Special Hearings — Faith Community Hearings — 1997-11-17

PROF VENTER: It is Chairperson, in itself a significant fact that we are here   without mandate or institutional support.
The specific reformed Afrikaner community from which we come, and who were   part of that privileged group who used the opportunity given to us by God, to   lead this country used that opportunity for selfishness and extremely atrocious   forms of oppression, still does not seem ready to confess its leading share   in what has happened.
I am struggling with the question whether this indicates that the community   such as that wants to continue in some way with the practices and attitudes   of the past. I have asked myself many times, forgive me my intellectual style   of doing, that is what I have been trained to and what I do every day, how it   came that the Afrikaner and especially those in the tradition in which I am,   went down the road of the ideology of apartheid.
And I see something in the history of the Afrikaner going back to a philosophy   of Jan Jacques Rossouw, who though espousing consensus democracy, elevated the   State into the position of God. Rossouw wanted to encompass all civil institutions   in the aims of the State, even prescribe a civil religion and interestingly   the only crime for which he explicitly prescribes the death penalty, is that   you deny any tannate of the civil religion.
Seems to me and it is also clear from Rossouw's work that he went back to the   ancient model of the Greek and Roman City States, where the State were God and   Socrates dies for having doubted the gods of the State and the charge sheet   brought before Pontius Pilot about one Jesus of Nazareth, said he says he is   the King of the Jews, which of course relativised he pretended divinity of the   Roman Emperor.
Conservative Christians often defend their complicity with an unjust state   for their own advantage, using Romans 13 where Christians are commanded to obey   the government. Too easily it is forgotten that Romans 13 provides no opportunity   for any Christian less a fair policy. It does induce Christians to accept even   an unbelieving government as the servant of God for justice which means amongst   others, that Christians are not to take the law into their own hands.
At the same time it relativises the Roman Emperor and his pretended divinity   to the position of a servant for justice no less, but no more.
As an Afrikaner striving to be a responsible Christian citizen, I felt liberated   on election day, 1994. For the first time in decades that I had the vote, my   vote counted for me alone. And I did not have to carry the unbearable burden   of voting for millions of other people who had neither vote nor voice.
The arrival of democracy however, spells liberation but not salvation. Democracy   in itself will not save us from a repetition of the oppressions of the past.   Jan Jacques Rossouw's model of the State was eminently democratic, yet he substituted   patriotic State education for parental education, he wanted to control public   opinion, prescribed a civil religion and proposed full control of the economy.
It was a modernised version of the ancient god States. It is also not for nothing   that he rejected Christianity as his civil religion, because he was afraid that   people who believe you must love God, your neighbour and your enemy, may just   be ambiguous citizens who would not kneel and adore the State finally and might   just at some stage or other, come up for justice.
Democracy serves as one of the best instruments to call the State to book about   justice, but it is not the only one. A very important instrument for this is   exactly what Rossouw did not want, independent, non-political institutions,   churches, universities, media which are critical and point to that higher norm   which the State is supposed to serve, the norm of justice.
This is what brought us together here, our failure as religious people. My   failure as a Christian citizen, my failure as a member of the Reformed Church,   the failure of Christian institutions in this country to which I and we belong,   to call the previous regime to book exactly on the obedience on that, on the   question of obedience to that higher norm.
Democracy I say in itself will not save us. Hitler came to power through democracy.   Pending on how one defines democracy, the apartheid State presented itself as   a democracy of the Rossouw kind, a Volks democracy, Afrikaner churches, Afrikaner   schools, Afrikaner universities in the days of the Reddingsdaadbond, even Afrikaner   rugby.
The Afrikaner volk was identified with the Afrikaner State and the State encompassed   all the other civil institutions. Afrikaners idealised their volk as embodied   in the State.
Thus the Afrikaner churches, universities and other institutions acted as no   more than limbs, the hands, the feet, the brain of the volk and the State.
Afrikaner churches married couples or refused to according to the unjustibles   of the State. It remained silent when the black members who worked, paid taxes   and obeyed the law, were denied their civil rights. They even justified this   denial theologically. 
It did not protest while blacks were living and working in such circumstances   that family life collapsed. It sanctioned white greed through the theological   justification of apartheid and remained silent mostly about its atrocious execution.
