This is part two of a three-part series. Read part one.
South Africa needs men and women who live and embody reconciliation and not racial division. I have seen what reconciliation can do. While researching my book Brothers in War and Peace, my Afrikaner wife, Lianda, and I traveled to Lichtenburg, a rural town in the Afrikaner hinterland of South Africa, to interview political leader Ferdi Hartzenberg. Busts of apartheid prime ministers in his lounge stared down hostilely at us, declaring unequivocally where his political heart was: He was an apartheid (segregation) hard-liner.
At lunchtime, he took us to a restaurant in what was once the home of an Afrikaner hero in their war against the British, General Koos de la Rey. Before we ate, I asked if I could pray. When he gave his assent, I prayed, and this staunch champion of Afrikaner hegemony started to cry when I prayed not only over the food but also for him. It was probably the first time in his life that a person who was not white had prayed for him. It was deeply moving and felt like genuine reconciliation. God was present.
God is present in South Africa, but the country is buckling under criminal activity fueled by poverty and lawlessness. Black Economic Empowerment is a government policy aimed at redressing the injustices brought about by apartheid. Laudable though its intentions are, it has not worked in its implementation. It has largely enriched the new black elite and the politically well-connected while many among the poor have become even poorer.
Youth unemployment stands at more than 45 percent. Last year, 13.2 million South Africans lived in extreme poverty, with a poverty threshold of $2.15 USD daily. People starve to death here. Meanwhile, corruption is widespread, and government emphasis on racial division does not help. A new South African law that protects farms but allows the expropriation of unused property has brought to the fore among Afrikaners the underlying fear of land grabs and the ever-looming threat of Zimbabwe repeated.
I am not white, but I know that white farmers generally love our country passionately and should not be demonized. They should also not demonize others. They are not being driven from their motherland. I have seen beautiful initiatives in various farming communities where white farmers who know farming inside out are assisting black and “coloured” farmers.
One initiative came out of the brain and heart of white farmer Kosie van Zyl, who uses a term familiar to American readers: servant leadership. Van Zyl, in the town of Napier, 105 miles southeast of Cape Town, said, “My wife and I decided a long time ago that we want to build God’s kingdom and not our little kingdom. The only way to do that is to take people with you and build with them, change their circumstances, and together build wealth for all.”
The organization van Zyl founded, Agri Dwala, is a diversified farming operation owned by nonwhite people. Van Zyl started with five farm hands he had known since childhood, and he offered them and others a life-changing break on open land. Today, 14 of the original group are owners, and other land-reform efforts are also helping some among the poor become successful commercial farmers.
Nevertheless, racial divisions in the country remain immense. Scholarly research indicates that integrated churches are rare. As part one noted, the apartheid system not only divided black and white people but also separated nonwhite people into different groups. Coloured is an invented term to describe the people mainly descended from the Indigenous Khoi while also carrying through racial sexual subjugation and intermarriage with various other races. As one of these people, I reject this term: I am an African.
One of the nuances many Americans do not understand is that black and “coloured” people are often at odds, even among Christians, as a sad history shows. Early in 1994, as South Africa was preparing for its first-ever democratic election and the country was readying itself for a future without the political policy of apartheid, two groups of church leaders, black and “coloured,” met to discuss uniting.
They were from two separate denominations, both created by the white Dutch Reformed Church, which had ignominiously provided the theological justification of apartheid. That denomination created the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa for black Africans in 1859 and the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa for descendants of the Indigenous Khoi in 1881.
Then, in April 1994, amid the bonhomie inspired by Nelson Mandela, these church leaders came together to merge their two respective denominations into one Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa. This historic event took place 13 days before the election that led to Mandela’s ascendance to the presidency.
One of the “coloured” ministers, Llewellyn MacMaster, said, “We were filled with the spirit of unity in the country.” MacMaster, an erstwhile student activist at the University of the Western Cape, had led a revolt of young people in 1985 and was detained without trial, but he did not deviate from his goal of one day seeing an undivided, nonracial country replacing the apartheid state.
Yet in 2023, almost 20 years after the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa was formed, racism reared up again as black African Christians insisted that one of them should become the church’s leader. They accused MacMaster of being a racist when he objected to a church takeover based on the division between Africans and so-called coloureds. That accusation brought him to tears: “My biggest disillusionment occurred at that general synod of the Uniting Church, when I came to the conclusion—and it’s not nice to have to say it—that in South Africa ethnicity and race even trump the gospel.”
Now, according to the government’s Black Economic Empowerment policy and the Employment Equity Act, black Africans get preferential treatment in all spheres of life. That’s true even in a town like rural Williston, where “coloureds” form more than 80 percent of the population and job opportunities are few. There, black Africans have been brought in and employed at the expense of the local population. Racial tensions are rising, as is deep disenchantment with democracy.
Some could accuse me of special-interest complaining or lack of sympathy for the poor majority of my fellow African brothers and sisters. Not so. I have dirt-poor relatives. My father was an illiterate dock worker, and my mother packed shelves in a big grocery store. It was not uncommon in a family like ours for children to leave school for low-paying jobs to support the family. I escaped the cycle. The majority of my childhood friends and family did not. Crime, self-destruction, gangsterism, drugs, and a sense of hopelessness are major roadblocks for South Africa’s poor.
President Donald Trump seemingly knows much about what white South Africans have to endure. His ill-informed comments about the terrible things purportedly happening to them led to many jokes and memes on social media, especially in Afrikaner circles. South Africa is a complex country. Rather than the emigration of our valued Afrikaner farmers, what will heal our nation is genuine reconciliation and a recommitment to ending discrimination.
This is what our four Nobel Peace Prize winners—Chief Albert Luthuli, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and even F. W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, at the end of his life—had dreamed of.
This series concludes on Thursday.
Dennis Cruywagen, author of The Spiritual Mandela, was deputy editor of The Pretoria News.
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