RESISTANCE AGAINST THE AFRIKANER RELIGION
In the pre-democratic South Africa there was no separation between the apartheid governance and white Afrikaner theology. Furthermore, the theology of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) was closely intertwined with the apartheid theology. In order to understand the theology of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) and its relation to those who condemned such theology, it is important to sketch a brief background of the history of what Moodie (1975:21) called the Afrikaner civil religion. This relationship was the source of confrontations between Black, Boer and Briton on South African soil. The British settlers occupied the Cape, thus forcing the Afrikaners to explore opportunities to confiscate the land that belonged to Africans in the hinterland of South Africa. The confrontations were many and dead bodies littered the African wilderness from the wars that were waged between the Afrikaners and the Africans. The theology of land and occupation (Afrikaners religion) has cost the lives and dignity of many black Africans in this country.
While the Afrikaners differed on many levels regarding their interpretations of European Calvinism, they all agreed on the fact that Afrikanerdom was “willed by God” and, hence, their survival of both English oppression in the Cape and the onslaught by African warriors as they trekked into the hinterland of the country and beyond during the Great Trek of 1834 (Davenport 1991:48). Moodie has written extensively about an Afrikaner civil religion and how, at the end of it all, the Boers believed that they were a nation willed by God despite the attempts by their enemies to annihilate them. While some mouthed about the equality of all people, they believed that every race had been ordained to pursue its own destiny (Moodie 1975:52).
The major problem for the Dutch settlers revolved around how the English and other European missionaries sought to treat baptised black people as equals and who sometimes used former slaves against them, as in the well-known Slagters Nek Rebellion (Davenport 1991:36). It reached its peak when the slaves were declared to be equal standing with whites based on their baptism and some slaves expected and insisted upon being treated as equals by their former Dutch slave owners.
According to Elphick (2012:2):
Most missionaries in South Africa did not straightforwardly advocate an extension of racial equality from the spiritual to the social realm. Black Christians, on the contrary, tended vigorously to assert that equality in the eyes of God should evolve into social and political equality. The white missionary’s relationship to the doctrine they had introduced was an immensely complex and intricate interplay of advocacy, subversion, and even downright hostility. Most significantly, the broad vision of apartheid, designed explicitly to thwart the drive toward racial equality, originated, in part, among missionary leaders of the Dutch Reformed churches.
There were many ferocious wars during the “treks” as various groups left the Cape at different times with fierce and atrocious confrontations with both the British and African, culminating in the Anglo-Boer Wars (Davenport 1991:180). It was this history, confirmed and given theological articulation by some ministers of the Word and Sacrament of the DRC, such as Dr DF Malan, that, ultimately, drove home the belief that the Afrikaners were a nation chosen and protected by God on the southern tip of Africa (Elphick 2012:39–51).
Despite the fact that, in 1829, a DRC Synod rejected discrimination based on colour, the church continued to practise prejudice, racism and racial discrimination against the “natives”. Notwithstanding the DRC’s evangelical inclination and the fervent evangelisation of Coloureds and Africans, there were many disputes about equal participation in worship and other church activities, such as Holy Communion. In 1857 the DRC instituted separate services for the Coloured members due to the “weakness of some”. Thus, the DRC, in its history, always had to grapple with the desire to evangelise the so-called “natives” but, at the same time, to maintain a sense of the divine and racial superiority of the Afrikaner.
The Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC) was established in 1881 by five Coloured mission churches that met in Wellington, Cape Town. However, despite the decision in Wellington, the white DRC still held the power to veto decisions made by the mission churches and insisted on all DRMC buildings being registered in the DRC’s name. The DRC was rooted in the colonial system of land invasion and capital accumulation and it came as no surprise when history revealed connections between the Reformed dominant classes who had also
African, Coloured, and Khoi-san slaves. As pointed out earlier, after its formation in 1881, the DRMC struggled with the mother church and there were many disputes over the years, especially about race and the Eucharist or Holy Communion (Plaatjies-van Huffel, 2014:301). The white reformed members oppressed the other race groups but were, themselves, discriminated against by the English in various ways, especially after the latter’s occupation of the Cape in 1795 and 1806. Worship often became a battleground between intense race ideologies under the guise of the perverse and perverted theology of white supremacy (Elphick, 2012:39–51).
The late, world-renowned and respected Dr Beyers Naude, who was rejected by the white DRC and who joined the DRCA and was a member of the Belydende Kring (BK), played an important role in the introduction of a theology that opposed white supremacy in the white DRC in South Africa. The BK, which comprised mainly Indian, Coloured and African members within the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa (DRCA), had reached a crisis point with the mother church that sought to stifle, throttle and oppress them. For the first time, in 1973, a gathering of 100 African ministers issued a statement rejecting apartheid, stating, among others, that the BK would “take seriously the prophetic task of the church regarding the oppressive structures and laws in our land” (Van Rooi 2011:173). According to Plaatjies-Van Huffel (2014), the BK influenced the original drafting and acceptance of the Belhar Confession that was, ultimately, embraced by Presbyterians and Congregationalists in South Africa. Plaatjies-van Huffel (2014) points out that the Belhar Confession was, ultimately, the result of many deliberations on different platforms within the Reformed tradition. Plaatjies- van Huffel (2014) wrote:
The Belhar Confession is, indeed, the culmination of a variety of factors, processes and efforts in the DRMC, DRCA, BK and Alliance of Black Reformed Christians in Southern Africa (ABRESCA).
This theology formed theological giants, such as Allan Boesak, who lived, learned and fought for this theology in all spheres of life. Boesak, the pastor, emerged as both a poet and prophet in the 1970s – prophets are often poetic at heart, creating with their words pictures and scenes that make God’s Word come alive and also new worlds of doom or possibility and new worlds of meaning or disillusionment. Their life stories as messengers of God are, for the most part, lost in the shuffle of people and society. Boesak’s powerful imagery revealed a man who was intimately acquainted with the majesty and the might of God. Dr Robra (2014:96) identifies such poetry in Boesak’s speech:
If there is no justice; there will be no peace Today the world has motion, but no direction. Passion but no compassion; production, but no equitable distribution. Religion but no faith; laws, but no justice. Goods but no God, each new economic advance gives birth to new moral pain, each technological discovery to new fears from the seas as much as from the skies.
Through his intellectual abilities and poetic talent, Boesak became one of the most influential people in the Black Reformed circles, as a member of BK. Boesak’s knowledge, skills and abilities afforded him an opportunity to be one of the delegates in Ottawa where apartheid was declared and reaffirmed as heresy.