South
Africa Is a Christian Nation. This isn’t surprising to anyone who knows about
the history of Africa and Missionaries. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in
Southern Africa is in existence today thanks in large part to missionaries
coming through the southern portion of the continent. One question that I have
struggled with throughout this year is, how do we live with the fact that South
Africa is a Christian nation because of Colonialism? I have had many
conversations with my host Pastor about this, and we have stumbled across
numerous answers, and even more questions. What would South Africa look like
today had the Dutch not landed on the Cape of Good Hope in the 1650’s? Has
South Africa becoming a Christian nation really helped the country, or has it
made things worse? What do we consider to be civilized?
When
white missionaries first arrived in Africa, the goal was to spread the word of
God as well as to teach the people to be more civilized. In the book “In Our
Own Skins: A Political History of Coloured People,” by Richard Van Der Ross, he
attempts to explain what it means to be civilized. In the opening part of the
book, Van Der Ross discusses the interactions between the Dutch and the Khoi
Khoi people’s, considered to be one of the first tribes of South Africa. Van
Der Ross defines civilization as a group of people who are governed by a
certain set of laws. By this definition, South Africa has always been a
civilized nation. The Khoi Khoi had their set of laws, the Zulu people had
their own set of laws, and the Xhosa people had their own set of laws. There
was civilization among the people.
A
reoccurring conversation that I have with Pastor is based around this idea of
what it means to be civilized. Pastor Lindo comes from a family steeped in Zulu
traditions. He and his wife celebrated a white wedding, much like we would find
in a European sense, but they also celebrated a traditional Zulu wedding. The
fact that there is a traditional wedding ceremony is a testament to the fact
that the Zulu tradition was chalked full of civilization.
Looking
at the Khoi Khoi people again, they are the first peoples to have contact with
white people in the country. The Khoi was made up of two groups of people, the
Khoi, and the San. The Khoi people were semi-nomadic farmers who were more
interested in herding cattle, and the San were a nomadic group of people who
followed wherever the hunt was. The Khoi were considered the more intelligent
peoples, and eventually, a Khoi woman became an interpreter for the Dutch. As
is natural in any close quarter situations, a relationship developed between
the Khoi translator and a Dutchman. The two were married and had children
together. This was a beautiful marriage, but it also caused another problem. Were the children to be considered Dutch, or
African?
The Children were later considered to be
Dutch. As the relations between the Dutch and the Khoi people grew stronger,
more and more marriages occurred. As the number of mixed race children
increased, the Dutch began to notice a problem. After several generations of
children being born of Khoi and Dutch decent being considered Dutch, the white
men changed their minds and decided that these people were no longer European,
they were African. Once again, the European’s attempt to civilize a group of
people had literally spawned an entirely new generation of peoples who weren’t
considered to be black, but also weren’t considered to be white, they were
Coloured.
Missionary work continued in South
Africa into the 18th century, with new people coming from missions
all around Europe. The Dutch, the British, and the French all felt it was their
duty to come to this country and bring God to the people who needed God the
most. Pastor has a different idea about why missionaries were so excited to
come to South Africa. Within South Africa there is a wealth of natural
resources, including Gold. The bible promises the Israelites a land of milk and
honey, a promised land that belongs to them. Hearing Pastor talk about how the
bible was used by Europeans to take over the land that isn’t theirs wasn’t new
to me, but it did bring up the question of what was God talking about then?
Pastor always asks me “Would God really send people to claim a land as theirs
that was occupied by other peoples?”
So now, at this point in the
history of South Africa, there are a number of problems cropping up, just
because the Europeans sought to “civilize” the people of Africa. First, the
civilized traditions of people living in Africa were being destroyed because they
didn’t live up to the European expectations of civilization. Second, The
Europeans had taken many wives from the indigenous people of the Khoi Khoi,
produced offspring, and then abandoned those offspring when the number of Coloured
people began to outnumber the white people. Third, the attempt to civilize
these people were really a mask to get after the resources and the perfect
placement of this country, making it a great stop for the East Indian Trading
Company, owned by the Dutch.
