29 - New Redeemers

Summary

THE DIRECTLY POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY were generally deplored by European Christians. Taking their own possession of the temple for granted, Jesus having long become an honorary European, they were pained by this unruly clamour in the back rows of the congregation. One can understand their feelings. They had opened the doors, after all, and now the flock was making trouble. Had these natives no sense of gratitude?

Yet the political emphasis of African Christianity was of a piece with all African attitudes to religion. The pact with the ancestors might be conceived in suprasensible terms; its practical character as a guide to the affairs of everyday life, whether moral, social or political, had never been in doubt. With the spread of Christian ideas, religion and politics continued to march hand in hand. They nourished each other as before. But now they marched towards ever more serious clashes with authority.

Some of these became notorious. There was the case of Pastor Enoch Mgijima's Children of Israel in South Africa soon after the first world war. South Africa in those days was not yet ruled by any system of legalised apartheid, of ‘separate development’. But a great deal of legal discrimination against Africans, especially in the matter of land disposal, was already on the statute book. In 1921 the Children of Israel built a settlement on the Bulhoek commonage in the Ciskei area of Cape Province, a good country where the foothills of the Drakensberg pile in blue enchantment to a far horizon. This was now land forbidden to African settlement. The Israelites were ordered to move on. They refused. They were ordered again, and still refused. On 5 May 1921 the government of General Smuts sent in troops to clear the Bulhoek commonage, and the troops opened fire, killing 163 and wounding 129 of these perversely stubborn Christians. A few of the remainder were moved on into prison; most were sent to the newly created Native Reserves.

For those days it was not a particularly rare incident. Africa knew many upheavals against colonial law; and many little massacres were quietly conducted in repressing them. South Africa perhaps had more of these than most, even under the reputedly liberal regime of General Smuts. Much has been said in praise of General Smuts. Not everyone saw him in that light.