According to our Christian tradition, based upon what we have already seen in the Bible, once it is established beyond doubt that a particular ruler is a tyrant or that a particular regime is tyrannical, it forfeits the moral right to govern and the people acquire the right to resist and to find the means to protect their own interests against injustice and oppression. In other words a tyrannical regime has no moral legitimacy. It may be the de facto government and it may even be recognized by other governments and therefore be the de jure or legal government. But if it is a tyrannical regime, it is, from a moral and a theological point of view, illegitimate.

The Kairos Document

It is our belief that civil authority is instituted of God to do good, and that under the biblical imperative all people are obliged to do justice and show special care for the oppressed and the poor. It is this understanding that leaves us with no alternative but to conclude that the South African regime and its colonial domination of Namibia is illegitimate.

Valparaiso University School of Law and the Christian Legal Society annually present a symposium on a critical public issue which is examined from a variety of perspectives. Between October 28-31, 1987, a major symposium was held entitled: “Perspectives on South African Liberation.” In the light of press and other media restrictions in effect since a state of emergency was declared in South Africa on June 12, 1986, and the banning of all political activity by 17 anti-apartheid organizations on February 24, 1988, it is crucial that the world community have access to current information and analysis concerning developments in that tragic land.

The Pretoria regime has renewed the state of emergency for a third year following an unprecedented three-day nationwide protest strike on June 6-8 by more than two million black workers mobilized by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and other anti-apartheid groups to protest the recent bannings, a proposed restrictive labor bill, the continuation of apartheid and the regime's violence. These comments are written on June 16, the 12th anniversary of the Soweto student uprising (now commonly known as South African Youth Day) as several million black workers again defied the regime by staying away from work in honor of the hundred of blacks killed following the 1976 protests against apartheid education.

Before Americans fought their British parents for freedom, we black Africans had fought the Boers in several wars for the preservation of ours. Kings Tshaka, Sekhukhuni and Makhado were continuing where their foreparents had left off. Before today's racist Nationalist Party was born in 1914, we had already established, in 1912, the Native National Congress, today's African National Congress. Before I knew the word “politics,” I had already been uprooted with my community three times in 1951, 1959 and 1961, to make room for whites in newly declared white areas. Before I knew the word “torture,” I had witnessed the brutal beatings of men and women on farms in the Northern Transvaal. Before I knew the word “apartheid,” I had already been denied timely education and daily bread. Before I learned anything about percentages and equality, I already knew that “white” meant more food, more land, more money, more cattle, better housing, better schooling, better health facilities. Before I heard the word “terrorist,” I was already being terrorized. I was already being chased around in Louis Trichardt for a passbook, or for being in town after 9:00 p.m., or for fun. Before I knew the concepts of oppression and exploitation, I knew that our people were killed and buried on the Bethal potato farms.

From an Afrikaner perspective, a firmly established way of life is at stake in the crisis situation of South Africa. The ongoing struggle centers on two passionately held principles. Taken in tandem, these two fundamental convictions have over the years assumed a quasi-confessional status. The one is freedom (vryheid), the other identity (identiteit).

A fierce determination to preserve its privileged freedom pervades the Afrikaner community. They fought long and hard throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to achieve liberation from the stranglehold of English domination and other opposing forces. Within the ranks of Afrikanerdom this hard-won freedom to exploit their own tradition is as clearly a self-evidently righteous cause as it is a self-serving one in the eyes of others. And they are not about to surrender it easily.

I count it a privilege to have been asked by you to reflect on this subject matter which is of grave importance to Christianity as it is witnessed to within the policies of South Africa and America.

The subject matter is of grave importance primarily because one's faith is “de facto” the reference point for one's political statements and actions. Therefore, the Christian faith correlated to the events in South Africa should assist us in determining whether our actions are consistent with the Christian Creeds we confess.

Let us begin with the observable fact that faith is not dead …. Faith is not dead. Faith does with the truth of God not only what Mary, the mother of our Lord, did; it also does what the shepherds did. Peter and John said to the Jewish council: “We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.” So, then, faith results in confession.

Before examining more recent developments, a historical perspective is helpful in coming to understand the emergence and evolution of liberation theology in South Africa. This perspective establishes the contrasts between the passivity of the churches - their flaccid social and political witness - during the first six decades of this century and what followed after the shootings at Sharpeville in 1960.

