Moral Radicals: Afrikaners and their Grassroots Ecumenism After Apartheid

Abstract

This article sheds light on grassroots ecumenism by pursuing a largely neglected interest in the participation of Afrikaners, from the late apartheid period to the present, in far-reaching religious and social change in South Africa. The account comprehends an apparent paradox. The more Afrikaners have sought to be inclusive, reaching across differences towards some consensus (humanitarian if not doctrinal), the more strongly and intimately has conflict among them intensified. In their struggles, an old, once formidably entrenched Christian public culture has been profoundly questioned. Now challenged by counterpublics concerned about racism and inequality, that Christian public culture is still being reconstructed, if somewhat fitfully, in ways that are deliberately reasoned and morally passionate. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork, the present analysis shows where and how grassroots ecumenism emerged in various forms in tandem with the institutional ecumenism that was once banned among Afrikaners by their dominant church, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK) or Dutch Reformed Church.

Keywords:

• Afrikanerdom
• counterpublics
• grassroots ecumenism
• moral radicals
• moral personhood

Acknowledgements

I dedicate this article to my esteemed colleague Dr Elaine Salo, whose life, work, and recent passing touched many people. She was a pioneer in many ways, and widely influenced discussions around moral personhood on the Cape Flats, an area of sprawling townships south-east and north of Cape Town.

I thank Amelia Burger and Ilse Evertse for their irreplaceable help with proof-reading different versions of this article, Richard Werbner for his wise and valuable editorial and stylistic guidance, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation for funding the fieldwork and writing phase of this work.

Notes

¹ Earlier notable analyses of Afrikaners’ moral and religious world views have been Crapanzano’s thorough account of the Afrikaners of ‘Wyndal’: V. Crapanzano, Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (New York, Random House, 1985); and Moodie’s of Afrikaner Christian Nationalism: T.D. Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975). Melissa Steyn’s work on ‘white talk’ among Afrikaners should also be mentioned in this regard: M. Steyn, ‘Rehabilitating a Whiteness Disgraced: Afrikaner White Talk in Post‐Apartheid South Africa’, Communication Quarterly, 52, 2 (2004), pp. 143–69. In the 21st century, there has also been research on the reconstruction of Afrikaner identity, as well as on ‘poor whites’. See, especially, J. Sharp and S. van Wyk, ‘Beyond the Market: The Case of White Workers in Pretoria’, in K. Hart (ed.), Economy For and Against Democracy (New York, Berghahn, 2015), p. 120.

² The data for this article came from longer and shorter periods of ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa from 1997, when I studied social anthropology at Stellenbosch University. I moved back to Finland in 2001, and to Sweden in 2012, but have returned almost every year to follow up or do new research in the Cape Town area. On every research trip, I spent a lot of time in Stellenbosch and gradually gained a long-term perspective on changing Afrikaner communities. They understood my position as an anthropologist, read my work, and still chose to help me in my effort to understand their reality. I have also included data from my work over the years in the greater Cape Town area. However, Stellenbosch was the central node and the point of reference for this article, while many ecumenical events took place in Cape Town.

³ On reflexivity as a way of dealing with the blurred boundaries between the ‘private’ and the ‘professional’, see C.A. Davies, Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others (Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2008), pp.70–81.

⁴ A. Teppo, ‘The Making of a Good White: A Historical Ethnography of the Rehabilitation of Poor Whites in a Suburb of Cape Town’ (PhD thesis, University of Helsinki, 2004); A. Teppo, ‘Church Rules? The Lines of Ordentlikheid among Stellenbosch Afrikaners’, Anthropology Southern Africa, 38, 3–4 (2015), pp. 314–30.

⁵ For a more detailed description of these rules and the consequences of breaking them, see Teppo, ‘Church Rules?’

⁶ Ordentlikheid has its important continuity as a cultural repertoire of historically contingent ideas that were significant in the former Cape Colony. See R. Ross, ‘Missions, Respectability and Civil Rights: The Cape Colony, 1828–1854’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 25, 3 (1999), pp. 333-45.

⁷ Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom, pp. 260–62.

