wfn.org | Major SA newspaper urges Archbishop not to back down

[Theo Coggin, Sunday 1 March 1998]

e-mail: coggin@sn.apc.org
Tel: +2711-648-5461 / +2711-487-1994

South Africa’s largest newspaper, the mass-circulation Sunday Times,
today carries a front-page lead story, headlined “Anglican fury at
Mandela”. The story is a sequel to a meeting held earlier in the week
between President Mandela and some Anglican leaders.
Here follows the text, as it appears in the Sunday Times:

The Anglican Church has gone into battle against President Nelson
Mandela, accusing him of trying to drive a wedge between their
Archbishop and his followers.
The row between church and state erupted after the President invited
senior Anglican clerics to a meeting this week during which he ‘very
forcibly’ attacked the views of Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, in his
absence.
In an unprecedented move, the Bishop of Johannesburg, the Rt Revd Duncan
Buchanan, has now warned his fellow bishops and other leading churchmen
that the President intends to use meetings with them to continue his
attack on Ndungane.
In a letter to the clerics, Buchanan said Mandela would ‘attack Njongo
very forcibly without any chance for discussion or reply’.
Ndungane - who replaced Bishop Desmond Tutu as head of the Anglican
Church in South Africa - has asked for a meeting with Mandela to ask:
If the President is trying to silence him.
Why Mandela is trying to ‘alienate an elected leader of a Church from
his followers’.
Director general in the President’s office Professor Jakes Gerwel said
Mandela would meet Ndungane this week, and he therefore did not want to
discuss the matter in public.
‘One really would not want to see a standoff between the church and
state,’ he said.
Mandela’s anger appears to have been raised by an article in a Cape
newspaper which quoted Ndungane as saying: ‘Madiba magic won’t be
solving our problems’.
The article reported Ndungane’s criticisms of the government’s neglect
of the poor, its inhumane treatment of pensioners in the Eastern Cape,
the slow delivery of houses and the financial crisis at the
universities.
This week Mandela hosted a lunch at his Pretoria residence for Buchanan,
the Bishop of Klerksdorp, the Rt Rev David Nkwe, and 10 Anglican
clergymen.
Buchanan said the President had spent over an hour attacking Ndungane
for his views.
‘We came away with a clear sense that the President was trying to
isolate the Archbishop from us and was trying to put the clergy up
against the Archbishop,’ Buchanan said.
‘What came through from the President was that: you are bigger than the
Archbishop - keep him in order.’
He said Mandela had told the clergy that he found it significant that
Ndungane had been interviewed the day before his address to Parliament,
thereby suggesting that the Archbishop had tried to undermine him.
Ndungane is a former PAC activist who was jailed for three years in the
60s.
Although he is no longer a PAC member, it is widely known that he is not
an ANC supporter.
Mandela told the clergy that he planned to hold similar lunches in the
Cape and KwaZulu Natal - as well as with Methodist and Catholic leaders.
In an attempt to prevent a suspected repeat of Monday’s lunch, Buchanan
wrote to the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern
Africa, the President of the Southern Africa Catholic Bishops
Conference, and the general secretary of the South African Council of
Churches, warning them about meeting Mandela.
Buchanan writes: ‘The important thing is that if you are invited to
lunch... be well aware that it is not as we thought at the time, to
persuade our Church to support the ANC in the next election, but so that
he can attack Njongo very forcibly, and without any chance of discussion
or reply.’
The letter ends with the words ‘.... be warned! God be with you.’
Buchanan has sent the same letter to the President expressing his
concern at the way his Archbishop was criticised.
‘What we did not enjoy was the way, without warning, you attacked our
Archbishop, and we were left utterly defenceless ....  We came away with
a clear sense that you were trying to isolate us from our Archbishop,
and equally that in spite of what you said to the contrary, you and your
government are in fact extremely sensitive to criticism.’
Ndungane briefed the Church Leaders Forum, a meeting of all the leaders
of the major denominations, on Thursday on the President’s attack.
In an interview this week, he said: ‘What concerns me is that according
to what I have heard, what was ostensibly a lunch became an attack on
me.
‘If the President, whom I respect very much, had a problem with anything
I have said, he could have called me.’
‘The whole question of freedom of speech is something we have to guard
and I don’t want to allow a purported silencing or an attempt to silence
or to feel that I am being looked upon as a bad boy.’
He said the views he’d expressed in the article appeared to have touched
a raw nerve, but the Church had to speak out for the poor and the
marginalised.
‘I will continue to speak. No one will silence the Church,’ he said.
Nkwe said he came away from the lunch ‘knowing that nothing that was
said would shift my support one iota from the Archbishop.’
The first vice-president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Durban’s
Catholic Archbishop Wilfred Napier, said this week that while he was not
unduly alarmed, the President’s attack on Ndungane had created tension
in the Church.
‘My own experience of President Mandela is that he does things face to
face. Why go about it in this way? It really amazes me.
‘I would bet my bottom dollar that the criticism of the party for
non-delivery prior to an election was the major reason for being so
sensitive,’ he said.

The Homepage address of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa is
http://www.cpsa.org.za/