Christianity and apartheid in South Africa

Abstract

In speaking of Christianity and apartheid in South Africa one should take into account that the terms “Christianity” and “apartheid” both call for some conceptual and historical clarification. “Apartheid” is an Afrikaans word that literally means “apart-hood” or “the state of being apart,” and is mostly associated with the official policy of racial segregation implemented between 1948 and 1994 in South Africa. Sometimes apartheid is compared to “segregation,” associated with the class and race consciousness that aimed at maintaining the so-called natural divisions between people, taken for granted mostly by white settlers in South Africa and was effective government policy between 1910 and 1948.1 Apartheid as a policy became associated with the National Party, which won the 1948 general election, using the term “apartheid” as an election slogan. The new government of Prime Minister Dr D.F. Malan, a former pastor in the white Dutch Reformed Church, cemented apartheid ideas by legalising and enforcing apartheid laws. Later, with Prime Minister Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, the grand architect of apartheid, the term “separate development” became more prominent, involving a system of independent or semi-independent “homelands.” Racial discrimination and separation escalated in brutality after 1948 but its long history is rooted in South Africa’s colonial past. Its ideological character and oppression, which hardened after 1948, before and after 1948 differed only “in degree and direction, rather than in kind.”2