SPIRITUAL AND IDEOLOGICAL DYNAMICS AT THE CAPE PART 1 March 2015)

Spiritual and Ideological Dynamics at the Cape

                                                               PART 1

              “Much more is wrought by prayer than this world dream of ...”

                                                                                                                              Alfred Tennyson

                        

Content

1. Roots of Cape Social Evils                                                            

2. Cape Missionary Outreach under Dutch Rule                             

3. Evangelical Zeal confront colonial Policy                                            

5. Early ‘Spiritual Warfare’ at the Cape                                          

5. Cape Political Ferment                                                                          

6. Great Cape Fighters of the early 20^th Century                              

7. Diverse Spiritual Dynamics        

Opposition to Fascism

Cape Nazi's did not have it quite their own way. Malan's challenge to the House - that South Africa has a Jewish problem - received a firm rebuttal by Jan Hofmeyr, the Deputy Prime Minister, denouncing anti-Semitism as something hateful. ‘It is in conflict with the feelings of humanity, without which we cannot build up the soul of a nation’ (Cited in Berger, 1979:56).  The minister of the Interior, Mr R. Stuttaford characterised Dr Malan’s motion as unabashed racialism. An interesting development was the formation of various ant-Fascist organisations including the ‘Friends of the Soviet Union’. To the credit of Dr Malan was that he did not follow through on his intentions when he became Prime Minister. But that was after World War II when Hitler was merely a bad memory. In a very strange switch, he became the first foreign Statesmen to visit the new state of Israel in 1953. With an obvious change of heart, he thereafter continued a policy of friendship towards the Jewish State.

     The main opposition to Fascism and anti-Semitism came from a group of young UCT students who came together in 1938 to form the New Era Fellowship (NEF) - along with a few other intellectuals who were likewise influenced by the Trotzkyist variation of Communism. The movement which had its hub in District Six, reacted strongly against all the ‘ja baas’ men, who had links to the United Party of Jan Smuts and company, whom they dubbed collaborators and quislings.[1] The elitist element was typical. The original Marxism was much closer to Christianity. In fact, his preference of poverty and exile to benefit mankind had been highlighted by no less than Olive Schreiner in her Letter to the Jew, which was read by her husband at a protest meeting in 1906 Cape Town against pogroms in Russia.

Early opposition against the apartheid theory

Geoff Cronje, one of a group of Afrikaners who studied in Nazi-time Germany, coined the term apartheid as a political concept in a book published in 1942. Apartheid was given a biblical justification in a book of essays by a prominent theologian, E.P. Groenewald (and edited by Cronje). The two Afrikaners cleverly high-jacked the ideas of the Dutch theologian and politician, Abraham Kuyper. Apartheid as ideology thus had a pristine link to Nazi Germany. The Ossewabrandwag movement, in which the Vorster brothers John and Koot were prominent, made no secret where their sympathies were in the war against Germany. Started in February 1939 as an off-shoot of the Great Trek centenary celebrations, it had a paramilitary wing, which claimed to have 100, 000 members in a few years. Eric Walker describes the Ossewabrandwag as ‘the most influential popular movement since the Great Trek itself’, Dr D.F. Malan called it the ‘greatest Afrikaner Association outside the Church’ (Walker, 1964: 678, 714). In this climate it is not so surprising that Ds J.D. Vorster, a member of the Ossewabrandwag, was found guilty of contravening the Official Secrets Act in 1940.

          One of the ideologists from these ranks, Oswald Pirow, spelt out clearly the ‘New Order’ he envisaged. When he sensed because he could be expelled from Malan’s party, he withdrew to form the New Order Party. The views of this group contained little less than naked racism, White supremist Herrenvolk notions.

          Professor R.F.A. Hoernlé of the University of the Witwatersrand, was the founder and president of the Institute of Race Relations. In 1936 he helped to organize the ‘Society of Jews and Christians’ and served on the editorial board of its journal, Common Sense. Hoernlé cleverly opposed all racist notions, defining cleverly what the ‘New Order’ should be like: ‘it is clear than any ‘new’ order should have to make an end of the master-race versus servant-race structure’. Completely against current trends, he went on to suggest that the franchise should be extended to Blacks ‘ultimately on the same terms on which whites possess it.’ For 1940 that was probably utopian, but indeed ‘Common Sense’, the name of the periodical of which he was the editor. He went on to say in the same edition (February 1940, cited by Lewsen, 1988:97): ‘But, more important even than the franchise, would be admitting individual Africans, as they achieved the required education, into all the professions, into the civil service, into leading positions in public life…and thereby to social equality with whites of similar standing while correspondingly whites would mingle with Africans through all the grades of skilled and unskilled labour.’ That sort of language will not have gone down well with the rank and file White, nor his prophetic statement in the same article: ‘the caste society cannot endure for ever. But it will be broken up, not under white leadership from within, but either by the impact of world events from without, or by Africans themselves gradually acquiring a unified group consciousness and taking their fate into their own hands.’ The other main source of opposition segregation theory from Whites at that time was in the houses of Parliament via the ‘native representatives’, who as a rule were linked to Hoernlé’s Institute of Race Relations where Donald Molteno, a young Cape advocate, the academic Edgar Brookes, Hyman Basner, Margaret Ballinger and Senator J.D. Rheinallt Jones all made significant contributions. However, where Jones was a conservative liberal, who hoped to reform without tackling the fundamental problems, Brookes on the other hand, had a convincing change of heart. He argued for a complete change of structure, politically as well as economically. Hyman Basner, who replaced Rheinallt Jones in 1943, harangued the Senate in a ‘frontal attack on the whole segregation system’ (Cited by Lewsen, 1988:27).

          In the House of Assembly the outstanding other ‘native representatives’ for many years were Margaret Ballinger and Donald Molteno. With her fine insight she saw already in March 1939 where ‘the increasing violence of anti-colour propaganda … the main plank now in the Nationalist Party platform’ was leading: ‘… some of the rights of the coloured people will soon go the way of the rights which the native people once had here in the Cape Province (Cited by Lewsen, 1988:33). A special achievement of the ‘native representatives’ was when Deneys Reitz, the Minister of Native Affairs attacked the pass laws in 1942 in the Senate as the greatest cause of ill-feeling in race relations. He undertook to consult Jan Smuts, the prime minister and the cabinet, with the result that the application of the pass laws was eased somewhat; only if an intended crime was suspected, the police would ask for passes.

          Unfortunately a series of strikes by Blacks caused public opinion to demand a stricter implementation of the pass laws. Reitz became a liability, removed from the Cabinet and posted to London as High Commissioner.

Evangelistic expansion

Probably the first indigenous church planting move at the Cape started in District Six.  A strong element of ‘Coloured’ Nationalism was present when Rev. Joseph J. Forbes started his ‘Volkskerk van Afrika’ on 14 May 1922. This visionary had the courage of his conviction to start a denomination for the upliftment of the poor from the Cape to Cairo. That is the reason why he gave his church a continental name. In only 14 years there were already 13 branches, 6 normal schools (as opposed to night schools) and the orphanage at Jonkersdam, which was later transferred to the Lawrencia Institution, Kraaifontein. Very significant of this denomination was that they had a special anthem, which was sung at their annual commemoration that hailed the protea, ‘blom van ons vaderland.’[2] The denomination made inroads in geographical areas where the traditional churches became slack. They even started a church in Genadendal, the first mission station of the Moravians albeit that this congregation broke away from the new denomination that was governed from Stellenbosch and expanded to places like Oudtshoorn and far-away Kimberley.

          Evangelism started to expand significantly in the 1930s. The depression of the early 1930s appears to have caused a new fire for evangelism. The start of the Docks Mission is a case in point. When John Crowe listened to an open-air service of the Salvation Army in Adderley Street in 1932, he was touched.  How happy his prayerful mother was when he shared that he had decided to follow Jesus! The ‘slightly Coloured’ family - as those with a fair complexion from that racial group used to be called - attended the Baptist Church in the Mother City’s Wale Street. Almost immediately the 18-year old John Crowe wanted to share the gospel with other people in the neighbourhood of Roggebaai - the area where Andrew Murray also evangelized. With his namesake John Johnson he soon struck a partnership, getting involved in open-air services at different places. Later they were especially active on the Grand Parade, Cape Town’s Hyde Park corner, where various political groups and others had their meetings. Harold, John Johnson’s brother, joined them at a later stage. When people started committing their lives to Jesus through their ministry, they asked for permission to conduct meetings in one of the Railway cottages that soon became too small. They then rented a wood and iron construction that was called the ‘Tin Shanty.’

          An evangelistic outreach was gradually picking up via Bo-Kaap and District Six in the first half of the twentieth century. Open-air services were prominent in this drive, with the Salvation Army, the Docks Mission and the Cape Town City Mission in the forefront. 

          Soon also the ‘Tin Shanty’ had become too small. In the 1950s the fellowship was allowed to use the hall adjacent to the Holy Trinity Church in Harrington Street that belonged to the Church of England in South Africa.

Growth of Sects at the Cape

At the Cape the New Apostolic Church experienced phenomenal growth. Only in 1902 Wilhelm Schlaphoff was sealed and ‘commissioned to lay the foundation for the Lord’s work in Cape Town’ (cited in Duncan, 1978: 13) for the New Apostolic Church. German immigrants were the first to be reached and the services were conducted in German. Tertullian’s adage – The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church -with regard to persecution and opposition, also worked in their favour. The founders ‘were often in danger of their lives, they were pelted with dirt and stones and they were threatened repeatedly’ (Cited in Duncan, 1978: 13). In a comparatively short time congregations were founded in Kensington, Heathfield, Somerset West and Paarl.

          On December 5, 1928 evangelist H.F. Schlaphoff, the son of the Cape Town pioneer of the sect, became the successor, ordained in Germany as an apostle the following year. By 1931 there were already 70 congregations under the jurisdiction of Schlaphoff, who was made responsible for work outside South Africa. Apostle De Vries was given great due for the rapid growth of congregations among the ‘Coloureds’. The group was well ahead of the mainline churches in the vision to empower indigenous people when they ordained District Elder S.M Bhulana to the apostle ministry on 12 October 1958. The Headquarters of the Movement in South Africa was established in Southfield, a suburb on the Cape Flats, where some of the living apostles have offices.

          The Jehovah’s Witnesses is another sect which had major successes, especially among the Non-Whites. In the spiritual realm this sect offered support to Islam because doctrinally it also opposes the Trinity and the deity of Jesus.

          The Seventh Day Adventist Church has traditionally been regarded as a sect. The legalism of the group may have contributed in a big way to this label, but the Church universal will in time have to look anew at her biblical origins. Church history has a big blot on this score when the 4^th century emperor Constantine declared Sunday as a rest day in 321 CE. In South Africa the group has been strongest at the Cape among the ‘Coloureds’.

          The doctrinally less burdened house church movement that started in China because of the atheist persecution was soon influencing things in different parts of the world. At the beginning of the new millennium such churches sprang up after committed members of mainline churches started to get together in homes for the purpose of fellowship and worship on week-days.

Spiritual vitality of praying women

The spurning and suppression of women with regard to leadership went a completely different route. Instead of getting bitter and resentful, Black women especially appeared to have accepted male leadership gracefully. Until the late 1940s church groups organised activities among these women. The manyanos (the Xhosa word for prayer unions) tended to focus at the Cape around church-based voluntary associations. They would often allow the men to formally open meetings, in which they participated as speakers. Thus one finds in a report of the Primitive Methodist Church how in an evangelistic campaign by women from Johannesburg in the Free State thirty three people were impacted under the preaching of three different women from Saturday evening to Monday, 22-24 September 1919 (cited by Deborah Gaitskell in Elphick et al, 1997:253). The manyanos turned out to be instruments of Black empowerment virtually second to none. Here women leaders would not only pray and preach, but here dignity and political awareness developed. A Xhosa female poet wrote about the praying women of a store boycott in the country town of Herschel:

                    ‘Right from the start, manyanos the shield to ward

                          To ward off the white man’s arrows’

(cited by Deborah Gaitskell in Elphick et al, 1997:254).

          The practice and hurts of apartheid society was possibly the reason for determined resistance in the 1950s to reshape their meetings to provide more practical instruction and community activism.

          Whereas White and some ‘Coloured’ church women’s groups concentrated on fund raising, Black women amended their name soon to ‘Prayer and Service Union.’ The social and mutual support offered by prayer groups helped compensate for the isolation and poor social structures which Western missionaries held up as models. Testimonies, preaching and spontaneous prayer became the lifeblood of Black Christian groups. In the prayer groups they could develop their potential as orators without first having to be literate. In accepting a role in moral teaching of their adolescent children, Black Christian women turned their backs on pre-christian norms, by which female relatives other than the mother had provided sex education. In general, the spiritual life of manyano women appears to have been more creative and vital than that of the other racial groups. Dawn prayer and nights of prayer were quite common.

          Among the ‘Coloureds’ at the Cape there were ‘gebedskringen’ in which both sexes participated but they appear to have kept social and political issues outside their meetings. Alcoholism and in the latter quarter of the 20^th century drug abuse were exceptions. Racial mixing happened in the early part of the century, but increasingly the apartheid patterns became the order of the day. Whereas some two hundred women also included other races (than Black) attending the annual district manyano in 1930 in Ndabeni, White churches would at best provide garages and the like (not even their church halls) for the religious meetings of their domestic servants.

Racism and denominationalism amputate promising beginnings

South Africa was on the verge of becoming a world force in missions when the cancerous racism and competitive denominationalism hit the mission movement at the core. The Groote Kerk refused to rent their school building for the use of Muslim outreach by Ds. G. B. A. Gerdener. Luckily a hall could be rented from a certain Mr Lowe, possibly the founder of the Cape Town City Mission.

          The blessed work ‘t Uitkomst, a house in District Six started by Rev. G.B.A. Gerdener in 1916 to accommodate converts from Islam, was closed around 1928. By this time it housed 30 neglected children in its successor in Gabriel Road, Wynberg (Plumstead). The cause of the closure was the lack of support of the `Moeder- en Sendingkerk.’

          The anointed ministry of the gifted Rev. A.J. Liebenberg in the 1920s - who came to the Cape after a stint in Nyasaland (the present Malawi) - merely camouflaged the real situation in the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC).  Apparently Liebenberg knew what he was in for. In December 1935 he described Muslim evangelism in the Koningsbode as ‘die moeilijkste sendingwerk wat enige mens kan onderneem’ and ‘die onvrugbaarste van alle sendingonderneminge’ - the most difficult work anybody can undertake and the least fruitful of missionary endeavours. This wise counsel would have saved a lot of frustration had it been generally known. Many a missionary and co-worker were still to be honourably wounded in the frustrating outreach to Cape Muslims in the subsequent decades of the 20th century.

Bigoted church politics

South Africa got to the verge of becoming a world force in missions when the cancerous racism and competitive denominationalism hit the mission movement in the core. White Christians unintentionally brought with them the baggage of racial superiority. Cilliers suggests aptly that they were themselves thus handcuffed (Cilliers, 1997:164). By the mid-19^th century ‘racism had become an important ideological pedestal for the Western self-image of superiority’ (Esterhuyse, 1979:22). In this process pseudo-science gave valuable assistance. Darwin’s epoch-making work with the title On the Origin of the species of Natural Selection of 1859 had as sub-title the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

          The teaching in the church seemed to have been lacking with regard to sensitivity to the Holy Spirit, e.g. the challenge that men of God should be at the right place at the right time. This happened although Dr Andrew Murray had taught the church worldwide in the teaching on the work of the Holy Spirit. Too often the arch enemy succeeded in luring gifted people to less effective ministry. Thus it might have looked strategic that the prodigious Ds Gerdener - who had been set aside especially for Muslim outreach - became a theology professor. Looking back, it is easy to see that Gerdener’s move to the Kweekskool at Stellenbosch, the theological seminary there, was not wise. He himself became handcuffed as his 1919 biography of Sarel Cilliers, a prominent voortrekker, demonstrates. This book served to entrench the myth of the covenant of Blood River (Thompson, 1985:181), that was tosow so much division and enmity between White and Black people the next few decades.

          The DRC by and large lost its vision to reach out to the Muslims, even though Gerdener was hereafter one of the mentors to their future ministers for many years (By his own admission, Ds Davie Pypers, who studied under Gerdener and who became a pioneer missionary to the Cape Muslims in the second half of the 20th century, did not get his inspiration for Muslim outreach at Stellenbosch. This only happened after he had become a minister at St Stephen’s in Bo-Kaap).

     At Stellenbosch Gerdener became closely aligned to the race policy of the National Party.  In fact, Gerdener became so engrossed in the racist set-up that he became a member of the party commission, which helped with the drafting of the apartheid policy.[3]

          In due course the very special mission centre of Andrew Murray at Wellington was diluted into racially segregated institutions when the theological training of the Sendingkerk started there in 1954. Nationals of colour were used by God outside of their home country later more by chance, after people of colour had left the shores of the country because of other reasons, e.g. due to apartheid repression or through bursaries for overseas’ studies.

Muslims hear the Gospel... however not clearly

At events with international preachers in the Old Drill Hall in Darling Street one could invariably reckon with some Muslims in the audience. Many from the ranks of Islam were attending Christian schools in Bo-Kaap and District Six anyway. Often enough Wayside and other Sunday schools were attended by some of them, although not always with the permission of the parents.

          The Anglicans had in Reverend Stephen Garabedian someone with an oriental background and knowledge of Arabic. A.R. Hampson joined this mission to Muslims in 1936. However, the negative approach of the outreach to Muslims by the Anglicans through the clergymen Hampson and Garabedian in the 1930s - by way of pamphlets that could have been counter-productive to Muslim evangelism - hardly seems to have held up the deterioration of Islam at the Cape. Nor was the effect significant from a competitive spirit that was present between the churches of Bo-Kaap and District Six at this time.

Stellenbosch as the new vanguard for Afrikaans

As educational centre Stellenbosch overtook other Boland towns like Paarl and Wellington in the last quarter of the 19^th century. Out of the Stellenbosch Gymnasium the Arts Department evolved, which became the Stellenbosch College in 1881.Ssix years later it was renamed the Victoria College, in honour of Queen Victoria. Prominent families would send their sons to prepare themselves for professions. J.C. Smuts, J.B.M Hertzog and D.F. Malan belonged to this generation. All three of them would later be Prime Minister of the country. Interesting was the pun of Prof T. Walker at this time. Instead of the motto Africa for the Africans he proposed that Afrikaners for Africa should be trained at Stellenbosch. The language medium was still English when the Patriotic movement for Afrikaans was making great strides in nearby Paarl. Yet, the student J.C. Smuts made a significant contribution in the journal of the Debating Society referring to ‘the grand empire of the south to be’ (Cited in Muller, 1990:36).

???

Towards the official recognition of Afrikaans

The arch imperialist Alfred Milner was an experienced journalist, who knew the value of the press, trying to use this for his war purposes. While martial law was still in place he saw to it that a powerful imperialist press group would be maintained. He did not want only the war, but also the peace. Already in 1902 he allowed the well-known author and poet Eugène Marais to publish Land en Volk in Pretoria, hoping that the paper would reconcile the Boers with his Trasnvaal policy. In the second major movement towards the official recognition of Afrikaans, the poet and dramatist C. Louis Leipoldt, the son of Johann Leipoldt, a Rhenish missionary in Wupperthal in the Clanwilliam district, played a big role, along with Jan F. E. Cilliers, who put the language on the literature map with his poem Die Vlakte.

          A special role was played in the language movement regard by the press. In early 1912 the Afrikaanse Taalvereniging (ATV), which flourished in Stellenbosch, proudly announced that an Afrikaans weekly was to be launched in Cape Town and distributed throughout the country. Prominent writers in the Mother City like ex-President F.W. Reitz and Advocate J.H.H. de Waal would be contributors. Equal rights for their language was propagated. However, De Voorloper, which finally came off the presses, only lasted from 1912 to 1914.  Yet, this paper was the harbinger of nationalist paper I, declaring in its leader of 13 November that the paper is against the spirit of reconciliation (Muller, 1990: 30). Still in the year of the ‘death’ of De Voorloper, the Afrikaans monthly, Ons Moedertaal was launched in Stellenbosch as the organ of the ATV. Ons Moedertaal was not to be political, but would plead the cause of Afrikaans.????

The Bible in Afrikaans

In 1923 two men were appointed on a full-time basis to translate the Bible into Afrikaans, Ds J. D. du Toit (better known as Totius and the son of Ds S. J. du Toit) and Dr J.D. Kestell. A major push to revive the fortunes of the language as a written medium was given by B.B. Keet in a lecture in Stellenbosch on 21 August 1924. This may have gone some way in influencing matters because Afrikaans was officially recognised in 1926.

            In August 1933 the first Afrikaans Bible was finally published. Within 18 months 250,000 had been sold - a world record at the time for a Bible translation. This united the Afrikaners in a special way when the DIE KERKBODE started with a series around the 'Voorwaartse Beweging' in the light of the spiritual need (Olivier, 1999:122). Ds. A. Moorrees compared the Afrikaner nation to be equated with the halfdead traveller of Luke 15. Only few people attended the Groote Kerk as a symptom. On 8 October 1933 the first meeting of the Voorwaartse Beweging took place in the Groote Kerk. Chairs had to be carried in as the cry to God went up, ‘revive your people! (Olivier, 1999:124). A movement of the Word was seen as essential to bring the volk to revival.

Cape Women leading the Way

The Cape indirectly played a role in the fight for voting rights for women globally. The wife of Saul Solomon, the great 19^th century parliamentarian, got involved in this movement after their emigration to Great Britain. From 1895 Julia Frances Solly, who came from England in 1890, became active int eh move to secure the vote for women. From the beginning of the 20^th century she concentrated on this issue after settling at Knorhoek, Sir lowry's Pass, in 1901. As a close friend of Olive Schreiner she was one of the chief personalities in the National Council of Women in South Africa.

The worldwide feminist movement received a major push through a book of Olive Schreiner with the title Woman and Labour (1911). Olive Schreiner was so much of a pioneer of positive feminism that Vera Brittain referred to her book as the ‘Bible of the Woman’s Movement.’ Brittain saw this book as ‘insistent and inspiring as a trumpet-call summoning the faithful to a vital crusade’ (Cited by Hobman, 1954:2).

          At the Cape itself, the Non-European Women’s Suffrage League only got underway in 1938 in District Six. Yet, Ms Halima Ahmed was the leading light there at a time when women were hardly found in politics anywhere in the world. She became better known as Halima Gool after she married Goolam Gool. In August 1938 she delivered the inaugural address of the Women’s Suffrage League in the Cosmopolitan Hall in Pontac Street, District Six. She became the first secretary of the national Anti-CAD (Coloured Affairs Department) movement in 1943.

          Even more famous became her sister-in-law, Zainunissa (Cissie) Gool, the daughter of Dr Abdurahman, who became a respected (and sometimes hated) outspoken and controversial City Councillor for 24 years on behalf of the National Liberation League. She was someone with stature, one of the country’s first female Master of Arts, but also someone who was critical of the APO policies of her father Dr Abdurahman. Cape Women were also pioneering in the field of publication when a people’s history booklet on Claremont was produced by the United Women’s Organization as part of its campaign against the Group Areas removals.

A renaissance in the history of the struggle

The decade after 1935 has been described ‘a renaissance in the history of struggle by the oppressed in South Africa after the “dark years” of the early 1930s…’ (Musson, 1989:77). It started with opposition to the three ‘Native Bills’ which spontaneously united Blacks in. In the midst of the great economic depression of the early 1930s, Smuts and Hertzog sunk their differences temporarily, forming an alliance in 1934.

          Not only would the Hertzog-Smuts legislation render Blacks to be aliens in their own country, but they were also forced to go and work in the mines or on the farms of the Whites.  The Bills, which were intended to remove Blacks from the common voters’ roll in the Cape and entrenching segregation, jolted the ANC to life. Seme and Jabavu, its leaders, initiated the All African Convention (AAC), to challenge the Native bills. Unity among the oppressed was indeed called for as never before.

           James La Guma and Johnny Gomas were Cape Marxists and trade unionists who were committed to justice and non-racialism from an early stage in their lives. James La Guma called his Fifteen Group for a special meeting in 1935 when the threat of Blacks being deprived of their franchise became clearer. He concluded: ‘We need an organization of all the oppressed.’ A new organization was formed: the National Liberation League (NLL). In Cissy Gool they had a ready-made president. The NLL became one of the main forces in the All African Convention (AAC) which met from 15-18 December, 1935 with more than 400 delegates. including the Cape-based NNL as a major faction and various Black sporting organisations. That congress was characterised by great enthusiasm and determination. The League started a periodical, The Liberator, in 1937 in which the NLL was hailed as ‘Part of a worldwide movement against imperialism’.

As one of the radicals at the convention, Johnny Gomas proposed that mass protest meetings should be organised throughout the country. His proposal was unanimously accepted.  In the face of the unprecedented unanimity, the rulers had to act. Instead of implementing the convention’s proposal, Seme and Jabavu walked into the Prime Minister Hertzog’s trap, when the two met Hertzog with a delegation in 1936. Hertzog claimed that the two leaders accepted concessions, although some of the delegation vehemently denied it. Perceived by many to be African acceptance of Hertzog’s Native Representative Council (NRC), many Blacks regarded the ANC leadership as stooges.  This Council had indeed later seen many resolutions passed by them, of which the government took no notice. The Council had become what many scathingly called a ‘toy telephone.’ The ANC proper went ‘into hibernation until after the war’ (Musson, 1989:77), when the party was rescuscitated by young radicals like Anton Lembede and Nelson Mandela.

New Trade Union and political Role Players

Sam Kahn was a leader of the Communist Party and a lawyer who earned his LL.B degree at UCT in 1932. He organized several ‘Coloured’ trade unions and in 1935 was one of the organizers of the National Liberation League (NLL). He was popular with Blacks and defended many clients of colour in the course of his legal career. A member of the Cape Town City Council from 1943 to 1952, he was elected to Parliament by the Blacks of the Cape Western District in 1949. He was however expelled three years later on the grounds that he was a Communist. Reginald September, born in 1923 as the son of working class parents, joined the NLL in 1938. From factory work he moved into full-time trade unionism, organizing textile and distributive workers in the Mother City and Port Elizabeth in the 1940s. When ‘Coloureds’ were threatened with disfranchisement, he helped to organize the Franchise Action Council, serving as its secretary at the time of the protest strike of May 7, 1951. After spending two years abroad, Reginald September returned in 1953. He became one of the principal founders of the South African Peoples Organization (SACPO). From 1954 until 1961 he was the general secretary of SACPO. After being imprisoned in 1960 and 1961, he fled the country in 1963, after which he became the chief representative of the ANC for Western Europe.

Deep-seated divisions within the AAC

In his enthusiasm for a united front of the oppressed, Gomas underestimated the deep-seated divisions within the AAC.  He, as the General Secretary of the AAC, was accused in April 1936 by Seme, the ANC leader, of trying to turn the AAC into a ‘permanent national organization’, an effort to undermine the ANC. Gomas responded in typical fighting fashion: ‘…What is all important now is to harness the giant wave of enthusiasm for Unity and Action, created in its unanimous opposition to the Native Bills’. What made Johnny Gomas so exceptional was his conscious decision to step back so that new leaders could come through. This happened e.g. in December 1937, to allow Moses Kotane to be delegated to the AAC conference, where Kotane became a rising star. He had already succeeded to get Kotane elected as General Secretary fo the Communist Party. In similar vein Gomas withdrew - after contesting one of the most bitterly fought municipal elections in Ward 7 (a part of District Six) - to prevent a split vote.

          The AAC was hereafter considerably weakened when the ANC disaffiliated. It was tragic that even after the elections of 1948 that led to the for the apartheid government - which was so catastrophic for the oppressed - the two groups could still not unite again. This only happened in 1983 with the formation of the United Democratic Front.

          Gomas continued to make things happen. He and James la Guma had been at the cradle of yet another move of opposition to the White rulers in 1935. In the preamble to the draft programme of the National Liberation League (NLL), which called ‘for Equality, Land and Freedom’, one finds the gist of the pamphlet ‘The Emancipation of slaves’, written by Johnny Gomas. The founding members of the Cape-based NLL included Gomas and the new rising stars of District Six, Alex La Guma and Cissie Gool. The latter two were children of two seasoned politicians. While waiting for the next conference of the AAC due in December 1937, Gomas concentrated on the activities of the NLL. He moved to 27 Stirling Street in District Six, from where he gave a lot of support to Cissie Gool.  In the municipal elections of September 1938, Cissie Gool unseated Mr Mc Callum, a sitting member of the Council. In due course she became a respected (and sometimes hated), outspoken and controversial City Councillor for 24 years as a member of the National Liberation League. 

New Era Fellowship

The whole APO, including Dr Abdurahman as well as the Native Representative Council was reckoned by the New Era Fellowship (NEF) to belong to the group of collaborators. George Golding and his Coloured People’s National Union (CPNU), were in the eyes of many the arch collaborator.

