From empire to empathy (29 Oct)

Walking the path of healing 

Walk Day 29

By Marthe Muller, Women Historian and Blocktober walker

Our stomping ground.

For four Sundays this October, I joined a changing herd of hikers, parents, children, strangers, survivors, and friends, climbing the steep path to the King’s Blockhouse on Devil’s Peak, helping to transform old strongholds of colonial domination into sanctuaries of safety. Built in 1796 to guard Cape Town from imagined enemies, the fort now stands watch over a different kind of battle, the interpersonal violence that still scars so many human relationships after the centuries of structural violence inflicted by white supremacy, colonialism, and apartheid.

 

Fading painting of woman, on the Queens Blockhouse ruins.  

We walked in honour of Blocktober, a movement of solidarity with survivors of gender-based violence. Below the crumbling stones of the nearby Queen’s Blockhouse, a faded painting of a woman once sat, huddled and despairing, mirroring the silent suffering endured by so many in our still remarkably unhealed land. My brother Jean du Plessis co-founded Blocktober to “switch this unique fortress from an armed lookout protecting empire to a symbol of resistance and solidarity.” Each step raises awareness and funds for the Saartjie Baartman Centre, a refuge for women and children who have endured violence.

How do we restore humanity in a fractured and unhealed society still haunted by apartheid, patriarchy, and intolerable inequality? In 2015 statistics from the Copenhagen Consensus revealed that domestic violence killed nine times more people than wars, and cost the world nine times more, than all the wars taking place in the world at the time.

In addition to the incredibly high rates of gender-based violence and femicide in South Africa, we are rarely reminded that men are at least five times more likely than women to be murdered, by male perpetrators, who themselves were often victims of violence endured or witnessed as children. Violence begins with disconnection, from self, from others, from Divinity, and from the inherent worth of life.

Families are the smallest units of planetary sustainability, where children should first learn to adjust their antagonisms, and be exposed to the values of compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. Without these being modelled, we, who evolved from fighting animals, will replicate what is modelled instead.

As a member of the race who tragically invented and implemented apartheid, I have become deeply aware of the unsustainability of the actions of my ancestors, and greatly interested in what I understand to be the opposite of apartheid:  Governance for the growth of souls.  I have been taught that governance for the growth of souls begins with making decisions based on seven enduring values, which provide the scaffolding for sustainable families and a sustainable society:

Life, honouring the sacredness of every person.
Equality, restoring the dignity to all.
Growth, replacing vengeance with transformation.
Quality of Life, ensuring conditions where souls can best thrive.
Compassion, where leadership begins with the heart.
Empathy, seeing through the eyes of both the wounded and the wounding.
Love, the only force that permanently disarms violence.

South Africa, and every survivor of violence, has the potential to remain a wound or become a workshop. We are all implicated in the state of our world and our relationships.  As Solzhenitsyn wrote, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” All evil is merely unrealized good, the shadowy part where the light of the sun has not yet reached. Faced with every challenge, we are asked to honour the Divine pattern that indwells us and ask, “What would Love do?”

Key links

• Please donate today – to help make the target for Saartjie Baartman Centre's income generation programme for survivors of gender-based violence (you can set the tip at R0)
• Read other Steps for Saartjie blogs

Next walk in Cape Town 

• Date: 30 October
• Time: 6am
• Difficulty: Moderate
• Duration: 2hrs, 7.5km
• Route: From the mountain end of Chelmsford Rd, Vredehoek, to the Kings Blockhouse - Starting point Pin  📍