wfn.org | Apartheid Refugee to Return Home

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4-November-1997 
97422 
 
    Apartheid Refugee to Return Home to Run 
    South African Council of Churches 
 
    by Bruce Best and Noel Bruyns 
    Ecumenical News International 
 
MELBOURNE, Australia--A Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) minister now 
working as a high school chaplain in Melbourne will, beginning in February 
1998, become general secretary of the South African Council of Churches 
(SACC). 
 
    Taking the job will mean going home for Charity Majiza. In 1978 she was 
the first woman ordained to the ministry of the Reformed Presbyterian 
Church in Southern Africa.  She has been a UCA minister ever since 1984, 
when she arrived in Australia. Majiza left South Africa in 1980 and went to 
Edinburgh, Scotland, where she undertook postgraduate studies and part-time 
parish work.  In 1984 she felt unable to go back home, largely because of 
her outspokenness  about apartheid, so she moved to Australia instead. 
 
    In South Africa she will head up a council she believes is going 
through big change. "The energies of SACC for 30 years until 1994 were 
channeled toward the dismantling of apartheid," she told ENI.  "Now the 
agenda is reconciliation and reconstruction.  We're talking about people's 
lives here, not just the physical reconstruction of the country." 
 
    "I will miss Australia," she said. "And I am proud to be a Uniting 
Church minister, because this church is so much at the forefront of 
tackling issues in the community.  My experience in the UCA is an important 
part of the resource I'll take with me." The UCA is Australia's 
third-largest church. 
 
    Part of that Australian experience she values is the acknowledged role 
of ordained women in the decisions of the church.  Women were "still not 
quite visible in the structures of the church" in South Africa, she told 
ENI. She also learned what it was like to be part of a church still 
learning to unite -- the three churches which formed the UCA came together 
in 1977, just seven years before she arrived.  She said that experience 
would be important to her work in helping to rebuild the links between 
churches in South Africa. 
 
    As she takes up her new post, some "reconstruction" will also be going 
on in her own life.  In January, she will marry Australian businessman 
Graeme McKenzie in Sydney. They first met 15 years ago when they were 
studying theology in Edinburgh.  Now they will be able to live openly in 
South Africa as a mixed-race couple. 
 
    "After 1994 they all came out of the woodwork.  There are now many 
couples like us,"  Majiza said.  Their marriage ceremony will be performed 
on Jan. 17 by Dorothy McRae McMahon, a prominent Uniting Church minister 
and the church's former national mission director. 

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