          William Peter van Schoor, a teacher who was born in Salt River in 1913 and who graduated through private studies, was the principal speaker at the inauguration of the New Era Fellowship. Johnny Gomas, James La Guma and a few other Marxists had much in common with the NEF rebels, but they detested their intellectual debates. Yet, in the NLL they found common ground in their abhorrence of Dr Abdurahman’s APO, who ‘steeped so low’ as to co-operate in the government ‘Commission of Enquiries Regarding the Cape Coloured Population’ - without even a single note of dissent. The recommendations of this commission laid the foundation of apartheid legislation like Group Areas for different races.

          The All African Convention prepared the ground for the Non European Unity Front (NEUF) and the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), the major opposition movements of the 1940s. On Easter Monday 1938, the Non European Unity Front (NEUF) was started. It was officially launched in January 1939, with Cissy Gool as President and James La Guma as the organising secretary. This can be regarded as the precursor of the UDF of the 1980s. Already on Easter Monday, 27 March 1939, twenty thousand people gathered on the Grand Parade for a rally of the NEUF, the biggest demonstration the Mother City had seen up to that moment. In a moving ceremony Cissy Gool lit a torch which was passed on to the masses, who likewise had torches. The NLL anthem, which was written by James La Guma and Johnny Gomas, was sung as the crowd marched to parliament, led by the District Six Moravian Brass band.

Dark folks arise, the long, long night is over… Dark folks are risen and the DAY is here.

          When James La Guma discerned that Whites were usurping leadership in the NLL, he asked them to step down. This led to some infighting, resulting in the NLL becoming a spent force by the early 1940s, although Cissy Gool-Abdurahman was still a City Councillor on that ticket.  The illustrious Cape female politician served in that capacity until her death in 1963.

Collaboration politics

District Six seems also to have been the place of birth of ‘Coloured’ collaboration politics. George Goulding, who became the principal of Ashley Street Higher Primary School, was the best early example.  (But before him N. R. Veldsman, who had been appointed inspector of ‘Coloured’ labour at the docks, seems to have been quite happy to be the state lackey ensuring that ‘Coloured’ men – and not Blacks – were employed there.) Goulding was wary of Dr Abdurahman’s radical policies.

          In the 1930s George Goulding was the man behind The Sun, one of the first ‘Coloured’ newspapers, and which was printed in District Six. From 1943 the newspaper got stiff opposition from Joyce Meissenheimer’s Torch, a paper linked to the Non-European Unity Movement. George Golding became the leader of the Coloured People’s National Union (CPNU), at that time the only political body which had any orientation towards co-operation with the Nationalist government, whose apartheid policy later made the country the skunk of the world. His brother, Charles Goulding, became well-known for the Protea Program, an ideologically tainted Afrikaans weekly radio programme.  The ‘realpolitik’ of George Golding was hailed by some Whites, who simultaneously mocked the ‘lofty ideals’ of those ‘Coloured’ leaders who refused co-operation with the apartheid regime, those who called themselves ‘non-collaborationists’.

          It was from the CPNU ranks that the Federal Coloured People’s Party defected under the leadership of Tom Schwartz in 1964 ‘on the principles of positive equal development’. This was little less than tacit acceptance of apartheid, actually the logical continuation of the pragmatic politics of George Golding.

Beginnings of cautious criticism in Afrikaner ranks

It is ironic that a critical spirit started to develop at Stellenbosch while a brilliant academic, Dr H.F. Verwoerd was pioneering the relatively new department of Sociology. Twenty years later Verwoerd was tobe the prime apartheid architect and ideologist. Beyers Naudé and his brother Joos were two of the students who demonstrated their independence from Afrikaner uncritical thinking by joining the editorial staff of a clandestine and daring newspaper called Pro Libertate.  In the second year of its operation a slogan was added to the paper’s masthead that typified the spirit of the eager but critical young journalists: ‘A University should be a Place of Light, of Liberty and of Learning.’ The newspaper’s editors had to guard their identities very closely, because once exposed, they would have been subjected to severe pressure and criticism. One senses how Beyers Naudé was not only prepared in this way for the Afrikaner ostracism at this time, but also how Pro Veritate, the mouthpiece of the Christian Institute in the 1960s and 1970s, was prefigured.

          Before Beyers Naudé entered the theological Seminary of Stellenbosch, he was severely tempted to enter the business world. Professor ?? Schumann discerned in him leadership qualities - just the man needed to take the Afrikaners by the bootstraps out of the economic dependence on the British. But something held Beyers Naudé back. In spite of his rebellion against his parents, it was probably their prayerful habits that made him sensing a calling from God for the ministry.

Beyers Naudé started his studies after the purge of critical academics that followed the sacking of the brilliant Professor J. du Plessis in 1930. ‘In the theological desert of the Seminary there was one oasis in the person of Professor B.B. (Bennie) Keet.’ Beyers Naudé was deeply influenced by Keet who was firmly opposed to the growing racist theology in the DRC. Writing in the Kerkbode, Keet would frequently clash with theologians who claimed that apartheid could be justified on biblical grounds. He was at some stage heading the Kweekskool, the Seminary in Stellenbosch. In 1956 Keet was at it again with his book Wither South Africa?, (p.85) warning that ‘The test of our civilisation is our treatment of the underprivilged. Everything which bears the stamp of oppression [and oppression of personality is the worst] debases the oppressor just as it degrades the oppressed.’ Writing in the Kerkbode, Keet would frequently clash with theologians who claimed that apartheid could be justified on biblical grounds.

          On a personal level, the heritage of the pioneer missionary Georg Schmidt impacted his life when Naudé met his wife. She was the daughter of Emil Weder, a beloved German missionary who managed the Moravian Mission Store in Genadendal. (The name Emil Weder still lives on in the name of the local High School). The seed for the multi-racial Christian Institute was sown into the heart of the former Afrikaner Broederbond leader.  A few years later, Dr Beyers Naudé, just after he had been elected as moderator of the new Southern Transvaal Dutch Reformed Church regional synod, was completely ostracized for criticizing apartheid.) 

          Another Afrikaner from the Cape who broke ranks with Verwoerdian ranks was Anton Rupert. The product of the Karoo town of Graaff Reinet made a name for himself when he established the industrial giant Rembrandt in the town of Paarl. Rupert fully identified himself with Afrikaner efforts to achieve economic independence. Already one evening in the late 1940s, after listening to a debate between Mr Justice H.A. Fagan and Prof. A.C. Cilliers he concluded: ‘Fagan is right. There is no salvation for South Africa in racial separation. We have to live and work together’ (Esterhuyse, 1986:26). That was to be the foundation of his vision of co-existence based on partnership and trust, a vision that was not popular in apartheid circles. He also believed that partnership provided the key to racial reconciliation.

A White backlash        

During World War II people of colour had started taking jobs which previously only Whites had occupied. The sum total of the dwindling support was that the UP of Jan Smuts lost the elections of 1948 marginally. Thus history repeated itself where the PACT government of 1924 was a result of the White backlash. The boycott call of the NEUM will surely also have helped to tip the scales in Malan’s favour. Albert Luthuli suggested with regard to the NEUM: ‘it is doubtful whether South Africa has so far produced a body more torn by friction and disharmony that the Unity Movement’ (Luthuli, 1962: 97)

It is tragic that a clergyman, Dr D. F. Malan, took over the mantle from Smuts. He became the legislator of the first formal apartheid laws with its striking similarities to Nazi legislation. They were instituted by the National Party, which came to power in 1948. Malan’s efforts to get the ‘Coloureds’ removed from the common roll – manipulation of the worst kind – goes down in history as one of the most tragic betrayals of pledges made to a people group.  Under Malan’s successor J.G. Strijdom, the government enlarged the Senate for this purpose. At this time the Minister for ‘Native Administration’ and a later Prime Minister, Dr H.F. Verwoerd, made a striking commitment: ‘When I have control of native education, I will reform it so that the Natives will be taught from childhood to realize that equality with Europeans is not for them’.

          After Jan Smuts had propagated segregation strongly in the 1930s, the foundation of apartheid legislation was firmly laid. He and his party nowhere opposed the removal of Blacks from the common Voters’ roll in 1936. Thus the United Party (UP) opposition to the removal of franchise rights of the ‘Coloureds’ in 1956 was hollow – tokenism at best.

Renewal or Demolition of District Six?[4]

Slum conditions in District Six had not been addressed yet in the 1930s. Renewal of the District was closely connected with proposals for the Foreshore development. Demolition of the existing houses was seriously debated February 1940 when the scheme was advertised in the Provicial Gazette and in local newspapers. Associations and the public were given six weeks to make recommendations and objections. The Non European Unity Front (NEUF) with its base in District Six was soon leading the protest movement under the leadership of Mrs. Cissie Gool, a city councillor. Protest against the scheme hinged on what the workers’ organisations regarded as the threat of segregation. The ‘remodelling of District Six’ involved the demolition of three thousand buildings and the evacuation of 29, 595 people. The Cape Times reported the objections of businesses in District Six as well as the deputation of the NEUF, led by Mrs. Gool. The delegation foresaw that the entire present population of the area would be forced out, forcing the poor to a distant suburb where they would be face with bus or train fares which they could not afford. Opposition to the scheme was fanned by revelations about conditions on the Cape Flats. Soon the Cape Argus featured banner headlines on behalf of the NEUF: MIGRATION TO THE CAPE FLATS OPPOSED. The scheme was indeed nothing else than ‘disguised segregation.’ Thirty years later their fears became reality with the difference that apartheid was not attempting to disguise anything.

            In 1940 the protesters were successful in getting city councillors on their side.  Councillor Louis Gradner suggested in a packed Liberman Hall in District Six on 25 July 1940 that they had been tricked into believing that the scheme was a provisional one: ‘What the Council is proposing to do under the guise of slum clearance is to disperse 27,000 ratepayers who were born and brought up in the district…’ The discussion led to the full council approving the Amended Town Planning Scheme on 27 May 1941 with 22 voting in favour and only three against.

          There was plenty of evidence that segregation was on the increase. State-sanctioned residential segregation was due to become policy because the ruling United Party had it in their plans and the Nationalist Party was actively propagating apartheid.

Spread of the gospel by people of Colour

Starting their outreach in the Dockyard, the group, which started operating from the ‘Tin Shanty’, called themselves the Docks Mission. From its earliest years prayer and fasting belonged to the habits of the Docks Mission. Many a Friday night was used for an all night prayer meeting. No wonder that God gave the new denomination phenomenal growth. Not only were new churches started on Browns Farm (Ottery) and Fractreton Estate, a new housing scheme, but also further afield like Wellington and Grabouw. In due course they conducted gospel meetings in the Community Centre of the Bloemhof Flats in Constitution Street, District Six and in the YMCA building in Chiapinni Street, Bo-Kaap. From their early beginnings they also started with outreach at the prison in Tokai and at the nearby Porter Reformatory. Many a life was changed through this ministry and at the Brooklyn Chest Hospital where services are still being held. After the services at the ‘Tin Shanty’ on Sunday, some members went to Somerset Hospital to pray with nurses there. A branch of the Hospital Christian Fellowship, which operated at this hospital for many years, benefited greatly from this assistance.

          The Africa Evangelical Band had evangelism as their main activity. As one of the first Bible Schools for people of colour, it operated in Bell Road, Kenilworth with great effect, sending their graduates as pilgrims throughout the country. Many pastors in the ‘Coloured’ churches of ‘mainline’ denominations where gospel preaching was neglected, were led to a personal relationship with Jesus through this evangelism and spiritual challenge. Because of Group Areas legislation the Bible School moved to Crawford in 19??.

Cape Prophetic voices

The almost classic guilt - going right through to the present - derives from the refusal of the church to listen to, let alone to follow the warnings and advice of prophetic voices, especially with regard to outreach to Jews and Muslims. Although people like Dr John M. Arnold had already spelled out the need in the last quarter of the 19th century - for the church to give its best people for evangelism among Muslims, this call was not heeded. In general, the church authorities persisted in looking for people who could achieve quick results.  (A notable exception was the Dutch Reformed Ds Davie Pypers, who persevered for many years to reach out to the Indians in the second half of the 20th century.)

          With regard to racial segregation, the warning voices of theological professors Barend B. Keet and Ben Marais should be added. In the Dutch Reformed synod of 1940 Marais warned his church not to accept apartheid because it was scripturally unjustifiable. However, he was sidelined. 

Racist separatist thinking was disastrous in its effect with regard to evangelizing the Muslims. Dr Andrew Murray, who had been a divine instrument for the spreading of the Gospel worldwide through his books at the turn of the 20th century, had unintentionally sowed the seeds of racial segregation when Dutch Reformed Theologians abused his a-political stand. Murray was branded in a negative way as a pietist.

          With the focus of so many church leaders on the government’s apartheid policy of yesteryear - either in defence or opposition - correction was definitely needed. Even the evangelical churches had no eye for the Muslims in their midst. The unspoken rule that one should not speak to Muslims about religion, won the day.  It was in this regard that help from abroad was surely an answer to prayer. In England prayers had been offered for many years. The prayers for the ‘Cape Malays’ - as the Cape Muslims were erroneously called - possibly came into focus either after the publication of an article about South African Muslims in 1925 in the Muslim World by Dr Samuel Zwemer, the greatest missionary to the Middle East, or after his challenge to the Keswick convention in England about ten years earlier.

Satan however hit back, when an artificial and unbiblical differentiation between Christian action and evangelistic outreach caused an ever-widening rift in the movement.

Indifference of the church

To the shame of the Church the disenfranchisement of Blacks finally came about in 1936, after General Hertzog, the contemporary Prime Minister, had consulted the churches ten years earlier. However, no clear biblical guidance was forthcoming from the church leaders. Ds Nicol, in his inaugural address at the formation of the Christian Council in Bloemfontein in 1936, bemoaned that ‘eie belang ...die botoon voer’ in the churches, that self- interest was predominant (Koningsbode, August 1936, p.226). The missionaries were silent, not coming up for the rights of the oppressed at this time.

          Also in respect of education the churches presented a poor image in the 1930s.  Ds Nicol asked with regard to the education of Blacks whether the churches were going to try to outwit each other and thus damage the issue at hand (Koningsbode, August 1936, p.227). He suggested ‘naturelle-opvoeding’ (native education) as a matter of the highest priority; that the Church should not be afraid to tackle such matters urgently. But Nicol’s was still a voice in the wilderness.

     Abdurahman might have been a bit harsh on the missionaries on the matter of land settlements, describing them as ‘tax-gatherers of the meanest type, because they worked under the cloak of religion’[5] (Van der Ross, 1990:110). He might have been too sarcastic with his lashing of the Dutch ‘predikant’, asserting that it was the DRC aim to make the ‘Coloured’ man travel in a different compartment on his journey to heaven. He was alluding of course to the apartheid practice of different train compartments for the different races. Yet, his use of nigra sed formosa - black but beautiful - was way ahead of his time (Even in the 1970s many ‘Coloured’ people - after all the years of racist indoctrination - still had difficulty to appreciate the slogan ‘Black is beautiful’).

          The depression of the 1930s affected every part of society.  By the end of the 1940s, Cape Islam appeared to be on its last legs yet again. The proposed Coloured Affairs Council split the Bo-Kaap community down the middle, the Muslims included. Cissy Gool - the daughter of Dr Abdurahman, the dynamic politician who died in 1940 - stood firmly for no compromise with anything that reeked like racial segregation. Even before its official inauguration in government in 1948, the apartheid ideology had started to divide and rule.

          The respective governments manipulated with the qualified franchise - education and other barriers were used to suppress people of colour. The formation of the Coloured Affairs Council (Department) in 1943 was the brainchild of Harry Lawrence, a cabinet Minister of Jan Smuts, drafting Salie Dollie and the unknown Mogamat de Vries as pawns in a sham representation of the Muslims. Cissy Abdurahman-Gool launched the Anti-CAD (-C.A.C) campaign in District Six as opposition to this ploy (Davids, 1984:209).  Soon Dollie resigned from both the United Party and the C.A.C, condemning the council in the process (Davids, 1984:210). History condemns him however as an opportunist when he joined Tom Swartz in a similar constellation in the 1960s.

Anti-Apartheid introduced

Smuts’ volte face was not completely convincing. There was reason enough to suspect that he was trying to appease the Africans. In the background there were the Japanese successes, closing in on Madagascar. An invasion of South Africa was by no means improbable at that juncture. 

     Nevertheless, the government’s wartime reforms fuelled hope among people of colour. Even a reform of the pass laws was considered. In the same measure it made Smuts more unpopular among Afrikaners and other conservative Whites. The knowledgeable ‘Coloureds’ however did not trust Smuts’ political summersault. Things came to a head after the 18 January 1943 announcement by Harry Lawrence of the governments intention to start a Coloured Affairs Department (CAD). On the Eleventh of February 1943 – unheralded and inconspicuous, unlike the same dates in 1966[6] and 1990[7] - Anti-CAD was inaugurated by a public lecture of the New Era Fellowship (NEF) with the title ‘CAD – The New Fraud’.

          The Anti-CAD movement rallied people of colour together in an unprecedented way.  In the bulletin No. 3 (8 April 1943) of the new movement, 7 public meetings were organized between 8 and 20 April, taking place not only in the Cape Peninsula, but also in places like Paarl and Malmesbury.  By 20 May they already had 81 organizations affiliated. Out of the Anti-CAD the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) developed, likewise with District Six as its nucleus. Using the boycott weapon with great effect, this movement in which people of different racial groups worked together for the first time as never before – thus a foreshadow of the UDF of the 1980s – gave conservative Whites a fright when the NEUM asked their supporters to vote for the Communist Party in the 1943 elections, rather than for the United Party (UP).  The Communist Party itself caused some confusion by merely suggesting that voters should fight against the Nationalist Party candidates (Alexander Simons, 2004:156).

          With W. P. van Schoor and A.J. Abrahamse teaching at the Söhnge training in Worcester, this Boland town soon joined District Six and Wynberg as a major venue of opposition to apartheid. The NEF ‘young Turks’ were already in leadership in the 1940s, e.g. in the TLSA, after ousting the Van der Ross/Hendrickse old guard at the 1943 conference in Kimberley. The clash with the government was inevitable.

Renewed Political activity in District Six

Much of the opposition to segregation in political activity amongst people of colour in South Africa started in District Six. A popular newspaper of resistance, The Torch, had its offices in Central Hanover Street. In nearby Barrack Street, The Guardian and New Age the last variations of the paper were located, until the newspapers were banned one after the other. International Printers in Van der Leur Street gave valuable assistance. The AAC had its national headquarters in Harrington Street.

          A major vehicle of protest was the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), which was founded in 1943. It had the Teachers’ League of South Africa (TLSA) as one of the most influential affiliates. Teachers had taken the lead countrywide in the resistance to the oppressive government, due to the lead given at Genadendal and the mission and church schools which fanned out from District Six. The churches made ample use of the government aid of 50% to equip their schools.

          By 1936, i.e. a year after the Genadendal Training school was forced to close down, 90% of all Coloured teachers held certified qualifications, working in relatively well equipped buildings. Compare that with the situation among the Blacks where still in the 1960s unqualified teachers had to contend with double shifts of overcrowded classes, often without the most basic teaching facilities and no churches supporting them.

     The description of the role of the TLSA by Vernie February, a Capetonian who went to study in Leiden (Holland), is probably not exaggerated:  ‘there is no parallel in the world where a mere Teachers Union played such a vital role in the politicization of a particular oppressed group’ (February, 1983:21). The TLSA was however not a normal Teachers Union, because also clergymen who were not teachers were associate members.[8] In fact, the strength of the organization was that it worked so closely with the churches. The Declaration to the Nations of the World in 1946 started a process by which the struggle in South Africa was to become increasingly internationalized.

     Surely not without merit Richard Dudley (in Jeppie/Soudien, 1990: 200) demonstrated how the bubbling former ‘slum area’ functioned as the cradle of ‘a national solution for all of South Africa and the structures and ideas upon which a truly national liberation movement came to be based.’ In similar vein, Yousuf Rassool (2000:193) referred to the Freedom Charter of the ANC as ‘nothing but an imitation in many respects of our Ten Point Plan’, i.e. that of the Unity Movement.  If one considers the similarity between the Freedom Charter and the People’s Charter of June 1948, they display indeed great similarity.[9] The 322 delegates at the latter occasion which became by far not so well-known as the big event of Kliptown 1955, demanded the right ‘to stand for, vote for and be elected to all the representatives bodies which rule our people.’ In a remarkable book When Smuts goes, Keppel-Jones prophesied how the political rights of the Coloureds would be taken away by the Nationalists.

          The new National Party government soon after their election into power reacted with initiatives to end African representation and the removal of the Coloureds from the Cape common voters’ roll.

          Yet, the NEUM was still critical of the Charterist movement, because the latter group accepted multi-racialism. Tabata, a rising star in the NEUM, saw this as political opportunism, which described as ‘the canker that has claimed the greatest toll of all our organizations…’ The AAC, of which the NEUM was a key affiliate, declared in 1944 the policy of the rejection of trusteeship and asserted the claim to full equality. The conception was a giant leap for all people who had been conditioned to feel themselves less equal.

              Non-racialism and non-collaboration were the key NEUM words, accompanied by fierce and uncompromising rejection of every trace of race or ethnicity. In this sense it was quite futuristic but not pragmatic enough to catch the imagination of the masses. The Cape resistance nevertheless bore the brunt of government repression when many of their leaders were discriminated against, dismissed or posted to country schools. Quite a few of them were banned. A weakness of the NEUM was that they never shedded the image of an upper class Coloured clique. Apart from a short period of defiance at the occasion of the celebrations to commemorate the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in 1952, they never seemed to have achieved any success in mobilizing the masses.

Defiance as reaction to apartheid

One of the first acts of organized resistance, which Dr Malan and his National Party government had to encounter after their 1948 victory, was the Train Apartheid Resistance Committee (TARC). On the Cape Flats and Suburban line to Fish Hoek and Simon’s Town, the trains still had no racial sign boards like on the Main line and elsewhere in the country.  The TARC saw their resistance as a bulwark against the fast eroding rights of all people who were not White. However, only 450 people volunteered instead of the thousands expected to do so in spite of well-attended mass meetings. The committee decided to delay the action, forced to admit that the majority of the organised workers are still standing aloof, outside the TARC (Neville Alexander in Saunders and Phillips, 1984:187). Yet, the attempt to defy new apartheid laws by the aborted TARC, the mood of resistance may be seen as an important starting domino, the foundation of the thousands of volunteers in the Defiance Campaign of 1952. The Group Areas legislation, Bantu Education passes and other laws linked groups which had previously differed. The attempt of the new Nationalist government to get ‘Coloureds’ removed from the common voters’ roll probably ushered in the defiance campaign of 1952 more than anything else. The Supreme Court nullified the initial voters’ roll legislation of 1951, heightening awareness to the shrewd moves of the Nationalist Party to bulldoze through the abhorrent legislation.

          In June 1951 the ANC executive called a conference with the SAIC (South African Indian Congress), the ‘Coloured’-based APO and FRAC (Franchise Action Council) to discuss the general prospects for joint anti-apartheid activity. The next year the ANC and its partners in the Indian and ‘Coloured’ communities initiated a campaign against unjust laws. ‘Defiers’ were to court arrest like sitting in rail carriages reserved for Whites or standing in queues for Whites-only, but acting with complete non-violence. Over 8,000 volunteers defied apartheid laws during approximately six months.

White identification with Black grievances

Many Whites within the greatly diminished Springbok Legion – veterans of World War II - identified with Black grievances. Whites who were anti-Nationalist, but who could not accept the ANC’s call for immediate universal suffrage formed the Liberal Party in May 1953. The theme of the Cape Town-centred party was equal rights for all civilized men and equal opportunities to attain civilization. Alan Paton, its leader, bravely called for one man one vote, opening up the membership to all races and thus swimming very much against the stream of White society.

          The defiance campaign prepared the way for the Congress of Democrats. More radical Whites like the Afrikaner union organizer Bettie Du Toit and the Socialist Patrick Duncan got on board. Duncan, son of his famous father and namesake, Sir Patrick Duncan - who had been a Cabinet Minister under Jan Smuts till 1924 – became a real firebrand. He was educated at Bishops in Rondebosch and became a high official in the ‘Basutoland’ (later Lesotho) Government Service. He gave up his post to join the defiance campaign. He served a prison term for entering a black township without a permit. Later he helped to found the labour Party, editing its mouthpiece Contact, which brought him in renewed conflict with the police.

          In Cape Town, White volunteers wore ANC arm bands as their contribution to the defiance campaign. During a rally at the Drill Hall Jewish-background Albie Sachs pledged his support, vowing that he would do all in his power to make the country a home for all South Africans. In October 1953 the Congress of Democrats was founded, with a definite slant to the left. Not only did they intend ‘…to win South Africans to support a programme of extending rights for all our people,’ but international issues would manifest itself a number of times, with a clear influence of the Communist Party. The Springbok Legion resolved that its members should be invited to join one of the Congress Alliance members. The Congress of Democrats brought together in one organization different groups on the left of the political spectrum. They provided much of the funding for the Congress of the People in Kliptown, Johannesburg in June 1955.

The divisive role of the NEUM/Anti-CAD leadership

A sad note to the defiance campaign is the divisive role of the NEUM/Anti-CAD leadership, which denounced the campaign as reformist, opportunist and treacherous. This was the standard non-collaboration language of the group which had succeed a decade earlier to mobilize effective opposition to the Smuts government’s segregation policies and helping ‘Coloureds’ to start stepping out of their undignified stance of a mere ‘appendix of the white man’. Mary Simons summarised the arm-chair politics of the NEUM which consisted mainly out of teachers: ‘They could give vent to their political resentment and frustration … and abstain from positive action and confrontation with the authorities’ (cited by Neville Alexander in James and Symons, 1989:189). Neville Alexander wrote about the results: ‘The policy of non-collaboration was often transformed from being one of the most creative ideas of the South African struggle into a pharisaical cliché, which was to be used to assassinate the political characters of any who did not agree with the leaders of the NEUM’ (Neville Alexander in James and Symons, 1989:188).

          Teachers were not allowed to engage in activist politics. Quite a few teachers were however involved in NEUM- related activities.W.P. Van Schoor was summarily dismissed as teacher after his presidential address in 1956 in which he condemned the Eiselen-De Vos Malan educational system. Bennie Kies, another NEF man and an outspoken TLSA leader, was teaching at Trafalgar High School in District Six, which was a breeding ground of anti-apartheid thinking. Kies soon suffered under the whip of the government repression. Because of his overt political activity, Kies was forced to leave the teaching profession. He subsequently became one of the best lawyers the Cape ever had. Many TLSA teachers were retrenched or banned without any reason given. In fact, so many TLSA leaders were banned that teachers later feared to join the association, preferring to rather become members of the less outspoken rival teachers union TEPA.

Church opposition to the Removal of ‘Coloureds’ from the Common voters’ roll

Probably in no other area did the influence of DRC (former) clergymen play such a clear role as in the removal of ‘Coloureds’ from the Common Voters’ roll in 1956. When a similar move happened in 1936 to remove Blacks from the voters’ roll, there had been hardly any church protest - apart from Ds Nicol’s address as officer of the Christian Council of South Africa. The run-up to the equivalent move in 1955 not only led to a temporary and uneasy union of all ‘Coloured’ groups, but it also caused quite a stir among Whites.

            In fact, a clear result of the actions of the Cape clergymen Botha and Morkel, was that they heightened the political consciousness of Afrikaners, after the new National Party government had used vicious manipulation to achieve their goals. This was doubly tragic because the Prime Minister. Dr D.F. Malan, who was a former dominee, had once been a supporter of the ‘Coloured’ franchise. His political summersault on this issue may be explained by the need for Afrikaner unity and the slim majority which his party had achieved in the 1948 elections. He realized how strong the Afrikaners of the Northern provinces felt about ‘Coloured’ voting rights. Furthermore, his majority in parliament could easily be overturned in a future election in Cape seats with a substantial ‘Coloured’ population. That had to be forestalled at all costs, especially after the 1949 provincial elections where the United Party took the constituencies of Paarl and Bredasdorp – both of which they had won the year before in the national elections. The Nationalist ascribed their defeat in Paarl to the registration of hundreds of new voters since the general election. Therefore the initiative to remove the ‘Coloureds’ to a separate voters’ roll, was vicious and pre-meditated to secure future electoral success.

            That the Nationalists were trying to settle an old score against the English-speakers on this issue was an added factor. This was dangerous seed indeed.

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[1] Vidkun Quisling, the head of the puppet government who collaborated with the Nazi’s in the occupation of Norway, gave his name to the term.

[2] Translation: flower of our fatherland.

