Ancestors and religion
What I know about my ancestory is not absolutely factual because I learned most of it from my mother who was not educated and did not concern herself with such things.
Throughout the 1600s the Dutch East India Company sailed to the East Indies (now Indonesia) to bring back spices. Scurvy was a major problem because of the lack of fresh vegetables on the ships so, in 1652, they dropped off a few gardeners at the southern tip of Africa, at the Cape of good Hope, to grow fresh vegetables.
Most of the Dutch stayed at the Cape for a few years and then returned to Holland but some decided to settle at the Cape permanently. To differentiate themselves from those who returned to Holland, they began to call themselves African, which is Afrikaner in Dutch. One of the Dutchmen who decided to settle there was my first ancestor to arrive in South Africa in 1654, Cornelius Van Sittert.
My maternal great-grandmother was a direct descendant of Cornelius. She married a man named Meyer and my maternal grandmother, Constance Ann Meyer, was born in Cape Town in 1892.
Constance married my maternal grandfather, Gustavus Adolfus Joubert, who was a descendant of the French Huguenots, Pierre and Isabeau Joubert, who were two of the 201 Huguenots who came to the Cape in 1688. Gustavus was born in 1880. He was named after Gustavus Adolfus, the king of Sweden from 1611 to 1632, who was revered for defending the Protestants during the Thirty Years War.
(The Huguenots were Calvinists from the south of France who had fled to Amsterdam in 1685 when the Edict of Nantes, which had given the Calvinists some religous freedom, was revoked by Louis XIV.)
My maternal grandfather was a freethinking fellow and soon gave up the religion of his ancestors. He left the Dutch Reformed Church and was ostracized by his family. He married Constance, who had been raised Anglican (the Church of England or Episcopalian) and they left the Cape to live in the Orange Free State. They bought a dairy farm just outside the town of Bloemfontein and settled down and raised four daughters and a son. My mother, Neva Joubert, was born in Bloemfontein in 1918.
I don't know who my paternal great-grandfather was. He was never talked about. My paternal great-grandmother, Florence Fisher was a descendant of the British 1820 Settlers. She lived in Port Elizabeth and had about 5 kids ((perhaps by different fathers) and may never have been married. Although "Ol' Muz," as we knew her, was Presbyterian, she sent her kids to a Catholic orphanage. So my maternal grandmother, Florence (known as Flossie all her life) was raised Catholic from an early age.
(One of Flossie's sisters had been fathered by a black man and was so dark that she was nick-named, Gypsy. She married a white man but her family never really prospered and they lived with their ten kids and six dogs in a trailer park. Some of the happiest memories of my childhood were of visits to see Auntie Gypsy. Although they were dirt poor, she and her drunken husband used to stuff my pockets with money and I always came home with one of their never-ending supply of puppies.)
It was through the Catholic church that Flossie met my paternal grandfather, Ernest Bernard Conlon, an Irishman. Ernest was the black-sheep of an otherwise fairly respectable family and died when he was only 37 (supposedly of drink) soon after my father, William Ernest Scott Conlon, was born in 1908.
Flossie then moved to Johannesburg (which was a boomtown because of the gold-mines) and made a living playing the piano in a brothel where she met a Presbyterian Scotsman, George Locke, whom she married. (She was coy about it, but we often wondered if she did more than play the piano in the brothel.)
Flossie was beautiful and talented but not a serious woman and my father (now known as Scotty) was never really encouraged to use his mind and relied on his movie-star looks. (Beauty ran in the family and my father's sister had a daughter, my cousin, Adele Kruger, who became Miss South Africa in 1957.) Scotty stopped going to school when he was ten and began to hang out with a gang of thieves. George Locke decided to straighten out my father and sent him to a reform school where he found that he was good at wrestling. When Scotty was 14, he dropped out of school and became a professional wrestler until he married his first wife and joined the Air Force just before WWll.
When George Locke died, he left Flossie some money which she used to buy a hotel in Isipingo beach and after the war, Scotty, came to live with her to help run the hotel. The hotel was used as a halfway house for British soldiers returning from Japanese prisoner of war camps and Scotty's first wife began to have "affairs" with these soldiers.
At that time my mother was a nurse working in Johannesburg. Her father was becoming sick so she decided to treat her parents to a vacation and brought them to my father's hotel in Isipingo. There she and my father fell in love. He divorced his first wife, married my mother and I was born in 1947.
