6. This moment

6. This moment

This is the decisive moment, the moment of truth for Christianity at the south end of Africa: Will the light shine in the darkness? Or will the darkness conquer it, like twelve centuries before in North-Africa, where the powers of darkness left the only traces of a once flourishing Christianity as embarrassment souvenirs in museums and libraries?

That there had to be such a moment of truth, was a decided matter, already on 6 April 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck prayed that “...under these wild and brutal people in time to come Your true reformed Christian Teachings may be propagated and extended to the praise and honour of Thy Holy Name...”.

This prayer must have sent a shuddering through the empire of the darkness. After thousand years of undisputed supremacy in a still darker becoming Africa, the potentate of the darkness is now dared, ordered, on 6 April 1652, from behind, the south, from his backside, to vacate the throne for the true Lord of Africa!

From that moment, this moment crawled invisibly behind many horizons, unavoidably nearer.

Now the moment arrived for which these 470 men at dawn around an open Bible in a shabby wagon laager, surrounded by murderous heathendom, any moment, the next moment, could be the last moment.
Is the way of Your true Reformed Christian Teachings on Africa ground now a dead end? Is this moment these Christian Teachings’ last moment? Or will this moment continue to the other side?
This moment is also the decisive moment for the civilization in Dark Africa: Will there in this wilderness “Under these great southern stars” be cultivation and ennoblement, fields and parks, science and technic, beauty and arts, word and song?
Or will only that which multiply be the dead bones and the vultures, the blood spilling, the hunger, the hunger cannibals? Will the garden of God be beautified by the humanness of the people? - so that something of the glorious image of its Creator become known here, amid an indeed severely mutilated humanness, but a humanness then in a process of being healed in the light of this Christian teaching? Or will plant and animal totally wither under the violence of dehumanised brutes?
Comes the path more than four thousand years, from Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, from south to north into Africa to a dead end in this moment? Or goes it further through this moment?