[3] Adonis, J, Die afgebreekte skeidsmuur opgebou, Amsterdam, 1982

[4] The information for this section is taken almost solely from the contribution of Naomi Barnett in the series Studies in  the History of Cape Town, vol.7, 1994, pp. 162- 183 with the title The Planned destruction of District Six in 1940.

[5] This terminology was ironically favoured in the apartheid era for critics by clergy. In fact, Prime Minister Vorster had a standard letter whereby he said that he respected concerned Christians, but he despised those people who ‘practised politics under the cloak of religion’ (I received such a letter in October 1972.).

[6] The amendment of the Group Areas Act to declare Disgtrict Six an White residential area.

[7] On this day in 1990 Nelson Mandela was released from the Victor Verster Prison.

[8] Information supplied by Mr. Salie Fataar in a personal interview on October 30, 2001.

[9] The secret in the similarity could possibly be in the person of Ray Alexander, the Cape Trade Unionist. After being banned in 1953, she continued to work behind the scenes, helping to draw up the Women’s Charter which outlined the women’s political and economic demands.

Opposition to the Separate Representation Voters’ Bill.

The one instance when George Golding, the leader of the Coloured People’s National Union (CPNU) – widely regarded by ‘Coloured as a quisling and collaborator- influenced national politics was when he made common cause with the Franchise Action Committee (FRAC), the ANC and other groups when a ‘most impressive demonstration’ (Walker, 1964:823) was organized in the Mother City on 11 March 1951 in reaction to the introduction of the Separate Representation Voters’ Bill.  This was followed by a fairly successful one-day strike.

            This caused Adolph Malan to invite White ex-servicemen of his Veterans’ Action Group from around the country to the Mother City. Presently changing their name to the Torch Commando, they conducted a huge mass-meeting on the Grand Parade. In the aftermath of this demonstration, teams of young policemen, who had been trained to break up mobs, charged unruly ‘Coloured’ folk without warning. ‘For the second time during this disastrous (Parliament) Session, the Mother City was the scene of scarcely excusable violence’ (Walker, 1964:823).   

            All this led indirectly to the founding of the mother organization of the Black Sash. Six White English-speaking women, gathering for a tea party in a Johannesburg suburb on 19 May 1955, decided to ‘do something’ about the proposed legislation authorizing the government to enlarge the Senate. The moral indignation was the result of another effort to get the ‘Coloureds’ removed from the Common Voters’ Roll. The Women’s Defence of the Constitution League was started, an organization which became known as the Black Sash. Over a period of twenty years this group – easily discernable through the symbols of mourning over the rape of the constitution[1] - developed a sustained campaign of public education, examining the legality and morality of the laws. Significant was that the move of The Women’s Defence of the Constitution League not only spawned a male counterpart, The Covenanters, but they organized a national prayer day for Wednesday, 10 August 1955. The weakness of all these organizations became apparent. They had limited themselves to ‘citizens’, i.e. they excluded Blacks. And even though the initiative was aimed on behalf of the ‘Coloureds’, they failed to catch the imagination of these people. It was surely no co-incidence that a broad representation of protest gathered the same year on 24 and 25 June in Kliptown, Johannesburg where the Congress of the People formulated its Freedom Charter.

Revival of the Trade Unionism

When the stalwart the Jewess Ray Alexander, the General Secretary of the Food and Canning Workers Union, (FCWU) was banned in October 1953, it looked as if trade unionism was given its death blow. Largely through her efforts, along with another White female, Helen Joseph,[2] the battling trade unionism sectors which fought for the poor, was kept afloat. An injection came from an unexpected corner.

     The scene was the Wolseley Fruit Canning Company, which refused to be a party to wage agreements negotiated by the FCWU. It all started in the winter of 1953 when a delegation of the FCWU Frank Marquard (Chairman), Ray Alexander and Oscar Mpetha, a young Black official, visited the mission station Saron from where many workers for the factory were transported. At the third meeting of a branch of the FCWU the dynamic Rachel Williams was elected chairman in spite of her reservations: ‘The chairman is always the first to g to prison when there is trouble’ (Cited in James and Symons, 1989:111). Williams and her brave colleague and name-sake Rachel Zeeman were to play a big role in the battle at the factory in 1954. Unionising Wolseley was proving to be very difficult. Finally, two officials of the FCWU, Oscar Mpetha and Annie Adams were mandated by the executive to obtain work there to gather first-hand information. The great strike of Wolseley of 1954[3] not only put the FCWU on the map in country towns, but it revived trade unionism at the Cape generally. It also wrote the name of Oscar Mpetha indelibly in the annals of the struggle for democracy at the Cape. In 1983 he was to be the first national President of the United Democratic Front (UDF), the people’s movement that finally brought the apartheid government to its knees more than any other.

A Cape-born reconciler at work

If ever there was someone who took the ministry of reconciliation seriously, it was the Cape-born David du Plessis. He moved to Ladybrand in the Orange Free State with his family before he was nine years old. Du Plessis first had to go through the mill himself, leaving his home when his father would not allow him to go to university. He was reconciled to his father two years later. The Lord first had to deal with the prayerful Du Plessis before he could be used optimally. ‘I began to be sensitive to the Lord’s checking’.

          Even though it was not generally recognized as such, one of Du Plessis’s greatest achievements was in race relations. At a time when Professors Ben Marais and Barend Keet were battling against apartheid in their denomination in the 1940s, Du Plessis as General Secretary of the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) was responsible for reducing missionary staff to a minimum, taking the work out of the hands of the North Americans and Europeans and putting it under the jurisdiction of Africans. ‘The local work, we felt, had to be under the control of the nationals’ (Du Plessis, 1977:112).[4] As if that were not radical enough, the AFM had a central conference in which ministers, missionaries and executives of all races met at top level. It appears that this denomination came the nearest to practical non-racialism at a time when apartheid was already practiced far and wide.

But this was by far not the end of Du Plessis’s ministry of reconciliation. He had to go through the crucible once again. After an accident in the USA, when the car in which he was a passenger, drove into a shunting locomotive, he landed in hospital. Du Plessis later described this time as ‘the most extended period of silent prayer in my life’. He was challenged to forgive Protestants in general. The first test came at the Second World Conference of Pentecostals in Paris, which he attended on crutches. God used him to reconcile Pentecostals who were fighting each other. In his typical humble manner, Du Plessis did not gloat over the victory achieved there. Instead, he said ‘I know that if I would have any success at all with what the Lord had directed, if I was to be able to forgive the old main line churches, I had to forgive these Pentecostal brethren.’ God was to use him to bring the first Pentecostal denominations into the maligned World Council of Churches.

Into the Vatican and further

David Du Plessis’ ecumenical work was however not appreciated in his own denomination. Fellowship with independent Pentecostals was to him just as important. He was invited to become the secretary of the world conference in Toronto in 1958. There he was completely cold-shouldered, and all but pushed out of the Pentecostal movement. Du Plessis felt clearly led ‘to resign from every position that I held in any society and to follow Him wherever he may lead.’ Sovereignly God over-ruled. In 1959 he was lecturing in the theological institutions of a wide spectrum of denominations.  The following year he was requested to give a lecture at a meeting in Scotland, in preparation for the WCC plenary occasion that was to be held in New Delhi in 1961. This resulted in him being invited to the WCC conference itself. There he met Professor Bernard Leeming from Oxford, who was the personal representative of Pope John XX111. One thing led to another until Du Plessis wrote from New Delhi that he would make a stopover in Rome.

There he spent many hours in prayer, ‘considering the difficulties that lay ahead for Protestants and Catholics in matters of trust and forgiveness.’ The Lord first had to deal with him through His Word. In fact, it came to him through the context of the Lord’s well known prayer. ‘...If you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses’ (Matthew 6:15). He sensed: ‘I am certain the Lord spoke to me about the many burdens of unforgiveness and suspicion’ between Catholics and Protestants for so many centuries. “The souls of Christians will live when all learn to forgive.”

In Rome Du Plessis met Dr Strandsky, the secretary of Cardinal Bea, who headed a new Roman Catholic secretariat for promoting church unity. Strandsky had a special charge to learn as much as he could about the Holy Spirit and the Pentecostals. Because David du Plessis was now a ‘mere zero’ in the Pentecostal movement, he was ideally placed to share at the Vatican. When Cardinal Bea asked him: ‘Well then David, what do the Pentecostals have to say to Rome?’, he was in a predicament. In honesty he could only hesitantly stutter: ‘I have to say that the Pentecostals have no intention of talking to Rome.’ When Cardinal Bea asked him for his personal opinion, God used David du Plessis to minister to millions of Roman Catholics all around the globe. ‘Make the Bible available to every Catholic in the world ... If Catholics will read the Bible, the Holy Spirit will make that book come alive, and that will change their lives. And changed Catholics will be the renewal of the church.’  Cardinal Bea immediately ordered those words to be written down.

The words of ‘Mr Pentecost’ – as David Du Plessis was nicknamed - turned out to be very prophetic. At the Vatican Council it was decided to make the Bible available to every Roman Catholic person in the world. David du Plessis was present at a session of the Vatican Council. His contribution in 1964 introduced the charismatic renewal to the Roman Catholic Church. Du Plessis was also used by the Lord to bring about a thaw in the relationship between Protestants and Roman Catholics worldwide, notably at a meeting in Zürich in June 1972.

Low-key Spiritual Dynamics

Another interesting pioneering ministry was the outreach to migrant labourers from East Africa. Rev. Gustav Tietzen, who had worked as a missionary in Tanganyika (the name of the country before it joined Zanzibar to became Tanzania) from 1929, preached to the workers in their Kinyakyusa language (Schaberg, 1984:142).

          The Group Areas legislation led to an interesting dynamic when Dr Isaiah Palmerston Samuels granted his church building in Wynberg to the Moravians. Already having lost two buildings because of the tragic legislation and no successor available, he was reminded of his upbringing in Antigua, one of the West Indian islands, a Moravian stronghold.

          German missionaries were involved in other interesting ventures at the Cape. Marie Else Melzer, a single missionary started in 1951 to visit and minister to 600 domestics from the countryside mission stations like Genadendal and Elim, who were working for Whites in the City (Schaberg, 1984:142). A little more than a decade later she was also pioneering a joint venture of the Moravians and the Berlin Mission with a Bible School for females in the Strand. Liesel van der Heyden, a missionary from Germany and Agnes Kroneberg, a daughter of David Kroneberg, one of the Genadendal Kweekschool protégées, taught at the Strand. One of their first students was Vivian Aisley, who became a pioneer (as Vivian West) in her own right with the Educare teaching programmes for pre-school kids in the 1970s at the Alpha Educare in Hanover Park.

The start of Africa Enterprise

Michael Cassidy, another Southern African spiritual giant, grew up in Maseru in Basutoland, as Lesotho was previously called, attending boarding school at Michaelhouse in Natal. He proceeded to study at the famous British Cambridge University in the mid-1950s. The Lord used Robert Footner, a law student to challenge Cassidy to become a follower of Jesus on 23 October 1955 (Coomes, 2002:59).  While attending an evangleistic meeting with Dr Billy Graham in the same city, he was greatly impacted.

          Soon the conviction developed that only a spiritual renewal could remove Boer-Brit alienation and Black-White racism in South Africa. In his prayer list Revival in South Africa was added and in his diary there featured quite a few entries in the beginning of 1956, stating that this was the only answer to his home country’s problems (Cassidy, 1989:66).

          On vacation in New York in mid 1957, he attended an evangelistic campaign by Dr Graham. He reports in one of his autobiographical works about this event: “Suddenly I heard within my spirit: ‘Why not in Africa?’ ‘Yes, why not Lord?’ I replied.” God started to prepare him for a special mission.

During a study stint in the USA in 1960 Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade, invited Michael Cassidy to start work in South Africa on behalf of the agency. During the Week of Prayer at the Campus Crusade Training Institute, Cassidy participated in a period of “Waiting on God”. There he was challenged to pray for the 31 major cities of Africa. This he did by praying one day of the month for the whole summer for African cities. Joined by a prayer partner, they were soon asking God for the chance one day to minister in each of these cities.  The very next year they undertook a trip to the 31 major cities of Africa.

          On a trip to Palm Springs with Murray Albertyn, a South African friend, he was told of a ship that sails between Africa and the USA with the name Africa Enterprise (Coomes 2002:82).  The 23-year old Cassidy ensuingly started an evangelistic agency with that name with the goal ‘to reach the influential people of this continent’. He wrote in a magazine ‘We desire to have a social emphasis in our ministry as well … because evangelical Christians have presented a lob-sided message that has greatly ignored the social implications of the Lord’s teachings.’ Across the continent of Africa the agency Africa Enterprise (AE) was still going to have a significant impact in the years to come, starting with an interdenominational campaign in Pietermaritzburg in August 1962.

The example of President Abraham Lincoln

The voyage on the steamer from England to Cape Town was to impact Cassidy deeply when he was challenged by a quote from John Foster Fraser: “When God desires to shake, shock or shape any age to save sinners, he always chooses people.” (Cited in Coomes 2002:72).  The Holy Spirit ministered to Michael Cassidy to be that man for Africa, more especially for South Africa. Immediately after his arrival in Cape Town, God used Archbishop Joost de Blank to refer to the neglect of evangelicals of “incarnational responsibilities”: ‘Then Joost said if only a man would arise who could confront the country with the necessity of synthesising the spiritual as well as political and social responsibilities of the gospel, the church would make real progress here. He added, “Perhaps you are the man to do this” (Coomes, 2002:73). 

          After leaving South Africa in January 1969 for Germany by ship, the author was personally moved to prayer for the Communist world after reading the Afrikaans translation of Richard Wurmbrand’s autobiographical Tortured for Christ during the voyage. Along with believers in different parts of the world, I started to pray with some regularity for persecuted Christians in Eastern Europe and China.

          The Bible verse starting with ‘if my people humble themselves and pray …’ (2 Chronicals 7:14) became one of the favourite Bible verses of Michael Cassidy. He used Lincoln’s example to challenge John Vorster and Ian Smith, the prime ministers respectively of South Africa and Rhodesia (of much of the 1960s and 1970s), to do the same by giving them a copy each of Lincoln’s biography with the title Abraham Lincoln, Theologian of American Anguish. Cassidy himself would be God’s instrument in the turbulent 1985 to call not only the National Initiative for Reconciliation (NIR) from 10 to12 September, but also as a pivot in a national day of prayer by this group on October 9, i.e. less than a month later.

          Back in Cape Town in 1970 I was still nowhere near to be a fervent intercessor, but I definitely sensed a need to pray for our South Africa. Early one October morning in 1972, while I was on my knees praying for the country at the Moravian Seminary in District Six, I felt constrained to write a letter to the Prime Minister. In this letter, I addressed Mr Vorster with ‘Liewe’ (dear). That was definitely something extraordinary. My natural feelings towards him were not that charitable. In this letter I challenged the State President to let himself be used by God like Abraham Lincoln in the USA, to lead the nation to the ways of God.[5]

          At and in the church building adjacent to the seminary, the former Moravian Hill manse, significant moves in the 1990s towards the first Global Day of Prayer was to occur, especially the evening service of 9 May 2004, the start of the 7 days initiative. At every prayer event on the Newlands Rugby Stadium from 21 March 2001, red wrist bands were given to the public which displayed 2 Chronicals 7:14.

Student Outreach

Even though Michael Cassidy did not start Campus Crusade in South Africa, hardly any other agency impacted campuses in the country more than AE. Already in 1965, their first year of full-time ministry, the University of Natal invited them. This was followed by visits to other universities in South Africa and Lesotho in the ensuing years. The University of Cape Town had its turn in 1969 and Stellenbosch in 1980. In the effort to call the modern campus back to its true centre in the person of Jesus, who is the truth personified. AE never shunned difficulties. In the main address on University Evangelism at the Lausanne Congress on World Mission in 1974, Michael Cassidy stated that: ‘the Christian has a unique right to be on the campus, not simply as an agent of evangelism, but as an agent of reminder that the university as we know it is really a uniquely Christian creation. It was born out of the mediaeval synthesis with its unified Christian world view… Jesus as heart of the universe, was the key to everything… The university is the offspring of the logos doctrine, “for in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and Knowledge”…’  (Coomes, 2002: 201f). 

          Africa Enterprise did not shun difficulties. But they would get prayer support worldwide, such as when they tried on two occasions to have campaigns at Fort Hare in the 1970s. The extremes of South African society wrapped up there; a government-controlled administration and the home of Black Power. Both efforts – in 1975 and 1976 respectively - had to be aborted, the former one shortly before the mission when their rector feared that the campus ‘might so explode that we would have to close it down.’

          In September 1976 the South African AE team held a mission to the teachers’ training college in the Capetonian suburb Mowbray. This was their best outreach yet to a teachers’ college. They were thankful to the Christian students who prepared thoroughly for the mission ‘in a fervency of prayer’ (Coomes, 2002: 207).  Michael Cassidy and Festo Kivangere visited and preached as equals in the Afrikaner stronghold of Stellenbosch. This was a bold step, building on the foundation laid by Professor Nico Smith at the Theological Faculty. With evangelical involvement in the Black ghetto of Soweto since 1976, Africa Enterprise was to be God’s choice instrument for change in Africa over the next decades.

Female Missionaries and ministers of colour

It was to take years before people of colour would be used abroad as missionaries. The use of females of colour in ministry was however an area where the Cape was once again the countrywide pioneers. The Baptist Church appears to have been the first in South Africa to use female missionaries of colour when Julia Forgus went to work among the under-privileged Muslim and Hindu Indians in Durban. After graduating in 1959, she first assisted ‘Coloured’ churches in 1960. The Baptist Missionary Association then sent her to Durban where she worked until March 1981.

          Lizzie Cloete came to the conviction in 1964 that the Lord was calling her for the spreading of the Gospel to the Muslims. As a church worker in the Sendingkerk congregation of Wynberg, she thus became one of the first full-time missionaries from the ‘Coloured’ community to the Muslims. But it was not regarded that way by the denomination at large. She was just seen as a normal church worker. Her consecration on 17 May 1964 was nevertheless a landmark for the ‘Coloured’ sector of the Dutch Reformed Church.

          Julia Forgus went overseas after her stint among the Indians in Durban, intending to minister in the USA, but because she could not get a work permit, she had to revert to studies, graduating with a Masters degree in Religious Education in 1985. She became one of the first Baptist females, surely the first of colour in South Africa, to be ordained. From 1986 to 1990 she worked as one of the pastors in what the US Americans called a ‘multi-housing’ ministry. After returning to South Africa in 1997, she continued to minister even after her formal retirement, assisting refugees.

          The Congregational Church and the Moravian Church were the pioneers in having women in the top structure. Rev Rica Goliath was the first to be elected to the Church Board and Rev Angeline Swart went even higher up the church hierachy, elected as the head of the denomination in 2002, after having been the first femal director of their Theological Seminary in Heideveld. In Stellenbosch Professor Elna Mouton, was probably appointed as the first female Dean of a theological faculty in South Africa in 2004.

Unhealthy Traditionalism and Dependency

The Moravians, who have often enough been described as the pioneers of modern missions, did not have a happy run among the Muslims at the Cape.  In fact, the spadework of this church in the city was not done by the German missionaries, but by church members who came from the mission stations like Genadendal and Elim. Their interest was however limited to gathering the members of their church in the city. These people had no vision for reaching out to other people with the Gospel, let alone to the Muslims. The work on the mission stations themselves deteriorated to a situation where the Moravian members more or less merely longed for the continuation of cherished traditions like the commemoration of the revival in Herrnhut in 1727. At Moravian Hill (District Six) a practice in the apartheid spirit stained the commemoration. German church members would come to the chapel twice a year, sitting on the stage of the church. (In 1972 theological students staged a walk out at the 13 August festivities after chairs had been specially brought out for the Whites.)

          Because of an unhealthy dependency on Germany and a lack of teaching on tithing and sacrificial giving, the denomination is now struggling to survive. A similar story can be told about other denominations that started with mission stations on the countryside.

          Nevertheless, the church schools initially saved the day for the denominational mission work. Thus the Zinzendorf Moravian Primary School in Arundel Street (District Six) and the St Paul’s institution in Bo-Kaap were guarantors for quality education.  Many Muslims preferred these schools even to the Muslim mission institutions like Rachmanyah in District Six - which was named after Dr Abdurahman. Whereas the denominational schools gave a sound biblical knowledge to many a Muslim, the neglect of a challenge towards a personal relationship with God was unfortunately also part and parcel of the message imparted.  Nevertheless, valuable Gospel seed was sown at the church education institutions. 

          The introduction of lecturers from overseas for the seminaries and Bible Schools whose salaries were paid from their home countries, brought spiritual deterioration into many a denomination. The faith principle of complete dependency on God for the needs of pastors got out of fashion. At the same time prosperity and liberal theology undermined the spiritual quality of many an evangelical church. At the same time there was government pressure on bible schools to yield to worldly academic accreditation. Others wilted under the temptation to live up to the standards of the Jones's with posh buildings and state of the art interior.

          We should nevertheless be compassionate towards so many of the European missionaries who had been the product of a watered-down teaching of the Gospel themselves. Terms like ‘conversion’ were regarded with scorn until the 1960s. The Baptist Church of Wales Street, with buildings in Sheppard Street (District Six) and Jarvis Street (Bo-Kaap), were regarded by many in the mainline churches as sectarian for this very reason.

Religious Dialogue and Ecclesiastical Disunity

All reports seem to confirm that Reverend (Eerwaarde) A.J. Liebenberg[6] was well received by the Muslims and he also co-operated well with the Anglican Muslim outreach work under British–born Reverend Arthur William Blaxall’s leadership in the 1920s. Liebenberg however apparently had little support from his own church in his endeavour to co-operate with other denominations. In the outreach to the Muslims both the missionaries and churches were clearly only intent on empire building.  A certain Mr Hope, a converted Muslim, left the Dutch Reformed Church to join the City Mission (Haasbroek, 1955:114), most probably because of this attitude  Four times Liebenberg was allowed to address the Cape Malay Association, and he visited 17 ‘hogere priesters’. [7] Through the reading room on the corner of Bree and Shortmarket Street in the old Bo-Kaap, Liebenberg made significant impact on the Muslim community. His Dutch Reformed colleagues were however not happy that Liebenberg accepted all sorts of invitations - ‘Even if it were held in a mosque.’  The impression gained by his church colleagues was that the Muslims were abusing these occasions and that the ‘Coloured’ press was under the control of the Muslims. There may have been some truth in the allegation, but jealousy definitely also played a role as it also happened with Reverend Vogelgezang in the 19th century.

          In his own denomination, the Dutch Reformed Church, Liebenberg seems to have been merely abused to prop up the strained relations to St Stephen’s.  In the sub-commission of their missionary work, Liebenberg basically got understanding from some people in his denomination, e.g. for the reality that it was impossible to do both pastoral work at St Stephen’s and to reach out to the Muslims.  But even within the sub-commission there was opposition to his work in the latter part of his term. Thus e.g. the chairman apparently had problems with the costs for ‘this discouraging work’. Sarcastically this speaker enquired after any fruit of the work. Liebenberg’s reply said it all: There had been a big change in the attitude of the Muslims towards him. He was possibly more intent on getting the Muslims to become followers of Jesus than to bring them to his church. The latter was the result the denomination’s leaders apparently had been hoping for.

Spurning of local ministers of colour

A sad development in the last decades of the 19^th century was that the gifting of people of colour was not appreciated sufficiently, combined with ambition and rebellion among a few ministers of colour who evidently did not understand the nature of the gospel properly.

          If one takes Gerdener’s statement as a cue that Black dislike of Whites was a common characteristic of those ministers who broke away to start their own denominations, the deduction is natural to suggest that they had bad examples of Whites who lorded over them, not allowing their understudies to develop their full potential.

          A case in point at the Cape is Reverend Joseph John Forbes. Starting off as a teacher, he was ordained as a Methodist minister at their Buitenkant Street fellowship on the outskirts of District Six in 1918. He withdrew from the church ‘owing to differences on the colour question’, accepting a call to the Congregational Church soon hereafter. There he did not last long before he started his own church and denomination, the Volkskerk van Afrika, in Gray Street (District Six) on 14 May, 1922. His leadership qualities were clearly overlooked and spurned because thereafter he became one of the greatest church planters at the Cape, starting an orphanage, five schools and congregations as far afield as Kimberley.

          In the case of the Cape Town City Mission, Alec Kadalie went to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, whose leader since the 1930s – the Cape–born Dr Frances Herman Gow from a ‘coloured’ mother and an Afro-American father – was all too eager to use people of colour. That denomination - with its origins among the Negroes of the USA - was a great propagator of the indigenisation of the church at the Cape. Under Dr Gow’s leadership – he became their bishop in 1956 - the church expanded rapidly, at least numerically, with churches in different parts of the Peninsula. The Kadalie clan was nevertheless however to play even a more significant role in the second half of the 20^th century in the Cape Town City Mission.

          The Salvation Army was especially known for their work among the down-trodden and their open air services. All these outreaches however never seemed to have caught fire amongst the people of colour. One of the common weaknesses of almost all Christian groups was that they all seemed to be paternalistic, hardly recognizing the potential of locals, let alone to involve people of colour in leadership positions. In the case of the Baptist Church in Wale Street, the first minister who officiated as senior pastor and who did not come from England, was Pastor André Erasmus in 1971, i.e. almost after a century of its existence. He was a Dutch Reformed Minister, who had been defrocked when he was convicted to be baptised by immersion.

Interaction between Christians and Muslims

The Anglicans had in Reverend Stephen Garabedian someone with an oriental background and knowledge of Arabic. Rev A.R. Hampson joined this Mission to Muslims in 1936. However, the negative approach of Hampson and Garabedian in the 1930s in the outreach to Muslims using insensitive pamphlets, was counter-productive.  This nevertheless hardly seems to have held up the deterioration of Islam at the Cape. Nor were the significant effects of a competitive spirit between the churches of Bo-Kaap and District Six at that time.

          The stature of Dr Abdurahman, the dynamic medical doctor and politician who died in 1940, however temporarily slowed down the retreat of Islam, although he was by no means a staunch Muslim, often citing the Bible and rarely the Qur’an. Though Muslims were a minute minority in the Cape Peninsula at the start of the 20th century, they held their own, especially through the esteem that Dr Abdurahman gave them. Although the religion was very much on the defence at this time, no less than 22 mosques were built or finished during his time of political office. That was only to be eclipsed by the period after the implementation of the Group Areas Act in the 1960s.

          Especially significant was Abdurahman’s moves in education, where he initiated no less than 13 Muslim schools. He campaigned for free and compulsory education, raising school-leaving qualification to Standard 7 (Grade 9). He also fought for free books. Abdurahman noted how little the government did in this regard for people of colour. Starting the Teachers League of South Africa (TLSA), he seems to have received inspiration from the churches and missions, which he rightly described as ‘the pioneers of education in this country.’ In the same presidential speech at the African People’s Organization (APO) conference, he was however justly critical of the ‘spirit of rivalry between churches responsible for the large number of small inadequately equipped schools.’  In many of these schools teachers operating in more than one grade, was the order of the day.  It is probably due to the schools which he initiated in Claremont and Salt River that Islam was established in these Christian suburbs. In later years Claremont especially was destined to play a substantial role politically as well as in the survival and spread of the religion. However, nepotism and sectarianism were rife. Abdurahman’s family members were appointed in Muslim Schools.  In the Christian counterparts, teachers were required to join the denomination if they wanted an appointment at the particular denominational school.

A cue taken from Johannesburg

On a Sunday in March, 1944 James ‘Sofasonke’ (meaning we suffer together) Mpanza led more than ten thousand people to open ground outside the Johannesburg suburb of Newclare. By Monday morning, when the White inspectors came to work, they found rows of shacks made of canvas and wood. Mpanza called the camp Shanty Town. This movement eventually forced the hand of the municipal authorities, until finally the South Western Townships (Soweto) came into being. Background support was notably given by Anglican clergy, with Father Huddleston very prominent in his denomination’s mission at Orlando. In another sense, Bishop Sydney Lavis put his stamp on the Mother City through community involvement.

          At the Cape the Black population doubled in the 1930s and again during World War II. With housing shortages as severe as in Johannesburg, Blacks went off into the bush like the followers of Mpanza. They were living among ‘Coloureds’, who were also coming off farms into the city. By the time the National Party came to power in 1948, 25,000 of the 36, 000 Blacks at the Cape were living in one of thirty ‘squatter’ camps. In 1955 it was announced that Africans would be eventually removed from the Western Cape, which was designated a ‘Coloured’ preference area. Dr Werner Eiselen, the Secretary for Native Affairs at the time when Dr H.F. Verwoerd was the responsible minister. He was not only repudiated vehemently by ‘Coloured’ spokesmen in the mid-fifties, but the rigid influx control measures whereby the Cape seemed to ‘simply eliminate non-wage earning Africans’ (Wells, 1993:106), indirectly caused the launching of the Federation of South African Women (FSAW). Particularly harsh enforcement began in 1954, when authorities granted almost no permits to Black women to enter the urban areas unless they were bona fide work seekers. - 

Cape women in the quest for peace and justice

Ray Alexander, a White member of the Communist Party, laid the foundation for the FSAW through her work with Black women in the Food and Canning Workers Union throughout the Cape. Her own membership of an organisation, formed after World War II to promote the unity of women world-wide in the quest for enduring world peace, inspired her to propose a great organisation of S.A. women, working together on a non-racial basis toward peace and justice.

