Cover
story
Apartheid horror stories point up churches
failings
By CARMEL RICKARD
Special to the National Catholic Reporter Durban, South
Africa
Amid the horror stories about human rights abuses during South
Africas apartheid years, one starkly illustrates the divisions within
that countrys faith community at the time: Frank Chikane, respected
general secretary of the South African Council of Churches and a leading cleric
in the black wing of the Apostolic Faith Mission, was in security police
detention and being brutally tortured. Overseeing this torture was an elder in
the white wing of the same church who, after his days work on
Chikane, left police headquarters and went off to worship.
This story, of a Christian minister and his brother
torturer, is recalled in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, the body set up under the chairmanship of Archbishop Desmond Tutu
to investigate human rights abuses over the last few decades. Released on Oct.
29, the report contains a list of well over 20,000 victims of such abuses, as
well as an indictment of the perpetrators of these crimes.
The report was intended to mark the end of a three-year process
during which human rights abuses have been investigated and uncovered, but it
has sparked a serious dilemma for the ruling African National Congress over
whether to prosecute certain named perpetrators, a dilemma that could take some
time to resolve.
In its long report, the commission chronicles the period and the
violence of the apartheid state as well as responses to oppression by
antiapartheid activists within the country and those who waged a guerrilla war
from outside. But it also tries to understand how apartheid could have been
implemented in the first place and what prevented civil society from taking a
united stand against it. Trying to answer this question, the commission looks
at the contribution of sectors of society to fighting apartheid or supporting
it.
Like the legal and medical professions, the churches and other
faiths come in for severe criticism of their roles.
At the heart of the problem, says the report, is the fact that
apartheid was conceived, justified and ultimately defended by reference to
Christianity. Some churches believed it was a logical extension of Christian
mission; others supported apartheid on the grounds that it helped guarantee
Christian civilization.
But this often collusive response was complicated by the fact that
some Christians and members of other religions became apartheids
strongest foes, motivated by the values of their particular tradition.
They were driven by what has been called the dangerous
memory of resistance and the quest for freedom, often suppressed but
never obliterated from their respective faiths, the report says.
Among those named for their courageous stand against apartheid are
several Catholics including: Archbishop Denis Hurley; Cosmas Desmond, a former
Catholic priest who exposed the horrors of black forced relocation camps; Fr.
Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, former general secretary of the South African Catholic
Bishops Conference and now deputy minister of education; Sr. Bernard
Ncube, who has worked extensively with womens groups; and Dominican
theologian Albert Nolan, whose writings helped shape a coherent response to
apartheid by the churches.
Others listed include Anglican bishops Trevor Huddleston, Desmond
Tutu and David Russell, as well as leaders of other Christian denominations and
of the Jewish, Hindu and Muslim faiths.
Accepting responsibility
The report says that despite the contribution of these
individuals, however, the churches have to accept moral responsibility for
providing religious and theological legitimacy for many actions of the armed
forces in their role of maintaining apartheid and crushing dissent. In
addition, the churches failed to give proper expression to their ethical
teachings that directly contradict apartheid and thus helped create a climate
in which the system could flourish.
The failure of the churches in this regard, says the
report, contributed not only to the survival of apartheid but also to the
perpetuation of the myth that apartheid was both a moral and Christian
initiative in a hostile and ungodly world.
But the commission suggests a way forward: Since the faith
communities include victims, beneficiaries and perpetrators of apartheid,
reconciliation within these communities could have a leavening effect on the
rest of society and provide a source of national renewal.
The story about Chikane and his brother torturer was
told in the context of the reports comments that some faiths had
suppressed, censured and condemned apartheid dissidents and even branded them
as heretics. In addition, Chikanes church, like others, mirrored
apartheid by having separate churches for each race group.
But even within churches such as the Catholic church, which
officially opposed apartheid, there were effectively two churches -- one black
and one white -- and the report notes that for church congregations the hours
of Sunday worship were the most segregated of the week.
The commission received written and oral submissions from more
than 40 churches or other religions. In their presentations these members of
different faiths tried to account for their lack of serious effort at ending
apartheid.
Representatives of the Jewish community, for example, said that in
the years that apartheid began to take hold, the memory of Nazi atrocities was
still fresh, and South African Jews feared to speak out strongly against the
state.
Catholic leaders told the commission that they, too, were affected
by their churchs history in South Africa: In the early years of apartheid
the position of the church in South African society had been tenuous, and it
was widely regarded in a derogatory way as the Roomse gevaar
(Roman peril).
The report was also concerned about the role of the right-wing
churches, which acted as arms of the state, infiltrating
evangelical denominations and neutralizing dissent. One church leader recalled
a young man telling him that he used to be involved in the struggle against
apartheid. Now Ive received Jesus Christ as my Lord and
Savior, the young man declared, and so Im no longer
involved. As part of this campaign, Assemblies of God leaders, claiming
to speak for South Africas 11 million evangelical
Pentecostals, often traveled around the world denouncing the activities
of antiapartheid Christians.
But it was the role of military chaplains that drew the most fire
in the report. These clergy gave moral legitimacy to a culture
whose hallmark was the perpetration of gross human rights abuses. Their
participation served to filter out dissenting voices, to strengthen the
resolve to kill and to reassure the doubting soldier that he or she was serving
the purposes of God. Within this climate, top politicians and officers in
the security forces authorized or participated in the bombing of buildings
housing the South African Council of Churches and the Catholic Bishops
Conference and other groups.
