Lamola: Sowing in Tears

A Documentary History of the Church Struggle Against Apartheid 1960 - 1990

John Lamola

• Publisher: African Perspectives Publishing
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781990931246
• eBook ISBN: 9781990931307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

A historicist interpretation of how the Christian religion, whose theology had notoriously been used to foster coloniality and explicitly nurture apartheid philosophy, had transformed itself into an intellectual force and an organisational bulwark of the struggle for freedom in South Africa. This is presented through documents and statements of the ecumenical movement which attest to the development of successive theological positions that were being arraigned against the apartheid regime. The reflection covers the period from the year 1960, which signaled the beginning of an identifiable Christian tradition of protest against political oppression and repression in South Africa, that is, from the Cottesloe Conference following the Sharpeville Massacre, to the 'Standing for the Truth Campaign' on the eve of FW De klerk's February 2 1990 Speech in Parliament. The gallant resistance of the people and the churches of South Africa is presented here as both a living record of the tumultuous past, and an inspiration for new local and global struggles.

CHAPTER ONE

The Resurrection at Sharpeville

By 1960, the ruling National Party, led by Hendrik Verwoerd (who was Prime Minister from 1957 to 1967), had arrived at the climax of its campaign to reconstitute South Africa into a racialised republic, independent of the British Crown. The Union of South Africa was then a post-Anglo-Boer War amalgamation of what had been the British colonies of the Cape and Natal and the Boer Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The National Party was intent on rendering the country totally free of British interference. The veiled anti-British and anti-Black assertiveness of Afrikaner nationalism reached its peak during this campaign.

On the wave of Afrikaner Nationalism, all White South Africans were united in their claim that South Africa was their country and that their ancestors were placed by ‘God’ to civilise and rule its African Native majority.³² There was of course, the economic motive at the heart of this White supremacist complex.

Within this hubris, the National Party government announced that there would be a referendum in October 1960 in which the White electorate was to be canvassed on the question of the proposed change in the status of the country. The announcement of this referendum provoked a trenchant opposition from the African National Congress and its Congress Alliance partners. This demonstration of the resolve at cementing exclusive White political control of South Africa caught the ANC reeling from two traumas: First, the 1956 Treason Trial in which nearly all of its leadership, who were among the 155 people charged,³³ were on a protracted trial for their lives; and second, a breakaway of the Africanists faction of the party who were protesting the ANC’s subscription to the 1955 Freedom Chapter, had launched the Pan Africanist Congress in April 1959.³⁴

The PAC’s politics of a decolonisation of South Africa along the nationalist model unfolding in Africa since the independence of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana occasioned serious political self-examination across the protest movement on the course and principles of the anti-apartheid struggle in the face of the marshalling of Afrikaner sovereignty. The ANC responded to the announcement of the referendum with preparations for a protest campaign which would take the form of a national strike and the burning of passes on 31 March 1960.³⁵

On Monday, 21 March 1960, ten days before the start of the ANC’s campaign, groups of residents in several Black townships went out on a defiance and civil disobedience action called by PAC leadership, marching out of their homes without their passes and handing themselves over for mass arrest at police stations. In Sharpeville, about seventy kilometres south of Johannesburg, the police responded with the utmost brutality to a crowd that had gathered around the police station without their pass books. By the end of the day sixty-nine of the marchers lay dead and over 200 were wounded on the streets of Sharpeville. Robert Sobukwe, leader of the PAC had been arrested in Orlando, Soweto, and would spend 9 years on Robben Island. On the same day, at a concurrent protest 1 200 kilometres away in the township of Langa, outside Cape Town, two protesters were killed and 49 wounded.

Many Black communities rose in revolt as news of Langa and the Sharpeville massacre reached them. Led by the ANC’s Nkosi Albert Luthuli, scores of people began to burn their passes on 27 March 1960, which had been declared a stay-at-home day of mourning for the victims of the massacre. Secondary protestant actions around the country were met with more state violence, which sparked off yet more revolts, initiating a widespread crisis of unprecedented gravity for the apartheid regime. By the end of April 1960, 83 more people had been killed³⁶.

It was not the first time that Black people had been murdered in this manner by the colonial Union of South Africa regime. In the case of the Sharpeville massacre, however, the sound of the shots fired by the police at unarmed and disenfranchised political demonstrators echoed throughout the world. The apartheid regime was confronted by international condemnation of a ferocity it had never encountered.

