A White South African Pastor Challenges His Country’s Policy of Racial Separation

Nico Smith plans to live in a black township where he pastors a Dutch Reformed congregation.

In 1981 Nico Smith, a white South African seminary professor, took a group of missionary science students on a field trip to Nyanga, a squatters’ community of thousands of homeless blacks. There, the families of migrant workers refused to move to government-assigned “homelands” that offered neither jobs nor food. The nation’s 22 million blacks, according to law, were to be confined to 13 percent of the nation’s land, while 5.5 million whites controlled the rest.

In the desperate faces of mothers separated from their children during forced deportations, Smith saw the harsh reality of his government’s policy of apartheid. The seminary professor began to view the policy of racial separation as a political failure, a theological abomination, and a social blight on the nation his European ancestors had claimed as their own for seven generations.

Smith prepared a statement about the squatters, criticizing government policy and charging his own white Dutch Reformed Church with responsibility to act on behalf of the homeless. “Migrant labour is inhuman and the church must emphasize that it is a cancer in our society,” his statement read. “Wives see their husbands only a few weeks a year. For the rest of the time, there exists only an emptiness.”

Word came to Smith that his outspokenness was an embarrassment to Stellenbosch Theological Seminary, where he had taught for 16 years. The white Dutch Reformed Church (known by its Afrikaner initials, NGK) supported the government policy of apartheid (meaning apartness). He resigned his prestigious post and accepted a call to minister to an all-black congregation in Mamelodi, the black township outside South Africa’s capital, Pretoria.

Smith’s commitment to his church has deepened during the past four years to the point where he and his wife have requested permission to move to Mamelodi—unheard of in a nation where laws strictly segregate residential areas. After ten months they received permission to make the move, scheduled for this summer. The Smiths will be the only whites living among 250,000 blacks.

Smith and many others acquainted with South Africa say apartheid will not change until the NGK withdraws its support from the rigid racial and ethnic separation it has advocated for more than a century. Smith says he does not expect that to happen soon, although there are signs of hope. In April, the government lifted its 36-year ban on interracial marriage. That change came in spite of the fact that the church did not give its approval.

Apartheid became law in South Africa in 1948, when the conservative National party won control of the government. Before, separation of races existed informally yet pervasively in the outlook of white Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers who were active in their offshoot of Holland’s Reformed church. Today the church claims the vast majority of National party members and 36 percent of South Africa’s white population.

The NGK has grown increasingly isolated from other Christians. It broke its ties with the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Reformed Ecumenical Synod, and it no longer interacts with them directly. The church’s pro-apartheid views are based on selected passages of Scripture, including Genesis 1:28; Genesis 11:1–9; Deuteronomy 32:8; Acts 2:5–13, and Acts 17:26. Apartheid is not merely an excuse to segregate blacks from whites, but it is seen as a sweeping doctrine of the imperative need to maintain ethnic unity.

South Africa’s most prominent black churchman, Desmond Tutu, refutes this view. Anglican bishop of Johannesburg and recipient of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, Tutu writes, “Apartheid … denies the central act of reconciliation which the New Testament declares was achieved by God in his son Jesus Christ. Apartheid maintains that human beings, God’s own creatures, are fundamentally irreconcilable, flatly contradicting the clear assertions in Scripture that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.”

As events in South Africa slide treacherously toward revolution, efforts to apply pressure from abroad are intensifying. The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have approved separate versions of a bill that would impose economic sanctions against the South African government. A compromise measure is expected soon. The sanctions would include a prohibition of U.S. bank loans and exports of nuclear technology to South Africa, and would require U.S firms to comply with an antidiscrimination code known as the Sullivan Principles. (The Sullivan Principles were developed in 1976 by Leon Sullivan, a Philadelphia minister who served on the board of General Motors. They call for nonsegregated workplaces, equal and fair employment practices, equal pay for equal work, improved training opportunities, and a commitment to increase the numbers of nonwhites in management.)

Observers say there is little likelihood of substantial change until the white NGK begins dismantling its own rationale for apartheid. Smith says he hopes he will set an example to hasten that change.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY interviewed the South African pastor in Washington, D.C. Following is an abridged version of that interview.

How does the Dutch Reformed Church support apartheid?

Long before any political party considered making separation of the races a government policy, the church was propagating it. In 1857, the Dutch Reformed Church was the first institution in South Africa that decided to separate whites and blacks. Since 1920 the denomination has justified apartheid theologically. The church began teaching that God created distinct races that are responsible for maintaining their own identities.

In 1948, when the National party took over the government, it decided to implement a political policy of separating the races. The National party says the different races in South Africa are irreconcilable and the only solution is to separate them geographically as well as socially.

Are there black as well as white Dutch Reformed Churches in South Africa?