Most of my basic religious and philosophical ideas came to me through my mother. Her father, Gustavus Adolfus, was an oddball for his time. He was a dairy farmer who was vegetarian. He was an Afrikaner who worshipped the British and Americans. He named his only son Abraham Lincoln Joubert and read the New England Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson. Somehow this led him to Mary Baker Eddy. He never joined the Christian Scientist church but constantly read Eddy's "Keys to the Scriptures" and believed in "mind over matter," faith-healing and positive thinking. My mother, Neva, was his most ardent disciple and passed along his ideas to me. She also was not a church-going Christian Scientist.
Neither George nor Flossy were religious and my father was never sent to church or taught any sort of religion. So my father was not much given to deep thinking. The only thing he ever studied was horse-racing "form." The only books he ever read were cowboy and detective novels like those by Raymond Chandler. (I read all of Scotty's books but lost interest in them when I was about ten.)
My mother decided to have me christened in the local Methodist church and then later sent me to Methodist Sunday School so I could get some basic Christian teaching but neither she or my father ever set foot in a church. My mother claimed that she was allergic to churches.
When I was seven I was punished with after-school detention and had to sit in the back of a class where a teacher was teaching Catechism to the few Catholics in the school. It was here that I heard something that would change my life forever.
The teacher read from the Catechism: "Who made me? God made me. Why did God make me? God made me to know Him, to love Him and to serve Him."
That night I could not sleep and, for days afterwards, I felt elated. I decided to become a Catholic. My father was slightly annoyed but pretty tolerant but my mother had a fit. Like all Afrikaners, she had been raised to believe that the Catholic church was evil. They called it "die Roomse Gevaar" - the Roman Danger.
But I was adamant and she knew that she could not dissuade me. I was re-batised in the Catholic church and recieved the sacraments of Confession, Communion and Confirmation and became an altar-boy. Then I decided that I wanted to go to Catholic school. The nearest Catholic school was a Marist Brothers' boarding school sixty miles away in Pietermaritzburg. I was eleven when I first left home.
At first I was terribly home-sick and lonely. The Brother in charge of my dormitory, a sadistic French Canadian, decided that I was too wild and willful and that he needed to break my spirit. He beat me with a cane every night for the first three months until he realized that I was actually a good scholar.
He then decided to mentor me. He sent me to special English language classes so that I could learn to "talk like a civilized Englishman" and get rid of my "ugly Afrikaner accent." I had studied classical piano since the age of seven when a Catholic piano teacher had taken a liking to me. This Brother made sure that I continued my piano lessons and also made me take singing lessons as I had a good voice.
Then my father became sick and could no longer afford to send me to boarding school. The only way that I could remain with the Marist Brothers and finish my schooling was to join them and become a Brother. There was one problem - I was regarded as a bastard by the Catholic Church and I could only join the Order if my mother was baptised a Catholic and my parents remarried in the Catholic Church.
By this time we were so poor that we could not afford electricity. There was so little food that my mother would feed us first and then pretend that she would eat later. She could not hide this from me for long and I convinced her that the Catholic church would take care of us if she became Catholic and I joined the Marist Brothers. She agreed and I went to live in the monastery in Hibberdene and the Catholics took care of my parents and sister who also became Catholic.
Being in the monastery was like living in the belly of the beast and I came to dislike it. As soon as I finished my schooling, I left the church. But I still wanted to know, love and serve God and that led me to study all the religions.
Then my father died and I felt free to do as I please. I joined the anti-apartheid movement which was also inspired by my religious fervor. Politics did not satisfy me and I was still searching for God. That led to my experimentation in the Sixties, with drugs, sex, communes, Hinduism, a guru and his cult.
But through all this, there underneath all of the -isms was my real religion which was what my mother had taught me. It took me years to realize that my mother had imbued me with an unshakeable faith in a God of love and mercy; complete faith that Jesus had lived and died to save us; a firm conviction that to live by faith means to always be optimistic and cheerful, "think positively" and be generous, kind, forgiving and loving and never worry about oneself because God is taking care of us.
Later: After dinner and that holy sacrament, a glass of wine, I felt like I was on a roll so I added this:
I tried to be an atheist once in my commie days but it always seemed obvious to me that life is an unexpected nand un-asked-for gift and the feeling of gratitude for this gift is the closest thing to heaven on earth that I can experience.
I don't have any concept of what God is eventhough my heart has glimpsed the magic of the Creator. How can my finite, limited mind comprehend infinity, eternity; something that is not in time or space? And I know that I cannot pray in the traditional sense because God already knows everything that I think.
But to me the best way to love and serve God, once you know God, is to be cheerful and enjoy life - no, not societal life; I mean the spark of life and breath in me and in all living creatures. That's what I mean by life.
So how do I express my gratitude? Maybe I'm just an African really. The traditional African religion is ancestor worship and I am grateful to my ancestors for being the conduits of this life that I have and would like to enshrine them in my own silly way in this post.
