This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Haywood: Could you summarize your career and what has brought you now to Yale and the Jackson School?

De Ruyter: I’ve been working in the energy sector for more than 30 years. I started in coal, I’ve worked in natural gas, I’ve worked in oil, I’ve worked in electricity. I worked in many African countries – Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, Ethiopia, and Nigeria – and then also lived for a period in China where I led a very large energy project, and I also ran a business in Germany for a while. My really broad range of international experience eventually culminated in my being appointed to the position of Group Chief Executive of Eskom, the South African national power utility. I was in that job for a period of three years. That sounds like a very short time, but it was the longest tenure of my ten predecessors. So it was quite a remarkable achievement in and of itself to stick it out for that long 

Eventually, I was confronted with a significant degree of corruption and malfeasance in the energy business there in South Africa. That made it extremely challenging to turn the business around and to implement some of the decarbonization initiatives that I had identified and for which I’d obtained significant financing from the international and multilateral financing communities. I then tendered my resignation. I also wrote a book about my experiences at Eskom, Truth to Power, that has been a bestseller. The Guardian in London has nominated this as one of the top five books by whistleblowers internationally. I was also recently nominated one of the top 100 Most Influential Africans by New African magazine. 

I was very happy when the opportunity came along last year for me to share some of my experiences and insights into decarbonization and climate finance with Yale. This opportunity is mainly due to the Jackson School, but also because of the Yale School of the Environment and School of Management, where I am currently lecturing on climate finance with a particular emphasis on developing countries. 

Haywood: That’s fantastic. If we can back up to right before you joined Eskom – what drove you to want to take the position as Group Chief Executive, especially when you knew about the high turnover rate among Eskom’s leaders in the past?

De Ruyter: I’ve often described my motivation as a combination of naivety and idealism. I strongly believe in a sense of civic duty: I think that citizens who sit on the sidelines and criticize and complain without being prepared to go out there and be part of the solution to the problems that they’re criticizing, forfeit their right to complain to a certain extent. If you’re not prepared to be part of the solution, if you’re not prepared to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in the mud and sort out what irks you in the society that you live in, then maybe it’s time for you to go look for another country. 

So when I received the offer, I thought to myself that, yes, electricity shortfalls, corruption – these are major issues plaguing South Africa. I had been fortunate enough to gain experiences that could be relevant in helping to address these shortfalls. And when the call came to ask whether I would be interested (it wasn’t a job that I applied for I must add) I accepted. I said, I’ll do this because I feel it’s my duty as a South African to do so. 

Kushi: I’m curious to learn more about Eskom’s leadership and how appointment to that role works. How did the government decide on you? What do you think the future leaders of Eskom will need to do to turn it around? 

De Ruyter: I guess that I was a fairly controversial appointment. For key government and parastatal appointments, of which the Eskom job certainly is one, the ruling party and government typically appoint somebody who is a loyal party member and can be counted upon to toe the party line. I definitely don’t fall into that category as I was a member of a political party thirty years ago, but since then, I’ve had no formal political affiliation, and certainly have not been a supporter of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party in South Africa. Be that as it may, I ran an industrial company as chief executive, where the chairman was the former Central Bank governor, similar to the chairman of the Federal Reserve in the US. Eventually, this gentleman left to become South Africa’s Minister of Finance. He and I got along really well at a personal level. There was a lot of mutual respect, I have a very high regard for his integrity and intellect. He was instrumental in suggesting me as a potential candidate for the job. Apparently, this was after they had already offered the position to 23 other candidates, who had already turned it down. I was the last man standing. 

Darragi: Mr. de Ruyter, the South African government has made several proposals for reforming Eskom. One of them is to divide Escom into three separate entities for generation, transmission, and distribution. Do you think that this proposal is efficient? And if not, what is perhaps another alternative that you propose? 

De Ruyter: I think this type of structural utility reform is absolutely critical for the electricity industry in South Africa to move forward. It’s not a particularly novel structural reform; this path has been trodden by, I think at last count, 126 other countries, where generation was separated from the transmission business and from the distribution business. It’s pretty much how the US electricity industry is set up as well, obviously subject to appropriate regulation and oversight to ensure that the environment is protected and that the rights of the consumer are protected, and so forth. In order to attract sufficient private investment in energy, and in particular to the generation sector which is where the biggest demand is for new capital, a disaggregated utility has proven to be a critical enabler in other cases. The old days of a monolithic monopolistic utility that could supply electricity at a rate below the cost of production, to a small minority of people in the country – those days are gone for good in South Africa. And there’s absolutely no way in which that construct can, or should, be resurrected. I’m fully supportive of that structural reform; it’s the right way forward for the utility to go.

Haywood: We’ve been dancing around the topic of the South African energy crisis for a bit here and I just want to make sure we take a step back and ask you, what do you think the root causes of the current energy crisis are and what is the context that led to the current situation?

De Ruyter: I think for students attending the Jackson School this can serve as a bit of a case study, really, as to what happens when there’s a policy failure. So in 1998, the South African government published a white paper, which was essentially a policy document that set out what the objectives are for dealing with the electricity industry going forward. And in that document, a mention was made that Eskom would no longer be allowed to build new generation capacity because the paper said there would instead be reforms to the energy sector that would allow the private sector to come in and build that generation capacity.

Now, building that generation capacity was crucial due to two factors. First, an expected growth in consumption, bearing in mind that the economy was growing and the largely African community that had been disadvantaged in terms of electricity supply, amongst many other things, under the apartheid era, were now being served with electricity connection, so the demand for electricity had suddenly increased substantially. The second element is that it was already anticipated back then that the aging coal fleet would have to be retired and replaced. Any mechanical piece of equipment has a finite age – you don’t see many 50-year-old cars on the road anymore, they all eventually break down and then need to be replaced.

Now, what happened was that the government effectively told Eskom they may not build new power stations but did not follow through on the policies required to enable the private sector and private investments to come in and fill in that gap of electricity demand. As a consequence, the reserve margin that South Africa had available very quickly got eroded by poor performance from the aging fleet, exacerbated by corruption, as well as an increase in demand. And that led to the first incidences of load shedding, which are rotational blackouts imposed on the community from between four to twelve hours per day. Load shedding is quite onerous and disruptive not only to domestic life but also obviously to business and industry. This has now been a feature of the South African landscape for 22 years and counting. The whole situation is really a classic case study of what happens if ideas are not translated into policies that are not translated into legislation and then implemented in order to achieve the objectives that governments have in mind.

Kushi: You mentioned a little bit about corruption in South Africa and Eksom, and it’s something I’ve heard you talk about in interviews before. What do you think made Eskom particularly vulnerable to corruption?

De Ruyter: I think that this has been the result of the change in the nature of Eskom from a standalone power utility that had one objective – to generate, transmit, and supply electricity at the lowest possible cost – to what is known as a state-owned enterprise, run by a board that was appointed by the ruling party. And that created a temptation to appoint people who would be pliable, people who would accede to the wishes of politicians, who wouldn’t have moral qualms about engaging in corrupt practices. That’s exactly what happened. There have been many cases that have gone through the courts here or have been exposed in the media that contained the elements of what’s called state capture, where the resources of the state are abused by politicians in corrupt association with private sector actors, and where these malfeasances then translate into corruption. And you actually create an environment where corruption can thrive, because you allow the normal principles of good corporate governance to be thrown out the window.

Just to prove the hypothesis that I’m putting forward, just about every state-owned enterprise, – and there are over 400 of them in South Africa, some are big and some are small – just about every one of them has been a hotbed of corruption since changing this model. So there are clear structural reasons why corruption got a foot in the door very soon after this change in political oversight and political involvement, or even interference, in running the affairs of state-owned entities.

Haywood: Why do you think corruption in South Africa is so persistent, especially given its broad recognition among the people? Public figures like you have called out corruption, I’m thinking of the recent commission into the subject, the Zondo Commission, which gave a very deep dive into looking at corruption in South Africa. It’s a very acknowledged problem. But what makes it so stubborn?

De Ruyter: You know, one of the spokespersons of the government, Smuts Ngonyama, made a very revealing comment about five, six years ago. He said, “I did not join the struggle [against apartheid] to be poor.” So there is this prevalent notion that access to the levers of power entitles you to access to financial wealth. Of course, one must be very careful. You cannot blame only the politicians, because in every corrupt relationship, there are two parties. There’s a corruptor and a corruptee. I think we absolutely need to acknowledge that private sector actors gleefully participated in the corruption. Some of them were very well-known international names: Deloitte; McKinsey; SAP, the German software company; and ABB, which is a major Swiss company. So it’s a two-way street.

But I do think that the opportunity that people had to abuse the positions of power that they were put in without appropriate checks and balances, and without the right consequence management in terms of successful law enforcement prosecution, followed by exemplary terms of incarceration; in the absence of those normal measures of control, corruption just took over and ran like wildfire. There was a specific focus by the ruling party, the ANC, to reduce the effectiveness of the anti-corruption entity, an independent investigative body called the Scorpions. The Scorpions were disbanded at the insistence of the annual Congress of the ANC which said we can’t have these people prying into our affairs. This was the same conference at which the very effective but fairly unpopular President of the African National Conference, Thabo Mbeki, was unceremoniously defenestrated and replaced by Jacob Zuma. And if you’re familiar with the Zondo report, you’ll know that during the Zuma years, state capture and corruption became completely rampant. This was because the institutions that were supposed to maintain adequate oversight over government procurement practices, which is how funds flow from government to private sector actors, were deliberately dismantled and undermined.

In your studies, you’ve likely already come across a book called Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. What that book really is about is institutions. Once you undermine institutions, that’s when states fail. Corruption and undermining of institutions has not particularly got anything to do with Africa, per se. The United States also went through periods of rampant corruption and the undermining of institutions. You might argue that’s an inevitable cycle that societies go through. But we certainly are in the middle of fighting corruption in a very challenging and very significant way.

Kushi: What do you think are some strategies that South Africans, whether they be government members or people in the private sector can take to stop corruption?

De Ruyter: One of the big elements that should be implemented is to ensure that there’s adequate transparency in public procurement. Thirty years ago, tenders – bids for providing goods or services to public entities – were opened in public and the numbers were read out in public. Now, of course, some of these tenders are very complicated, they’re very technical, they’re subject to adjustment, and they’re not always easy to compare. But the transparency that is introduced by a public opening of documents, so that there’s no opportunity to “lose” a bid, or there’s no opportunity to quickly adjust the numbers, because it’s opened right there when everybody’s present, and all the bidders can say “yes, that’s the number that I wrote into my document.” That public opening, I believe, is one of the critical steps.

There’s an old saying, ”sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Transparency in any public process is a sine qua non for good clean governance. And unfortunately, the public procurement processes in South Africa are incredibly complicated. They have scoring mechanisms that are based on adjustments for the race, gender, age of the bidders. In that complicated process, of course, the opportunity arises for non-value-adding intermediaries to inject themselves into the process. Also, by the deployment of bribes, brown envelopes, paper bags, cars, and even in a couple of instances, cows that are delivered to farms, people can influence the process in a way that would in a transparent environment not be possible.

Darragi: Mr. de Ruyter, while we are on the topic of transparency, I have seen references by some journalists to an “energy apartheid.” Some allegations have been made that Eskom segregates load shedding based on where you are in South Africa. For instance, townships like Soweto (which has a large black population) have experienced more load shedding than places like Sandton (which is more white). What is your response to those allegations?

De Ruyter: I think you need to distinguish first of all between load shedding, which is a way of managing the demand for electricity in order to allow the available generation capacity to meet the demand. That is done on an equitable basis across the board. There’s absolutely no discrimination. But what has happened in a place like Soweto, for example, is that years ago, at the advent of democracy, some irresponsible politicians went to Soweto and said, as a reward for supporting the ANC, we will absolve you from ever having to pay your electricity accounts. As a consequence, the payment rate in Soweto during my tenure at Eskom was hovering between 13 and 17%. Now, just what happens in the US, if you don’t pay your bill, electricity gets cut off. The utility just comes and disconnects you. But this has nothing to do with race. It’s got everything to do with whether you buy your bill. And the extent to which there is widespread meter tampering, electricity theft, and nonpayment, those feature quite strongly in electricity distribution, and unfortunately, the perception has been created that this has somehow correlated to race, which is not the case at all. In fact, I think Eskom was particularly lenient in still providing electricity in spite of the fact that revenue collection was so poor.

Haywood: Speaking of revenue collection, one of the things we noticed is that South Africa still exports energy to its neighboring countries. Do you think that behavior is incompatible with South Africa resolving its energy crisis? And to what extent do you see solving the South African energy crisis as involving other regional actors?

De Ruyter: South Africa is one of the members of the Southern African Power Pool, which pools electricity supply into one interconnected grid, across countries. Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Eswatini, Lesotho, and obviously South Africa are all members. South Africa dominates the power pool – it generates about 73% of all the electricity that is consumed in the pool. But it is also a significant buyer of electricity from Mozambique, for example. Mozambique has a very large and very successful hydroelectric project called Cahora Bassa and there’s a high voltage direct current line that has been supplying electricity from the north of Mozambique to South Africa for many, many decades. So if we were not a member of the pool, if we did not provide electricity to other countries, and we did not buy electricity, then the shortfall in our own electricity would be even greater.

Now, what needed to be done on this issue was a couple of quite unpopular things which I introduced. I said, first of all, Eskom needs to make a profit on the electricity that it sells and that is a process where we significantly increased the tariffs charged to our neighboring countries. But also we said, like we did with Soweto, well, you actually have to pay for the electricity that we provide you. We went so far as to demand cash upfront from Zimbabwe, which had an extremely poor payment record before we would supply them with electricity because we just had no faith in their ability or their willingness to pay for the electricity offered and supplied. So I think regional integration generally is a positive thing.

We know that Namibia, for example, is going to be investing massively in renewable energy and for South Africa to be able to tap into those resources as part of the Southern African Power Pool makes absolute sense. So I think buying and selling electricity across the region is a good idea and is to be supported.

Kushi: There’s been some talk about South Africa trying to transition away from coal. What proposals are out there for that transition? Do you think that they’re going to work?

De Ruyter: This was one of the main thrusts of my tenure as Group Chief Executive of Eskom is that I very quickly came to the conclusion that we had to produce new generation capacity as quickly as possible. If you compare different technologies, the lowest cost and the quickest to deploy these days are solar and wind energy. Even if you ignore the negative environmental impacts of the externalities imposed on the environment by coal-fired power generation, which you shouldn’t, it still makes perfect sense to roll out wind and solar as quickly as possible. There are technical challenges with the fact that these are variable renewable energy sources, but these can be resolved and certainly only become a critical problem for the grid when you get to a very high penetration of renewable energy sources.

This drive ran into considerable opposition, in particular from the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, which had a focus on prolonging the life of coal-fired power stations because it had a dual mandate to both promote mining and provide policy direction for the energy industry. The inherent conflict between those two mandates, in addition to the very significant political sway held by heavily unionized coal workers, caused the process to be, pardon the pun, undermined.

That being said, we still made very good progress in our energy transition. We were able to deliver a groundbreaking $8.5 billion Just Energy Transition Partnership agreement, which was signed between the US, UK, France, Germany, the European Union, and South Africa at COP 26 in Glasgow. We were able to secure more than a billion dollars through concessional financing to repurpose and repower a decommissioned coal-fired power station, in order to ensure that the transition to a decarbonized electricity industry would be a just one. This is something that I feel very strongly about: without ensuring that there is social and environmental justice that accompanies the transition, it is highly likely that those kinds of energy transitions will not succeed. They will be held up by interference through the vested interests who have been involved in the coal industry or have made investments in the industry over many decades and have legitimate concerns about the transition’s effects.

South Africa is very fortunate in that it’s got some of the best wind and solar resources in the world. I’m still firmly of the view that in the absence of any sort of likelihood that the government will solve the energy crisis, there will be a de facto liberalization of the electricity sector that will cause the electricity industry in South Africa to decarbonize. Just in the last year, privately distributed energy generation through renewables exceeded the capacity of one major coal-fired power station in South Africa without any incentive or support from the government. So load shedding is forcing people to take matters into their own hands and decarbonize. Whether the government wants to promote that or not is no longer relevant. It’s happening because people need electricity to live their lives.

Haywood: Do you foresee a future in South Africa where the growth of the private sector energy generation and renewable energy push out Eskom or state involvement in energy? Or how do you see that future playing out?

De Ruyter: In the future, I think all of Eskom is going to be very different. As we spoke about the restructuring of Eskom, I think we were going to have an Eskom which will have a very reduced presence in the generation sector, which will be largely operated by the private sector. It will still have a substantial presence in the transmission industry, that’s a natural monopoly – it is infrastructural in nature. Typically, that is the last element of the electricity industry where the state maintains a significant degree of involvement. The distribution parts of the industry, I think, will either go into the hands of private distributors, very much like mobile phone operators, or it will go into the hands of local authorities. So the role of Eskom, as I said earlier, the monolith that was able to meet all of South Africa’s electricity needs, that’s going to change and it’s going to become a much smaller, much more focused business with a significantly smaller presence in generation and distribution.

Kushi: While we’re looking ahead, do you see yourself returning to South Africa in the future? And if not at the moment, what will it take for that to happen?

De Ruyter: I’d love to return to South Africa. It’s still a place that I regard as home. It’s a place that I’m very fond of. I’m fond of the people, I think we’ve absolutely fantastic people who live in the country. So yeah, I absolutely intend to return to South Africa. Much as I appreciate the opportunity of living and working in the US, I do miss South African sunshine and South African wine.

Haywood: I wanted to ask you personally about the circumstances under which you left both Eskom and South Africa. I’ve heard that’s a complicated and fraught story. Can you tell us about that?

De Ruyter: Yeah, it was a very interesting period. On the day that I tendered my resignation to the chairman of the board, I returned to my office and was provided with coffee. That coffee turned out to be laced with poison, a mix of cyanide and insecticide – which by the way is apparently a Russian recipe. I’ve since learned more about poison than I ever wanted to. So I became quite ill. But fortunately, I survived the attempt. I was told by a toxicologist that I was very, very lucky to escape. I won’t go into all the gory details but yes, I made it.

Soon after that, as I was serving my notice period, I started to speak up more openly about the reasons why we have not been able to make as much progress as people wanted to on solving the energy crisis. In particular, I spoke out about some of the vested interests that underpinned corrupt behavior in Eskom: coal theft by organized crime of very, very significant proportions, and to a large extent a supine police force that wasn’t particularly interested in ensuring that there were consequences for these criminal activities. That then led to some considerable pressure on me at that stage. I was driving around in a bulletproof Land Cruiser accompanied by bodyguards due to various threats that I’d received. So life was getting quite interesting. You always watch movies, but once you start living it, it’s not to be recommended.

I decided I’d rather go abroad. This was achieved by some sleight of hand. At that stage, various people were looking for me who wanted to apprehend me and force me to testify and so forth. I’m told they were watching the airport in Johannesburg, so I then hitched a ride on a private jet to Cape Town, got on a plane there, and made my way out of the country.

Haywood: Wow. That is truly remarkable. I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been for you and everyone close to you. How do you manage to stay committed to speaking out against corruption and working to improve South Africa even when there’s all this persecution against you?

De Ruyter: You need to be a bit bloody-minded when it comes to principles relating to honesty and integrity. I’ve often been asked, you know, why? Why did you speak out? And I guess one strategy I could have followed was to just keep my mouth shut, attend all of my farewell parties, and just go off quietly into the sunset. I could have had a very nice retirement and served on a couple of boards, and that would have been the end of the story. 

But I do think that there is something like principle, there is something like right and wrong. By not speaking out when you see something that is wrong, you become complicit. You become part of the problem, even if you’re not a direct beneficiary of corrupt activity. If you’re aware of it, and you don’t speak out, you are compromised, and you are complicit. And I just thought that the people of South Africa deserve better. They deserve to know why the lights were off for many hours every day. It was not due to people who work hard and try their best, but it was due to a toxic combination (I guess I shouldn’t use that phrase) of poor policy and corrupt and criminal activity.

Kushi: South Africa has an election this year. What are you looking for? What are your hopes?

De Ruyter: One of the frustrations with the South African political environment is that parties have been quite poor about articulating their policies. If you look at the ANC, I think we know what the ANC’s policy agenda is because they’re in government: they publish white papers, they push laws to Parliament, so we know what the policies are. But most, if not all, of the opposition parties define themselves by being opposed to the ANC. So their election strategy, by and large, is to say, please vote for me, because I’m not the ANC, which I find to be a very unsatisfactory approach to canvassing votes from the electorate. Yes, you might not be the ANC, but does that mean that you’re going to be better or worse than the ANC? And if you don’t tell me what your policies are going to be, well, I’m really going to struggle to make that decision 

There is a dearth of good policy thinking in South Africa, that is coherent, that is consistent, that hangs together across the various aspects of policy. For example, if you think about energy policy, it’s not only about energy policy, it’s about environmental policy, it’s about fiscal policy, it’s about industrial policy. All of these policies have to hang together and integrate. Sitting in Parliament and shouting at the Minister for not doing his or her job is necessary, I guess, for there is some form of political accountability. But what is your alternative agenda? What I’d be looking for in the selection is a party that articulates policies that I believe have a high degree of successful implementation to address the very significant challenges that South Africa faces.

Haywood: I think we have some time left for a few more questions.

Darragi: If the government chooses to make Eskom a private company, do you think that would help solve its corruption problems? If it’s not owned by the government, would this mean fewer opportunities for corruption and corrupt actors to be in control?

De Ruyter: I think more private involvement in the electricity industry would be beneficial. I think it’s highly unlikely that the current ruling party will privatize Eskom because it’s ideologically opposed to doing so. Part of the ANC’s policy is a very strong preference for significant state control and state involvement in the economy. I don’t think that privatization is likely to happen.

What I do think is that transparent market-based competition will be a good check on corrupt activity in the electricity industry. Once you’ve got monopolies, and you’ve got the coincidence between politics and commercial interests, that’s generally when things go off the rails. But when people have to compete for business, and they are properly regulated, and there’s adequate transparency, things are much better. So, my preferred solution is not so much to privatize Eskom, but it is to enable far more private sector participation in the electricity industry.

Kushi: Do you have any message to the next generation of leaders in South Africa that are looking at this corrupt situation and thinking what hope is there? How are we going to get out of this?

De Ruyter: South Africa is a very interesting country. We seem to have this knack for peering over into the abyss and at the moment when it seems inevitable that we are likely to topple over the edge, we manage to pull back and somehow make it work. This characterized the greatest challenge of all, which was the transition from apartheid to democracy. The transition was fraught with risk and the potential for very, very significant bloodshed and eventually went off largely peacefully, which was a minor miracle at the time.

