A Preacher's Meditation for Tuesday of Holy Week
“Above all else the South African song is a victory-song, a defiant hymn.
This song sounds out when two thousand women and chil dren gather on a sandy field outside Capetown. They refuse to he separated from their menfolk and sent to Transkei, a “homeland” a thousand miles away, where starvation and sickness await them, a reserve that many have never been in, but which is now according to the apartheid policy the only legal domicile for these women. Despite constant harassment from the police, despite the cold and rain the women stand there round the fires and the wooden cross—and sing hymns. After six weeks of unbroken singing, the patience of the police ends. Early one morning, just before dawn, they strike. Heavily armed and with dogs they occupy the small hills around the camp. The women gather round the cross, fall to their knees in the wet sand and pray. Then they dance round the cross, the symbol of this folly. These women have lost everything—their homes, their families, their jobs and their possessions. They have nothing more to lose—only their chains, but everything to win. ”
From Freedom Is Coming: Songs of Protest and Praise, Anders Nyberg. Published by Utryk, Uppsala, 1984.
Cited in A Lent Sourcebook: The Forty Days (Book Two: Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent to Holy Thursday). Edited by J. Robert Baker, Evelyn Kaehler, Peter Mazar. Liturgy Training Publications Copyright © 1990, Archdiocese of Chicago.
Resource no longer available.