved here to Central Pennsylvania, and then in the joined Penn State Friends meeting, just down the road from me. I love the religious society of friends. I love the silent contemplation of meeting. I love the sense of community and feel very good about it. Wow, that's a mouthful. And so well put. You say these things more clearly than almost anyone else I've heard. Maybe it's the clarity of having grown up in South Africa and having really wrestled with these really deep issues. Again, they're in the book, The Jack Bank, "Memoir of a South African Childhood" by Glenn Retiff. And his last name is spelled R-E-T-I-E-F. And at glenretiff.com, you can find out where to get the book. Certainly Amazon and everyone else has it. It's a wonderful book. And I thank you so much, Glenn, for sharing your story and for being here to speak with us today for Spirit in Action. Mark, thank you. It's been wonderful. You've asked great questions. I am just being a delight to be on this program. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. [MUSIC PLAYING]