I still back the resilience and character of the ordinary South African – let’s forget about the politicians – to do the right thing, to do the decent thing, and to pull through. But they need to do so with proper leadership. My appeal would be to the next generation to step up to the plate, do your duty, and take the lead in doing what is right for the country and its people.

This interview was conducted by Nour Darragi, Owen Haywood, and Ty Kushi on January 30, 2024.

South Africa’s state-owned energy monopoly, Eskom, was established during the Apartheid Era in 1923 and remains responsible for all phases of electricity supply from generation of electricity to distribution. [2] During Apartheid, Eskom was able to generate all its energy from coal, an abundant resource in the country. Eskom functioned using a grid system that was created to distribute energy to geographic areas where the country’s white minority resided, thus diverting energy from historically Black areas. However, in the post-Apartheid years, demand increased due to rapid economic growth and the extension of the national electricity grid to low-income Black townships. Despite the rise in energy consumers, Eskom’s expansion was limited by poor governance and corruption. [3] When the demand for energy surpassed the supply, Eskom began to use load-shedding as a means of reducing the pressure on the power grid. Major geographic areas in South Africa are divided into different load-shedding zones and experience periods of scheduled power outages in which the entire area does not receive electricity for any period from two hours to a full day. [4] 

The current electricity inequality is a direct ramification of the policy of separate development for different racial groups under the Apartheid administration. The majority of South Africa’s Black population was forcibly relocated to informal urban settlements, commonly known as townships, on the outskirts of major cities. One such township, Soweto, emerged in the 1930s as a result of Black laborers from rural areas moving to Johannesburg to find employment. [5] Soweto’s unsystematic growth resulted in the township lacking municipal services and government infrastructure to this day. A scathing report, titled “Energy Racism: The Electricity Crisis in South Africa,” published by the Center for Sociological Research and Practice at the University of Johannesburg, lambasted Eskom for its strategies that continue the legacy of Apartheid and separate development by limiting access to electricity to low-income Black communities in the township of Soweto. [6] The effects of the scheduled power cuts are barely noticeable in wealthy, historically white-only areas. According to the report, the areas that had the most hours of load-shedding over the 30-day period in which data was taken in the South African province of Gauteng were Soweto, the West Rand and the Vaal. Soweto, where 98.5% of the residents identify as Black Africans, experienced load-shedding a staggering 29 times, while the Vaal area, where 72.7% of residents are white, experienced load-shedding a mere eight times.  [7] 

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has ordered Eskom to halt the unfair practice of targeting townships to have extended periods of no electricity compared to wealthy areas. [8] Social media users have voiced their concerns that the load reduction policy unjustly preys on low-income Black communities. Eskom has justified its strategy of prolonged load-shedding in townships by contending that it prevents the theft of electricity by means of illegal connections and vandalism of its infrastructure. [9] The company makes accusations that residents of these townships do not pay their electricity bills, despite people who live in historically white neighborhoods also defaulting on payments. A current Eskom executive who elected to remain anonymous for fear of retribution described the prolonged periods of load-shedding in townships as “indiscriminate blackouts coated as load reductions” and challenged Eskom to release data that supports their stance that there are alleged illegal connections in these areas.  [10]

Overall, load-shedding costs the South African economy over $40 million per day. [11] Electricity shortages negatively affect economic growth through the loss of production, causing damage to equipment, the spoilage of raw materials, and restart costs. Small businesses in townships such as Soweto are more heavily affected by continuous planned power cuts as they cannot afford to invest in contingency plans such as backup power generators like most of the businesses in wealthy urban areas do. Economic activity during business operating hours is limited by the lack of electricity, resulting in less income for workers who are already living below the poverty line. Extended periods of load-shedding has forced Mzee Kutta, a member of the Khayelitsha Business Forum, to close his laundry service business, which was located in the majority-Black township of Khayelitsha.   In Soweto, Most Black South Africans are uneducated, but many of those who turn to entrepreneurship to make a living have become deterred by load-shedding. [12]  The disturbance to the livelihoods of low-income Black workers is a systematic impediment that mirrors the injustices of racial capitalism perpetrated during Apartheid . [13] 

Despite this, many South Africans remain hopeful that the newly elected CEO of Eskom, Andre De Ruyter, will solve the energy crisis. De Ruyter claims he is battling to end the widespread corruption that extended from lower levels of Eskom to the senior and executive management level, particularly in procurement processes. In October 2022, De Ruyter’s predecessor was arrested and charged with corruption, fraud, and money laundering. It is estimated that over $121 million was spent granting construction contracts to unqualified businesses due to political relationships, resulting in the inefficient allocation of funds and the limitation of competition. [14] His arrest showcases progress in combatting widespread corruption in state institutions, but this will not immediately fix South Africa’s energy crisis. 

De Ruyter argues that implementing central control measures won’t solve the problem, but convictions and prosecutions will. Under De Ruyter’s control, Eskom is cooperating with South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority in order to share information that will lead to the prosecution of officials who engaged in corrupt actions such as granting tenders based on personal ties as opposed to competency. [15] 

De Ruyter approximates that South Africa will need to fork out R1.2 trillion or around $68 billion by 2030 to provide enough generation, transmission, and distribution capacity to meet the country’s growing demands. [16] As a solution to the crisis, the South African government has proposed that Eskom be divided into three separate entities each tasked with either generation, transmission, and distribution. This seems to be a viable solution, as it could result in increased competition in the energy sector, making it more efficient. However, influential labor unions have lobbied against dividing the entity out of fear it will lead to privatization and mass retrenchment. Another more expensive but costly solution is for Eskom to turn to renewable energy as an alternative form of electricity generation. However, the company is currently around $25.2 billion in debt, so this will prove a challenging feat. [17]South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has placed reforming Eskom and mitigating the energy crisis high on his agenda, but his administration has thus far failed to deliver. It is clear that South Africa’s energy crisis and electricity inequality reflect a macrocosm of the historical inequalities and economic crisis perpetuated under Apartheid. For the time being, it seems as if the country’s energy Apartheid will persist and low-income Black South Africans living in townships will be left in the dark.

 References

[1] Maggott, Terri, Siphiwe Mbatha , Claire Ceruti, Lydia Moyo , Alice Mporo , Trevor Ngwane , Cleopatra Shezi , and Luke Sinwell . Energy Racism Report: The Electricity Crisis and the Working Class in South Africa. University of Johannesburg. Accessed November 30, 2022. https://www.uj.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/energy-racism-csrp-web.pdf. 

[2]  Rathi, Anusha. “Why South Africa Is in the Dark, Again.” Foreign Policy. Foreign Policy, July 8, 2022. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/08/south-africa-energy-crisis-eskom-power-cut/. 

[3]  Ibid. 

[4]  Daniels, Nicola. “Victims of Apartheid Suffer ‘Energy Racism’.” Independent Online. IOL News that Connects South Africans, April 29, 2022. https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/news/victims-of-apartheid-suffer-energy-racism-8aa82e0a-1717-4504-bf87-806d89f03831. 

[5] De Selincourt, Kate. “South Africa Takes the Apartheid out of Power: Although More than Half the Electricity Generated in All Africa Is Produced in South Africa, Most of the Country’s Black People Have No Power Supply. but Things Are Changing.” New Scientist. New Scientist, September 6, 1991. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117852-800/. 

[6] Maggott, Terri, Siphiwe Mbatha , Claire Ceruti, Lydia Moyo , Alice Mporo , Trevor Ngwane , Cleopatra Shezi , and Luke Sinwell . Energy Racism Report: The Electricity Crisis and the Working Class in South Africa. University of Johannesburg. Accessed November 30, 2022. https://www.uj.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/energy-racism-csrp-web.pdf. 

[7] Ibid. 

[8] Makinana, Andisiwe. “Ramaphosa Tells Eskom to Stop Targeting Townships with Prolonged Blackouts.” SowetanLIVE. SowetanLIVE, July 5, 2022. https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/south-africa/2022-07-05-ramaphosa-tells-eskom-to-stop-targeting-townships-with-prolonged-blackouts/. 

[9]  Makwakwa, Thabo. “De Ruyter’s Energy Apartheid: Eskom’s Load Shedding Policy in SA’s Townships Raises Eyebrows.” Independent Online. IOL | News that Connects South Africans, May 18, 2022. https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/news/de-ruyters-energy-apartheid-eskoms-load-shedding-policy-in-sas-townships-raises-eyebrows-f46ac1ec-e8c7-457e-8a88-eedc26aa18a0. 

[10] Ibid. 

[11] Ibid. 

[12] McCain, Nicole. “’It Has a Ripple Effect’: Load Shedding Bringing Cape Town’s Township Businesses to Their Knees.” News24, June 30, 2022. https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/it-has-a-ripple-effect-load-shedding-bringing-cape-towns-township-businesses-to-their-knees-20220630. 

[13] Ibid. 

[14] Givetash, Linda. “South Africa’s Former Electricity Boss Charged with Corruption.” VOA. Voice of America (VOA News), October 28, 2022. https://www.voanews.com/a/south-africa-former-electricity-boss-charged-with-corruption/6809698.html. 

[15] Omarjee, Lameez. “Corruption ‘Normalised’ at Eskom, but Sending People to Prison Will Help – De Ruyter.” Business, September 1, 2022. https://www.news24.com/fin24/economy/corruption-normalised-at-eskom-but-sending-people-to-prison-will-help-de-ruyter-20220901. 

[16] Staff Writer. “South Africa Needs R1.2 Trillion to End the Energy Crisis: Eskom.” Business Tech, September 28, 2022. https://businesstech.co.za/news/energy/629270/south-africa-needs-r1-2-trillion-to-end-the-energy-crisis-eskom/. 

[17] Staff Writer. “Eskom Crisis: Why the Lights Keep Going out in South Africa.” BBC News. BBC, February 16, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47232268. 

“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government” (Jefferson 1809). The critical analysis of the degree, characteristics, and sustainability of countries’ achievements or ‘objects’, has been the subject of political academia for many years, with several pieces of scholarship being written on the concept. Less discussed in political circles, but just as imperative to realising political scholarship’s aim to specify and expand upon “legitimate object(s) of good government,” (Jefferson 1809), are the influences on government behaviour, and to what extent they inform and determine a government’s achievements. The most prolific of these ‘influences’ are the goals a government pursues, the structure of the state, and the power of organised interests within the country, and this essay will aim to analyse which of these influences is more imperative in determining what governments achieve. The context through which these concepts will be assessed and compared is that of the present South African government and state. This choice was made in order to provide a case study with which to observe the real-life application of these concepts, so as to provide a deeper understanding of the degree of their effect on governments, as well as to offer more literature in areas where this essay’s analysis of the government influences seemed academically lacking (for example, the ‘goals’ a government pursues is entirely dependent on the government itself, so there appears to be a shortage of academia that provide specific parameters for this concept). Before delving into the main argument, it is important to note that the frequently used term ‘government achievements’ will for the purposes of this essay, broadly be defined as ‘all behaviour of government, as well as all its interactions with the political environment it exists in’; policymaking, government programmes, strategy implementation, to name but a few examples.

The goals a government pursues:

To clarify exactly what the ‘goals a government pursues’ refers to, it can be classified as any situation, state, or statistic a country aims to achieve or obtain. As stated above, the goals a country’s government pursues are dictated by the specific political characteristics of the country and government itself. It is reasonable to assume that there might be general goals that all governments should strive towards, for example a developing country might aim to achieve goals in the field of economic growth, redistribution of income, and employment rates (Chand 2018), but not the existence of strict codes or guidelines.  

Ideally, the goals a government sets should be the ultimate dictator of what they achieve, as the former sets the theoretical parameters with which the latter is measured against. In practice though, governments’ goals act only as a façade of capability and competence, and often offer little to no guarantee of delivering progress or development in any of the aspects of society addressed. There exist several exemplary futile illustrations of these goal strategies in South Africa. The outcomes approach, the government’s plan to address five priority areas identified in the socio-economic landscape of South Africa, “decent work and sustainable livelihoods, education, health, rural development, food security and land reform and the fight against crime and corruption,” (South African Government 2019), within the period of 2014 to 2019. From the time of writing, all five areas of need identified within this framework, have seen little to no improvement, with food security substantially decreasing to the lowest it has been since the birth of the South African democracy (IPC 2020). Similar examples are present in more times, perhaps the most prevalent of them being the National Development Plan 2030. Implemented in 2013, it details a step-by-step approach to the grandiose goal of completely “eliminating poverty and reducing inequality” (South African Government  2013) by the year 2030. Eight years after the NDP’s initial formation, South Africa’s former statistician-general Dr. Pali Lehohla is quoted as having said “The NDP was never implemented; it was left on the shelves” (Sibanyoni 2021). This serves to prove that goal setting, in a South African context, has no effect on what the government achieves, and rather acts as a projection of the potential intentions of government, as opposed to committed promises and guarantees.

The structure of the state:

State structure can be defined as “the organizational form of the state, i.e. the distribution of power among agencies, the working of these agencies, and the underlying self-perception influencing the exchange between these agencies as well as between the government and society at large” (Cante 2016). The formation of the state directly informs the power dynamic between state agencies, the processes of accountability state agencies are liable to, and finally the relationship between state agencies themselves (Cante 2016). The government, being one of the aforementioned ‘state players’ is therefore directly affected the state structure.

There are different types of state structures, that each inform the dynamic between the state agencies in their own unique manner. The United States of America, for example, employs federalism, a state structure that dictates the national government and the state government be two individual sovereign powers, for the purpose of creating a distinct separation of powers (Norton 2020). Similarly, South Africa organises its state into the legislative branch, the judicial branch, and the executive branch, also to broaden the spread of power (South African Government 2021).  The legislative authority controls the creation of legislation, and is presented as the South African parliament system, the exectuive authority, who are in charge of implementation of legislation and governance and who are represented as the President, his Deputy and Minisiters, and finally the judicial authority, who enforce the compliance with the country’s laws both on an individual and state agency level and who are represented by the South African court systems (South African Government 2021). There are also several more separate state institutions in South Africa, whose main aim is to support and enforce democratic practices, such as the Public Protector, the Human Rights Commission, the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, the Commission for Gender Equality, the Auditor-General of South Africa, and the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (South African Government 2021). All of the aforementioned branches of state power and state institutions, act as state agencies and thus interact with other state agencies, i.e. the government. It would be then reasonable to conclude, that the structure of the state has the most considerable and substantial affect on what a government achieves (out of the list provided by this essay), purely based on the number of state agencies with a considerable, if not, an equal amount of power in the South African political landscape. For example, the public protector has been integral in exposing the corruption of the South African government and its involvement with the infamous Gupta family, and the judicial and executive branches of state power went at a figurative ‘head-to-head’ when the constitutional court sentenced former president Jacob Zuma to jail, earlier this year.

Power of organised interests in South Africa:

Interest groups are defined as “any association of individuals or organizations, usually formally organized, that, on the basis of one or more shared concerns, attempts to influence public policy in its favour,” (Thomas 2021). The extent to which interest groups influence government behaviour depends equally on the strength of the interest group, as well as the willingness of the government in question. The National Rifle Association for example, an interest group in the United States of America, has been so successful in its attempts to affect public policy to represent its own ethics and affiliations, that despite having one of the highest rates of gun violence in the world, the NRA has successfully defeated every single attempt at institutionalising even the most basic gun control, with an unprecedented level of influence of the American government (Hammer 2010).

While South Africa possesses no interest group with that level of influence and power currently, there are a few that certainly have become a strong political entity in their own right. COSATU, or the Congress of South African Trade Unions, is perhaps the most prevalent example of a powerful interest group within South Africa. A congress of trade unions that include mine workers, teachers, policemen and allied health workers, it has played both a significant role in South Africa’s history and current times, being both instrumental in mobilising black workers in the Apartheid era, as well as currently fighting and negotiating with the government on behalf of the workers it represents (most often the mine and public service workers) (COSATU 2021). While there is a certain amount of government influence employed by COSATU,  it does not exist in any extreme degrees, and is therefore not as consequential as other influences this essay has tackled. 

Conclusion:

This essay aimed to critically analyse three possible sources of government influence, the goals a government pursues, the structure of the state, and the power of organised interests, through the perspective of South Africa’s complex socio-political climate, to identify which of these concepts had the greatest affect on what the government achieves/how it behaves in South Africa. It has concluded that, in South Africa, the structure of the state has the most affect on what a government achieves, with the power of organised interests coming second, and the goals a government pursues ranking having the least influence on what the South African government achieves.

Works Cited:

South African Government . 2019. The Outcomes Approach. Johannesburg: South African Government .

Cante, F. 2016. Handbook of Research on Transitional Justice and Peace Building in Turbulent Regions. Colombia : Universidad del Rosario.

Chand, S. 2018. “5 Main Aims of Government for Economy Development – Discussed.” Your Article Library , January 3: 1.

COSATU. 2021. “Congress of South African Trade Unions .” Johannesburg .

Hammer, S. 2010. Interest groups in the USA – The National Rifle Association. Washington: Martin Luther University .

IPC. 2020. South Africa: Acute Food Insecurity Situation September – December 2020 and Projection for January – March 2021. Cape Town: IPC analysis portal .

Jefferson, T. 1809. Thomas Jefferson to the Republicans of Washington County, Maryland, 31 March 1809. Washington : Maryland Herald .

Norton, W. 2020 . Federalism and the separation of powers . Chicago : Norton and Company .

Sibanyoni, M. 2021. NDP 2030 Targets: SA’s targets vs reality. Cape Town: SABC.

South African Government . 2013. The National Development Plan 2030. Pretoria : South African Government .

South African Government . 2021. The South African Government structure and functions . South African Government .

Thomas, C. 2021. Britannica. Accessed November 1, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/topic/interest-group.

What is the Cotonou Agreement? 

The Cotonou Agreement, signed on 23 June 2000, serves as the legal framework for all  EPAs and governs relations between African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries and the EU. [5] An EPA describes a bilateral trade and development agreement to create a free trade area (FTA). [6] An FTA describes an agreement between countries to lower barriers to trade, such as tariffs or quotas, and reduce government regulation. [7] The benefits of the FTA supposedly include granting consumers access to a broader and cheaper range of foreign goods, as well as encouraging economic, social, and cultural development in ACP countries. [8] In dire need of access to the international market, investment, and developmental aid, 79 ACP countries excitedly joined the  Cotonou Partnership Agreement with the EU. [9] The agreement pledged to improve the institutional framework of governing structures, to allow for the augmentation of democratic states, and to forge greater regional peace and security. Regional and sub-regional integration are also encouraged through monitoring joint institutions. [10] According to the Cotonou Agreement, to achieve these professed objectives, these countries are required to support trade liberalisation to allow for the “reciprocal” exchange of goods for both the EU and ACP countries. [11]

Unpacking the Nature of the EU–SADC Relationship

The EU–SADC EPA, consisting of Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South African and Eswatini, is a development-focused trade agreement founded on the principles of the Cotonou Agreement. [12] Under this new partnership, the intended benefit for the SADC includes new access to markets and better trading terms in agriculture and fisheries. [13] The EU–SADC agreement aims to improve sustainable development by identifying areas which can benefit from funding, emphasizing private sector development, creating more equitable access to resources, and increasing employment. [14] The EU–SADC agreement proposes that these benefits can be achieved if SADC countries eliminate 86 percent of tariffs on imports from the EU. [15] Simultaneously, the EU would remove 98.7 percent of the customs duties on imports coming from the SADC. [16] However, this reciprocal exchange has been undermined by the principle of originating products. [17] The originating products principle refers to the trade rule which allows a specific product to qualify for a lower or zero preferential tariff. [18] A product can be categorised as originating (from either the EU or SADC regions) if it is “wholly obtained” from that country or manufactured in that specific country using their own technologies. [19] Moreover, for a product to retain the benefit of a lower customs duty, a product must abide by all other requirements, including the non-alteration rule, which prohibits the alteration or transformation of a product by a third country during transit to the partner country. [20] However, owing to the ACP countries’ relatively small economic power, the nature of the partnership agreement has been asymmetrical. Deregulation and trade liberalization have had pervasive consequences, undermining regional integration, development, and economic growth. [21]

A Partnership Between Unequals

Members of the SADC argue that this EPA breeds inequality and can be constituted as a “partnership between unequals” owing to their relatively weak bargaining power. [22] This partnership reifies a colonial-type trade relationship, as the SADC region is often unable to qualify for lower customs duty and is forced into an unequal exchange of goods. [23] Moreover, SADC countries have severe debt-servicing obligations which prohibits them from investing in their industrial base. [24] Thus, countries in this region are forced to export mostly primary products and become net importers, undermining their pursuit for the beneficiation and value addition of raw materials. [25] For example, South Africa’s largest export, accounting for 17.7 percent between 2009-2016, was precious metals and stones. [26] The biggest import from the EU in this same period was machinery and mechanical equipment, accounting for 20 percent of total imports. [27] The fact that SADC imports more in monetary terms, than it exports, has resulted in a negative trade balance with the EU (between 2009-2016). The loss of revenue from import duties (between ten and thirty percent) impacts socio-economic development and worsens the human development crises in African countries. [28] Therefore, the EU–SADC EPA can be seen as favoring the EU and reinforcing asymmetry in the international arena. [29]

The World-systems theory posits that this social structure of global inequality is a deliberate exercise wherein the “periphery,” systematically underdeveloped countries, are exploited of their raw materials by the “core,” dominant capitalist countries with higher skill and capital-intensive production. [30] Currently, the EU’s industrial and agricultural exports are cheaper than domestic goods in SADC countries.[31] Cheap exports from the EU have outcompeted local products and severely affected domestic productivity and increased unemployment, poverty, and malnutrition, as SADC countries are dependent on agriculture as the largest contributor of its gross national income. [32] Moreover, food security has been undermined as local agricultural sectors are unable to compete with subsidized agricultural products from Europe. [33] The Human Development Index (HDI) for Sub-Saharan Africa was recorded at 0.55 in 2021, an indication of poor human development. [34]

African Opposition

It is worth noting that there has been a strong opposition to the EU’s categorization of Africa, considered split regionalization, as it does not conform to Africa’s five traditional geographic blocs recognized by the African Union (AU). Whereas the AU divides the continent into Central, Northern, Southern, East, and West, EU divides it into Central, the SADC, East, Eastern and Southern, and West. [35] Six traditional SADC countries — Tanzania, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Zimbabwe and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — have not been included in the SADC EPA group. Instead, they have been split across three different negotiating regions: the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) group, Central Africa, and East African Communities (EAC). [36] Because of this, EPAs have inhibited efforts for regional integration and the “overlapping membership” problem has undermined Africa’s ability to form a unified position in negotiations. [37]

The role of economic development funds (EDF) for regional projects, building trade capacity, and infrastructure, both in the forms of direct financial flows and technical assistance, have also been a point of contention. [38] The EU is one of Africa’s largest contributors of foreign aid, contributing roughly $21 billion per year. [39] However, this donor aid is under the ownership and control of the EU, and thus largely serves their interests, which have tended to be neoliberal in nature. [40] This aid has had similar injurious consequences to Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), a set of economic reforms imposed by donor countries that a recipient country must adhere to in order to receive a loan. [41] Moreover, these countries experience high debt-servicing obligations — around $15 billion every year — which divert capital away from investing in industrialization, export diversification, technological advancement, and skills development. [42] Therefore, a cycle of “aid dependency” is created and the EU is able to continually exert strong influence on SADC countries. [43]

The Need for Change 

SADC countries should reconsider the EPA with the EU, as the trade negotiations are clearly not amounting to the intended objectives. Instead, the EPAs favor EU interests, failing the SADC’s economic growth, development, regional integration, and agricultural productivity. This partnership can almost be seen as a neo-colonial “Scramble for Africa.”

