Bishop and the Boer on Collision Course

A major row between church and state in South Africa shows signs of worsening.

At the center are the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu, and the man who controls South Africa, President Pieter W. Botha. The controversy rakes up historic political antagonisms and has the potential for massive church-state conflict in this troubled land.

Archbishop Tutu is the first black to head the influential but rather traditional Anglican church, an autonomous branch of the same church in England. His church has had skirmishes with the National Party government ever since the latter came to power in 1948, but none has been as serious as the present impasse.

In the 19th Century, the British authorities and their missionaries, relative newcomers to the Cape, were strongly resented by the Dutch-speaking farmers on the frontier in the eastern region. It was essentially rebellion against the British and their way of life that led to the Great Trek, the migration into the interior by about 14,000 dissidents who were determined to be “free and independent people”--free, also, to follow white supremacist policies towards blacks. In modern days the political heir to the trekboers , the Afrikaner-dominated National Party government, has been locked in conflict with the Anglican church in South Africa that so irritated their forbearers. And it is no longer Oxbridge-trained, English archbishops who preside over the Anglican church in South Africa, but a black from Soweto, an African National Congress sympathizer who has won world fame, Desmond Tutu. This adds a sharp edge to the conflict, and propels it to the forefront of the central battle over apartheid.

After winning power in April, 1948, the nationalist government institutionalized apartheid by passing scores of laws based on race. The non-Afrikaner churches, with Anglicans in the forefront, revolted. Within months, the Anglicans had pronounced that discrimination on grounds of race alone was “inconsistent with the principles of the Christian religion.” It took the pro-government Dutch Reformed churches (sometimes called the National Party at prayer) a generation to come to roughly the same conclusion.

In the 1950s the government clashed with the churches head-on by closing or taking over church mission schools--some of which it called “protest schools.” There were other celebrated controversies in which archbishops were locked in conflict with government.

As the South African crisis developed, lurching from the Sharpeville shootings in 1960 to the Soweto youth revolt of 1976 and then on to the countrywide violence of recent years, Anglican priests with strong principles about race clashed with the government. Some were deported, restricted or charged in court. One young priest flung himself in front of a bulldozer that was demolishing squatter shacks.

The current controversy follows the government’s restrictions on 18 anti-apartheid organizations and its refusal to grant clemency to the “Sharpeville Six” who faced the gallows for a township murder. Capetown’s two archbishops (Tutu and the Catholics’ Stephen Naidoo) were arrested outside St. George’s Cathedral while making their dignified way with other church officials to present a petition to President Botha.

Hard words have been exchanged between the Anglican archbishop and the president, the latter suggesting, in a fit, that Tutu was furthering the cause of the African National Congress and of communism, with Tutu retorting that he takes his orders from God. In the latest exchange, Tutu said “The Bible and the church predate Marxism, and the African National Congress, by several centuries.”

The government’s immediate strategy is clearly to isolate Tutu, and to capitalize on the degree of conservative white resentment that exists in the church about the “political priesthood” of their spiritual leader. Although this group is vociferous and wealthy, and enjoys some support in the English-language press, it is probably still a small minority among the country’s 2 million Anglicans, many of whom are black. But a far-reaching church split is not impossible.

Tutu has made it clear that he has no intention of backing down on his demands for social justice for all South Africans, whatever the government does to him. At the same time, Botha is in a belligerent mood, having virtually told the rest of the world to go to blazes over the issue of his race policies, and he is unlikely to back down either.

But what to do? If Botha wishes to risk the whirlwind, he might interfere with Tutu’s passport, or charge him under laws that make it an offense to call for sanctions against South Africa (which he has done), or even restrict his freedom to speak and move about the country. As it is, the current state of emergency makes it difficult for the archbishop to speak out without risking prosecution. Tutu might also find some of the foreign funding for anti-apartheid organizations that fall under his patronage being cut off by the government.

Botha is unwise to castigate the recognized leader of an established church in this way, thereby escalating an already dangerous confrontation. A psychological climate is being created in which the rabid right wing in white politics will demand ever-increasing action against Tutu. Considering Tutu’s wide popularity among blacks, this could surely increase social unrest in a country that could bear little more.