White church minister crosses apartheid’s great divide

Press, 15 October 1986, Page 21

White church minister crosses apartheid’s great divide

From

ALLISTER SPARKS,

“Observer”

correspondent in Pretoria

The Rev. Nico Smith, of the Dutch Reformed Church, has moved house. Only three miles from his former home but, he says, “I feel as though I have emigrated.” In terms of social distance, Mr Smith has made the longest journey of any member of his race. He has become the first Afrikaner to live in a black township. “I did it,” he says, “because as minister to a black congregation I felt it was important to live among the people of my parish.

“I have been their minister for over four years. My wife and I have been coming here and meeting them in their homes, talking to them about their lives. We have listened to so much misery. But then we would return in the evenings to the safety of our white world. It made us feel like visitors instead of people who really belonged.”

For Nico Smith — his surname is pronounced Smit, in the Afrikaans manner, without the "h" — it is the culmination of a long personal trek. He was brought up in a conventional Afrikaner home, had a conventional education, absorbed all the conventional ideas about race, became a minister in a powerful Church J

which puts forward theological justification for the doctrine of apartheid, joined the Broederbond secret society, and finally became head of the Church’s seminary at the University of Stellenbosch.

In Afrikaner terms, he was at the top of the tree. But, as happened with the Rev. Beyers Naude and several other remarkable Afrikaner dissidents, many of them dominees, as Dutch Reformed pastors are called, there'began an agonising process of soul-searching as Smith’s Christian convictions came into conflict with the realities of apartheid, as he saw them in practice. He quit the seminary, joined the black branch of the Church, and became its minister in Mamelodi township, outside Pretoria.

Now, after two years of battling the authorities to break through the segregation laws in reverse, he has built himself a house in Mamelodi and moved in with his wife, Ellen, a child psychiatrist at a black hospital nearby. Crossing the barrier between the white and black living areas is like crossing an international ■ *

frontier separating first and third world countries.

When the first Dutch settler, Jan van Riebeck, landed at the Cape in 1652, he planted a hedge of bitter almonds to keep the indigenous inhabitants out of his little encampment. His descendants have done the same since, creating an enclave of Europe, fenced off from the rest of Africa. Few whites cross that frontier even temporarily. Mr Smith says: “I sometimes ask white audiences how many of them have been overseas. Ninety per cent may raise their hands. Then I ask how many have been to Mamelodi and there’ll be one or two hands.

“Many old friends think I’m mad,” he says. “They ask if we’re not afraid.”

Well, isn’t he afraid? “No,” he replied emphatically. “You only fear something that is unknown to you.” But he admits that life in Mamelodi is dramatically different from the comfortable Pretoria suburb of Meyer’s Park

where he lived before.

Essentially, Mamelodi is a teeming labour camp containing about 800,000 black workers with jobs in Pretoria. They live in four-roomed matchbox houses, packed close together, with rutted streets between and high security floodlights above. Other than a soccer stadium and a cemetery, it is devoid of public facilities — no restaurants, no cinema, no proper shops, no parks or playgrounds. “My first night here, I couldn’t sleep,” Mr Smith says. “Everything was so deathly quiet. People have to get up so early to go to work that the whole of Mamelodi is in bed by nine o’clock.” There are other differences, too. Such as dogs barking constantly: “I’m sure everyone in Mamelodi has a dog.” And cocks crowing, in the morning: “They keep chickens in their back yards.” But no birds singing: “There are no trees, you see.” Attitudes are also different, and Mr Smith says he can alh

ready sense he his uwn attitudes changing since the move. “I listened to the radio news this morning and it sounded like news from another country.” He watched President P. W. Botha make a speech on television and was appalled. “His aggressiveness struck me more forcefully than ever. I thought: ‘My God, he’s going to kill the blacks’.” The Smiths were concerned that their home should not stand out ostentatiously among the rows of matchbox dwellings, but they wanted at least to be comfortable. Their answer is a cleverly designed round house with a dome roof, based on a concept by the American architect, Buckmeister Fuller, that Nico once saw in New York.

From outside, it looks little bigger than the surrounding houses, but the dome allows for an upstairs section including a bedroom, bathroom and study. Downstairs is a kitchen, lounge and dining section all in one, with a guest bedroom at the back. The effect is spacious. Even so, the Smiths have had to store three-quarters of the furniture they had in their Meyer’s Park house.