Religion: Bridge Builder

When Zachariah Keodirelang Matthews left South Africa early this month, he sadly told a friend: “All the bridges are being broken down.” By “bridges” he meant the hope of constructing a civilization in South Africa where black men and white men could live in harmony together. Matthews, a Negro and one of Africa’s leading Christian laymen, has spent his life trying to build them.

Last week, on the campus of Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, Anglican Matthews gave a more specific warning to the National Council of Churches’ Assembly on African Affairs: South Africans are drifting toward bitter extremes, and “it seems to be the tendency of the church to be silent or hesitant to speak out.” Ahead of 50-year-old Zachariah Matthews now is a year’s teaching tour at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary as Henry W. Luce Visiting Professor of World Christianity, a chance to let U.S. churchmen hear, and reflect on, some of the lessons of his life.

Brewing Storm. Matthews is the son of a Kimberley diamond digger who named him for an Old Testament prophet. He was brought up in Christian mission schools, proved a brilliant student, and won a chance to study at Yale and the London School of Economics. In 1935 he settled down to his career as professor of native law and anthropology at the Negro college at Fort Hare, in the Cape Province. Full of his Christian-mission teachings, Matthews devoted himself to the gradual improvement of the lot of the black man. He spoke as a moderate. While others were making sweeping demands, he asked only for limited reforms, e.g., to let Negroes with high educational and property qualifications vote.

But Matthews warned the whites that a storm was brewing. He was ignored. The South African government’s African Representative Council, in which he took an active part, was never heeded. Said a more militant Negro, scathingly: “The council is a toy telephone. Matthews and the other members speak into it, but it ends there. The whites aren’t listening.”

Black Supremacy. When the Malan government launched its apartheid policies, Matthews denounced them and walked out of the powerless council. He and like-minded members of South Africa’s mission-sponsored Christian Council have fought apartheid with Christian weapons, condemned it as “contrary to both natural law and the Christian revelation.” But the moderates have been caught between whites and blacks with no patience for moderation.

One of Zachariah Matthews’ chief critics is his own son, Joseph, 22, a South African law student who takes his stand with the fiery African Youth League, which in turn takes its marching orders from the Communist-minded African National Congress. Says son Joseph: “Cooperation is useless. The new, true slogan is ‘Africa for the Africans.’ The whites should clear out.” Joseph and others like him have come to believe in black supremacy as fervently as Prime Minister Malan believes in white supremacy.