Slave Lodge Asserting Dignity

              Yesterday afternoon, Belville HFB joined us here at Isilimela, the first time our three schools have been together since 2023. We had warned our students that it might be awkward: The other two HFBs met only once since the school year just started in January this summer, and Belville learners might be more shy here in the township; but their van arrived and Belville and Isilimela buddies, Afrikaner and Xhosa, were leaping into each other’s arms. For all the teachers, watching the three communities embrace each other, as happened within the hour, is the prize. And for me, being together with all these teachers from all three schools, some friends I had not seen since 2019, brought me a deep, contented calm.
              This morning Roosevelt ascended to the bottom of the funicular at Table Mountain, but it was closed for the day due to wind. The views even from there, the air already, the cloud and mists melting off the sides of the mountain called the tablecloth, were crisp and enlivening to the soul.
              It was fortification for the Slave Lodge, a sturdy building raised by the Dutch East India Company in 1660 and housing slaves especially during the British occupation. What struck me in this visit was the active and proud voice accompanying the exhibits throughout. I don’t remember what was written. But this is what I remembered about what was felt: In this space, we honor the pain, the trauma, the complex stories. In this space, we share the voices preserved from grandparent to grandchild and on down because no one preserved them into the historical record and because stories are alive to us, sensing the many as we imagine the one. In this space, there is no excuse for ignorance or forgetting.
              Everywhere alongside horrific stories was dignity—in pictures and in the words of descendants proud of their names however awful their provenance, proud, because their families wore them, passed them on, turned them to love, and strong, because it reminds them why they might still be struggling now, still waking up at three in the morning for a job, and wise, because knowing the past carried in their names teaches them how to organize and resist and build for the future. The trauma and brutality was there in that museum, but with no trace of defeat or despair.
              I couple months ago, read How the Word is Passed, by Clint Smith, a powerful, wise book about how history is actively remembered or forgotten. He discussed places like the Slave Lodge—he discussed visiting the Door of No Return on Gorée Island in Senegal, a similar encounter—and the importance of such “sites of remembrance,” because here we can gather history around us, in stone, plaster, lintels, and the very air and ground beneath our feet, and invoke a past with both horror and reverence: it was here, it was here, I can’t imagine, and I can’t imagine because I am finally imagining.
              And this is the importance of Hands for a Bridge whose first tool is the razing of classroom walls. We can read a book and scan a Wikipedia article, or we can go and make ourselves ache to really understand something in the very moment we have started to understand.
              We returned to Isilimela to drum together in quaking, electric unison, every face a light.