WHEN THE World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) declared “Apartheid is a heresy” at Ottawa in August 1982, they did so knowing that the general synods of South Africa’s Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK) had posited there were “skriftuurlike gronde” (scriptural grounds) to support “rasse-apartheid” (race-apartheid) understood as, “afsonderlike, eiesoortige ontwikkeling” (separate, distinctive development).
In essence the NGK was responsible for what is known as apartheid theology, religious justifications for separate development.
As UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese addressed the issue of Palestine & Israel from a podium in Cape Town’s Groote Kerk on Sunday, it may have come as a surprise to those old enough to remember this incident, that no mention of the church and its connection to apartheid theology was made by anyone at the event. Instead, the rally signaled a dramatic moment of inversion in which the church, freed of its own history, was now waggling its index finger at the Jews in the Middle East, with the assistance of Albanese.
The National Party came to power in 1948, its manifesto claimed that the policy of apartheid
was “separation on Christian principles of justice and reasonableness”, absolutely nothing to do with Jews, Israel, or Judaism.
Thus the N.G. Sendingkerk, also in 1982 had issued in an impressive statement on apartheid, a confession of faith which accused the NGK, and the same Groote Kerk, of “theological heresy and idolatory ” for supporting apartheid which it described as a “pseudo-religious ideology’.
It would take the NGK decades until the turn of the millennium to untangle itself from the disaster of its association with apartheid, with members such as Professor Willie Jonker, issuing a dramatic confession of guilt “for the sin of apartheid” at a church conference in Rustenburg, 1990, leading up to special faith hearings conducted by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission.
Interestingly in testimony from the South African Council of Churches, the word ‘heresy’ is exchanged and interpolated by the word ‘hierarchy’, one of many problems with the Final Report issued by the commission, noted in my submission to the Equality Court in 2015.
In 2018, the High Court determined that I was not entitled to legal aid in a matter effecting the prestige and status of the commission, handing down a decision upholding a Legal Aid South Africa (LASA) determination, that since the ‘report would take a long time to read, it may be ignored.’