Botha told of churchmen’s ‘anguish’

Press, 4 July 1985, Page 10

Botha told of churchmen’s ‘anguish’

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg The South African Council of Churches kept up a war of words with the President, Mr Pieter Botha, condemning apartheid and denying his accusation that it was arrogant in telling the Government what to do. The council’s general secretary, the Rev. Beyers Naude, replying to a fierce

attack by Mr Botha on Tuesday, said that church leaders had feelings “not of arrogance but of intense anguish and a deep concern of Christian leaders seeking to achieve peace with justice for the whole of South Africa, black and white.” In a letter to Mr Botha Dr Naude wrote, “Where the rule of Man is in contradiction with the rule of God, as is the case in regarding the

policy of apartheid, we are in duty bound to obey God rather than Man.” Mr Botha had accused the S.A.C.C. one of the Government’s staunchest foes, of malicious propaganda in blaming the authorities for continuing unrest and bloodshed in black townships. The police have found the body of Matthew Goniwe, a teacher whose dismissal by

white authorities made him an important symbol of black resistance in more than 10 months of antiapartheid rioting across South Africa. A police spokesman, Colonel Gerrie van Rooyen, said that the stabbed bodies of Mr Goniwe and Fort Calata, another community leader, had been found along a road outside the Cape Province industrial

centre of Port Elizabeth, five days after they had disappeared. In Lusaka, Zambia, a bomb damaged the Southern Africa headquarters of the African National Congress, the main guerrilla movement sworn to end white domination in South Africa. The A.N.C. and the Zambian Government blamed South African agents.