Harvest Thanksgiving in the Southern Hemisphere

By Peter Lor

T.S. Elliot wrote: “April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land …”

This is the first line of his poem, “The Waste Land”.
[I’m taking it a bit out of context]
It continues, a bit later:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

We lived in Gauteng for many years. In spring I often thought of this poem. Gauteng is in the summer rainfall zone of South Africa. In fact, most of South Africa, and by far the greatest part of sub-Saharan Africa, is in the summer rainfall zone. Here spring comes harshly. The thorn trees come into leaf before the rains come. A west wind brings red dust from the Kalahari. Further north, in Zimbabwe and further, it is the hot dry season which never seems to end. Not for nothing is it called there the “suicide season”. There the earth is still dry and cracked. There is little sustenance for cattle. Until the rains come, farmers can’t plant or sow. For millions of small subsistence farmers, who don’t have overdrafts, this is a desperately lean time. And after they have sown, they have to await the summer’s crop. Will their store of grain last until they can harvest again?

Here in Africa, I have reservations about our celebration of Harvest Thanksgiving in October. It may be appropriate in the Northern Hemisphere, but here? In South Africa, we obediently follow the German lectionary, but it is not harvest time here. In Australia, also in the Southern Hemisphere, many Lutheran congregations celebrate harvest thanksgiving at the end of January or the beginning of February. That’s when their harvests have mostly been gathered. Ours too.

There is another reason. All over the world millions of people are going hungry. Crops have failed due to drought. Other crops have been washed away by massive floods along with the topsoil. Extreme heat burns up what has been growing. The invasion of Ukraine has seriously reduced the supply for grain from that country and Russia, which are major exporters. This drives up food prices in rich and poor nations alike. Even in formerly middle-class neighbourhoods, people are struggling. I don’t feel comfortable about our celebrating harvest thanksgiving this year with pretty pictures from Germany, pictures of altars adorned with sheaves of wheat or golden pumpkins and neatly-combed blonde, blue-eyed kiddies glowing with health. We can’t live in a bubble.