Throughout the 1600s the Dutch East India Company sailed to the East Indies (now Indonesia) to bring back spices. Scurvy was a major problem because of the lack of fresh vegetables on the ships so, in 1652, they dropped off a few gardeners at the southern tip of Africa, at the Cape of good Hope, to grow fresh vegetables.
Most of the Dutch stayed at the Cape for a few years and then returned to Holland but some decided to settle at the Cape permanently. To differentiate themselves from those who returned to Holland, they began to call themselves African, which is Afrikaner in Dutch. One of the Dutchmen who decided to settle there was my first ancestor to arrive in South Africa in 1654, Cornelius Van Sittert.
My maternal great-grandmother was a direct descendant of Cornelius. She married a man named Meyer and my maternal grandmother, Constance Ann Meyer, was born in Cape Town in 1892.
Constance married my maternal grandfather, Gustavus Adolfus Joubert, who was a descendant of the French Huguenots, Pierre and Isabeau Joubert, who were two of the 201 Huguenots who came to the Cape in 1688. Gustavus was born in 1880. He was named after Gustavus Adolfus, the king of Sweden from 1611 to 1632, who was revered for defending the Protestants during the Thirty Years War.
(The Huguenots were Calvinists from the south of France who had fled to Amsterdam in 1685 when the Edict of Nantes, which had given the Calvinists some religous freedom, was revoked by Louis XIV.)
My maternal grandfather was a freethinking fellow and soon gave up the religion of his ancestors. He left the Dutch Reformed Church and was ostracized by his family. He married Constance, who had been raised Anglican (the Church of England or Episcopalian) and they left the Cape to live in the Orange Free State. They bought a dairy farm just outside the town of Bloemfontein and settled down and raised four daughters and a son. My mother, Neva Joubert, was born in Bloemfontein in 1918.
I don't know who my paternal great-grandfather was. He was never talked about. My paternal great-grandmother, Florence Fisher was a descendant of the British 1820 Settlers. She lived in Port Elizabeth and had about 5 kids ((perhaps by different fathers) and may never have been married. Although "Ol' Muz," as we knew her, was Presbyterian, she sent her kids to a Catholic orphanage. So my maternal grandmother, Florence (known as Flossie all her life) was raised Catholic from an early age.
(One of Flossie's sisters had been fathered by a black man and was so dark that she was nick-named, Gypsy. She married a white man but her family never really prospered and they lived with their ten kids and six dogs in a trailer park. Some of the happiest memories of my childhood were of visits to see Auntie Gypsy. Although they were dirt poor, she and her drunken husband used to stuff my pockets with money and I always came home with one of their never-ending supply of puppies.)
It was through the Catholic church that Flossie met my paternal grandfather, Ernest Bernard Conlon, an Irishman. Ernest was the black-sheep of an otherwise fairly respectable family and died when he was only 37 (supposedly of drink) soon after my father, William Ernest Scott Conlon, was born in 1908.
Flossie then moved to Johannesburg (which was a boomtown because of the gold-mines) and made a living playing the piano in a brothel where she met a Presbyterian Scotsman, George Locke, whom she married. (She was coy about it, but we often wondered if she did more than play the piano in the brothel.)
Flossie was beautiful and talented but not a serious woman and my father (now known as Scotty) was never really encouraged to use his mind and relied on his movie-star looks. (Beauty ran in the family and my father's sister had a daughter, my cousin, Adele Kruger, who became Miss South Africa in 1957.) Scotty stopped going to school when he was ten and began to hang out with a gang of thieves. George Locke decided to straighten out my father and sent him to a reform school where he found that he was good at wrestling. When Scotty was 14, he dropped out of school and became a professional wrestler until he married his first wife and joined the Air Force just before WWll.
When George Locke died, he left Flossie some money which she used to buy a hotel in Isipingo beach and after the war, Scotty, came to live with her to help run the hotel. The hotel was used as a halfway house for British soldiers returning from Japanese prisoner of war camps and Scotty's first wife began to have "affairs" with these soldiers.
At that time my mother was a nurse working in Johannesburg. Her father was becoming sick so she decided to treat her parents to a vacation and brought them to my father's hotel in Isipingo. There she and my father fell in love. He divorced his first wife, married my mother and I was born in 1947.
Most of my basic religious and philosophical ideas came to me through my mother. Her father, Gustavus Adolfus, was an oddball for his time. He was a dairy farmer who was vegetarian. He was an Afrikaner who worshipped the British and Americans. He named his only son Abraham Lincoln Joubert and read the New England Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson. Somehow this led him to Mary Baker Eddy. He never joined the Christian Scientist church but constantly read Eddy's "Keys to the Scriptures" and believed in "mind over matter," faith-healing and positive thinking. My mother, Neva, was his most ardent disciple and passed along his ideas to me. She also was not a church-going Christian Scientist.