          Believing that the bonds of common womanhood could transcend race and class differences, she began promoting the idea among her colleagues in the trade unions from 1952. By late 1953 plans were made for a national inaugural conference to be held in Johannesburg. This conference, which took place on 17 April 1954 with delegates from all over the country, envisaged ‘to fight for womens rights and for full economic citizenship of all’ (Wells, 1993:106).  Here Louisa Metwana from the Nyanga Vigilence Asssociation, a Cape Black township, moved the participants with her vivid story of harsh influx control enforcement at the Cape. The conference voted unanimously to launch the FSAW. The presidency went to Dora Tamana and Ray Alexander became the secretary. Both of them were from Cape Town. Federation women became very active in 1955, responding to a call from the Congress alliance to help organise a massive meeting to be called the Congress of the People.  The Transvaal FSAW, with Helen Joseph very conspicuous, agreed to provide home accommodation for the one thousand delegates to the Congress, and this too, served to involve women of all races in a Federation activity. (Helen Joseph had learnt a lot while working as a community worker in Elsies River, a Cape ‘Coloured’ township)

     Josie Palmer and Lilian Ngoyi were other leaders who were to play a major role in women’s emancipation. The Transvaal FSAW called a pre-Congress conference on 8 March 1955 to draw up their own list of ‘What Women Demand’. At the Congress of the People on June 26, both Josie Palmer and Helen Joseph spok, delivering the women’s demands. They proved to be pretty similar to those which appeared in the final version of the Freedom Charter produced at the event.[8]  The Transvaal FSAW organised a follow-up conference, the Transvaal Congress of Mothers designed to popularise the demands of the Freedom Charter. Cross-fertilisation of women across racial barriers appears to have occurred at this time as the news filtered through that White women of the newly-formed Black Sash had just staged a march and overnight camp-out at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the seat of the government. This inspired the FSAW to hold a similar march. The Transvaal Indian Youth Congress disseminated large numbers of pamphlets to advertise the demonstration and protest of women against the apartheid legislation and passes for men. On 27 October 1955, 2000 women protesters filled the amphitheatre in front of the Union Buildings. A delegation of four women, one from each racial group, delivered piles of written protests to the government offices. The event proved to be a practise run a national protest on 9 August 1956, when 20,000 women from all over the country converged on the capital, with many more prevented by the police from coming. At the Cape the FSAW lost its effectiveness when Ray Alexander was served with a strict banning order.

          In many ways the great Pretoria march of women on 9 August 1956 was a turning point in the struggle against passes. For male political leaders, both Black and White, it meant that women had to be taken seriously as a force.

 

Lack of Vision for the Unity of the Body

As we have already shown, the churches hardly had any vision for the unity of the body of Christian believers. It is sad that the clergy - and the missionaries - were more often than not just as guilty. All round they appeared to be quite content with the racial divisions, which were characteristic of the previous dispensation in this country. Even the ecumenism, which grew in the 1960s, was not based on a solid unity of the body of Christ, but boiled down to mere window-dressing.  Every denomination - very often also the individual churches - was basically busy building its own kingdom. Little has changed since then, but racially and denominationally combined prayer events did pick up at the beginning of the new millennium.  However, the church in general was still fairly indifferent to the racial divisions.  The demonic origin of apartheid was not yet recognized generally.

Dutch Reformed Church Opposition against Apartheid

For many it will be surprising to hear that arguably the most effective church opposition against apartheid ironically came initially from the Dutch Reformed Church. The Anglican Bishop Trevor Huddleston and others were making some inroads through their stand against the race policies that became official after 1948, but the most effective counter came surprisingly from within the ranks of the denomination, which was led by racist ideologists. I do not refer to the warnings by people like Ds. Ben Marais and Professor Keet, but specifically to the stand of a ‘Coloured’ Dutch Reformed clergyman. He was Eerwaarde (Reverend) I.D. Morkel, who in turn influenced a dynamic mover, a young clergyman, Ds. David Botha of the Wynberg Sendingkerk.

          These ministers opposed the apartheid policy long before the famous Dr Beyers Naudé.  The ring (circuit) of Wynberg agreed unanimously with the motion tabled by the dynamic Rev. I.D. Morkel, to oppose apartheid on scriptural grounds. The participants at this meeting included quite a few Afrikaner dominees because there were still very few ministers of colour ordained in that denomination around 1950. The circuit protested against the proposed legislation of the new regime, appealing to the government urgently not to implement apartheid laws (Botha, 1960:127).[9]

          That the Malan Cabinet ignored their protests was not as deplorable as the fact that the very same dominees who voted in October 1948 did not pitch up when all ministers of the Sendingkerk were invited to a meeting to discuss the legislation. Although 28 congregations were represented, only two white dominees attended this meeting. Another meeting on 14 October 1949 resolved to encourage believers to retreat into a day of prayer on 16 December 1949 ‘to be relieved from the apartheid affliction’ (Botha, 1960:127). 

          The Wynberg Dutch Reformed Mission Church, with Rev. David Botha as its minister, spearheaded an effort toward reconciliation. In a letter to the (White) moderator dated 29 October 1949, the church council deplored the deterioration of relations between the mission church and its mother. In the letter the church council furthermore protested sharply against the apartheid policy with the implied inferiority of ‘Coloureds’.

          The spiritual value was limited from the outset because an activist political undercurrent was clearly present in the date set for the corporate implementation, 16 December 1949 - to be followed by a public meeting in the City Hall the following day. The Afrikaans daily Die Burger in its report of the City Hall meeting scathingly referred to the event as a ‘sogenaamde Kerklike Konvensie’, a so-called church convention.

          Afrikaner solidarity - probably via the Afrikaner Broederbond connections - tragically undermined the principled stand of White Dutch Reformed dominees in the ‘Coloured’ Sendingkerk. They had still agreed in October 1948 that ‘no ground for colour apartheid can be found in Holy Scripture’ (Botha, 1960:127). To Afrikaners it was especially painful that Rev. Botha, the young Dutch Reformed Sendingkerk dominee, graced the meeting with his presence. 

     It was nevertheless pathetic how his speech in the City Hall was reported in Die Burger. In a letter to the editor of the Afrikaans daily Rev Botha complained about serious distortions, also pointing out important deletions from his talk. Amongst other things Botha had noted in his speech that the church has no right to criticize the state unless she can show a positive way. More important was his strong plea for intercession and his reference to the main weapons of the church, namely the Word of God and prayer. Botha also mentioned that ‘the whole audience in front of me was urged to pray for revival instead of having a critical spirit.’ None of these notions was reported in Die Burger.[10]

‘Coloureds’ segregated from Blacks

The government went ahead with the removal programme in the shanty towns of which Windermere, built behind the industrial suburb of Maitland, was the oldest and largest camp. ‘Coloureds’ were first segregated from Blacks and then sent to new exclusively stownships like Q’town on the Cape Flats. The 2,500 Black families were then screened according to Section 10 of the new Urban Areas Act. 750 families qualified for temporary residence at the Cape. Twelve hundred families were ordered to separate – husbands to the hostels for single men, the wives and children back to the ‘native reserves’.

          The authorities could not sort out the remaining 500 families. ‘Squatters’ from all thirty camps were herded to the ‘Nyanga Emergency Camp’ in 1956 where they could re-erect their shacks. Most of the ‘squatter’ camps around Cape Town were dismantled by 1960, the year Werner Eiselen died. He was Dr Verwoerd’s right hand man in the cleansing of the Cape of Blacks. More than ten thousand women had been sent ‘home’, i.e. to the Cis- or Transkei. Yet, despite the government’s energetic work, the Black population of Cape Town grew further to 180, 000. Twenty one years further, the Nyanga-Crossroads ‘squatters’ – with support from church leaders - were not only showing up the sham of the apartheid policy, but they inflicted the government the crucial blow, which ushered in the demise of the pass laws.

          A new campaign to revive the removal scheme was launched in 1962. Die Burger prominently reported that some Afrikaner businessmen and farmers were willing to reduce the number of Black Employees. For farmers this was of course convenient to get rid of workers in the course of mechanization and still have a ‘good conscience’. The repeated argument in Afrikaans newspapers was: What is being planned in the Western Cape, is the government’ policy for the rest of the country. To this end also settled Black workers were transformed into migrants and a further amendment to the Native Urban Areas Act denied rural Black men the right to seek work in Cape Town.

         

Robben Island – incarceration gives birth to faith: 

The government was quite successful to create fear of incarceration on Robben Island among all communities of South Africa in the 1960s. What they did not entertain was that God used the brutality of the system just as he heard the groans of the Israelites in Egypt in preparation of their final liberation. For Njongonkulu Ndugane, who was sentenced to three years on the island because of his political activities on behalf of the Pan African Congress of Azania, his time there became a turning point in his life. The son of an Anglican priest, he found himself wrestling with God asking the question: ‘How could a good God allow so much suffering in my country and now on the island? It was in the course of that wrestling with God that I found inner peace, as if God laid his hand on me. It was in a prison cell that I felt the call of God to serve him in the ordained ministry’ (Ndugane, 2003:5). In June 1996 he was elected to become the successor of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. In this office he was instrumental in the renovation of the Church of the Good Shepherd on Robben Island and the reconsecration of the sanctuary ‘as a symbol...of future hope’ They also made a statement to the effect. claiming the island to be ‘a place of pilgrimage and reconciliation. The island of incarceration has become an island of faith… It is part of that spirit of hope, that reconciling effect that people who were incarcerated on the island can bring to the world’ (Ndugane, 2003:3).

Opposition ‘divide and rule’ policies

Opposition to the ‘divide and rule’ policies of the government surfaced especially in the reaction of High School pupils in the years after 1976, which sent the clear message that ‘Coloureds’ are not falling any more for the ‘divide and rule’ tactics. In fact, it was the divisive tri-cameral parliament with limited representation for 'Coloureds' and (South African) Indians which spawned the launch of the National Forum and the UDF.  (Black Africans would be left in the cold). Humanly speaking, this was the major factor which initiated the beginning of the end of the apartheid edifice with Western Cape leaders like Dr Neville Alexander, Dr Allan Boesak and the lawyer Dullah Omar. The first-mentioned politician, who came from a ten-year imprisonment on Robben Island in 1974, appears to have been the main spur for the uniting of opposition forces when he proclaimed: ‘Let us make 1982 into the year of the united front and raise our struggle for liberation from apartheid and capitalism on to a higher level. ‘Let us unite for a non-racial, democratic and undivided Azania-South Africa’ (Alexander, 1985:17). The wording seems to be a deliberate attempt to unite the PAC and ANC factions in the liberation struggle. Azania was the preferred terminology for the country to be liberated by AZAPO and the PAC but resented by the Charterist movement. Alexander however seemed to have fallen into the trap of the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of the ruling power and its allies.  In the same ‘year of the united front’ he ended his address at the annual congress in December 1982 with the words ‘One Azania, One Nation’ (Alexander, 1985:40). At the inaugural occasion of the National Forum in Hammanskraal on 11 June 1983 the same thing happened (Alexander, 1985:41, indicating that the movement was PAC-related. Two months later the UDF was founded in Mitchells Plain, using the colours of the ANC.

          Christmas Tinto was one of the most colourful struggle personalities. After his release from incarceration on Robben Island in 1973 he and Oscar Mpetha were instrumental in joining the ‘Old Guar’d Cape township politicians with the young Black consciousness revolutionaries like Cheryl Carolus, Johnny Issel, Trevor Manuel and Zoli Malinde who came through in the wake of the post-1976 riots. This was the pristine beginning of the UDF, which got the final nudge through a speech from Dr Allan Boesak in Johannesburg. Quite aptly the movement was started in the Western Cape, in the Rocklands Town Centre of Mitchells Plain in August 1983. Deservedly, the old Cape trade unionist Oscar Mpetha was elected the first president, with Tinto as his deputy. After the failing health of the old stalwart, Tinto succeeded Mpetha. This choice was strategic, impacting the black townships because the public face of the UDF was very much determined by Coloureds like Dr Allan Boesak, Dullah Omar and Trevor Manuel.

         

               6. Great Cape Fighters of the first half of the 20^th Century

          Two prominent Cape Afrikaners had the same names. Both of them distinguished themselves. I refer to Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr. Born in 1845, ‘Onze Jan’ as he was endearingly nick-named, was a champion of Afrikaans, acquiring fame as the editor of the paper De Zuid Afrikaan, which was later renamed Ons Land. His major achievement was the recognition of the equality of the Dutch and English languages. His worst move occurred when his Afrikaner Bond joined the foremost British Imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes, to keep people of colour out of the Cape Parliament in 1894. The seed of prejudice against Blacks bore the fruit of racialism, which was to bedevil the country for over yet another century.

The younger Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr

The other Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, his nephew, had perhaps an even more illustrious career. He matriculated at the age of 13 although he only started school at the age of 8. He proceeded as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford in England. He hereafter set all sorts of age records, becoming Professor of Classics at the Johannesburg School of Mines at the age of 23 and two years later in 1919, he was the principal, a position Hofmeyr continued to hold after its conversion to the University of the Witwatersrand. From 1924 to 1929 he was Administrator of the Province Transvaal. The all-rounder Hofmeyr was successively Minister of the Interior, Minister of Health and Minister of Education from 1933 to 1936. Set to become the successor of Jan Smuts, he was Minister of Finance and Deputy Premier, but Hofmeyr died even before Smuts in 1948, aged only 54.

          The younger Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr was the one person that could have straddled the racial and church divisions of the mid-20^th century. The former possibility was ruled out by a sequence of ecclesiastical errors and the latter one by his early death. The prodigy that was born in the Mother City in 1894, fell seriously ill when he was only two years old. The lack of compassion by the minister in charge of the Groote Kerk, drove the mother of Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr to accept the offer of help from Rev. Ernest Baker of the nearby Baptist Church. The genius, who only went to school when he was eight, matriculated already at the age of 12.  Politics or an academic career was not his first vocational choice. As a child and teenager he had been deeply impacted by Rev. Ernest Baker and Oswin Bull of the Student Christian Association (SCA). At the beginning of 1912 the teenager was elected president of the SCA at the forerunner of the University of Cape Town, a mere 17 years old. At the end of that year he attended the seaside services at Somerset Strand and in July of the following year he surrendered his life completely to the Lord at the SCA conference in Worcester. After his return from Oxford in the UK where he had also won one prize after the other, he had no bigger desire than to serve the Lord full-time with the Students’ Christian Association. Hofmeyr’s church affiliation proved to be a stumbling block. ‘He was not employed by the interdenominational association for which he had done so much, for the reason that he was an Afrikaner who did not belong to one of the Dutch Reformed Churches’ (Paton, 1964: 67).    

     Hofmeyr used his position in secular society, for example that of Chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand, to remind the country what was at stake. When there was still too much euphoria over the freedom achieved during the victory of World War II, he honed in on the four freedoms [11] of President Roosevelt in his State of the nation address during the war on 6 Januar 1941, to remind of the danger of ignoring freedom of prejudice. In the graduation address of 16 March 1946 he referred to it as ‘not the least of the freedoms for which we must fight’ (Cited in Lewsen, 1988:195). In the same address he warned against racial prejudice: ‘We are paying a heavy price for our subverience to it today… we are the poorer as a nation because of our unwillingness to make full use of all our human resources.’ The spiritual man he was, he also warned, quoting William Penn, the American Quaker and freedom fighter: ‘… if we are not governed by God, we shall inevitably be ruled by tyrants.’ Coming shortly after World War II, the message was sure of hitting the mark. While adding the fifth freedom – that of prejudice – he warned prophetically, and so aptly against ‘the tendency to describe as a communist … anyone who asks for fair play for all races, or who suggests that non-Europeans really should be treated as the equals of Europeans before the law.’

A great world statesman

Another Jan, one of South Africa’s greatest sons, did not get the recognition in this country which he deserved. Grave blunders unfortunately caused a blot on the copybook of Jan Christiaan Smuts. One of his biographers, Piet Beukes, concedes that ‘undoubtably Smuts’ greatest blunder’ was when in 1916 he had the rebel leader Jopie Fourie shot. Comparable was however also his role in the rift in Afrikaner ranks after known as the broedertwis. Armed protest in the North by the Generals Beyer and De Wet – highlighted by the taking of his troops to the German camp by Colonel Maritz on 12 October 1914. this  led to a deep rift in Afrikaner society.

          Other serious mistakes were when he used extreme force to quell the mining strike on the Rand in 1922, the ruthless treatment of Mahatma Ghandhi and his bringing in armed forces to put down strikes in 1913 and 1914 when he was the Minister of Mines. For what was regarded as high-handed action, he incurred much odium, which seems to have clung to him much too long. Also he did not muster the political courage to listen properly to Black leaders.

          Looking back on his life in broader perspective, against the backdrop of really great achievements which brought acclaim to the country and worldwide recognition – yet by far not on a par with Nelson Mandela at the end of the 20^th century – it remains a tragedy that his errors still stain the great world statesman. 

     Smuts hailed from the Cape Swartland and studied Greek in Stellenbosch and Cambridge.[12] Piet Beukes not only pointed to his religious roots and studies in Greek at Stellenbosch in his youth, but he also especially noted the change in 1906 when Smuts was 36 years old - a result of his personal contacts with the Quakers in England. And then of course, there was the completely underrated example of the British Liberal politician and Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell–Bannerman, which influenced 20^th century history deeply. At London’s number 10 Downing Street Jan Smuts challenged Campbell–Bannerman in December 1905, after the Boers had been truly beaten in the South African war: ‘Do you want friends or enemies? You can have the Boers as friends...’  Campbell–Bannerman rose to the challenge – prepared by two English women for an act of mercy: Emily Hobhouse and the Quaker Margaret Clark Gillett to whom Smuts wrote some 2000 letters over a long period of time.

          Campbell–Bannerman showed the way that a true believer in Christ should follow in politics and statecraft. Britain granted self-government to the defeated Boer Republics in a supreme gesture of mercy and magnanimity. Perhaps that was the example, which influenced the Marshall Plan to help the defeated Western Germany onto its feet after the Second World War.

            The friendship of the Boers – or should we say Smuts - paved the way for South Africa entering both world wars on the side of Britain. This occurred at great electoral cost to Smuts, who linked up with Louis Botha and his politics of reconciliation. The tension between Hertzog followers and Botha men in the Boland were aggravated by the outbreak of World War I on 4 August 1914. Hertzog with his policy of South Africa first clashed with Botha, who agreed to invade German-controlled South West Africa on behalf of Britain. On 14 September the lawyer Willy Meyer wrote in Ons Land that Afrikaners should not be forced to fight against their mede-Afrikaners. Armed protest in the North by the Generals Beyer and De Wet – highlighted by the taking of his troops to the German camp by Colonel Maritz on 12 October 1914 - led to the Broedertwis, which led to a deep rift in Afrikaner society. Smuts's loyalty to Britain caused strain with his nationalistic-minded Afrikaners, notably with his Swartland compatriot Daniel Malan, who broke away to form the Purified nationalist Party in 1934.

         

A statesman who initiated things for which others got the recognition

Smuts may go down in history as the statesman who par excellence initiated or prepared things for which others got the recognition. It was surely special foresight to bring back to the country Dr Hendrik van der Bijl, a South African scientist with international acclaim. Van der Bijl had been involved in the development of the thermionic valve. By inviting Van der Bijl to become the Technical Advisor to the government and giving him sufficient funds – harvesting much criticism from lesser citizens – the industrial Revolution of South Africa was introduced. His successor Hertzog got the praise when Van der Bijl organized the Electrical Supply Commission (Escom).

          In 1917 Smuts’ feats as general in East Africa impressed the British Government so much that he was invited to the War Cabinet. He conceived the League of Nations, which was the predecessor of the United Nations. Furthermore, he received the greatest honours in Europe and the USA after his drafting of the Covenant of the international body. In the 1930s at the time of the great depression, he practiced the ‘contagion of magnimity’ which he had seen in action with Campbell–Bannerman, the British Prime Minister. Smuts offered Hertzog the Prime Ministership in a coalition government, although he had won the election. He discerned that the nation needed a government of great unity above all else. At the beginning of the Second War War however, Hertzog decided to pull out of their coalition when Smuts decided to fight alongside Britain against Hitler and his Nazi’s. 

          Raised in Afrikaner circles, it is not surprising that Smuts ‘in his inner heart… could not reconcile himself to the idea of African equality with Whites’. It was his conviction that the Black voters first had to be educated before full democracy and equality could be given to them, otherwise chaos would result. But he was not a racist. Furthermore, he already referred to forces which would change the attitude of Afrikaner to Blacks in a 1906 letter to Merriman, the later Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.  After his altercations with Mahatma Ghandi in South Africa, he came to respect him highly. It has been reported that Smuts replied in 1916 to someone who raised the possibility that Europeans might be placed under Indians: ‘Why not, I would be proud to serve under an Indian officer, if he were able.’ Smuts's greatness can be attributed to his ability to adapt to changes, without relinquishing his religious principles which he derived from Scripture. Though he was a pragmatic segregationist even up the run-up to the elections of 1948, he prepared for change towards non-racialism. But for that change he was by far not committed enough. He stressed duty as one of the conditions to ensure success for a non-racial South Africa, to avoid the emphasis on rights. His politics were still marked by a major leaning towards segregation. He had no ear for the suffering Blacks. Lutuli reminded us that ‘the General did not once exert his undoubted influence to extend a helping hand to the masses who groaned under their disabilities, and it was he who gave Hertzog the power to disenfranchise the few African voters’ (Luthuli, 1962:106).

          The realisation that all the races had to be given progressively more voting opportunity, went into hibernation after 1948. Alan Paton and the Liberal Party, who could not accept the ANC’s insistence on universal franchise, carried the baton further, albeit not with much of an impact. Frederik W. de Klerk was to get the credit in 1990 for the bold steps, which had been prepared by Jan Smuts, but which he and his party unfortunately did not push forcefully enough in the run-up to the 1948 elections.

         

          Sadly, the illustrious statesman Smuts bequeathed a party in tatters, with a programme not much different to the apartheid brand of the new rulers, Malan and his National Party. At Smuts’ death in September 1950 the United Party had no leader to replace the statesman who was born and bred in the Western Cape and who had become a world leader in the meantime. The country lost out as apartheid got more and more entrenched.

Jan Smuts, the Christian

In another field, Smuts’ intimate knowledge of New Testament Greek and Science caused him to coin the word holism, when he wrote a book Holism and Evolution.

          Smuts’ feats in the two world wars were spectacular. Behind the scenes he acknowledged in his correspondence to Margaret Clark Gillett how he was carried through in the most trying circumstances by his faith in his Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.  In his book The Religious Smuts Piet Beukes devotes a whole chapter on ‘the influence and personality of Jesus Christ on Smuts’s life.’

          Smuts’ firm basis in Scripture comes through when he said in this regard: ‘the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament; and the highest code of men, the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus Christ – all are silent on rights, all stress duties’. As another condition for a new South Africa, Smuts stressed the preservation of law and order. The powers that be would do well to learn from him, even as he endeavoured to have his ear close to the Word of God. He referred to justice, which exalts a people ‘as a basis for a solution…of our Native relations, the most difficult of all and the final test of our Western Christian civilization.’

          The theological ideas of Smuts remained unknown for decades. Only people like Margaret Clark knew of his deep insights. Profound, even though by no means worked out properly, were his ideas on Mary Magdalene. It would have graced Black Theologians – and shocked Catholics! Smuts suggested that not the Virgin Mary was the Mother of Christianity, but the former demon possessed prostitute Mary Magdalene. He furthermore proposed that she was the one who anointed Jesus with fragrant expensive oil and dried his feet with her hair. According to Jan Smuts, the vision of the risen Christ made Mary Magdalene the Mother of the Christian Faith. Similarly, his notion that ‘Christianity began in the slaves’ quarters of the decadent Roman Empire, and so some seed of good may be germinating in the hearts of men’ would have been unpallatable to church authorities in December 1922 when Smuts wrote these lines. This was especially remarkable because he was only known at this time as a stern, uncompromising military leader, who was prepared to use force to quell rebellion of any sort.

          Because of his firm base in Scripture, Smuts’ discerned clearly what the bottom line was in the fight against the ideology represented by Adolf Hitler. In a wartime speech he spelt it out that the swastika, the deformed cross which symbolized Hitler’s National Socialism, was ‘a symbol of moral enslavement.’ The ‘happy warriors of the New Order… could only arise under the sign of the Cross, in the spirit of service and self-sacrifice, leading man to his destiny, which he must find not in mastery but in service, not in dictatorship but in freedom’ (Cited in Lewsen, 1988:194).

          An astute student of philosophy and physics, Smuts explained the concept, why ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ in 1926, many decades before it was generally accepted by physics scholars. He did get recognition for this scientific contribution when he was asked to became a Fellow of the Royal Society and President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Later he was also to become the Rector of the famous St Andrew’s University in Scotland.

Two Cape Revolutionaries of Colour who changed the political Landscape

At the Cape itself things were going to change drastically, due to two ‘Coloured’ men. James La Guma travelled the country with his father who was a travelling cobbler, but Simons Town was their home base before he later settled down at 2 Roger Street in District Six.  When he heard of the strike of Clements Kadalie’s ICU in the Cape Town Dock, he was working in Lüderitz, Namibia, where he also learnt to speak German fluently. Immediately he wrote to Kadalie, who agreed that he could set up a branch of the ICU in Lüderitz. At the age of 27 he was back in Cape Town, but already in October of that year, 1921, he was requested to be the organizer in Port Elisabeth. In no time he made such a success of the job there, that he was recalled to the Headquarters in Loop Street in Cape Town, where things were in a pretty mess. In 1923 he was elected Assistant General Secretary and the year thereafter General Secretary. He introduced index cards, membership numbers and an alphabetical filing system.

          In 1923 he met Johnny Gomas in Cape Town. The two immediately found each other as James La Guma mentored the plaasjapie from the Abbotsdale mission station, who however had already been active in trade union activities and also as a member of the ANC. La Guma taught Gomas: ‘Black people will first have to cast off the shackles of racial oppression…’

          Until 1924 the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) remained basically a White party, a situation which arose from its basic belief in the backward character of Black workers. This all changed through the input of James La Guma and especially Johnny Gomas, who joined the party in January 1925. In December of that year Gomas was elected Cape Provincial Secretary. From December 1925, to be a member of the CPSA meant to ‘identify openly with the movement for the emancipation of Blacks’ (Musson, 1989:49). Simultaneously, Cape Town became the home territory of ‘independent South African Marxism’. The national CPSA was linked to Soviet Russia’s Comintern. The Cape Town left set out to make sure that the CPSA would not bow to Soviet dictates.

          Being thoroughly trilingual, the young man from the Cape rose quickly in the ranks of the Communist Party of which he had become a member. He was duly elected to represent South Africa at the international occasion in Moscow.  When James La Guma came back from Moscow after the tenth anniversary celebrations of the revolution in 1927, he saw the solution for the country as an independent South African Republic as a first stage towards a workers and peasants’ republic, with full rights for all workers. 

Rise of the Capetonian Worker Class

The trade union work initiated at the Cape by Nyasaland-born Clements Kadalie and his colleagues in 1919 - with their Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) was short-lived, but it succeeded in giving White South Africa a fright. Gomas also joined the ICU of Clements Kadalie, of which he became a full-time organizer in 1923. The militant language of the ICU soon surpassed the ANC (Musson, 1989:30), making it a mass movement after 1923.

          At this time Gomas was back in the Cape, operating from his home in Sussex Street in Wynberg. He worked closely with James La Guma, in District Six. The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (ICU) nevertheless left a legacy: ‘the flame of revolt which it had fanned’, especially in rural Western Cape areas. But also in the new townships of the Mother City the flame was ignited under the direction of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) and for a while by a revived ANC.

          Until 1925 the ICU was a Cape-based trade union. Through the dynamic leadership of Clements Kadalie, membership of the ICU spread throughout the length and breadth of the country and beyond. However, when the ICU leadership became increasingly under the influence of liberals, the communists were seen as a threat. Gomas, together with the other Communist Party members, was something of a headache to Kadalie because Gomas wanted to transform the ICU into a mass movement. When Gomas and La Guma refused to resign from the CPSA, they were expelled from the ICU. That back-fired on the ICU, which hereafter declined sharply. Tabata (1974:10) had no doubt that the bureaucratic methods of the leadership crippled the organization.

