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When You Become the Thing You Hate | Mornings with Mico

Crossroads Church

Apr 20, 2026 · 9 min12K

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Join Mico as he is walking through the Apartheid Museum in South Africa when one exhibit stops him cold—the story of Andrew Zondo, a 20-year-old who planted a bomb at a shopping mall in 1985, was sentenced to death, and later said he was ashamed of what he'd done. Not because it was wrong to be angry. But because he let that anger make him into the very thing he was fighting against.

This is a short, raw, unscripted moment—Mico processing something heavy in real time and finding a thread that connects a history museum in Johannesburg to something universal: what do you do with anger that's actually justified? What happens when you let it live in you unchecked?

He draws a line from Andrew Zondo to Moses to you and me—and lands somewhere that's less about having the right answer and more about who you bring the question to.

What is Apartheid?

Apartheid was a system of government-enforced racial segregation in South Africa that lasted from 1948 to the early 1990s. Under apartheid (an Afrikaans word meaning "separateness"), the white minority government legally classified people by race and used that classification to control nearly every aspect of life. That included where you could live, what schools you could attend, what jobs you could hold, who you could marry, and even which park bench you could sit on.

Black South Africans, who made up the majority of the population, were stripped of their citizenship, forcibly relocated to underdeveloped areas called "homelands," and subjected to daily violence and humiliation backed by law. Those who resisted faced imprisonment, exile, or death.

The system finally ended through decades of internal resistance, international pressure, and negotiations that led to the country's first fully democratic election in 1994—when Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first Black president.

The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg exists to make sure the world never forgets what state-sponsored racism actually looks like when it's written into law.

00:00

I'm here at the Apartheid Museum, and there's one exhibit so far that's really, it's really kind of captured my attention. It's the story of a guy, Andrew Zondo, says on March 17th, 1986, Andrew Zondo was sentenced to death five times for placing a bomb in a shopping mall in Amin Zimantati that killed five people and injured 42. Zondo raised his arm in a clenched fist salute and shouted, Amandla, which means power. There was no response of N'gwatho, it's ours. Zondo's supporters had stayed away from the heavenly fortified court. Six months later, on September 9th, 1986, Zondo was hanged in Pretoria. He was 20 years old. Andrew Zondo left the country at the age of 16 to join the ANC in exile, where he hoped to continue with his studies. He was in Maputo when the South African Air Force bombed the city, killing six people, including a child. He changed his plans about studying and decided to be a soldier to liberate black people in South Africa. After receiving military training, he reentered South Africa in 1984 and carried out two operations on behalf of the movement. The following year, he returned and was placed in charge of three ANC cells. The Amin Zimtati bomb was planted four days after the South African Defense Force killed innocent people in a raid on Masuru Masoto. Zondo was transferred to Pretoria Central after his sentence was passed. In his last letter to his mother from death row, Zondo wrote, Each time I think of you, Mama, I automatically think of a Aretha Franklin song which says, Mama, don't you weep. Please, Mama, do not worry yourselves about visiting me. I know you are financially broke. Zondo's father, a priest, hoped he would be able to say a prayer over Andrew's grave. The request was rejected by the authorities. On the day of his execution, young people from Kwamashu arrived in Pretoria in two buses.

02:35

They held a silent protest outside the prison as a mark of respect for their comrade. Andrew, as is stated, he had, I guess, in retaliation, not even as so much a part of ANC, but out of his own anger and frustration, he planted a bomb at a shopping mall and killed five people. He was quoted when he was interviewed, one of his last interviews says, I thought I would come back here and put my limp in mine. The decision I took that day was racial in character because I had seen that the area had a lot of whites. But I decided to do it as racial as it was. I knew that the people were innocent and had nothing to do with the government. I hoped I would not injure them, but I hoped it would bring the government to its senses. In another interview, he said, I look back on what happened at Amin Zimutati and I'm ashamed of myself. More than anything, I find myself to have failed to have control on racial conscience that day. I behaved no differently from them, S-A-D-F, I became like them, racist, just like them. They killed black people, I had killed white people. I'm not a racist, but it's very easy in South Africa to be a racist. He said that he had intended to telephone the shopping center before the explosion to warn people to evacuate. Sorry today that I failed to warn the people. What was on my mind was that every day, there was an average of three Africans dying from political violence in South Africa. When I hear his story, man, as I'm processing this stuff myself, I was literally just on the walk and I was like, I just had to take a break and just go get coffee because it is so easy to see this stuff and hear this stuff and to identify people as the enemy. And that's not the case, right? That's just not the case. And I think specifically as believers, man, we, we, we, we, I don't know, there's a better word to use,

05:15

but the word lazy comes to mind. The word, when we just settle with this fleshly perspective of, you know, this hatred and this evil. And we see here what that leads to, right? He knew that that wasn't the right thing to do. He knew that those people weren't his enemy. He knew that. And like he said, it's so easy to just be racist, you know, in, in, in South Africa, but in the same way, it's so easy for us to settle at our anger and our frustration and our confusion in times like this, and in situations like this and just dwell there. As I'm processing this, I have to admit, like, yes, my heart also is angered by some of these things. And, but that's a part of this process. I can't dwell there. That's a part of, that's a part of the process of, of getting to God's perspective and all of this, getting to the other side of this. We can't dwell in that place. It's just the process, process through it, process through it, whether it's, it's, it's, it's through prayer, whether it's through having communication with, with other believers to kind of help walk you through and navigate some of that anger and that frustration, but we cannot dwell there, man. This is so, it's just sad, you know, to see,

06:41

to see the life of this guy, the lives that he took from a place of a, you could even say a righteous anger that was perverted. I'm reminded of Moses when he saw something that, when, when, when the, when the, the Egyptians, when they were, when they were beating the Israelites and out of anger, he killed the Egyptian. It's like, okay, that may have been a righteous anger initially, but when you go about it the wrong way, it doesn't bring about the resolve that God intended. The thing that's stirring up in your heart, maybe God is allowing you, allowing you to see that maybe the thing that bothers you may not bother someone else. And it is a righteous anger, a righteous indignation, right? That God has trusted you with, but unless we take it to him and allow him, unless we partner with him in it, then like Moses or like this guy, Andrew, we just become the hatred that we hate. We just find ourselves biting off the other side of the same bad apple as the oppressors, as the, as the, as the people, as the races, as the people feel with their own hatred, that are victim to the hatred that's flowing through them from the enemy and, and, and flesh.

08:14

And we have to, we have to process that with God. We have to allow God to massage our heart, to condition our hearts. As much as I pray, God, break my heart for the things that break your hearts. I also have to say, but God protect my heart, protect my heart, protect my mind, that I'm not overwhelmed and consumed with the emotions that I feel as I'm processing Lord over my emotions. Right? Because if he calls us to have a hand in it, we're not going to have to let go of his hand to do the thing that he's calling us to do in it. We're not going to have to step away from, from, from, from, from him. We're not going to have to turn our back on him to go do the thing that he's calling us to. He's going to be right with us. He's going to go before us. He's going to be behind us. He's going to be right with us.

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