⁸ Teppo, ‘The Making of a Good White’; F.C. Ross, ‘Model Communities and Respectable Residents? Home and Housing in a Low-Income Residential Estate in the Western Cape, South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31, 3 (2005), pp. 631–48; S. Jensen, Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town (Oxford, James Currey, 2008); E. Salo, ‘Coconuts Do Not Live in Townships: Cosmopolitanism and its Failures in the Urban Peripheries of Cape Town’, Feminist Africa, 13 (2009), pp. 11–21.

⁹ Teppo, ‘The Making of a Good White’, p. 130.

¹⁰ The NGK was connected to its Dutch mother church from its early days in the 17th century. From the 19th century, it started to develop separately and divided into three churches (the Dutch Reformed Church, the Gereformeerde Kerk or Reformed Church, and the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk, also translated as the Dutch Reformed Church). The NGK eventually split into churches for ‘black’ and ‘coloured’ people, namely the NG Kerk in Afrika (Dutch Reformed Church in Africa), and the Sendingkerk (Mission Church). In 1994, these two churches united as the Verenigende Gereformeerde Kerk (VGK – Uniting Reformed Church), with a small group remaining as the NG Kerk in Afrika.

¹¹ For a more detailed discussion of the religious experimentation of the Stellenbosch youth and the boundaries of ordentlikheid that they drew with regard to these new congregations, see Teppo,‘Church Rules?’

¹² For a broad perspective on the making of cultural change through such interaction involving counterpublics, see M. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, Zone Books, 2002).

¹³ Ibid., p. 62.

¹⁴ Many notable Afrikaner politicians belonged to the two other churches; former President F. W de Klerk, for example, was a member of Gereformeerde Kerk.

¹⁵ A. du Toit, ‘No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology’, American Historical Review, 88, 4 (1983), pp. 920–52.

¹⁶ G.A. Duncan and A. Egan, ‘The Ecumenical Struggle in South Africa: The Role of Ecumenical Movements and Organisations in Liberation Movements to 1965’, Ecclesiastical Law Journal, 17, 3 (2015), pp. 269–82.

¹⁷ J. Robbins, ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity’, Current Anthropology, 48, 1 (2007), pp. 5–38.

¹⁸ Owing to the history of apartheid, the focus in the study of Calvinist theology has been on Afrikaner relations with others, especially African ethnic groups, rather than on its own internal moral order. For a brief commentary on the morality of Afrikaners having a church ethnically identified with themselves, and the verligte/verkrampte moral debate, see Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom, pp. 289–92.

¹⁹ As André du Toit pointed out, there have been many less than successful attempts in the past to explain apartheid and its racial ideas as a product of Calvinist theology. See Du Toit, ‘No Chosen People’. To say this does not mean that Calvinism did not play a considerable role in cultural Afrikanerdom. The real question is how its role should be understood and interpreted.

²⁰ These dominees included names such as Dominee Keet (as early as the late 1940s), Fred van Wyk, Nico Smith and Abraham Viljoen (in the 1980s). See also J.A. Nichols and J.W. McCarty III, ‘When the State is Evil: Biblical Civil (Dis)Obedience in South Africa’, St. John’s Law Review, 85 (2011), pp. 593–625.

²¹ Duncan and Egan, ‘The Ecumenical Struggle’.

²² See, for example, documents published by the Christian Institute of South Africa: B. Naudé, B. Brown, O. Phakathi, R. Meyer and T. Kotze, ‘Divine or Civil Disobedience’ (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1973), and the Kairos theologians’ ‘Kairos Document’, compiled and edited by G.S.D. Leonard (Ujamaa Centre for Biblical and Theological Community Development and Research, University of KwaZulu Natal, 2010 [1985]), available at http://ujamaa.ukzn.ac.za/Libraries/manuals/The_Kairos_Documents.sflb.ashx, retrieved 19 December 2017.

²³ Breytenbach, who had married a ‘coloured’ woman, was found guilty of treason because of alleged terrorist activities, and spent time in prison and eventually in exile. Jonker committed suicide in 1965. Many Afrikaner moral radicals died in exile, anonymous and now forgotten.

²⁴ Meaning, literally, ‘free as a bird’.

²⁵ M. Vestergaard, ‘Who’s Got the Map? The Negotiation of Afrikaner Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Daedalus, 130, 1 (2001), pp. 19–44.

²⁶ D. O’Meara, Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party, 1948–1994 (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1996), p. 368.