By the late 19th century, the white Dutch Reformed Churches (DRC) were intimately associated with the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and provided the initial institutional structure around which the volk gathered. As the 20th century unfolded, an Afrikaans language movement, the Afrikaner National Party, a secret society—the Broederbond (Brotherhood), separate volk schools, various welfare organizations and the Federation of Afrikans Cultural Organizations all helped to strengthen the white nationalist movement that was to capture the South African state in 1948. Afrikaner corporations helped to consolidate that power—SANLAM, VOLKSKAS and Federale Mynbou being pre-eminent. Afrikaner leadership was nurtured within the white trade union movement. Having gained control of the state, Afrikaners also came to dominate the civil service as well as the extensive parastatal sector of the apartheid economy. They established their ascendancy in the military and police. As Dr. Malan put it in 1938 when speaking at the centenary of the Battle of Blood River: “The Trekkers received their task from God's hand. They gave their answer. They made their sacrifices. There is still a white race. There is a new volk.” A decade later that nation had come to power.

The Kairos Document presents a theological response to the deepening political crisis in South Africa which has far-reaching consequences for the Christian community in South Africa. The Document is unique because prior to June 1985 the churches tended to reflect a typical, liberal response to the ongoing political crisis. Previous resolutions of the major denominations clearly evidence this viewpoint. The only exceptions to this pattern were the Christian Institute, the University Christian Movement and the Black Theology Movement in South Africa in the early seventies. When we met as a small group of Christians to respond to the deepening political crisis in South Africa, we were very much aware of the serious confusion within the Christian community. Moreover, we knew that the prevailing theologies of our churches exhibited inadequacies and limitations for helping the Christian community to engage in the struggle for liberation.

The eradication of apartheid in South Africa is a major item on the agenda of the international community. The apartheid system fundamentally threatens international peace and security. Moreover, human rights violations in South Africa indict a system of governance fundamentally incompatible with even the most limited interpretation of international law and morality under the United Nations Charter. Thus, the international community is being pressed to weave collaborative strategies to bring South Africa into compliance with contemporary international obligations and expectations.

In the international system, states and other actors commonly employ the bases of power at their disposal in logistic strategies designed to influence others to behave in ways deemed more consistent with their own interests or the common interest of mankind. The strategies invoked may be coercive or persuasive and may involve the use of military force, economic policies, diplomacy or ideology. With regard to apartheid, an increasing international consensus is emerging that the use of economic sanctions against the Republic of South Africa might best facilitate a political transformation from a racial oligarchy to a democratic state.

As a rule, in the Third World, social scientists and governments present their economic strategies in terms of national ends—typically, in the 1980's, as some variant of a supply-side, basic-needs or socialist approach. Similarly, in South Africa, the debate on policies to transform the economy away from apartheid often focused on the feasibility and desirability of different social systems. Yet each strategy originally arose out of a particular analysis of problems commonly afflicting Third World countries, including South Africa. Making that analysis explicit permits a more systematic evaluation of its applicability to South Africa and other countries. To facilitate such an assessment, this article reframes the three development strategies that rose to prominence in the 1980's in line with a problem-oriented, explanatory methodology, and suggests how each general analysis would apply in South Africa.

In the early 1960's, when the winds of change began to blow freedom into southern Africa, the causes of Africa's poverty seemed obvious. Since the turn of the century, colonial regimes had systematically disinherited and disenfranchised the black majority. As a result, while the region enjoyed a wealth of natural resources and, in a number of areas, developed industries and infrastructure, the majority of the population lived at the edge of subsistence.

By the mid-1980's, only South Africa and Namibia still labored under minority or alien rule. Yet even where countries had shed colonialism twenty years earlier, most people endured poverty and powerlessness. Their leaders had come into government promising a radical redistribution of power and wealth. That did not occur. Instead, the region's economies remained largely stagnant and dependent on unstable foreign markets, and the distribution of income and political power remained highly skewed. Poverty and inequality continued because of the failure to use the legal order—that is, the laws and regulations and the behavior of the relevant implementing and law-making institutions—to transform economic and social relationships.

