Keeping a dream alive …

In the villages of southern Sudan for three nights around every full moon the people celebrate. They eat well of the grain stored from the harvest and they drink the beer they have brewed. Laughter, rhythmic clapping and singing emerge from the huts. The sand is cool and white in the moonlight; the broad ancient trees are dark, haunting silhouettes in the silver glow. Deep into the night the drums reverberate and snatches of song drift over the bush. It is a rare glimpse of an older Africa.

The moon has fascinated human beings since ancient times. This year we celebrate the 55th anniversary of the moon landings. Ironically, for South Africans, it serves partly as a reminder of the deep isolation we suffered as a result of the apartheid years. In 1969, billions of people all over the world watched as the moon landing vehicle named ‘Eagle’ touched down on the lunar surface. It was one of the most significant events of our age and it was one of the very first live global television events. It defined an era, but South Africa was one of the few countries excluded from sharing in this momentous global event because the apartheid government under John Vorster refused to allow television in this country because he believed it would corrupt our minds.

In the event, it ended up stunting them. The moon landing was an event that changed global consciousness, and South Africans were unable to experience it, unable to be fully aware of the sharing of human feeling that it evoked. As an 8-year-old boy growing up in Johannesburg I remember the feeling of mingled awe at what was happening out there in the wider world, and a sense of confusion and frustration at having to listen to it on the radio and follow it through newspaper reports while the rest of the world could watch it happening live.

We should not forget that the moon landing was the distant of that last great global convulsion: World War II. The weapons race that led to the creation of the V-2 rocket in the last months of the war and the movement of German scientists to the US was the technical and scientific basis that led to the success of Apollo 11.

Certainly the space race and America’s lunar victory followed in the aftermath of WWII and emerged out of the competition between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but, in the end, it changed the way we see the universe, and ourselves. The view of our earth from the moon was one of the most fundamental revolutions in human consciousness. That first photograph of our blue planet was a revelation of our physical existence in this universe. It was hauntingly beautiful and terrifying at the same time. To stare at that small, sapphire jewel hanging against the black shroud of space was to know that, as far as we can tell, we are alone in the vastness of space that surrounds us – a frail planet of water and fragments of earth spinning in the cold, subzero cruelty of an infinite, starlit vacuum.

From that moment on it was no longer a theoretical notion that we humans are all intricately connected on this planet. To peer through the thin gossamer layers of our atmosphere from the grey horizon of the moon was to see, for the first time in our history, that from Israel to Palestine; Xinjiang to Sydney; Rwanda to Vancouver – our human differences are utterly subsumed by the fragility of our geography. There is no divide between earth and heaven. We do not live on the earth; we exist within the fragile web of our planet and its place in the gravitational complexity of the universe.

Fifty-five years later, South Africa is a different country, and it almost seems impossible to imagine the one that existed in 1969. The wider world, too, is an entirely different place, but all across our planet, human consciousness has not fully caught up with the scientific miracle of landing a man on the moon. We have not fully grasped the implications of our global vulnerability.

Our shared destiny as humans is no longer a distant, utopian dream of poets, prophets and philosophers; it is an inescapable fact of our overpopulated continents, our polluted air and our denuded seas – it is a brutal ecological reality that has the potential to destroy us. We should never forget that view from the moon as it acts as a mirror into our soul that no humans in history before us could see. We can, now, destroy ourselves and our planet with the technology we have developed, but that same technology has given us the image of our planet in space, the constant reminder that our future is indeed shared.

We know that God does not reside in some distant heaven; he exists within ourselves and the choices we make here on this fragile planet watched over by the waxing and waning of our silvered, infinitely beautiful, moon.