An experience that will forever be imprinted on my mind happened when I was nine years old in a small town called Rustenburg, 60 miles from Johannesburg in the Rep. of South Africa. I have fond memories of my growing-up years in this town. This is where I learned to swim in the cold mountain streams called “the cliff.” I ran track, played rugby, and, wearing a school uniform, walked barefoot to school every day. My dad was the pastor of a small Nazarene church plant. We lived in the parsonage right next door to the church, and the street name of my home address was Church Street. A block away was a large Dutch Reformed church. Life in Rustenburg was lived outdoors with “Braai’s” (barbeques) and Rugby and Cricket competitions every weekend. Food from the Malayan, Indian and British cultures blended with the Dutch cuisine to bring multiple flavors to the plate. I still remember the avocado, guava, orange, and lemon trees lining the back yard and passion fruit growing wild on the fence marking the parameters of our fenced-in property.
And yet, for all the good going on in this town, this town had a dark side. It was an aspect shared with every other town in South Africa. When you drove into town during the daytime it was not so obvious. Everyone was getting on with his or her regular routines and life seemed very normal. That is until the clock struck 9 o’clock at night. It was one of the most predictable occurrences in this small town. Every night right at 9 pm a siren went off. Yes, my growing-up years included a siren blaring through town every night at 9 pm. The tornado warning-like siren was the scream of apartheid. This siren signalled that all those whose skin color was black had to leave the white areas and go to the locations outside of town, known as “townships.” Those who were without a “pass” (an identity card needed to be in a white area after 9 pm), if caught, were jailed and sometimes had to wait two weeks just to get a hearing. If you were not a white Caucasian, the anticipation of the clock ticking up to 9 pm must have been a dreaded experience.
What made this particular night when I was 9 years old traumatic and especially memorable was the sound of screeching tires and a corresponding thump sound coinciding with the piercing siren all happening precisely at 9 pm right in front of our house. I soon learned that the thump was the sound of a car hitting our dog “Voetjies” right as the siren of apartheid blared through the town. Voetjies was instantly killed, and the fact that it happened at the same time as the siren burned into my psyche the dark side of this apparently “normal” town.
The siren was not unique to my youth. It also blared with regularity every night at 9 pm through the town of Malmesbury (60 miles from Cape Town) when my Dad was growing up 25 years prior. What was different for my dad was that his parents belonged to a political party who sided with Hitler during WWII. This party was called in Afrikaans the “Ossewa Brandwag,” literally the “Ox Guard” who, besides their zealous political posture, also sponsored a young men’s drill team (very similar to what Hitler participated in during his youth). This drill team had to dress in khaki-colored uniforms and make the Hitler salute every week as part of their drill exercises. The Hitler salute signalled this political party’s attempt to indoctrinate young Afrikaans-speaking men to hate those who were non-white. I still can’t get out of my mind the image of my dad as a young man making the Hitler salute on the drill grounds of Malmesbury, all with the encouragement of his parents. Here we touch the very nerve center of the apartheid system … the brainwashing of the youth of South Africa to label and depersonalize those who were non-white.
Drill parades happened on Saturday, and then on Sunday the whole family took their place in the Dutch Reformed Church where apartheid and racism were biblically enforced by referring to the black people as the cursed offspring of Noah’s son Ham. In the providence of God, via the Noah story, God ordained the servanthood of black people, and those of Caucasian descent saw themselves as God’s agents to make sure that this supposedly biblical curse remained intact. Of course, the church conveniently overlooked the fact that God promised in Genesis 12 to bless allpeople through Abraham. Stuck in an old world of prejudice and racism, every Sunday, my Dad and grandparents were religiously brainwashed with Old Testament mantras coming from the pulpit… “people should get what they deserve,” “love your neighbor, but choose your neighborhood,” and the all too familiar phrase: “everything happens for a reason.”
As my dad grew up in the church, he was assured that he was part of the elect. The God that was presented to him was a deistic God, a God who decreed outcomes from a distance. It kept things sterile where people merely fulfilled certain “religious” functions in an impersonal way. In this atmosphere, it was easy to label people and write them off. The message was clear: this is the way things are… why mess with the way God ordained society? The Afrikaans word describing this dark secret of prejudice and racism was the word “apartheid.” An Afrikaans word literally meaning, “separate development.”
The nefarious, unspoken agenda of “apartheid” was, in essence, the desire to preserve the unique identity of a particular group of people. The Afrikaners (those of Dutch descent) felt threatened by the British who took over the Dutch colony in Cape Town as part of the global expansion of the British Empire around the mid-17thcentury. With British colonialism came the mantra, “English, everything English…” in the schools and churches along with increased taxes. Besides these cultural skirmishes, the showdown between the Dutch and British found its most significant clash on the issue of slavery. In fact, the Dutch had already been involved in the Atlantic slave trade for centuries.
