Christianity and Revolution in Southern Africa || The Church's Dilemma in Southern Africa

The Church's Dilemma in Southern AfricaAuthor(s): Ralph E. DodgeSource: Africa Today, Vol. 15, No. 3, Christianity and Revolution in Southern Africa (Jun. -Jul., 1968), pp. 12-14Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184910 .

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Tie Church's Dilemma in Southern Africa

Ralph E. Dodge

The Use of Violence What position should the churches take in

face of increasing violence in southern Africa? Should they condemn, condone, or cooperate with the revolutionary forces? In this matter the churches will not speak with unanimity, but they will speak. Even in silence they will speak. Their silence is a vote to support the subtle spiritual violence operative wherever patterns of discrimination and injustice prevail.

The Christian church is increasingly concerned about the use of violence in any form. Jesus' ex- ample in rejecting the use of force to save himself is and always will be an ideal toward which Christian people will strive. Harmonious and creative cooperation with all other members of society in bringing about a just social order is the ideal.

Spiritual violence is as distasteful to the Christian as any other kind of violence. Whatever stultifies and damages the spirit is injurious to the total man. Any use of force to uphold discrimination, which breeds injustices and thwarts man in his normal development, cannot be justified in the light of the gospel.

In southern Africa, namely in the Republic of South Africa, Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique and South West Africa, some thirty million non- whites live in the midst of, and are controlled so- cially, economically, and politically by four million whites with the cooperation of metropolitan Portugal and other outside western interests. This control is maintained by the use of both spiritual and physical force.

Non-whites cannot develop to the full stature of personhood because of the environment in which they live. This conditioning environment is maintained by the use of spiritual force backed up by the use of physical force wherever and whenever the white-dominated governments think it is needed.

From the beginning, where treaties could not be secured, the whites took over southern Africa by force. By the use of the lash and palmatorio they have maintained their position. They have kept their guns in their holsters and their hands free should more humane forms of suppression fail. There had been a few decades of comparative calm, but with the arrival of the current decade greater physical force is being used.

The 1960 Sharpeville incident in South Af- rica, the Portuguese reprisals against defenseless villagers in Angola in 1961, and the Rhodesian hangings in 1968 will forever be a reminder to Africans that if the exercise of spiritual force should fail to maintain the status quo, machine guns, steel bullets, and the hangman's noose will

do the~ job. Police dogs, helicopters with bombs, and large well-equipped armies are further re- minders. In brief, for decades (and even centuries in some instances) violence has been employed against the dispossessed black people in southern Africa. Traditionally violence has been used subtly to cow the spirit, mold the mind, and limit the development of all persons with dark skins. Now that this more covert type of violence is failing, the display and use of physical force is increasing -in the attempt to keep dark-skinned people in their place.

Since becoming politically conscious, the Blacks of southern Africa have tried to negotiate for more adequate representation in the power structure of society. In some instances token representation has been granted, as in the 1961 con- stitution in Rhodesia, but it is meaningless so long as the rights of the whites alone are entrenched. Every attempt by Africans at peaceful confrontation in demonstrations, strikes, and dis- cussion has been met by more restrictive legisla- tion against them and the granting of more power to police and other security agents. As a result, politically-conscious Africans have given up all hope for peaceful reconciliation and are resorting to the use of counter violence. Currently this is taking the form of sabotage and guerrilla activity, fairly intense and constant in some areas, sporadic elsewhere. Indications are that guerrilla activity will increase until the African liberation groups achieve their goals of majority governments. There is the sinister possibility that the conflict may increase in intensity until there is open war- fare in which the entire world may become in- volved in a global racial struggle. The Responsibility of the Churches: A Dichotomy

As the churches look at the agonizing situation in southern Africa they recall their own traditional involvement, which has been both posi- tive and negative.

The churches recognize that they are partly responsible for a divided society. Had they rejected the concept of superior and inferior people and insisted on oneness in Christ, the apartheid laws would never have been established and even today would be quickly undermined, weakened, and replaced. But, because the churches still uphold the concept of white superiority, with Af- ricans living under "Ham's curse," the fellowship has been broken, making way for a political phi- losophy of separatismn. It is only through a broken fellowship that segregation can take place. By their exclusiveness the churches have permitted the broken fellowship and have become partners in the spiritual violence that gave birth to the monster which is threatening to destroy all southern Africa.

On the other hand, it has been largely through

12 AFRICA TODAY



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the educational activity of the churches that Af- rican people have become politically self-conscious in a national and world scope. Some of the young people have read history in the universities of Europe and America and have come to understand the dynamics of history as applied to an emerging continent. They feel their repsonsibility, as the enlightened of their generation, to do some- thing to assist their subjugated brothers in their struggle against the injustices that impede them in their march toward creative maturity. Largely throuigh the schools and through the press the churches have created an expectation for better things even among the less-educated.

