If i have not love

I wasn’t planning on doing a Valentine’s Day post because I don’t really celebrate the holiday as a single PCV living in South Africa. It’s also hard to be romantically minded in a country where 1 in 4 women has experienced violence at the hands of a partner and many girls are forced into sexual encounters before age 18. Still, I think that I can take something away from this holiday, so I’m going to try to do so.

If there’s one thing that immediately stands out to me about Valentines Day, it’s the concept of Love and how different cultures interpret it. The ancient Greeks came up with a categorization of various types of love, starting with Eros and adding on Philos and Agape, with Eros being the common form we know of today as “Romantic Love”. This love is focused primarily on physical and emotional intimacy with another person, be it a lover, wife/husband or girlfriend/boyfriend. The main purpose of this type of love is to meet the desires of another. Philos and Agape are different in that they emphasize brotherhood, kinship and relationship on both a civic and kinship level. It is this that I think needs resurgence here in South Africa. At the height of traditional Zulu culture, the concept of Ubuntu created a system in which love of ones community, family, culture, and tribe was non-negotiable. You either cared for other people or you ceased being recognized as a contributing member. Ubuntu meant that one cared for others because they believed their humanity did not stop and end with them but rather was binding them to others like strands of DNA creating a cell structure. To deny this practice was to essentially deny one’s own humanity-You are a person because of other people, Batho Pele, People First. Because of this structure, family systems were strong, the Zulu became prosperous and powerful, and the needs of each member of a village were taken care of. All this worked well until the arrival of the first European explorers in the 1600’s. As Musa Dube, a scholar on the system of Ubuntu in early Zulu culture states, Ubuntu has the potential to be revisited as a cornerstone of a just and peaceful African society:

“The concept of community, the Botho/Ubunthu/Buthu paradigm , should become the cornerstone of for propounding the African philosophy of justice and liberation by constantly revisiting what it means to be community and live in community, what violates community, and how to live in community in the new and hybrid twenty-first century contexts.”

Ubuntu eventually started to fade as a common cultural practice as Apartheid created fear and distrust in communities, and the focus shifted to survival and individual human rights. Ubuntu didn’t completely disappear, but it was squarely challenged. People who had once been loving and caring for others started to move inward. After the arrival of democracy, the dream of togetherness and unity lasted for a short honeymoon period before promises started to be broken and a nation became cynical and even more inwardly focused. For all the talk of Ubuntu, people eventually felt more like the other, alienated, unloved, and struggling to get the full equality promised to them in the Freedom Charter the new ANC Government had long ago drafted. An anxious populace started to wonder: What is the point in idolizing brotherly love and Ubuntu if I still live at a standard of living far below those who purport to be my brothers in this “Rainbow Society”? Slowly but surely, this new political era started to become more power-focused and individualistic despite tangible gains for South Africans. The people became jaded and their leaders marched on.

When I look at the country today, in 2011, with all the ups and downs over the past year, world cup unity, civil unrest, and bold promises of a better future laid out by President Zuma in his State Of The Nation speech, I start to wonder if South Africans have forgotten how to really love one another. Families are disintegrating, violence against women and children is on the rise, newspapers are filled with stories of corruption and abuse of public funds and the sense of collective community responsibility has all but faded from memory. Broken promises of care and action have left many people cynical and without much hope in change. This is ironic in that the 3 major religions here in South Africa-Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam- all have the unconditional tenet of love for one’s neighbor and for one’s community. In Christianity, you have the example of Paul’s famous passage on love:

If I speak in the tongues^[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,^[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Islam emphasizes love in acts of mercy and charity, or Zakat , while many of the Hindu community here in Greytown are generous donors to feeding schemes and social welfare organizations. To these 3 religions, love is not negotiable but rather as important to human life as living and breathing. Perhaps it’s time for