ABSTRACT

At the conference organised by the Programme to Combat Racism (PCR) of the World Council of Churches in Lusaka in May 1987 (4–8 May), the then president in exile of the African National Congress (ANC), Oliver Tambo, acknowledged the long history of partnership between churches and the ANC, at that time a liberation movement and not yet a political party, and called religious actors in the country to play an even more active role in the final stages of the joint struggle against Apartheid:

The African National Congress has a long history of association with the Church. Our founders were churchmen and women. Throughout our 75 years [from 1912 to 1987] that link has never been broken. As we enter the final stages of our struggle, we believe that you, too, have a responsibility to contribute to the maximum to remove a regime which offends the very principles on which the Church itself was founded.

(Oliver Tambo, SAHO online, 1987) While at its inception the ANC was, as Stephen Ellis put it, ‘a rather genteel organisation’ composed of middle-class black South Africans mostly educated in religious schools or religious leaders themselves (Ellis, 1991: 439), the relationship between religion and the ANC was almost completely forgotten or strategically swept away by the dominant public media coverage at the time of the 1987 WCC conference in Lusaka. Indeed, those were the years in which armed opposition and violent strategies intensified in South Africa and in which the Cold War was used to frame politics and public action. Therefore, the South African Church (with the exception of the Dutch Reformed Church that maintained its support to the regime of Pretoria), which had publicly supported the liberation struggle led by the ANC and the civil society umbrella of the United Democratic Front (UDF) since the 1970s, was accused by various voices – the Apartheid regime in primis – of collaborating with a liberation movement that was allied to the Communist Party (SACP) and colluded with the Soviet Union which persecuted churches and encouraged others to do so in neighbouring African countries (see for example in independent Angola and Mozambique from 1975: Helgesson, 1994; Blanes and Paxe, 2015; 264 Morier-Genoud, 1996). In the polarised climate of the time, the ANC was, nationally and internationally, 1 depicted as a secular anti-religious organisation that aimed to eradicate any form of religious presence if successful in its political struggle against the National Party (NP) regime. The fact that the ANC consistently pledged allegiance to the founding principles of the Freedom Charter (the precursor of the current democratic Constitution) that stated that the struggle aimed to build a ‘democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright, without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief’ counted for little (Freedom Charter, 1955: 1). Churches were publicly requested to take a clear separational stance from the ANC and the Communist Party, for example as the then president of South Africa P.W. Botha conveyed in a public letter to Archbishop Tutu on 16 March 1988: ‘You are no doubt aware that the expressed intention of the planned revolution by the ANC/SACP alliance is to ultimately transform South Africa into an atheistic Marxist state, where freedom of faith and worship will surely be among the first casualties’ (Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, 1988: 72). 2 If the media controlled by the NP managed to forge the opinion, at home and abroad, that the relationship between religion and the ANC was of a dangerous nature, academic literature has not been successful in uncovering the relevance and specificities of this collaboration.