The churches have also directly stimulated the imagination and created a hope in the most humble people by the preaching of the gospel with its underlying assumption of the worth of the individual as a child of God. Even where the churches have denied the right of an inclusive fellowship the gospel has proclaimed that right to all who could read or understand. The procla- mation and acceptance of the gospel conditioned man for a more abundant life. The African political leaders have made this their spring-board and, in their efforts to spell out their self-discovery in action, have encountered- to a large extent-

a rigid and controlled church that denies the fluit- age of the gospel.

There has developed, therefore, a dichotomy between the teaching of the gospel and the prac- tices of the churches, causing an emotional rejec- tion og the churches by many Africans. Even though the carrier may be rejected completely the essence of the message has been at work.

The western churchmen may have thought of redemption in eschatological terms, but Africans gave it a more practical and temporal interpre- tation and set out to claim their inheritance.

The Positions of Church Leaders Now that Africans are determined to claim

that inheritance even with counter violence-this time no more defenseless black bodies against whizzing lead-what is the position of the church?

The leaders of the churches are divided in their approach to the southern Africa problem. Some have condoned the injustices of the past and,; by their attitudes and pronouncements, are giving encouragement to the white agents of suppression today. While condoning the violence of the whites in maintaining control, they cry out against the use of counter violence by the liberation alacks. They have adjusted to a pattern of life that they admit is not ideal. But it has brought certain benefits to them personally and to their racial group, and they are willing to have it maintained at any cost. The injustices of the pattern are unfortunate, they say, but it is better to maintain the known, even with its unfair prac- tices, than to move blindly into the unknown. Thus a fairly large group of churchmen, mainly whites, will uphold the establishment and condemn any revolutionary force that attempts to disrupt it.

At the other extreme are those whose con- demnation of the traditional injustices of the situation is so complete that they welcome and will participate in a revolutionary task force, no matter how violent. This group is largely composed of Africans. They justify their action by the fact that all attempts at peaceful change have been spurned by those in power. They feel the only alternatives are either to continue living under repressive conditions or else to rebel violently. To submit to the first alternative, they say, is to live under inhuman conditions where the body be- comes stunted, the spirit embittered, and the mind often warped. In thi5 group are also Christians who sincerely think there is such a thing as a just war.

For those who have never lived under conditions of discrimination and repression it is easy to say that the spirit of man can develop under adverse circumstances. And it is true that suffer- ing and repression can make a Gandhi, an Albert Luthuli, or a Martin Luther King, Jr., but the masses are not made of such noble stuff. Under constant repression, even torture, they wither, become poisonously bitter, or accept the injustices as normal and sell themselves and their children into spiritual slavery. The older generation has generally conformed; the younger generation is revolting almost en masse and turning to violence

13



as the only possible way of escaping the injustices of the present situation.

A third group views the increasing injustices legalized in southern Africa with deep concern. Many of both major races find themselves in this position. They oppose those perpetuating the injustices aind violence of the government and re- gimes-in-power, but as Christians they shrink from the use of physical violence to change it.

If one approaches the ,situation rationally he may well come to different conclusions. The Christian absolutists will hold that violence is never tolerable. Then what do they say and do about the violence constantly practiced by whites in southern Africa? Rationally they cannot condone the actual violence of the whites and condemn the counter violence of the blacks. The whole situation in southern Africa is violent, with more destructive violence in the making.

The Christian relativist will see counter violence as the only apparent or possible way of righting the wrongs so deeply entrenched in southern African society. If all attempts at peaceful demonstration have failed, as apparently they have,-if all attempts at creative confrontation have been spurned, as they have, then he feels the only visible solution is a confrontation of force with force. The injustices are many and of long duration. From the human perspective there seems no other way to right them. He realizes that this, too, may fail, as have many "righteous

wars" of the past. But in attempting to do some- thing concrete he finds fulfillment.

The Dilemma of Violence Christians, both black and white, are caught

in this dilemma of violence. The Christian ideal is harmonious fellowship. In southern Africa that fellowship has been broken. Violence has occurred and is now built into the very structure of or- ganized society. Counter violence is being used to try to destroy the structure and right the wrongs. Because she has not insisted on the rights of human dignity and justice from the first the church seems to be trapped between violence and counter violence and has no concrete alternative to offer.

If the church in its entirety would, it could act so as to make unnecessary the use of counter violence. It could bring about peaceful change. But to do so it would have to dissociate itself from the current political, economic, and social structure of southern Africa. This is possible, but un- likely.

Thus there will be Christians who, by circum- stance, feel forced to identify themselves with those who seek change peacefully but are pre- pared to use counter force if necessary. Even when we cannot fully agree 'with their violent action we can understand their position and re- dedicate ourselves to the search for more con- structive methods of attaining justice.

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Christianity and Revolution in Southern Africa || The Church's Dilemma in Southern Africa