          The CPSA gained from it all the more. Gomas, who had really put the ICU on the map in the Western Cape, also rose in rank in the ANC. During Gumede’s absence in Russia in early 1927, Gomas was the national acting president. The communist influence in the ANC was considerably extended at this time. Johnny Gomas was very much of an optimist, thinking that White and Black workers could unite in opposition to the ilk of Jan Smuts, who epitomized to them the mine magnates who exploited the workers. Gomas’ hope was smashed in the aftermath of the 1924 elections. One of the first laws of the 1924 Pact Government was the Native Administration Act. This law equipped the Native Affairs Department with enormous powers, e.g. to control the free movement of Africans.

Compassionate work amongst peripheral Groups

Reverend Arthur William Blaxall, an Anglican clergyman, came to South Africa in 1923 to work with the deaf. At the Cape he was open for the need to reach out compassionately to other peripheral groups of the society like the Muslims. In the 1930s he headed the Athlone School for ‘Coloured’ Blind children, which is now located in Glenhaven, Bellville South. In 1939 he opened the first workshop for blind Africans in South Africa – Ezenzeleni in Roodepoort. For many years he was secretary of the the South African Christian Council, which was established in 1936 and he was also chairman of the South African branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.

          The need for reconciliation was necessary all round. A competitive spirit and backbiting even among missionaries seems to have been quite common at that time.  In his inaugural speech as chairman of the Christian Council in 1936, Rev. Nicol referred to a letter of a missionary, which he concedes was not typical: ‘Ek veg ook wat ek kan teen die Y-seksie...Ek is ‘n man van vrede, maar nou het ek oorlog verklaar’ (Koningsbode, August 1936, p.258).[13] The same missionary states that he never knew that one sister church could be so distrustful of another. 

          Over the years Reverend Blaxall developed ‘an ever deepening sense of solidarity’ in his own words with the Black, ‘Coloured’ and Indian struggle against apartheid (Karis and Carter, Volume 4, 1977:8). Trusted as a friend, he received money in the 1960s from exiled ANC and Pan African Congress (PAC) leaders and passed it on to former political prisoners and their families who were in need. This led to his arrest in 1963 and conviction under the Suppression of Communist Act.

Another unheralded Cape Son – Donald Barkly Molteno

Donald Barkly Molteno is another one of the unheralded Cape stars who faught for justice in our prejudicial strife-torn society. Born in 1908 in Wynberg and attending Bishops in Rondebosch, the Cape Anglican school for the top bracket of the Cape elite, he had everything going for him in terms of privilege. After graduating with honours in law at the prestigious Cambridge University in the UK in 1930 and a short period at the Inner Temple of the English Bar, he returned to the Cape where he practised in the Cape Provincial Department of the Supreme Court from 1932 to 1964. He moved to lecturing at UCT where he was Dean of the Faculty of Law at his death in 1972.

          Molteno represented Black ‘voters’ in the House of Assembly from 1938-48. However, in 1947 he decided not to seek re-election because the system was very unsatisfactory and increasingly unpopular. Yet, during his time in Parliament he was a brave fighter for the voteless and thereafter he continued to occupy leading positions in the Civil Rights League and the Liberal Party. Soon after his entry into parliament Molteno fought for the pass laws to be repealed, and when there was merely an effort to insert the colour bar for employment – the forerunner of Job Reservation – he opposed it vehemently. He did not limit himself by any means to discrimination against Blacks. Thus Molteno fought anybody suggesting an economic colour bar to protect Whites. They ‘can only mean certain privileged groups which will benefit at the expense of the vast mass of the population’ (Lewsen, 1988:81). When Eric Louw tried to justify the prohibition of new Jews who were fleeing the Holocaust, he opposed in Parliament the suggestion that the portals of South Africa would be ‘barred and bolted against Jewish immigration’ (Lewsen, 1988:91)

          Donald Molteno saw his role as fighting tyranny, poverty and discrimination. Through his ‘compassion and pertinacity he won redress for the misconduct of officials, headed deputations’ (Lewsen, 1988:29) and a host of other issues. Yet, whenever possible, he addressed the larger issues which affected Blacks especially, such as the poll-tax and the pass laws.

                              7. Diverse Spiritual Dynamics   

The Malay Quarter falls apart - literally

Bo-Kaap was threatened from yet another angle after Dr Abdurahman’s departure from the political scene. At this time the slamse buurt, the ‘Malay Quarter’, proper was also falling apart physically. White speculators pocketed exorbitant rents, not concerned with the condition of the houses on their properties. The invasion of non-Muslims as subtenants resulted in the over-crowding of the ‘Malay Quarter’. It deteriorated gradually into slum conditions.  Even the pride of the Cape Muslims, their artisans, was affected so that the author Lewis (1949:649) wrote about the disappearance and even ‘death of the Malay crafts’.  However, he overstated his case somewhat by speaking of the ‘disintegration of community living’ (p.598). The old houses of the original ‘slamse buurt’ (Malay Quarter) with the borders, Dorp, Strand, Rose and Chiappini Streets, were deteriorating fast towards the end of the 1940s but the Islamic community was still clinging to each other, with Bo-Kaap and District Six as an axis around which much of the subculture revolved.

Bo-Kaap saved by far-sighted People

Far-sighted people like Dr Izak David Du Plessis, a lecturer from UCT and a famous Afrikaans poet - along with other Whites like Dr E.G. Jansen - had a deep sense of cultural history.  Dr Du Plessis especially was loved by many Muslims of the Bo-Kaap and appreciated by them for his efforts to get the Malay Quarter restored to its former glory.  It is appropriate to repeat that when the Malay Quarter was definitely threatened with extinction, Du Plessis rallied many friends - almost all White and Christian - to fight for the restoration of the dilapidated houses. In altruistic style Du Plessis passed the honour to the group headed by Dr E.G. Jansen, who later became the Governor General of the Cape Province.  Du Plessis described them as ‘...untiring idealists who realize that the Malay Quarter is the pivot of Cape Malay life’ (Du Plessis and Lückhoff, 1953:12/13).  They succeeded to get 15 houses restored in the block between Rose, Wale, Chiapinni and Longmarket Streets. The rest of the Bo-Kaap continued to deteriorate.

          At the request of the government department of Community Development, the City Council drew up a scheme for the general rehabiliation of the area.  In 1966 Mr P.W. Botha had a number of houses built in his capacity of Minister of Community Development. How genuine he was, was never clear. It really was a question whether it was not merely a gesture to placate the opposition after the furore and outcry after the District Six proclamation of February 1966.  Soon Botha was to show his true colours when he became the Minister of Coloured Affairs. Yet later, he was known as the unbending ‘groot krokodiel’ as Prime Minister.

          Also on the Christian side, there was a threat at this time. Only a remnant of St Stephen’s Church members had remained when many moved away to other parts of the Peninsula. The maintenance of the building became a big burden to the church. Rev. P.S. Latsky, who served the congregation from 1930, had a heart for the historical value of the building. He fought successfully for its preservation when developers wanted to use the church and the adjacent lot for a parking garage in 1949.

The Legalising of racial Separation

At a time when Islam was reeling, the legalising of racial separation in 1948 saved the day for Muslims. When the Nationalist government took over, it soon became clear that people of colour would be discriminated against. Islam at the Cape was embattled also from this side because its adherents were grouped with the ‘Coloureds’.  The first Nationalist Prime Minister, Dr D.F. Malan, had been a Dutch Reformed Minister. It is ironical that Malan - a direct descendant of a Vergelegen[14] son and a slave woman with whom Malan’s ancestor had eloped - was to be co-responsible for the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which caused so much misery in the apartheid era. Yet, it was not so surprising because the DRC had requested this legislation. Dr Koot Vorster - long time minister of the Tafelberg congregation, which is almost equidistant to the Parliament Building as the Groote Kerk - played a pivotal role in the lobbying for racist laws. His brother John became Prime Minister in 1966 after the assassination of Dr H.F. Verwoerd.

          The dubious honour goes to Dr Izak David Du Plessis for the application of apartheid ideology to the Cape Muslims. He contributed in a big way to the ‘redefinition of ‘Malay’ as an ethnic designation in terms of the larger racialist scheme of apartheid’ (Chidester, Religions in South Africa, 1992:167). He wrote books about the Cape Muslims, their culture and history. Originally the term ‘Malay’ denoted a religious and not a racial group in his writings.

          Muslims (like all peoples of colour) were divided with regard to the opposition to the oppressive laws. The government of the day manoevred cleverly to co-opt leading figures of the respective communities like Tom Swarts and Salie Dollie into the Coloured Representative Council (CRC), the ‘Coloured’ Parliament, which was a forerunner of the sham tri-cameral system. The CRC had their meetings in a building in Bellville that was scathingly called ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ (The Council was situated adjacent to the ‘Bush College’, as the University College of the Western Cape was derogaratively called in those days).  One would have thought that Mr Salie Dollie had learned his lesson when he was abused as a pawn some 20 years earlier. The implication was that the CRC, which met there, possessed the cap-in-hand/door-mat mentality of so-called collaborators who easily said ‘ja, baas!’ 

          One wonders what the main motivation of the White DRC Synod of 1957 was to move the Sendingsinstituut from Wellington. Officially the reason given was to join the other theological training in Stellenbosch and Pretoria.  I surmise that another reason could have been the embarrassing situation, which had arisen because the Teologiese Skool of the Sendingkerk had also started the training of their ministers in Wellington in 1954. But also the seminary for Sendingkerk ministers later moved from Wellington to Bellville in the mid-1960s, where the ideologically influenced University College of the Western Cape had started for the ‘Coloureds’.

          Unfortunately the enemy used the issue of race to send the Dutch Reformed Church on the path of isolation, causing a deep rift in the denomination. White theologians legitimised a biblical heresy of racial separation and their counterparts of colour - especially the ‘Coloured’ dominees - responded by politicising the church. 

ANC Leaders teach the Unity in Christ

Generations of political leaders in South Africa, particularly within the ANC, drew on Christian values for the building of a broader political unity. Coming from the African background of a broad humanity, ubuntu, there was, they believed, an ethical imperative to move beyond narrow identities of family, clan and race. – The thinking of White and ‘Coloured’ churches was bedevilled by the neat separation of politics and religion. Long before White and ‘Coloured’ churches embraced the concept, Blacks already saw the importance of the unity in Christ. One of the pioneers at the Cape was Rev. Zaccheus Richard Mahabane, a Methodist minister, who was posted to Cape Town in 1916. He joined the Cape African Congress in 1917 after hearing political speeches by Charlotte Maxeke and her husband.

          In 1919 Rev. Zaccheus Richard Mahabane became president of the Cape African Congress.  In 1924 he was elected president-general of the national ANC and again from 1937 to 1940. He maintained in 1925 that ‘the universal acknowledgement of Christ as common Lord and King break down the social, spiritual and intellectual barriers between the races’ (Cited in Elphick and Davenport, 1997:384). He propagated moderate conciliatory views of compromise, for instance he found a separate voters’ roll for Blacks acceptable if Whites found the prospect of a common roll too menacing.

          Not bearing the brunt of the hurts caused by apartheid, the White-led denominations were out of touch with the spiritual dynamics of the resistance against the heretical ideology which became government policy from 1948. Helen Joseph, a Jewish anti-apartheid campaigner bemoaned in respect of the Defiance Campaign of the 1950s: ‘The Church turned its back on the ANC, [but] the ANC never turned its back on the Church’ (Cited in Elphick and Davenport, 1997:386).

          The deep religiosity and prayerfulness of that campaign was described by Tom Lodge as a ‘mood of religious fervour [that] infused the resistance.’ He went on to note: ‘When the [Defiance] Campaign opened it was accompanied by days of prayer, and volunteers pledged themselves at prayer meetings to a code of love, discipline and cleanliness… and even at the tense climax of the Campaign in Port Elizabeth people were enjoined on the first day of the strike “to conduct a prayer and a fast in which each member of the family will have to be at home;” thereafter they attended nightly church services’ (Cited in Elphick and Davenport, 1997:386).

Paternalism hinders the Cause of the Gospel

Missionaries whose lives had been transformed through personal faith and conversion, often expected that this would also happen in society at large automatically - if the Gospel would only be effectively preached. Satan hit back, when an artificial and unbiblical differentiation between Christian action and evangelistic outreach caused an ever-widening rift in the Church.

          South African exponents of the ‘Social Gospel’ embraced education, social work and politics not as replacements of evangelism, but they were sometimes accused in this way by right-wing evangelicals. For Blacks, the discussion was academic in part, because as Professor D.D.T. Jabavu, a Black Christian leader, claimed, ‘the secular-sacred dichotomy was foreign to their African cosmology’ (Elphick, 1997:368).

          The disunity between churches for much of the 20^th century actually centred around paternalism. The White-dominated English-speaking churches thought that the other races only needed equality of opportunity, which the Whites owed to the others. Afrikaners generally thought themselves to be called to be the guardians of the ‘non-White’ races. White supremacy was thus taken for granted by both groups. In the former case – also among missionaries - full equality and total integration were dragged and postponed to a distant future. On the other hand, nobody put the thinking of Afrikaner Christians more clearly than Hendrik Verwoerd, the architecture of apartheid. It was his conviction that the Black man had to be kept ‘in his place’, i.e. in subjection and servitude.

          Both groups were unaware that they were hurting themselves by denying dignity to others and thus seriously hindering the cause of the Gospel. Somewhere the teaching that unity is a prerequisite for effective prayer did not penetrate into the churches. That does not mean though that the message was not vocalised. Donald Fraser, a former Scottish missionary preached in twenty-six South African towns and cities in 1925 during the United Missionary Campaign. He charged Whites to abandon their fears of a so- called ‘black menace’, claiming wisely that there is ‘no menace when people are determined to do justice to one another’ (Cited in Elphick et al, 1997:368).

          Professor Hoernlé, by no means an evangelical, accurately described a liberal failing that was too often overlooked: ‘The greatest moral danger in the heart of the liberal spirit’ is that it is so apt to become paternalistic and condescending (Cited in Lewsen, 1988:25). It is strange that Afrikaner and radical intellectuals could see in him ‘the precursor of apartheid’. Edgar Brookes, the real precursor of apartheid who however recanted, could build on that foundation declaring in 1945: ‘We have no hope of preserving white racial dominance. It is not a question of whether it will fall, but of when’ (Cited in Lewsen, 1988:27).

Early 20^th Century Black Church Leaders in costly Reconciliation

Over the years the church in South Africa has been a major catalyst for peace and reconciliation. Strong personalities like Reverend John Dube and Professor D.D.T. Jabavu had been playing a moderating and conciliatory role in the early days of the ANC. Successive White governments failed to appreciate the gold of human resources, by not listening to Black church leaders.

          Substantial resistance to the oppressive race policies came as a rule from the ranks of these church leaders until the 1950s. One of the most prominent of them was South Africa’s first Nobel Prize laureate, Albert Lutuli. After he had been dismissed as chief in November 1952, he responded with his famous address which had at its beginning the momentous words ‘thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door…’He ended with the powerful sentence: ‘The Road to Freedom is via the CROSS’ (The full address in printed as an appendix in Luthuli, 235-238).  Long before Black Theology was in vogue, Lutuli expressed his conviction that apartheid degrades all who are party to it. He was optimistic despite all evidence to the contrary that Whites would sooner or later be compelled to change heart and accept a shared society. Lutuli was elected ANC president-general by a large majority the next month, followed by his ‘cross’: Bans imposed in early 1953 were renewed in the following years, completely silencing them in 1959. Lutuli was not around any more to experience the freedom which Nelson Mandela could walk into, but he paved the way.

          On the other hand, many Christians naively overlooked the innate convenience in man to hold on to privilege. Some needed Black Theology in the 1970s and 1980s, for example the Kairos Document of 1985, to shake and liberate some of them out of their cosy zones.

The Proliferation of organized Anti-racism Resistance at the Cape 

In the early 1930s Dr Abdurahman started radiating a type of conservatism and respectability, which made him suspect. He had already displayed dirty political tricks such as denigrating his brother for not wearing a fez. His marriage to a second wife Maggie by Muslim rites might have been a significant factor in aligning his children and his first wife Nellie against him. When he participated in the Commission of Enquiry regarding the Cape Coloured Population, he was already tainted, suspect of trying to attain respectability in the eyes of Whites in an unprincipled way. He ushered in his own swansong when the report was published in August 1937 (Union Act no. 54 of 1937), notably without a minority dissenting voice. The findings turned out to be a blueprint for petty apartheid legislation. One could find there all sorts of segregatory measures like job reservation, residential areas and housing schemes in which Coloured would be separated from Blacks.  The Coloured Advisory Council (CAC) and Coloured Affairs Department (CAD) were ostensibly introduced with the intention of bribing the ‘upper crust’, from which collaborators could be drawn. Thus, the Schotsche Kloof Flats in Bo-Kaap now stand there not as a proud momunent of Abdurahman’s efforts for the Cape Muslims, but as an indictment, a sad reminder of a great politician with a dismal end to his career – a man who started off fighting for the rights of all oppressed people, but who ended as a collaborator with segregation politics. Sad was also that an Anglican bishop who did so much for the upliftment of the Coloured people, was also drawn into the divisive schemes. Bishop Lavis and White liberals helped to introduce the CAC (Cape Times, 30 January, 1943).

          Most prominent in the rebellion against Abdurahman’s leadership was his daughter Zainunissa (Cissie) Gool, along with her husband Dr A.H. Gool and his brother Goolam, plus other members of the Gool and Abdurahman clans. The Abdurahman contribution was coming from the children stemming from the first marriage of the political pioneer. Out of this new thinking the National Liberation League started in District Six in 1935. Two years later, a few UCT students initiated the New Era Fellowship (NEF). Young teachers from these ranks soon started to challenge the old guard in the Teachers League of South Africa (TLSA) which had ironically been started by Dr Abdurahman.

World War II influences the Struggle of the Underdogs

The influence of the run up to World War II had a profound influence on the struggle of the oppressed at the Cape when it became generally known that Haile Selassie, a Black man, was leading a nation. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia made it easy for Johnny Gomas to call dockworkers at a Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) mass meeting in 1935 in Cape Town to stop any shipment of food for the ‘…Italian robbers, who are out for imperialist aggrandizement at the expense of the Abyssinian people.’ The initial successes of the Japanese in the East proved that the white colonizers were not invincible after all.  The fight against the Nazi’s brought the term Herrenvolk into the vocabulary of the TLSA and related bodies.

          The final result of the World War furthermore gave hope to all colonized people of colour that the liberty - hard fought for in the war - would be extended to all people. The war had been presented as a struggle for a better world, for democracy and for human rights.

          Out of all this emerged the Springbok Legion in December 1941. The Legion was open to all soldiers, regardless of race or sex.  The Legion with a strong Cape base, was definitely on a collision course with conservative Transvaal Afrikaners. Fred Carneson, who later became the editor of New Age, the Communist Party (and later the ANC) paper, recalled: ‘the Springbok Legion called for sterner measures against the Broederbond and the Nazi Ossewabrandwag.’ The anti-Fascist theme was a focus of the Springbok Legion, also speaking for Africans to White audiences. The Nationalist victory in the 1948 elections spelled the death knell for the Legion. The Ossewabrandwag was however also branded through their close links to the Nazi’s. However, many of those Afrikaners who studied in the Germany of Hitler, like Diederichs and Jeff Cronje, were going to be influential in the ideological battle in South Africa from the ranks of Malan’s Purified National(ist) Party.

Repression revives Revolt    

The voice of Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr became an increasing voice in the wilderness after World War II. Smuts seemed to have forgotten that he had predicted evil days with regard to segregation. In March 1946 Hofmeyr warned that the struggle for freedom is a continuing one, calling for ‘unwearying devotion and eternal vigilance’ (Cited in Lewsen, 1988:194). He went on to point out that racial prejudice made South Africans ‘victims of the anti-Semitic doctrines… that we have fought to destroy.’

          Notwithstanding these warnings, a pattern continued at the Cape since the earliest beginnings, namely that excessive repression revived revolt again and again. The government made the opposition by people of colour rise out of the ashes through the implementation of the Coloured Advisory Council (CAC) and Coloured Affairs Department (CAD) in 1943. Cissy Gool-Abdurahman launched the Anti-CAD (-C.A.C) campaign in District Six as opposition to this ploy. It spread like wild fire, with the scheduled parliamentary elections of that year adding fuel to the revolt.  

          The very intensity of Nationalist oppression contributed in a big way. Albert Lutuli suggested ‘what we had so far failed to achieve – awake the mass of Africans to political awareness… the Nationalists more than anybody have given force and insistence to African demands.'

          After Johnnie Gomas had become ‘defiled’ through his two year banning in 1952, he refrained from attending the formation of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU). He nevertheless became involved in the formation of the South African People’s Organization (SACPO) in 1953. SACPO was formed out of the remnants of the Franchise Action Committee (FRAC), which endeavoured to secure voting rights for all citizens of the country. Alex La Guma was elected SACPO full-time Secretary in 1954, scheduled to become one of their delegates at at the Congress of the People in June 1955 in Kliptown, Johannesburg. One of Alex La Guma’s early achievements was to organize a fairly successful bus boycott against segregation.

          The most notable intentional absentee in Kliptown was surely the Cape political veterans, Johnny Gomas and James La Guma. Gomas stated his reason for not intending to go: the ‘fear that my association … would cause the government to blacklist it as they have done to other organizations. My name is mud with the government.’ The bulk of the Cape delegation was ultimately absent at the Congress, after the government had intervened, detaining 60 Western Cape delegates - en route to Kliptown - in Beaufort West. Delegates who left the Western Cape for Kliptown included Alex La Guma, Eveline Ngoso of the Woman’s Anti-Pass Committee and Albie Sachs of UCT representing the Active in the Modern Youth Society. The younger La Guma was one of those who never arrived in Johannesburg.

          After the lifting of his banning in June 1954, Johnny Gomas’ main weapon was the pen. This did not endear him to the ANC, e.g. when he pointed out that ‘Apart from the fact that the Freedom Charter was one of the finest programmes drawn up, the ANC only adopted it more than 12 months later.’ Nevertheless, the ANC and SACPO were fairly close to each other at this stage, closer than those participants of the Unity movement, who would not accept any racial tags. Alex La Guma was involved with New Age, the ANC mouthpiece. The weekly paper which started in 1937 as The Guardian, had to change its name a few times after being banned by the government of the day. It bounced back respectively under the name Clarion, People’s World, New Age and Spark.

          At the Cape provincial congress of the ANC in August 1953 Prof. ZK Matthews, just after his return from a lecturing stint in the US, proposed the summoning of a ‘national convention at which all groups might be represented to consider our national problems on an all-inclusive basis’ to ‘draw up a Freedom Charter for the democratic South Africa of the future’. The idea was endorsed by the ANC’s annual conference in September.

The Aftermath of Kliptown

In the aftermath of Kliptown and the adoption by the ANC of the Freedom Charter, the government swooped in December 1956, arresting 156 opposition leaders, including Nelson Mandela and Alex La Guma. This was to lead to what became known as the Treason Trial. Through a protracted court case, the government appeared to keep the opposition at bay as long as possible.

          An interesting reaction of Afrikaners was that exactly a year after Kliptown, they had their own version of a congress of the people. In Bloemfontein the Volkskongres gathered, basically to discuss the government Tomlinson report, which had been appointed in 1951 to study the ‘Socio-Economic Development of the Bantu Areas.’ An important suggestion of this government commission, the intensive development of industry in these areas - which were later called homelands - was never implemented.  Later they did however encourage border industries on the edges of the 'homelands'.

          At the renewed repression, concretely after his son Alex and others like Reggie September were detained in 1956, James La Guma was persuaded to come out of political retirement, to try and fill the gap caused by the arrests.  He was duly elected as President of SACPO in 1957. Alex la Guma and Reggie September were banned for five years. During this time Alex La Guma continued to write in New Age, which had become the mouthpiece of the ANC. His column Up my Ally continued to appear until June 1962, when he was banned as well.

          After the Pan African Congress’ (PAC) had broken away from the ANC in April 1959, the latter organization was forced into a more militant position than the pacifist stance which their leader Chief Albert Luthuli, a committed Christian and Methodist lay preacher, had advocated. His dictum of ‘freedom via the Cross’ was branded as unworkable by young militant elements in the party. With his outspoken support for the Black Republic in the late 1920s, it was not surprising that Johnny Gomas and other Cape Coloureds broke away with the (PAC) in 1959. After a play ‘Try for White’ was staged in October 1959, the old Coloured leader, pleaded for a ‘black identity’, an early version of Black Consciousness. However, Gomas did not subscribe totally to its manifesto which expressed hostility towards all that was associated with the Western ‘Way if Life’. He was committed to the destruction of racism, discerning that it was dehumanising people of colour. However, it does not seem that he discerned that it was also dehumanising the Whites as well.

          In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre and the Langa episode shortly thereafter, both Johnny Gomas and James La Guma were arrested. How fitting it was that the two veterans of the struggle against racial oppression shared a prison cell after the country-wide swoop. However, it did no good to the health of the old man La Guma. He recovered but he was not going to be the same again. A year later, in July 1961, he died.

Authors of Colour take up the Cudgels

The Awakening of a People by Isaac Tabata, one of the New Era Fellowship members of District Six, gives an excellent analysis of the South African struggle. Like so many seminal books of resistance, that book of 1950 and every reprint of it was banned and its effect stifled. As one who not only comes from the Black community himself, but who was also involved with the NEUM from its inception in 1943, Tabata was in the special position to write history from within. Brilliantly he analyses the two divergent policies, namely against the government and against the line of opportunism. The book opened the eyes of many to the real political situation. His exposure of the opportunism of the early generations of the ANC surely helped Nelson Mandela – to whom Tabata wrote a personal letter in 1948 – and his colleagues in the CODESA negotiations in the transition period, not to be tricked again by the likes of de Klerk and his team. Like the other two books mentioned, the two main issues of land and liberty are expounded in The Awakening of a People as clearly as any scholar of history would wish.

          A major correction in historiography followed the publication of a booklet by a Genadendal descendant of the Khoi. Henry (Jutti) Bredekamp became an academic by ‘default’. Stemming from Klippies Street in the backwater of the famous mission station, he proceeded for teacher training in Oudthoorn after his Matric in 1962. He was regarded as not possessing the right pedigree - like stemming from the influencial Wessels or Joorst families – to go and study theology at the Moravian seminary which was situated in Fairview Port Elisabeth, before it had to re-locate to District Six, Cape Town because of the Group Areas Act.  After qualifying as a teacher, he started teaching at a farm school near the Karoo hamlet of Leeu Gamka. He however still joined in the holiday activities of the Christian Students Association. During a visit to Tiervlei (Ravensmead) in 1968, he got more information about the extra-mural degree studies of UWC where he subsequently graduated. As lecturer of that institution, his first literary production in 1981– writing ‘Van Veeverskaffers tot Veewagters, in Afrikaans,’ was strategic. That it was not a thick book surely also helped the cause. Along with the publication of the diary of Georg Schmidt in the previous year – which was not thin - a process of correction of many a prejudice was started.  Many of the myths were uncovered. (Although much of the research was not completely new, but because the work of Tabata, Mguni and Majeke had by and large been unknown because these works were still banned.) As a descendant from the Khoi and stemming from Genadendal, the booklet had a special touch.

Mid and late 20^th Century Jewish Contributions towards a more just Dispensation

The Jewish UP member of the Provincial Council Abe Bloomberg dared to express ‘uncompromising opposition to the principle of coloured segregation’. When the immediate predecessor of apartheid legislation reared its head, he stated publicly: ‘I shall do everything possible to bring about the rejection of this miserable piece of legislation in its entirety’ (The Sun, 12 August, 1938). Unfortunately, Bloomberg’s role was tainted through his links to the expedient George Golding, the leader of the Coloured People’s National Union (CPNU). Bloomberg nevertheless later became a valued Coloured Persons’ Representative in Parliament in the late 1950s.

          Helen Suzman, a Jewess, representing the posh Johannesburg suburb of Houghton from 1953, brought moral values into play. Coming from Lithuanian parentage, the contribution of Helen Suzman was gratefully recognized by all people who suffered under the oppressive apartheid rule. For many years she was the only parliamentarian of the Progressive Party. As the MP for Houghton from 1953-1989, she used the forum of Parliament to speak out on behalf of equal justice for all human beings in our country.

          In the course of her parliamentarian work Helen Suzman visited political prisoners. After speaking to Nelson Mandela on Robben Island in 1967, she reported to the Minister in charge that a Nazi warden was giving the prisoners hell, resulting in the villain to be removed from the island. Suzman’s quest for complete truthfulness made her respected by all and sundry.  She was well aware that this would, in Suzman’s own words ‘earn me the acute displeasure of the anti-apartheid movement’ (Suzman, 1994:156).  The overriding goal was to get the political prisoners released. She however also dared to refute Winnie Mandela’s exaggerated claim in 1983 that her husband Nelson was maltreated on Robben Island.

