TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 3

Subsection 7

Repression and abuse of religious values and laws

73 Despite the many different religious allegiances of its subjects, the apartheid state saw itself as the guardian of ‘Christian civilisation’ in southern Africa. From the time of the arrival of the colonists in the seventeenth century, other faith communities were barely tolerated. Using education as its weapon, the apartheid state perpetuated this. Christian National Education was imposed on non-Christian faith communities – a fact highlighted in Muslim and Hindu submissions. The expression of certain religious values in education was repressed and other alien values were imposed. This was true even in the case of such Christian communities as the amaNazaretha where taboos concerning shaving were not honoured in schools and children were forced to remove their hair, causing ritual defilement.

74 Related to the repression of religious values in education was the repression of religious law, especially in the case of Islam and Hinduism. Muslim marriages observed by the Ulamas were not legally valid, making their children illegitimate.²⁸ The MYM pointed out that the state was also able to use religious laws to suit its own ends. It recalled how the Ulamas were co-opted onto a South African Law Commission committee on the recognition of Muslim marriage in 1986 - a cynical attempt on the part of the state to gain the approval of the Islamic community.²⁹

75 The religious values of the Baha’i faith preclude opposition to governments, a position contested by other faith communities. While its racially mixed worship practices and black leadership resulted in state surveillance, members of the so-called ‘black Baha’i’ were traitors in the eyes of some other blacks. This resulted in the tragic execution of four of its adherents at its places of worship in Umtata and Mdantsane.

Manipulation by state propaganda

76 The apartheid state targeted faith communities in other ways. Evangelical groups such as the Church of England said it was subjected to state propaganda, especially in relation to the struggle against Communism. Such propaganda played on white fears and distorted the meaning of the Bible which the church saw as authoritative. It was thus “misled into accepting a social, economic and political system that was cruel and oppressive” and “failed to adequately understand the suffering of [its] many black members who were victims of apartheid.”³⁰ It might be an over-statement to link such ‘victimisation’ with the more direct and violent attacks by the state on anti-apartheid leaders. However, the fears of white church members made them vulnerable to propaganda, leading them into sins of omission. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Chairperson of the Commission said:

I would want and I’m sure that all of my fellow Christians would want to apologise to you members of other faiths for our arrogance as Christians when for so very 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 multi-faith society.

Victimisation by other faith communities

77 Churches willingly engaged in fomenting division in society and were paralysed by propaganda. The demonisation and dehumanisation of other faith communities were prevalent, especially in conservative and right wing Christian groups. In 1986, at the same synod where its policy of uncritical support for apartheid was beginning to be challenged, the Dutch Reformed Church proclaimed Islam a “false religion”.³¹ The victimisation of African Traditional Religion by Christians was highlighted in the submission of Nokuzola Mndende: Africans were forced to become Christians, as a baptismal certificate was a common form of identification.

78 As Farid Esack observed at the hearings, the past was only partly about apartheid, security laws and so on: “It was also about Christian triumphalism.” All non-Christian faith communities were victimised by an aggressively ‘Christian’ state, and die Islamse gevaar took its place alongside the other enemies of the state.

79 There were other kinds of victimisation of one faith community by another – even within Christian churches. The submissions indicate that this took a number of forms, from denominational splits to the appropriation of buildings declared off-limits to black people under Group Areas legislation.³² Fault lines developed in churches on questions of commitment to the struggle, and conservative ‘splinters’ proliferated.³³ While these newer institutions often claimed ‘theological’ reasons for their existence as alternatives to mainline groups, many served the state as ‘shadow’ institutions and denominations set up to oppose those who were against apartheid policies. The Evangelical Fellowship of Congregational Churches, a breakaway from the United Congregational Church, was set up in the wake of the debate over that church’s membership of the World Council of Churches. It was linked to churches funded by the state and exposed in the 1979 information scandal.³⁴

A special note on gender and faith communities

80 The representatives of faith communities at the hearings were overwhelmingly male. Only four of the sixty-six persons who appeared before the Commission in East London were women, and little mention was made of the links between racial, class and gender oppression. Women and women’s groups played key roles in supporting victims and opponents of human rights abuses, as witnessed by the fact that most of those who testified at the human rights violations hearings were women, and usually did so on behalf of others rather than themselves. Yet, in churches and mosques, as elsewhere, they were relegated to secondary status.