rarely spared the Cape Flats, the dismal plain behind Cape Town s Table Mountain w

here Jansen was born in 1956, from its daily scouring by the sea wind just becau
se it was a Sunday. So, on many Sunday mornings, all seven Jansens--four sons, a
daughter, the mother, and the poor but proud patriarch--walked the whole three
miles to church holding their hats onto their heads. You couldn t walk that part o
f the Flats on a Sunday without a hat, not then. The Jansens lived in a colored ne
ighborhood, and the coloreds--a peculiarly South African term for a subset of bl
ack people with mixed ancestry--liked their religion formal. On that three-mile
walk, the Jansens would pass countless other families dressed to the nines, wend
ing their way to some outpost of the Methodists, the Anglicans, even the Dutch R
eformed, the Afrikaners strict Calvinist sect.
But the Steenberg Assembly, the church at which the Jansens particular Sunday wal
k ended, was even more rigid than most. Old Mr. Henry would greet you at the doo
r and hand you your hymnbook. Inside, benches would be set up in a circle accord
ing to the protocol of the Plymouth Brethren, the small Irish evangelical sect w
ith which the Steenberg Assembly had its roots. Any Brethren member could sit in
the circle and partake in communion. Anybody else had to sit at the back. The B
rethren were serious about this insularity. If you were traveling and stopped in
some Sunday to an unfamiliar Brethren church, you had to deliver a note from yo
ur pastor attesting that you were worthy to sit in the circle.