There are four Dutch Reformed Churches: white, black, colored, and Indian, and they are thoroughly separated from one another. They are four autonomous churches. The black church is the biggest denomination, but the white church is the most influential because 90 percent of the National party members of Parliament belong to it.

Has the thinking of white Dutch Reformed Church leaders in South Africa changed since the 1920s?

No. Someone said to me, “You are defending the dismantling of apartheid on biblical grounds, and those who support apartheid also appeal to biblical grounds. What proof do you have that you are right?” My answer was that I know of no other Christian church that justifies apartheid from a biblical point of view, and we have the obligation to be in dialogue with the rest of the body of Christ. We must listen to what other churches have to say. If ever we become heretical, or if someone tells us, “Brothers, you are going the wrong way because you can’t understand God’s Word like that,” we need to pay heed. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa is isolated from the rest of the churches in the world.

Please describe your church and your ministry.

My congregation has 1,200 full members, all black. I do as much house visitation as possible. I go into the black township every afternoon and visit members of the congregation. I listen to the way they experience life. They are suffering because they feel their human dignity is violated by the attitude of the whites. The fact that I listen to them has an enormous impact on them.

I usually read to them from the Bible and tell them, “The message of this book is that God did not forget you.… And as long as God is still remembering us, then there is real hope in any situation.” Then I pray with them. They thank me and say, “You’ve helped us so much.” Actually, I didn’t give them any advice or solutions, but they were aware that I was experiencing their situation with them. The Westerners in my country don’t realize how much they’ve lost by not being willing to listen to African people.

How do black Christians in South Africa tolerate these conditions?

I believe God granted them endurance, without which there would have been a bloody racial war long ago. A black poet once wrote, “Because my mouth is wide with laughter you do not hear my inner cry; because my feet are gay with dancing, you do not know I die.” Whites often say, “But the blacks are always laughing, they’re always gay and dancing, so they can’t be that unhappy. They can’t be suffering that much.” But when you go to their houses and speak to them, then you hear their inner cry and become aware of the fact that they are actually dying.

One of the questions blacks ask me is, “Can you tell us why white people do not like us?” They say that when many whites talk to them, their faces become hard and cold. The blacks ask, “Did God really put a curse on us by creating us black, because black means to be inferior?” I tell them that in studying the Bible for many years I’ve never come across a passage that says God hated black people. All I know is that God created people. The diversity gives us a richness of human existence that we must appreciate.

How do you promote reconciliation?

I started an organization called Koinonia, in which fellowship groups consisting of two black couples and two white couples are formed. They share a meal together once a month in one of the houses—a black home one month and a white home the next. They learn to accept one another. It is a strange experience to the whites, because for years they have been indoctrinated to believe that whites and blacks cannot communicate, that they cannot be reconciled. They must be brought together at the grassroots level.

Eventually, their ability to meet together may work through the whole society. The more whites hear about Koinonia and become willing to participate, the more open they become toward participation in a new society. They grow willing to create a society in which there will be free association.

At the moment, this is the most necessary action that has to take place, and Christians must take the initiative. If Christians do not believe that different peoples can be reconciled and can accept one another, who else will be able to do that? We have discovered that politics cannot bring a final solution. South Africa has tried the concept of racial separation and separate development for 35 years, and we have come to the end of the line. South Africa must turn around, but it can’t. It has become a prisoner of the system it has created.

How would you characterize the political situation in South Africa?

The revolution has really started, and it will be impossible to stop it again. I pray that there will be enough wise white people and black people, enough Christians who will be willing to find ways to bring people together.

Would it help or hurt blacks if U.S. companies stopped doing business in South Africa?

I do not support U.S. companies discontinuing their business activities in South Africa. Disinvestment is not practical. If U.S. companies decide to move out, many other countries have companies that would move in. I support the Sullivan Principles, because I meet blacks who work for American companies that are implementing these principles. They have an enormous positive effect on black employees. The most important thing to them is that at those companies, a black man is not allowed to call a white man “master.”

Is it common practice in South Africa for blacks to address whites as “master?”

All blacks call whites “master” as a form of address. A white addressing a black he did not know would call him “sir.” In the American companies, they are not allowed to make a distinction. If the U.S. government could somehow put pressure on all American companies to implement the Sullivan Principles, I feel that would contribute more toward change in the country than by following any other line of action.

Is political pressure from the United States effective?

The black community sees U.S. pressure as a sign of hope. The United States is the only country that has a significant influence on the South African government. President Reagan emphasizes that violence is counterproductive. That usually is interpreted by white South Africans as Reagan telling the blacks not to be violent. I would like to see the President also emphasize that whites must be aware of the violence they exercise on human dignity. That is also counterproductive. There can be no peace unless whites realize that they are violating human dignity. They have to learn to accept blacks, to acknowledge them, to see them as full citizens of the country. That means that eventually blacks will have to participate in the political system of the country. It is impossible to think that 5 million white people can keep political power away from 26 million black people.

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