Shares plummeted in the stock market as foreign confidence in the South African economy and the future of the Verwoerd government evaporated and a panic-stricken emigration of South African Whites began. The beleaguered government responded by invoking the Public Safety Act of 1950 to declare a national State of Emergency on 31 March 1960.

Within a week of the declaration of the State of Emergency, more than 20 000 people were in detention. The detainees included two English missionaries and virtually all the grassroots-level leadership of the ANC and the nascent PAC. The freedom of the ANC’s top leadership had been restricted for some time in any case – apart from Oliver Tambo and Albert Luthuli, who were living under government-imposed restrictions – they were all defendants in a Treason Trial which had by then been in progress for four years.

On 8 April 1960, both the ANC and the PAC were declared unlawful organisations under the Unlawful Organisations Act. Those deemed to be furthering the aims of the banned organisations and those claiming continued membership of such organisations after their proscription, became liable to ten years imprisonment.

Just before the declaration of the State of Emergency, the ANC’s National Executive took a decision to send Oliver Tambo on an international mission as the organisation’s ambassador, to solicit international support for the struggle against White minority rule. Tambo had been the acting President of the ANC since 1959 when iNkosi Albert Luthuli was put under house arrest. Smuggled through Bechuanaland on 27^th March 1960, he eventually made it to London and to the United Nations headquarters in New York without a passport to present a firsthand account of the situation in South Africa.

In South Africa, a network of defence and aid committees emerged. These committees, under the presidency of Ambrose Reeves, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, sought to alleviate the extreme hardships suffered by the families of detainees in consequence of the massive repression. They also strove to publicise the harsh conditions in which African detainees were held.

As an indication of the world’s attention drawn to post-Sharpeville South Africa, iNkosi Luthuli was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize for 1960. This award drew unprecedented international attention to the ANC’s long struggle which began 1912, waged by means of passive resistance, against the racism of British colonialism in the earlier period, and apartheid in the later period. The announcement that the ANC’s President-General was being honoured by the international community for his leadership in the non-violent struggle also sparked a painful self-examination, as the ANC sought to count the achievements of this struggle through peaceful means, particularly during the preceding five years.

The revelation of the brutality of the apartheid regime against the backdrop of the history of the non-violence of the ANC flabbergasted the international community. This period led to a renewed academic and political scrutiny of the philosophical roots, structures, and modus operandi of the ideology of apartheid. In turn, this drew attention to the way in which Christian theology had been misused in the interests of apartheid.³⁷

The World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva responded to the events by launching a ‘Mission to South Africa’ in April 1960. A delegation of six eminent persons drawn from the international Christian community spent about six months in South Africa, where they consulted with the various South African Churches and gathered first-hand information for the WCC. The mission culminated in a consultative conference with representatives from the eight churches in South Africa which were members of the WCC.

The conference was held at Cottesloe, a suburb of Johannesburg, on 14-17 December 1960. It is noteworthy that the date of the sitting of this conference straddled the national holiday of 16^th December, which among the Afrikaans nationalists was observed as the Day of the Vow ( Geloftedag), a solemn vow made by the Voortrekkers to preserve themselves as a nation in South Africa, following their victory “through Gods help” over the Zulu warriors of King Dingane in December 1838 at the Battle of the Blood River. In 1982 the holiday was renamed the Day of the Covenant, and after 1994 the Day of Reconciliation.

The first of the three documents in this chapter (Document D1.1) is a record of the observations of the WCC international delegation tabled at the Cottesloe Consultation. Besides being the statement of the social role of the church and the evaluation of its response to the developments described above, it provides a rare seminal attempt of a rational view of the South African society in conflict with itself by an outsider.

The Statement of the Cottesloe Consultation, the second of the documents (Document D1.2), was appended to the WCC delegation’s report and was distributed among WCC member churches throughout the world.