So, when the British abolished slavery in 1833, the Dutch moved north away from the Cape (known as the Great Trek), in order to retain the historical “slave-master” relations between black and white. The establishment of two provinces: the “Orange Free State & Transvaal” with their own elected president (Paul Kruger) served to define themselves separate from the British. It would eventually blow up into a full-scale war with the British known as the “Boer War.” This all served to reinforce the idea of “Apartheid” and the Dutch wanting to define their own unique identity separate from the British, but also from other races in South Africa. The Dutch’ desire to continue the “slave-master” relations between black and white, imprinted itself on South Africa’s political, social and economic structures for years to come. Black people were “enslaved” by the oppressive laws of industrialization, “pass” regulations, and labor ordinances, which made it a criminal offense for a worker to break a labor contract. Little did I know when I was only 9 years old that the siren at 9 pm served to enforce all these pass regulations and labor laws. Obviously, Apartheid wasn’t only at 9 pm, and pervaded so much of race relations in South Africa during my childhood and young adult years.
It was only after 1994, and the dawning of democracy in South Africa, that all South Africans were truly emancipated from slavery. I still have the image in my head of “purple thumbs” being held up to the camera signaling that awesome day when thousands of black South Africans voted for the first time.
These short windows into some of my personal experiences during the apartheid era South Africa – and some history – give us a glimpse into the undercurrent that sustained these systems of oppression. In particular, Christians justified this crime on humanity through compartmentalized predestination theologies claiming that God preferred some people over others. The Puritan idea of the “chosen ones” became a powerful-lived theology for the Dutch people of South Africa. In fact, the Dutch Reformed Afrikaners were able to justify their behavior by claiming that South Africa was given to them as their promised land, just as the Israelites were given Canaan. To them, this made it okay to subject the indigenous African people to slave labor, as long as they brought the gospel to them. The Dutch Reformed theologians had no problem reading themselves back into the story of Israel as representing their story in South Africa. (As a side note; I am glad to share that in 1994 the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK) in South Africa made a public confession that they abused scripture to justify apartheid and that they were wrong. The price paid for this confession was that the moderator of the Synod of the DRC was assassinated four days after this confession by a group called the White Wolfs).
Unfortunately, this has been a familiar pattern all over the world, including the United States. It seems that racism, sexism, and bias towards certain people groups lurks just below the surface and easily rises to the surface with racist propaganda. (For example, the present rise of white nationalism and homophobia in the US). Much of evangelicalism in America has become complicit in its own form of “apartheid” as it looks the other way when certain people groups are scapegoated or marginalized. The woundedness of our common humanity cries out for deliverance and liberation. The cry is for us to be rescued from our depraved humanity. Where shall we go for help? Shall we run after a pastor, media guru or political leader? Where do we get a picture of what a solution would look like?
I propose that we go back to the way God designed his creation and the role he gave us as human beings to engage his creation, to see that any theology that postures one race to be more important than another is unbiblical. The diversity of our common human race started at the tower of Babel as God’s idea and was brought to its fullness at the day of Pentecost when all different races heard the gospel in their own mother tongue. When I read Genesis and I consider the Ancient Near Eastern context, I am amazed to see that the biblical God does not hoard power as a sovereign ruler; instead, he invites us to share in ruling the earth as his representatives. J. Richard Middleton in his book: A New Heaven and a New Earthinvites us to consider the following:
This sharing of power is radically different from the ancient Near Eastern worldview, in which only some elite person (typically the king) was regarded as the image of God. Indeed, the entire social order in the ancient world was predicated on the concentration of power in the hands of a few who controlled access to blessing from the gods, thus reducing the majority of the populace to a lower, dependent social status.Human imaging of God’s power on earth will, therefore, need to take into account the fact that in the biblical account no human being is granted dominion over another at creation; all equally participate in the image of God.[1]Italics mine.
To go back to our design, we must realize that the whole human race, male and female, regardless of ethnic, racial or nationality, were created in the image of God. And here is the heart of God’s design for us… We were given a joint mandate to rule the earth (Gen. 1:27-28). To oppress another human being is to go against our creational design to rule togetherand to be co-rulers with God. The reversal of our fallenness is to seriously consider what it would look like to share power and rule together as equals.
A picture of what a solution would look like can be found in the way Jesus related to the systems of power that was part of his daily reality. On a very practical level, Jesus came to show us how to be human all while living in the very oppressive society of the Roman Empire. Jesus is saying the way we are going to protect our identity, as a people group, is not going to come through “pass” laws of separate development. Our identity will not be determined by where we live and how much money we have, how we look, from what culture we come, the color of our skin, or our national identity and gender. What is going to protect our identity is to lose ourselves in Him, to take on His identity – the only identity that matters and is worthy of protection! His Kingdom is about building bridges of love to every people group, regardless of their race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, etc. The way we can have an impact on society is not by pointing the finger in judgment, but to stand with open arms to all people. (John 3:17).
With this understanding in hand, we can follow the example of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa by confessing our wrong interpretations of scripture, especially the Genesis story of Noah’s son Ham. With you I confess my own complicity in racial bias. I cannot wash my hands in innocence. I am confronted with the fences I have erected to preserve the identity of my own people group. With you, I have labeled and scapegoated others. I am open to investigate whether the identity I am trying to preserve reflects Christ and His Kingdom.
While we no longer have sirens going off at 9 pm, we have plenty of other siren-substitutes in our society and even internal alarms within each of us trying to preserve a kind of separation from one another. Wouldn’t be great if we could disarm each and every one of those alarms forever?
[1]J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, Kindle version, p. 52.