SOUTH AFRICA: White Man’s God

The rock upon which the Boers founded their great Afrikaner culture was the Dutch Reformed Church, a puritanical institution as sternly fundamentalist as the Dutch settlers themselves. Last week apartheid (segregation;, a latter-day fanatic projection of Afrikaner culture, ran smack aground the rock of the Reformed Church.

In his effort to keep black and white strictly apart, tall, Dutch-born Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd recently got the Native Laws amended so that he now has control of practically every social contact between the races, even in white areas—schools, hospitals, clubs and churches. Stubbornly self-reliant Minister Verwoerd (pronounced Fairvoort) boasts that not one of his seven children has ever been bathed or put to bed by an African servant. Like most stout Boer nationalists, he holds that God intended that races be kept apart. The church clause in the new law gives him power to ban mixed worship in a white residential area if he thinks that the Negroes are causing a nuisance, and if he has the consent of the local municipality.

Despite the qualifications, South Africa’s churches saw a clear threat to the right of the church to say where and how people may worship.

First to protest were 25 South African Roman Catholic bishops, who issued an urgent appeal to all white South Africans to consider “the evils” of apartheid: “One trembles at the blasphemy of attributing to God the offense against charity and justice that are apartheid’s necessary accompaniment.”

The following Sunday every Anglican clergyman in South Africa read from his pulpit a letter from his controlling bishop urging him to defy church apartheid, and proposing to establish a fund to support people prosecuted under the act. “If Verwoerd were so foolhardy now as to try to implement his church clause,” said the conservative Johannesburg Star, “he would make an eternal martyr of the first person arrested, set the Anglican church in revolt, and probably spark off a series of events that would convulse the entire country.” But that was not all. The Presbyterian Church declared church segrega tion “morally indefensible,” the Baptists announced their conviction that the government’s policy “had no sanction in the New Testament and was diametrically opposed to the teaching of Christ,” and the Methodist Church joined in criticism.

But for Verwoerd the unkindest cut of all was from his own Nederduits Gere formmeerde Kerk (Afrikaans for Dutch Reformed Church), which has always taken the pro-Afrikaner view in all his disputes. It said that it could not support the “width of impact of the church clause.” At the church’s Stellenbosch Seminary, Theology Professor B. B. Keet, a blunt Afrikaner, spelled out what may prove the turn of the tide in South Africa’s official segregation policy. “It will be suicidal,” said Keet, “for the white group in South Africa to continue to try to apply the impractical and immoral policy of apartheid, which can only be implemented by use of force.”