When I started writing this article I was reflecting on the walls we build around our homes. This practice is very common in the province of Maputo and its surroundings. With the belief that these structures protect us from other people’s curiosity, that we believe that they give us greater privacy and that they guarantee our safety, I am realizing that we build them higher and higher and that they are distancing us a little more from those around us.
I remember well what those walls looked like when I was a teenager. There I would sit flirting and watch my mother chat with the neighbors. But reality has changed. Those have been replaced by others who are insurmountable, resistant to good neighborly ties, socialization and social diversity. They isolate and distance us from those with whom we should relate, with those to whom we are closest.
Within the walls we create our “paradise” and we only value the nuclear family – father, mother and children. Extended families, very common in African societies, do not have the support of any organization that denounces their foreseeable extinction and that expresses interest in fighting for their preservation. These walls that separate us and block contact with others are like an iron curtain: they may fulfill their function of protecting us from prying eyes and discouraging lovers of other people’s things, but they have robbed us of precisely what makes us human, socialization, what the German people fought for for more than 28 years, until the end of the 1980s, when the fall of the Berlin Wall occurred.
During the Easter holidays I traveled to Spain to fulfill an old dream: doing the Camino de Santiago. While I was walking through it, I realized that, in a world where concrete walls are built, walls of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, where walls of social inequalities, of inequalities of knowledge, of injustices are erected – with gigantic investments for their maintenance, by the way –, in a world where isolation, distancing and social distancing seem to make up a new culture, another reality is also consolidated. A reality in which a new community has been erected and subtly imposed for centuries. A community where there are no walls, where people, even though they are aware of their individuality, make the decision to mix and walk together, where the curtains are not iron, because these people see each other, appreciate each other’s presence and dialogue.
These people are nourished and united by spirituality, by the search for self-knowledge and hope, because the members of this community undertake the path aware that it is a space of communion, shared and exchange, where in the stories told by the pilgrims the essence of the human being is found again: the need for socialization. A space where diversity is essential.
On the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, where this community is becoming stronger, its members walk with determination and firmness, always with others or for others, “for those who have already gone, for those who are and for those who will come.”