²⁷ C. Pienaar, ‘Voëlvry and the “Outlawed” Afrikaners: An Analysis of “The Alternative Afrikaans Music Movement” and Afrikaner Identity’ (M.A. dissertation, University of Witwatersrand, 2012).

²⁸ J.M. van der Merwe, ‘The Dutch Reformed Church from “Human Relations and the South African Scene in the Light of Scripture” to “Church and Society”: The Struggle Goes On’, Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 39, 1 (2013), pp. 137–55.

²⁹ The changes in the church were not unexpected, as Moodie’scritique of volkskerk predicts. See Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom, pp. 289–92.

³⁰ On the nationwide growth of Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches in South Africa, see A.Anderson, ‘New African Initiated Pentecostalism and Charismatics in South Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 35, 1 (2005), pp. 66–92.

³¹ These numbers, according to the NGK publication Die Kerkbode, fell between 1986 and 2010 by 23.8 per cent, from over 1.4 million to 1.1 million; see Juig!, available at https://www.juig.co.za/article.php?id=191, retrieved 20 July 2017.

³² A. Klopper, ‘In Ferocious Anger I Bit the Hand that Controls: The Rise of Afrikaans Punk Rock Music’, in A. Grundlingh and S. Huigen (eds), Reshaping Remembrance: Critical Essays on Afrikaans Places of Memory (Amsterdam, Rozenberg Publishers, 2011), pp. 179–89.

³³ The band was established in 2003 in the mostly Afrikaans suburb of Bellville, Cape Town. The common joke was that Bellville (like Stellenbosch) was located behind the boerewors curtain – in other words, in areas where lots of Afrikaners lived.

³⁴ Klopper, ‘In Ferocious Anger’.

³⁵ Kan iemand dalk 'n god bel / En vir hom sê ons het hom nie meer nodig nie (Fokofpolisiekar, Hemel op die Platteland).

³⁶ Hou jou kop vas / Die probleem is net dat ek nie weet wie ek is nie / Hierdie gaan nog lank vat / Hierdie gaan nog seermaak (Fokofpolisiekar, Tevrede).

³⁷ C. van der Westhuizen, ‘Afrikaners in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Inward Migration and Enclave Nationalism’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 72, 4 (2016), available at http://www.hts.org.za/index.php/HTS/article/view/3351, retrieved 19 January 2017.

³⁸ M. Jackson, ‘Thinking through the Body: An Essay on Understanding Metaphor’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 14 (1983), pp. 127–49.

³⁹ Field notes, Stellenbosch, 2015.

⁴⁰ E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, Anchor Books, 1959).

⁴¹ H. Alava, ‘“There Is Confusion”: The Politics of Silence, Fear and Hope in Catholic and Protestant Northern Uganda’ (PhD thesis, University of Helsinki, 2017).

⁴² C. van Wyk, ‘Kerk en Hof’, e-kerkbode, 12 June 2017, available at http://kerkbode.christians.co.za/2017/06/12/kerk-en-hof/ , retrieved 10 July2017; F. Gaum, ‘Om Met de Kerk hof toe te gaan’, e-kerkbode, 19 May 2017, available at http://kerkbode.christians.co.za/2017/05/19/om-met-die-kerk-hof-toe-te-gaan/, retrieved 10 July2017.

⁴³ Interview with Laurie Gaum conducted by the author, 5 July 2017. All interviews for this article were conducted by the author.

⁴⁴ A dominee, Stellenbosch, 20 December 2016.

⁴⁵ J. Wenzel, ‘Amandla! Awethu!: Energy, Infrastructure, Rights, Services’, Interventions, 18, 6 (2016), pp. 816–22.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 816.

⁴⁷ Formerly the Broederbond (Brotherhood), an elite organisation.

⁴⁸ N. Smith,‘A Church as the Captive of an Ideology: The Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk in Suid Afrika in the Clutches of a Secret Organisation – the Afrikaner Broederbond’, in W. Weisse and C. Anthonissen (eds), Maintaining Apartheid or Promoting Change?: The Role of the Dutch Reformed Church in a Phase of Increasing Conflict in South Africa (Munich, Waxmann, 2004), pp. 67–98.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 95.

⁵⁰ Van der Westhuizen, ‘Afrikaners in Post-Apartheid South Africa’.