People said that going on tour would be transformative, but I don’t know how much I really believed it. That’s the thing about transformation—it’s not something you can truly prepare for or understand until it’s happening.
It wasn’t until our third full day in Johannesburg, in the middle of our concert at Wits University, that it fully hit me.
On day 1, we had gone to the Apartheid Museum, which is not just a museum about apartheid—it’s a museum that tells the entire history of South Africa through the lens of apartheid. You’re primed for what you’re about to experience by being randomly assigned as white or non-white and entering through different doors. Once you get inside, you are taken all the way back to the beginning of known human history in the southernmost part of this continent, and then the story builds, explaining the history of different groups and the timeline of British and Dutch colonization, then the economic forces that combined with the ideology of white supremacy to create the conditions for apartheid. The literal maze of the museum’s interior ends with actual footage from the Truth and Reconciliation hearings.
On day 2, we visited Kliptown and met with the children, youth, and staff of the Kliptown Youth Program, the beneficiary of the concert we were to perform that evening. Kliptown is a neighborhood of Soweto, the township of Johannesburg where the black population was forcibly relocated to in the early years of apartheid. In Kliptown, the housing is almost entirely shacks, the roads and paths are dirt, the electricity is pirated, and the plumbing is nonexistent. The poverty is made all the more stunning by the fact that Kliptown exists within a metropolitan area that also houses extreme wealth. Not only was there sharing of songs and dance, on all sides (featuring us, a group of youth singers, a four-person stepping troupe, and the youngest children present), but we also got to share stories. We were blessed with the presence of members of the Mzansi Gay Choir, who sang two songs and then met with us in small groups to talk and share. That evening they joined us on stage for a concert experience like none we had ever had before, at the Soweto Theatre.
On day 3 we had the honor of being invited by the President of South Africa to join in marching in the Youth Day march, which honors the tens of thousands of youth who turned the tide in the fight against apartheid in 1976 when they took to the streets in protest of being forced to learn exclusively in Afrikaans, the language of the white ruling power. Hundreds of unarmed youth were murdered by police, and their memory is honored each year on June 16, the day the uprising began. We joined President Cyril Ramaphosa, survivors of the 1976 protests, and hundreds of youth in marching 3.5 miles down the streets that the youth of Soweto took to 42 years ago and on which so many of them gave their lives.
That night we performed a concert to benefit a youth initiative of GALA (Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action), a national LGBTQ organization. And it was electric. Over the course of our first act, the applause grew and grew until, during Down By the Riverside, the audience exploded. When the second act started and the dancers came out, the audience really lost it. Then we sang Shosholoza, one of the most beloved songs in South Africa, which was sung as a resistance song during apartheid. When we finished, the crowd was on their feet. And then something magical happened. From the back of the auditorium, a row of people took up the opening call of the song, and the rest of the audience sang the response, and then we were all singing it again, led by the audience. It was incredible. It was no longer a performance—the tables had been turned and the whole room was united.
In that transformation of the space, the entire concert was transformed. I was transformed.
You couldn’t visit the Apartheid Museum and not make parallels between South Africa and the United States—and not just the classic comparison of apartheid with Jim Crow, but the present-day throughline of oppression and white supremacy and the fact that the same forces that created apartheid in 1948 in South Africa are rising and thriving and actively destroying life and liberty within the United States right now, with those who control the highest level of our government seeking to create an apartheid-like reality. You couldn’t visit Kliptown and not have your heart broken by the wealth divide and the stark reality of the legacy of apartheid and white supremacy. And then, when we ourselves took to the streets of Soweto, we joined the mingling of past and present. In my mind the youth of Soweto mingled with the youth of the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s—as well as the youth who started the I Am Trayvon Martin campaign and the activist survivors of Parkland, Florida. I marched for, and with, them all.
That night, on stage, I experienced a full-body feeling of solidarity that touched my very core. The very meaning of the songs we were singing changed for me. Ysaye Barnwell’s words, “Those who have died have never ever left … they are with us in this crowd” encompassed all those killed by the violence of oppression and the forces of hate: the youth of 1976, the souls lost to AIDS, the generations of Black folks killed or locked up by the state, the victims of the post-apartheid violence, those who have died attempting to cross borders for the sake of freedom or their families, the victims of Pulse and all other mass shootings, murdered trans women of color. “I’ll rise up, a thousand times again, for you.” Before, this song felt personal, a song of resistance and solidarity among my gay and queer family. Now, in my mind and heart, I was singing it to everyone who has ever been oppressed. And through the transformation that had happened, with those listening no longer being an audience but rather participants, the final line of the song, “we will rise,” encompassed everyone in the room and everyone we had brought with us in our hearts.
The chorus first decided to travel to South Africa well before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Afterward, a lot of people questioned whether we should be going. Shouldn’t we focus on changing hearts in our own country? What could we possibly offer folks in South Africa? But we aren’t here to teach, we are here to learn, and to share. We are here to grow our own hearts and perspectives and solidarity. We are here to understand that history is not linear; it is circular, and global. The election of Trump laid bare the lie that the story of racism in the United States is a story of forward progression (from slavery to Jim Crow to the Voting Rights Act) with a happy ending (the election of Obama). The true story is a tug of war between the forces of oppression and liberation—slavery leading to Reconstruction leading to Jim Crow leading to the Civil Rights Movement leading to mass incarceration leading to Black Lives Matter & Obama leading to Trump.
Those who perpetrate the worst forms of oppression are always learning and improving on each other’s methods. The architects of apartheid traveled the world—to the United States, to Australia, and to other countries with racial caste systems—to find out what worked best to most completely oppress people of color. Those of us committed to the resistance and to creating a world where all are free from violence and oppression need to learn from each other also, before it’s too late. That’s why I came here, and why it matters that we form bonds across borders, and oceans, and cultures. Being in South Africa has humbled me and transformed my understanding of who I am in solidarity with, forever.