The following is a blog post by Dries Coetzee, the Associate Pastor at Oak Grove Presbyterian Church in Bloomington.  He is currently on sabbatical with his wife and children in his native country of  South Africa.

I am back in the Cape Town area in a town called Paarl, where I am visiting my sister Emily and her family; I also spent five years of my life (grades 8 through 12) here at Paarl Boys High. I am fortunate that my Sabbatical coincided with my 20^th high school reunion and homecoming for my alma mater against Paarl Gymnasium. On Thursday and Friday we will watch my nephews play rugby on their various teams and then Saturday we will be watching rugby the whole day with the epical final game in the afternoon between the first teams of the two schools. Hopefully Boys High can turn the tide around as Gymnasium has been winning for the past five years.

A great and life-changing experience I had these past weeks was spending a night and the following day in Soweto. Soweto is an urban area in the City of Johannesburg and its name an English syllabic abbreviation, short for South Western Township. What makes Soweto unique is that it is infused with the history of the struggle against apartheid and was home to people like Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Very memorable were my visits with Antoinette, the sister of Hector Pieterson, a 12-year-old boy who died during the Soweto uprising on June 16, 1976. Hector was killed when the police opened fire on students protesting against the apartheid state’s policy of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools, regardless of the student’s first language. He became the iconic image of the 1976 Soweto uprising after a news photograph by Sam Nzima of the dying Hector being carried by an 18-year-old school boy, Mbuyisa Makhubo with Antoinette (then 17 years old) running next to them was published around the world.

Although I was too young to remember the events of June 16^th, it was  truly amazing to visit with Antoinette, who now is a tour guide at the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum. During my visit with her I once again realized how apartheid dehumanized people to the effect that we could forget that Hector was really a child, and not just an image in the newspaper. Antoinette helped me recognize that he was a normal 12-year-old boy who was very close to his mother, loved to play in the garden collecting bugs of all sorts, and that he dreamed dreams. As I was listening to her I became aware that he could have been one of my own two children who now are at the same stage in their lives. It was then that Hector came alive to me and I envisioned the cost of the ultimate price he and his family paid for a free and just South Africa. Most amazing to me is that Antoinette does not hold any grudges or bad feelings against the people or system who took her brother’s life. She has made a choice not to allow hate to hold her life captive. For her to be truly free and to do justice to her brother’s sacrifice is to forgive and to let go.

For me personally I broke a barrier spending the night in Soweto. Growing up white in apartheid South Africa we lived with a tremendous fear of the black majority, a fear that still separates many people today. For me it was unbelievable to be there, walking down the streets of Soweto, watching the Bafana Bafana’s (South Africa’s national soccer team) semi-final FIFA Confederation Cup match against Brazil, hearing the sounds of the vuvuzelas, and drinking a beer with my gracious host.

I left Soweto with a sense of wholeness, realizing that our biggest fears sometimes keep us from living our lives as people who are set free, which in turn minimizes the sacrifice of those who paid the ultimate prize.