Let me just mention two examples of wilful cooperation between church and State.   Young men who had just completed their studies for the ministry were conscripted   into military service, in the chaplaincy services and there were references   to that already during the past three days.
In spite of Reformed Church law, which places every minister under supervision   of a local church council, almost nothing if anything was done, to protect these   young men from the pressures of the total onslaught ideology espoused by their   officers. The church did nothing to protect the few of them who dared to ask   critical questions and landed themselves in serious trouble.
The second example, a few people in Potchefstroom following up on the national   initiative for reconciliation in the 1980's and I suffer from a little bit of   premature (indistinct), I cannot remember exactly when in the 1980's and I ask   the Archbishop who was involved, but he couldn't help me either.
Those people in Potchefstroom started an initiative to provide study space   for black matriculants in the afternoons during the unrest of the 1980's. They   requested to use church halls and church buildings from Afrikaans churches in   town. Direct communication from the Security Forces and I was a member of one   such church council, there was a member of the Security Forces as an elder there,   who came up with this story, branded this action as communist inspired because   the national initiative for reconciliation, that was the origin of it and of   course those were aligned to the communists, and no church council in Potchefstroom   was prepared and I am referring to all three of the major Afrikaans churches,   was prepared to supply such space.
The ideological blindness was so strong that the elders and ministers totally   overlooked the fact that a black matriculant who did use this opportunity, was   in fact jeopardising the short term aims of the struggle, how this could be   communist inspired, I cannot figure out.
Pleading that we did not know about the atrocities being committed, is simply   not valid. Enough persons were supposed to have jumped out of a window at John   Vorster Square or died in some other strange ways, for us to have had to ask   ourselves the question about the Police methods of interrogation and to have   concluded that Steve Biko was not the only one ever to have been killed in Police   custody.
And we surely knew what powers had been conferred by the Security legislation   and the state of emergency on young men of 18 and 19 years old indoctrinated   to see citizens calling for dignified treatment, as their enemies.
We took young men, we gave them guns and we instituted a state of emergency   so we made them judges. They could apply the death penalty and they could execute   it and they could do so in split second or in 30 seconds, on the spot. That   is what the state of emergency implied, they could shoot.
We knew that if we did not know the details of what happened inside, either   by silence or explicit support, reformed Afrikaner people acted in complicity   with the State. Both academics and ministers who spoke out were few and far   between.
Philosophically and theologically we in the reformed tradition, have no excuse   either. We have a clear and good tradition of social criticism, based on two   principles. All societal institutions are equally subject to God's law and societal   institutions should guard their independence conscientiously so as to fulfil   their own particular tasks and to witness prophetical to all of society about   that law.
Our cosy relationship with the apartheid State went against our very reformed   understanding of society. I am a member of the Reformed Churches who finally   decided to denounce apartheid as a sin and its theological justification as   a heresy but then, did it systematically start to oppose this sin and heresy   amongst its own members, was any member ever reprimanded, any theologian called   to book for voting for this policy or providing biblical support for this doctrine?
As far as I know, the answer is no. The sinner decided not to confess at least,   not here before the TRC. This makes Prof Meiring's question how to get the Afrikaans   churches on board the reconciliation process, very acute.
In part the problem lies in our discourse. In a sense we allow them to be separate   by using the discourse of separation. There are in fact no Afrikaans or Afrikaner   churches, all of them have black members too.
Getting reformed Afrikaners on board the reconciliation process, can be the   product of a loving confrontation by their own black members. What does this   all mean for the future?
Firstly without a real confession which shows a change of heart, we have a   credibility problem. We want to do our civil duty whatever valid critical contributions   we can make, will be read in terms of the sins of our past.
It is possible since the apartheid State touched on every aspect of life, it   was a totalitarian State that presently we feel seduced into intervening from   the side of the present democratic State into every aspect of life so as to   transform it, which may if we are not careful, bring us back to the position   of a State which intervenes in every aspect of life, but we can only tackle   this problem at least from the side of the reformed Afrikaners if we have come   clean on having done the same sin.