In order to achieve reform, there is an urgent need to promote regional integration, especially since the Cotonou Agreement expired in November 2021, and more bilateral trade agreements will undoubtedly arise. A post-Cotonou Agreement has been drafted but has not yet been formally signed. [44] It is worth considering other trade agreements like the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, a free trade area encompassing most of Africa, for eradicating trade barriers between the blocs imposed by the EU and creating greater regional integration. [45] Secondly, the SADC should collaborate with the other regional blocs to overcome their weak bargaining power relative to the EU and increase their ability to negotiate trade agreements. Lastly, the EU should create more favorable conditions, via subsidization, for the SADC to have more equal access to European markets and to ensure that EU goods do not flood African markets. It is vital that Africa insists on transformation within these trade negotiations, rather than stagnation and dissatisfaction with the status quo.

References:

[1]  “Panel rules in favour of EU on Southern African Customs Union’s safeguard on EU poultry cuts.” European Commission, accessed November 23, 2022, https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/news/panel-rules-favour-eu-southern-african-customs-unions-safeguard-eu-poultry-cuts-2022-08-03_en

[2] Ibid.

[3]“South Africa suspends chicken tariffs to ease price pressures,” Vanek, M., accessed November 23,2022, https://www.news24.com/fin24/economy/south-africa-suspends-chicken-tariffs-to-ease-price-pressures-20220801

 [4] “Panel rules in favour of EU on Southern African Customs Union’s safeguard on EU poultry cuts.” European Commission, accessed November 23, 2022, https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/news/panel-rules-favour-eu-southern-african-customs-unions-safeguard-eu-poultry-cuts-2022-08-03_en.

 [5] “Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs),” European Commission, accessed December 2, 2022. https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/economic-partnership-agreements-epas

[6] Ibid.

[7] “What is a Free Trade Area? Definition, Benefits and Disadvantages,” The Investopedia Team, accessed December 27, 2022, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/free_trade_area.asp.

[8] “Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs),” European Commission, accessed December 2, 2022. https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/economic-partnership-agreements-epas

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] “SADC-EU Economic Partnership Agreement: briefing”, Parliamentary Monitoring group, accessed December 2, 2022. https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/23118/

[13] “EPA SADC- Southern African Development Community”, European Commission, accessed December 2, 2022. https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/epa-sadc-southern-african-development-community

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] “Neoliberalism: What it is, with examples and Pros and Cons,” Liz Manning, accessed December 27, 2022, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/neoliberalism.asp.

[22] Omolo, Christopher Otieno. “The Africa-EU Relations and Regional Integration in Africa: Reassessing EU’s Influence on Africas’s Integration Project (s).” L’Europe en Formation 1 (2019): 27-50. https://www.cairn.info/revue-l-europe-en-formation-2019-1-page-27.htm accessed December 2, 2022.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Kamidza, Richard. “The Southern African Development Community Group and The European Union Trade Negotiations: Implications and Challenges to Regional Integration and Development.” In Conferência Inaugural do IESE: Desafios para a investigação social e económica em Moçambique. 2007, 5.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27]  “South Africa’s trade with the European Union Category: Economics” South African Markets Insights, accessed December 2, 2022. https://www.southafricanmi.com

[28]  Kamidza, Richard. “The Southern African Development Community Group and The European Union Trade Negotiations: Implications and Challenges to Regional Integration and Development.” In Conferência Inaugural do IESE: Desafios para a investigação social e económica em Moçambique. 2007, 3.

[29] Ibid.

[30] “World Systems Theory”. Study.com, accessed December 2, 2022. https://study.com/learn/lesson/world-systems-theory-wallerstein.html 

[31] Kamidza, Richard. “The Southern African Development Community Group and The European Union Trade Negotiations: Implications and Challenges to Regional Integration and Development.” In Conferência Inaugural do IESE: Desafios para a investigação social e económica em Moçambique. 2007, 3.

[32] Action, Practical. “The Crisis in African Agriculture, A More Effective Role for EC Aid.” Practical Action/PELUM. Available at the africanvoices. org. uk website (2005), 10.

[33] Kamidza, Richard. “The Southern African Development Community Group and The European Union Trade Negotiations: Implications and Challenges to Regional Integration and Development.” In Conferência Inaugural do IESE: Desafios para a investigação social e económica em Moçambique. 2007, 5.

[34] “Human development index scores of sub-Saharan Africa from 2000-2021”. Statista, accessed March 9, 2023. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1244480/human-development-index-of-sub-saharan-africa/ 

[35] Kamidza, Richard. “The Southern African Development Community Group and The European Union Trade Negotiations: Implications and Challenges to Regional Integration and Development.” In Conferência Inaugural do IESE: Desafios para a investigação social e económica em Moçambique. 2007, 5.

[36] “EPA SADC- Southern African Development Community”, European Commission, accessed December 2, 2022. https://trade.ec.europa.eu/access-to-markets/en/content/economic-partnership-agreements-epas#:~:text=Economic%20Partnership%20Agreements%20(EPAs)%20are,EU%20imports%2C%20over%20transitioning%20periods

[37] Ibid.

[38]  Tshuma, Darlington. “What if Africa stops receiving foreign aid? The risk of reversing development gains in a Covid-19 world.” (2022): 7.

[39] Ibid.

[40]  Kamidza, Richard. “The Southern African Development Community Group and The European Union Trade Negotiations: Implications and Challenges to Regional Integration and Development.” In Conferência Inaugural do IESE: Desafios para a investigação social e económica em Moçambique. 2007, 4.

[41]  “What are structural adjustment programs (SAPs)?” Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/structural-adjustment.asp

[42] Ismi, Asad. Impoverishing a continent: The World Bank and the IMF in Africa. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2004.

[43]  Kamidza, Richard. “The Southern African Development Community Group and The European Union Trade Negotiations: Implications and Challenges to Regional Integration and Development.” In Conferência Inaugural do IESE: Desafios para a investigação social e económica em Moçambique. 2007, 4.

[44] “The OACPS-EU partnership: Damage control or saving the last pieces?” ECDPM, accessed March 9, 2023. https://ecdpm.org/work/oacps-eu-partnership-damage-control-saving-last-pieces

[45]  “Cotonou 2.0: A bad trade deal for Africa?” Jan P. Wilhelm, accessed accessed December 2, 2022. https://www.dw.com/en/cotonou-20-a-bad-trade-deal-for-africa/a-57503372

The Omicron variant was first reported to the World Health Organization on November 24, 2021, by a team of scientists in South Africa.[1] The variant, which is characterized by at least 30 amino acid substitutions in the spike protein (compared to the Delta variant’s 15 or so) is potentially likely to evade current vaccines, some scientists say.[2] Current reports also indicate that although Omicron may cause only mild illness, it could be more transmissible due to mutual genetic material with the common cold SARS viruses.[1] Within weeks of being detected, Omicron had spread to over 35 countries and at least 17 American states.[3] The arrival of the variant has brought a new wave of political alarm and economic concern.

President Biden announced travel bans that went into effect November 29, 2021, closing the border to travelers from South Africa and seven other sub-Saharan countries.[4] Border restrictions have been used continually throughout the coronavirus pandemic – by early April of 2020, nearly all countries had introduced some sort of restraints on travel.[5] The current border restrictions imposed by the United States and other wealthy countries stand to have devastating economic effects on many nations in southern Africa. 

Although travel restrictions may delay the arrival of the disease, scientists question the actual efficacy of these bans. In a study led by the University of Washington’s Nicole Errett and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, very little evidence was found to indicate that travel bans eliminate the risk of a disease crossing the border in the long term.[6] A similar study from 2014 found that extensive travel restrictions cannot entirely prevent the spread of a virus.[7]

Several scientists and public health experts have therefore criticized the travel bans, arguing that they punish South Africa for doing precisely what the United States has expected of other countries – extensive and transparent tracking of and testing for the virus.[8] The implementation of such extreme restrictions, many of which will have overwhelming effects on the economies of several low and middle-income countries, has the potential to establish a dangerous hesitancy to identify and report new COVID-19 outbreaks. Such opacity could derail global efforts to manage the pandemic, prolonging the return to health and normalcy that has long been coveted.

Michael D. Shear and Sheryl Stolberg recently wrote an article  on the Biden administration’s institution of travel bans in response to Omicron. They say that in D.C., it is “better to be criticized for something you do, rather than for something you don’t do.”[8] But buying time is an expensive endeavor. South Africa’s economy relies heavily on tourism, much of which occurs during the holiday season. Reports indicate that the tourism industry employs over 1.5 million people in South Africa, accounting for more than nine percent of total employment.[9]

While border control measures serve as an expedient political maneuver used to promote a false impression of protection, there is evidence that intensive domestic public-health efforts such as social distancing, mask-wearing, and vaccination mandates stand to be far more effective at significantly stalling the spread of the virus.

At stake right now is the economic security, which often equates to political stability, of South Africa and many southern African countries. But the greater threat rests in the geopolitical instability these travel restrictions have the potential to ignite. Hesitancy to report new COVID-19 outbreaks because of the economic instability that may come if countries do poses a significant risk to global health and security.

While travel bans may have the potential to delay the dissemination of the virus (though not eliminating its presence altogether), they stand to have significant impacts on the economies of developing countries. In order to preserve the standard of international transparency and trust that will be critical to ending this pandemic, wealthy countries such as the United States must think twice before so quickly implementing such drastic restrictions on travel and instead consider more aggressive domestic approaches. 

References

[1] “Omicron: What We Know about the New Coronavirus Variant.” Accessed December 9, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/article/omicron-coronavirus-variant.html.

[2] “Science Brief: Omicron (B.1.1.529) Variant.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed December 9, 2021. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/scientific-brief-omicron-variant.html.

[3] Spencekimball. “Who Says Covid Omicron Variant Detected in 38 Countries, Early Data Suggests It’s More Contagious than Delta.” CNBC. CNBC, December 4, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/03/who-says-omicron-covid-variant-has-spread-to-38-countries.html.

[4] “A Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Certain Additional Persons Who Pose a Risk of Transmitting Coronavirus Disease 2019.” The White House. The United States Government, November 27, 2021. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/11/26/a-proclamation-on-suspension-of-entry-as-immigrants-and-nonimmigrants-of-certain-additional-persons-who-pose-a-risk-of-transmitting-coronavirus-disease-2019/.

[5] “Covid-19 Restrictions ‘Unprecedented’ in History of International Travel.” ICEF Monitor – Market intelligence for international student recruitment, August 28, 2020. https://monitor.icef.com/2020/04/covid-19-restrictions-unprecedented-in-history-of-international-travel/.

[6] Nicole A. Errett, PhD, MS Lauren M. Sauer, and PhD Lainie Rutkow. “An Integrative Review of the Limited Evidence on International Travel Bans as an Emerging Infectious Disease Disaster Control Measure.” Journal of Emergency Management. Accessed December 9, 2021. https://www.wmpllc.org/ojs/index.php/jem/article/view/2688/pdf.

[7] Mateus, Ana L P, Harmony E Otete, Charles R Beck, Gayle P Dolan, and Jonathan S Nguyen-Van-Tam. “Effectiveness of Travel Restrictions in the Rapid Containment of Human Influenza: A Systematic Review.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization. World Health Organization, December 1, 2014. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4264390/.

[8] “With Scant Information on Omicron, Biden Turned to Travel …” Accessed December 9, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/us/politics/biden-omicron-variant-travel-ban.html.

[9] Richardson, Heather. “Africa’s Fast-Growing Tourism Industry Could Lose up to $120 Billion and Millions of Jobs.” Quartz. Quartz. Accessed December 11, 2021. https://qz.com/africa/1888306/africa-tourism-market-to-lose-up-to-120-billion-with-covid/.

Robert Michels, a German sociologist with renowned political distinction, first put forth the idea of ‘The Iron Law of the Oligarchy’ in academic circles over seventy years ago. Michels was of the opinion that all organizations, regardless of their political ideologies or their position on the political spectrum, were nothing more than masquerading oligarchies. He placed particular emphasis on institutions that made claims to be ‘democratic’ in their intentions, saying that “The notion of the representation of popular interests, a notion to which the great majority of democrats cleave with so much tenacity and confidence, is an illusion engendered by a false illumination,”  (Summers 1984 ). The very nature of democratic organizations, such as political parties or trade unions, lend themselves to bureaucratic tendencies (Summers 1984 ). It is this perspective, this identification of a conceptual dissonance in politics, that ‘democratic’ systems and organizations create environments that allow characteristically undemocratic/oligarchy-esque practices and behavior to flourish, that creates the basis of the argument presented in this essay. While it almost exclusively occurs in ‘democratic’ states, the system of one-party dominance is definitively undemocratic/oligarchy-esque, and poses more harm to a country’s politics than good. This essay will aim to prove this, through a careful analysis of the advantages and disadvantages this one party-dominant system has had in the context of a post-Apartheid South Africa.

Theoretical preliminaries: Factors that enhance South African one party dominance

The preliminaries of this argument against one party dominance, involve firstly defining one party dominance for the purpose of this essay. One party dominance can be defined as “a country where the political landscape is perpetually overshadowed by a single dominant political party that wins consecutive elections and governs for a prolonged period” (Khambuhle 2019). In the South African context, this definition makes reference to the African National Congress Party, as it has won six national elections at the time of this essay, and each time was won with the overwhelming majority of votes, and has been the ruling party for over twenty-five years  (Khambuhle 2019).  For the sake of contextualization, it is important to briefly analyze the political history that lead to the ANC’s political dominance in South Africa, as well the political environment in which the ANC exercises its dominance presently.

The political period before South African democracy, and the ANC in power, was called ‘Apartheid’, which referred to the institutionalization and inclusion of discriminatory and racist policies into the very fabric of South African politics (Endoh 2015). This horrificly racist ideology subjugated black persons in South Africa for centuries, before the ANC, along with other activist parties, fought for and achieved the first democratic elections in 1994, as well as a complete eradication of all Apartheid laws (Endoh 2015). This piece of South African history is important to the content of this essay, because it explains the position the ANC plays, not only in South Africa’s political landscape, but in the cultural and social fabric of the country as well. This equation of the ANC to the end of Apartheid is an integral part of why they have achieved and maintained such political dominance in South Africa, and these unique circumstances influence the way one party dominance is presented in the South African political environment. This link is integral in forming and contextualizing the main argument of this essay: why this dominance is ultimately damaging to South Africa.

The advantages of one party dominance:

In the interest of remaining objective, and providing a balanced commentary on the subject matter, it is important to explore the various benefits that exist as a result of one party dominance, with a special interest in analyzing how these advantages present themselves in the South African political landscape. The generalized advantages of one party dominance include: quick decision making (theoretically, the party in power acts as homogenous entity in decision making, employing the unification of ideals to make political decisions quickly and easily, a characteristic that is undeniably useful to developing countries, which often do not have the benefit of time when the need for a decision arises) (De Jager 2009); centralized decision-making (because the decisions are coming from one source, i.e. the ruling party, the decisions made are more focused and direct, implying a better rate of success) (De Jager 2009); and finally its unique applicability to developing countries (it is often suggested that developing countries, while in the process of ‘developing’, are more suited to unified control that the one party dominant system employs, and that more parties and political voices would only lengthen the period in which a country stayed ‘developing’) (Monyani 2018 ).

To analyze whether or not these ‘advantages’ are present in South African one party dominance, is to take a closer look at its current political climate. It could be said that the ANC is ‘quick’ to make decisions for the country, having effective and well developed strategies for crises. For example, the vaccine rollout strategy to combat the Covid-19 pandemic was developed quite quickly  (Diseases 2021), though the ANC seemed unable to act upon it; South Africa has an exceptionally low rate of vaccines at the time of this essay (37.50%  of all adults, according to the latest vaccines statistics) (Government 2021). This inability to adhere to the time constraints and goals set forth in their plans, as illustrated in the Covid-19 example, can be characterized as an ongoing problem for the ANC, with factors such as corruption, mismanagement, or insufficient resources heavily affecting the degree to which their strategies are implemented. Centralized decision making and the unification of ideals also do not apply to the ANC, as their party has already had two major divisions that resulted in party splits, within their short period of power. The first took place in 2008 and resulted in the formation of the Congress of the People party, and the second took place in 2013, that resulted in the formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters party  (Khambuhle 2019). And finally, to address the idea that an one-party dominant system supports the quicker development of a third-world country, within the period of time that the ANC has been in power, South Africa’s development has made no substantial progress, even being rated as ‘non-investment grade’ or ‘junk status’ by the Standard & Global Rating system in 2020  (Wasserman 2020). To summarize, whatever perceived ‘advantages’ there are to a one party dominant system, they are not present in the South African political environment.

The disadvantages of one party dominance:

There are many disadvantages to the one party dominance, but this paragraph will only offer those that are most prevalent in the current political environment of South Africa. While one party dominant systems occur in democracies, more specifically countries with democracies that are in the process of consolidation, this system gives rise to characteristics that seem, at worst, undemocratic, and at best, heavily affecting the quality of democracy  (De Jager 2009). Examples of this include: lack of accountability (a democracy is maintained through agents of accountability, which include prominent opposition parties, of which the ANC has none) (De Jager 2009); limiting the scope of political and civil society; and the exchange of civil and political liberties for the provision of basic necessities  (De Jager 2009), which is exceptionally prevalent in South Africa, as proven by a recent survey that suggests a significant percentage of participants were willing to “sacrifice democratic procedures for the promise of law and order and improved services” (Lanegran 2001). Furthermore, it acts as a highly effective breeding ground for corruption, (as a result of the lack of agents of accountability), a problem that has been plaguing the South African political environment for years, as is illustrated by the exceptionally high ranking South Africa has achieved in the Corruption Perceptions Index (44^th out of 195 countries)  (Transparency International 2020). The one party dominance system of politics does more harm than good to the country it operates in and entails many disadvantages in South Africa since the ANC’s rise to power.

Conclusion:

This essay’s main aim was to prove that the political system of one party dominance carries more disadvantages than advantages for its host country, through the context of a post-Apartheid South Africa. It analyzed whether or not the theoretical benefits of the one party dominant system were illustrated in present day South Africa, determining that they are not. In addition, it explored all of the harm the one party dominant system has done to the South African political climate, and posed questions for South Africa’s future as a political entity.

Works Cited

De Jager, N. 2009. “Voice and accountability in one party dominant systems .” The University Of Pretoria 74 (12): 93.

Diseases, The National Institute for Communicable. 2021. The Covid-19 vaccine rollout strategy . Johannesburg: NICD.

Endoh, T. 2015. “Democratic constitutionalism in post-apartheid South Africa.” Africa Review 67 (79): 4-5.

Government, South African. 2021. SA Corona virus . Accessed October 16, 2021. https://sacoronavirus.co.za/latest-vaccine-statistics/.

Khambuhle, I. 2019. “Coexistence as a Strategy for Opposition Parties in Challenging the African National Congress’ One party Dominance .” South African Journal of Political Studies 46 (4): 1.

Lanegran, K. 2001. “South Africa’s 1999 Election: Consolidating a Dominant Party System.” Indiana University Press 48 (2): 2.

Monyani, M. 2018 . “One Party State: Is It Good or Bad for Governance?” E-International Relations , May 25: 2-5.

Summers, W. 1984 . “Democracy in a One-Party State.” Maryland Law Review 43 (1): 2-3.

Transparency International . 2020. The Corruption Perceptions Index . Transparency International .

Wasserman, H. 2020. “South Africa is ‘junk’ – here’s what that means to you.” Business Insider, March 30: 1-8.

In the United States, protesters demanded that local governments strip police forces of their vast financial resources and redistribute services to other responders. Yet this call misses another insidious possibility: issues such as brutality and racial discrimination reappearing in private police forces. Although private security forces are not referred to as “private police” in the United States, elsewhere, they are often referred to by this alarming moniker. How does a country ensure proper safeguards against outsourced security developing the same plights as the police force? Despite private security officers’ large ranks in the United States, they are not always conspicuous. While the United States boasts over two private security officers for every police officer^[4], this ratio has grown even more disproportionate in other countries. One relevant case study for this phenomenon rests in South Africa — a country where there are nearly four private security officers for every one public police officer. In South Africa, private personnel filled a gap when the country was unable to provide adequate security services. But outsourcing security to private companies risks re-instating the racialized violence of ‘protection’ within the security domain. If the private security industry were to increase further in the United States, racist practices and biases run the risk of being preserved, carried over from the police state to the market-driven security apparatus. South Africa is one such cautionary tale of security outsourcing.  

As the eminent German sociologist Max Weber made clear in his political writings, the state is the only entity that “lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate violence.”^[5] If this is not the case, the state runs the risk of ceding authority to non-state enterprises, such as private security firms. When South Africa transitioned from an apartheid state, the new, democratically-elected government was woefully under-resourced. Moreover, the public’s trust in the police was at an all-time low. The police had been a primary perpetrator of apartheid-era violence, and now those same officers were expected to protect the very citizens they had systemically hurt previously.^[6] Although the scale and magnitude of apartheid-era violence is often perceived as being in a league of its own, it is important to remember that Western countries share an equally violent history of racism. Many Western countries — among them the United States, Great Britain, and France — have engaged in a centuries-long system of racial oppression through colonialism and slavery. Today, systemic racism persists through institutions such as the police. For instance, of the 1,000 people killed by police between 2013 and 2019 in the United States, approximately one-third were Black, despite Black people making up only 13% of the population.^[7]In addition, public trust in the country’s police has been marred by extreme cases of violence, making the situation in the US an even closer parallel to South Africa’s apartheid-era context.

^[8]

South Africa was not always destined to be dominated by private security. When Nelson Mandela assumed power in 1994, he was determined to revamp the economy through a bottom-up approach. This welfare-oriented strategy, called the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), mirrors a left-leaning policy that many police abolition activists would support: grassroots funding for community safety initiatives, public healthcare, and greater public education.^[9] This program targeted security at its roots by confronting socioeconomic inequality. However, the country’s funding dried up. Foreign investors scoffed at the progressive initiative, insisting that neoliberalism and top-down economic strategy was the only way to go. Eventually, Mandela’s administration conceded, abandoning the RDP for a neoliberal macroeconomic program called the Growth, Economic, and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy.^[10] GEAR promoted the marketization of public services, such as private security, making this economic program the backbone of the country’s upwards trend in privatization. And in the countries that should have the greatest concern regarding the privatization of security — such as the United States — this sort of neoliberal policy has been the foundation of their economies for decades. 

When Mandela accepted the private security industry’s stronghold on the country’s security apparatus, he pushed his administration to develop a system of regulation. Like South Africa’s path-breaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission a few years prior, the nascent democracy once again pioneered a democratic institution by creating the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (PSIRA).^[11] The PSIRA manages the private security industry as a business, keeping tabs on officers and companies with the clinical exactitude of an accountant. Although the PSIRA has admittedly been subject to criticism for its lack of regulatory teeth, it still remains an achievement as it monitors one of the greatest private security industries in the world. In its establishment, the South African government at least acknowledged a problem. Meanwhile, in Western countries today, there has been little more than a cursory nod to the industry’s existence.  

The role of private security in South Africa reached a fever pitch when the police service began leaning on the industry’s companies to bolster their own capacity in the years following GEAR’s installment. In recent years, these public-private partnerships have grown, where the services either work together, or the police hire private security companies to protect their precincts and supplement patrolling capabilities. For instance, between 2005 and 2006, the South African police spent close to ZAR100 million ($6.5 million USD) paying private security companies to protect them. This trend can be viewed as self-cannibalizing: the police service’s outsourcing leads to a perpetual cycle in the corrosion of trust between the public and the police. If the police force distrusts their own capabilities to protect themselves, why should South Africans trust the police to protect them? 

Despite the South African public’s general acceptance of the private security industry, the last five years have marked a sour shift in their reception of security outsourcing. One event that catalyzed the shift came days before Christmas in 2018. Private security guards were ordered by local residents to remove “rowdy” Black beachgoers from the posh Clifton Beach in Cape Town. Despite having no jurisdiction over the area, the security guards’ formal uniforms and air of authority made the group of friends comply.^[12] Given that police officers do not have the authority to remove people from the beach, this was especially outside of the private security force’s purview. A group of activists gathered on the same beach only one week later in protest. They slaughtered a sheep on the sand, brandishing it with a sign reading “Reclaim Clifton Beaches.”^[13] This moment marked a turning point: South Africans have begun to distrust private security too. 

As some Western countries are forced to confront mounting distrust in the police and demands for defunding, it is critical that states remain proactive in addressing the role of privatization in the security apparatus before they cede the “monopoly of violence” to private entities. The public-police relationship in many countries is broken, but outsourcing runs the risk of concretizing similar concerns of racism and aggression through private means. And without adequate regulation, the private security industry could pose a significant problem for Western societies in years to come. In order to ensure a more equitable and peaceful future, activists in the United States, Great Britain, and France must employ a two-pronged approach in fighting police brutality: demanding reform in the public police force while proactively advocating for adequate regulation of the private sector. 

^[1] Perrigo, Billy and Mélissa Godin. “Racism is Surging in Germany. Tens of Thousands Are Taking to the Streets to Call for Justice.” June 11, 2020. https://time.com/5851165/germany-anti-racism-protests/.

^[2] Civis Analytics, “Public Opinion Data on Black Lives Matter Police Reform,” June 19, 2020. Accessed: https://www.civisanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Public_Opinion_Data_BLM_CombinedCrosstabs_ALL.pdf.

^[3] Salingue, Julien. “Abolish the Police in France?” July 17, 2020. https://nobordersnews.org/2020/07/17/julien-salingue-debating-abolishing-the-police-in-france/. And Elliott-Cooper, Adam. “Defund the Police is Not Nonsense. Here’s What it Really Means.” July 2, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/02/britain-defund-the-police-black-lives-matter.

^[4] Small Arms Survey. (2011). Small Arms Survey 2011: States of security, 106. Retrieved from http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/publications/by-type/yearbook/small-arms-survey-2011.html. 

^[5] Max Weber, Peter Lassman, and Ronald Speirs, Weber: Political Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 310. 

^[6] Sabelo Gumedze, “Regulating the Private Security Sector in South Africa,” Social Justice 34, no. 3 (2007): 198. 

^[7] “National Trends,” Mapping Police Violence (2019). Accessed https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends.

^[8] Small Arms Survey. (2011). Small Arms Survey 2011: States of security, 106. Retrieved from http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/publications/by-type/yearbook/small-arms-survey-2011.html.

^[9] S. J. Mosala, J. C. M. Venter, and E. G. Bain, “South Africa’s Economic Transformation since 1994: What Influence Has the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) Had?,” The Review of Black Political Economy 44, no. 3–4 (January 2017): 327–40, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-017-9260-2.

^[10] Mark Shaw and Clifford Shearing, “Reshaping Security: An Examination of the Governance of Security in South Africa,” African Security Review 7, no. 3 (January 1998): 9.

^[11] Private Security Industry Regulation Act, Republic of South Africa (2001): 11. 

^[12] Rebecca Davis, “As SA Policing Fails, Private Security Steps In — But at a Cost,” Daily Maverick (South Africa), January 15, 2019. 

^[13] “Committee to begin inquiry into Clifton beach incident”. Cape Times (South Africa). February 04, 2019 Monday.

When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land…

On December 10^th, 1993, a strange drama was unfolding in Oslo. Before a star-studded audience at the famed Oslo City Hall, Francis Sejersted, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, commended together Frederik Willem de Klerk and Nelson Mandela on winning the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. All evening, a curiously religious mood hung in the air. F.W. de Klerk, quoting Afrikaans poets, highlighted in his Nobel lecture the Apartheid regime’s ‘soul-searching’ to “work for peace in our land,^[1] while Mandela drew on the work of the preacher Albert Lutuli, the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to frame his lecture. Sejersted praised both de Klerk and Mandela for recognizing “the God-factor in [all men]…[who] strive to serve [their] creator to the best of [their] ability…”^[2] “Reconciliation,” declared the Committee, “…the recognition that one must give in order to be able to take… provides hope not only for South Africa; it is also a shining example for the world that there are ways out of the vicious circle of…bitterness.”^[3] Committee members, prize winners, and observers held up the prize as a model for stitching together a world left in tatters by religious and ethnic divides. Four months later, Nelson Mandela won the South African presidency. “At the southern tip of the continent of Africa, a rich reward [had been] in the making,” and in 1994, they won a victory long-delayed.^[4] The spectacle of the 1993 Nobel cycle seemed to be the final nail in Apartheid’s coffin and great hope of reconciliation. But, how would the new regime in Pretoria choose “not to dwell on the deep wounds of the past?”^[5] And would it succeed?

Black churches functioned as key organizational networks and prophets of liberation and reconciliation in the South African movement for independence and its aftermath. Today, however, post-conflict transformation in South Africa stands largely stalled. The disenfranchisement and violence of the ancien régime lives on, even among the ‘born free’ generation. Nowhere is this reality more apparent than in the land itself. The Afrikaner colonial enterprise was fundamentally motivated by land, and to this day, white South Africans own over 70% of the country’s arable territory.^[6] The contemporary land reform debate brings to the surface difficult questions about what the Nobel Committee entrusted Mandela and de Klerk to achieve and typifies the unfinished business of reconciliation. As the South African democratic experiment grapples with the urgent and divisive question of land justice, Black churches have not been able to play a fruitful role in the debate since a short burst of activity in the early 2000s. This paper contends that the justitial-prophetic capacity of black churches and FBOs, which once pioneered ‘restorative justice’-based reconciliation, has declined. I offer three key reasons for this absence of dynamic prophetic voice on the land question. First, the South African Council of Churches (SACC), once the chief prophet of liberation and reconciliation, lost its momentum on the land debate after the early 2000s and has, since then, lost much of its social and political power. Second, the face of South African (and African) Christianity itself is evolving, with Pentecostal-type African-Initiated Churches (AICs) assuming greater influence among ordinary South Africans. I analyze, to this end, the emergence and growth of the largest church in South Africa, the Zion Christian Church (ZCC). Finally, taking the ZCC as an example, I argue that most AICs in South Africa are politically disengaged, which holds critical implications for theological contributions to the land justice debate and the future of public Christianity in the country.

Perspectives and Terms

Before beginning, it is important to address some of the key terminological debates and controversies relevant to discussing the church-state relationship in South Africa. First, this paper uses extensively the terminology of ‘prophet,’ ‘prophecy,’ and ‘prophetic voice’ to analyze the public and political roles black churches have played. The concept’s origin lies in the idea of ‘prophetic witness,’ through which Christian prophets offered contextual critiques and programmes to society on behalf of God.^[7] For scholars like Walshe and Nell,^[8] the “prophetic Christian voice”^[9] in South Africa brings biblical values to bear on social analysis and advocacy for justice. However, such a justice-focused understanding also brings a host of value judgements about the appropriate place and role of the church. South African ‘prophets,’ such as the Afrikaner churches, have as much been agents of injustice as they have been, in the grand tradition of the SACC, advocates for justice. Therefore, in this paper, I use a thinner understanding of ‘prophetic voice’ simply to characterize how churches relate to and work within particular socio-political contexts.^[10]

Second, this work rests on a comparative analysis of ‘mainline’ and ‘African-Initiated’ churches. I will use interchangeably the terminology of ‘mainline’ and ‘mission’ church to characterize the established mainline churches of South Africa, which trace their roots back to missionary work in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and generally maintain strong theological and organizational links to mother churches. On the other hand, African-Initiated Churches (AICs) are becoming the next frontier of Christian expression on the continent. Although, strictly speaking, AICs refer simply to churches initiated and controlled by Africans, for my purposes, a narrower understanding includes the recognition that most AICs in Southern Africa are related to Pentecostalism.^[11] These AICs do have early links to Evangelical missionaries of the early 20^th century, but they will not be characterized as ‘mission churches’ here because they are organizationally, theologically, and liturgically distinct from their Western Evangelical origins. With this conceptualization of the “African manifestation[s] of Christian pneumatology,”^[12] I borrow from Anderson and use the terminology of AICs in South Africa interchangeably with ‘African Pentecostals’ and ‘Pentecostal-type’ churches.^[13]

Public Christianity and religious activism in South Africa have operated at multiple registers, including the individual, local, communal, regional, national, and transnational. This, however, is a middle-range analysis focused neither on the “million acts of everyday struggle”^[14] in local Christian communities nor on networks mobilized in Lusaka, Dodoma, London, Geneva, and Washington. Instead, I will examine thinkers and activists at the national level who have contributed to the development, or lack thereof, of prophetic voice among South African churches. The land debate is currently dominating and transforming South African politics. Much of the literature on land reform falls into three broad categories: those that trace the genesis of current land policy and its political and ideological antecedents,^[15] those concerned with the implementation of land policy, its successes, and failures,^[16] and those analyzing recent developments in the land debate.^[17] None, however, have connected public theologies and Christianities to the questions of land justice and its recent upheavals. By bridging research in religious studies on the continent with the unfolding debate on land reform in political science, I will attempt to highlight the ambiguity of church roles in South Africa and some of the complex social, political, and economic relationships that are making and un-making productive public Christianities on the continent.

Prophecies of Subjugation, Prophecies of Liberation: Constructing White Afrikanerdom, Black Churches, and the SACC

The land question as it stands now has been defined by several critical junctures from the colonial era and independence struggle. Dutch and British colonialism,^[18] which eventually matured into rasse-Apartheid (race separation),^[19] constructed a distinctivelyAfrikaner role civilisatrice (underpinned by Afrikaner churches^[20]) linked to a particular understanding of the relationship between land and race. As settlers from marginalized European communities, colonists understood keenly the profound power of land. The Afrikaner weltanschauung thus embedded narratives of racial deservingness and identity within the traditional Anglo-Saxon understanding of property. Whiteness became the fundamental property^[21] upon which the colonial regime built Apartheid. Thus D. F. Malan, one of the principal architects of Apartheid and a Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, NGK) minister, argues:

Our history is the greatest masterpiece of the centuries. We hold this nationhood as our due for it was given us by the Architect of the universe. [His] aim was the formation of a new nation among the nations of the world…the history of the Afrikaner reveals a will and a determination which makes one feel that Afrikanerdom is not the work of men but the creation of God…^[22]

At the same time, black churches used their own theological resources and approaches to push back against the ideologies upon which their marginalization had been premised and to claim South African land as a site of meaning-making and material empowerment. In 1962, Dr. Beyers Naudé, an NGK minister, founded the journal Pro Veritate and the Christian Institute (CI, since 1968 the SACC).^[23] Under the visionary leadership of, among others, General-Secretaries Desmond Tutu (1978-1984), Beyers Naudé (1984-1998), Frank Chikane (1987-1994), Sam Buti (1979-?), and Peter Storey (1981-1983), the SACC became a famed foe of Apartheid.^[24] “There are alarming signs,” the SACC declared, “that this doctrine of [racial] separation has become, for many, a false faith, a novel gospel…such a claim inevitably conflicts with the Christian Gospel, which offers salvation, both social and individual…we believe that his kingdom and its righteousness have power to cast out all that opposes his purposes and keeps men in darkness.”^[25] In 1984, Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role within the SACC because “few other organisations can make the same claim to speak for the black population.”^[26] Slow and highly-confidential negotiations between the Apartheid regime and the then-imprisoned Deputy President of the ANC, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, and with ANC President Oliver Tambo, exiled in Lusaka,^[27] coalesced around the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) in 1991, the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum in 1993, a government of national unity, an interim constitution, and a transitional executive committee.^[28] In December of that year, Mandela and de Klerk were awarded the joint Nobel Peace Prize, and, just four months later, Madiba was sworn in as the first democratically-elected, black President of South Africa.

Prophets of Transitional Justice: The SACC, Reconciliation, and Restorative Justice

The spectacle of the 1993 Nobel cycle captured both the great hope of reconciliation and what would become its significant limitations in post-Apartheid South Africa. The 1993 interim constitution laid out CODESA’s vision for South Africa’s democratic transition: a transitional justice agenda focused on ‘national unity and reconciliation’ would become “a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society…and a future founded on…peaceful co-existence and development opportunities…”^[29] In exchange for the full and honest truth and acknowledgement about what had been done in the name of the ancien régime, the new state would grant its perpetrators amnesty through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) chaired by the Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu.^[30] Although a pragmatic political initiative in many regards,^[31] there is no doubt that the reconciliation agenda also represented a deeply-felt and deeply-embedded grappling with the profoundly philosophical and ethical dimensions^[32] of democratic transition. Religion, Christianity in particular, became a, if not the, crucial idiom of reconciliation: the TRC’s “notion of reconciliation…associated with contrition, confession, forgiveness and restitution”^[33] had emerged first in South African liberationist-Christian circles and filtered out to the broader anti-Apartheid coalition which ultimately formed CODESA.^[34] As part of its transformation from primarily an ecumenical organization to a storied collective preaching revolution, the SACC and its allies transitioned from prophets of liberation to prophets of reconciliation and a ‘restorative justice’ that would acknowledge harms, seek to repair them holistically, and improve social relationships.^[35] The key role of mainline churches in this project is captured, for instance, by these words from a SACC brochure: “the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation is not another Nuremberg. It turns its back on any desire for revenge…the space is thereby created where the deeper processes of forgiveness, confession, repentance, reparation, and reconciliation can take place.”^[36] Reconciliation thus became the “civic sacrament,”^[37] as Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts call it, through which South Africa was meant to recover. 

Truth commissions had been pioneered in Latin America, beginning with Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP).^[38] What was distinctive about South Africa’s TRC process, which worked with over 21,290 people,^[39] was its explicit effort to foreground reconciliationand its religious character.^[40] Reconciliation was performed and lived every day in the TRC.^[41] On the very second day of public hearings, for example, Tutu, clad in his purple vestments, broke down in tears and held his head in his hands listening to the harrowing story of ANC veteran Singqokwana Ernest Malgas.^[42] Often, commissioners, and Tutu and Alex Boraine in particular, would end testimonies with homilies^[43] and traditional songs like the Xhosa Senzeni Na.^[44] Many who told their stories, like Paul Williams, Frank Retief (two St. James Massacre’93 victims), and Ramorakane Mohajane (a Sharpeville’60 survivor) drew on Christian ideas to frame their testimonies and how they came to terms with their suffering.^[45] “The spotlight gyrates…,” as Cole writes, “exposing old lies and illuminating new truths.”^[46]

The South African model of transition, with truth and reconciliation at its center, has been heralded as a success and a model of reconciliation for a world torn apart by socio-political divides in popular^[47] and academic^[48] memory. Cynthia Ngeweu, whose son Christopher Piet was murdered as part of the Gugulethu Seven, summarized it as “this thing called reconciliation…if I am understanding it correctly…if it means the perpetrator, the man who has killed Christopher Piet, if it means he becomes human again…so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back…then I support it all.”^[49]

Unfinished Business: ‘Diminished Truth,’ Structural Legacies of Apartheid, and the Land Question

The TRC, or at least its Human Rights Committee where perpetrators, victims, and bystanders told their stories and the nation publicly grappled with its past, seemed to be a cathartic “miracle”^[50] for South Africa. The story of the Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee (RRC), however, was different. “So many in the white community,” Desmond Tutu writes, “were able to live normal lives, enjoying the freedoms of citizenship, with huge privileges and benefits.”^[51] It was, indeed, a privileged citizenship. Very little economic-racial data exists from the Apartheid period both because the government made very scant information available and because of the spatial isolation of black populations in ‘homeland’ territories.^[52] However, the 1994 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) does allow us to put numbers to some of this privilege on the eve of transition – on average, white, colored, and Indian people were wealthier, healthier, and happier than black people. 45% of surveyed Africans had completed at least grade six compared to 92% of whites,^[53] 44% of Africans lived in a house/part of a house compared to 82% of whites,^[54] 34% had access to sanitation and electricity infrastructures compared to close to 100% of whites,^[55] the average monthly household expenditure in white households was close to five times larger at R4742 than that of black households R1111,^[56] and African households had an average monthly income of R1005, compared to R6394 among white people.^[57] 39% of surveyed Africans were ‘dissatisfied’ with their quality of life, compared to 53% of whites who were satisfied.^[58] For black people, the most desperate needs included ‘jobs’ and ‘housing,’ while white people noted a need for ‘political settlement’ and ‘end of violence.’^[59] A majority of black people did not feel safe within or outside their homes.^[60] According to the 1996 census, 40% of the economically active (15-65) was unemployed (hitting near 50% in the poorest provinces).^[61]

Land was, and continues to be, a critical dimension of this structural struggle. As the TRC wrapped up in 1998, the RRC – the least well-known TRC committee – became particularly controversial. It could only make recommendations for reparation, and Shore argues rightly that the amnesty and reparations process “revictimized” survivors who “witnessed their violators go free without having received any compensation.”^[62] The government authorized R50 million^[63] as urgent interim reparations,^[64] alongside 20,000 victims, who received (after many delays) R660 million^[65] of individual reparation grants^[66] (roughly R30,000 to each). This hardly begins to tackle the structural problems facing black South Africa, briefly touched upon above. Thus, for Mamdani, the TRC, by not engaging more deeply with the thorny questions of structural transformation and social justice, produced a “diminished truth.”^[67] The ‘individualization’ of harm – a social and political necessity at the time – remains indefensible for some observers.^[68] As I briefly traced earlier, the colonial project concerned itself fundamentally with land, land dispossession,and exploitation of black labor to work the land – on farms, in mines, in factories around the country – which influenced deeply the formation of white Afrikanerdom and black opposition to it.^[69] Moreover, land and access to land is not simply an economic matter. As Shipton argues, “landholding is at the center of the confluence…[of] religion, ritual…cognition…adaptation, sustenance, and production…”^[70] Land, in short, is inextricably bound up with the metaphysical and material dimensions of enfranchisement, liberation, and reclamation in newly-democratic South Africa. Apartheid had limited Africans to only 13% of the reserved territories (‘Bantustans’/‘native homelands’).^[71] In 1994, the average black person held 1.3 hectares of land compared to 1,570 hectares owned by the average white person^[72] – a staggering 199% difference. About 82% of South African land is available for agricultural use,^[73] and 86% of this arable land was in white hands in 1994.^[74] 60,000 commercial landowners,^[75] representing the white minority (in 1996, 10.6% of the population^[76]), not only kept the majority of South African land out of black hands but exploited black labor through tenure systems. The political economy of white domination, and in particular the need for land reform, restitution, and redistribution were thus recognized as urgent by the new government.

The 1996 constitution acknowledged both the right to property and “the nation’s commitment to land reform,” for which property could be expropriated.^[77] While revolutionary in sentiment (at least by Western standards of property rights), its application was anything but. The ANC regime was called upon to reconcile multiple dimensions of deprivation and various political sensitivities wrapped up in the land question: white landowners controlled most of the arable land to produce export-oriented high-value products like meat and fruit.^[78] Lahiff argues that after 1994, black South Africans needed not access to commercial-scale production, but simply a return to the “thriving African peasant sector [of] the early 20th century,” which the Apartheid regime had destroyed.^[79] The new South African government needed to maintain a delicate balance, addressing not just land dispossession as systematic injustice (for example, as Zimbabwe did through Fast-Track Land Reform, FTLR in 2000), but also addressing rural poverty and urban exploitation^[80] while “contribut[ing] to economic development, without destroying the advanced agricultural sector or alienating politically conservative white landowners.”^[81] “Restitution,” argued the Land Affairs Department in 1998, “has turned out to be much more complex than was originally realised.”^[82] It was in this atmosphere – in a country with dispossession “greater than any other…in Africa”^[83] – which the neoliberals were about to step up to the plate.

The government, in its 1997 White Paper on Land Policy, set three policy priorities: restitution, redistribution, and tenure reform.^[84] The new state’s policy approach was strongly shaped by the World Bank and affiliated Bretton Woods technocrats,^[85] with whose advice the new government set out to redistribute 30% of all agricultural land in the first five years using a market-based approach.^[86] Throughout the independence movement period, neo-Marxist ideas about redistribution and expropriation – drawn from the rich tradition of post-colonial socialist thinking on the continent – had been a cornerstone of the policy vision espoused by key players like the COSATU, ANC, and the SACC.^[87] But, the policies of land justice in South Africa after 1994 do not reflect these radical visions. Trevor Manual, former South African Finance Minister (1996-2009), explains this ideological shift as such: “the collapse of the Soviet Union, the destruction of the Berlin Wall broke the…revolutionary romantic illusions of many…”^[88] The ‘willing buyer-willing seller’ system that emerged instead connects voluntary sellers and buyers (while the state provides grants and services to needy buyers)^[89] for redistribution. Meanwhile, the restitution program would hear claims from those who said they were dispossessed to restore land or provide capital or financial alternatives,^[90] and tenure reform would rest on a non-racial rights-based system that protected de facto landholders (vested workers).^[91] This policy ecosystem sidesteps many of the thorny questions about public interest expropriation enshrined in the constitution.

Despite these diverse policy pathways, the way property ownership and land justice has been enacted in post-1994 South Africa has remained a domain of controversy and failure. By 1999, 1% of land had been transferred, and in 2006, this number stood at 4.1%.^[92] The strategy of reform by “buy[ing] out white privilege”^[93] has been a slow, even stagnant process: in 2005, 3.5 million hectares of land had been transferred.^[94] In 2018, of the over 80 million arable hectares, the government had delivered 8.4 million.^[95] Compared to the government’s target of 30% redistribution by 1999 (a date later extended to 2015), by 2018, the government had only managed to transfer about 10% of all viable farmland.^[96] Approximately 60% of South Africans continue to hold no property or property rights (with only a small minority having secure tenure).^[97] A 2017 Land Audit revealed the true extent of these failures: Africans still owned only 4% of the land. 72% remained with white landowners.^[98] The “mediocre hucksters of neoliberalism” had managed to push for a form of individualized and atomized land reconciliation that ultimately failed to deliver the fruits of land justice to black South Africa.^[99]

But the land question in African politics rarely rests easy. Already with FTLR in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s, the landscape of policy possibilities in Southern Africa was shifting: “the winds of change that were started by Mugabe [we]re indeed blowing across South Africa and Namibia and fueling the voices that call for a radical, non-market driven land reform process.”^[100] The 2014 election brought the land question to the forefront of South African politics with renewed urgency. In July 2013, Julius Malema – a former ANC Youth League renegade – began transforming the South African political landscape narratively and visually through the new Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party. The EFF’s ubiquitous red beret, “a must-have fashion accessory,” stood as a “symbol of commitment to the struggle for economic freedom.”^[101] The party – ideologically polysemic but with socialist influences and representing a “radical blackness”^[102] – advocates for expropriating white-owned land without compensation, nationalizing the ‘strategic sectors’ of the economy, and for “a move from reconciliation to justice”^[103] (emphasis added). The EFF and its firebrand politicians – Malema, Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, Floyd Shivambu – began putting forward an explicit and piercing critique of the reconciliation paradigm, labelling the post-1994 Rainbow Nation as an extension of the “white supremacist state” in the absence of the “economic emancipation of the Black majority.”^[104] That the EFF was tabling a publicly and politically-resonant agenda became clear when the new party became the third-largest in the 2014 parliament, overtaking older and more established opposition blocs like the United Democratic Movement (UDM) and Congress of the People (COPE). In raw numbers, the EFF only picked up 25 seats and the ANC certainly towered over it with 249 seats,^[105] but it was a clear signal to the old guard about shifting tides in South African politics. As the 2019 election season began heating up, the land reform debate was back in the public consciousness. At its 54^th National Conference in December 2017, the ANC acknowledged that “expropriation of land without compensation should be among the key mechanisms available to government to give effect to land reform…”^[106] In 2018, the EFF tabled a motion calling for a review of Section 25 of the Constitution,^[107] which set up the principle of public interest expropriation with compensation.^[108] The Constitutional Review Committee’s public hearings confirmed the “overwhelming support for constitutional amendment and expropriation of land without compensation.”^[109] In August 2018, Akkerland Boerdery became the first white-owned property to be sent a controversial, non-negotiated expropriation notice after initial sale negotiations with the government stalled.^[110] In this political context, the 2019 election saw the EFF nearly double its seat count,^[111] keeping land reform high on the national agenda. The Constitutional Review Committee’s findings were reaffirmed by President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2019 Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture, which recommended a significant rethinking of the Western notions of property and property compensation on which the 1996 property clause was originally based.^[112] As of November 2019, Ad Hoc Committee to Initiate and Introduce Legislation Amending Section 25 of the Constitution continues to work on what form this new land reform regime might take, and expects to wrap up by 31^st March, 2020.^[113]

For the foreseeable future, land justice and land reconciliation will remain salient in the public and political consciousness. The neoliberal moment in South African politics is at a point of crisis, and political challenges fielded by parties like the EFF demand a concerted reconfiguration of the land question, and broadly, a radical rethinking of the reconciliation framework within which land justice has thus far been embedded. Indeed, it is difficult to disagree with McCusker, Moseley, and Ramutsindela’s observation that even as the TRC pioneered the restorative justice paradigm, its legacy on and the ANC’s approach to land reform displays a “sheer lack of imagination…[in] reconfiguring either the [colonial-era] patterns or processes of the production of space.”^[114] New voices like the EFF are pushing the public and political elites in new directions. The South African religious establishment, whose prophetic imaginaries had sustained the liberation movement for decades and propelled forward the reconciliation paradigm near the end of Apartheid, however, is adding little to the current land debate. Why? This paper offers three key reasons for the absence of a dynamic prophetic voice on the land question. First, the South African Council of Churches (SACC), once the chief prophet of liberation and reconciliation, lost its momentum on the land debate after the early 2000s and has, since then, diminished significantly in its social and political power. Second, the face of South African (and African) Christianity itself is evolving, with Pentecostal-type African-Initiated Churches (AICs) assuming greater influence among ordinary South Africans. I analyze, to this end, the emergence and growth of the largest church in South Africa (and the second-largest in Africa) – the Zion Christian Church (ZCC). Finally, taking the ZCC as an example, I argue that most AICs in South Africa focus on the experiential and charismatic dimensions of Christianity and remain political disengaged, which holds critical implications for theological contributions to the land justice debate and the future of public Christianity in the country.

“Going Back to the Church:” The SACC’s Missing Prophets and Political Marginalization

In 1994, Desmond Tutu introduced Nelson Mandela as the first democratically-elected President of South Africa on the steps of the Union Building in Pretoria. “Now,” he said, “I am going back to the church to do the real business of the church and leave politics to those well qualified to do it.”^[115] Yet, as South Africa began transitioning to a democracy, organizations like the SACC were called upon not simply to ‘go back to the church,’ but also to move from a liberatory theology to a “theology of nation-building.”^[116] Kumalo and Dziva describe this approach as a ‘critical solidarity,’ through which churches support “those government initiatives that promote justice, peace, and democracy, whilst continuing [their] protest against unjust policies and its protection of the interests of the poor and minority groups.”^[117] At a 1994 conference at Vereeniging, the SACC described its role in a democratic South Africa in this way.^[118] However, this is not precisely where the SACC’s prophetic potential lies. After all, ‘critical solidarity’ is “redolent with ambiguity.” In fact, when articulated, it often implies (if not outrights constructs) a ‘subsidiarity’ between state and church. For some, like Vellem, “it is a misnomer for the [prophetic] church to be in solidarity with the state, i.e. with power.”^[119] Villa-Vicencio offers a more nuanced and powerful take on churches’ ideal roles after 1994. South African churches have a moral imperative to continue to lead with contextual voices in the arena of human rights and law-making. Otherwise, institutions like the SACC would merely become “an escape from the challenge of discerning the liberating presence of God in the midst of the struggle for a better world.”^[120] In other words, it is not for churches to show solidarity with the democratic state or simply to speak about unjust practices. Churches must continue to lead publicly and politically with novel and evolving prophetic voices.

However, though accepted in principle, the ecclesiological practice of dynamic prophetic witness on the land question has generally eluded the SACC since 1994 for two key reasons. First, the council has reproduced, in important ways, the ANC’s traditional line on land reform and land reconciliation. As we have seen above, the ANC adopted, under pressure from the Washington neoliberals, a market-oriented, gradualist vision of land reform and land justice. In the early 2000s, there was some pushback from the SACC on willing buyer-willing seller. In an October 2004 submission to the Portfolio Committee on Agriculture and Affairs, the council prioritized the long-term vision of land reform over its pace: “the success of land reform should not be measured in terms of how quickly the ‘task’ is completed or even how much land is transferred, but rather how extensively…it advances…the restoration of human dignity.”^[121] At this time, the SACC advanced the idea that “ownership of land was never absolute…the Jubilee tradition affirmed the redistributive nature of God’s commitment to the poor, seeking to ensure just and equitable access to land and resources…”^[122] This redistributive and pro-poor activism for ‘humans as stewards of the land,’^[123] however, has diminished.

In the years since, just as land reform itself has lost its momentum (at least until recently), so has the SACC’s advocacy for it. To be fair, the council has pushed back in other ways against the neoliberal logic of the contemporary South African state. Most prominent among these is its support for the People’s Budget Campaign, which seeks to transform the understanding of ‘fiscal responsibility’ from an austerity-oriented one to a person- and society-oriented one.^[124] It has criticized the “mortgaged state” of South Africa and particularly Jacob Zuma, the face of corruption and neopatrimonialism within the ANC.^[125] It has condemned South African militarization as detracting from the urgent needs of development.^[126] Kuperus argues that these developments reflect clearly “the survival of the SACC’s critical and prophetic voice.”^[127] On the land question, however, after the short burst of activity in the early 2000s, the council has been fairly silent. Its voice is missing from the unfolding national dialectic between the ANC and EFF’s approaches to reform as well as on recent developments on expropriation without compensation. In a 2017 statement, the SACC laid out its sparse strategic vision of land reform as follows: the land question should be dealt with through “a comprehensive spatial utility approach that involves all areas, rural and urban, communal and freehold; with appropriate trade-offs to the satisfaction of all.”^[128] Thus, even as the land justice debate occupies the current political consciousness, the SACC has not offered a concrete program nor a vision that goes beyond the reconciliatory “trade-offs” of 1994. During a period of renewed focus on land reform, its justitial-prophetic voice on land justice has been absent from ecumenical statements, in parliament, in reports, and steering committees.

Second, theSACC’s influence within the ruling ANC, and therefore the South African state, has diminished significantly, which limits its prophetic capacity on the receiving end. Democratization in the 1990s blurred the line between the SACC and the new South African state. The “remarkably humanizing policies” of the Mandela government and the euphoria of democratization led organizations like the council to exchange their ‘prophetic distance’ from the pre-1994 state for ‘critical solidarity’ with the post-1994 state.^[129] Already, through appointments to the TRC, this process had begun. Other key religious leaders like Brigalia Bam, Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, Makhenkesi Stofile, Mvume Dandala, Peter Marais, Frank Chikane, Motsoko Pheko, Sipho Mzimela, and Stanley Mogoba joined the government or the civil services.^[130] Some like Allan Boesak found themselves embroiled in corruption scandals.^[131] The SACC, because of its close association with the state, has been criticized on a variety of fronts, including its hesitation in criticizing the government’s record on poverty reduction, Zimbabwe’s human rights violations, response to HIV/AIDS, and the corruption of the Zuma regime (which only recently did the SACC become very vocal in criticizing) as well as the rape charges against him.^[132] As Storey writes, institutions whose “theological clarity had been forged in the heat and burden of the struggle” began losing their way by “signing onto Caesar’s payroll.”^[133] The SACC did begin voicing more insistent criticisms of the ANC, particularly on the Zimbabwe issue and on the marginalization of the poor, in the late 2000s,^[134] which then led the Zuma regime to make a concerted effort to marginalize the council’s political role and restrict the reach of its voice.^[135] In July 2009, the Zuma government brought various religious groups together to form the National Interfaith Leaders Council (NILC) – a partnership with the government on public service provision. In a “remarkable development,”^[136] the SACC – once the foremost religio-political authority in the country – was not invited onto the NILC.^[137] Mogomotsi Diutwileng, a former SACC staffer, describes the council’s decline: “The SACC is not influential. If we had influence and power, the government would consult with us before it takes certain decisions…even when the church stands on a public platform to issue a statement, if we are lucky, a spokesperson of the ANC replies to the statement—that is, if we are really lucky…”^[138] Without financial support from the government or international organizations, the SACC was forced to shut down its Parliamentary Liaison Office in 2016 – a disturbing indicator of its waning political voice. Its national staff, which numbered at over six hundred at the council’s height of influence, now has dropped to one, along with twelve to twenty regional staff. ^[139] “Inspirational and charismatic” leaders like Bayers Naudé, Peter Storey, and Frank Chikane neglected to pass on the prophetic reins to a younger generation of activists.^[140] The contemporary SACC, shows Kuperus, has become only one of the many organizations that are able to capture the national imagination.^[141] Espousing a politics of conciliation and reconciliation, the council has not successfully developed a substantive theology of reconstruction and nation-building.

Because of these developments, the SACC has been unable to bring a productive prophetic voice to the land reform debate or address the higher-order challenges inherent to the restorative justice paradigm, which tends to dissociate social justice from social reconciliation. Vena Mqondisi, Director of the Western Cape Province of Churches, says that

We seem to have lost the prophetic voice…I think to a certain extent…we have been very complacent…we should do away with critical solidarity with the government. I think our solidarity should be with the poor and marginalized.^[142]

 In sum, the SACC today is unable to provide prophetic guidance on the land question because it lost its momentum on the debate after the early 2000s and because of its complex relationship with the ANC regime. But it is not simply the chief prophet of South African Christianity that has changed since 1994. In fact, the face of South African (and African) Christianity itself is evolving, with critical implications for theological contributions to the land justice debate and the future of public Christianity in the country.

“The People Will Look for the Church:” Africa’s Evangelical Turn, the Changing Christianity of South Africa, and the Zion Christian Church

African-Initiated Churches (AICs) – including Ethiopian-type churches, Zionists, and Apostolics – emphasize “the working of the Holy Spirit.”^[143] Many Southern African AICs trace their roots to the American healing and Pentecostal movements which spread on the continent through missionary work in the 20^th century. However, AICs imbue their focus on the Holy Spirit with distinctively African characteristics, embedding their experience of Christianity into a relational and contextual framework.^[144] West suggests that unlike the traditional mission-sponsored churches, which center mainline churches’ characteristic ‘other-worldliness,’ AICs introduced to Evangelical mission Christianity a focus on the “explanation, prediction, and control of space-time events” common to “traditional African religious systems.”^[145] Because mission Christianity was pushed onto a population cognitively oriented to ‘this-worldly’ spirituality, “Christianity would be judged in these terms.”^[146] But, as Ranger argues, AICs did not just ‘Africanize’ mission-Evangelical teaching, they also intensified it and propelled its transformation into an “oral prophetic” tradition.^[147] AICs, writes Mashabela, allow black people to “live out the Gospel as Africans.”^[148] The AIC’s ‘prophet’ (particularly in Zionist churches), through whom God speaks to congregants and addresses their concerns, usually diverges from the mission churches by forging their credentials in actively addressing this-worldly concerns like sickness and misfortune.^[149] 

Opportunities for advancement, a resonant mix of Western and African thinking, and spaces for healing and releasing tensions and frustrations communally have all been cited as reasons for the emergence of AICs in Africa.^[150] Scholars like Thompson also situate the proliferation of AICs within the larger growth of an “Evangelical-Pentecostal-charismatic spirituality” around the world in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.^[151] According to a 2011 survey, Sub-Saharan Africa is home to the greatest share of the world’s evangelicals at nearly 39% of the total Sub-Saharan population.^[152] In South Africa, AICs have seen startling growth. In 1996, 26.8% of South Africans belonged to AICs. The 2001 census identified a third of the population (nearly 32%) as AIC members.^[153] Unlike the general trend to secularism in Western countries,^[154] in South Africa, Christianity continues to experience steady growth into the 21^st century. In 2001, about 79% of South Africans were Christian.^[155] In 2010, a Pew survey estimated this number to stand at 87%.^[156] In the official 2013 General Household Survey, nearly 86% of South Africans were identified as Christians.^[157] Moreover, 74% of surveyed South Africans in 2010 found religion to be very important in their lives (and 66% of them went so far as to say the Bible should be the basis of law). South Africans consistently report community organizations like churches as key frontline resources.^[158] In 1991, there were at least six thousand AICs in South Africa, to which 46% of the black population belonged.^[159] By far, the biggest Christian sector in South Africa is the Evangelicals, with over 22 million members in 2016.^[160] This brief quantitative sketch highlights two important trends: one, the continued salience of a growing Christian sector in South Africa, which gives churches significant social capital and power, and two, the importance of Evangelicals, and particularly the AICs. Gifford argues that the shift away from mainline/mission churches in Africa to Pentecostal and Pentecostal-type AICs is not just a “significant realignment within African Christianity,” but also represents a powerful filtering down of elite mission Christianity to the masses.^[161]

This gives AICs, which constitute the largest and a swiftly-growing Christian sector in South Africa, significant potential. In particular, I focus on the Zion Christian Church – the largest AIC in South Africa (and in Southern Africa) and the second-largest in Africa.^[162] The ZCC was founded by Engenas Lekganyane, an evangelist from Mamabolo, who had his education in the Word of Christ with the Free Church of Scotland and then with Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), established in South Africa by North American missionaries in 1908. ZCC lore holds that Lekganyane received a vision in 1910 and in 1925, he founded the ZCC.^[163] Lekganyane commanded “supreme charismatic authority”^[164] in the church and left its control to the ‘bishops’ (leaders), who come from the Lekganyane family. Edward Lekganyane (1926-1967) and Barnabas Lekganyane (1954-) have led the church as ‘prophet-type leaders with administrative talents,’^[165] focused on faith healing, dancing, drums, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, nightly communion, sing-song testimonies, pilgrimages to the Lekganyane home and ZCC headquarters in Moria, symbolic dress codes,^[166] alongside various theological and liturgical continuities with mission Pentecostalism.^[167] Exact numbers are not available, but the ZCC has at least 10 million members in South Africa, with hundreds of other congregations around the world. Indeed, even with Engenas Lekganyane’s guiding proclamation that “a true Church will not look for the people, but the people will look for the Church,”^[168] the ZCC has had a phenomenal record of growth: in 1990 it had about 1 million members. By the 2001 census, this number had grown to 4.9 million.^[169] This is the latest government data available, making it safe to assume that the number is much higher today – at least 10 million, by ZCC’s most recently stated estimates.^[170] ZCC members comprise at least half of all AIC members in South Africa, and some estimates put the number up to 11-12 million, which would make ZCC members half of all evangelicals in the country. Despite the dearth of reliable data, ZCC members, in their silver-star badges, headscarves, caps, and uniforms, are a highly visible constituency in South Africa, particularly in the North. Müller argues that the ZCC exists as a ‘cultural enclave’ – a “world within worlds,” a “borderland world” – which makes it especially popular among poorer South Africans in both urban and rural areas.^[171] The ‘enthusiastic Christianity’ of the ZCC provides meaningful and “concrete answers to African problems”^[172] within the cultural, social, and economic worlds of its congregations. At the same time, the ZCC’s top leadership commands a powerful financial network supported by social security programs, insurance, transportation, and agribusinesses.^[173] Engenas Lekganyane, for example, is said to have made recruiting trips in a Rolls Royce.^[174] The creation of these cultural enclaves by the ZCC also influences its politics, or lack thereof. While AICs, and particularly the ZCC, are leading a socio-religious zeitgeist in South Africa, they are oddly absent from the country’s political scene— a strange state of affairs considering the long entwinement between church and state in South Africa. Yet, as the next section demonstrates, the ZCC’s lack of political participation is not novel or surprising. For all the decades the SACC and its political allies were preaching liberation, there was a “surprising silent majority”^[175] that still remains. The apolitical tradition of this ‘silent majority,’ combined with the ascendance of the ZCC in South Africa, I will argue, accounts for the declining prophetic potential of black churches when it comes to the question of land justice.

“All Things End and Prayer Alone Shall Remain”: The Politics of African Pentecostals and the ZCC

Evangelicals approached the radical-liberationist period of anti-Apartheid politics in diverse ways. The “cultural adaptability of the discourse of the Spirit,” says Thompson, enables multivocal, even inconsistent, responses to the socio-political context.^[176] Some, like Ranger and Balcomb, show how evangelicals in pre-1994 South Africa existed within the ambiguous “interstices between activism and acquiescence.”^[177] While institutions like the SACC were advocating for an explicitly political mission of active resistance through the Christian medium, others, like Pentecostal-type churches, provided their congregants, often the most powerless in society, an “ideological and symbolic”^[178] mode of implicit resistance through their religious practices. Comaroff argues that through its rituals and imaginaries, the ZCC — “the Zionist church par excellence”— articulated a situated form of internal protest against colonial and neocolonial “cultural forms.”^[179] Some scholars consider these forms of protest as symbolic and culture, and therefore inherently political.^[180] As Schoffeleers writes, “what looks like acquiescence to one party may be described by another as a subtle form of resistance.”^[181] Ranger advances one of the most optimistic readings of Evangelicals in Africa, arguing that AICs can make significant contributions to the democratic consolidation process because of their potential to “moralize” neopatrimonial African regimes and address the needs of their communities on the ground.^[182] Because the ZCC offers its congregations significant autonomy, they gain the capacity to address essentially local problems.^[183] Yet, as Gifford shows, the ‘faith gospel’ of African Pentecostals often clashes with the structural experiences of most Africans.^[184] For my purposes, I will borrow from Schoffeleers’ understanding of ‘political acquiescence,’ which he defines as a church’s avoidance of “political activism of a critical nature” (emphasis added).^[185] Taking that perspective, despite the AICs’ “cultural dynamism”^[186] and their potential contributions as civil society actors,^[187] it is difficult to contest the fact that Pentecostal-type churches in South Africa rarely venture into the explicitly political arena. On an issue like land reform, which churches cannot address without wading into the nitty-gritty politics of it, the AICs leave a significant portion of the justitial-prophetic role they could play on the table. Indeed, Gifford quotes one Liberian bishop who, frustrated by the “insignificant role” AICs had been playing in the democratization of Africa, exclaimed: “we don’t know why they won’t join us.”^[188]

Like many AICs, the ZCC espouses no “systematic theology.”^[189] However, two key themes emerge clearly in analyses of its theology and praxis. One, the ZCC both draws on and diverges from the practices of mission Pentecostals. The Holy Spirit is the guiding framework within which the church’s practices are embedded. This “spirit-oriented Christianity” foregrounds the experience of the Holy Spirit through experiences like healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues.^[190] Müller shows that while the traditional Pentecostal language of being ‘born again’ is absent from the ZCC, ZCC members are baptized into the church^[191] and abide by strict moral codes, including restrictions on alcohol, tobacco, and pork.^[192] This emphasis on a “personal encounter with God through the power of the spirit” and “signs and wonders” represents key continuity with the early years of mission Pentecostals.^[193] Yet, the ZCC, like most AICs in Southern Africa, also diverges from classical Pentecostalism through rituals and forms that many label “unscriptural and ‘heathen.’”^[194] Their clothing, dancing and drums, and prophetic and healing practices can all be considered ‘Pentecostal-type with African characteristics.’ The prophets of the ZCC, most prominent among whom are Engenas Lekganyane and the subsequent Lekganyane family bishops, are very important and typify the experiential and charismatic Christianity of the church. Prophets “hear from God and proclaim his will to people.”^[195] They bring distinctive embodied practices to church services, including jerking, snorting, and so on, and play multiple social roles, including as conduits between congregants and the Spirit,  advisors, and maintainers of social equilibrium.^[196] Linked to this first pattern is the second: ZCC preachers offer strong critiques of ‘traditional’ African rituals in favor of their own healing practices that draw both from their Pentecostal antecedents and its Africanization. The critical importance of healing practices with the ZCC has led some, like Schoffeleers, to label it a “healing church.”^[197] 82% of ZCC members surveyed by Anderson in the early 1990s rejected consulting traditional diviners.^[198] Müller shows how ZCC preachers criticize traditional practices, especially the role of the ngaka (traditional diviner) and muti (traditional medicine). “Who in their right mind,” he quotes from the preacher at a sermon he attended, “would be so gullible as to think that the blood of a slaughtered chicken would be of any beneficial use?”^[199] Instead, prophets espouse the ZCC’s own holistic “material theology” ^[200] that focuses on individual and social healing, health, and well-being.^[201] In this role, “the offices of prophet and diviner coalesce.”^[202] According to Anderson, “many ZCC members saw [healing] as the primary function of a prophet.”^[203] Indeed, the emphasis on healing as a manifestation of the African-Christian experience has been a part of the ZCC canon since the earliest years of Engenas Lekganyane, who forged his religious credentials through his renown as a healer.^[204] ZCC congregations expect these healing practices and ‘prophetic therapy’ to diagnose, to effectively heal, and to help them through troubles of misfortune, witchcraft, family conflicts, and secret sins.^[205] Through the ZCC’s healing role, its members find Christian solutions to pain and suffering.^[206] Occupied with “the micro-world of the suffering individual,”^[207] however, the ZCC and its members remain fairly disengaged from policy activity and activism.

In the South African case, Balcomb distinguishes between five archetypical Evangelical responses to the independence struggle: the conservatives, particularly the Church of England in South Africa, became “havens” for conservative white Evangelicals fleeing the ‘radical liberalism’ of the SACC; the pragmatists, including the Rhema Bible Church, were first apolitical and slowly politicized as the movement gained momentum in the 1980s; proponents of the ‘third way,’ like African Enterprise, attempted to opposed Apartheid but espoused a gradualist, nonviolent form of opposition; the ‘liberationists,’ encapsulated most famously the Apostolic Faith Mission’s Frank Chikane, participated openly in anti-Apartheid politics and tried to ally themselves with the SACC through organizations like the African Independent Church Association (AICA), and finally, some, such as Nicholas Bhengu’s Back to God Movement, “transcended political categories and asserted the alternative values of the kingdom of God” through their belief in “the right to reach our hand to God in the unseen World.”^[208] This last category is the one into which the ZCC roughly fits, though not quite.

During the Apartheid period, the ZCC’s ‘apolitical’ positioning often invited accusations of being a collaborationist institution by anti-Apartheid activists. Schoffeleers, for instance, describes the strange experience of journalist Allister Sparks, who visited the ZCC’s Moria headquarters in 1982. In an all-black church, Sparks saw portraits of Afrikaner heroes and white leaders and a replica of the Voortrekker Monument. In 1960, Minister of Bantu Administration and Development, Daan de wet Nel, visited the ZCC’s Easter celebrations.^[209] According to Sparks, when another ‘minister of Bantu government’ visited the church in 1965, Edward Lekganyane thanked him for bringing “orderly freedom” to black South Africans.^[210] At the 1980 Easter gathering, Bishop Lekganyane called on ZCC members to abide by the government’s homeland policy and other Apartheid laws as domestic and international opposition to the regime was heating up.^[211] The political ambiguity of the ZCC is epitomized most infamously by the church’s 75^th-anniversary celebration on Easter Sunday in 1985. To the great consternation of the ANC and SACC, the ZCC invited President P.W. Botha to address a crowd of over two million black ZCC members in Moria. Bishop Barnabas Lekganyane felicitated Botha for “his efforts to spread peace and love.”^[212] Botha’s speech, punctuated by applause, criticized the “messengers of evil” ^[213] (assumed to be the ANC and its allies) because “we read in Romans 13 that every person is subject to the governing authorities. Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad conduct.”^[214] Among major SACC leaders like Beyers Naudé and Desmond Tutu, the spectacle of the anniversary celebration elicited shock and disbelief.^[215] The same year, Bishop Lekganyane said sanctions were hurting black South Africans and eroding the “goodwill between blacks and whites.”^[216]

After 1994, the ZCC emphasized its “spiritual war against hatred amongst fellow South Africans.”^[217] In describing their contributions to the struggle against Apartheid, ZCC’s leadership highlighted their work toward moral reconstruction by advocating against addictive substances and violence, their schools, clinics, and contributions to local economies. The work of active resistance, argued the ZCC, could be undertaken by its members outside the church’s purview.^[218] In his testimony before the TRC in November 1999, Emmanuel Motolla from the ZCC Bishop’s Council, summed up the church’s position on political activism as follows: “the church never had any problem with any political organisation…[but] in most cases, this church simply keeps quiet.” When questioned by Commissioner Rev. Dr. K. Mgojo about the ZCC’s political disengagement during Apartheid, Motolla stated: “the Zion Christian Church did not lead people into a mode of resistance against apartheid…but we taught our people, all these people who are members of this church, listen to his Grace’s sermons regularly and they are taught nothing less than rejecting that which is evil and unjust.”^[219] This leads scholars like Thompson to argue that the idea that “once spiritual problems were taken care of, the social problems would take care of themselves” guided AICs.^[220] Since then, things have not changed much.

Once a powerful counter-culture haven “in the heartless world of white political power,”^[221] the spaces for prophetic political engagement have opened up and the needs of ZCC congregants have shifted. Still, Engenas Lekganyane’s injunction that “all things end and prayer alone shall remain”^[222] — that ‘all may change but Jesus never’^[223] — continues to guide the church’s approach to politics even in a transformed external landscape. On the land question, socially powerful churches have the power to both legitimate and delegitimate the market-led system the ANC regime adopted after 1994.^[224] In the ZCC’s case, its majority-poor membership would ideally lay the groundwork for a church highly-engaged with land reform and the questions of socio-economic justice latent within it. After 1994, far from needing counter-cultural enclaves, the new South Africa and its disenfranchised — many concentrated in AIC congregations— need directed and resolute justitial-prophetic guidance in politics. Yet, the material prosperity of the Lekganyane family, preachers’ and prophets’ roles as agents of individual and communal healing, and the church’s history of political disengagement all contribute to the ZCC’s political detachment. Moreover, as a civil society actor, the ZCC’s capacity for transformation at the grassroots is limited and ambiguous.^[225] In fact, the “redistributive ethic…of the Christian articulation”^[226] is largely missing from most of South Africa’s Pentecostal-type churches. The ZCC, in short, carries significant but unfulfilled potential as a liberatory network in the absence of any systemic and critical engagement with the black working-class struggle.^[227] 

Conclusion

In 1994, South Africa embarked on one of the most ambitious political and ethical projects of the era of decolonization. Black churches were key players in the South African movement for independence, assuming prophetic-liberatory roles to push back against the Afrikaans ideology (embodied by, among others, Afrikaner churches) that helped underpin and justify Apartheid. After the 1994 election brought the ANC to power, South Africa adopted a mission of post-conflict transformation, epitomized by the spectacle of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which broadcast the lived experiences of Apartheid into South Africans’ homes (and across the world) into the late 1990s. Today, this reconciliation project stands stalled, and nowhere is this reality more apparent than in the land itself. White South Africans continue to own a majority of the country’s arable territory. The issue of land reconciliation, and the economic grievances it symbolizes, has been the TRC’s major failure and continues to be one of the most salient and divisive issues in the country (and region). South African churches have not been able to play a fruitful role in the land reform debate ever since a short burst of activity in the early 2000s, even though the issue has only become more politically and socially relevant. Why? This paper advances three interrelated explanations. First, the justitial-prophetic capacity of the SACC, once the chief prophet of liberation and reconciliation, has declined. Second, the nature of South African Christianity is undergoing a significant transformation, with Pentecostal-type African-Initiated Churches (AICs) becoming increasingly influential. And third, analyzing the biggest AIC in South Africa —- the Zion Christian Church — I argue that most AICs in South Africa are politically unengaged, which holds critical implications for theological contributions to the land justice debate. Altogether, this paper highlights both the ambiguity of church roles in South Africa and on the continent as well as some of the complex social, political, and economic relationships transforming South Africa’s public Christianities.

About the Author

Ankushi A. Mitra is a senior at Georgetown University’s International Politics-Security Studies Program, where she holds the Junior Centennial Fellowship. She is interested in displacement, subaltern citizen-making, and development in the Middle East and Africa, which she will be pursuing further through an M.Sc. in International Development in 2020-2021. This project was made possible with generous assistance from Georgetown’s John & Pat Figge Fellowship, with constant advice and support from Dr. Lahra Smith at the African Studies Program, Dr. Drew Christiansen, S.J. at the Catholic Studies Program, and the wonderful 2019-2020 Figge fellowship cohort.

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Endnotes

^[1] “F. W. de Klerk – Acceptance and Nobel Lecture,” The Nobel Prize, December 10^th, 1993. Accessed at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1993/klerk/26129-f-w-de-klerk-nobel-lecture-1993/.

^[2] “Presentation Speech by Francis Sejersted, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,” The Nobel Prize, December 10^th, 1993. Accessed at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1993/ceremony-speech/.

^[3] “Presentation Speech by Francis Sejersted, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,” The Nobel Prize, December 10^th, 1993. Accessed at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1993/ceremony-speech/.

^[4] “Nelson Mandela – Acceptance and Nobel Lecture,” The Nobel Prize, December 10^th, 1993. Accessed at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1993/mandela/26130-nelson-mandela-nobel-lecture-1993/.

^[5] “Presentation Speech by Francis Sejersted, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,” The Nobel Prize, December 10^th, 1993. Accessed at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1993/ceremony-speech/.

^[6] “Land Audit Report,” Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, Republic of South Africa, November 2017, pp. 7-9.

^[7] Wessel Bentley, “Redefining Christianity’s ‘Prophetic Witness’ in the Post-Apartheid South African Democracy,” Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 39(1) (2013), pp. 261-262.

^[8] Ian Nell, “In Search of Meaning: Moving from the Prophet’s Voice to Prophecy in Community: A South African Perspective,” Scriptura 102 (2009), pp. 562-578.

^[9] Peter Walshe, “South Africa: Prophetic Christianity and the Liberation Movement,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 29(1) (March 1991), pp. 27-60.

^[10] The last two sections of the paper, which focus on AICs and the Zion Christian Church, also use the terminology of ‘prophets.’ In that context, I am referring not to ‘prophetic voice’ but rather the technical position of ‘prophet,’ prophetic healing, and prophetic preaching within the ZCC (Mashabela, 2017).

^[11] Allan Anderson, Zion and Pentecost: The Spirituality and Experience of Pentecostal and Zionist/Apostolic Churches in South Africa (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2000), p. 8.

^[12] Allan Anderson, Moya: The Holy Spirit in an African Context  (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 1991), p. 3.

^[13] Allan Anderson, Zion and Pentecost: The Spirituality and Experience of Pentecostal and Zionist/Apostolic Churches in South Africa (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2000), p. 9.

^[14] John W. de Gruchy and Steve de Gruchy, The Church Struggle in South Africa (Minneapolis, MN.: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 40.

^[15] Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa (Pluto Press, 2000);

Deborah James, Gaining Ground? Rights and Property in South African Land Reform (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007);

Richard Peet, “Ideology, Discourse, and the Geography of Hegemony: From Socialist to Neoliberal Development in Postapartheid South Africa,” Antipode 34(1) (2002).

^[16] Lionel Cliffe, “Land Reform in South Africa,” Review of African Political Economy 27(84) (2000);

Brent McCusker, William G. Moseley, and Maano Ramutsindela, Land Reform in South Africa: An Uneven Transformation (Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016);

S. Turner and H. Ibsen, “Land and Agrarian Reform in South Africa: A Status Report,” Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies Report (2000);

^[17] Ruth Hall, “A Political Economy of Land Reform in South Africa,” Review of African Political Economy 31(100) (2004);

Edward Lahiff and Ben Cousins, “Smallholder Agriculture and Land Reform in South Africa,” IDS Bulletin 36(2) (2005);

Thembela Kepe and Ruth Hall, “Land Redistribution in South Africa: Towards Decolonisation or Recolonisation?” Politikon 45(1) (2018);

Busani Mpofu, “The Urban Land Question, Land Reform and the Spectre of Extrajudicial Land Occupations in South Africa,” Africa Insight 46(4) (2017);

Noor Nieftagodien, “The Economic Freedom Fighters and the Politics of Memory and Forgetting,” South Atlantic Quarterly 114(2) (2015).

^[18] Gerrit Schutte, “Company and Colonists at the Cape, 1652-1795,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840, edited by Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), pp. 283-323;

Leonard Guelke, “Freehold Farmers and Frontier Settlers, 1657-1780,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840, edited by Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), pp. 66-108.

^[19] The Apartheid (separateness) agenda developed through, among others, the 1911 Mines and Works Act, which limited black employment, the 1913 Land Act, which restricted black South Africans to particular enclaves (the ‘native homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’), the 1923 Native Urban Areas Act, which controlled black access to urban land, the 1936 Representation of Natives Act, which created a separate African electorate to be represented by white politicians, the 1949 Mixed Marriages Act and 1950 Immorality Act, which circumscribed African and non-African unions, the 1950 Group Acts, which classified residential areas along Colored, African, and White lines, the 1952 Documents Act, which strengthened the Apartheid surveillance state, the 1953 Separate Amenities Act, and the 1953 Bantu Education Act, which mediated black access to education (Chiwengo, pp. 50-53; Hope and Young, pp. 32-33).

^[20] John W. de Gruchy and Steve de Gruchy, The Church Struggle in South Africa (Minneapolis, MN.: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 1-15;

Marjorie Hope and James Young, The South African Churches in a Revolutionary Situation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981), p. 25-30;

Tamara Rice Lave, “A Nation at Prayer, a Nation in Hate: Apartheid in South Africa,” Stanford Journal of International Law 30(483) (1994), pp. 483-524;

Susan Rennie Ritner, “The Dutch Reformed Church and Apartheid,” Journal of Contemporary History 2(4) (October 1967), p. 17-37.

It is crucial to acknowledge that while the system of racial domination espoused by the Dutch Afrikaner population is wrapped up in very specific political-theological developments and the British tended to be different in their approach to missionary work, the treatment of black South Africans, and notions of sacred destiny, there was no shortage of similar ideas among the British either. Cecil Rhodes, for instance, felt that “only one race approached God’s ideal type, his own Anglo-Saxon race; God’s purpose then was to make the Anglo-Saxon race predominant.” (de Gruchy and de Gruchy, p. 33).

^[21] Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106(8) (June 1993), pp. 1707-1791.

^[22] Tamara Rice Lave, “A Nation at Prayer, a Nation in Hate: Apartheid in South Africa,” Stanford Journal of International Law 30(483) (1994), pp. 483-484.

^[23] John W. de Gruchy and Steve de Gruchy, The Church Struggle in South Africa (Minneapolis, MN.: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 102.

^[24] See, among others, the Rosettenville Conference (1949), ANC Freedom Charter (1955), Cottesloe Declaration (1960), A Message to the People of South Africa (1968), The Apartheid and the Church Report (1972), Programme to Combat Racism (1969), the Hammanskraal Conscientious Objection Resolution (1974), the 1980 WCC Consultation, Testimonies to the Eloff Commission (1982), and the Kairos Document (1985);

Marjorie Hope and James Young, The South African Churches in a Revolutionary Situation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981), pp. 15-45;

Anthony Balcomb, “From Apartheid to the New Dispensation: Evangelicals and the Democratization of South Africa,” in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa, edited by Terence Ranger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 191-224;

Peter Walshe, “Church versus State in South Africa: The Christian Institute and the Resurgence of African Nationalism,” Journal of Church and State 19(3) (Autumn 1977), pp. 457-479;

Peter Walshe, “The Evolution of Liberation Theology in South Africa,” Journal of Law and Religion 5(2) (1987), pp. 299-311. 

^[25] “A Message to the People of South Africa,” Theological Commission of the South African Council of Churches, 1968.

^[26] “Presentation Speech by Egil Aarvik, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,” The Nobel Prize, 1984. Accessed at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1984/ceremony-speech/.

^[27] Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Little Brown, 2008), pp. 87-97. 

^[28] William Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 263-300.

^[29] “Constitution of the Republic of South Africa,” Act 200 of 1993, Republic of South Africa.

^[30] “Constitution of the Republic of South Africa,” Act 200 of 1993, Republic of South Africa.

^[31] Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

^[32] Justice Richard Goldstone, quoted in “Volume I: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, October 29^th, 1998, p. 104.

^[33] “Volume I: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, October 29^th, 1998, p. 108.

^[34] Desmond Tutu, “God-Given Dignity and the Quest for Liberation,” Address to the National Conference of the South African Council of Churches, July 1973.

^[35] Agata Fijalkowski, “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions,” in An Introduction to Transitional Justice, edited by Olivera Simić (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 101;

Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999).

^[36] John W. de Gruchy and Steve de Gruchy, The Church Struggle in South Africa (Minneapolis, MN.: Fortress Press, 2005), p. 224. 

^[37] Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, and Ronald Suresh Roberts, Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance (South Africa: David Philip Publishers, 1997), p. 49. 

^[38] Agata Fijalkowski, “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions,” in An Introduction to Transitional Justice, edited by Olivera Simić (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 102.

^[39] “Volume VII: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, October 29^th, 1998, p. 1.

^[40] Megan Shore, Religion and Conflict Resolution: Christianity and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ashgate, 2009).

^[41] Richard Wilson, “Reconciliation and Revenge in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Current Anthropology 41(1) (2000), p. 82; “Facing the Second Day of the TRC Hearings,” Sunday Times Heritage Project. Accessed at: http://sthp.saha.org.za/memorial/articles/facing_the_second_day_of_the_trc_hearings.htm;“Washing Past Victims’ Feet Won’t Redeem this Former Apartheid Leader,” Quartz Africa, October 7^th, 2015. Accessed at: https://qz.com/africa/517401/washing-past-victims-feet-wont-redeem-this-former-apartheid-leader/; Catherine M. Cole, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 2010).

^[42] “Ernest Malgas Tombstone Unveiled in Port Elizabeth,” SABC News. Accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey7XWetG0f0.

^[43] Catherine M. Cole, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 128-129.

^[44] “Facing the Second Day of the TRC Hearings,” Sunday Times Heritage Project. Accessed at: http://sthp.saha.org.za/memorial/articles/facing_the_second_day_of_the_trc_hearings.htm. 

^[45] Megan Shore, Religion and Conflict Resolution: Christianity and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ashgate, 2009), pp. 88-89.

^[46] Catherine M. Cole, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 129. 

^[47] “What South Africa can Teach the U.S. about Reparations,” Washington Post, June 25^th, 2019; “Special Report: Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation,” The Guardian, June 24^th, 2014.

^[48] Agata Fijalkowski, “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions,” in An Introduction to Transitional Justice, edited by Olivera Simić (New York: Routledge, 2017); Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, MA.: Beacon Press, 1998), p. xii.

^[49] Cynthia Ngeweu, quoted in Lyn Graybill, Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Miracle or Model? (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), p. 34.

^[50] Piet Meiring, “Truth and Reconciliation: The South African Experience,” The Expository Times, 2002, p. 79. 

^[51] Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999), p. 251.

^[52] Martine Mariotti and Johan Fourie, “The Economics of Apartheid: An Introduction,” Economic History of Developing Regions 29(2) (2014), pp. 113-125.

^[53] “South Africans Rich and Poor: Baseline Household Statistics,” Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town, 1993, p. 47. 

^[54] “South Africans Rich and Poor: Baseline Household Statistics,” Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town, 1993, p. 65.

^[55] “South Africans Rich and Poor: Baseline Household Statistics,” Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town, 1993, p. 81, p. 86.

^[56]“South Africans Rich and Poor: Baseline Household Statistics,” Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town, 1993, p. 220.

^[57] “South Africans Rich and Poor: Baseline Household Statistics,” Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town, 1993, p. 314.

^[58] “South Africans Rich and Poor: Baseline Household Statistics,” Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town, 1993, p. 290.

^[59] “South Africans Rich and Poor: Baseline Household Statistics,” Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town, 1993, p. 293.

^[60] “South Africans Rich and Poor: Baseline Household Statistics,” Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town, 1993, p. 296.

^[61] William Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 313. 

^[62] Megan Shore, Religion and Conflict Resolution: Christianity and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ashgate, 2009), p. 103.

^[63] Megan Shore, Religion and Conflict Resolution: Christianity and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ashgate, 2009), p. 103.

^[64] “Volume VI: Report of the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, October 29^th, 1998, p. 94. 

^[65] Megan Shore, Religion and Conflict Resolution: Christianity and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ashgate, 2009), p. 103.

^[66] “Volume VI: Report of the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, October 29^th, 1998, p. 94. 

^[67] Mahmood Mamdani, “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC),” Diacritics 32(3/4) (Autumn-Winter 2002), p. 57.

^[68] Mahmood Mamdani, “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC),” Diacritics 32(3/4) (Autumn-Winter 2002), p. 57.

^[69] “Volume VII: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report,” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, October 29^th, 1998.

^[70] Parker Shipton, “Land and Culture in Tropical Africa: Soils, Symbols, and the Metaphysics of the Mundane,” Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994), p. 347.

^[71] Edward Lahiff, “ ‘Willing Buyer, Willing Seller’: South Africa’s Failed Experiment in Market-Led Agrarian Reform,” Third World Quarterly 28(8) (2007), p. 1578.

^[72] Klaus Deininger and Julian May, “Can There be Growth with Equity? An Initial Assessment of Land Reform in South Africa,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, 2000, p. 5.

^[73] Edward Lahiff, “ ‘Willing Buyer, Willing Seller’: South Africa’s Failed Experiment in Market-Led Agrarian Reform,” Third World Quarterly 28(8) (2007), p. 1578.

^[74] Klaus Deininger and Julian May, “Can There be Growth with Equity? An Initial Assessment of Land Reform in South Africa,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, 2000, p. 5.

^[75] Edward Lahiff, “ ‘Willing Buyer, Willing Seller’: South Africa’s Failed Experiment in Market-Led Agrarian Reform,” Third World Quarterly 28(8) (2007), p. 1578.

^[76] “Population Census 1996 – 10% Sample,” Statistics South Africa, 1996.

^[77] “South Africa’s Constitution of 1996 with Amendments through 2012,” The Constitute Project, pp. 18-20.

^[78] Edward Lahiff, “‘Willing Buyer, Willing Seller’: South Africa’s Failed Experiment in Market-Led Agrarian Reform,” Third World Quarterly 28(8) (2007), p. 1579; Their contribution to the economy, however, was small – in 1994, it was a mere 4% of the GDP and now averages about 2% (“Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing, Value Added (% of GDP Added) – South Africa,” World Bank Data Bank). Land dispossession in the Apartheid era, then, was a form of domination in the explicit service of white strength, rather than any national development per se.

^[79] Edward Lahiff, “ ‘Willing Buyer, Willing Seller’: South Africa’s Failed Experiment in Market-Led Agrarian Reform,” Third World Quarterly 28(8) (2007), p. 1579.

^[80] “White Paper on South African Land Policy,” Department of Land Affairs, Republic of South Africa, April 1997, pp. 102-103.

^[81] Edward Lahiff, “ ‘Willing Buyer, Willing Seller’: South Africa’s Failed Experiment in Market-Led Agrarian Reform,” Third World Quarterly 28(8) (2007), p. 1579.

^[82] Hein Marais, South Africa: Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transition (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2001), p. 191.

^[83] Edward Lahiff, “ ‘Willing Buyer, Willing Seller’: South Africa’s Failed Experiment in Market-Led Agrarian Reform,” Third World Quarterly 28(8) (2007), p. 1578.

^[84] “White Paper on South African Land Policy,” Department of Land Affairs, Republic of South Africa, April 1997.

^[85] Klaus Deininger and Julian May, “Can There be Growth with Equity? An Initial Assessment of Land Reform in South Africa,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, 2000.

^[86] Hein Marais, South Africa: Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transition (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2001), p. 191.

^[87] “Freedom Charter, Adopted at the Congress of the People at Kliptown, Johannesburg, on June 25 and 26, 1955,” Historical Papers Research Archive, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

^[88] Trevor Manual, quoted in Brent McCusker, William G. Moseley, and Maano Ramutsindela, Land Reform in South Africa: An Uneven Transformation (Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), p. 90.

^[89] Ruth Hall, “Transforming Rural South Africa? Taking Stock of Land Reform,” in The Land Question in South Africa: The Challenge of Transformation and Redistribution, edited by Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ruth Hall(Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2000), pp. 88-89.

^[90] “White Paper on South African Land Policy,” Department of Land Affairs, Republic of South Africa, April 1997.

^[91] “White Paper on South African Land Policy,” Department of Land Affairs, Republic of South Africa, April 1997, p. 16. 

^[92] Ruth Hall, “Transforming Rural South Africa? Taking Stock of Land Reform,” in The Land Question in South Africa: The Challenge of Transformation and Redistribution, edited by Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ruth Hall(Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2000), p. 88. 

^[93] Ruth Hall, “Transforming Rural South Africa? Taking Stock of Land Reform,” in The Land Question in South Africa: The Challenge of Transformation and Redistribution, edited by Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ruth Hall(Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2000), p. 88. 

^[94] Ruth Hall, “Transforming Rural South Africa? Taking Stock of Land Reform,” in The Land Question in South Africa: The Challenge of Transformation and Redistribution, edited by Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ruth Hall(Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2000), p. 89. 

^[95] “Final Report of the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture for his Excellency the President of South Africa,” Expert Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture, May 4^th, 2019, p. 12.

^[96] “Final Report of the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture for his Excellency the President of South Africa,” Expert Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture, May 4^th, 2019, p. 12.

^[97] “Final Report of the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture for his Excellency the President of South Africa,” Expert Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture, May 4^th, 2019, p. 12.

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^[99] Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa (Pluto Press, 2000), p. 55.

^[100] De Villiers, quoted in Jaco S. Dreyer, “Land Reform: A Key Human Rights Issue and a Challenge for Religion in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Dreaming the Land: Theologies of Resistance and Hope, edited by Hans-Georg Ziebertz and Friedrich Schweitzer (Brisbane: International Academy of Practical Theology, 2005), p. 40.

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^[102] Ebrahim Fakir, “Fragmentation and Fracture – The Loss of Trust and Confidence in Political Parties,” in SA Elections 2014: Political Opposition – Cohesion, Fracture or Fragmentation? Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa, 2014, p. 5. Accessed at: https://www.eisa.org.za/eu/pdf/electionupdate4.pdf.

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^[104] “Economic Freedom Fighters Founding Manifesto: Radical Movement Towards Economic Freedom in Our Lifetime,” EFF Online, July 27^th, 2013. Accessed at: https://effonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Founding-Manifesto.pdf.

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^[115] Desmond Tutu, quoted in Simanga R. Kumalo and Daglous Dziva, “Paying the Price for Democracy: The Contribution of the Church in the Development of Good Governance in South Africa,” in From Our Side: Emerging Perspectives on Development and Ethics, edited by Steve de Gruchy, Nico Koopman, and Sytse Strijbos (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 2008), p. 175.

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^[117] Simanga R. Kumalo and Daglous Dziva, “Paying the Price for Democracy: The Contribution of the Church in the Development of Good Governance in South Africa,” in From Our Side: Emerging Perspectives on Development and Ethics, edited by Steve de Gruchy, Nico Koopman, and Sytse Strijbos (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 2008), p. 172.

^[118] Simanga R. Kumalo and Daglous Dziva, “Paying the Price for Democracy: The Contribution of the Church in the Development of Good Governance in South Africa,” in From Our Side: Emerging Perspectives on Development and Ethics, edited by Steve de Gruchy, Nico Koopman, and Sytse Strijbos (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 2008), p. 172.

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^[121] Jaco S. Dreyer, “Land Reform: A Key Human Rights Issue and a Challenge for Religion in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Dreaming the Land: Theologies of Resistance and Hope, edited by Hans-Georg Ziebertz and Friedrich Schweitzer (Brisbane: International Academy of Practical Theology, 2005), p. 39. 

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^[127] Tracy Kuperus, “The Political Role and Democratic Contribution of Churches in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Church and State 53(2) (Spring 2011), p. 290.

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^[133] Peter Storey, “Banning the Flag from our Churches: Learning from the Church-State Struggle in South Africa,” in Between Capital and Cathedral: Essays on Church-State Relationships, edited by Wessel Bentley and Dion A. Forster(Unisa: University of South Africa, 2012), p. 15.

^[134] Tracy Kuperus, “The Political Role and Democratic Contribution of Churches in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Church and State 53(2) (Spring 2011), p. 291.

^[135] Peter Storey, “Banning the Flag from our Churches: Learning from the Church-State Struggle in South Africa,” in Between Capital and Cathedral: Essays on Church-State Relationships, edited by Wessel Bentley and Dion A. Forster(Unisa: University of South Africa, 2012), p. 15.

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^[144] Allan Anderson, Moya: The Holy Spirit in an African Context  (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 1991), pp. 2-5.

^[145] Martin West, Bishops and Prophets in a Black City: African Independent Churches in Soweto, Johannesburg (Cape Town: David Philip, 1975), pp. 190-191. 

^[146] Martin West, Bishops and Prophets in a Black City: African Independent Churches in Soweto, Johannesburg (Cape Town: David Philip, 1975), p. 192.

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^[149] Martin West, Bishops and Prophets in a Black City: African Independent Churches in Soweto, Johannesburg (Cape Town: David Philip, 1975), p. 192-194.

^[150] Martin West, Bishops and Prophets in a Black City: African Independent Churches in Soweto, Johannesburg (Cape Town: David Philip, 1975), pp. 87-88.

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^[161] Paul Gifford, African Christianity: Its Public Role (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 329.

^[162] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), p. 285.

^[163] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), pp. 287-289.

^[164] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), p. 290.

^[165] Martin West, Bishops and Prophets in a Black City: African Independent Churches in Soweto, Johannesburg (Cape Town: David Philip, 1975), p. 50.

^[166] Marjorie Hope and James Young, The South African Churches in a Revolutionary Situation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981), pp. 192 -193. 

^[167] Allan Anderson, Zion and Pentecost: The Spirituality and Experience of Pentecostal and Zionist/Apostolic Churches in South Africa (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2000), p. 8.

^[168] Barry Morton, “Engenas Lekganyane and the Early ZCC: Oral Texts and Documents,” unpublished. 

^[169] Retief Müller, African Pilgrimage: Ritual Travel in South Africa’s Christianity of Zion (Ashgate, 2011), p. 7.

^[170] “Nothing Unholy about ZCC’s Financial Affairs,” ENCA, February 17^th, 2016. Accessed at: https://www.enca.com/south-africa/zccs-financial-affairs-order-church-council;

Joanne O’Brien and Martin Palmer, The Atlas of Religion (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 48-49. 

^[171] Retief Müller, “The Zion Christian Church and Global Christianity: Negotiating a Tightrope between Localisation and Globalisation,” Religion 45(2) (2015), pp. 180-182.

^[172] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), p. 285.

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^[174] Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and the Apartheid Regime’, Leidschrift (Leiden) 4(3) (1988), p. 49.

^[175] “A Surprising Silent Majority in South Africa,” The New York Times, April 17^th, 1994.

^[176] Glen Thompson, “‘Transported Away’: The Spirituality and Piety of Charismatic Christianity in South Africa (1976-1994),” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 118 (March 2004), p. 129.

^[177] Anthony Balcomb, “From Apartheid to the New Dispensation: Evangelicals and the Democratization of South Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 34(1/2) (Feb.-May 2004), p. 7; Terence Ranger, “Introduction: Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa,” in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa, edited by Terence Ranger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3-35.

^[178] Paul Gifford, African Christianity: Its Public Role (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 31-32.  

^[179] Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 238. 

^[180] Paul Gifford, African Christianity: Its Public Role (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 32.

^[181] Matthew Schoffeleers, “Ritual Healing and Political Acquiescence: The Case of the Zionist Churches in Southern Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 61(1) (1991), p. 2.

^[182] Terence Ranger, “Introduction: Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa,” in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa, edited by Terence Ranger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3-35.

^[183] Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and the Apartheid Regime’, Leidschrift (Leiden) 4(3) (1988), p. 51.

^[184] Paul Gifford, African Christianity: Its Public Role (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 338-342.

^[185] Matthew Schoffeleers, “Ritual Healing and Political Acquiescence: The Case of the Zionist Churches in Southern Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 61(1) (1991), p. 3.

^[186] Tracy Kuperus, “The Political Role and Democratic Contribution of Churches in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Church and State 53(2) (Spring 2011), p. 282.

^[187] Paul Gifford, African Christianity: Its Public Role (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 340-342.

^[188] Terence Ranger, “Conference Summary and Conclusion,” in The Christian Churches and the Democratisation of Africa, edited by Paul Gifford(Brill, 1995), p. 25. 

^[189] Retief Müller, African Pilgrimage: Ritual Travel in South Africa’s Christianity of Zion (Ashgate, 2011), p. 49.

^[190] Allan Anderson, “New African Initiated Pentecostalism and Charismatics in South Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 35(1) (2005), p. 68.

^[191] Retief Müller, “The Zion Christian Church and Global Christianity: Negotiating a Tightrope between Localisation and Globalisation,” Religion 45(2) (2015), p. 182.

^[192] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), p. 308.

^[193] Allan Anderson, “New African Initiated Pentecostalism and Charismatics in South Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 35(1) (2005), pp. 69-74.

^[194] Allan Anderson, “New African Initiated Pentecostalism and Charismatics in South Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 35(1) (2005), p. 69.

^[195] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), p. 298.

^[196] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), pp. 297-301. 

^[197] Matthew Schoffeleers, “Ritual Healing and Political Acquiescence: The Case of the Zionist Churches in Southern Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 61(1) (1991), p. 1.

^[198] Allan Anderson, Bazalwane: African Pentecostals in South Africa (University of South Africa, 1992), p. 77.

^[199] Retief Müller, African Pilgrimage: Ritual Travel in South Africa’s Christianity of Zion (Ashgate, 2011), p. 51. 

^[200] Retief Müller, “The Zion Christian Church and Global Christianity: Negotiating a Tightrope between Localisation and Globalisation,” Religion 45(2) (2015), p. 182.

^[201] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), p. 298.

^[202] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), p. 302.

^[203] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), p. 298.

^[204] Barry Morton, “Engenas Lekganyane and the Early ZCC: Oral Texts and Documents,” unpublished.

^[205] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), pp. 298-300.

^[206] Allan Anderson, “The Lekganyanes and Prophecy in the Zion Christian Church,” Journal of Religion in Africa 29(3) (August 1999), p. 304.

^[207] Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and the Apartheid Regime’, Leidschrift (Leiden) 4(3) (1988), p. 47. 

^[208] Anthony Balcomb, “From Apartheid to the New Dispensation: Evangelicals and the Democratization of South Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 34(1/2) (Feb.-May 2004), pp. 9-24.

^[209] Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and the Apartheid Regime’, Leidschrift (Leiden) 4(3) (1988), p. 44.

^[210] Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and the Apartheid Regime’, Leidschrift (Leiden) 4(3) (1988), p. 53.

^[211] Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and the Apartheid Regime’, Leidschrift (Leiden) 4(3) (1988), p. 44.

^[212] Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and the Apartheid Regime’, Leidschrift (Leiden) 4(3) (1988), p. 42.

^[213] Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and the Apartheid Regime’, Leidschrift (Leiden) 4(3) (1988), pp. 42-43. 

^[214] “Botha in Address to a Black Sect, Warns Against Evil From Abroad,” The New York Times, April 8^th, 1985.

^[215] Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and the Apartheid Regime’, Leidschrift (Leiden) 4(3) (1988), pp. 44-45. 

^[216] Matthew Schoffeleers, “The Zion Christian Church and the Apartheid Regime’, Leidschrift (Leiden) 4(3) (1988), p. 54.

^[217] “Zion Christian Church His Grade Bishop B.E. Lekganyane,” Statement to the TRC, TRC Faith Community Hearings, 18^th November, 1997.

^[218] “Zion Christian Church His Grade Bishop B.E. Lekganyane,” Statement to the TRC, TRC Faith Community Hearings, 18^th November, 1997.

^[219] “Zion Christian Church Testimony Before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” TRC Faith Community Hearings, 19^th November, 1997.

^[220] Glen Thompson, “‘Transported Away’: The Spirituality and Piety of Charismatic Christianity in South Africa (1976-1994),” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 118 (March 2004), p. 135.

^[221] Peter Walshe, Prophetic Christianity and the Liberation Movement in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Cluster Publications, 1995) p. 110. 

^[222] Barry Morton, “Engenas Lekganyane and the Early ZCC: Oral Texts and Documents,” unpublished.  

^[223] Glen Thompson, “‘Transported Away’: The Spirituality and Piety of Charismatic Christianity in South Africa (1976-1994),” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 118 (March 2004), p. 129. 

^[224] Robert Garner, “African Independent Churches and Economic Development in Edendale,” in Engaging Modernity: Methods and Cases for Studying African Independent Churches in South Africa, edited by Dawid Venter (Westport, CT.: Praeger, 2004), pp. 78-82. 

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^[226] Robert Garner, “African Independent Churches and Economic Development in Edendale,” in Engaging Modernity: Methods and Cases for Studying African Independent Churches in South Africa, edited by Dawid Venter (Westport, CT.: Praeger, 2004), p. 82.

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Introduction and Background

Many nation-states are guilty of an “original sin” of a sort: a case in which the state was complicit in, or more commonly, the perpetrator of, a genocide or system of oppression. In most cases, the generation that rebuilds a society fractured by this “sin,” which almost always includes primarily one-sided, horrific violence, is directly descended from the perpetrators of said violence. How is culpability determined? How is justice balanced with the need for reconciliation – the need to salvage a fully functioning society after the sin is committed? Finally, can the nation experience some semblance of recovery or healing?

In the United States, this dilemma is intertwined with its entire national identity and history; there can be no doubt that America’s original sin is slavery, an institution whose underlying ideology has lived on to the present, one hundred and fifty years after its de jure death. This failure to remember the past correctly is by no means endemic to America alone. In Russia, the tyranny of Stalinism is deemed a necessary evil; in China, the tyranny of Maoism is deemed nonexistent. The governments of Australia and Canada are both guilty of stealing entire generations of indigenous people from their native lands and societies. In addition, how to properly reconcile from more recent injuries remains an interest of nation states.

In March 2018, for example, the President of Kenya and the leader of his opposition met to discuss the election crisis of the preceding year, the “deterioration of relationships between communities”, and the disunity of Kenya (International Crisis Group 2018).  How can nations heal from wounds to national psyche in addition to more literal wounds levied upon a minority? This paper will attempt to answer that question by examining two case studies of nations that are coping with national crimes so traumatic, so momentous, that they shifted the entire nation’s centre of gravity. Rwanda is still recovering from a horrific hundred days of slaughter in 1994, and remains dependent on an overly intrusive, authoritarian government that manipulates healing as official policy. South Africa has embarked on an initially inspiring path from apartheid, but one that appears half-hearted in hindsight. This paper will judge the efforts of Rwanda and South Africa based on four essential components of meaningful confrontation with the past: commemoration, civic education, justice, and socio-economic development. The lessons learned from these two nations’ experiences are occasionally contradictory, but always revealing, and with luck, nations still contending with “Original Sins” can learn from their mistakes and emulate their successes.

Rwanda

The societal divides that eventually erupted in the Rwandan Genocide have roots in both colonialism and a native privileged elite. After the Berlin Conference in 1884, Germany acquired the lands of present-day Rwanda and Burundi. Germany’s power in the region lay with the Rwandan monarchy, a Tutsi clan existing since the 11th century. Rwandan kings, known as mwamis, labeled all conquered peoples “Hutus”, regardless of their ethnicity (Newbury 1988). Lineages that were wealthy in cattle and linked to powerful chiefs or warriors were deemed good enough to be Tutsi. These statuses were mobile; if a family’s fortunes changed, their Hutu status could advance to Tutsi, and vice versa. This change was so common that there is a word for it in Kinyarwanda: “kwihutura”, literally meaning “to shed Hutuness”. Until 1860, wealth, not race, provided the organising factor of society for the Kingdom of Rwanda, and social mobility was common (Pottier 2002). In many ways, the word Hutu was synonymous with a campesino-like peasant class.

However, these divides were amplified by a European presence in the region. Germany formed an alliance with the mwamis of Rwanda that, with added German military strength, allowed the king to exact greater wealth from Rwandan land. The monarchy sought to protect its status and that of the nobility, both of which were Tutsi by definition, and was heavily favored by Germany. This arrangement was still one of indirect rule; German policy was generally to defer to the Kingdom’s administration. Only when Belgium took control of Rwanda as a spoil of World War I did direct colonial rule come to Rwanda. From 1916 to 1962, the Belgian administration in Rwanda enacted “reforms” that disrupted the entire social fabric of Rwandan society, and erased most of the institutions that kept the three major social groups of Rwanda – Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa – interdependent. In 1926, the Belgians abolished the tripartite structure of land governance utilized by the mwamis, comprised of a land chief (always Hutu), a cattle chief (always Tutsi), and an army chief (Kagame 1972). Ironically, Belgian colonists intended to give Hutus more representation with this action; the result was just the opposite. In 1935, Belgium implemented an identity-card system by what they termed ethnicity. No longer was it possible for wealthy Hutus to ‘become’ Tutsi; any Rwandan born Hutu would die Hutu (Gourevitch 2000). During this period, Belgium also embarked on military campaigns to subjugate primarily Hutu regions north of Kigali; today this north-south divide still exists. Belgium supported the Tutsi monarchy up until Rwanda’s independence, when a Hutu popular revolution overthrew the king, established a republic, and expelled 336,000 Tutsis as refugees.

The events of the 1994 genocide are infamous for their sheer brutality and scale, and for the international community’s outstanding ability to do nothing to stop it. 800,000 Rwandans were murdered, mostly by their neighbors and fellow community members. Infrastructure, government, and healthcare grounded to a halt: buildings in ruins, workers disappeared enmasse, either having died or fled. UNAMIR, the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda headed by Romeo Dallaire, was famously useless. It took the efforts of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel movement started by Tutsi refugees, to stop the genocide. While UNAMIR attempted to negotiate a ceasefire, commander Paul Kagame refused to stop fighting until the killings ended. RPF captured Kigali on July 4. The genocide, from Kagame’s view, was over. The next year was one of chaos and continued violence (although not at the same level of the genocide). In April 1995, hundreds of Hutu civilians were massacred by the RPF (Clark 2017). Similar revenge killings occurred across Rwanda, committed by rogue RPF soldiers who arrived home to find “loved ones murdered and entire villages wiped out”.