The destruction of the state, the end of law, the dissolution of society, in which terms we can sum up the political situation today, what are these if not the end of the bourgeoisie as a class capable of guaranteeing order, of creating and keeping alive a state?

Antonio Gramsci, quoted in

J. Joll, Antonio Gramsci 77

(1977).

Oppression, it has been said, breeds resistance and struggle. This is a basic law of human development from time immemorial. Like everybody else, the oppressed and exploited peoples of South Africa yearn for and dream of freedom and justice. Though the intensity of their struggle ebbs and flows, crucial junctures have occurred during which years are the equivalent of decades in terms of the intensity of their resistance. During these critical periods, illusions, which otherwise could linger and foster acquiescence, die. It is this state of affairs that has existed since September 1984 when the South African regime moved its troops into the black townships in an attempt to crush popular resistance to apartheid. Eight months later, having failed to do so, the South African government declared a state of emergency on July 21, 1985. Since then, with the exception of a brief period in early 1986, the country has been under continuous rule by emergency power. The powers themselves have been expanded and made more draconian as the regime attempted not only to suppress resistance but to destroy alternative structures organized by the resistance.

The most dramatic development within the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa involves the growth of the black trade union movement. This movement's history (to be addressed later) goes back a number of years and had its first limited success during World War I.

The area of labor-management relationships in South Africa, particularly the development of trade unions, is one area in which the South African government can assert that it has made concessions of substance, albeit within carefully defined constraints. These concessions do not involve what is characterized as the so-called “petty” apartheid policies. They involve, instead, new legislation enacted in a series of statutes beginning in 1979. However, the concessions were soon constrained and limited because the black trade unions were and are operating in South Africa in the context of a number of policies and laws which do not fall under the rubric of labor law, but which nevertheless have a substantial impact upon the ability of the black trade union movement to function effectively. (Indeed, it seems apparent that the government is now curtailing union activities in political and other spheres as of this writing in February 1988.)

I am an ordinary worker who became part of the trade union movement in the early 1970's when South Africa was hit by a wave of strikes which eventually spread to the whole country. My experience of apartheid is a practical one. I never read about it in books. Instead, I am a direct product of that system.

I would like to begin by stating that trade unions in South Africa are as old as trade unions in North America. While black trade unions in South Africa were not legally recognized until 1979, black trade unionism dates as far back as 1919 when blacks were organized within the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICWU) which, at its peak, had 100,000 members. In the 1940's, many black unions existed and received guidance from the Council of Non-European Trade Unions (CNETU) which had emerged in 1941 as a coordinating body of black trade unions under progressive leadership.

Since 1984 South Africa has been marked by black violence and resistance, followed by repressive controls, stringent censorship, recurring states of emergency, and an embattled white regime. Many questions arise: is white rule in South Africa drawing to an end, or is the current violence part of the cycle of violence that has characterized South Africa under the apartheid regime? Is the present government able to institute constitutional changes that will appease black discontent and return the country to stability, or are these reforms reminiscent of the futile constitutional efforts made by white Rhodesians in the waning days of their rule? Is white South Africa ready to make far-reaching changes in the repressive apartheid system, or are there non-negotiables over which compromise is impossible? Are current efforts to return the country to order and stability inherently flawed because they seek to appease African discontent, while at the same time sustaining white power and privilege? Some of the answers to these questions are embedded in current political, economic and social directions within South Africa.

What has happened here thus far is precisely what we needed to see: an analysis of what is happening in other parts of Africa and an honest exchange of views, including disagreements, in preparation for the kinds of discussions which must be undertaken right now about the future of South Africa. That is what I propose to address.

A couple of preliminary remarks, however. Let me thank Valparaiso University and the School of Law for inviting me and the other speakers. This kind of discussion is extremely useful. Also, I direct your attention to our symposium at the University of Pittsburgh scheduled for March 17-19, 1988, the third in a series of symposia addressing post-apartheid South Africa. The sessions are open to the public, registration is free and some of the participants here will present papers. At previous symposia, we have had people like Professor Bob Seidman and representatives of the ANC, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the Black Consciousness Movement, the United Democratic Front and the South African Council of Churches. Other participants have included Aggrey Mbere, Godfrey Sithole, Ben Magubane and Jacqueline Williams. In addition, people like Peter Mahlangu would make an important contribution in the area of future labor relations and labor legislation.