‘Civil war’ in South Africa: Christians with ‘irreconcilable causes of interest’

Press, 25 October 1985, Page 17

‘Civil war’ in South Africa: Christians with ‘irreconcilable causes of interest’

From

ALLISTER SPARKS

in Johannesburg

“There we sit in the same Church while outside Christian policemen and soldiers are beating up and killing Christian children and torturing Christian prisoners to death, while yet other Christians stand by and weakly plead for peace.” That observation, contained in a statement issued by a group of clergymen calling for the adoption of a “theology of liberation’’ by South African Christians, pinpoints a cleavage in the interpretation of faith between the two sides of this racially divided but uniformly religious country which many outsiders find puzzling. Perhaps only in Poland are the themes of faith and rebellion so closely interwoven in the history of a people as they are in South Africa, and do priests play such an important political role. The difference is that in South Africa this is true of both adversaries in the conflict, the majority black nationalists who feel themselves to be oppressed as well as the minority white Afrikaner nationalists who control the Government.

Both invoke the Christian faith to justify their cause. It lends the elements of a theological civil war to the present deadly conflict between white authority and black rebels in the segregated townships. To the blacks, as packed township congregations hear their ministers preach it every Sunday, God is unequivocally on the side of the oppressed, which gives a divine sanction and the inevitability of eventual success to their struggle against apartheid. To the Afrikaners, as their equally packed Dutch Reformed Church congregations hear it expressed, the repeated references in the Gospels to the existence of separate nations right up till the end of time in the Book of Revelations, constitutes Biblical approval of the right of a volk, or nation, to exist as a separate nation and to ensure their national survival. That constitutes a kind of divine justification for apartheid, or separate development as they prefer to call it, to prevent the small Afrikaner nation from being swamped into extinction by the black majority with whom they share South Africa.

The preservation of the Afrikaner nation is further justified by portraying the forces attempting to overthrow or absorb it as agents of atheistic communism. From the Afrikaner side, too, the struggle thus acquires the elements of a holy war. Given this theological overlay to the South African political conflict, it is hardly surprising that many of the major political spokesmen on both sides have been clergymen: Dr Daniel Malan, a Dutch Reformed Church pastor who led the Afrikaner National Party to power 37 years ago, and Dr Andries Treurnicht, leader of the far Right Conservative Party today, with Bishop Desmond Tutu and the Rev. Allan Boesak among the blacks.

Even the African National Congress, which the Government equates with terrorism and communism, has a deep Christian base to it. South African businessmen who met with the A.N.C.’s leaders in Zambia recently were startled when its president, Oliver Tambo, insisted on saying grace before lunch.

Tambo, like many of the A.N.C.’s founders and early leaders, was the product of a missionary school. Before he took over the leadership of the movement in exile after it was banned in South Africa, he had hoped to become an Anglican priest. Albert Luthuli, the A.N.C. leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961, was a Methodist lay preacher. “I am in Congress precisely because I am a Christian,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Nelson Mandela, the putative leader now serving life imprisonment in Cape Town’s Pollsmoor Prison, regularly receives the sacrament of Holy Communion, and his prison pastor, the Rev. Dudley Moore, portrayed him in a letter to a South African newspaper the other day as a man of deep faith. The initiation ceremony for the powerful Afrikaner Broederbond secret society features a vow made on the Bible in a darkened room, in which the new member must swear before God to keep faith with the volk and its national aspirations. All Afrikaner members of the Cabinet belong to the Broederbond, and a former chairman, Dr Gerrit Viljoen, is a likely successor to President P. W. Botha.

The far Rightists, meanwhile, have formed their own version of the society, called the Afrikaner Volkswag, headed by Carel Boshoff, a professor of theology at Pretoria University. Boshoff was chairman of the Broederbond until he left it last year to form the Volkswag. In this context, the statement which the black theologians have

issued propounding a “prophetic theology of liberation” is seen as a major new development in the racial conflict. Its tough line expresses exactly the mood of the young township militants, who will regard it as giving a theological legitimacy to their attitudes and actions.

The statement, called the Kairos Document — derived from a Greek word meaning the moment of truth — sets out to demolish what it calls the “State theology” of the ruling Afrikaners, as well as the “Church theology” of Pretoria’s moderate opponents as represented by the churches of the Englishspeaking community, who number about 40 per cent of the white minority.

It then spells out its “prophetic theology” and the action this implies. The “State theology” employed by the apartheid regime misuses Christian belief and Biblical texts to justify oppression, the document argues. Such theology is selective in" employing almost solely the apostle Paul’s view of the state as a power “ordained of God” and commanding obedience.

The regime also elevates the concept of “law and order” above morality, the document states. “It is indeed the duty of the State to maintain law and order, but it has no divine mandate to maintain law and order.

“In the present crisis, state theology has tried to re-establish the status quo or orderly discrimination, exploitation, and oppression by appealing to the consciences of its citizens in the name of law and order,” the Kairos paper adds.

It observes that the State makes liberal use of the name of God — military chaplains to encourage the Defence Force, police chaplains to strengthen policemen, Cabinet Ministers in their political pronouncements, and law-makers in writing the preamble to the country’s Constitution. “This God is an idol,” the document says. “It is as mischievous,

sinister, and evil as the idols that the prophets of Israel had to contend with. Here we have a God who is historically on the side of the white settlers, who dispossesses black people of the land and who gives the major part of the last to his ‘chosen people.’ “It is the God of the Casspirs and hippos (police vehicles), the god of teargas and rubber bullets, sjamboks (whips), prison cells, and death sentences. Here is a God who exalts the proud and humbles the poor, the very opposite of the God of the Bible.” The criticism of “Church theology,” somewhat less stinging, chides the established churches for confining themselves to a “spiritual” approach to oppression, addressing themselves to the “conscience and goodwill of those responsible for oppression” while knowing that this will be ineffective.

It accuses them of being lopsided in their attitude towards the violence in the townships, criticising the resistance of the people while over-looking the violence of the State.

“Would it be legitimate to describe both the physical force used by a rapist and the physical force used by a woman trying to resist the rape as violence?” the document asks.

“To be truly Biblical,” the statement declares, “our Church leaders must adopt a theology of direct confrontation with the forces of evil rather than a theology of reconciliation with sin and the devil.”

The steps the Kairos group suggest towards a “prophetic theology” are based on an analysis which holds that the South African conflict is not just a race war, but a conflict “between two irreconcilable causes of interests in which the one is just and the other unjust.” Faced with this, Christians are under a Biblical injunction to side with the just. No compromise or reconciliation is possible. Arguing that the apartheid system constitutes a tyranny because it is mandated to govern only in the interests of the white minority and not "the common good of all the people,” the black theologians contend that the South African Government therefore has no “moral legitimacy.” This gives the people the right to resist and to find the means to protect their own interests against injustice and oppression. “Christians must participate in the struggle for liberation and for a just society,” the statement says. “The campaigns of the people, from consumer boycotts to stayaways, need to be supported and encouraged by the Church. In other words the present crisis challenges the whole Church to move beyond a mere ‘ambulance ministry’ to a ministry of involvement and participation.

“The Church will have to be involved at times in civil disobedience. A Church that takes its responsibilities seriously in these circumstances will sometimes have to confront and disobey the State in order to obey God.”

Copyright — London Observer Service

Elements of a holy war

Vow of leading Afrikaners

“This God is an idol”