During my first ministry assignment, I worked in the Cape Flats, an area designated by Apartheid and described by Desmond Tutu as a place for dumping humans. The college where I worked was located in Athlone, which was not far from where the infamous Trojan Horse Massacre took place in 1985. Athlone was a place filled with tension, and the college was right in the middle of it. All the lines between white and black were blurred, and life was uncertain and messy. However, it was the ideal place to become integrated theologically and spiritually.  

The Cape Flats was an area fuelled by tension. From our campus, we watched the armoured vehicles of the South African Police and Defence Force storming onto a School Campus across the way, shooting at the family and friends of some of our students.  We watched young people wandering onto streets, stoning cars, setting up barricades, and venting their frustration and rage. I saw first-hand the difficulties that people faced as they were brutalised by a system that was certain and acting on the doctrines of apartheid.

Paulo Freire1, an educator among the poor in Brazil, explained that the disadvantaged could often not think for themselves as their thoughts have been colonised by the dominant ideas of those in power. This was our experience on the Cape Flats; we came face to face with the tyranny of the “perfect answers” of Apartheid. We had to learn to think for ourselves again. Freire's word for this is "conscientisation".(1) When the poor are "conscientised", they develop the critical awareness that gives them the vocabulary to express their thoughts and values and even the courage to take action against the oppressive elements of their world.

I realized that my fear of thinking independently was hindering my spiritual integration. The church's unwavering certainty and the Apartheid's propaganda paralyzed me, as they provided "perfect answers" that left no room for questioning. This made me wonder about my students' difficulties in their spiritual journeys. However, we had no other option but to think for ourselves. With my students, I embarked on a quest to explore my vocabulary and find answers to the questions we faced on the Cape Flats. It required me to abandon my prior certainties, my habit of seeking the perfect solution, and my desire for an irrefutable proposition. I had to learn to let questions guide me. As Lloyd Alexander once wrote: "We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself." This has been my experience.

The breakthrough moment for me was when I realized that my answers could never be perfect. Life does not always work that way. The best I can do is to find answers for this particular situation, for now. During the next twelve years, it felt like I was learning a new language to make sense of the world. It was similar to how a baby learns a language- word by word, sentence by sentence, and experience by experience. It was not about refining theological positions or polishing doctrines, but about life and death. Theology was visceral, and my answers mattered - as well as those of others.