Despite all the odds against it, Rwanda has not experienced mass violence since. Throughout the hills and valleys of the most densely populated country in Africa, genocide survivors live side by side with perpetrators, the vast majority of whom are successfully reintegrated into modern society. Certainly Rwanda’s recovery from utter catastrophe is impressive, beginning with its commemoration of the genocide. On the 7th of April in Rwanda this year, a hundred-day period of national mourning will commence for the one million victims of the Rwandan Genocide. President Paul Kagame will light the Flame of Remembrance at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Gisozi. This is where victims were brought, after their bodies, thrown into the streets and rivers and sewers of Kigali, were eventually recovered. They lie in graves of 100,000 each. The government, effectively synonymous with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) party, will broadcast the official theme of this year’s commemoration. This theme will coincide with the RPF’s current policy priorities. In 2013, the theme was “self-reliance”; officials encouraged citizens to contribute to a national development fund to relieve the cost of lost foreign aid – lost due to Rwanda’s support for rebel groups in the eastern Congo. In 2015, the theme was “fighting genocide ideology” for the purpose of “promoting unity among Rwandans”. Hundreds of Rwandans are convicted every year for “genocide ideology”, and most are imprisoned for five years or more (Amnesty 2010). This commemoration ritual will happen in 2019, because it has happened every year for over two decades—for all twenty-four years that Kagame has been Rwanda’s leader.

Rwanda’s remembrance of the genocide is top-down: in every one of the four components examined here, the reach of the state is obvious. Perhaps most worrisome is its influence in the second component of recovery: civic education. Essentially every adult Rwandan has been through a state-run ingando education camp. The professed aim of such camps is to foster a sense of unity among Rwandans via Rwandanness (patriotism) and Rwandicity (the shared cultural aspects of being Rwandan), and dissuade Rwandans from approaching problems from a perspective of differing ethnicities. Rwandans learn about the main causes of the genocide, Rwanda’s abandonment by international community in 1994, and the song and dance rituals that are shared by both Tutsis and Hutus as cultural heritage, which are performed nightly. Finally, they learn about government policy and government priorities from a perspective of defending these policies. Ingando camps have a subtle, almost Orwellian effect beyond their seemingly innocent aims. According to interviews with camp coordinators, in ingando, “people sit together, sort differences, see things in the same way…students need ‘one way of looking at things, especially government policy” (Perdeková 2011). The narrative of coexistence and love among all Rwandans is undeniably noble, but much like most institutions in Rwanda, it is officially implemented and overseen by a group overwhelmingly constituted of the older generation of Tutsi refugees from Uganda. The strongest emphasis of ingando camps is consensus: in the words of an RPF communications adviser, one cannot build a nation without it. What exemplifies consensus more than a national leader who receives 99% of the popular vote in every election?

Most Rwandan adults have graduated from ingando camps, which will not be continued for the first generation of Rwandans born after the genocide. More and more often, Rwandans have simultaneously been participating in bottom-up, grassroots dialogue groups within villages and communities, usually facilitated by churches and private citizens. While the national narrative of the gacaca courts used to dominate discussion, today these groups place their focus on issues such as “improving food distribution, protecting communities’ security, containing disease, and family disputes” (Clark). While there is not a large body of evidence supporting the theory that this form of education is directly effective in national healing, their vast popularity suggests that Rwandans are searching for a safety valve to top-down healing, that ingando camps have not been enough to quell their need for recovery.

Rwanda’s third component of recovery, justice, is dominated by the gacaca court process. The gacaca courts were effectively the final response of the RPF to a UNSC-supported tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania. Relations between the International Criminal Tribunal (ICTR) for Rwanda and Rwanda itself were fraught from the beginning; the fact that the ICTR was not located in Rwanda complicated everything from suspect transportation to witness safety. The ICTR had no jury; the Rwandan Patriotic Front had no control over which suspects would be tried, or what penalties would given; Rwandans became “disillusioned with the process” when learning that the death penalty, as per international law, would not be an option for the perpetrators (Graybill 2004). Rwanda did not attempt Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) in the South African style, because most churches in Rwanda were complicit in the slaughter of Tutsis, and at the time, TRCs were viewed as inseparable from a religious authority. The government attempted to try all detained genocidaires via state courts, but this plan quickly collapsed due to the sheer scale of individuals being tried. 120,000 Hutu suspects of genocide were detained in 1995; practically, Rwanda could sustain the cost of holding that number of detainees, while at the same time making up for the lack of manpower in Rwanda’s agricultural industries. Instead, Rwanda invented its own version of justice: the gacaca courts.

Nearly every member of Rwandan society participated in the gacaca process, which had the ability to hand down sentences ranging from the death penalty to simply community service. 12,000 courts were assembled, their “juries” made up of 260,000 ordinary citizens. The principle of gacaca was that both public acknowledgment and punishment of crimes were essential aspects of Rwanda’s reconciliation. If perpetrators met the terms of gacaca – an honest confession to all their crimes, an apology directly to their victims, and a compensation to the victim, either in the form of money or community service – they received a far shorter prison sentence, or didn’t receive one at all. With these incentives and stipulations, the vast majority of the 400,000 prosecutions were sentenced with community service or a prison sentence under five years. Gacaca caused a “vital cross-ethnic dialogue about the causes and impact of the genocide and the successful reintegration of perpetrators who had served their sentences” (Clark). The process was far from perfect, however. While most Rwandans interviewed today agree that gacaca courts were a net positive for releasing anger and resentment, nearly all were exhausted by the ten-year process, which required one full day of every participant’s week. More seriously, the courts excluded crimes committed by RPF soldiers, such as the aforementioned massacre of Hutus in April 1995.

The last component of Rwanda’s recovery is socioeconomic development, and this is perhaps the most successful. Before the genocide, Hutus viewed Tutsis as unjustly wealthy because they were favored by Europeans; during the genocide genocidaires prioritized the capture of Tutsi land and livestock. Since the genocide, Rwanda has experienced its highest living standards in history, unprecedented economic growth (at one point, the highest in Africa), and momentous leaps in healthcare and poverty reduction. From 2000 to 2015, Rwanda cut its childcare mortality rate in half. This development has been, perhaps surprisingly, more or less equally shared by Rwanda’s people. Belgian and German colonizers left a legacy of vast economic divide between Tutsis and Hutus; that gap has almost disappeared. The bulk of credit for this social and economic growth belongs to the RPF, which emphasized development after the chaos of transitioning to peace was over. The government has focused on improvements in rural healthcare and education, and these improvements have cut across ethnic lines. Additionally, local Hutus and Tutsis have started economic cooperatives to pool resources such as fuel or seeds or co-operate whole businesses. These local cooperatives are motivated by a combination of economic necessity and an interest in mending community ties. The words of a widow belonging to a joint potters’ cooperative capture the best of the Rwandan recovery:

“Among our members, we have people whose relatives were genocidaires and people whose relatives are survivors. What we have in common is that during the genocide, we lost our husbands and everything we owned. That unites us and motivates us to share what we have.”

While these grassroots developments in Rwanda’s recovery are encouraging, much of Rwanda’s recovery and remembrance of the genocide is still facilitated by an authoritarian state.  The RPF does not suffer dissent; it has intimidated voters, harassed, imprisoned, and assassinated opposition leaders, and has occasionally prevented polls from opening in unfavorable areas of the country (Clark). Paul Kagame won the 2017 presidential election with 99% of the vote, and due to a national referendum to allow him to run for a third term (98% voted for), could remain in power until 2034. For all intents and purposes, Rwanda has known no other leader post-genocide. Rwandans greet Kagame and by proxy the whole RPF with a combination of admiration and fear. It’s likely that, even without the government’s aggressive suppression of dissent, the RPF would still win elections by a wide margin, since it is credited with so much of Rwanda’s economic development, and because people are afraid of what will come after Kagame is gone. For while it is very likely that the genocide would have proceeded if not for the RPF, it is also true that the RPF could not exist in its current state without the occurrence of genocide. The government monopolizes an official style of “healing”, of “consensus”, so that there is no room for multiple narratives – and as a result, the RPF stays in power.

South Africa

While the end of apartheid was a contemporary to the end of the Rwandan Genocide, the “reconciliation” period of South Africa’s history seems, at face value, much quicker. In April 1994, the first multi-race elections took place in South Africa since apartheid had been implemented as official policy in 1948 by the National Party. Nelson Mandela, the formerly imprisoned anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress party, was elected. The forty-six years in between were traumatic for those labeled “Africans”, “Coloureds” or “Indians”; apartheid included the forced removal of over 3 million black Africans from space designated for whites, segregation to the degree that it was dictated where black and white could live, travel, or be employed, and the creation of “homeland” complexes for Africans in remote verifiable deserts to delegitimize their South African citizenship. 18,000 people were killed for their politics. All this the National Party attempted to justify by using “separate but equal”-style doctrine, and an argument that white rule in Africa was the last line of defense against communism.

South Africa’s commemoration of apartheid is less visible than that of Germany, or even Rwanda, but what does exist is revealing. The South African Apartheid Museum is located off a stretch of highway linking Johannesburg and Soweto between a theme park and a casino. The design of the museum is based on the United States Holocaust Museum: a controlled environment designed to bring viewers along a linear narrative. But unlike the Holocaust Museum, where connections to the present are constantly being made for you, the Apartheid Museum has a singular narrative: apartheid is a thing of the past. At one point in the tour of the museum, visitors are assigned “white” and “nonwhite” identification cards and invited to enter a reconstructed prison cell with the access that those monikers would have provided, to imagine “what it must have been like” (Teeger 2007). The museum devotes all its coverage of the “present” to the famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, and so the present is easily identified as hopeful. Indeed, the museum expends far more of its time and space to explain the conflict between Afrikaners and British colonizers. According to the curators, the museum “is not meant to divide people”, “not meant to open wounds”, and not meant to make viewers “polarized about race”. The goal of this museum, similarly to that of ingando camps in Rwanda, is consensus and the discouragement of conflict.

The Apartheid Museum is indicative of a broader South African attitude towards apartheid. Apartheid has been solved, goes the narrative. The goal of South Africa today is to perfect its unique, “Rainbow-Nation” unity. This is especially visible in civic education. While learning about apartheid is mandatory in the 9th grade, the national South African curriculum regarding apartheid is so vague as to be essentially open-ended; less than 100 words long, it offers one sentence per decade of history. Teachers of apartheid are almost entirely on their own, and as a result, the history of apartheid as translated to South Africa’s next generation is completely distorted. Researcher Chana Teeger found in a study of two diverse public high schools in Johannesburg that when teaching apartheid, “all teachers, regardless of race, gender, first language, or age introduced the narrative of both sides of the story [emphasis added] into their teaching”. What is meant by “both sides of the story”? Rather than portraying blacks as victims and whites as perpetrators, teachers felt it was important to show students depictions of blacks as perpetrators and whites as victims of apartheid. Teachers in Teeger’s study performed this historical bit of gymnastics regardless of the races of students in the class. An interview with a black South African teacher, Ms. Mokoena, sheds light onto the thought process behind such a decision:

“What I noticed, particularly my first year of teaching apartheid, I noticed that the black kids made the others feel responsible for what happened…I had a lot of fights…A lot of kids started hating each other because, you know, the others are white and the others were black. And they started saying, ‘My mother is a domestic worker because she was never allowed an opportunity to get good education.’”

To introduce “unity” into her classroom, Ms. Mokoena decided to “show the involvement of all races in all the different sides” of apartheid.

The most famous aspect of the South African reconciliation process is, unequivocally, Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC was based on a combination Christian theology and redemption, and the Xhosa doctrine of ubuntu – the loss of one person’s humanity is the loss of everyone’s humanity. It offered perpetrators of grave human rights violations amnesty if they admitted to their crimes during the apartheid era. There is no doubt that the TRC hearings offered some degree of closure to South Africa in the short term. African, Indian and Coloured victims had the authority for the first time to question white perpetrators, individuals who previously held positions of power. While the immediate aim of the TRC was to get to the truth, the experience of watching the hearings, and delivering statements yourself, had the byproduct of delivering long-lost dignity to South Africa’s oppressed racial groups (Msimang 2018). In hindsight, however, the TRC seems shockingly shortsighted, considering it was the only national medium for reconciliation of South Africa. Nowhere in the TRC mandate were the structural effects of apartheid addressed. The TRC did not discuss segregated education, nor the exclusion of black Africans from entire sectors of study or employment; the TRC virtually ignored Bantustans, forced removal policies, and pass laws. The TRC sidestepped all these aspects of apartheid by emphasizing individual crimes against humanity, even though these structural aspects of apartheid constituted the majority of apartheid’s victims. And even for individual truth and reconciliation, the TRC was often deficient. While perpetrators and victims both testified, rarely did they meet. While perpetrators confessed their crimes, they almost never needed to face the actual victims of those crimes and apologize in order for amnesty to be granted. This deficiency in the TRC process may have left a psychological toll on victims; according to the director of a Cape Town trauma centre, victim-witnesses for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission often experienced a return to intensified symptoms after an initial, short-term sense of relief (Graybill 2004).

Where Rwanda finds its greatest success is where South Africa finds its greatest failure: socioeconomic inequity. A 2015 poll of South Africans showed that while over 60 percent of white respondents felt they had access to the financial resources they need to achieve their goals, only 43 percent of black respondents did, and only 26 percent of Coloured respondents did. Unemployment shows an even more striking economic gap. 31 percent of black South Africans are unemployed; less than 7 percent of white South Africans are (Msimang 2017). Unlike Paul Kagame, the ANC, when given an opportunity to do so in 1994, did not use South Africa’s international stature of the moment to remedy the vast privilege gap that remains between white and black South Africans. The political instability that roils within South Africa to this day is testament to that.

Conclusions

There are several conclusions that can be drawn from the cases of Rwanda and South Africa in regards to successful models of reconciliation. First, and perhaps most importantly, a society cannot even begin reconciliation until the socioeconomic disparities that caused one-sided violence are changed. While Rwanda is far from whole after the 1994 genocide, government efforts to rebuild, grow the economy, and improve education, healthcare, and infrastructure did a world of good for Tutsi-Hutu relations. The gacaca strategy of using perpetrators as the labor to rebuild a broken nation (via community service) is especially ingenious. It was economic linkages between Tutsis and Hutus on a local level that allowed for deeper cross-ethnic healing and acceptance, not the official government policies of ingando and the 100-day mourning period. This stands in stark contrast to South Africa, which has long standing issues of corruption and inefficiency in its government, and has not remedied long-standing socioeconomic gaps, coinciding with a society that has barely begun the process of true engagement with the past.

Second, neither bottom-up nor top-down strategies of recovery and reconciliation are guarantors of success. While ingando has served the purpose of the RPF government in Rwanda to scare its population, there is little evidence that it has improved the state of cross-ethnic relations. The two factors that Rwandans point to to explain the peaceful state of the nation are reduction in socioeconomic disparities and gacaca courts, which began and ended on the local community level. Additionally, the grassroots efforts of dialogue groups and economic cooperatives have been successes for Rwanda. However, the lack of leadership on the government side of education in South Africa has resulted in a perhaps subconscious revisionist version of apartheid being taught to young people on a massive scale. Additionally, as previously stated, the lack of government intervention into the socioeconomic divide in South Africa has taken a toll on black South Africans.

Third, commemoration of national crimes should include multiple narratives from the side of the victims. In Rwanda, Hutu victims of crimes committed by RPF soldiers are wiped from the pages of history. In South Africa, commemoration of apartheid implies that the problems of apartheid have been solved, when a conversation with an unemployed black South African citizen would likely wipe away that impression. Victims of crimes as immense as genocide or apartheid experience suffering in different ways, and their numbers tend to overlap those of many different groups and situations. The expectation that time will heal wounds does not always apply to all victims, particularly when the mass crime in question has not been resolved satisfactorily. Singular narratives of victimhood will always exclude some victims and can provide false resolution to a recurring societal problem.

The question remaining for national reconciliation is the process of justice. The gacaca courts and South Africa’s TRC certainly did not make their respective situations worse; however, both systems of justice had weak points. On balance, I would argue the gacaca courts are more successful than the TRCs, judging the sheer amount of people processed and the enthusiastic participation of most Rwandans. If the gacaca system allowed for restitution for all victims, not just those on the side of the government, it would be far more successful.

Bibliography

Kagame, A. (1972). An abstract of the history of Rwanda from 1853 to 1972. Editions Universitaires du Rwanda.

Amnesty International. (2010). Safer to Stay Silent: The Chilling Effect of Rwanda’s Laws of ‘Genocide Ideology’ and ‘Sectarianism’ (Publication). London: Amnesty International Publications.

Clark, P. (2018). Rwanda’s Recovery: When Remembrance is Official Policy. Foreign Affairs, 97(1), 35-41.

Gourevitch, P., & Stewart, R. (2000). We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: stories from Rwanda. London: Picador.

Graybill, L. S. (2004). Pardon, Punishment, and Amnesia: Three African Post-Conflict Methods. Third World Quarterly, 25(6), 1117-1130.

International Crisis Group. (2018, March 13). After Kenya’s Leaders Reconcile, a Tough Path Ahead. Retrieved from https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/horn-africa/kenya/b136-after-kenyas-leaders-reconcile-tough-path-ahead

Msimang, S. (2018). All Is Not Forgiven: South Africa and the Scars of Apartheid. Foreign Affairs, 97(1), 28-34.

Newbury, C. (1988). The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960. New York: Columbia University Press.

Pottier, J. (2002). Reimagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival, and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Purdeková, A. (2011). Rwanda’s ingando camps: Liminality and the Reproduction of Power (Working Paper). Oxford University.

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With Madikizela-Mandela’s death, South African politicians have scrambled to associate themselves with her popular legacy. Biographers and historians, on the other hand, now face the difficulty of presenting a complete portrait of the woman, reconciling the righteousness of her politics with some of the less-than-honorable moments in her life. The focus of this brief profile is to make note of how Winnie Madikizela-Mandela earned such widespread love from the South African people in her struggle against apartheid, and what made her a troublesome figure even to her political allies.

Respect and Honor Won

Before marrying Nelson Mandela and affixing his name to her own, Winnie Madikizela worked for a short period of time at a hospital in Soweto, a township within Johannesburg. Despite obstacles she faced as a black woman seeking an education in a system of apartheid, she managed to earn a degree in social work, as well as a later bachelor’s degree in international relations. She allegedly had an offer to study abroad in the United States, but preferred instead to remain in South Africa, reflecting a characteristic attachment to her homeland.^[2]

After meeting him at a bus stop in 1958, she married Nelson Mandela, a lawyer already on the government’s radar as a leading opposition leader. They had two daughters together before the South African authorities sentenced her husband to life in prison for conspiracy to overthrow the state. Madikizela-Mandela, left alone to single-handedly raise her children, inevitably became a symbol of resilience in the face of government oppression. During her husband’s imprisonment, she worked with the African National Congress (ANC) to organize opposition against the government, especially advocating on behalf of political prisoners.^[3] Because of her seemingly fearless opposition, she drew widespread international support for the anti-apartheid cause. But Madikizela-Mandela’s political activities during her husband’s imprisonment also attracted the apartheid government’s attention. She was arrested several times before ultimately being imprisoned in 1969 following a police raid on her house. In the end, the government never convicted her of any crime, but nonetheless she spent 17 months in solitary confinement in the far-off town of Brandfort, removed entirely from the community she was most familiar with.

The suffering she endured while in prison seemingly transformed her. In one respect, she appeared to grow closer to her husband despite being confined to a small prison cell. She later wrote to him in a letter: “Eating what you were eating and sleeping on what you sleep on gave me that psychological satisfaction of being with you.”^[4] But the trauma of her imprisonment obviously remained with her even years after being freed. As she writes in her memoir, she was “so brutalised by that experience that [she] then believed in the language of violence and the only way to deal with, to fight, apartheid was through the same violence” the government had used against the anti-apartheid activists.^[5] The marked shift in her rhetoric following her time in solitary confinement suggests that the experience hit her more deeply than some of her colleagues may have observed at the time. The figure that emerged from prison still fought for racial equality alongside other ANC leaders, but she also became associated with

Controversy and Criticism

In 1986, Madikizela-Mandela endorsed the practice of “necklacing” for any black civilians known to be informants to the apartheid government. The practice involved restraining the victim with a tire filled with ethanol, and lighting it aflame. “We shall liberate this country,” she said in a speech, “with our boxes of matches and our necklaces.”^[6] Her shift towards violence spurred a division within the anti-apartheid movement, and the controversies surrounding her were enough for the ANC to keep her at arm’s length, though she remained popular within the anti-apartheid movement.

In 1988, her bodyguards kidnapped four teenagers, including Stompie Seipei, a 14 year old they had accused of being a police informant.  Under fire from the ANC for the kidnapping, Madikizela-Mandela claimed she was protecting them from molestation at the hands of their pastor. Her bodyguards tortured the minors to coerce confessions that they had been sexually assaulted by the pastor. One of her bodyguards, Jerry Richardson, captain of the so-called Mandela United Football Club, killed Seipei by slitting his throat. His body was found near Madikizela-Mandela’s house five days later.^[7] At a hearing for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1994 (appointed after the end of apartheid by then-President Nelson Mandela to investigate human rights abuses), Richardson confessed to the murder of Seipei, but he asserted that it was only on the orders of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Of course, she denied any involvement in the murder, and indeed she was acquitted on those charges. But the evidence made clear that she played a direct role at least in supervising the kidnapping.^[8] Initially sentenced to a six year sentence, she ultimately only paid a fine after an appeal. Along with other accusations that she ordered her security detail to assault and possibly murder other suspected black informants, the Seipei murder marked the most disgraceful stain on Madikizela-Mandela’s biography.

Conclusion

Following these controversies, however, Madikizela-Mandela emerged with her reputation largely intact. Her divorce from Mandela in 1996 and even charges of fraud and theft as a member of the South African parliament in 2003 failed to diminish her public image. She returned to politics in 2008, easily re-elected to parliament, where she served until her death.

Madikizela-Mandela’s role in South African history is unmatched by any other woman. The complexities of her life re-emerged even at her state-sanctioned funeral, put on by the political party she worked with for much of her life, and which had at several points pushed her away. Her daughter, speaking on behalf of her family, spoke for many South Africans at the ceremony when she asserted plainly: “To those of you who vilified my mother, don’t think for a minute that we’ve forgotten.”^[9] So Madikizela-Mandela’s defiant legacy lives on, her popularity illustrated by the crowds of South Africans adorned in yellow and green to honor the “Mother of the Nation.”

Endnotes

^[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/14/world/africa/winnie-mandela-funeral.html

^[2] http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/winnie-madikizela-mandela

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] https://www.brandsouthafrica.com/people-culture/people/winnie-s-pain-and-torture-in-prison

^[5]https://www.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/specials/Winnie-Mandela-revolutionary-kept-spirit-of-resistance-alive/2110658-4371090-e41lv8/index.html

^[6] https://www.theguardian.com/century/1980-1989/Story/0,,110268,00.html

^[7] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/stompies-ghost-refuses-to-rest-in-peace-1258597.html

^[8] http://sabctrc.saha.org.za/originals/finalreport/volume2/volume2.pdf

^[9] Ibid.