            Another famous South African Jew, Joe Slovo, was one of Helen Suzman’s students at Wits University, where she lectured before she entered politics. He was from a different ideological persuasion, an atheist who became a Cabinet minister in the first post-apartheid government. Our country owes much to him, the much-admired General Secretary of the Communist Party, who was so committed to negotiations. He was particularly responsible for persuading the radical elements in the party to accept what were called the ‘sunset clauses’ – concessions to the government in order to keep negotiation on track. Slovo’s contribution went a long way to avert a White backlash or a counter revolution after 1994. However, he harvested the chagrin of other leftist colleagues for allowing Whites, who killed their comrades, to get away scot free; that apartheid politicians could draw fat pensions in spite of the sin against humanity, which they had perpetrated.

            Zac de Beer was another Jew who played a leading role in politics. He became the first sole leader of a new opposition political party[15] of the post-apartheid era, the Democratic Party. Under Tony Leon, yet another Jew, this party was playing an important role in opposition to the ANC as a watchdog and critic of possible excesses. However, Leon overreached himself in October 2001, causing the split of a coalition which had enabled the Democratic Alliance to rule the Western Cape. In a sense that was inevitable, because the alliance with the New National Party had been a ‘marriage of convenience’ any way, a ploy to keep Whites in power in at least one province of the country.

More Political Protest

The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 led to the dissolution of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), but it backfired on the government because the ANC hereafter grew into a mass movement. Alex la Guma was hereafter the main contributor of New Age, which became the mouthpiece of the ANC. Often however the paper was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. The newspaper, which ran for 25 years as a weekly under different names, after being banned again and again, was a key organizational tool. However, the response to racial segregation was tainting almost every segment of society in the 1950s. Even members of the former Liberal and Communist Parties, which had been fairly principled, started participating in ideologically tainted institutions.  Johnny Gomas was especially critical of those African and Coloured leaders whom he regarded as stooges: ‘What kind of non-white person can be willing to perform such a degrading role. It can only be persons who are completely punch-drunk by the blows of white oppression,  … who… scrambled like dogs when the NRC and CAD were flung at them’ (Musson, 1989:118).  That the former Communist Piet Beylefeld stood as candidate against Abe Bloomberg as the SACPO man - to become the Coloured Persons’ Representative - gave respectability to the flawed situation, after the ‘Coloureds’ had been take from the voters’ roll. SACPO changed their position, agreeing to support White candidates who were carefully selected. Only those ones qualified who had sacrificed and suffered on behalf of the liberatory movement.

          George Peake was the president of SACPO. When Alex la Guma and Reggie September went on trial in the lengthy so-called treason saga, Jimmy la Guma agreed to join the fray against apartheid. Divide and rule came into play with Alex La Guma swiping at Cissy Gool, who supported Bloomberg. In New Age he ridiculed the intellectualism of the Unity Movement. He was however also attacked – probably from the regime in May 1958 – when two shots were fired at him, one of which ‘grazed his neck slightly.’  The following year he was arrested for entering Nyanga without a permit.[16]

Other repressive Laws

Before 1948 and the entry of the National Party as sole governing political party, various attempts had been made already to get a law on the statue books to prevent miscegenation.  It is however especially sad that the church took the initiative at this time through the influence of Ds Koot Vorster of the Tafelberg Dutch Reformed Church, who requested the new National Party government in 1948 to introduce a law to prevent marriages between Whites and any person of colour. There had been earlier attempts, which gave them much hope. Jan H. Hofmeyr, the Deputy Prime Minister was known to have detested miscegenation significantly.

           The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 caused a trickle of people to leave the country over the years. (The author left South Africa at the end of 1973 for that reason.) Pastor Alfred West, who worked as a missionary in the Cape townships of Kensington, Bonteheuwel and Bishop Lavis, proved the exception when he waited for 20 years before he could marry his ‘Coloured’ sweetheart Gladys.

Other ‘Exports’ from the Cape     

There is quite a list of people of colour who left South Africa because of their skin pigmentation, which prevented them from using their talents to the full. The history of the cricketer Basil D’Oliviera, one of the greatest cricketing all-rounders which South Africa produced, is perhaps the best known in a long list of Capetonians of colour who had to go elsewhere to get recognition. The cricketer who was raised in Bo-Kaap’s Jordaan Street, went on to play for England in an illustrious career. Lesser known were the five Abed brothers from Aspeling Street in District Six, who originally came from India. While playing in the Lancashire league in England, Goelie, one of the brothers, hit three sixes off Garfield Sobers, possibly the best all-rounder ever to play cricket.[17] Dik, another brother from the Abed clan, settled in Holland, where he later captained the Dutch national cricket team. One could say that Dik Abed performed development work in this way, enabling the Dutch to compete internationally, and participating in the Cricket World Cup.[18]

          It remained more or less completely unknown to South Africans that Johaar Mosaval, who was born at 1 Little Lesar Street in District Six, was the solo dancer in Gloriana, an opera specially composed by Benjamin Britten in 1952 at the coronation of Queen Elisabeth. Mosaval was discovered at George Golding's Ashley Higher Primary School in 1932 during a pantomime performance of The Beauty of the Beast before he went to the Royal Ballet School.

          The repressive clampdown by the government on school teachers in the late 1950s and early 1960s turned out to be counter-productive from the viewpoint of the regime in a sense. Resistance was actually exported to country towns like Upington. However, a major exodus of ‘Coloured’ teachers transpired when some of their most gifted professionals left first for especially Zambia and Canada. Later Australia became a preferred destination. The loss  due to emigration was the gain of these countries. About Winston Layne was written by Yousuf Rassool, a teacher colleague of the Chapel Street Primary School in District Six: ‘His career might have been stunted in the South African context, but in Canada his intellectual talents were recognized by the State of Saskatchewan where he helped to revolutionize the teaching of English.’

          Many other countries profited from the brain-drain from South Africa. Quite a few of the emigrants came from the ‘Coloured’ sector of the Western Cape, but they were not always politically motivated. Thus Professor Forgus – a protegé of District Six – after lecturing in Pschychology at the University of Pennsyllvania in the USA, became a renowned speaker in his field. He later landed up at the famous Harvard University.

          Quite often the race laws forced gifted people of colour to leave or to remain overseas. Dr Roy Weber, a top UCT science student, won a bursary to study overseas. His father was the school principal of the primary school on the Moravian mission station at Elim.  Professor Weber became a top world academic in Marine Biology - based in Den Helder, Holland - after his marriage to a Danish national. I had little option in 1973 than to leave for Germany after Rosemarie, my wife – whom I had met in Germany during a study stint there – had twice been refused visas because government spies got to know about our friendship.[19]

          Unfortunately, parallel to the positive forces of resistance to injustice and compassion, the demonic influences of resentment and bitterness were also exported from District Six.

The Sports Boycott

The effective sports boycott contributed so much to the breakdown of the apartheid edifice. It can also be traced to beginnings which originated at the Cape. Yousuf Rassool (2000:189) recalled how he agitated with all the passion he could muster in the mid 1950s. The result was that a proposed West Indian cricket tour did not take place. What drove him and those who voted with him was the idea that ‘by supporting apartheid cricket, they would be relinquishing principle in favour of expediency’. (This was probably also the principle which guided the Muslim Judicial Council for many years to refuse money from undemocratic Islamic countries, such as Saudi Arabia for the building of mosques.) In later years Hassan Howa, a principled Muslim sports administrator and leader of the South African Council for Sports (SACOS), with its strong base in the Western Cape, became a real thorn in the flesh of apartheid die-hards. When the government appeared to make special exceptions for sports, they consistently proclaimed: ‘no normal (i.e. multiracial) sport in an abnormal society.’

Circumventing and Flouting of Apartheid Laws

District Six was one of the first places in South Africa where the race factor was effectively countered by practices of non-racialism, notably in the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). The proof that non-racialism in District Six was real, is demonstrated by the fact that the first secretary of the Unity Movement was Saul A. Jayiya, a Black who fled ‘from virtual serfdom on a farm in the Eastern Free State.’ Jayiya taught himself English as well as the skills of a motorcar mechanic. When ‘Coloured’ society in general was still looking down on Blacks in an arrogant and condescending way, Saul Jayiya, practised the trade in Harvey’s garage in the city – albeit behind locked doors. He was thus flouting the Job Reservations Act, which did not permit Blacks to work in this trade. Legislation also caused estrangement between the Blacks and ‘Coloureds’ living in District Six. Thus a Black has been quoting the custom that three ‘Coloureds’ first had to refuse an employment opportunity before it was offered to a Black (Sala Kahle, p.64).                          Circumventing and flouting of Apartheid laws was by far not wide-spread until the defiance campaign of 1952. And even thereafter it was more done as a schoolboy prank, for example to try and outwit railway police, who had to check whether bridges and subways at railway stations reserved for ‘Whites only’, were not used by other races.

Apartheid spawns Gangsterism.

The law was contributory to the proliferation of gangsterism. Long before World War II gangs were already present in District Six. The 'Coloured' author and Cape Times reporter George Manuel notes that there were gangs already in the 1920s, organised in a pattern prescribed by Chicago. But they were apparently not a scourge, mainly fighting each other and hardly bothering other citizens till World War II.

          Although the numbers of ‘skollies’ increased dramatically after the war, the situation changed minimally. They were standing on street corners aimlessly, because of the lack of unemployment opportunities. They were still well under control until the late 1940s, with the Globe Gang running the show, countering criminality. This gang was started in 1946 as a vigilante group by the Ismael family in District Six (Schoeman, 1993:50). With the increasing protection of poor Whites through the Job Reservation Act, many ‘Coloureds’ were frustrated. The new gang leaders were not merely ignorant criminals. In fact, most were ‘men who struggled to obtain an education… and then, in frustration of finding that there were no real professional openings for them in a white man’s world, turned to crime.’ A strong White criminal element had also moved into District Six, including ‘an infamous murder, one Munnik who lay low in District Six during the late forties.’ Schoeman (1993:46) furthermore had ‘no doubt that white owners of cafés and shops in the area worked hand in glove with the gangster element.’

          Another negative tradition, which also had its origins in District Six, was the collaboration of the police with gangs in exchange of favours. In the apartheid years they were allowed to peddle in drugs if they would supply information about opposition activists.

A Wind of Change?

One day early in February 1960 Harold Macmilla, the British Prime Minsiter, was due to address the combined chambers of Parliament. He outlined Britain’s aim to establish societies ‘in which individual merit, and individual merit only, is the criterion for a man’s advancement, whether political or economic’(Cited in Shaw, 1999:157). Harold Macmillan furthermore warned that a ‘wind of change is blowing throughout the continent'.

1960 became a year of nation-wide turmoil in the run-up and aftermath of the riots in the Cape Black township Langa.

            The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), led by the dynamic Robert Sobukwe, was a Black nationalist break-away from the African National Congress (ANC). Sobukwe, a pioneer advocate of Black consciousness, believed that the Blacks had to throw off the shackles of oppression themselves before they could accept Whites as compatriots and fellow Africans. In the view of the PAC, the ANC commitment had become diluted because of the presence of other races. The pass laws were first introduced with the sole purpose of channelling and directing cheap African labour into white farms and other establishments. The pass book was thus to them ‘a badge of slavery’. Thousands of Blacks would leave their passes at home and present themselves at police stations all over the country for arrest. They would fill prisons to overflowing and make influx control unworkable.

            The idea of taking the passes to police stations en masse had already been mooted by the ANC. By doing this a few days ahead of the mother organisation, the PAC in this way actually upstaged the ANC.

The PAC-led campaign faltered everywhere the next few days, except in Cape Town. The metropolis was one of a few areas to respond enthusiastically to the PAC call. In the week prior to the 21^st march, ‘war prayers’ were offered ‘on the sandy hills of Nyanga West almost every night, and recited the famous war songs and prayer of the great Xhosa warrior, Ntsikana’ (Kgosana, (1988:20).

            Philip Ata Kgosana, a young student who hailed from the north, was the regional secretary of the PAC. Already from midnight on Sunday 20 March a large crowd gathered at Bunga Square in Langa. In a roaring speech Kgosana passed on the final instructions of Sobukwe - there was to be absolute non-violence! ‘Anyone who agitates for violence or starts violence … we will regard as a paid agent of the government…. The white rulers are going to be extremely ruthless. But we must meet their hysterical brutality with calm iron determination…’ (Kgosana, (1988:105). In his motivational address the young Kgosana whipped up the crowd with an appeal and a call to action to ‘throw our whole weight …to defeat forces of oppression …We are either slave or free men – that’s all…We are fighting against a Calvinistic doctrine that a certain nation was especially chosen by God to lead, guide and protect other nations … Fellow Africans, the hour for service, sacrifice and suffering has come. Let us march to a new independent Africa with courage and determination. Forward to independence! To independence now! Tomorrow the United States of Africa! (Kgosana, (1988:103,107).

            On the morning of 21 March 1960 – the same day as the notorious killings of Sharpeville - thousands of Blacks congregated at the Philippi police station, forming an orderly line, declaring that they had come to hand in their pass books and wanted to be arrested. The bemused policemen at the station took their names, telling them to go home and await a summons to appear in court. The crowd left peacefully, leaving great piles of pass books at the police station.

The PAC had called a meeting for the same evening to take place at Langa to report on the progress of the anti-pass campaign. Many turned up that evening, unintentionally defying a ban on meetings in Langa that day, under the impression aht they were to receive an official response to their protest (Shaw, 1999:159). At the meeting covered by Cape Times reporter Terry Herbst, the meeting had just been opened with prayers when ‘a strong force of police drove up in a Saracen armoured car and wire-meshed troop-carriers formed up alongside the road’. An officer with a houd-hailer ordeed the crowd to disperse and tgehn proceeded, before the crowd had broken up, to order a baton charge. This was the first of several charges. The enraged crowd retaliated by throwing stones at the police, who opened fire in return with Sten guns and small arms.

Fortunately the police soon retreated to their station soon hereafter, covered by machin-gun fire. Otherwise the casualty toll whould have been worse than Sharpeville. Yet, two men were shot dead and 49 people were injured. Richard Lombard from Walmer Estate, the driver of the Cape Times vehicle, was battered and burnt to death in an outburst of mob hysteria. Seven buildings including two schools were destroyed by fire in a wild night of violence.

Now rendered unenforceable, the pass laws were suspended on Saturday 26 March. This sent a wave of hysterical jubilation among Blacks and the entire Black population of the Peninsula seemed to throw their weight behind the PAC campaign, which included a very effective stay-away and crippling Cape industry significantly.

A most remarkable March

After a brutal attack on striking residents with the police into Langa and Nyanga, going from house to house, ‘driving residents out of their houses and telling them to go to work’ (Shaw, 1999:161), the tide of insurgency led to a mass march on 30 March 1960. Knife-edge tension was building up throughout the Western Cape. 30,000 angry protesters decided to walk from Langa to the City along De Waal Drive. Kgosana joined the protest march belatedly but immediately took command ‘of the most remarkable march in South African history to date’ (Heard, 1990:91). Now and then he stopped the marchers and taught them on non-violence. A dissident almost caused a revolt by denouncing non-violence, calling the crowd to sack Parliament. Kgosana decided on his own to lead the marchers instead to Caledon Square, the headquarters of the police, because the houses of Parliament were surrounded at this time by a massive built-up of troops. A major massacre was thus prevented.

          Colonel Terblanche, who had been called urgently to the scene, was staggered when he saw the size of the crowd. ‘He fell to his knees in the police station and prayed before embarking on a daring quest for peace – which, without doubt, clashed with the views of the government’ (Heard, 1990:96). Divine peace must have overpowered him as he dared to go outside, leading a small party of senior officers unarmed.  The scene witnessed and described by Tony Heard, a journalist of the Cape Times and a later editor of the Cape Town morning paper, belongs to sacred history. It included very special words, unheard for an Afrikaner, the son of a bankrupt ostrich farmer, speaking to a Black. Heard reports Terblanche’s first remark and the reaction when he was introduced to the young student as follows: “Mr Kgosana , I speak to you as one gentleman to another. Please would you ask the crowd to be quiet.” Kgosana was given the use of a loud hailer and … said in a loud voice in English: “Let us be silent … just like people who are going to a graveyard… Quiet descended abruptly on the scene…”

          Kgosana agreed to disperse the crowd after an undertaking by Colonel Terblanche that he could meet Mr F.C. Erasmus, the Minister of Justice, later in the day to discuss their grievances. ‘He complained about Africans being hurled from their hostel rooms in the townships by police trying to force them to go to work that day ...' (Heard, 1990:97).

          Kgosana and the trusting thirty thousand were to be tricked. The young student from Pretoria was summarily arrested when he arrived for a meeting. (Tony Heard, later testified to this fact. He was convinced that Terblanche was sincere, but that his Cabinet Minister let him down. ‘The available record leaves Terblanche an honourable man and condemns Erasmus’ (Heard, 1990:99).

The Start of the violent Struggle

Tension rose to breaking point. Tony Heard (1990:101) suggests that there ‘was no further inclination to accept the white government’s assurances.’ The breach of promise on 30 March 1960 has to be regarded as the start of the violent struggle against apartheid. Sharpeville had been bad enough, but now Blacks were convinced that the Afrikaner government could not be trusted.

          Police hereafter surrounded the Black townships, combined by a military cordon, to crush all further resistance. A state of emergency was called from March 30 to August 31, 1960 during which twelve thousand people were detained around the country. The pass laws, which had been temporarily suspended on March 26, were reinstated and on 8 April 1960 the ANC and the PAC were banned. By 11 April the strike was broken and the cordon lifted, but the three weeks of protest shook the country. This situation continued on a more subdued note for quite a few months.

          The Cape remained part and parcel of the revolutionary ferment for some time – notably through POQO in the Paarl area towards the end of 1962. (The splinter group calling themselves POQO meaning alone – beyond talking, beyond negotiation - was especially strong in Paarl. It started with the goal of purging the country of Whites. The PAC slogan of the 1990s ‘one settler, one bullet’ has its origins in that movement.)

          Large-scale capital flight seemed to bring Harold Macmillan’s speech in the parliament into fulfilment, namely that the wind of change has also hit South Africa.

The very Purpose of Unity defeated

Amid the mounting crisis and still more repressive measures, the Unity movement took a further step by establishing the African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA). Isaac Tabata, a founder member of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), became the first President, a position he would hold for many years with great esteem. His pamphlet Boycott as a Weapon of Struggle and articles like Industrial Unrest in South Africa as well as Imperialism and the Liberation Movements in Africa, especially his book The Awakening of a People made him well known throughout Africa and circles of liberation.  If ever there was someone who stood steadfastly to a principle over decades, Tabata was one – a die-hard Trotskyite who believed unstintingly that continuous revolution would finally overcome exploitation of man by man. He obviously never knew the Bible properly, viz that man’s heart is wicked above all things, that only a spiritual heart transplant could affect the changes he hoped for. They could not be achieved by man-made efforts like the perpetual revolution. (And even then, the danger of backsliding is always lurking.) The same thing applies for the NEUM principal of non-collaboration which in effect created disunity, thus defeating the very purpose of Unity. The movement with that name has so accurately and consistently seen as the necessary condition to defeat racial and class oppression.

           On the occasion of the republic born on 31 May 1961 the next year, a three-day strike was called to co-inside with the celebrations.  The government responded in typical hardline fashion. The house of the La Gumas as well as those of other stay-away organizers was attacked, and 10,000 were detained under a special 12-day detention law. In July 1961 Alex la Guma and Reggie September, two Cape leaders of the Unity Movement, were served with a 5-year banning order. La Guma continued writing in New Age through a column called Up my alley.  The government finally discovered who was responsible for the column. On 21 June 1962 Up my alley appeared for the last time.  

The Run-up to the POQO Uprising in Paarl

The government started implementing grand apartheid in the 1950s to remove blacks from the Western Cape. Its effects were felt quite early in the decade. In 1955 women whose husbands had not lived in Paarl for fifteen years and who therefore did not qualify for permanent residence, began to be ‘endorsed out’ and sent to the Transkei.

          In mid-1959 there was a demonstration in Paarl against the issue of women’s passes, which seemed to have the effect of delaying the local application of the law. This required all Black female employees to hold passes. A few months later, in November 1959, rioting broke in the suburb of Huguenot. Thousands of people – Black and ‘Coloured’ – stoned cars, burnt and damaged shops and attacked Whites. The crowds were reacting to a government banning order which had been imposed on Elizabeth Mefeking, a Paarl resident and the president of the African Food and Canning Workers Union. These disturbances were followed by tension in Mbekweni Township a month later. The following year Paarl was one of the few urban centres where there was a good response to the PAC’s anti-pass campaign. Passes were destroyed and a school in Mbekweni was burnt down.

          In 1962 the Maphaele case highlighted the heartless government policy w.r.t. Blacks. A young wife was expelled from Paarl. All her married life she had been living illegally in Langabuya, an emergency ‘site and service’ camp, while her husband was compelled to stay in a hostel at Mbekweni. In August 1962 Prime Minister Verwoerd announced the formation of a special action committee to stimulate employers to replace unskilled Black workers by ‘Coloureds.’ In October 1962 a concerted drive was launched in the Black townships to 'deport' women to the Transkei.

          A major source of discontent revolved around the behaviour of officials of the Paarl municipal administration, notably a former police sergeant in the Transkei, J.H. le Roux and a Black colleague Wilson Ngcukan. Accusations included the selling of passes and the endorsing out of men to create employment vacancies for which passes could be sold. Various instances of brutal behaviour by municipal employees came to light. The volatile situation was compounded by a hierarchical structure where there were persons in the Black community at the summit, who enjoyed a degree of status and security by virtue of the length of their stay, but who nowhere enjoyed the trust of the community.

Cape Anglican Church Opposition against Apartheid

The Anglican Church leaders opposed apartheid from the outset. Michael Scott and Trevor Huddleston, both of whom arrived in 1943, stood up for justice on behalf of the oppressed. Scott became the first clergyman to be deported because of his involvement on this score in 1950. But he was not the last clergyman to pay for his ‘meddling’ in politics. That was regarded by the establishment to be the preserve of Afrikaner clerics, especially around commemorations like the Day of the Covenant or when they could abuse the state-controlled radio, the SABC. Huddleston felt that it was his Christian duty to defy the apartheid legislation. Thus he had no qualms to support the defiance campaign in 1952, much to the chagrin of his Archbishop, Geoffrey Clayton.

          When Geoffrey Clayton came to Cape Town in 1949, after being elected Archbishop of the Church of the Province, he naively hoped for a closer association with DRC men like the Professors Gerdener and Keet, who were known to be in opposition to the isolation of their denomination. Also in 1949 the conference in Rosettenville of the Christian Council of South Africa affirmed the need for unity among the believers from the different churches. Clayton hoped that he could press upon those in authority, together with these DRC men, ‘the importance of approaching the country’s problems in the spirit of the Gospel.’ He probably did not know that Gerdener had helped to formulate the apartheid policy.

          The next year Clayton addressed headmasters and headmistresses of the church’s schools. He stated in this private address: ‘I believe Calvinism is a false interpretation of our faith’ (Paton, 1974:195). It was  printed and distributed for internal church school use. Three years later a copy landed with Die Volksblad. That was tantamount to inviting the full force of the revenge of the Afrikaners.

          Archbishop Geoffrey Clayton opposed Clause 29(c) of the ‘Native Laws Amendment Bill’, which would have restricted freedom of worship, making it difficult for Blacks to attend churches in so-called White areas. On 6 March 1957 he wrote a letter to Dr. H. Verwoerd, the minister responsible for the Bill: '... we feel bound to state that if the Bill were to become law in its present form we should ourselves be unable to obey it or counsel our clergy and people to do so.' (Cited in De Gruchy, 1979:61)  He wrote in a letter on Ash Wednesday 1957 a few days later: ‘The church cannot recognize the right of an official of the secular government to determine whether or where a member of the church of any race shall discharge his religious duty of participation in public worship.’ He is quoted to have said to Bishop Ambrose Reeves hereafter ‘I don’t want to go to prison… But I’ll go if I have to’ (Paton, 1977:280).[20] The next day he was found dead. The drama effectively put breaks on the enforcement of the prohibition of people of colour from entering the St George’s Cathedral and a few other multi-racial churches.

          Interesting was that also the usually conservative Baptist Union protested against the 'Church Clause', stating the 'the proposed bill will compel law-abiding Baptists... to violate the law'  (Cited in De Gruchy, 1979:61)

          It must be said though that the DRC was also perturbed by the Bill, stressing in an eight-point statement the duty of the state to allow the church the freedom to fulfil its calling: 'The right to determine how, when and to whom the Gospel shall be proclaimed, is exclusively in the competence of the Church.' (De Gruchy, 1979:61). In a rare moment of protest in the denomination at that time a Black DRC minister was invited to preach to a White DRC congregation in Pinelands (De Gruchy, 1979:62).

          A large notice was put up outside the St George’s Cathedral later that year in clear defiance of the government intention, proclaiming: ‘This church is open to all people of all races at all services at all times.’ Inside the walls however, apartheid practice continued to be just as rife as everywhere in society. Whites were sitting in the front pews and people of colour at the back. Just as hollow were the vigils of prayer for racial harmony and Eucharists of Unity, because the same denomination paid discriminatory stipends to its clergymen, based on race classification. Yet, in the spiritual realms the prayers were surely not completely useless. At least, as Dean King, a cleric at St George’s Cathedral for many years, wrote, they ‘...were regularly held to keep us thinking, praying, questioning’ (King, 1997:25). 

The Boer-Brit stigma undermines the Anglican Church witness

The Boer-Brit stigma, a traditional animosity as a legacy from the Anglo-Boer War, was however undermining the efforts of (Arch) Bishops Trevor Huddleston, Geoffrey Clayton, Joost de Blank and Gonville Ffrench Beytag because these leaders had little support from other White-led denominations. These clergymen were nevertheless household names in the opposition to the apartheid folly of the 1950s and 1960s. Bishop Huddleston had to smuggle the manuscript of Naught for your Comfort to England. The book reverberated throughout the English-speaking world in the mid-1950s. Published in March 1956, it already had to be reprinted the following month.

          The relationship between the British and Afrikaner plummeted during the office of Archbishop Joost de Blank. De Gruchy compares his controversial ways with that of his missionary compatriot Dr van der Kemp, estranging Afrikaners significantly. Yet, he was 'an important catalyst in the Christian struggle against racism in South Africa' (De Gruchy, 1979:65).

White Dutch Reformed opposition against Apartheid

Already in 1950 Professor Ben Marais wrote a controversial book Kleurkrisis in die Weste. The resulting controversy caused the popular preacher to be effectively silenced by the tactics of the secretive Afrikaner Broederbond. Church councils had to make sure that he would not be invited to preach. In 1956 the Stellenbosch academic Professor Barend Keet raised the question in his book Whither South Africa whether apartheid or the better sounding term ‘separate development’ could be applied in a just manner as claimed by his church. Five years later – thus a year after Sharpeville - he and eight other Afrikaner theologians answered the question with a resounding NO! in their book Delayed Action! They spelled out clearly that apartheid implied discrimination.

          One of the leading Dutch Reformed ministers, the gifted Ds Beyers Naudé, was seriously challenged. In Wellington, the first congregation that he served as a hulpprediker (assistant pastor), he immediately became uneasy when he saw that the training was inferior at the Sendinginstituut, where ministers were trained who would serve at the daughter churches (Ryan, 1990:31).  On a personal level the heritage of the pioneer missionary Georg Schmidt impacted his life when he met his wife. She was the daughter of Emil Weder, a Moravian missionary in Genadendal. (The name Emil Weder still lives on in the name of the local High School). After seeing the degenerate ‘Coloureds’ in the Karoo town of Loxton where he was a pastor subsequently, Beyers Naudé was reminded of the cultured educated people of colour he had encountered for the first time in Genadendal during the time of courting. The question came to him ‘why it was not possible to have this in other parts of the country’ (Ryan, 1990:33). The seed for the multi-racial Christian Institute was sown into the heart of the former Afrikaner Broederbond leader whose father had helped to found the secret organization with lofty ideals for the upliftment of Afrikaners.  

Low-key but effective Opposition

The Cape Town City Mission, with its modest beginnings at the beginning of the 20^th century, soon had no less than four congregations in District Six, respectively in Aspeling, Constitution, Cross and Smart Street. Fenner Kadalie, son of the trade unionist Clements Kadalie, became one of the most well known sons of the mission. Fenner Kadalie was impacted by the City Mission's work in District Six when he was seven year old.  Working closely with Bruce Duncan, he was to become a pivot of massive expansion of the Mother City’s most well-known institution of compassion. When the community was forced out of District Six by cruel legislation, Fenner Kadalie and his right hand, a young Bruce Duncan, gathered the scattered remnants of the District Six fellowships, ministering to their needs in their new homes on the Cape Flats.  Fenner Kadalie was ‘a catalyst for the birth of many upliftment projects in and around Cape Town’ (Martindale, 2002:29).

