Well I have covered every other aspect that we were supposed to focus on, but the unifying power of love. This was a little challenging for me, but actually as I started to reread several passages I started to realize that, for me at least, you have to read a lot of in between the lines for some of the ways it comes in and the effects that it has and that you can see. There were some obvious passages where love was shown. When Absalom's girlfriend was part of the family her love for the priest and his family was automatically there. She wanted that family and the priest loved her and the baby she bore as the family they were. When Absalom and the girlfriend were married the priest saw nothing, but family. That is what I took from that. They were instantly united as a family and they went through hardships, such as Absalom's sentence, as a family and loved each other like a family.
This book is filled with so many things such as melancholy, injustice, unfairness, remorse, hate, and unbelief, but you can also see if you look a little further maybe you can see some hope that things will look better and you can see some love. Though some of these people have suffered more than I can imagine and their is fear almost everywhere you turn love is the thing that held everyone together.
In the last chapter of the book it says, "...God save Africa. But he would not see that salvation. It lay afar off, because men were afraid of it. Because, to tell the truth, they were afraid of him, and his wife, and Msimangu, and the young demonstrator. And what was there evil in their desires, in their hunger?....Yet men were afraid, with a fear that was deep, deep in the heart, a fear so deep that they hid their kindness, or brought it out with fierceness and anger, and hid it behind fierce and frowning eyes. They were afraid because they were so few. And such fear could not be cast out, but by love."
It said "God save Africa", but Africa would not be saved from the fear of it. The old ways were fine cause they would be at least used to it, so they didn't want to change and be saved basically. The effect of fear like I said in the recent post will hinder progress as it said in this passage. The ways that South Africa tried to keep up because they were afraid of everything else was the apartheid. The injustice that they showed through the apartheid.
The book seemed pretty bleak with no unifying power honestly in my opinion. It wasn't until the very last paragraph honestly that I found their might be a little more then the fear, inequality and the little land comments. It says, "...The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret." In my opinion this is a statement of hope for all of those people back then. The situation personally seemed pretty bleak and hopeless with not a lot that couuld be done about it. This is where I believe that the whole unifying power of love came in though. They loved the land and realized its importance. They pushed through the hard times after they figured out what was wrong. They overcame some fears and started to bring about some equality for those that deserved it. All of the 4 topics of focus I believe came into play under the unifying power of love because they all had some role to bring it about. The fear and inequality kinda brought the need while the importance of the land brought a common interest to build off of.
As it turns out South Africa did end up pushing through it. Look at South Africa today.
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