The Cottesloe Conference became a watershed in the development of an anti-apartheid political theology in South Africa, even though its view of developments was rooted in the Eurocentric perspective that dominated the ecclesiastical tradition of the time. It marked the beginning of a theological tradition which was informed by a concern about ‘race relations’. This developed into a pivotal conceptual framework would inform the appraisal of the ideological rationale of the apartheid regime for about a decade. It dominated the anti-apartheid theological scene until it was overshadowed by the emergence of Black Theology and the Black Consciousness Movement in the early 1970s. The Cottesloe Conference is particularly significant because of its recommendation that a South African Council of Churches be formed in order to further the process pioneered at Cottesloe. It took eight years to put this recommendation into effect.

While the Cottesloe Conference was in progress, the ecumenical and international membership of the WCC was engaged in preparations for its third General Assembly. General Assemblies of the WCC, which had by then assumed the influential status of being major international platforms for the pronouncement of unified theological thought within the Protestant churches on matters relating to the church’s role in the world, are convened every seven years. The third one, taking place in the Indian capital New Delhi in 1961, was the first to be held outside Europe and North America. Issues around decolonialisation, self-determination of the indigenous peoples, and racism hovered over its agenda. The tabling of the report of the “Mission to South Africa” at this General Assembly presented a chilling concreteness to these issues, and firmly placed the liberation struggle in South Africa on the agenda of the international ecumenical movement.

The South African churches’ Cottesloe Statement had given a veiled but not sympathetic consideration to Verwoerd’s adumbration of the concept of ‘separate development’, a philosophical rationalisation of apartheid. The New Delhi Assembly departed sharply from the Cottesloe Statement on this issue, and sought to put the character of the church’s response into perspective. It asserted that in developing a political language and engaging in politics, the church was not merely commenting on political developments as an external observer. Instead, it was urged to “identify itself with the oppressed race in its struggle to achieve justice”. Experts from the official WCC report on the New Delhi Assembly constitute the third document in this chapter, and explains why the NGK (Dutch Reformed Church) could no longer feel at home in the World Council of Churches (Document D1.3).

The New Delhi Assembly gave new impetus to the WCC’s 1954 undertaking to establish a Secretariat on Racial and Ethnic Relations. The establishment of this Secretariat as one of the main departments of the WCC presaged the foundation in 1969/70 of the visibly more active and programmatically more radical Programme to Combat Racism (PCR). The situation in South Africa encroached as the foundational material that would shape much of the theological praxis of international organised Christianity from the 1960s, as the following chapters will reveal.

The Roman Catholic Church globally, and in South Africa was not part of the processes outlined above due to the fact that the World Council of Churches is expressly a multidenominational association of the historical Protestant movement within Christianity. The Catholic Church has a novel governance structure, which, it must be remembered, includes the fact that the Vatican City has a status in international law that is equivalent to that of any other sovereign state, with concomitant diplomatic ramifications. This unique ecclesiastic status, in the case of South Africa, dictated that questions pertaining to social and political responsibility are judiciously dealt with through the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference.³⁸

After two very ambiguous and largely uncritical statements on race relations in 1952 and 1957, where the latter was more concerned with the effect of the Bantu Education Act on Catholic schools, the bishops issued a pastoral letter in February 1960, a month before the Sharpeville massacre happened. As recorded in Andrew Prior’s Catholics in Apartheid Society³⁹ this pastoral letter warned, inter alia, that,

The problem of ‘race relations’ must be solved soon, and in the light of Christian principles. Otherwise there is little hope for peace and order, as antagonisms will grow, prejudices harden into intolerance, and frustration lead to outburst of disorder and violence.⁴⁰

It further stated that all people, irrespective of race, had fundamental human rights, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• PROLOGUE
• CHAPTER ONE - The Resurrection at Sharpeville
• CHAPTER TWO - The Challenge of the Apartheid Republic
• CHAPTER THREE - Triumphant Apartheid
• CHAPTER FOUR - Liberalism and Race Relations
• CHAPTER FIVE - Black Consciousness and Black Theology
• CHAPTER SIX - Church Support for Armed Resistance?
• CHAPTER SEVEN - The State Versus the Christian Institute: Schlebush Commission
• CHAPTER EIGHT - The State Versus the SACC: Eloff Commission
• CHAPTER NINE - The Demise of Afrikaner Civil Religion
• CHAPTER TEN - Call To Prayer for an End to Unjust Rule
• CHAPTER ELEVEN - Sanctions: The World’s Moment of Truth
• CHAPTER TWELVE - Pilgrimages to Lusaka
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Standing for the Truth
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY