Jack Voelkel
Saving the Beloved Country
by Jamie Morrison
The amazing story of how Christians working together influenced a political breakthrough in the crucial elections in South Africa in 1994.
The taxi sped through the streets of Johannesburg, its passenger desperate to get to Lanseria airport before the plane carrying Zulu Chief Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi took off. “Please drive faster,” the 300-lb passenger begged the driver. “I must see the Chief Minister before he leaves!”
Washington Aggrey J’alango Okumu, the Kenyan “gentle giant” had been in South Africa only a few weeks, seeking to help craft a negotiated settlement to an election drama that was set to engulf the Beloved Country in a civil war on the eve of its first-ever democratic vote in April 1994. Henry Kissinger and other international diplomats had already come to South Africa and gone home empty-handed and predicting doom, having given up all hope that a way could be found for Chief Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) to participate in the elections.
The Political CrisisButhelezi had in the distant past been a member of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), now South Africa’s ruling party, but had left many years back to form the IFP. With strong support from traditionalist Zulus, the country’s most populous group, especially in the KwaZulu-Natal province and in the huge townships around Johannesburg, the IFP was angling for greater devolved provincial power away from the central government and for recognition of the Zulu king in the country’s new constitution, something the more Westernized and statist ANC was unwilling to agree to.
So the IFP was boycotting the April 27 elections in protest. Rwanda had just exploded in genocide in early April. Frighteningly, most experts were predicting an even worse catastrophe in KwaZulu-Natal and the Johannesburg townships if the elections went forward without the IFP’s involvement.
Washington Okumu was crestfallen when he finally arrived at the airport to hear that Buthelezi’s airplane had already taken off. The Chief Minister was on his way to see the Zulu king. It was April 15th, twelve days until elections began. Twelve days to try to avert a bloodbath. There was no time to waste and Okumu was distraught. He had become an advisor to Kissinger and the international mediators just a week or so previously and so he knew the situation intimately. In fact he had studied under Kissinger at Harvard and now, with his old professor far away, this gentle Kenyan politician was now the only mediator still seeking to bring a solution. But how had a man from East Africa come to be so intimately involved in the South African miracle that was to unfold?
He was invited into the fray not by anyone in the South African political or business community, but by a South African evangelist named Michael Cassidy. While it might seem strange to some that an evangelist was caught up in the details of a political solution to enable an election to come off successfully, it was not strange to Cassidy himself.
Born to British parents, he grew up in Lesotho, the tiny mountain kingdom surrounded by South Africa, and was heavily influenced as a child by the political views of Patrick Duncan, son of Sir Patrick Duncan, formerly the British governor-general of South Africa. Duncan helped the young Cassidy to see clearly the evils of the racist policies enforced by the apartheid government which ruled South Africa from 1948 until 1994.
Michael Cassidy, God’s Man for the Hour
As Cassidy pursued his education at Cambridge University in England and then at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, he gained a wider world perspective on what would become his home country. It was becoming clear to him during these formative years of his early 20s that his primary calling was to preach the Gospel in the major cities of Africa, and especially to its leaders, though not neglecting the many poor across the continent.
Billy Graham and John Stott had already become his heroes and role-models, and from the beginning of his ministry Cassidy had adopted a solidly evangelical stance. Though these two heroes were not overtly involved in political issues, while in the States Cassidy had also registered the example and ministry of Martin Luther King. Here he saw a Christian, a pastor even, at the forefront of the struggle against legalized racism in America. A very similar battle was already being waged in South Africa and Cassidy concluded that Christians could not but be involved in it. He came to believe that justice was simply love enshrined in structures and that Jesus had mandated us to walk in the way of love.
His aim upon returning to South Africa after completing his theological studies was primarily to preach the Gospel and win converts to Christ, but he resolved also to stand in any way he could against the apartheid policies of the South African government. This he did with great courage, as he established African Enterprise (AE) as an interracial and interdenominational ministry operating ultimately in ten African countries with support links in eleven nations in North America, Europe and Australasia. This global partnership exists “to evangelize the cities of Africa through Word and Deed in Partnership with the Church,” the deed aspect being so crucial in South Africa in 1994.
One of Cassidy’s major discouragements in life was that there were so few in the South African church, especially white evangelicals, who were willing to stand with him and other Christians opposing apartheid. Many evangelicals and charismatics derided Cassidy for being “too political” even as they were otherwise impressed (or sometimes mystified) by his concomitant commitment to evangelism. He also received criticism from many on the left who thought he wasn’t active enough in the struggle against apartheid, especially since he spent so much time preaching the Good News.
