Dangerous Years Ahead

CT’s editor at large, J. D. Douglas, is on assignment in Africa. In this report, he sets forth in detail his assessment of conditions in the Republic of South Africa, where church leaders as well as political leaders are sharply divided over racial issues.

Passengers in a South African plane approaching Johannesburg were said to have been advised, “We are about to land at Jan Smuts Airport. Please put your watches back one hundred years.” So reported a newspaper just after I arrived in the Republic. Even if the story is apocryphal, it reflects an element of press freedom at a time when two black newspapers had been banned.

It reflects also the sort of provocative utterance most disliked by Prof. Piet Cillie, who teaches journalism at Stellenbosch University (an Afrikaner stronghold). The English-language press, he complained, might make the government introduce more restrictive legislation. This evoked a robust rejoinder from Joyce Harris, national president of the Black Sash. “A press which is permitted to be free as long as it does not embarrass the government,” she declared, “simply becomes another propaganda arm for the government.”

Cillie had expressed the earlier opinion that South Africa was heading for the most dangerous 10 years of its history. This view I found held with chilling unanimity, irrespective of race or class, throughout this all-but-friendless nation. Many consider 10 years to be an optimistic estimate of the time frame for the white government’s survival. “Even if we got everything right from now on,” says Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the antiapartheid Progressive Federal Party, “it might still be too late.”

An engagingly frank and personable 41-year-old, Slabbert gave us a half-hour interview despite a hectic pre-election schedule, and ducked none of our questions about reform, equal pay for all races, the dilemma of the ruling Nationalists, and the ambivalent role of the Dutch Reformed Church. He himself had studied for the DRC ministry, but after five years forsook theology when he sensed that to serve the clerical wing of the South African establishment would be “inhibiting.” A sociology professor with a Ph.D. from Stellenbosch, Slabbert was to increase the PFP’s parliamentary representation to 26 seats—and promptly had his home severely damaged by arsonists who came while the family slept.

His modest success may indicate a changing mood, but Pieter Botha’s Nationalists retain 131 of the legislature’s 165 seats. The mood, alas, is also changing on Botha’s right. Hard-liners are becoming harder. Alarmed even by Botha’s imprecise talk about reform, the white-supremacist Herstigte National Party put up its own candidates in the recent elections. They won no seats, but polled an ominous 13 percent of the total vote in a country where only whites have the franchise. “These people,” observed Botha, “do not belong in a decent community.” In this context there was something bizarre about what he was objecting to: not the HNP’s odious political policies, but its dirty campaign tactics.

This might imply that, despite the publicity given to his 1979 promises of reform, Botha is tolerably well satisfied with the status quo. He defies world criticism (a point reconfirmed in a postelection interview), including those perennial resolutions of the World Council of Churches. Another one will predictably emanate from East Germany when the Central Committee meets there in August. The WCC would not be so contemptuously dismissed in South Africa as Communist-inspired if just once a conciliar resolution were to show specific concern for the victims of Russian imperialism. Until the WCC shows a healthy impartiality, the Afrikaner nature is only encouraged in its stubbornness and intransigence. One recalls the biblical mandate for apartheid manufactured by the Dutch Reformed hierarchy, and how it was said of Botha’s predecessor, John Vorster, that he seldom missed the midweek prayer meeting in his home congregation.

Yet even the DRC is breaking ranks. A rare spirited protest was made in its councils when eight “liberal” theologians, with substantial support from younger DRC members, were called upon to repudiate a statement calling for more “cooperation” with black daughter churches. The professors had expressed concern at the “apparent inability” of the DRC to reconcile various race groups in South Africa. The establishment response was that the church had no duty of reconciliation toward race groups. “It has nothing to do with the church,” said an official spokesman, “if a bunch of blacks throw stones in Rustenburg—except to stand by the police who are protecting peace and freedom.”

Many white Christians in South Africa, on the other hand, do believe that reconciliation is the business of the church. They deplore the stone throwing, but they know what causes it. They know that many of their fellow whites, whether their language is Afrikaans or English (the ratio is about 60:40), live insulated lives, ignorant of the plight of other races. There is some acknowledgment of the need for change, but as veteran writer Alan Paton says, they are “psychologically incapable of it.” The same fatal failure of the imagination was evident when the government deprived Bishop Desmond Tutu of his passport on the eve of Easter.

Move about in African townships and colored (mixed race) communities, talk with Indian pastors and white businessmen, interview editors, and see in Afrikaner faces the love of Christ—and one sees the tragedy of this beautiful land, and beyond it to the conviction that the major problem of the world today is alienation. How is that seen in the section of this fallen world that is South Africa? Some quotes from my travel log:

• “Does this mean that I have to love the Special Branch [security police]?” (old black man’s response to a sermon on love).

• “I always tell my wife when I go out, if I don’t come back, remember who I am” (evangelist).

• “Surely the bond of Christ that is between us is strong enough to stand the stress of these days.” (Zulu professor).

• “We have built a fortress that may become a prison that may become a grave” (white commentator).

• “All young people must join us in the struggle for justice, but we must keep Jesus central. I believe now that Jesus can take away the white desire to oppress” (young black political activist).

• “Get out, Fascist. Where’s your pass?” (student hecklers at Witwatersrand University to cabinet minister Piet Koornhof just before the 1981 elections).

• “Many of the Dutch Reformed clergy have never had an English-speaking Christian greet them in love” (Michael Cassidy, founder of African Enterprise).

• “Write to me” (parting request from many white South African Christians, faithful witnesses, but with a feeling of isolation from the worldwide fellowship).

The above—nothing like a comprehensive view of the South African situation—are a few insights and reflections gained from a brief visit that took me to Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and Kimberley. I would have seen much less had not my friends of African Enterprise arranged an itinerary that was hectic and … enterprising. It enabled me to attend a political meeting, join a Zulu Bible study group, attend an Indian pastors’ planning committee, breakfast with the general manager of a large diamond company that has an enlightened staff policy, talk with black pastors who had been detained without reason and later released without explanation, interview a non-Christian white editor who was crusading for human rights, and participate in a colored church meeting whose members rise for 5 A.M. prayer sessions.

African Enterprise is a remarkable movement founded in 1962 by South African Michael Cassidy, a graduate of Cambridge University and Fuller Theological Seminary. With teams operating in Southern and East Africa (and offices planned elsewhere on the continent), AE is interdenominational, interracial, and international. Described as “a mobile mission auxiliary” with deep commitment to evangelical truth and biblical authority, AE emphatically disagrees that reconciliation is not the business of the church.

This brings misunderstanding, especially in the South African context. Says Cassidy: “I think our attempt to be true to the whole of the gospel and the whole of the church inevitably lands us in hot water with those who, probably in all integrity, don’t feel the whole wrap-up to be theologically or practically possible.”

But it is. Last month, AE held a one-week campaign in Elsie’s River, a Cape Province township with the country’s highest crime rate. Last year its 100,000 people experienced 131 murders, 1,500 cases of rape and violent assault, more than 2,700 burglaries and robberies. Before the meetings I asked the (black) Anglican rector who was chairman what he expected from the mission. “To bring a message of hope,” he replied, “to bring Christ—our hope for our country, our hope for Elsie’s River.” It was about that hope that Michael Cassidy spoke at the closing rally attended by 9,000 people, including Cardinal McCann and Anglican Archbishop Bill Burnett. AE plans a meticulous follow-up process for the many in Elsie’s River who responded to the gospel.

South Africa will need their Christian testimony in the dangerous years that lie ahead.

Wycliffe’s Golden Jubilee

Unwritten Tongues Agency Honors Its Pioneer “Uncle”

The “homegoing” of slain Wycliffe linguist Chester Bitterman III last March was not a setback to the work of translating the Scriptures into the world’s remaining 3,000 unwritten languages. It was, said William Cameron Townsend, 84, founder-patriarch of Wycliffe and its Summer Institute of Linguistics, “a tremendous advance. Young people have been awakened in a new way.”

That this is not pious sentiment or wishful thinking became evident at the Golden Jubilee celebration of Wycliffe in Anaheim, California, last month, when 7,500 Wycliffe supporters paid tribute to “Uncle Cam” and Wycliffe’s 4,255 members who work in 750 languages in 35 countries. Since the 28-year-old Bitterman was kidnapped, then murdered 48 days later in Bogotá, Colombia (CT, April 10, p. 70), about 100 students at Columbia Bible College in North Carolina, where Bitterman was graduated, have pledged themselves to missionary service. Chet’s widow, Brenda, has vowed to return to Bible literacy work, and his younger brother, Craig, 21, has applied to Wycliffe, hoping to be a Bible translator. And a new chair of linguistics and Bible translation has been established at Biola College in La Mirada, California, in Chet’s memory.

Said Chet’s father, Chester Bitterman, Jr., who, with his wife, Mary, and Chet’s five brothers and sisters were special guests at the Golden Jubilee: “On a human level, Chet may have lost his life. But we believe that God is not finished in this. We haven’t read the last chapter yet.”

“Uncle Cam,” who wrote the first Wycliffe chapter 50 years ago when he completed translating the New Testament into the Cakchiquel language for Guatemala Indians, is convinced the last chapter—Jesus’ return—will follow when “hundreds of volunteers fill the place left by Chet.”

The call to preach the gospel to all nations was clearly sounded by Billy Graham, who challenged the large audience to respond “in this ministry of translating those languages that remain.” The job could be done in this decade, if Wycliffe recruits about 500 new members each year, the evangelist said as persons making a mission commitment joined present Wycliffe workers at the front of the auditorium.

Praising Townsend’s accomplishments in Bible translation as “one of God’s … great events in the past 50 years,” Graham added: “If a man has ever had a one-track mind, it’s Uncle Cam.… If we ever make contact with other planets, I guarantee he will be there, pioneering and translating.”

Meantime, Townsend, predicting that television and mass evangelism “will raise up at least 8,000 young people to learn and translate these languages,” urged Christians to “get the Word to every tribe and nation.”

RUSSELL CHANDLER

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