AFRICANEWS

South Africa

Interview on racism in post-apartheid South Africa

AFRICANEWS' Managing Editor, Cathy Majtenyi attended the recent UN conference on racism in South Africa. In this extensive interview on racism in post-apartheid South Africa she spoke with Fr. Dabula Mpako who is the General Secretary of the African Catholic Priests' Solidarity Movement, Bishop Kevin Dowling of the Diocese of Rustenburg, and Neville Gabriel, Director of the Justice and Peace Department of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference.

Africanews: I am interested in the role of the church in the post-apartheid South Africa, especially in the areas of reconciliation, restitution, and compensation.

Fr. Mpako: My sense is that the church in South Africa is striving to find a way of grappling with such issues. I do not think we have as yet found an adequate way - that is, processes and mechanisms - that helps us to do that. We are just beginning to raise those questions now and to think about what can be done.

Bishop Dowling: In the old apartheid system, we were kind of playing an adversarial role as a church against a clearly defined enemy. Apartheid had to be destroyed as a social system. The post-apartheid legacy is even far more complex than what we were struggling with before. In the first stage of a very complicated process, we've got to transform a brutalised people and communities, which brings in all the issues of racism and intolerance. How do you heal all of that? There is also the reality of the white community being just so totally unaware of what racism and racial discrimination have done to the vast majority of our people in South Africa. But then, to simply say that we've got now a democratic society and we now have freedom is very minimal. There's a major issue of economic transformation for millions of our people who are still [living] in degrading poverty.

Mr. Gabriel: Apart from the social transformation that has to go on, there's this whole area of economic transformation. To me, there are two clear spheres that different people emphasise. One would be personal attitudes, racial prejudice, incidences of racism etc. And then there's the more complicated technical areas that are to do with structures that were part and parcel of the apartheid system relating to social and economic issues, for example, settlement patterns

EDITOR'S NOTE: Gabriel is referring to the blacks-only townships, set up under the apartheid system, that are located on the outskirts of cities. To this day, they still exist and are much poorer compared to white neighbourhoods in the city]. Those are the kinds of things that have not been paid sufficient attention by the church. They [the structures] are really the continuing legacy of apartheid. For any kind of a future, we need a systematic approach to redistributing wealth using different kinds of strategies.

Africanews: Bishop Dowling, you had brought up a very interesting point, about the fact that prior to 1994, you were fighting against an identifiable "enemy". Now that apartheid has been officially abolished, what or who is the focus now?

Fr. Mpako: Now, we are faced with the effects of that whole system, which are deeply rooted effects. The political transformation was just one little part of this process. So, we are faced now with a system of the disempowerment of groups of people and that goes into all the different aspects of social life. Settlement patterns are entrenched. When I used to be in a former white suburb, the roads were perfect. If there was a pothole, it would last only a few hours. Whereas, now, potholes last years. There's a system that continues to entrench inequality.

Mr. Gabriel: One good example of what needs to be done is land reform. It is happening in this very diocese [Durban]. It [the Diocese of Durban's land reform programme] is small, but effective, where the church is looking at its own land and is looking to use pieces of land that it is not using to empower communities. The other key area is economic issues, particularly advocacy on macro-economic policies, but also educating local communities on how the economic system functions and empowering them with the skills and awareness to be able to take up advocacy on social and economic justice issues for themselves.

Africanews: Presumably, one of the church's roles would be to address the spiritual or theological dimension of apartheid. How do you work with people who have been born and raised in a system of such inequality?

Bishop Dowling: This is precisely what we were crafting in our [anti-racism] seminar - changing attitudes entrenched into these mentalities. In terms of "targets," this would be one target area, the internal church direction, something that we really must speak on.

Fr. Mpako: For me, that would be a very important area. As I indicated earlier, if we as church are to be an agent of transformation, we must begin to do that within our own community. We must find ways of dealing with that mindset. Racism has affected peoples' way of looking at things. It operates more on the unconscious. One needs to find ways of bringing all those things up to the surface and then helping people to change. Well, we can talk about how the church can do that, but as I've said earlier, my sense is that we still need to develop practical ways of dealing with that. We need to go beyond denying that we as church have been affected by apartheid. I think that's one of the obstacles. When we fought apartheid, the church was very vocal and articulate in some of the statements it made. But when we look at the experiential realities, we ourselves invented the same kind of settlement pattern in terms of our white churches, for instance. For me, the beginning would be to go beyond denial and say that we have structures from the past, and then, follow up on the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation] process.

Africanews: Bishop Dowling, you had received a lot of publicity for your recent statement on condom use (Editors note: Dowling raised controversy recently when he said using condoms was OK in the war against AIDS). How can we as a church get the priorities straight?

Bishop Dowling: My perception has been that, as a church, we're identified as having a preoccupation with all matters sexual. We have preached consistently the ethic of social morality. To me, it's the spiritual theme of charity, not dealing with structural issues in any coherent way. There's never been the same kind of horror that we would feel at some kind of infringement on our chastity as all these matters of racism and social injustice. There's been a kind of division, in my perception, between the spirit and the fabric of social life. How do we project this much more holistic spirituality, which embraces the dignity of people who have been totally disempowered? It's the beginning of a new spirituality, an articulation of an authentic, holistic spirituality in this reality now, to drive our process.

Fr. Mpako: At one time within the church, people who were raising up these social issues were immediately labelled politicians talking politics. Even today, some in the church label you a "political priest". Racism, reparations, those are not the kinds of things that we should be involved in as church Instead, [they said], we should be baptising, saying Mass, saying prayers. The conventional approach within the church was to see anything that was touching social justice issues as meddling in politics. If you look at how the engages in the issues around sexuality, you see the passion, of the bishops, who were otherwise media-shy, as they condemn condoms. But when it comes to issues like racism, they don't get the passion, which shows what our priorities are.

Africanews: Do political leaders accuse you of being political? What is the church's role in politics?

Mr. Gabriel: In the Justice and Peace Department, our role is to articulate the problems being experienced in our communities. Of course, it is political. We don't intend it to be party political. Immediately after the democratic transition in South Africa, there was this whole debate in the churches about what is the appropriate new position of the churches. We came up this term, "critical solidarity," supporting social justice measures, but to be critical and prophetic. I believe that that was a compromise position that was not very helpful because it meant that you never knew exactly whether you should be critical or prophetic. What's emerging at the moment is that the church is broadening, and we're beginning to see ourselves very clearly as part of civil society where there are problems.

Africanews: Fr. Mpako, you had mentioned in an earlier interview with Catholic News Service that there were many manifestations of racism in the church itself. Could you tell me more about that?

Fr. Mpako: The church itself has a colonial past. For instance, the early missionaries were themselves captive to the ideology of the time, which was saying that the white Europeans were superior and whatever was African and black was inferior, backward, uncivilised. And that translates into cultural racism. I often refer to the first statement by the bishops in 1952 on race relations, which, in fact, shows that very clearly. At that time, it was acceptable to say such things openly as Africans being children who are under the guardianship of the Europeans. Then, in the early 1960s, it became politically incorrect to say such things. Today in the church, particularly in the white hierarchy there is a sentiment again that gives the impression that the African is not ready. When we talk, for instance, about the assumption of the highest positions of leadership in the church, you hear especially some white priests saying, no, you have to stay here, you're not ready. That may be true, but the question I always pose is, what do YOU mean by "ready." Who decides when we are ready and not ready?

One doesn't get the feeling that inculturation is taken up with enthusiasm. There may still be suspicion of these Africans. The re-distribution of resources and personnel amongst white and black parishes are not the same, even today. We have internalised the belief, for instance, that the white European knows better.

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