However, Cassidy felt he was on sure biblical ground in holding together both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of the Gospel, both evangelism and social justice. And he could identify deeply with the dictum of the great Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper that “There is not one inch of the whole created universe over which Jesus does not say, ‘Mine!’” For Cassidy, the Gospel had to be applied to every aspect of life – personal, marital, social, political and economic.
The South African Christian Leadership Assembly (SACLA)Cassidy’s outlook caused him to spearhead the first truly interracial nationwide gatherings of Christians ever in South Africa, probably the most notable being the South African Christian Leadership Assembly (SACLA), which saw 6,000 church leaders come together in Pretoria during the height of the apartheid system in 1979.
The SACLA experience was also a watershed, Cassidy believes, for the Dutch Reformed Church, whose racist theology had propped up the apartheid edifice. For many Dutch Reformed pastors and theologians returned to their churches and classrooms with their old views shaken by exposure to the views of the wider church, not to mention by having formed real friendships, many for the first time, with actual people of color. It took seven years, but in 1986 the Dutch Reformed Church officially changed its position and proclaimed that apartheid was sin. For a government that had relied so much upon the views of the church for legitimizing and undergirding its policies, this pulled the rug out from under the apartheid regime and its days were now numbered.
This became startlingly evident on February 2, 1990, when F. W. de Klerk, the new South African president, astonished both South Africa and the world by declaring in a speech that the ANC and all the liberation movements would be unilaterally legalized and that Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners would be released from prison. South Africa was about to embark on a four-year project of creating a new, non-racial democracy with the main architects of this new government having spent at least the last half-century as enemies, often violently opposed ones.
Just as Cassidy had found that so many black and white Christians were alienated from one another, and so needed to be brought together in gatherings such as SACLA, so now he also found that political leaders were miles apart in their understandings of one another. In many ways this was not surprising, for half the leading black politicians had been exiles for multiple decades while the other half had been in prison. So he sought to bring black and white, capitalist and communist, English and Afrikaner together for a series of dialogue and encounter experiences. “We found that one of the best ways to get people to be themselves and open up to one another is to take them out into nature. In Africa, that means going out into the bush, to a game lodge where you can go out in Land Rovers and see rhino, elephant, giraffe and so on,” he said.
Dialogue, Fun, and Relationship-building in Kolobe LodgeIn the course of about a year, almost a hundred South African politicians went with Cassidy and his AE colleagues to Kolobe Lodge, several hours north of Pretoria, for a total of six weekends of dialogue, fun and relationship-building. Cassidy’s basic aim was to help these leaders see how close they were to one another in terms of their humanity and in their desires for the new South Africa. All basically wanted a peaceful and prosperous country free of racial discord where their children could grow up as friends and without the painful baggage of the past. But the most powerful aspect of the weekends came when each person shared their autobiography and told of what they had experienced in their life.
The Pan Africanist Congress was a political party that broke away from the ANC in the 1950s and whose military wing had adopted the slogan “One settler, one bullet.” As whites were viewed by some blacks as “settlers” this sort of sentiment would have made the PAC a despised entity in the minds of most whites. Yet tears fell from the eyes of white politicians as they heard Philip Mlambo, one of the senior PAC leaders, tell during one of these weekends of being imprisoned on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent most of his prison years. “On one occasion,” he said, “we were digging trenches and I was forced into one of these and covered up until only my head was above the soil. I was then urinated on by one of the warders. Sometimes, when manual work had generated great thirst, I asked for water, but was offered urine.” Having heard this, it was now possible for whites to understand why some blacks would adopt an outlook characterized by “one settler, one bullet.”
Read part two.
Jamie Morrison is a freelance writer based in Spokane, Washington. He is Jack Voelkel’s nephew and also the great-grandson, grandson, son and cousin of missionaries. He has worked with Michael Cassidy for ten years and was privileged to be in South Africa during the 1994 election miracle. He is married to Amy and they have three children.
Photo of Michael Cassidy, courtesy of African Enterprise. Used by permission.
This essay is based on, and contains quotes from, the account of the 1994 South African elections, and other events leading up to them, contained in A Witness For Ever by Michael Cassidy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995). Cassidy, a South African, is the founder of African Enterprise.
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