A Fruitless Attempt To Save My "Daughter" and Me From Eternal Damnation

My "daughter" and me perched on the edge of the abyss AKA Table Mountain, Cape Town

In 2004, I rejoined the Peace Corps for a 10-month assignment in Namibia. When I arrived in the country and met the Namibian woman who administered the teachers' program, she advised me to run, not walk, back into the closet. Homophobia was so deeply entrenched in Namibian society that I couldn’t have done my job had my sexual orientation been disclosed. I had been an out man in the States for over 25 years.

At the age of 54, it would have been extremely odd to present myself as single to my Namibian colleagues, so I converted my sister, a lawyer back in Berkeley, to my wife and her daughter, recently graduated from college, to my daughter. I had family album pictures at the ready and a plausible explanation as to why I had come to Namibia by myself. My lawyer “wife” was the breadwinner in the family, and she couldn’t forsake her practice.

While establishing a state-of-the-art computer lab in a high school that served one of the poorest (i.e. Black) townships of the capital, Windhoek, I gained a modest renown as the only white man who lived and worked in these non-white areas. White South Africans would occasionally show up at the school for social or developmental initiatives. (Namibia had been a de facto colony of South Africa for 75 years, from 1915 to 1990.) Relations with these fellow whites were easily established but always fleeting.

In one case, however, a South African educational consultant spent quite a few days at the high school towards the end of its academic year, and we became quite friendly. Piet, of Afrikaaner descent, was attractive, funny, liberal (for a white South African), and we were both family men! In his early thirties, he had recently married and hoped to start his own family in Sandton, a white suburb of Johannesburg. He already seemed to dote on my “daughter” simply through pictures. My niece, Maya, shared my last name, so that was one less discrepancy to explain away.

When I told Piet that Maya and I would be flying out of Johannesburg after a month of touring his country, he delightedly insisted that we contact him when we got to town. And so we did.

Piet and his wife, Magda, asked us to meet them at an Italian restaurant in Montecasino, a huge entertainment complex designed to replicate an ancient Tuscan village. We sat on the “outdoor” restaurant terrace overlooking a busy square. The “outdoor” terrace was actually indoors. The whole village was enclosed under an ersatz sky painted on the ceiling, light on one side sliding to darkness on the other. The weather outside was hot and humid, but in our Tuscan village, it was temperate and pleasant. Always temperate and pleasant -- and pretty much all White.

Maya had already been playing the role of my daughter ever since we’d met up three weeks earlier in Cape Town. Explaining our real relationship (daughter of two lesbian moms and niece to a “guncle”) was too much and unnecessary information. Anyway, we had plenty of shared family history, and it was easy to bring off. As we were looking at the menu, I teased Maya that I was going to order a double portion of shrimp scampi for the both of us. (She hates shellfish.) “Stop, Unkie!” she protested good-naturedly – a gaffe, but our Afrikaaner hosts didn’t notice.

Although Piet had seen some of the world, Magda, much younger, was clearly excited by this unusual outing. She’d never eaten Italian food, and when she asked the waiter what polenta was, he replied, “It’s like fufu.” This was the perfect response given the cultural context.

We were charming and Piet was charmed. “My wife and I are hoping for a boy for our first child,” he told me at the end of our meal, “but if I had a daughter like yours, that wouldn’t be so bad.” “Not so bad at all,” I replied with light irony, winking at his wife. She reddened but smiled in complicity.

When we parted at the end of our meal, Piet wouldn’t hear of splitting the bill. There was some hesitation on his part as we separated, and I caught a glint of desperation in his eyes but dismissed it as my daughter and I walked further into the gaudy recesses of the main casino.

The next morning I woke to Piet’s email:

Robert, I can’t tell you how much I was taken with you and your daughter. What a delightful pair, so much evident love between the two of you! I couldn’t say last night what I wanted to say and what you needed to hear. The thought of such wonderful people burning forever kept me up all night. Robert, you must accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior! As someone who cares about you and your daughter, I must speak out. Jesus says, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."(John 14:6)

I never wrote back nor replied to the few follow-up emails. What possibility was there for any true communication, any basis for friendship, no matter how sincere he was? He lived in a totalizing world view that brooked no contradictions. The Dutch Reformed Church is a stern and unbending master. The lies about our actual relationship might be forgiven if properly confessed and atoned for, but my being gay? In PIet’s eyes I was already condemned to the flames of hell. Accepting Jesus wouldn’t change that.

Were I to die and find out that the Dutch Reformed Church had the afterlife properly pegged all along, I might feel some guilt having dragged my “daughter” into the fiery pits with me. She didn’t have to collude in my lies, helping ensnare the innocent affections of the Saved. I will plead her brief before the Throne of God, if I am allowed to speak.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

-- Robert Philipson

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