Skipping over centuries of African
people being told that they must change their ways to be like white people, but
they will never be like white people, we arrive to the early stages of
apartheid. Apartheid was not just a systematically enforced racism; it was a
way to completely demolish the non-white people in South Africa. Apartheid
government was run by white people, the minority in the country, and forced
black people to live in only a small percentage of their own country. The laws
were designed to cripple the black people both financially and spiritually.
When the missionaries first came to South Africa, the people were told that
they must turn away from their traditions and become civilized. With apartheid,
they were told the exact opposite. To create more tension between black people,
the apartheid government forced blacks to live in certain areas based on their
culture. Zulu’s could only live with Zulu’s, Venda’s could only live with
Venda’s and Xhosa’s could only live with Xhosa’s.
Once again, people here were told a
different story of how they should behave in order to be accepted by white
people. First, you would only be accepted if you turned away from your
traditions, now you would only be accepted if you lived by your traditions. As
you can imagine, once again, this left the Coloured people in an awkward spot.
Coloured people weren’t considered white, so the segregation laws still
applied, but they weren’t considered black either, so they were stuck in an odd
middle ground, creating a culture completely their own.
The difficult conditions faced by
black people during the apartheid left an opening for missionaries to continue
their work once again. The problems these people were facing were caused
because they weren’t Christian, and could be fixed by turning to God. Once
again, South Africa is a Christian nation, thanks to these missionaries. German
Missionaries, Swedish Missionaries, British Missionaries, and several other
missionaries began building churches all over the country and Christianity grew
more and more. Bantu schools in the townships were forced to separate even
further, they could only teach in the language of their people, not in English
or Afrikaans, the languages of power. Eventually, a law was put into place that
all the schools were required to teach in Afrikaans, forcing the schools full
of students who didn’t know the language to start learning in a language they
didn’t understand. The removal of understanding further lowered the education
of black people, and again created the standing of “you aren’t like us, but you
should act like us.” Missionaries spoke in English and taught people English, a
language of power in South Africa (some call it the language of money), drawing
people even closer to Christianity.
The missionaries have helped to
create the church we see in ELCSA today. The church in Gelvandale, where I
live, was built by missionaries, the church in Bethelsdorp was built by
missionaries. There are many signs of missionaries still surrounding us today.
The noticeably absent part of the mission in South Africa is the ways in which
this life is better than the one that missionaries had “rescued” people from in
the first place. Port Elizabeth, where I am placed for the year, is surrounded
by poverty, both in the town and just outside in the townships. There are
people within the city limits of PE that don’t have paved roads, there is need
for food shelfs that pass out almost 700 loaves of bread a day, but yet people
are still hungry. One of the highest rates of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in South
Africa is found in Port Elizabeth, and education in government schools is
fighting to survive. It is difficult for a black child to attend any other
school than a government school, which barely has enough funds to hire
teachers, let alone supply classrooms with the right equipment. These are the
things I have seen just in one portion of the country, but the issues are
spread across all of South Africa.
South Africa is a Christian nation.
I am thankful that it is a Christian nation, otherwise I would not be living
with a Pastor and my faith would not have been challenged in the ways it has
been throughout this year. However, according to Van De Ross and his definition
of what it means to be civilized, the people of South Africa have been
civilized for thousands of years before the Dutch ever arrived in the Cape of
Good Hope and began trying to civilize a nation that was already civilized.
The missionaries of old were successful in creating a
country that was “civilized” according to their standards, but at what cost?
Where would South
Africa be today if people had respected the fact that peoples here were already
civilized before Europeans decided it wasn’t the right kind of civilized?
How many of the problems facing the country today were
created because Europeans attempted to change the way of life in a way that the
people of South Africa didn’t need at that time?
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