The Official Blog of the Lichfield Cathedral Youth Fellowship visit to the Diocese of Matlosane, South Africa

21st-29th October 2011




The Diocese of Matlosane

The Diocese of Matlosane covers over half the North West Province of South Africa, an area of 24,432 sq. mls., is 165 miles from north to south as the crow flies and 145 miles from west to east.

The Diocese is organised into 4 Archdeaconries, North, Central, Cathedral, and South. The Church of the Resurrection at Ikageng (Ika-heng) was inaugurated as the Cathedral in 2004, the first Cathedral to be established in a township in South Africa.

In October 2009 there were 41 clergy in the Diocese: Bishop Stephen, Bishop Sigisbeth (ret’d), 36 priests and 3 Deacons.

Of the priests, 2 are retired, 3 others over retirement age, and 21 are Self Supporting. There are only two white clergy, one of whom is over retirement age.

The clergy serve 20 parish churches, most of which have daughter churches and a very large number of outstations. The majority of the congregations are black, and there are over 80,000 communicants in the Diocese, some of whom receive the sacrament very infrequently due to lack of transport.

There are also 2 ordinands in full time training at the College of the Transfiguration, one paid for by Lichfield Diocese.



Friday 28 October 2011

Day 5 Museum visits continued


Tuesday

We were taken today to Soweto and Johannesburg to visit two amazing museums. This was a real eye-opener for all of us. The first museum was in the heart of Soweto – and just visiting this iconic township was an incredible experience. This was the Hector Pieterson memorial museum, in the heart of where the Soweto riots began in 1976. Hector Pieterson was a 13-year-old boy who was shot dead in the riots by security forces, and a picture of whose body, next to his distraught sister and carried by a friend, became one of the symbolic images of apartheid. His murder led to the international pressure which ultimately would help to bring down apartheid. The museum was an archive of the Soweto riots – how they began and developed, and their after-effects. We were all moved at the end of the visit to see a small garden where tablets were laid out, each with the name of one of the young people who were killed in the uprisings. We were also struck to see Hector’s sister, who now works at the museum, leading a tour party as we were leaving.

We travelled via Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s former homes in Soweto, into Johannesburg to visit the Apartheid Museum, a more general museum on the whole story of Apartheid. We also saw an exhibition about the life of Mandela here. The entrance to the museum hit home the message about life under apartheid: our entry tickets randomly allocated us as “white” or “non-white”, and we had separate entrances to the museums, with either a spacious ramp or a narrow steep staircase into the main part of the museum.

All of the group were heavily affected by the story of Apartheid as told in the museum, through explanations, exhibits, photos and films. The museum was cleverly designed with bars, chains and metal, heavily symbolic of the restrictions of the apartheid age. Ros, Pete and Helen could remember some of the footage from the 1980s, and we were also accompanied by Dean Edward, Peter, Wilhemina and Manana, four of our South African friends, who found the experience deeply moving because of their own memories of living through apartheid. Later in the evening, after dinner in a small house in one of the poorer areas of Ikageng, we sat outside and listened to Peter and other of our friends’ memories of apartheid and discussion of how things had – or had not – changed in the years since. To be sharing a meal in the heart of a black township, after what we had learned today, we felt to be a deep privilege, as we sat under the stars together (being eaten by mosquitos).
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