Song for Sarah

by Jansen, Jonathan;

  Sarah, the young, born-again Christian in church mode, approaching one of her mentors, Mr Jardine (who will become Firstborn’s grandfather-in-law, when he marries Grace)

  The old church building of the Sendingkerk is now a ramshackle museum. There, in black-and-white photographs scattered around the place, you will find pictures of the Johnson relatives attending church, including the choir conductor Yawn-knee. Pa’s family had been moved and yet in some strange way, they were still there. It was, however, from this church that Sarah herself would move on, with serious consequences.

  The large Johnson clan of Ma, Pa and seven children was a close-knit family unit bound by language, faith and blood. An abiding memory is of the Johnson children and friends sitting on the steps outside the location house late into the night telling jokes, sharing gossip and just enjoying one another’s company. When Yawn-knee came into the company after a choir practice at the church, there was an almost audible deference to the eldest brother. Yawn-knee would grunt a greeting, his peculiar way of acknowledging the siblings. Ma would pass baked bread and jam to the children over the lower half of the wooden swing door. Later that night the party would eventually break up as the children left for their homes. Besides the party, there was another break-up coming that was clear even to Sarah’s children as they started to make sense of the social world of the Johnsons.

  VI

  The Gospel People

  After she left nursing college, Sarah found a job in Cape Town working at Brooklyn Chest near Milnerton on the northern outskirts of the Mother City. As the name suggests, this was a specialist hospital for patients with tuberculosis, known to the locals only by its abbreviation, TB.

  It was there that Sarah would meet up with Christians from an evangelical church called The Brethren. This church, with branches across Cape Town, was established by missionaries as an offshoot of the Plymouth Brethren in England. One of her fellow nurses, Rosalind Flanders (later Moore), would take Sarah to the gospel meetings where the Montagu girl met the Lord.

  It must have been a heavy burden for Sarah to tell her parents that she was walking away from the NG Sendingkerk into which she was baptised as a baby and gained membership through katkisasie (catechism). As a born-again member of the gospel community, however, Sarah now had new convictions about how to live a life pleasing to the Lord.

  The Dutch Reformed church permitted you to smoke, drink, dance and have a generally good time, provided you became a member and showed up for church services. It was not uncommon to see a senior member of the Montagu church stone drunk on a Saturday, only to miraculously show up sober and in his right mind on a Sunday morning singing the Afrikaans pesalms (the psalms, phonetically) with their monotonous tunes.

  Sarah with her best friend and fellow nurse, Rosalind Moore (then Flanders)

  Out of a backroom behind the high pulpit, men called diakens (deacons) would emerge in black-and-white frocks to take their seats in the front rows of the audience. The Dominee, or Minister, in what looked like a graduation gown, would elevate himself onto the immense wooden preekstoel (pulpit) as he stared down on the rather serious-looking gemeente (parishioners).

  The Gospel People from the Brethren looked down on the establishment churches as ‘having a form of godliness’ far removed from the real thing. This Pauline reference expressed a thinly veiled contempt for organised religion that followed rules and obeyed rituals but without knowing what it meant to be transformed through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. For the Gospel People, an evangelical faith meant that on hearing the good news you confessed your sin, turned your back on a wasted life, and became a new person through the public act of adult baptism. Something like that. Goodbye alcohol, dancing, premarital sex and all kinds of sinful pleasures. For the born-again Sarah, the evangelical tradition meant one thing only – the end of any association with the NG Kerk.

  VII

  The warrior woman

  You had a greater chance of winning the Lotto twice than the likelihood of a biblically named Sarah from faraway Montagu meeting a biblically named Abraham from Cape Town through mutual friends in a small church community to which they had both converted. Believe it or not, Abraham’s Sarah would bear a son called Isaac.

  If the NG Kerk was Afrikaans in language and culture, the Brethren churches, established by mainly Scottish and Irish missionaries, were English in more than language. It was among the Brethren, no doubt, that the young rural Afrikaans-speaking nurse would improve her competence in the country’s other official language as she entered networks of mainly English-speaking friends in the lower middle-class areas of the Cape Flats such as Crawford and Lansdowne. The hymns were in English books with titles such as Sacred Songs & Solos and The Believers Hymn Book, all imported from the United Kingdom. The culture of the church was decidedly English – what with the women wearing small to very large hats of the kind you saw at the horse races in Ascot. There was even a time when some women wore those long gloves and carried handbags as foreign culture and personal faith melded together awkwardly under the African sun.

  The Gospel People were fundamentalists, meaning that they took their scriptures literally. But they were not charismatic and even joked about their serious, solemn faith: ‘When the Lord returns to take his departed people home, the Brethren will enjoy priority.’ It says in the Bible, ‘The dead in Christ will rise first.’ In that sense only Sarah’s transition from the Dutch Reformed Church to the Brethren was seamless. There was no speaking in tongues or ‘happy-clappy’ Pentecostalists swinging from the chandeliers. The services were dull but sincere and the elders prided themselves on doing everything ‘decently and in order’, according to the Word. Any undue excitement was quickly nipped in the bud, which explained why the slow-moving organ was the preferred musical instrument for accompaniment; guitars and drums were decidedly unwelcome in those days. Even the organ was deemed a distraction in the more solemn Sunday-morning services and so the believers often sang a capella with a brother ‘putting in’ the hymn.

