Siles Nates

Oppression as traditionally defined is between those who wield power—politically and/or economically—and those who are victims of the powerful. Colour played a predominant role in past colonialism but that paradigm has long shifted. In the

2010 Arab uprisings it was a case of Arab oppresses Arab while the Irish struggle for liberation is white against white. Africa itself has demonstrated how yesterday’s liberators quickly turn into today’s oppressors. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were Filipino when they oppressed their own people. This reversal of roles is not new. As Fromm (1969:1) observed, it is a psychological problem which characteristic in the histories of all liberation:

Classes that were fighting against oppression at one stage sided with the enemies of freedom when victory was won and new privileges had to be defended.

Thus, the possibility of being oppressed by the erstwhile liberators is not that remote. However, it is often very difficult to see when the devil pretends to be an angel of light. In South Africa Einstein’s words are being realised sooner than we would like to concede. He said, “I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels” (n.d:3–4). Political rascals never learn because their platforms are used for self-enhancement.

Like Boesak, there are many who believe that what is happening in the political landscape in South Africa is not what our ancestors fought and died for. Nevertheless, their descendants are using their names in designing and implementing clandestine structures for the oppression of the very people they had sought to liberate.

I argue that it is not possible for a liberative theology and consciousness to ignore the psychological implications of a new era. It is, therefore imperative, that every prophet in every era makes a deliberate attempt to revise the way in which history may have informed and therefore shaped his/her thinking. It may be that,

in the excitement and spirit of liberation Boesak and Chikane lost some of their original Mosaic prophetic direction, However, they serve as a stern warning of how prophetic-oscillation is always a possibility and, even worse, it has the potential to lead Mosaic prophets into the temptation of being wrapped up in the Davidic prophecy and, therefore, engulfed by the very evils their ancestors had prophesied against.

For Biko (1978:91) “black consciousness is an attitude of mind”. The struggle for freedom is not so much political and/or economic as it is psychological. It is vital that political and/or economic freedoms are the corollaries of a change in mindset during the process of expelling the entrenched mental models of oppression (Freire 1970). If this does not happen, the oppressed will curse ourselves with blessing we fought so hard to win. The polarities of black and white in Biko’s time were dictated to by the racial political context of the time. However, this is now evolving into an economic polarisation of the rich and poor while the poor are still predominantly black. Indeed, Biko exposed an aspect of the struggle for liberation that has been exhausted, namely, how an individual’s mindset may surreptitiously invade and destroy the very moral fibre of a just cause when those who were oppressed do not engage vigorously with the models which they internalised from the oppressor as they enter a new epoch. It would appear that, in his book, Boesak is reminding us this aspect of Biko’s thinking. He is under no illusion that this will be easy and, like all noble causes, it will have as its opponents – yesterday’s liberators who have, consciously or otherwise, gradually become today’s oppressors.

Boesak and other valiant opponents of oppression have challenged how this has happened in the history of South Africa. Hamlet’s (Shakespeare 1992) soliloquy “To be or not to be …” expresses the tensions and contradictions of the human journey in many of the socio-political contexts, especially those characterised by racism. Tillich (2000) spoke of the challenges of being and non-being and the courage to confront these challenges. In his hierarchy of needs Maslow (1999) affirmed the existential issue of actualisation that has plagued all ages in human history. According to Biko (1978:92), “[f]reedom is the ability to define oneself with one’s possibilities held back, not by the power of other people over one, but only by one’s relationship to God and natural surroundings”. The challenge in the new directions in black theology is to redefine our own humanity and consciousness. However, this cannot be done in relation to the same structures that historically dehumanised the oppressed.

5.7 SUMMARY

It may be that the answer to the question raised above will be found, not in the old prophets trying to renew their strength, but in the birth of new prophets. Boesak appears to yearn for the past when the church prophesied with deep insight into the evils of the apartheid era. There is no doubt that the prophetic role made a major contribution to the dismantling of apartheid and the dawn of a democratic era in South Africa. However, it would seem that the church is refusing to admit that those days are gone, not to be forgotten, but gone. While the task of prophecy is never exhausted, the task of a prophet is always limited to a particular era.

Like the ANC, the prophetic voice during apartheid spoke to the present in the context of the future with the “now” addressing issues of the “not yet”. Mandela’s ideal looked forward into the distant future and so did the church. This vision, while some credit the Freedom Charter for its articulation, had been voiced much earlier with the founding of the South African National Native Congress (SANNC) in 1912. What is needed now is not so much a return to the past as is a prophecy with deep insight into the depth and distance of an unfolding and robust democracy. Yesterday’s visionaries created history. However, today’s politicians are, above all else, engaged in personal aggrandisement or in destroying that for which others made so many sacrifices. The dearth is to be found in the obsessive preoccupation with what Mandela called crass materialism that has come to characterise the political terrain in this country.

Molefe Tsele was right in saying that “We must run away from an incestuous co- habitation with government” (Boesak 2005:169), However this is easier said than done. Prophets are mortal and will always be trapped in the limitations of mortality. What has rendered prophets in the tradition of Boesak and Chikane obsolete is that they spoke for a certain time. Their disappointment with the existing political system emerged only after they had fallen out of favour with those from who they had expected favours. When Chikane was still in the government structures, he said very little about the concerns he is now raising. The same is true for Boesak. The weakness of all mortality is to pursue its own interests at the expense of the rest.

The church is silent because its prophetic voice has been tainted in various ways. It may be times have changed and that new prophets need to identify new

directions that speak to the prevailing situation. Of course, such initiatives will be informed by the old patterns of challenging prophecy during apartheid but they cannot speak to the situation in the same way in which they spoke to apartheid. If, at some point, they now say what was said during apartheid, then there is something dramatically wrong with the new dispensation in South Africa and that yesterday’s liberator is gradually evolving into the oppressor from whom they sought to liberate themselves. That is a challenge for the new prophets and not for old ones who are trying to renew their strength.

CHAPTER 6

SUMMARY, FINDINGS, RECOMMENDATIONS AND

CONTRIBUTION

6.1 INTRODUCTION

This study undertook the task of understanding why the church, that had spoken out so vigorously and vociferously against apartheid, had suddenly gone silent in the face of the corruption dogging the unfolding democracy in South Africa since 1994. This issue had been addressed at a UNISA and Stellenbosch conference on society and religion scarcely ten years after the new ANC government had been voted into power with the following question being raised, namely, Where have all the prophets gone (Cilliers 2015:367). While the new government has made progress and has, undoubtedly, done much good work in the more than 23 years since it came into power, this concern, raised so soon after 1994, suggested that some people were beginning to observe troubling signs of moral inconsistency within the ANC.

At the inception of this research study South Africa had had four presidents, namely, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma. Motlanthe, in a sense, served as a caretaker president between Mbeki and Zuma during troubled times between the ANC and its allies. He could be regarded as a compromise candidate as the party struggled to pave the way for Zuma to succeed Mbeki in what one may call a battle of political egos. By the end of the research Cyril Ramaphosa had been elected as the fifth president of South Africa since 1994.

This chapter presents a summary of the study, the study findings as well as recommendations in the context of the main research question and the conclusions. The main research question focused on silence of the church in the face of the corruption and the lack of austere governance during the presidencies of Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma.