The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa

18 A Divided Missionary Impulse and Its Political Heirs

297 18 A Divided Missionary Impulse and Its Political Heirs In the wake of its 1948 electoral victory, the Nationalist government imposed apartheid on trains and other facilities in the Cape Peninsula; abolished electoral rights granted to Indians by the Smuts regime; and outlawed all marriages, and later, all sexual relations, between whites and people of color. In 1950, three sweeping acts extended the foundations of a rigorously segregated and authoritarian society. The Population Registration Act required all South Africans over sixteen to carry an identity card specifying their race, sometimes with different family members assigned to different races. The Group Areas Act authorized the state to designate urban residential and business areas exclusively for the use of a specific race. The Suppression of Communism Act outlawed not only the Communist Party, but virtually any organization deemed by the Minister of Justice to favor “political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbances or disorder.”1 Black Christian leaders faced, on the one hand, a government resolved to block every path to equal citizenship with whites; and, on the other, some fellow blacks who angrily demanded an end to all white-black collaboration. Afrikaners who advocated the Mission Policy of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) had the dual task of persuading the government to implement “constructive” apartheid in the teeth of the white electorate’s indifference or hostility, and of pleading with moderate blacks, liberal whites, and, increasingly, with Christian opinion overseas, to give the government time to deliver on its promises. Liberal Christian whites—long accustomed to opposition from both recalcitrant whites and impatient blacks—saw their prospects of success dim further. The missions, after the takeover of their schools, lost most of their institutional base, and the cross-racial and cross-cultural networks they had fostered began to unravel. Increasingly , the activities of the political missionary were transferred to secular (and separate) settings outside the churches: among blacks, to African National Congress leaders still committed to interracial cooperation; among Afrikaners, to SABRA (the South African Bureau of Racial Affairs); and among liberal whites, to the newly founded Liberal Party. 298 Parting of the Ways “Defiance of Unjust Laws” In 1949, the African National Congress (ANC) adopted a Programme of Action drafted by radicals in its Youth League, among them Nelson Mandela, and later approved by its older and more conservative leadership. The ANC chose the Youth League’s candidate, Dr. James S. Moroka, as its president-general, thus casting off Dr. Alfred B. Xuma, an able president-general over the previous nine years but one who seemed temperamentally unsuited to the dawning era of civil disobedience. The Programme’s stress on African “self-determination” made no appeal for white support; it rejected not only apartheid, but also “trusteeship, or white leadership which are all one way or another motivated by the idea of white dominion.” Going well beyond traditional tactics of petition, appeal, and persuasion, the document called for the “abolition of all differential political institutions ” and authorized the use of “immediate and active boycott, strike, civil disobedience, [and] non-cooperation.”2 On May Day, 1950, a work stoppage in the Transvaal led to clashes with the police and the deaths of eighteen Africans. A “National Day of Protest and Mourning,” on June 26, was supported by the Indian National Congress and by members of the Communist Party, which had recently dissolved itself before the government could ban it. The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 abolished the Native Representative Council and erected a pyramid of African tribal authorities. The same year, the Separate Representation of Voters Act removed Coloureds from the common roll in the Cape (a measure ruled unconstitutional by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court but revalidated in 1956, after the Senate was packed and the court enlarged). In response, many Coloureds and some white radicals and liberals rallied to defend the Coloured franchise with legal actions and public demonstrations , and the ANC prepared for its first prolonged campaign of civil disobedience . In 1952, Moroka and Walter Sisulu, the ANC’s secretary-general, demanded that Prime Minister Malan repeal six “unjust laws”: stock limitation (resented in rural areas), the pass laws, and the Suppression of Communism, Group Areas, Bantu Authorities, and Voters Acts. If Malan did not take action within a month, “the African National Congress [would] hold protest meetings and demonstrations on the 6th day of April, 1952 as a prelude to the implementation of a plan for the...