One reformed colleague, a theologian has criticised us for confessing and I   am not referring to him in order to answer him directly, but in order to point   to an attitude. He was calling this confession which my colleague Bennie van   der Walt read, referring to old cows. Most of you know the Afrikaans expression   "ou koeie uit die sloot grawe". If an old cow falls into the trench,   well, then let her stay in the mud and die there, why dig her up?
He wants us rather to tackle the present government, focusing on corruption,   incompetence and crime. I shiver at these expressions. It is an insult to the   bereaved families, those murdered in atrocious ways, those who became the objects   of suspicion and even necklacing. It is also an insult to bereaved parents,   wives, who lost husbands and sons in military service, not knowing where and   how, while we as Afrikaners were pretending to practise a foreign policy of   non-intervention and non-interference in our neighbours' affairs.
Our critics wants us to attack the government for crime, corruption, incompetence   otherwise he says we shall have to confess again very soon in the future. I   fear he is both wrong and right. 
He is wrong in since the past is very much still with us in its consequences   and alive. There is no such thing as old cows in the trench. And also wrong   about having to confess in future, since we already have to confess that we   are failing and are insensitive about getting to grips with the present consequences   of the past.
The past is very much alive in the demographic distribution of our church members   and its geographical delineation of congregations.
The extremely poor are still hidden in the township congregations, while the   deacons who do have the means to support them, are concentrated in the white   congregations.
I have not yet seen any theological rethinking, also not by our colleague,   who is a theologian, I am not of the office of deacon in a multi-cultural geographically   divided society although cultural prejudice is at the very heart of the institution   of the office of deaconship in the New Testament.
Family life has been destructed by the conditions of life under apartheid.   The destruction of (indistinct) of morality is part of our present crime and   greed problem. The Apostle Paul recognised the independence of family life when   he encouraged Christian wives not to divorce their pagan husbands. All of us   have to help emancipate family life as a healthy form of social life, not to   be swallowed up by church or State.
We have to support it and not just break it up, even if we don't like polygamy   from the side of womens' rights, we cannot just tell polygamist's wife to divorce.
I have seen and signed petitions against our liberal abortion laws but our   responsibility for family planning, does not end with petitioning the government.   How about the churches putting their deeds where their words are, providing   shelters and or schooling for pregnant women who might otherwise consider abortion   as the only option?
We are critical, so am I when government interferes with parental controls   over their children's education. But thousands of teachers are out of their   jobs. Why do we, Christians not hire some of those teachers to teach our children?
If private Christian schools at a fair cost ever had a chance of success, they   do now. By taking the responsibility for the education of our children upon   ourselves, those who have the means, the government does not only save on school   places for the poorest of poor, but also costly control mechanisms.
Part of our divisions of the past came from the way in which Afrikaners tried   to protect their cultural heritage. Is exclusivity the only way because we are   struggling in some institutions with this? Isn't it time to swop the roles and   protect not our own cultural heritage, but that of others and thus create goodwill   for our own?
We cry that socialism works nowhere when government intervenes in economic   life for the sake of affirmative action and I am nearly finished, Your Grace.
It is a well-known fact that even in hi-tech Japan the bulk of employment comes   from small and mini businesses. Where are the Christian businessmen who will   train mini entrepreneurs, help them to tools and contract them into their manufacturing   line, so that they have a market for their products.
One last remark, government totalitarianism is not the only god, social god   on the horizon. Late capitalist competitive totalitarianism is already wreaking   havoc in our country. We tend to, we seem to say well if the government cannot   do it, then the market can and will, competition will care for us.
We are too happy atheist socialism failed, so competitive totalism must then   be the Christian answer. The economy gains investment, the GMP grows, yet unemployment   grows too. Suicide amongst young people is on the increase. Selfishness, corruption   and greed crimes abound.
Yet, we blindly serve the capitalist god. A new kind of elitism develops. Those   that can afford sophisticated technology are well off, the rest are without   merit and not competitive enough.
It covers a new racism, poverty and being left behind in the market go together   and more or less overlap with the racial divide.
We see no resistance or even analysis of this brutal philosophy from Christians   yet, I hope that we will soon see it come.
Thank you Honourable Commissioners for having listened to us. We represent   nobody accept that which we believe in.