SOUTH AFRICA
I’ve just returned from a holiday in the Cape Povince of South Africa. We had a guest lecturer, an old friend of mine who is an expert on the political geography of South Africa. For this is a country where geography is politics and politics is geography. (It can only be compared with Israel/Palestine).
You cannot visit South Africa without being forced to think about the issues of race and inequality. These are important issues in Europe too, but in South Africa there are quite literally writ large upon the landscape.
It is a very strange country, a mixture of Europe and Africa. In some places it feels just like Europe, in other places it is very much Africa. But the great question posed by South Africa is:
How can different races live together in harmony?
How can you organise a mixed-race society?
To recap, the races in question are:
The indigenous peoples (very few, the Khoisan, formerly known as Hottentots and Bushmen);
The whites, with their major division into those of English origin and those of Dutch origin (the “Afrikaners”);
the Coloureds (not, as I thought, a mixture of black and white, but a mixture of Asiatic former slaves, especially from Indonesia and Malaya, and white Dutch; they speak Afrikaans);
Indians (descendants of indentured labourers brought in by the British; the samllest group);
Blacks, i.e. Bantu Africans, and of course much the largest group.
I think you can sum up post-war South African history as a tale of two experiments.
- Apartheid: the failed experiment
Apartheid = apartness, separation. Based on the belief that the only way to manage a racially mixed society is to keep the races apart.
Apartheid was brought in after the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948. Separation by law; it systematised the existing informal separation.
The cornerstone: The Group Areas Act of 1950 (amended in 1966). This drew lines on the map to determine who could live where, so as to maintain, or create, racially homogeneous neighbourhoods. It involved moving people around, with much suffering and uprooting of communities (though the whites stayed where they were). The white areas were much larger and much better situated than those for the other races.
We saw the notorious District Six of Cape Town. This was a fairly central, mixed neighbourhood which was declared to be white. The Coloureds were carted off to crowded peripheral neighbourhoods, but - Cape Town always having been relatively liberal in its attitudes – there were great protests and no agreement was ever reached on redeveloping the area. It remains as a huge grassed over area of prime development land just outside the city centre, a monument to the failure of apartheid.
Black Africans were supposed not to exist, except as temporary migrant workers. They were confined to the so-called black “homelands” or to squalid black townships for migrants, no family reunion being allowed at first. The blacks had no political participation because they were deemed to be citizens of the theoretically independent homelands. This was a terrible system, though in some respects not entirely unlike how migrant workers were treated in Europe, at least to start with.
The system never really worked because it flew in the face of economic reality, as well as being morally unsustainable. The white economy and way of life depended on black and Coloured labour.
In the end the system imploded.
A word about apartheid religion: how not to use the Bible, or the false Promised Land.
The Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa provided the ideological backbone of apartheid. The Church found support in Old Testament texts for the separation and subordination of the races (Genesis 9, the descendants of Ham the slaves of his brothers, Tower of Babel, “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, Deuteronomy, Nehemiah etc).
But even more important was the Calvinist urge to establish the pure church in the pure society. Hence the Afrikaner epic: to get away from the English; to ignore the Africans; to be themselves in their own land. Hence the Great Trek into the interior, and the foundation of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The Afrikaners saw themselves as the new Children of Israel journeying across the wilderness to their Promised Land.
2. The South African Miracle: the “negotiated revolution”.
After widespread unrest and international condemnation, but in the end because of pressure from business interests, President F. W. de Klerk realised that he had to abandon apartheid and negotiate a new South Africa with the arch-enemy, the ANC (African National Congress).
Fenruary 1990: de Klerk announces the release of political pisoners, and soon after Nelson Mandela was released from Pollsmoor Prison (the more open prison to which he had been transferred after the long years on Robben Island). We stood by his statue at the entrance to Pollsmoor, a moving moment. (The sea was too rough to visit Robben Island.)
1994: the first democratic elections under the new constitution. Mandela elected President.
The collapse of apartheid was inevitable. That it was so relatively peaceful was due to the influence above all of two men: Nelson Mandela (especially) and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Another moving moment was to attend the Sunday Eucharist in St George's Cathedral, Cape Town, Tutu's cathedral. The cathedral always stood out against pressure on the churches to segregate by race, proclaiming itself “the people's cathedral”.
Anglicanism does not perhaps go in very much for heroic sanctity, but in South Africa, because of Desmond Tutu, Trevor Huddleston, and many others, you can be proud to be an Anglican.
- The new South African experiment: “the Rainbow Nation”
You can sum up the new South Africa by saying: “everything has changed, and nothing has changed”.
The whites are still very much on top economically, even though an important development is the emergence of a black middle class. The gap between the rich and the poor has increased (especially among blacks because a few are now rich, while most remain very poor as they always were).
You can live where you like now, but most people cannot afford to. There has been some residential desegregation, but you can still immediately distinguish “white” areas (now with a few Coloured and black residents too) from the intermediate housing of the Coloured areas and the black townships.
Despite some improvements to electricity and water supplies, and the building of more – very small – brick huts, large shanty towns continue to grow up in the midst and on the edges of the townships because people are now free to move to the cities from the rural ex-homelands, and becasuse of immigration from other African countries, including a huge number of refugees from Zimbabwe.
While people are now free to move “up” to the former white areas, and a few do, no one would dream of moving “down” into the Coloured areas or the black townships, which therefore remain as mono-racial as ever.
We were very pleased to be able to visit a black township, Imizanu Yethu, perched on a hillside (as they often are) above Hout Bay, a coastal town near Cape Town.
But, on the positive side:
- there is majority rule;
– there is a visible relaxation of relationships, there is mutual respect (even if, surely, many prejudices remain, you can see people relating quite naturally across the racial barirers, and you get the impression that South Africans, especially the younger generation, now feel comfortable with themselves);
– there is hope – of moving up, even if most do not (rather like the way the USA copes with glaring inequality?).
The new South Africa is still very much an experiment in progress. There have been many mistakes; there is much corruption and crime. It could all go horribly wrong, but for the time being the new South Africa is still just about on the rails.
So please pray for South Africa. Pray for her leaders and all her people. Pray for the success of the Rainbow Nation experiment. Because if it collapses it will not just be a tragedy for South Africa, it will be a tragedy for all of us who live in racially mixed societies.
Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Chaplaincy
20 September 2009