  Mom (right) as a young adult, perhaps in her late teens or early twenties, with close friend Joey Fortuin in Montagu

  In the unbending asceticism of the Brethren tribe, Sarah was a warrior. You would not, for example, find a drop of strong drink in her home. Wine was a favourite target of the gospel preachers. Perhaps it was a response to the alcoholism of the Cape Flats where hardly a family was left untouched by the effects of liquor. On the flatlands and in the vineyards you would find one of apartheid’s most devastating legacies. Descendants of farm workers would have seen the effects of payment under the ‘dop system’ as wine farmers of the Western Cape substituted cash payment with cheap, leftover wines. In this way, generations of farm workers became dependent on the fruit of the vine. ‘They drink to forget’ was a favourite expression among those sympathetic to families held captive by alcohol – to forget the forced removals, the grinding poverty, the job discrimination and the humiliation of everyday racism.

  Forget that Jesus turned water into wine for there was a convenient scripture from which this brand of fundamentalists would draw literal lessons: ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.’ Such an interpretation created problems in Sarah’s church because the Breaking of the Bread (Holy Communion, as the established churches call it) required bread and wine. This led to decades of theological debate in the Brethren as to whether the glass on the table should be filled with wine or grape juice. Branches of the church went both ways in this delicate debate.

  Under Sarah’s roof, the abstinence of the evangelicals came home with a harsh regime of control over the family that went way beyond liquor. No smoking, no dancing, no movies and no sex before marriage. Any one of those got baptised members excommunicated from the Brethren. The body was the temple or dwelling of the Lord, and so whatever evil thing went in there, whether semen or smoke, would defile a holy place. For S
arah’s eldest son this meant that the much-awaited matric ball, which every high-school graduate looked forward to, was off limits. Such high-school events were described as dens of iniquity and Sarah’s curt explanation to Firstborn came in Afrikaans verse: meng jy met die semels, dan eet die varke jou op (if you mix with the dirt/oats, the pigs will eat you as well).

  At the appointed time on Sunday morning, the baptised believers gathered for the Breaking of Bread while sitting in an inner circle (it was actually a square arrangement) to share the loaf and drink the wine after a period of prayer and singing. Outside the holy circle sat the unbaptised; their role was to watch and hope to make it to the inside. The men preached and prayed and the sisters remained silent, as in the Dutch Reformed churches. But whereas those churches ran a one-man show with the Dominee doing everything, the Gospel People believed in lay preachers who served ‘according to their gifts’.

  On a Sunday night there was the gospel meeting and this was where earnest preachers would convey their simple message. Christ died for you, so confess your sins, accept Him into your life, and be saved. Failing which, you were headed for a hot place, literally. It must have been at one of those hellfire-and-brimstone gospel meetings that Sarah found the Lord. In an instant she would have felt the burden of sin lifted from her shoulders and the drudgery of formal religious rituals left behind. Sarah would qualify for baptism shortly thereafter and then, as a full member of the gospel community, her life would take a radical new turn. But first the unenviable task of telling Pa and Ma about her ‘born-again’ experience.

  Naomi remembers...

  Sarah’s every action seemed to be inspired by biblical scriptures which constantly made their way into the minds of her children whether from the pulpit in church or in routine family talk at home. Hardly any conversation happened without a verse from the Bible being quoted, whether in jest or otherwise. You really started to believe that there was a scripture for just about everything. Even our brother Peter got in on the act in reference to his sister’s anatomy: ‘We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts; what shall we do for our sister in the day of reckoning?’ (Song of Solomon 8 vs 8). Sibling teasing was relentless and even the best-kept secrets would be revealed about — well, now you know who.

  VIII

  Breaking bonds

  The two-hundred-kilometre journey from Cape Town to Montagu must have felt longer than usual as Sarah summoned up the courage to tell her parents about her conversion. She probably took along her best friend, Rosalind Moore, for back-up. Rosalind came from a staunch Brethren family, the Flanders clan from the Coloured side of Rondebosch. Her parents were steeped in Brethren tradition, no doubt among the first Cape converts of the European missionaries. Working with Sarah at Brooklyn Chest, Rose coaxed the upcountry Afrikaans girl towards the Lord. And now she had to help break the news to the Montagu family.

  By the time Sarah’s children became aware of their surroundings, it was obvious on family visits to Montagu that the born-again daughter was the odd one out. Sometimes the tension was palpable. First off, Sarah spoke English to her children whereas everyone else in the Johnson clan spoke Afrikaans. Her ability to move effortlessly between the two languages was impressive nonetheless – speaking to Ma in Afrikaans, instructing her sons to fetch water in English, back to Pa about something non-urgent in Afrikaans. It was how English-speaking families on the Cape Flats lived their language lives, except there the Afrikaans is flat, Afri-kaaps, some inventive fellow called it. Not with Sarah. Her Afrikaans was always perfect rural Afrikaans like the whites spoke it, unmixed. It simply did not fit her decorum to do otherwise, the girl from Montagu, the nurse from Chest and now the gospel convert from Athlone.

  While her facility in Afrikaans kept Sarah connected to her family culturally, it was clear that socially things were tense. Speaking English in those rural parts was not only seen as being different, it suggested being fancy, even elitist, better than those you left behind. Sarah was aware that by adopting English as her new family’s language in Cape Town she was distancing herself from the Afrikaans Johnsons in Montagu. That of course was the last thing on her mind but it mattered little in the town of her birth.

  Sarah courting her husband, Abraham (behind her, second from right); her best friend Rosalind (fourth from right) and Rosalind’s husband, Walter Moore; and her other friend Josie Flanders (far right)

  When Sarah and her children visited Montagu over weekends, the question hung in the air. Would she on Sundays go to her old NG Kerk or somewhere else? Sarah chose to travel to Robertson, a rural town about thirty minutes away, where there was a small gospel church. It was the ever-smiling Attie Jass, the eldest son of a family of builders, who did the driving from Montagu through Ashton to Robertson and back. When Attie sped along that narrow, winding road the old hymn, ‘Nearer my God to Thee’, often flashed through the mind.

  There would be no NG Kerk for the principled Sarah any more. It was a steadfastness that would mark all parts of her life. Sarah had found the Lord and that meant no going back, regardless of the pain she must have felt among the Johnsons when the Jansens came to visit. And yet, despite the obvious tension, Sarah was always welcomed back into her parents’ home on every visit from Cape Town. She was not rejected, like so many other families would do to children who turned their backs on the faith of their fathers. Which raised the question – why was Sarah not shut out of the house?

  It is possible that the acceptance of born-again Sarah, however difficult, came from her parents’ own struggles with rejection. Pa and Ma were a mixed couple of sorts. September Johnson was called a see kaffir (sea infidel) by his in-laws. Stemmer had Caribbean blood for his family came to South Africa across the seas from those faraway West Indian islands. On top of that his family was Christian whereas Kulsum Said was Malay Muslim. ‘A double whammy,’ exclaimed a relative relaying the story. What would Kulsum do? Would love prevail over family prejudice towards the infidel foreigner? Kulsum followed her heart and converted to Christianity with her new name Katarina Johnson. Katie, Pa called her. Sarah’s children never heard about or met Katie’s family. Is it possible that Ma’s apparent joylessness and that lonesome stare into the distance came from the fact that her family had cut off all ties with their daughter?

  Naomi remembers...

  Sarah and Abraham chose to speak to and educate their children in English while they themselves addressed each other in her mother tongue, Afrikaans. She spoke in Afrikaans when she was angry and scolded her children. That they spoke both of these official languages perfectly would stand their offspring in good stead in the years to come.

  Sarah always ensured that there were good books available in the home, another way in which she ensured her children had an above-average language proficiency, whether in writing or speaking. Possibly also why she thought that her daughter was school-ready at the age of five years and enrolled her at a local Afrikaans-medium school for the first two years of her education. Academically all was well as the middle child remembers being proudly escorted from one classroom to the other to read out loud to the rest of the school.

  Sarah used to say that the one thing that changed in her life when she became a born-again Christian was letting go of her ‘stinking pride’. I am sure that the very down-to-earth Abraham had a hand in this. I say this because he would venture into the poorest of homes and accept whatever it was that he was offered to eat or drink. The Jansen children were expected to do the same and so if we were visiting one such home together, our eyes would dart from the perhaps not-so-clean cup to our mother’s face looking for approval. She was the one who gave the final nod.

  IX

  An Abraham for Sarah

  Back in Athlone the young nurse Sarah was now a regular member of the Gospel Hall community. At one of the church meetings she must have met Abraham, a dashing young man whose church roots were Anglican and whose home language was English. He lived in a wood-a
nd-iron home in Denver Road, Lansdowne. Abraham too found his church life meaningless – the Anglicans could drink, dance and party over weekends without consequence. The lofty hymns and prayers of die Engelse kerk, as locals called it, left him empty and so the young Abe also found himself drawn to the gospel meetings where he would be born again.

  Where Sarah grew up in a warm, tightly knit family home marked by simple faith and present parents, Abraham came from a broken home. His mother passed away when he was a child while his father lived and died an alcoholic. The jolly Pa Jansen would come alive with humour and all kinds of riveting stories after a few drinks; in his case, it seemed, he drank to remember.

  Horrific stories of harsh Jansen discipline would filter through in family gatherings – like the one about Abraham’s youngest sister whose hand was forced on to a hot stove to teach the naughty child a lesson. Their wood-and-iron home burnt down, leaving the family destitute. One escape from these harsh conditions was the party scene where Abraham and his sister Edith were popular with their impressive singing voices and dance moves. Until Abraham too discovered the good news of the gospel and turned his life around.

  Abraham and Sarah were married by an Irish brother called Sam Moore in one of the Gospel Halls. The black-and-white wedding photograph shows the bald-headed white man ministering from the front of the church while facing the taller, brown-skinned Abraham and the petite, olive-skinned Sarah standing close together as they tied the knot.