          Under the inspiring leadership of Rev. Bruce Duncan and Fenner Kadalie the denomination grew rapidly in the 1970s, getting involved in various ministries of compassion. Bruce Duncan, an unsung heroe of the ‘struggle’ because he was not formally involved with politics, dared to speak out against the injustice of apartheid, communicating at the same time ‘with anyone from Constantia to Hanover Park and gained credibility with ganglords that few others have achieved’ (Martindale, 2002:31). Halls of the Cape Town City Mission developed into fully-fledged churches. The story has been told of a young man with an afro hairstyle who walked into one of these churches while Barry Isaacs was preaching. He kept coming back until he eventually committed his life to Christ. Lorenzo Davids, the young man, and Reverend Barry Isaacs later served together as leaders of The Cape Town City Mission.

          Susan Benjamin represents one of the many success stories of the Mission, described as one of the ‘Women who Changed the heart of the City in her book with that title (Martindale, 2002:27). She and her husband had been heavy drinkers when Jesus rescued them through the ministry of the Mission. When the family had been forced to leave District Six, Susan asked the City Mission to hold meetings in her home. That became the pristine start of many new congregations across the Western Cape. Her children became stalwarts in the denomination.

An emerging Church Unity high-jacked

In South Africa the Boer-Brit rift, a traditional animosity was still rife in the 1940s among Whites as a legacy from the Anglo-Boer War at the end the 19th century, especially after the Dutch Reformed Church withdrew from the Christian Council of Churches. The unity in the latter body, which was started in 1936 with Dutch Reformed ministers in leading roles, had however been quite frail all along. The sense of unity which had been experienced at the inauguration of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Amsterdam (1948) was nevertheless still reverberating in many a country. Gerdener could still write in 1959: ‘With thankfulness we observe signs to come together and work together, also in our own Dutch Reformed Church’. Gerdener rightly saw exclusiveness and isolation as a danger to missionary work. ‘Nowhere is isolation and exclusiveness so deadly and time-consuming than in the fight against the mighty heathendom and nowhere is co-operation and a unitary front so necessary and useful as here.’

          Albert Luthuli, the President of the ANC, was asked to address a predominantly Afrikaner –all White study group in Pretoria in the early months of that year: ‘In my audience, on this occasion, there was an unexpected mixture of Afrikaner theologians and professors and foreign diplomats, and to my surprise some of the Afrikaners had come from as far afield as Potchefstroom, about two hundred miles away’ (Luthuli, 1962:212). Soon hereafter, Luthuli was escorted from the Cape Town railway station to ‘an open square packed with people’, pre-figuring the event on the Grand Parade with Nelson Mandela many years later after his release.  

          The enemy of souls succeeded in high-jacking an emerging unity of believers in South Africa at the end of the 1950s. After Luthuli’s return to his home town Groutville, he was visited by the Special Branch and served with a muzzling banning order, silenced and confined to the town for five years. The link to the apartheid legislators threatened the emerging unity in no uncertain way. The Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960 could have been God’s corrective to get the church in South Africa at large to change its course. The World Council of Churches (WCC) met their eight member churches in South Africa – ten delegates from every church - at Cottesloe, a suburb of Johannesburg, from 7 December 1960 to discuss the crisis in the country in the wake of the Sharpeville killings and the arrest of Black leaders.

          The body of Christ seemed to be speaking with one voice. Present were delegates of the Transvaal and Cape Dutch Reformed synods and the very conservative (not in a positive sense) Hervormde Kerk, which included an article in its constitution forbidding people of colour to become members of the denomination.  A significant segment of the White Dutch Reformed Church was at this time very much part of the ecumenical movement in South Africa in 1960. The Cape and Transvaal Dutch Reformed Dutch Reformed ministers initially agreed to oppose apartheid but the bulk of the leadership was thereafter subtly cajoled into line - after the Prime Minister, Dr H.F. Verwoerd, had exerted pressure on the bulk of them. Interesting was that the Transvaal delegation included two Blacks, Rev. S.S. Tema and J. Selamolela, whereas the Cape delegation had not a single one of colour. The only woman delegate was Professor Monica Wilson, a delegate of the Anglican Church.

          Dr H.F.Verwoerd was successful with demonic scheming to make every move suspect, which intended to foster church unity. The ‘English-speaking churches’ and others sympathetic to the unity of believers across the race divide, were made suspect. The storm caused by these moves caused the old Boer-Brit resentment to flame up: divide and rule was once again the name of the game.

Cottesloe’s country-wide Reverberations

Already at the summit strange things had happened. That was an expressed condition that no proposal would be given to the press before the respective church delegations had reported to the participating churches. Yet, the Afrikaans daily Die Transvaler featured information from the proceedings already on the second day. The suggestion of direct representation of Coloureds in parliament was of course very much a thorn in the flesh of thorough-bred Afrikaners and an embarrassment to the government. That far-reaching consensus was achieved in statements that all unjust discrimination was rejected, must have hurt the regime. intensely. Dr Verwoerd, the author of the notorious 'Church Clause' of 1957, must have perceived the following words as a tremendous blow: 'The spiritual unity among all men who are in Christ must find visible expression in acts of common worship and witness, and in fellowship and consultation on matters of common concern' (Cited in De Gruchy, 1979:61).

          Another incident was the distortion of Geldenhuys’ explanation of apartheid, such as the words ‘…as jy hulle wil bereik, moet jy hulle benader in hul eie taal, hul eie idoom, hul eie milieu… (his own paraphrase in Geldenhuys, 1982:50).[21] He explained the mission work of his church as follows: ‘ … nie net te doen met die siel van die swartmens nie, maar ook met sy praktiese daaglikse omstandighede’.[22] After the latter words, Alan Paton the well-known Liberal Party founder (author of Cry beloved Country) and an Anglican delegate, exclaimed excitedly: ‘If I understand him correctly, I almost hear my own voice speaking because it has always been my ideal in life to see my neighbour in need and to help him.’ This was enough for some bigoted Afrikaners to label Geldenhuys as the ‘grootste liberaal wat rondloop’ [23](Geldenhuys, 1982:51).

          When the decisions of the consultation were published on 15 December 1960, a storm raged, especially among Afrikaners. The mild decisions – which however touched the cornerstone pillars of apartheid like the saying that the prohibition of mixed marriages was not scripturally justifiable - already enraged the rank and file Afrikaner. The context of the painstaking frank deliberation was glossed over. The apology of Archbishop Joost de Blank – which should have made the headlines – were completely ignored. (De Blank acknowledged that he was wrong to have judged the Dutch Reformed Church in such a harsh way even though he still did not agree with their viewpoint.)

          Cunningly, Dr Verwoerd abused the radio in his New Year message to suggest that the synods have not spoken finally on the matter, that the delegates of the Cape and Transvaal synods at Cottesloe were acting so to speak in their private capacity. He was tomake sure – via the Broederbond - that the Cottesloe resolutions were going to be rescinded! The Afrikaner Broederbond was a secretive organization of which only male White Afrikaners could be members.

          One of the leading Dutch Reformed Church ministers, the gifted Ds Beyers Naudé, was a delegate at Cottesloe. He was seriously challenged. The ferment of the aftermath of Cottesloe produced a special synod of the Synodal Commission of the Transvaal Dutch Reformed Church, scheduled for 2 March 1961. At the special synod of approximately 700 delegates in the Pretoria Town Hall on 5 April 1961, a new moderature was elected. Geldenhuys and his brother-in-law Beyers Naudé were kicked out. Dr Frans O’brien Geldenhuys and Naudé were upset at the role of the Broederbond, the former resigning from the secret organisation a year later. He however disagreed with his brother-in–law to work from outside the church when Naudé wanted to start the Christian Institute. Further Transvaal stirrings occurred in the Dutch Reformed Church. Enlightened moderators were elected in the new separated Northern and Southern Transvaal Synods of the church. In the case of Ds Meiring - one of the Cottesloe delegates) - he was re-elected by a narrow margin.

The Wings’ of Beyers Naudé clipped

The Sunday Times published a secret Broederbond plan on 21 April 1963 to oust the ‘new deal’ leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church, people like Beyers Naudé  - and to outlaw theological criticism of apartheid. The Sunday Times revealed that the Afrikaner Broederbond wanted to tighten their stranglehold on church affairs and that they wanted to ‘clip the wings’ of Beyers Naudé. The disclosure did not save the gifted church leader. He was effectively ostracized by Afrikanerdom, until he more or less had to resign from the Aasvoëlkop congregation in Johannesburg. But that also ushered in the isolation of the Dutch Reformed Church. The emerging church unity was effectively put on hold.

          Furthermore, one can safely surmise that denominational rivalry at the Cape contributed greatly to the lack of significant success in evangelism, especially in the 20th century. 

           The Broederbond got the White Dutch Reformed Church church to change its stance. Rev Beyers Naudé, could not palate the underhanded tactics. He now dreamed of establishing a ‘Confessing Church’ in South Africa on the model of what happened in Germany when Nazis threatened to absorb the church in its ideology. With a few other ministers he started the Christian Institute along similar lines. Beyers Naudé was by now quite influential – as the moderator of the new Southern Transvaal Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Church Rift completed

One of the closing paragraphs of the Cottesloe declaration stated: ‘We give thanks to Almighty God for bringing us together for fellowship and prayer and consultation. We resolve to continue in this fellowship,  … to join in common witness in our country’ (Hofmeyr, et al 1991:235). The resolve became more concrete after Beyers Naudé attended the 1966 Conference of the WCC on Church and Society. Together with an Anglican bishop, Bill Burnett, who was instrumental in reorganising the Christian Council of Churches, he drafted The Message to the People of South Africa. The document declared in no uncertain terms that apartheid was incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The reorganized national church body – known hereafter as the South African Council of Churches (SACC) was now branded as politically tainted, ground enough for the conservative Baptist Union to withdraw their membership along with the Dutch Reformed Church. The rift between churches supporting apartheid and those opposing it was complete.

The Wall of Communism under Attack

After the Second World War Communism became a greater threat to the progress of the Gospel than Hitler and his regime had been. The demonic roots of Communism were not generally known but the atheist stand of the ideology should have made it easy to discern as opposition to the Church. Yet, Communist infiltration into church bodies was fairly successful, notably into the World Council of Churches. Very few people in the mainline churches discerned what was going on. Here and there individuals warned, e.g. the German Reverend Rolf Scheffbuch, who attended the WCC plenary conference in Nairobi in 1975, but the course was set. It took only a few more years before ‘inter-faith’ was the official position of the WCC. There had been some preparation in isolated cases like through the Moral Rearmament (MRA)[24] movement that had started as the evangelical Oxford Group under Frank Buchman. He misled the believers when the unique claims of Christ were compromised. Everybody was encouraged to worship God in their own way, but atheism was outlawed. Morality was the ‘in’ word. Mahatma Ghandi’s example was placed next to Jesus’ teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.  Muslims and Hindu’s came to Caux (Switzerland), the international headquarters of the MRA movement along with Christians.  With Geneva not so very far away, the WCC Headquarters might have received some inspiration from Caux and vice versa.

          Persecuted Christians, who succeeded in coming out of Communist countries, aroused the sympathies and interest of believers in the West. Pastor Richard Wurmbrand of Romania was one of them, sharing his experiences in a booklet with the title Tortured for Christ.

          I got personally moved to prayer for the Communist world after reading Tortured for Christ when I left South Africa in January 1969 for Germany. In Stuttgart I had the opportunity to hear Richard Wurmbrand speaking. Soon I was supporting the cause of the persecuted Christians in the Communist world, starting to pray for persecuted Christians in Eastern Europe, along with believers in different parts of the world.

          Anne van der Bijl, a Dutchman, was a Western evangelical believer who discerned things quite clearly. He was trained at the WEC Missionary Training College in Glascow (Scotland) when Norman Grubb, the son-in-law of C.T.  Studd, led the mission agency that was still known as Worldwide Evangelation Crusade. When Van der Bijl – more widely known as Brother Andrew - visited to a communist youth event in Warschau in 1955 and Prague at the time of the Soviet invasion in 1968, his eyes were opened to the vicious ideology. A programme of smuggling of Bibles – at considerable risk - was developed in obedience to the Lord. The link to his WEC training in Glascow was kept alive in Holland when he founded Kruistochten (Crusades), a ministry on behalf of the persecuted church. Internationally the organisation became known as Open Doors. Brother Andrew wrote a book in 1977 about the ideological battle for Africa in 1977. He listed no less than eleven countries where a real threat of civil war with a communist takeover a real possibility - all this happened in the space of the last three months of 1977!

Ds. Davie Pypers leads the Outreach to Muslims 

The Dutch Reformed Church pioneered the work among the Cape Muslim slaves from 1731. It is fitting that the initiative for the resumption of evangelistic work among the Cape Muslims in the second half of the twentieth century was undertaken by the South African Missionary Society. Ds. Pypers, who became a full-time missionary for this purpose in July 1961, was joined by Pieter Els who had been challenged to reach out to Muslims with the Gospel along with two other student theological colleagues, Willem Louw en Coen Brand, while they were studying at Stellenbosch in 1960. A witness group - spearheaded by White theological students - was started in Stellenbosch in the 1960s, reaching out to the Muslims of Idas Valley, the local ‘Coloured’ residential area.  

             The group of ‘Coloured’ churches called the ‘ring’ (circuit) of Wynberg - stretching from Retreat to Claremont including a big part of the Cape flats at that time - decided to give a bigger responsibility to the churches to witness to the Muslims and Hindu’s. The ‘Coloured’ sector of the denomination accepted Muslim Evangelism as their special task. In many suburbs they were their neighbours.

          The stalwart work of women in breaking down the prejudice of Muslims has too often not been duly recognized. Johanna van Zyl and Ria Olivier kept the loving outreach to Muslims in Bo-Kaap and other places going, along with other women of the Vrouesendingbond (Women’s Missionary Guild). That Johanna van Zyl could write in the August 1974 edition of Die Ligdraer about her 25 years of work amongst children in Bo-Kaap is an exception that only amplifies the rule. The fact is that whereas quite a few Cape Muslim women came to faith in Christ, conversions among their male counterparts remained rare for decades. 

Christian Compassion in District Six and Bo-Kaap

The Rev. Sydney Warren Lavis had succeeded Archdeacon Lightfoot as Priest-in-charge of St Paul’s Mission in 1905 and became its first Rector in 1913. In 1928 he became Dean of Cape Town and subsequently Co-adjutor Bishop in 1931. He was a great figure in the history of Cape Town and was extremely popular, particularly amongst the coloured people of the City. He battled all his life to remove poverty and to improve housing. Bishop Lavis Township, one of the City Council schemes was named in his honour.

          The Nanniehuis of Bo-Kaap showed the way of compassion. In another move which started in Bo-Kaap and District Six, care was taken of unwedded mothers and prostitutes. Anna Tempo in Bo-Kaap, the initiator of the project, was the daughter of slaves from Mozambique. She became the matron of the Stakeby-Lewis Hostel in Harrington Street, District Six. The Nanniehuis became the model for similar projects in other parts of the country after she had been awarded the King George Coronation Medal in 1937 for her work.

          By the early 1960s there were 288 welfare agencies in the city, of which less than half were run by religious organizations. The City Mission was by far the best known. The combination of evangelism and compassionate outreach – which they took from their model, the Salvation Army, became an integral part of their ministry.

More Battles on the front of Compassion        

Compassion became also the hallmark of the Black Sash. The Athlone Advice Office - near to the township of Langa, was the brainchild of Noel Robb, a resident of Bishopscourt. This was another Western Cape model serving as an example for compassionate work elsewhere. The Athlone Office was started in 1958 as a bail fund facility, to enable mothers who had been arrested and imprisoned, to return to their homes and children. In a sense it was an extension of another Black Sash Western Cape initiative, the Cape Association to Abolish Passes for African Women (CATAPAW), which was founded in 1957, in co-operation with a few other groups. CATAPAW collected evidence for submission to the Secretary for Native Affairs to show the hardship and injustices of the pass laws. The June/July issue of Black Sash of that year was devoted entirely to the analysis of the pass system with a projection of its effects on family life (Michelman, The Black Sash of South Africa, 1984:103).  The scheme to extend the system of passes to include women, was responsible for widespread unrest, which matured into dramatic conflict when the government used brute force to put down passive resistance demonstrations of Blacks protesting against passes. A special supportive project of the Black Sash followed after Alex La Guma had been imprisoned in Worcester, just over 100 Kilometres from the Mother City. The women organized transport for the families on a regular basis, giving an example to the South African Council of Churches of support to political detainees. Deservingly, the Black Sash has been dubbed ‘the conscience of the nation’, being an essentially women’s organisation committed to protection by law of human rights and liberties.

Evening Schools

The ANC in the Western Cape was virtually defunct when James La Guma was elected secretary. In no time he reorganized things, starting an office in Caledon Street and launching the ‘African Labour College’, a night school where the students were taught socialism and the politics of the labour movement.

          Towards the end of World War II there was an evening school experiment in a Presbyterian Church Hall in Retreat.[25] It proved so successful that it finally expanded into a literacy project and an educational

organization that for two decades involved thousands of Black and ‘Coloured’ men and women as pupils. Thousands of Whites served as volunteer teachers. Inspired by Emily Gaika, an elderly Black woman, Oliver Kuys, an engineering graduate, started the evening school. Those who volunteered to teach often became deeply interested and involved in their work. On the other hand, the desire for education among the Blacks expanded rapidly. The infamous Bantu Education came into affect in 1955, which forced churches to hand control of their schools to the government. (A government commission set up in 1948 concluded that the missions had done nothing but destroy Black culture. Another commission set up under the chairman of Dr Werner Eiselen in 1951 had to look into means of controlling Black education and further curtailing the influence of mission and independent schools). The result of the Eiselen report was the Bantu Education Act of 1953. This was followed by regulations that caused night schools to collapse in other parts of the country.

          The Cape Night Schools Association persevered with a strong determination, finding ways and means to carry on when the government stopped subsidies. In 1957 regulations stated that schools outside the townships had to secure a Group Areas permit, and then apply annually for registration with the Department of Bantu Education. Restrictions on teachers and the substitution of short-term contract labourers for the old, more permanent labourer, made many schools redundant.

Student Involvement   

When the apartheid legislation prescribed education segregation at tertiary level as well, thus interfering with academic freedom, UCT students were incensed. Zach de Beer was a student leader along with Raymond Ackerman, who was also on the Student Representative Council. Together with other students Raymond Ackerman developed SHAWCO [26] Night Schools, which had grown into a chain of schools. After leaving UCT, Ackerman became the principal of them all – ‘my first experience of running a chain, though of schools, not of stores’ (Ackerman, 2001:42). In the course of this involvement he met Wendy Marcus, who not only became his wife, but who later was a pivot of the expanding Pick ‘n Pay empire of supermarkets in the 1970s.

          In 1965 the SHAWCO Night School at Windermere was forced to close and finally the last of the schools of the Cape Night Schools Association, St Mark’s in District Six and the twenty-two year old Retreat Night School closed down by order of the Deputy Minister, Mr Blaar Coetzee. Maryland is a Catholic institution in Hanover Park, where Mr Harry Fortune taught for many years, long after he had gone into retirement. Harry Fortune was raised in District Six before he went back to High School as an adult. After further studies at UCT, he became a high school teacher in Bonteheuwel.

A significant Power Encounter

When Ds. Davie Pypers commenced work in 1956 as a minister of the Dutch Reformed St Stephen’s Church in Bree Street, he discerned the need for increased prayer for the Muslims of the area. Soon he initiated praying for Bo-Kaap and the Muslims living there. Together with two other pastoral colleagues, he interceded every Monday for the area that became even more pronouncedly Islamic in the wake of the envisaged implementation of Group Areas legislation.

Ds. Pypers appears to have been one of the very few ministers at the Cape of his era who had any notion of spiritual warfare. It was by far not common practice yet.  And satan was definitely not going to release his gains so easily.

Davie Pypers was called to become the missionary to the Cape Muslims on behalf of the Dutch Reformed Church, linked to the historical Gestig (Sendingkerk) congregation in Long Street. It is the church where once people from different denominations worshipped, the cradle of missionary outreach in South Africa.[27] Ds. Pypers had hardly started with his new work when a challenge came from a young imam, Mr Ahmed Deedat, to publicly debate the death of Jesus on the Cross.  As a young dominee David Pypers prepared himself through prayer and fasting in a tent on the mountains at Bain’s Kloof for the event which was to take place on 13 August 1961 at the Green Point Track.

Because of publicity in the media, 30 000 people of all races jammed into the Green Point sports venue. The stadium quivered with excitement like at a rugby match. In the keenly contested debate, Imam Deedat started with the assertion that Jesus went to Egypt after the disciples had taken him from the Cross. He thoroughly ridiculed the Christian faith, challenging Pypers to give proof that Jesus died on the Cross. The young dominee rose to the challenge by immediately stating that Jesus is alive and that his Lord could there and then do the very things He had done when He walked the earth.

Dr David du Plessis, who was nick-named ‘Mr Pentecost’, reported on the event in his autobiography: ‘Taking a deep breath, he (Pypers) spoke loud and clear, ‘Is there anybody in this audience that, according to medical judgement, is completely incurable? Remember, it must be incurable...’ Of course, the stadium was abuzz by now. And then several men came along, carrying Mrs Withuhn, a White Christian lady, with braces all over her body. She was completely paralyzed. Then Pypers went ahead, asking whether there were any doctors present who could examine her and vouch for her condition. ‘Several doctors came forward, including her own physician, and they concurred in pronouncing her affliction incurable.’

Pypers simply walked to her and without any ado prayed for her briefly and proclaimed: ‘In the name of Jesus, be healed!’ Immediately she dropped her crutches and began to move.

The Green Point Aftermath

The Green Point Track event resulted in a victory for the Cross, with Mrs Withuhn being miraculously healed in the name of the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.

Many Muslims were deeply moved, but an unfortunate thing also happened. The booklet The Hadji Abdullah ben Yussuf; or the story of a Malay as told by himself (in an Afrikaans translation) was re-issued. Its distribution at the gates of the Green Point Track was definitely not helpful. Actually it was quite unfortunate and insensitive. The booklet refers negatively to the Qur’an and Muhammad, the founder of Islam.[28] The Cape Muslim community was enraged by the re-publication of this nineteenth century pamphlet.

What was perceived as the defeat of Ahmed Deedat, and thus of the Muslims at Green Point, inspired a call for revenge. Deedat stated publicly that the original motivation for public debates was his humiliation at the hand of Christians. He was not willing at all to accept defeat lying down.

The effect of the Green Point Track miracle was almost nullified by news that came from another part of the world on that same day. The report of the building of the Berlin Wall resounded throughout the world! A new type of battle was cemented - the ‘cold war’ between Soviet Communism and Western Capitalism!

However, it was nearly just as bad that Pypers was heavily criticized by his denomination  for undertaking the confrontation without getting prior synod approval. Furthermore, the leaders of his denomination were still clinging to an untenable interpretation of divine healing – that it belonged to a past age - to the times of the apostles.                                            

Islam linked to Communism?

As the ensuing cold war became the focus, the enemy of souls abused Communism with its atheist basis, attempting to stifle the spreading of the victorious message of the Cross, as it had been proclaimed at the Green Point Track.

              Was there a subtle link to Communism

                          in opposition to the Cross?

I surmise that the event of 13 August 1961 had great importance in the spiritual realm. One wonders whether the Islamic Crescent was not probably subtly linked to Communism in opposition to the Cross at that occasion. (This was to happen again in reverse in 1990 after the demise of Communism. Islam took over the mantle from the atheist ideology as a threat to world peace when the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait. That event became the catalyst for many Christians to start praying for an end to the bondage and deception at the base of the ideology of Islam as a destructive spiritual force.) 

In his denomination, Ds. Pypers was still a lone ranger.  In some quarters he was vilified after the Green Point event, although he had actually been challenged by the literature on faith healing, which had been written by Dr Andrew Murray, a revered hero of his church.  Pypers was out on a limb in the Dutch Reformed Church. At the Kweekskool in Stellenbosch, the theological seminary of the denomination, it was officially taught that faith healing was a doctrinal tenet which pertained to the days of the apostles.

More Dutch Reformed Outreach to Cape Muslims

A notable by-product of the work of Ds Davie Pypers at the ‘Coloured’ S. A. Gestig congregation in Long Street ensued when one of his former congregants, Lizzie Cloete, came to the conviction in 1964 that the Lord was calling her for the spreading of the Gospel to the Muslims (Els, 1971:432).  As a church worker in the congregation of Wynberg, she thus became one of the first full-time missionaries from the ‘Coloured’ community to the Muslims, but it was not regarded that way by the denomination at large. She was just seen as a normal church worker. Her consecration on 17 May 1964 was nevertheless a landmark for the ‘Coloured’ sector of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Sendingkerk as a whole hereafter announced its intention forthwith to be mission-minded corporately, i.e. not only to send individuals. The synod of 1966 resolved their striving formally: ‘Every church member - the whole church – instead of missionaries, must be the church in action.’

Power Encounters[29]    

Until relatively recently, spiritual warfare was regarded as a modern fad. Isolatedly, the expertise of Kurt Koch on the occult and its diabolic links was widely recognized since the 1960s. Paul Billheimer’s 1975 book Destined for the throne approached the matter in a revolutionary way. Although the book had many printings, the content was somehow not translated enough globally before 1989.[30] Thus it did not succeed in mobilizing masses of believers to either use praise or prayer - let alone both - to break down demonic strongholds in spiritual warfare.

          Yet, Billheimer made some profound statements about the role of the prayerful church, which would have influenced world history if it had been taken seriously. Billheimer (1975:61) said for example that the church wields the balance of power ‘in overcoming disintegration and decay in the cosmic order’. This has become especially relevant at the beginning of the new millennium with an increasing moral decay and an almost universal increase in (organized) crime and violence.

          At the Cape, Rev. Davie Pypers was one of very few evangelists who has been involved in spiritual power encounters, albeit that he did it in a very low-key way because the Protestant church had hardly any ear for this sort of thing in the 1960s. However, the Green Point event of 13 August 1961 got relatively wide media coverage. The publicity around the public meeting was not of Pypers’ making. It did open doors to him throughout the country. This secured for him a prayer backing few ministers enjoyed (He testified how he visited Hendrina, a far-way town 20 years later when a man came up to him. This man not only recognized Pypers immediately but he told Pypers that he had been praying for him every day since 1961).

          Faith healing was widely regarded as sectarian. In his ministry to the Hindus, Pypers furthermore made use of films, exposing the demonic nature of the walking through fire when the role players are in a trance.  In Muslim strongholds of those days like Sherwood Park, Pypers used a film about the crucifixion of Jesus extensively.  In this film Barabbas made the significant statement: ‘He died in my place.’ The film was used in conjunction with a series of sermons on the ten ‘I am’ pronouncements of Jesus. This series in Sherwood Park with the title ‘Who is this man’ definitely was a power encounter. Two weeks before the campaign rain and wind were ravaging the area. The Muslims themselves recognized the supernatural ‘co-incidence’ when the rain and the wind stopped the moment the team unpacked their evangelism material. A terminally ill lady, Fatima Olckers, heard parts of Pypers’ sermon on her bed. She wondered whose voice was repeating these words again and again as the breeze brought the words ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ to her. She realised that it was Nabi Isa ibn Mariam. She resolved to call on the name of Jesus, after she had called on Allah and Muhammad in vain. She was instantly healed and thereafter she became a believer in Him, one of the first coming out of Islam in the Western Cape in the early 1960s to be a follower of Jesus.

          Pypers displayed exceptional courage to show the same film in Macassar, i.e. near to the prime Muslim shrine of the Western Cape, i.e. that of Shaykh Yusuf.  Quite understandably, Pypers reaped the anger of the local imam. Not satisfied with the situation, Pypers went to the municipality where it was pointed out to him that they had indeed trespassed. With the Stellenbosch University students who had joined him, Pypers wanted to apologise to the imam. He asked immediately where they could show the open-air film. The place in the bushes turned out to be even more strategic because the Muslim villagers could now watch the film undetected.

          In the Western World the term ‘power encounter’ has often been associated with John Wimber, an American evangelist who revolutionized theological thought in the evangelical world in the 1980s.  It is not generally known that Wimber was greatly influenced by Peter Wagner at the Fuller Seminary (USA) where they lectured together in the Church Growth department. Wagner himself was impacted in a revolutionary way through his contact with Pentecostals after 16 years of sterile ministry as a non-charismatic in South America. There he was challenged when he researched the history of the Pentecostal movement. Wagner's 1973 report on the movement in South America with the title Look Out! the Pentecostals are coming had Western theologians sitting up straight. Perhaps he prepared many of them to take to heart what third world theologians had to say, notably at the world conference of evangelicals Lausanne (Switzerland) in 1974.

