wfn.org | South Africa's Churches Confess Their Complicity With Apartheid

[PCUSA.NEWS@pcusa.org]

9-December-1997 
97457 
 
    South Africa's Churches Confess 
    Their Complicity With Apartheid 
 
    by Noel Bruyns 
    Ecumenical News International 
 
EAST LONDON, South Africa--No church in South Africa is exempt from the 
duty to confess its actions under apartheid, according to Desmond Tutu, 
former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and now chairman of the nation's 
official Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which is investigating 
gross human rights violations committed during the apartheid regime. 
 
    Archbishop Tutu was speaking on November 17, at the start of three days 
of TRC hearings for religious organizations. Representatives of Christian 
churches and related organizations, as well as leaders of the Jewish, Hindu 
and Muslim faiths and African traditional churches, traveled to the coastal 
city of East London to give testimony to the TRC about how they had 
suffered under apartheid and how they had fought or supported it. They also 
put forward suggestions for national reconciliation. 
 
    Representatives of some churches told the TRC this week that they had 
in word or deed opposed apartheid, but had not done enough to support their 
beliefs. Others admitted they had been blinded by the regime's propaganda 
and had not made any concerted effort to oppose the heresy of apartheid 
because the anti-apartheid activists were "Communists." All had to some 
degree tolerated apartheid practices in their own structures, they said. 
 
    Archbishop Tutu said on November 17 that those confessing were not 
supposed to confess the sins of others, nor justify themselves.  "You are 
meant to say what went wrong with yourself," said the Nobel Peace laureate. 
"South Africa is a very religious country. Religion is not necessarily a 
good thing and not necessarily a bad thing. 
 
    "It was, after all, German Christians who supported Hitler, but it was 
also Christians who showed that wonderful resistance to the awfulness of 
Nazism." 
 
    Initially, the TRC, which began its hearings in May last year, heard 
admissions of abuses from individual perpetrators, but then began special 
hearings for groups. 
 
    This week's session for faith groups follows special public hearings 
for doctors, lawyers, businessmen and journalists. Even judges were invited 
to explain how the judicial system had connived or otherwise with the 
apartheid state and security forces -- but the judges refused to attend the 
hearings. 
 
    The commission's amnesty committee may under certain circumstances give 
amnesty from future criminal or civil lawsuits to perpetrators of human 
rights violations. Its reparation committee will next year hand suggestions 
to President Nelson Mandela on compensation to  victims of apartheid and of 
the liberation struggle. Most of the faith communities had already made 
written submissions, at the TRC's request, on their role under apartheid. 
This week's special hearing was for public statements. 
 
    During this week's hearings, Archbishop Tutu, who was one of South 
Africa's preeminent anti-apartheid clerical leaders, personally apologized 
for "Christians' arrogance." 
 
    At the start of the second day of hearings, at which Jewish, Hindu and 
Muslim representatives testified, he said: "I would want to, and I am sure 
all my fellow Christians would want to, apologize to members of the other 
faiths for our arrogance as Christians. 
 
    "For so long, we behaved as if we were the only religious faith in this 
country, when in fact from the year dot we have been a multifaith society." 
 
    Non-Christian faiths had, for instance, received almost no air time on 
radio and television, he said. 
 
    "We claim arrogantly, a claim that is difficult to justify, that this 
is a Christian country. I've never known what is meant by that, unless we 
are merely claiming that the majority of the country are Christians. 
 
    "The experience we have had in the world is that those who have claimed 
to be these [Christian countries] have not usually excelled. 
 
    "Christians do not have the monopoly on God. To acknowledge the reality 
of the existence of other faiths does not mean you, as a Christian, need to 
compromise on the tenets that you hold dear," Archbishop Tutu told those 
present. 
 
    Many different faiths had worked together to fight apartheid. Now they 
needed to join forces to help heal and reconcile the new, post-apartheid 
South Africa, the archbishop said. 

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