TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 3

Subsection 10

Withdrawing from state structures

98 Another way that faith communities - and here in this ostensibly ‘Christian’ land we must speak of churches - expressed opposition to apartheid was by withdrawing from state structures in which they were complicit, particularly the military.

99 It is significant that the preamble to the Tricameral Constitution declared that South Africa was a Christian state, even though the structures it proposed aimed at co-opting groups with many Muslim and Hindu members. Opposition to the Tricameral Constitution was strong, and there was an “overwhelming consensus” amongst Muslims that it was “contrary to the spirit of Islam”. Hindu leaders who participated were ostracised, the Maha Sabha told the hearings. The United Congregational Church urged its members to distance themselves from the Tricameral Parliament and removed such participants as the Reverends Alan Hendrickse and Andrew Julies - two former chairs of the United Congregational Church - from their ministers’ roll.

100 While many churches drew upon the just war tradition within Christianity, others were opposed to combat as a tenet of faith. For Seventh Day Adventists and Quakers, to have served in the military (on either side) would have meant apostasy from their faith tradition.⁴⁴ Many leaders in the conscientious objection movement were Christians and objected on the basis of Christian principles.⁴⁵ Individual Catholic priests refused to act as military chaplains or marriage officers, as did some clergy in the Uniting Reformed Church.⁴⁶ The Quakers and the SACC issued resolutions in 1974 supporting conscientious objectors. The United Congregational Church spoke of its “constant support” for objectors, the principle of objection and the End Conscription Campaign. It also refused to be co-opted onto the SADF-sponsored Board for Religious Objection. The Presbyterian Church, which had supported the rights of conscientious objectors from 1971, spoke of how, in 1982, it had initiated a process “aimed at moving the denomination towards opposing service in the SADF.” While it did not withdraw its chaplains until 1990 (underlining again the gap between resolution and action), it met in 1988 with delegations from the ANC and the PAC to discuss the possibility of appointing chaplains to their liberation armies. The United Congregational Church also supplied “pastoral care” to the liberation movements, including the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), while the Church of the Province was in the unusual position of seeing its defence force chaplains providing succour to an army of occupation in Angola and Namibia and did so only ‘unofficially’.

Civil disobedience and passive resistance

101 Another way in which faith communities expressed opposition to the policies of apartheid was through deliberate disobedience of state laws. From 1981, for example, the Presbyterian Church embarked on a campaign of defying laws on mixed marriages, group areas and quoting banned persons and publications. This followed the work of the Reverend Rob Robertson at a local level, whose multi-racial and multi-class congregations in East London and Johannesburg represented “the first move to take actual steps to reverse the segregating effects of apartheid on congregations and to set an example to the nation”.⁴⁷

102 Other local congregations deliberately flouted laws by promoting mixed worship. The Baha'i Faith came under scrutiny for insisting that its members meet together across racial boundaries and the Ulama spoke of Muslims of different race groups worshipping and studying together. It can be argued that these were not always deliberate acts of defiance,⁴⁸ but were simply activities that conformed to the norms of the faith community’s tradition - sharing a common faith across racial barriers. The fact that they flew in the face of the state only underlined the fact that the state’s policy was wrong. Institutional resistance was expressed, for instance, in the Catholic Church’s opening of its schools to all races in 1976 – something which engaged it in battle with the state until 1991.