          From another part of the globe Paul Yonghi Cho of Seoul (South Korea) impacted the Church, illustrating to all and sundry that the Bible is nowhere outdated. He emphasised that what he dubbed Fourth Dimension Faith is needed in evangelism. Korea taught the whole world the power of prayer, breaking the ground for Patrick Johnstone’s powerful prayer guide, Operation World. Internationally, the Third World started to challenge the leadership of church growth in the 1980s with Cho’s International Church Growth Centre. In fact, the dynamic pioneer of the church growth movement, Donald MacGavran, initially called it ‘Third World missionary enterprise’. Discovering how it seemed as the first instinct of many Latin Americans to consult a witch in case of problems, Wagner - and many missionaries around the globe - learned the hard way that occult power cannot be broken with logical arguments. With some of their evangelists coming from a background of spiritism, the South Americans may have assisted the rest of the Christian world to deal with Folk Islam, where white (sometimes black) magic and spiritism occur. Peter Wagner asserts that practising spiritists serve the devil like practising Christians serve God.  A former Brasilian spiritist leader Heber Soares told after his conversion how he made a pact with the devil to receive the healing powers from five medical specialists from different parts of the world.

Covert Power Encounters at the Cape

A covert power encounter ensued at the Cape in 1962 when Theo Kotze became the pastor of the Sea Point and Malmesbury Methodist congregations. John Wessels, the Sea Point minister in 1999 described Kotze’s ministry with the following words:  Theo Kotze ‘combined church growth and integrity on the one hand, and evangelism and social justice on the other’ (Knighton-Fitt, 2003:94). With his wife Helen and their children the Kotze family formed a formidable team, becoming soon the talk of the town. At the Cape Theo Kotze was one of the first Christian Institute members, forming an ecumenical Bible Study group and using CI material. In the second year of their ministry in Sea Point, Theo Kotze ‘masterminded a prayer vigil and the publicity’ (Knighton-Fitt, 2003:103) for the multiracial Alan Walker Mission at the Goodwood Showgrounds in September 1963. Special trains were organised to bring people from as far away as Simon’s Town and two massive crosses were erected on Signal Hill and Tygerberg. An all-night prayer vigil preceded the opening day. Alan Walker, a godly and fearless Australian evangelist, led campaigns in different countries. Unlike most contemporary evangelists he emphasised the social implications of the Gospel. During the preparation for the mission an ex-cabinet minister – angered by Alan Walker’s statements on non-racialism, unleashed a politically contrived controversy. Tony Heard, the editor of the Cape Times, described the handling of the crisis with the following words: ‘The steadfast way in which Theo handled (this) was a harbinger of his future, principled, non-racial work in the Christian Institute.’ (Quoted by Knighton-Fitt, 2003:124). Through his involvement with the evangelistic campaign, Theo Kotze was linked to Alan Walker, of whom the government disapproved.

          A demonstration of the fine balance of biblical compassion and social involvement became evident in his ‘Straight Talking’ columns of the Sea Point Vision church magazine that he started in March 1964. On the cover of the first edition is written: ‘Wide Vision, big Thinking, Great Faith, Stout Effort, God’s Husbandry... bring results.’ The youth work of the church impacted the 'Ducktails', the White gangsters of the area, in no uncertain way. ‘Club Route Twelve’ was led by Derek Kotze, the eldest son of the family.

          Nelson Mandela and his colleagues had been on Robben Island for almost two years when the Cape Methodist Synod appointed Theo Kotze as Robben Island chaplain. Among his Methodist congregants there were big name political detainees like Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe and Stanley Mogoba.

          More covert power encounters were to follow under the ministry of Straatwerk. Thus Esther Dunn, a former drug addict was supernaturally delivered. Thereafter she attended the Glenvar Bible School that is linked to the Africa Evangelistic Band (Victor, 2001:30). She became the first full-time worker of Straatwerk. Drug addicts were set free through the power of the Gospel, and many a Satanist or person under occult bondage discovered that there is power in the Blood of Jesus when believers stand together in prayer.

A Capetonian Prophet in the making

Theo Kotze was granted a Christian Fellowship Trust grant in 1967 for three months of overseas’ travel and study. This trust was closely related to the Christian Institute (CI). This vision was decisively broadened when he and his wife Helen were privileged to meet the leaders of the Methodist Renewal Movement in the UK. Dr Pauline Webb, one of them, summarised the essence of the renewal mission that Kotze would try and implement back in Cape Town as follows: ‘... renewal can come about only as the church is recalled to the priority of mission - for then the focus of our concern would not be... the church and its forms, but rather the world and its needs’ (Knighton-Fitt, 2003:114).

          On discovery of the depth of God’s grace and forgiveness, Theo Kotze committed himself also to the local problems. Very daringly he addressed not only the burning issues of his White congregants, but also the social ramifications of apartheid legislation that made it for example illegal for Black workers to be accommodated in servants’ quarters. His involvement with the CI - of which he became the Regional Director in 1969 - played a major role in his spiritual development in this regard. Jenni Sweet, who worked on a literacy programme at the Sea Point Church, met him through the CI. She quoted Kotze as saying: ‘Political involvement stems from your love for Jesus. If you love Jesus, you love people. The way you express that love is by getting involved in a concrete way in people’s struggles’ (Knighton-Fitt, 2003:109). At the Methodist Synod his clear and convincing articulation of the problems of the dispossessed alienated himself from his White colleagues.

          When Kotze became Regional Director of the CI in 1969, the organisation had already become quite unpopular among Whites because of the clear stand on the side of justice and against apartheid. Kotze also became General Secretary of the Western Province Council of Churches.

          The theme of the CI was (racial) reconciliation. All initiatives were preceded by discussions based on Bible Study and prayer. Beyers Naudé, the national leader, set the prophetic tone in the pursuit of truth and reconciliation, a message with which Theo Kotze had no problem at all.

The Black Christ travels the World

Born in Cape Town in 1940, Ronald Harrison spent most of his youth in District Six and completed his education at Harold Cressy High School. His artistic abilities manifested at an early age, and in his teens he displayed a keen interest in the political scenario of South Africa. One of his main role models was South Africa's first Peace Nobel laureate, Chief Albert Luthuli. This became the inspiration for an oil painting, The Black Christ, which caused an immediate stir when it was unveiled in Cape Town in 1962.  The young artist chose Chief Albert Luthuli as a model for the face of Christ. The two centurions depicted John Vorster and Hendrik Verwoerd, arch-proponents of apartheid. For his bold act and defiance, refusing to divulge the whereabouts of the painting, Ronald Harrison had to pay a high price – incarcerated, tortured and harassed. His health was seriously affected detrimentally, but he was also offered a bursary to study in the USA. The government responded by offering him an 'exit permit', which meant that he  would not be allowed to return to his home country after completion of his studies. Many people of colour left South Africa in the 1960s in this way.  Ronald Harrison then rather turned down the offer to study overseas. Aalso socially he was deprived when two broken engagements ensued because 'I was hesitant to commit to marriage' (Harrison, 2006:99) as a result of the interogatory torture inflicted to him. After being smuggled out of the country, The Black Christ painting turned to become seed of liberation, used for fund-raising overseas to defend apartheid victims via the Defence and Aid Fund. 

A Catalyst for unchristian Activism        

Beyers Naudé dreamed of establishing a ‘Confessing Church’ in South Africa along the model of what happened in Germany when Nazis threatened to absorb the church in its ideology. With the help of friends and colleagues Theo Kotze regularly prepared and sent out memos explaining the implications of Parliamentary Bills and giving ideas for practical involvement. The demonic apartheid ideology tilted the Bible-based beginnings of the CI. The CI was quite prophetic when the organisation encouraged Black, Indian and ‘Coloured’ Dutch Reformed Church leaders to look at how apartheid was destroying church unity in South Africa. But the CI was at the same time acting diabolically, politicizing a part of the body of Christ in an unhealthy activist way. 

          Unwittingly and unintentionally the prophetic Theo Kotze became the harbinger of a compromise of the Gospel. Thus it was surely compassionate and loving that he went to the home of Farid Esack, a young Muslim, to explain to the family that the first police detention of the high school student was not because he was a bad person. Esack later confessed in Harare years later - in the presence of Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki and Bishop Trevor Huddleston - about Kotze’s contribution in his spiritual development: ‘It was a Christian minister who taught me that Islam is not the sole repository of truth.’ (Knighton-Fitt, 2003:186).[31] Kotze and the CI of the 1970s were unwittingly sowing the seed of inter-faith teaching that compromised the uniqueness of Jesus as the divine Son of God. The uncompromising stance of CI leaders probably also influenced church leaders to oppose all forms of legalism, but many of them went overboard in the end. In my view it is no co-incidence that quite a few ministers that were closely linked to the CI in later years supported an unbiblical view on homosexuality, sometimes with the excuse that they opposed the unloving and legalistic practices in the churches.

          The CI became a catalyst for unchristian activism. This was especially evident in the University Christian Movement (UCM) that was more or less a spiritual child of the CI established formed by English-speaking churches after the SCA changed its constitution to divide into separate ethnic organizations (De Gruchy, 1979:154). Most White students withdrew from active participation when Black Theology and Black Consciousness came strongly to the fore. The mood of Black students - under the leadership of Steve Biko, who broke away with others at a UCM conference to form SASO – was very much one of polarization. 'Black man, you are on your own!' became a commonly used slogan.

          Correction only came to the fore in the 1970s in the course of the expounding of Black Theology. Thus Manas Buthulezi, a Lutheran Bishop and prominent theologian, spelled this out with great effect at the South African Congress on Mission and Evangelism in 1973, noting that Christianity had to be liberated from every form of racial bondage if it was to speak meaningfully to Blacks: 'The white man will be liberated from the urge to reject the black man...' (Cited in De Gruchy, 1979:162). In similar vein Desmond Tutu explained what the liberation meant: It is 'fundamentally liberation from sin to which we are all (oppressed and oppressors alike) in bondage, it means a readiness to forgive, and a refusal to be consumed by hate...' (Cited in De Gruchy, 1979:163).

Islamic Shrines come into the Limelight

Father Bernard Wrankmore had been a chaplain to seamen when he was especially challenged to pray for the beloved country.  Just at that time Wrankmore saw the dossier of Imam Abdullah Haron, who had died while in police custody on 27 September 1969. Mrs Catherine Taylor, an opposition MP, had brought up the issue in Parliament, which the government of the day evidently wanted to squash. The Imam Haron case highlighted for Wrankmore the fact that South Africa was now misled by a similar delusion as the Germans under Hitler. He decided to retreat for prayer and fasting to St George’s Cathedral for the situation in the country. However, Wrankmore was refused permission to do so by the Archbishop and the Dean of the Cathedral.

          In the church at large there was ignorance about the effects of ancestral worship on people in general and of praying at shrines. Being a lover of mountaineering, Wrankmore retreated for prayer to the Kramat near to Lion’s Head. He was in deep meditation when a group of Muslims entered. They promptly invited Wrankmore to attend the Muir Street mosque in District Six. When the Muslims there heard that permission had been refused for him to pray in the St George’s Cathedral, one thing led to another. Eventually Wrankmore was allowed to use the Islamic shrine at Lion’s Head for his fast. He was probably not aware of the occult connections. 

         

          Wrankmore came into the frontline of opposition to Prime Minister Vorster, when he requested an inquiry into the death of Imam Haron. He added weight to his protest through a drawn-out fast. A friend who had visited him at the shrine near to Lion’s Head, put the newspaper reporters on his track. It was definitely not Wrankmore’s own idea to get media attention.  Initially the effort of the cleric seemed in vain, as Prime Minister Vorster remained unbending. Eventually a judicial inquiry followed when advocate Wilfred Cooper came into the picture. Imam Rashied Omar pointed to the role played by the local newspaper The Cape Times to keep protest alive in the minds of the people. What Wrankmore did not bargain for, was a major health hazard.  After an extended period of fasting, his body became mysteriously swollen up. He thanked God that another round of prayer and fasting could sort out this matter. It is interesting that he started his fast on 19 August - 40 days before the second anniversary of the death of Haron.

          Through apartheid legislation the ‘Malay quarter’ of Bo-Kaap was greatly extended, churches there were closed down and Christians were tempted to become Muslims if they wanted to continue living there. Some of the believers, who worshipped at St Stephen’s and the Anglican St Paul’s Churches, had started leaving the residential area because of this legislation. By 1980, Bo-Kaap had become a Muslim stronghold with very little Christian influence left.

Marriages to Muslims as a Catalyst of Outreach

Ds Chris Greyling had in the meantime been appointed as the first mission organizer of the ‘Sendingkerk’ with a special charge to reach out to the Muslims. Gradually however, the intention to be a missionary church went out by the window. The struggle against apartheid took its toll, operating as cancer at the evangelistic zeal of members.

          Evangelist Izak van der Vyver, who operated in Philippi, was very sad when one of their church workers, trained as a social worker, married a Muslim in May 1974.  He wrote one of the first pamphlets for Muslim evangelism in Afrikaans: ‘Wat dit beteken as ‘n Christen Moslem (Slams) word.’  (‘What it means when a Christian becomes a Muslim’). Van der Vyver was not the only one in the church who was upset. The Sendingkerk church organ, Die Ligdraer, published a full issue in August 1974 on Islam, with contributions from Izak van der Vyver, Ds Chris Greyling and Professor Pieter Els. The tract of Van der Vyver ‘oombliklik gered’ apparently made quite an impact in the ‘Coloured’ community. Van der Vyver and Greyling’s main strategy at this time was the training of church members, empowering them to reach out to their peers in schools, neighbourhoods and factories. Apart from the occasional outreach to Muslims, the emphasis was on warning their church members against marriage with Muslims, those who were ignorant of the problems that would follow. The other facet of their work was winning back those who had become disillusioned. A ‘getuienisaksie’ (witness action) team from the Lentegeur congregation of the Sendingkerk started advising many young girls who had become pregnant from Muslim men. Their efforts were often crowned with success when the young women discovered that the church did not completely condemn them.  Likewise, a few women of their congregation who had been divorced from Muslim men, returned to the church fold.

A renewed Anglican Mission to the Muslims

The first known appointment of a person of colour for full-time outreach to Muslims occurred after Rev. (later Bishop) George Schwarz had approached Archbishop Joost de Blank in 1959 with a pastoral problem. One of Schwarz’s parishioners had become pregnant from a Muslim patient at the Brooklyn Chest hospital. De Blank now told him that Miss Leslie, the church’s only remaining missionary to the Muslims, would be retiring soon. The Archbishop challenged Schwarz to get involved with this work.

          Schwarz’s calling to the Muslim work was confirmed at a ministers’ retreat in 1960, after which he was given a special appointment as full-time priest for the ‘Mission to the Muslims’.  In order to be better equipped for this work he was sent to Canterbury in England, where he was trained for a year at St Augustines by the renowned Bishop Kenneth Cragg. A stint of nine months in Jerusalem to minister among Arab Christians was intended to make him acquainted with the Middle East setting.

          Back in Cape Town, Schwarz was linked to the St Mark’s parish in Athlone with the full-time charge of ministering to Muslims in the whole diocese of the Mother City. His work centred around the counselling of marriages (or other people where a marriage was considered) in which one of the parties was a Muslim.  Soon the archbishop approached Schwarz to move to the parish of St Phillip’s in District Six in a caretaker capacity.  Schwarz went to St Phillip’s in 1963. Here he also conducted seminars on Islam and Muslim Evangelism for the whole diocese. For seven years Rev. Schwarz laboured in District Six, but increasingly the parochial responsibilities devoured his attention.  By his own admission, 90% of his time was devoted to parish work by 1970. In that year Schwarz was called to take charge of the Anglican congregation in Bonteheuwel. To all intents and purposes, this signalled the end of all formal Muslim outreach by the denomination.

          The official name of the ‘Mission to the Muslims’ was changed after a visit by Bishop Kenneth Cragg to the Mother City, when he suggested a less aggressive tag. It became the Board of Muslim Relationships.  The outreach work itself petered out to become almost non-existent in the late 1980s. The official position of the denomination was now ‘inter-faith’, which boiled down to absence of Gospel presentations to Muslims.

Recruitment of Ministers from Christian Student Work

In one area there was some drive for missionary outreach, namely among students. The bulk of the Christelike Studentevereniging (CSV) ministry was carried by that denomination where ‘Mammie’ Le Fleur pioneered work with Nic Apollis as the next itinerant secretary until the early 1960s, followed by Chris Wessels from the Moravian Church.

          One of the young Sendingkerk ministers, Esau Jacobs, who started off in the Transkei, had a definite vision to reach out to the Muslims. He inspired many a young student, including myself. At the student evangelistic outreach he exposed the group to ‘spiritual warfare’ when he joined the group on New Year’s Day, 1965.

          Paul Engel was a student colleague from Hewat Training College and co-fighter in the battle within the Moravian Church for biblical conversion as an aim for all teaching in Sunday Schools. He was instrumental in bringing me to a major turning point in my life when he invited me to the evangelistic outreach of the Christian Students Association at the seaside resort in Harmony Park. This was scheduled to start just after Christmas at the end of 1964. I was 18 years old and had just finished my two years of teacher training and had been preaching in youth services all over the Cape Peninsula. Conversely, we had other young people like Allan Boesak at our church as preachers. Allan also told me about the Harmony Park outreach.

          At Christmas 1964 I felt spiritually empty and bankrupt. How could I go and share the Gospel with others in such a condition? I cried to the Lord to equip me! God somehow divinely touched me. I sensed the power of the Holy Spirit getting hold of me. I was now ready for the outreach effort.

          A special friendship and partnership developed to the tent mates David Savage and Ds Esau Jacobs (who was generally known as Jakes). At that time Jakes was a young pastor, who had just started off as a pastor/missionary to ‘Coloureds’ in the Transkei. David Savage was a librarian, who later became a pastor of the Full Gospel Church and Principal of the Chaldo Bible Institute.

          The event at Harmony Park contained seed for spiritual revival. It also contributed to the birth of leaders. Rev. Abel Hendricks, who led the camp. along with Rev. Chris Wessels, became a leader in later years in the Methodist Church and Wessels in the Moravian Church. Allan Boesak, Jattie Bredekamp, Esau Jacobs, Franklin Sonn David Savage and Vivian Aisley (later married with the surname West) became influential members in the Sendingkerk, Full Gospel Church and Lutheran Churches. Bredekamp, Franklin and Fanie Sonn became academic and professional leaders in the fields of History, Education and Psychology.

Apartheid as Cancer

The White Dutch Reformed Church suffered a similar fate as their Sendingkerk counterparts. By accommodating racial condescension and racist White supremacy, it got rotten to the core spiritually. After the demise of apartheid in the 1990s, the denomination lost many young members who had become estranged and confused by their leaders.

          A Muslim backlash threatened good relations between Christians and Muslims in the late1980s after Ds Zevenster (a minister from the Afrikaanse Gereformeerde Kerk), called for a boycott of all products which had the hallal demarcation - including the Islamic crescent. This indicated that food-stuff could be consumed by Muslims. Professor Els reacted promptly in the Kerkbode, to bring matters back to normal in the Christian-Muslim relations, abetting a situation of confrontation and tension.

Another Apartheid Offspring

Tragically, discord set in soon after the special Harmony Park camp - caused by an apartheid offspring. The Christian Students’ Association (SCA) was ripped apart. Some of the leaders among the ‘Coloured’ sector of the student movement thought that it was inevitable to accept the new racial divisions. The Sonn clan and Rev. Abel Hendricks belonged to this group. Chris Wessels, a young pastor of the Moravian church, who had returned prior to this event from a study stint in Holland and Germany, became the travelling secretary of the SCA. He believed that one should fight apartheid tooth and nail. In his view, a division of the student movement along racial lines would be tantamount to towing the line of government policy. (After his election as President of the CPTA in 1976, Franklin Sonn was to change the image of the Sonn clan on this score significantly.)

          Theologically, the group around Chris Wessels was probably on target, but the activist spirit rubbed off on others. Wessels was a product from Genadendal and very much influenced by the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German resistance theologian and fierce critic of the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer was still quite unknown in South Africa in the early 1960s. Wessels had came to faith in Christ through the ministry of the Africa Evangelistic Band, which paradoxically has been proclaiming the ‘stay out of politics’ line, but unofficially they were supporting the government. The response to the status quo caused divisions throughout ‘Coloured’ society.

Ministry of Compassion to City Nightclubs

A special ministry of compassion to the city nightclubs from the early 1970s was based in the old Tafelberg Hotel of District Six. It started though amongst the youth of the White Dutch Reformed congregation of Wynberg. This ministry was birthed in prayer. Pietie Victor, who started his theological training in Stellenbosch in 1964, founded the compassionate ministry with his wife Annette, who was a social worker by profession. Only four of the fairly big youth group of young people were prepared to join Pietie and Annette Victor for outreach on the streets and in the nightclubs on Friday night, but many of the young people came for Bible Study and prayer before the other young folk left for the outreach that would take them into the early hours of the morning.

          God used the breakdown of the bus that took the group to Stellenbosch after a training weekend, to bring them to the realization that they needed His touch dearly. At the Sunday evening service in the Student Church that evening 350 remained in the church after the service. This was an indication that God had dealt with them in the week before that.

          In the denomination there was initially a lot of opposition. However, after an invitation by Ds Solly Ozrovech to come and share about their work in his congregation in Gordons Bay, they received invitations from all over the Western Cape. The favour of the devout young people seemed to anger Satan tremendously. Pietie Victor was asked to appear before his church council. Via the grapevine he heard that he had to account for the ‘late night activities and that he was busy with sectarian “things” like speaking in tongues, laying on of hands and other “geestelike vergrype” (spiritual offences). The group was driven into prayer as never before. God vindicated them. At the actual meeting not a single one of the accusations were mentioned. Instead, the youth group only harvested praise.

          One of the criticisms thrown at Pietie Victor, who finished his theological studies at the end of 1971, was that he was a liberal. The reason for this judgement was because they took people from all races into their mobile ‘coffee bar’ – a Microbus that they parked in front of St Stephen’s Church in Bree Street under a street lamp. There they served those whom they had brought from the streets with sandwiches and coffee. That was the spur for the St Stephen’s Church council to offer them two of their cellar rooms for the use of the coffee bar. What an irony of history followed that the ‘Coloured’ congregation that was still linked to the Groote Kerk – that once had refused teaching to Muslims in one of their rooms – now hosted the White young people. Even a greater irony followed when the very room where the coffee bar started had been the source of conflict in 1842. It was the room where manumitted slaves learned to read and write. That had been the main bone of contention – the reason why the building got its name, pelted with stones by angry colonists. For many decades the Straatwerk Koffiekamer at 108 Bree Street remained a blessing to many destitute people, also after they bought the old Tafelberg Hotel in District Six.

Surfing the spiritual Waves

As an eighteen-year old Gavin Rudolph was among a few other South Africans invited to the 1971 Smirnoff Pro Am at Sunset Beach in the USA. Rudolph stunned the surfing world by winning in 8-12' surf - his second session at the fabled break - becoming the first South African to win an event outside the country. Being a committed Christian, the world champion ushered in a big interest among youngsters.

In 1991 a Christian surfing club was started at the Cape Town Baptist Church in an attempt to reach unchurched surfers. Mike Geldenhuys, a young believer who went on to study theology at the Cape Town Baptist Seminary, invited Roy Harley, a devout surfer from Durban, to come and challenge the youngsters at a camp. Nathan, the son of Graham Gernetsky, the pastor, invited his friend Terran Williams. Under the impact of the Word, Terran was the first to commit his life to Christ. Demitri Nikiforos and Nathan Gernetsky were two other teenagers who, like Terran, later went into full-time ministry. Demitri and Roy Harley became the co-leaders of the Christian surfing club when Roy came to study theology at CEBI (that later became Cornerstone Christian College).

The Cape Town surf ministry linked with two similar groups in East London and Port Elizabeth. Soon Sun Surf became the national brand name for ministries all over the country linked to a local church. At this time God raised similar ministries among surfers in Australia and the US. Roy Harley relocated to Jeffrey’s Bay, the Mecca of surfing in South Africa. Roy Harley became the continental co-ordinator in due course.

Demitri Nikiforos became a pioneering pastor of Calvary Chapel in the Mother City afters studying in the USA. Nathan, after studying at Cornerstone Christian College, joined the leadership team of Friends First Church, followed by leading a church in Hermanus and then Hout Bay. Terran Williams, after years of serving with Scripture Union and after his studies at Cornerstone Christian College, joined the leadership team of Friends First (renamed Common Ground Church in 2008), which has since then grown to be a large church with a strong reach into the city.

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[1] The reference is to the government attempts to bypass the entrenched clause in the Constitution guaranteeing the rights of ‘Coloured’ voters.

[2] It is unfortunate that the history of Jews in South Africa gives so little attention to those on the left of the political spectrum.

[3] The saga of the Wolseley strike is wonderfully documented by Richard Goode in The Angry Divide, James and Symons, 1989:111-127.

[4] In a position of authority the Moravians appear to have led the field with the indigenous Ernst Dietrich a member of the Church Board in 1930, along with Richard Marx and H Birnbaum, two German missionaries.

[5]As far as I know, no head of state personified a humbling before God in history more than Abraham Lincoln. On no less than nine separate occasions during his 49 month reign as president, he called for public penitence, fasting prayer and thanksgiving. The first of the nine calls on 12 August 1861 ‘characteristically brought ‘humbling ourselves’ to the fore in recommending a day of public humiliation, fasting and prayer…’ (Cassidy, 1989:297).

[6] This information about Rev. A.J. Liebenberg is mainly taken from minutes of the sub-committee for the mission work among the Muslims in the archives of the Dutch Reformed Church as well as from a handwritten report of 1948 by Rev. F. N. van Niekerk, a colleague of Liebenberg, found at the same venue.

[7] The reference to higher priests is probably to imams. It is unlikely that there were so many shaykhs or maulanas at the Capeat that time; those who have respectively studied in the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent.

[8] The authors could have been influenced by the document of the NEUF produced in the 1940s.

[9]Ds D.P. Botha later became the moderator of the Sendingkerk, the ‘Coloured’ sector of the denomination.

[10] Botha’s letter to the Burger can be found among his correspondence at the Western Cape Institute for Historical Research.

[11] The four freedoms were: freedom of speech and expression, freedom from want, freedom of very person to worship God in his own way and freedom from fear.

[12] Beukes was employed by Smuts as information advisor after he had resigned as newspaper editor - after Beukes had refused to change his prediction in the beginning of 1941 that Hitler would lose World War II. Beukes revealed interesting facts about Smuts in the three parts of the biography: The Holistic Smuts, The Romantic Smuts and the The Religious Smuts.

[13] I fight as much as I can against the Y section.  I am a man of peace, but now I have to declare war.

[14] Vergelegen was the farm of Willem Adriaan van der Stel an early governor at the Cape (1699-1707).

[15] Initially three politicians joined in the leadership of the porty which succeeded the Progressive Party.

[16]  People other than Black had to get a permit to enter the Black townships..

[17] Ebrahim, Noor Noor’s Story, My life in District Six, 1999:80.

[18]In a similar way, Eddie Barlow brought the team of Bangladesh to international standard, after doing similar boundary breaking development work among 'Coloureds' in the Boland.

[19]It turned out that Rosemarie was black-listed for entry into the country. The attempt to get information about the procedure to get her reclassified as a Coloured - so that we could marry – had failed. However, I had made it very easy for the government agents, by writing naively about her in a Christmas newsletter to German friends in 1970.

[20] The full letter is printed on p. 279f of Paton’s book, Apartheid and the Archbishop

[21] Translation: If you want to minister to them, you must approach tehm in their own language, their own idiom, their own environment.

[22] Translation: …not only relating to the soul of the Black man, but also with his practical circumstances.

[23]Translation:  The biggest liberal around.

[24] The global movement is today known as Initiatives for Change.  

[25] My notes are heavily based on Daphne Wilson’s article ‘Purging of the Night Schools’, South African Outlook, March, 1969, on pp. 532-34 in Outlook on a Century, 1973.

[26] Acronym for Students Health and Welfare Care Organisation.

[27]The building is the premises at which the SAMS started. Later it was turned into the Missionary Museum.

[28]Some of the insensitivities are listed in Gerrie Lubbe’s article Wit Afrikane en Afrika se ander godsdienste in Wit Afrikane?, an anthology to commemorate Professor Nico Smiths’s 70^th birthday, p. 60.

[29]I took much of the information for this portion especially from C. Peter Wagner’s Spiritual Power and church Growth, 1987, which is a revision of Look Out! the Pentecostals are coming, 1973

[30]The Dutch translation for example - a language that has really not been slow in having translations from English - was only printed in 1984.

[31]Farid Esack is recognized in the Islamic world as one of the first ‘liberation theologians’, who dared to criticize the religion from within its fold.