Neither George nor Flossy were religious and my father was never sent to church or taught any sort of religion. So my father was not much given to deep thinking. The only thing he ever studied was horse-racing "form." The only books he ever read were cowboy and detective novels like those by Raymond Chandler. (I read all of Scotty's books but lost interest in them when I was about ten.)
My mother decided to have me christened in the local Methodist church and then later sent me to Methodist Sunday School so I could get some basic Christian teaching but neither she or my father ever set foot in a church. My mother claimed that she was allergic to churches.
When I was seven I was punished with after-school detention and had to sit in the back of a class where a teacher was teaching Catechism to the few Catholics in the school. It was here that I heard something that would change my life forever.
The teacher read from the Catechism: "Who made me? God made me. Why did God make me? God made me to know Him, to love Him and to serve Him."
That night I could not sleep and, for days afterwards, I felt elated. I decided to become a Catholic. My father was slightly annoyed but pretty tolerant but my mother had a fit. Like all Afrikaners, she had been raised to believe that the Catholic church was evil. They called it "die Roomse Gevaar" - the Roman Danger.
But I was adamant and she knew that she could not dissuade me. I was re-batised in the Catholic church and recieved the sacraments of Confession, Communion and Confirmation and became an altar-boy. Then I decided that I wanted to go to Catholic school. The nearest Catholic school was a Marist Brothers' boarding school sixty miles away in Pietermaritzburg. I was eleven when I first left home.
At first I was terribly home-sick and lonely. The Brother in charge of my dormitory, a sadistic French Canadian, decided that I was too wild and willful and that he needed to break my spirit. He beat me with a cane every night for the first three months until he realized that I was actually a good scholar.
He then decided to mentor me. He sent me to special English language classes so that I could learn to "talk like a civilized Englishman" and get rid of my "ugly Afrikaner accent." I had studied classical piano since the age of seven when a Catholic piano teacher had taken a liking to me. This Brother made sure that I continued my piano lessons and also made me take singing lessons as I had a good voice.
Then my father became sick and could no longer afford to send me to boarding school. The only way that I could remain with the Marist Brothers and finish my schooling was to join them and become a Brother. There was one problem - I was regarded as a bastard by the Catholic Church and I could only join the Order if my mother was baptised a Catholic and my parents remarried in the Catholic Church.
By this time we were so poor that we could not afford electricity. There was so little food that my mother would feed us first and then pretend that she would eat later. She could not hide this from me for long and I convinced her that the Catholic church would take care of us if she became Catholic and I joined the Marist Brothers. She agreed and I went to live in the monastery in Hibberdene and the Catholics took care of my parents and sister who also became Catholic.
Being in the monastery was like living in the belly of the beast and I came to dislike it. As soon as I finished my schooling, I left the church. But I still wanted to know, love and serve God and that led me to study all the religions.
Then my father died and I felt free to do as I please. I joined the anti-apartheid movement which was also inspired by my religious fervor. Politics did not satisfy me and I was still searching for God. That led to my experimentation in the Sixties, with drugs, sex, communes, Hinduism, a guru and his cult.
But through all this, there underneath all of the -isms was my real religion which was what my mother had taught me. It took me years to realize that my mother had imbued me with an unshakeable faith in a God of love and mercy; complete faith that Jesus had lived and died to save us; a firm conviction that to live by faith means to always be optimistic and cheerful, "think positively" and be generous, kind, forgiving and loving and never worry about oneself because God is taking care of us.
Later: After dinner and that holy sacrament, a glass of wine, I felt like I was on a roll so I added this:
I tried to be an atheist once in my commie days but it always seemed obvious to me that life is an unexpected nand un-asked-for gift and the feeling of gratitude for this gift is the closest thing to heaven on earth that I can experience.
I don't have any concept of what God is eventhough my heart has glimpsed the magic of the Creator. How can my finite, limited mind comprehend infinity, eternity; something that is not in time or space? And I know that I cannot pray in the traditional sense because God already knows everything that I think.
But to me the best way to love and serve God, once you know God, is to be cheerful and enjoy life - no, not societal life; I mean the spark of life and breath in me and in all living creatures. That's what I mean by life.
So how do I express my gratitude? Maybe I'm just an African really. The traditional African religion is ancestor worship and I am grateful to my ancestors for being the conduits of this life that I have and would like to enshrine them in my own silly way in this post.
posted by Joubert at 4:32 PM
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