Cape Town, South Africa Mission

January 06, 2019

Cape Town Mission Field

5 January 2019
Day 392
Saturday

This morning we slept in until 8:30, woo hoo! We then headed for Camps Bay to relax on the beach. We met some fun folks and enjoyed the beautiful scenery. You can see the east side of Table Mountain and all the way down south to the 12 Apostles and on the North side is Lion's head. The beach is long with beautiful white sand. We met a group doing some cleanup along the beach and invited Rev Didi to church tomorrow and gave him a Book of Mormon. He was very gracious and thankful.

We then drove up Kloof road to the turn off to Signal Hill. There we planned on taking a nap under the trees on the hillside overlooking Cape Town. But Sister Courtright found an oil painter and began chatting with him. This turned into a two hour conversation with a new friend. His name is Ismail Achmet. He has been active in the art scene in South Africa for a long time and has tried to use his influence to bring peace to the South African country. It started with a long manuscript he wrote to President Botha (he preceded Nelson Mandela) describing a peaceful approach to ending apartheid. President Botha was seen as a hard line apartheid supporter but something changed in his demeanor and it began to soften. We don't know for sure how much Ismail and others like him influenced him to begin to make changes. But before he could realize any changes he suffered a stroke and died. There are many who believe he was actually poisoned by those not wanting to see a change made. Years later when Nelson Mandela was to make a speech at the University here in Cape Town, Ismail approached him to share what he contributed towards bringing peace to the country. He made a portrait of Nelson Mandela and wanted share his efforts and present him with the painting. He had a difficult time trying to get an audience with Nelson and at one point his aide came out to try and buy him off to leave. This infuriated Ismail and told her to keep her money because it was an insult. This loud exchange got the attention of another one of Nelson's aides who came out and asked again what he wanted. He repeated that he wanted "nothing" but to present the portrait to Nelson and share what he had been doing over the years to bring peace to the country through his art. This touched the aide who was able to convince Nelson to meet with Ismail. They had a short exchange and by then Ismail was still upset by the earlier exchange and didn't feel this was the mood or right time to give the portrait to Nelson so he asked if they could get their picture taken together and arrange for another meeting where they could exchange the portrait in a more solemn setting. The other meeting never took place so Ismail still has the portrait of Nelson today. Ismail is writing a book of memoirs that is coming out in March titled "For the Love of My Country". We took some pictures with Ismail and then bought one of his small paintings he had on him of Table Mountain taken from the Tableview area. We found out that he new Sister Woods quite well who used to buy many of his paintings and send them back home to her family. She was the Mission Presidents wife two presidents ago.