Human Rights Violation Hearings — Soweto — 1996-07-23

REV THEMA: Honourable Members of the Commission and dear fellow Africans, I have experienced June 16th in a different manner.  On June the 16th I was in the United States for studies and the following day, the 17th, I was a guest of the General Senate of the Reform Church in America.  At that Senate it leaked through the media that Soweto was on fire and that is how the New York Times and other newspapers portrayed June the 16th.  Then, of course, the point I would like to make with this remark is that June the 16th validated the utterance of the South African people and the world by saying South Africa was a police state.  It came very clearly that South Africa was a police state.
 Secondly, it was just coming after some literature and pictures and films portraying the brutality of this police state, the role of the police state in South Africa through pictures like The Last Grief to Timbaza.  It also validated the truth of the brutality of the white race of South Africa.  That was June the 16th how we saw it, but I would like to say as a Church man, I am a Minister of the Dutch Reformed Church.  
 You know very well that the Dutch Reformed Church was said at that time to be the National Party prole.  I, personally, perceived that we would not go anywhere in this country in as far as freedom and justice is concerned before we dealt with the Dutch Reformed Church on this point because the Dutch Reformed Church had believed, like others I think, that they were the chosen people of God and designed to come and own South Africa and scripturally we 
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refuted that because it alleged, on the other side, that others who were not white were not the people of God.  That is how we started to fight against apartheid.  Of course in order to come to that we had difficulties with the Church structures because financially the black Churches were financed by the white Church and in order to deal with this matter we had to create our Church organisations of Christians like the confessing group called the berating the grail and then from there we also worked hand-in-hand with other Reform Churches, the Congregationals and the Prespitarians to form an alliance of black Christians in South Africa to fight apartheid from within the Churches.
 Of course that led, for an example, to presenting our matter to the World Alliance of Reform Churches in 1982 in Ottawa where we demonstrated, beyond doubt, that apartheid was a heresy and seeing kind of caused also a crime to humanity.  This is how the Church, how we played our role in, sort of, bringing around the understanding of what apartheid is.  Then at the same time we had a stance, a Christian stance to fight this standing all that of Church unity because if we allowed disunity in the Church it was making allowance also for disunity in the larger community in the nation.  At the present moment we were able to bring the coloured and the blacks together to form what we call the United Reform Church.  We are still fighting this fight within the Church, to bring in the white people.  More or less, this is what happened and what happens in the Dutch Reformed Church.  
 Of course after 1976 we continued, as you have heard from the other people here, struggling to get our place within the community.  The only thing we could do as 
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Churches was to be supportive, to support the Church organisation, I mean the student organisations, the community organisations and others by way of disseminating of collecting and processing information and disseminating this information in the community.  At the same time by way of making ourselves available for memorial services and other, all types of services and to make our Churches available for the students and other organisations to hold their meetings.
 You still remember there was a time when the Churches were told no longer to allow people to hold meetings or services, community services in the Churches.  We rebelled against this and continued to allow the communities to come to these.  Then, of course, this also led to a point where at some stage, miraculously, a place like Soweto and of course even other places, were virtually passed by the prison Pastors.  Most of us were arrested, charged, more especially under the Riotous Assemblies Act and we were fined and paid, the fines were paid and on top of that we were given suspended sentences for five years.  This is how we saw the Church participating in this whole thing, but I think I have to come back to say why did we do this?  We regarded apartheid as a system, not as just a thing that occurs at one time, that was designed to disinherit, dispossess and to dehumanise black people.  To do that the Government had to have a machinery, inter alia, they actually created a problem, even for this present day, by converting the police force in this country into a military force.
 Remember then that it means South Africa had to go through a period, virtually without a police force, but with SOWETO HEARING GAUTENG PROVINCE
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a military force.  That is how the principles of justice and the Laws and regulations governing law and order were negated because they had nobody to take charge of as the police were militarised with uniform and everything.  Of course that also resulted in one thing.  It is not just a militarisation of the police, it also meant the turning the entire community into criminals.  If, for an example, like I have set in Soweto, we had a point where we had almost all Ministers serving suspended sentences.  It meant we were faced with a community or communities with criminal Ministers which implied criminal congregations which meant criminal society.  We were criminalised therefore it was easier for these people, for these police of these forces to deal with criminals and not with people.  These are some of the things that we as Pastors and people in the Churches had to try and interpret to the people and show the people what we were and what we are.  
 Then, of course, our thrust of our mission was humanisation to tell the people that, regardless of all these things, we are not criminals, we are God's people, we are the people like any other person and we encouraged people to stand up.  We were aware of the brutalisation, the killings, the murdering of the people, people disappearing.  Up to this day they have disappeared, we cannot trace them and some of our people here also have substantiated this by saying there were helicopters by night getting to places like Dorenkop, Avalon, unloading corpses which were buried and, of course, at that time also there were some reports of people being buried alive by this army.  Of course there were, you can understand that they were not seeing people, they were seeing criminals.  I think time is gone.  This is 
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what I would like to say.  Thank you.

MS SEROKE: Thank you Reverend Thema. Before you go I would like to ask you one or two questions.  When your white counterparts in the Dutch Reformed Church tried to silence you as black Priests within their own Church, that you were meddling in politics, you should go on preaching the Gospel, how did you interpret your Gospel to these people?

REV THEMA: Well, our Gospel to them was just to say we are created by God just as he created them.  That people are people and God is God, we are all one people.  We have to become one.  Hence, we strove for unification of the believers, the people of God and, yet, on the other hand they resisted this.

MS SEROKE: When the repression intensified, as it intensified the more the people lost their faith and did not believe that there was a God for black people.  How did you try to restore this faith to the people, particularly the young people who started shunning away from the Churches at that time in 1976 and so on?