Jonathan Jansen: A bright light in gangland
IF you enter the word “Silvertown” into your Google search engine you are more likely to find links to horrific crimes – like the kidnapping of a three-year-old child while her allegedly drug-afflicted parents were arguing on a street corner – than anything uplifting of the human spirit. That’s because the three “towns” (Kew Town, Silvertown and Bridgetown) that run along Klipfontein Road, Athlone are typical Cape Flats areas long plagued by drugs, gangs and unrelenting violence.
It is this one-sided view of the depressed Flats that make it onto Special Assignment or Focus and as staple newsfeed for the print media.
Nobody however tells you about the genius of the New Apostolic Church (NAC) in the heart of Silvertown.
I had never set foot in a NAC before since doctrinally the church was at odds with my evangelical upbringing – I mean, praying for “the departed” sounded downright creepy. But the church had a gift – singing.
Like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on the other side of the world, you did not have to embrace their strange teachings to know their music was absolutely world class.
And so I made my way for the first time to the NAC Easter Music Festival in Silvertown. What an experience. In stark contrast to the drab council houses outside, the otherwise modest church was fitted with impressive sound pipes for the organ, a grand piano and any number of polished instruments on the stage.
But it was the more than 120 young people who caught your attention. Each one meticulously groomed in elegant black dress, men and women.
Most were there to sing from a difficult repertoire of classical and gospel music, Negro spirituals and tough pieces from Handel’s Messiah. The rest played the range of instruments, including a teenager on various keyboards.
The classy soloist was from windswept Belhar and the conductor had performed on the great musical stages of Europe. All from the community.
What I was witnessing here was not simply a township church offering the best musical talent in South Africa. On display was a grand sociological experiment that took young people from the misery of the Flats and taught them high-end musical skills alongside discipline, focus, grooming and commitment.
Here was a talent factory if ever you saw one and without question some of these youth will graduate to become gifted national and world artists. There is no doubt in my mind that without the NAC choir many of the church young people would be lost on the streets, their talents undiscovered and Silvertown left even more hopeless.
What you have here is music, culture and community in ways seldom seen on the harsh streets outside. I mention culture because I believe that one of the disasters of black life in South Africa is that so much of the energy or ideals of youth is being reduced to politics and little else.
No, don’t give me that old sing-song about “seeking first the political kingdom”. There are many other dwellings in which more of our youth can aspire for greatness, which include music, art, drama and theatre.
Truth is, our youth have become more adept at destroying works of art rather than creating them. We must therefore discourage the idea that the only existence worth pursuing is party political, which increasingly is expressed among South African youth as violent, intolerant, aggressive and even racist.
We need balance so that the many different kinds of talents can be identified, nurtured and promoted as the NAC community does so well with the musical arts on the Cape Flats.
Last Monday night small groups of young men slunk past the church with that all too recognisable physical movement of a gangster, the exaggerated swaying of the body from one side to the next.
Inside the NAC church were 70 or more mainly young people playing instruments and being tested by the conductor as they sang a difficult few lines over and over again.
“None of this is an accident. It is intentional, part of a culture long established in the church; you learn to sing before you can read,” a couple of church leaders told me. And so from a young age these children are inducted into music, learning to play a simple instrument like the recorder long before they come to sing complex arrangements by John Rutter.
After the most stirring live musical experience of March 28 this year in the heart of Silvertown, who the hell cares if they pray for the departed? They are, after all, doing a great job with the living.