But while some of the churches had been targeted for state
oppression, the report accuses the churches, in turn, of oppressing others, in
particular other religious faiths (although the report does criticize those who
made submissions for not seeing the link between racial, class and gender
oppression). The Dutch Reformed church, for many years regarded as virtually
the state religion or as the ruling National Party at prayer,
declared Islam a false religion in 1986. As one Muslim leader told
the commission, the past was only partly about apartheid and security laws.
It was also about Christian triumphalism.
The report concludes that Christianity, as the dominant religion
in South Africa, promoted the ideology of apartheid in many ways, including the
overt promotion of biblical and theological teaching in support of apartheid,
paying salaries to clergy who discriminated on the grounds of race and
providing chaplains to the security forces.
Religious-based nationalism
It also finds that during the apartheid years, the faith community
was guilty of religious proselytizing and religious-based
nationalism, which sowed the seed for interreligious distrust and strife
as well as religiously inspired conflict. This has occurred as a result
of some forms of missiological teaching and manifestations of Christian
imperialism and because of anti-Semitic as well as anti-Islamic
theologically-based propaganda.
As for the future, the commission says the country has a right to
expect the faith community to be committed to mutuality among religious groups
and to efforts to build up a nation that includes people of different
religious, racial and ideological persuasions and the promotion of peace and
justice.
Finally, it regrets that the missionary and colonial attitudes
that undermined African culture and traditional religions continue today and
recommends that this practice should be carefully reconsidered -- a task in
which Christianity has a particular role.
A number of church leaders have welcomed the publication of the
report, although they have so far made no direct comment on the section dealing
with the faith communities.
Their focus has been on the general impression created by the
report, which the Catholic Bishops Conference describes as a beacon
of hope. The report includes, the conference said, an indisputable
record of the atrocities committed during the apartheid era.
The bishops have also criticized two leading members of the former
government for their efforts to hamper the work of the commission: former
presidents P.W. Botha and F.W. de Klerk.
The latter has won a temporary injunction preventing the
commission from publishing in its report its finding that he was responsible
for helping create a culture of impunity, because he knew about top-level
instructions and approval for the bombing of the South African Council of
Churches building and yet did nothing about it. The High Court case in
which de Klerk will attempt to make the injunction permanent will resume early
next year.
But while de Klerks strategy might have been anticipated,
the bishops conference and its Anglican counterpart have been astonished
and dismayed that one section of the African National Congress -- whose
government was instrumental in setting up the commission in the first place --
also resorted to court action to prevent the publication of the report.
ANC officials behind the abortive attempt complained that the
report was too critical of their party and did not sufficiently distinguish
between actions committed to end apartheid and the actions of the former
government in implementing the system. Other members of the ANC, however,
including President Nelson Mandela, do not support the legal action and have
given their strong support to Tutu and the report.
As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission winds up its work, many
problems remain.
Problems for the future
Tutu says the commission won some truth and some
reconciliation, but who is to take this work forward? A number of
churches have begun to do so, preparing their members to oversee and join in
further reconciliation efforts and opportunities for individuals to tell their
stories, at parish and neighborhood levels.
Then there is the political problem posed by the report. The
commission recommends that those it has named should be prosecuted
for human rights abuses: Like every other South African, they had the
opportunity to apply for amnesty from prosecution and from civil action, but
they chose not to apply. Perpetrators who opted for an amnesty application had
to face a humiliating process of public confession, during which they were
cross-examined about their actions, often by legal representatives of those
they had wronged. They chose this route because they knew that without a formal
grant of amnesty, they could be charged if their actions should come to
light.
In keeping with the logic of the legislation under which the
commission was set up, those named should therefore be charged,
Tutu argues.
The list, however, includes political figures across the spectrum,
such as Mandelas former wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and the leader
of the Inkatha Freedom Party and national minister of home affairs, Mangosuthu
Buthelezi.
Charging Madikizela-Mandela could have serious ramifications for
the ANC because she has strong support within the party. ANC officials are
fearful that she could leave the party, taking her followers with her, or that
she could stage a coup within the party.
More intractable is the problem of Buthelezi, whose Inkatha
Freedom Party supporters fought a 15-year undeclared war against ANC
sympathizers in the province of KwaZulu Natal, leaving many scores of thousands
dead. His position on the national cabinet has helped reduce those tensions.
The nation has seen an increase in violence between supporters of the Inkatha
Freedom Party and the ANC as campaigns for next years general election
get underway. Prosecution of Buthelezi could lead to another major outbreak of
hostilities, something the ANC wants to avoid.
Such considerations are behind some of the calls for a general
amnesty to be extended to those named in the report, a call
strongly opposed by Tutu and the other commissioners.
But there are other reasons that a general amnesty is finding
support, despite the argument that it is unfair and undercuts the premise on
which the commission was originally based. After three years, many South
Africans have had enough of the skeletons of the past. They have looked back
across the abyss and seen the hell from which they have escaped. Now they want
to focus on the future and deal with its problems, rather than continuing to
keep the past alive through long drawn-out trials that would be the inevitable
result of any decision to prosecute.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Web site.
http://www.truth.org.za/
National Catholic Reporter, November 20,
1998
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