76 NLS B375 Watt to Arnott 15 Oct. 1954. Watt remarked to Rev. McColm ‘one’s judgement of this case is not much altered by Shaun Herron’s fire works but there will certainly be some people in the Committee who will raise the issue.’ NLS ACC7548 B394 Watt to McColm 16 Oct. 1954.
Sunday Observer and we are expecting that they will want some vigorous action taken77
The pressure on the FMC led its Africa Committee to demand the release of a statement on Bantu Education, an indication that it was concerned with public opinion. Writing to Kerr, Watt noted:
If only people in South Africa had to be considered we have no doubt that the Foreign Mission Committee would agree to say nothing, but people in this country are agitated about the Bantu Education Act and, moreover, people in other parts of Africa, Africans and missionaries, are watching what is happening78
The MC opposed the release of any statement, arguing that it would jeopardise negotiations with the government and pandered to ‘extreme expressions which may be variously motivated.’79 The pressure on the FMC continued to mount, however, with a ‘fringe element’ arguing that the Church should have nothing to do with Bantu Education; the Presbytery of Ayr called on the FMC not to hand over any schools by lease or sale.80 At this juncture Watt thanked Kerr for keeping him informed of opinion within South Africa, because if he had not done so ‘there would have been a grave danger of divergence of thinking between you in South Africa and us in this country’.81 Yet only a day before this letter was written the FMC had released a press statement, a copy of which was sent to Eiselen, clearly indicating that there was indeed a very distinct divergence o f opinion between the FMC and the MC.
77 NLS B370 Watt to R. K. Orchard 19 Oct. 1954. Orchard was the Africa Secretary of the London Missionary Society. Orchard wrote back ‘we are feeling some pressure from people who have been reading the British Weekly and the Sunday Observer, and I quite expect we shall have to justify our line of policy at some length at our board meeting. ’ 27 Oct. 1954.
78 NLS B370 Watt to Kerr 1 Dec. 1954. Watt’s sympathy with Kerr and Shepherd may simply have been because he was convinced by their arguments. However, Watt’s personal position regarding race relations in South Africa may have been the key; in 1954 he remarked that total apartheid could be ‘ morally justified’.
79 NLS B370 Kerr to Watt 13 Dec. 1954. 80 NLS A77 Watt to Kerr 13 Dec. 1954. 81 NLS A77 Watt to Kerr 29 Dec. 1954.
Unlike the MC the^directly linked i Bantu Education and the policy of apartheid. They stressed the state’s duty to provide education for its citizens, and welcomed the increasing enlistment of Africans in the management of schools, but opposed the ‘eviction’ of mission schools from the new system. It also rejected ‘the racial policy on which the Act is based’, declaring that apartheid was ‘contrary to the law of God.’82
According to Watt
We don’t imagine that a statement made to the South African Government about the schools will really make any difference to their policy but we feel that we can’t just hand over our educational work without formally disassociating ourselves from the educational policy of the Union Government, and, so to speak, entering our discontent. It may be that in some time in the future it will be useful to have it on record.83
Watt’s comments suggest that there was a public perception that the Church was handing over its schools willingly, or at least without complaint. There seems to be little doubt that it was public pressure that pushed the FMC towards the release of the statement. Yet it did little to extinguish this pressure, which continued to mount. As Watt wrote to Kerr
There is considerable feeling in Scotland that the Foreign Mission Committee has been rather weak in its handling of the Bantu Education Act matter. The attitude of the Bishop of Johannesburg in closing the schools and the Adams College appeal for funds to keep the institution going with reduced grant-in-aid is much more attractive to certain firebrands.
He appealed to Kerr for ‘any ammunition with which to repel the attacks o f the hot-heads. ’84 There was undoubtedly consternation amongst Church of Scotland supporters that, unlike Reeves and the American Board Mission, the church had decided to hand over its institutions with little, if any, complaint. By June 1955 the pressure forced Watt to appeal directly to Shepherd to reverse the decision not to run the hostels at Lovedale. Despite the
82 NLS A77 Watt to Eiselen 28 Dec. 1954, The statement ended by appealing to the BPC to use its influence to ensure that Africans used what education would be available to their best advantage.
83 NLS B370 Watt to Orchard 19 Oct. 1954.
difficulties, running them, was perhaps ‘what God is calling us to do’ and would certainly go some way towards ‘satisfying the Foreign Mission Committee’.85 This is somewhat ironic given that previously there had been concern that to run the hostels was to identify the Church with Bantu Education. It appears that opinions changed within the FMC who increasingly saw the retention of hostels as a sign they were maintaining their Christian witness against apartheid, rather than a compromise with apartheid.
In response to this, Kerr and Shepherd sent a joint letter to the FMC. They rejected Reeves’s stand on the grounds that he was closing primary schools, the very schools that the MC in South Africa was pleased to be handing over to the government, nor did they ‘object to the control of secondary schools by them [the government] where there is the likelihood o f the formation o f school committees sufficiently informed to be able to manage them’. Where they disagreed with the Government was over its handling o f the larger missionary institutions ‘which might well, with advantage to the Native people and the cause o f education generally, have been maintained alongside any provision they [the government] cared to make.,86 Once again the justification for their actions was divorced from politics, the letter focussing purely on financial and administrative issues. Evidently, neither Kerr nor Shepherd had any intention o f bowing to the pressure of the FMC which they considered was being manipulated by uninformed and irresponsible figures from outside the Presbyterian Church.
Notwithstanding FMC pressure, there was no change in policy by church leaders in South Africa. Despite the publication of its statement, the FMC did not reverse any decisions made by the MC, who thus alone decided the fate of the Presbyterian mission schools.87
United Church Action
85 NLS B379 Watt to Kerr 30 June 1955.
86 NLS B370 Kerr & Shepherd to Watt 8 July 1955.
87 There is no doubt that the support of Watt as the South Africa secretary of the FMC helped the MC in South Africa.
Another issue that occupied the FMC in Scotland and impinged upon its relationship with the MC was the hope of its members that the churches in South Africa would stand together over Bantu Education. As early as December 1953 Watt remarked ‘I hope that there is real cooperation between the various denominations in this matter, for the future of Bantu Education looks ominous.’88 In early 1954 Watt was urging Kerr to make sure that the Church of Scotland was at the forefront of any discussions concerning joint church action.89 Watt wrote to Orchard of the London Missionary Society (LMS) asking him to consider ways in which church bodies could stand together in negotiations with the Department of Native Affairs.90 A month later Watt informed Kerr that the FMC wanted ‘all denominations to stand together’ but admitted that he ‘did not see how the solidarity suggested is to operate.’91
Watt’s doubts about a unified stand was based upon a damning personal appraisal o f the churches in South Africa:
I feel what is happening in South Africa is in a way a judgement on our Churches and Missions there. If there had been a greater measure of co-operation, less denominationalism, more willingness to come forward in incorporating union, our Mission education in South Afr ica would have been so good and so strong that even Dr. Malan would not have cared or dared touch it. Our divisions have meant that our Christian service in education and otherwise has been very weak and so through Dr. Malan, the judgement of God has fallen on it.... We have been thinking along denominational lines, been [too] anxious to keep our beloved Institutions and Mission Stations going 92
Until the government took control of all the Presbyterian schools Watt lamented the lack of co-ordinated church action. In particular he expressed his disappointment with the inability of the CCS A to agree to run an institution as a witness for the mission churches.
88 NLS B374 Watt to Arnott 24 Dec.
89 Watt commented on the larger institutions ‘if they all stood together, Government might be