Church life and race politics in 1940s South Africa, by Deborah Gaitskell (SOAS)
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2021-10-27

Two 1940s Crises and a Christian Response: The Christian Council of South Africa, the Second World War and the Coming of Apartheid

Abstract: 

At two vital moments in the 1940s, the key decade of transition to apartheid, the Christian Council of South Africa (CCSA) held large, significant ecumenical conferences. The 1942 wartime one was appropriately entitled ‘Christian Reconstruction in South Africa’, while the gathering called in 1949, a year after the National Party’s victory under the slogan of apartheid, explored ‘The Christian Citizen in a Multi-Racial Society’. The CCSA itself explicitly linked the two conferences in 1949, comparing their timing and contextual challenges. Central to both conferences – though virtually unknown and largely unremembered today - was the British Methodist minister, Edward William Grant, assiduous secretary for the first conference, and chairman, then CCSA president, during the second. The paper weighs up this Eastern Cape ecumenical mission venture as compared with the significance of better-known radical anti-apartheid white Anglican clerics active in Johannesburg in the 1940s and 50s. It provides a way of gauging and evaluating church reaction to two over-riding crises of the 1940s facing South Africa. It also makes it possible to probe the degree to which such ecumenism mobilised African support and offered meaningful, confrontational political challenge from the churches to the status quo in that vital decade. 

 

Biography

Deborah Gaitskell first studied history in Cape Town, where she grew up, then completed an MA in African Studies and later a PhD in history at SOAS. This focused on women missionaries and African women Christians in the Johannesburg area in the first half of the 20th century, and resulted in the publication of various journal articles and book chapters. She has since worked on black girls’ mission education; and Methodist prominence in the ecumenical movement. She has taught in secondary schools and adult education, as well as five colleges of London University, most notably the Institute of Education and SOAS. A former editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies, she ran a seminar series on Gender in Empire and Commonwealth for some years at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and is now a co-convenor of the Christian Missions in Global History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research.