What is racism, and how can the church, the government and society, play a leading role to actively champion its demise, uprooting it from the face of the earth in a country such as ours where it is stubbornly rooted and entrenched?
In Durban, seven years after South Africa came out of the hell-hole of apartheid, transforming itself into a democracy following the demise of the unjust system in 1994, the United Nation’s General Assembly ordered that the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance Conference, be held in South Africa.
The conference took place in Durban in 2001, seven years after the country had rid itself of apartheid rule.
This was a symbolic gesture by the UN to have the conference take place in this country, emerging from the ashes of apartheid.
At the end of the conference, a document espousing that discrimination of any kind, should never again be countenanced, was produced.
To give effect to this understanding, a document of the 2001 conference to be known as the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action was adopted.
A tougher legislative framework was to be adopted expressive of the mind of conference that discrimination of any kind should be regarded as intolerable.
The programme would be made “in a spirit of solidarity and international cooperation and inspired by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and other relevant international instruments”.
But racism in South Africa, as in many other countries, is often stubborn and entrenched, and difficult to eradicate
About seven years ago in 2017, the country was rocked by unsavoury newspaper headline, “Priest wins K-word case, but loses his job.”
The headline related to an Anglican priest who was booted out of the church following a court order against a racist colleague who had used the K-word in an altercation with him.
According to the newspaper article, the Reverend Brian -Stephen, a black clergyman, approached the Equality Court, alleging the K-word had been used to belittle him.
Trevor Kordom, a lay minister in the church, was ordered by the court to pay Stephen R5 000 compensation, and to also pen an apology to be read out to the parishioners during a Sunday morning service.
The Anglican hierarchy failed to take action against the offender. Instead, Stephen was removed from the church, with the Anglican Bishop of Saldanha Bay diocese, the Right Reverend Raphael Hess, informing him he would no longer be considered to be nominated for any parish in the diocese because he had “chosen not to use the processes for healing and reconciliation provided for in the canons of the church”.
Stephen was upset that the office of the Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba had said it would not entertain the matter because it was “a diocesan matter”, and should be dealt with at that level.
At the time, the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana, said “the reality was that there had still not been much socialisation away from the divisive and socially toxic mindset of the apartheid era”.
But racism is not only a regional concern. It is a world phenomenon.
The church with all its might must condemn it, and not make an excuse for it.
No law trumps the Constitution, and this includes the church canons.
About two years ago, a constitutional professor at the University of Cape Town, Pierre de Vos, reflected on what it would mean if, in the South African context, the word “race” would be expunged from our Constitution in view of the current debate in Germany on whether the word “race” should be expunged from section 3 of article 3 of the German Basic Law.
De Vos said if such a thought were to be contemplated in SA, an uproar could arise as this could be seen as regressive considering the country’s past with the dominance of racial laws that oppressed black people.
De Vos argues that the country’s Constitution was drafted taking into account the long history of “colonial conquest and, later during the apartheid era, the legal enforcement of the system of racial segregation”.
So, in the end, the church, the government and society must work together to rid the country of any form of racism.
- Mdhlela is a freelance journalist, an Anglican priest, an ex-trade unionist and former editor of the South African human rights Commission journals
