behind me a family with Indian features. Together we pray for truth and reconciliation and accountability before God: a God – our Father and Mother – of justice and love. The coloured Canon tells us about a white priest in France who asked him for forgiveness for everything Europe did to Africa, while making the sign of the cross in the Canon’s hand. During the service the Canon invites all of us to make a similar sign in the hands of those around us. But I couldn’t do it.
Why not? The invitation caught me by surprise; my shyness; the legacy of a different DRC spirituality, etc. But I was also afraid that this would make my asking of forgiveness too easy, cheap – there is too much for which I should ask forgiveness. Or am I too proud? Perhaps I don’t trust a fellow human being to forgive me – as PW Botha was quoted in yesterday’s Rapport: “I confess only to God, I apologise to my neighbour”.
Then I walk back from the steps where I received Holy Communion in the front of the church and my eye is caught by the large Black Christ painting – with Oupa Hendrik stabbing Albert Luthuli in the side with a spear.
Suddenly I have a strong feeling that there is indeed too much for me to ask forgiveness for – the faceless system of apartheid all at once feels very near.
On my way home I notice the front-page interview with PW Botha in the Rapport. Under the heading “Take me to court!” he describes the TRC as the “Revenge and Retribution Commission”, which is “scattering Afrikaners”. According to him it is time for “we Afrikaners” to stop “our constant apologising … we need to recover our self-respect … to honour our Blood River covenant with God” as “a chosen volk”.
Twenty years later I am still haunted by this stark contrast between the Black Christ and Botha’s Afrikaner world. I continue to find it strange to see a black person on the cross, rather than the typical Westernised “whitey in a nightie”, as the painter, Ronald Harrison, later referred to it in his autobiography The Black Christ. And I struggle with renewed intensity to face the Roman soldier with the sharp spear and the all too familiar face – my grandfather’s.
Black Christ is a disturbing painting. Harrison expected the apartheid government to react to his artistic contribution to the liberation struggle, but he probably underestimated the intensity of condemnation by Christian Nationalist Afrikaners. The painting was immediately branded as blasphemous in Die Kerkbode, the mouthpiece of the white Dutch Reformed Church. The mainstream Afrikaner Nationalist newspaper Die Burger called for its banning and there were plenty of people in power eager to respond to this indignant appeal. The Security Police were furious but were unable to prevent the Black Christ being smuggled out and used to raise funds overseas for the anti-apartheid movement. The 22-year-old Harrison was repeatedly interrogated and tortured for information, which permanently damaged his health.
Harrison was wary of blasphemy. His intention was not to deify Luthuli but to highlight the undeniable connection between the agony of Jesus and the suffering of people of colour in his country. The young artist was protesting in particular against the ideological use of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus – the domesticated Jesus I grew up with. Representing the suppression of “non-Whites” as a crucifixion enabled Harrison’s sharp visual critique to combine political and moral denunciation with a profound condemnation of the DRC’s religious justification of separate development. His Black Christ presents a radical questioning of Christian Afrikaner Nationalism: what Verwoerd and his supporters did to Luthuli and his people, we also did to Christ. Even though I had been sincere in my Christian nationalist following of (a white) Jesus, I had remained complicit in the re-crucifixion of the Christ I love.
I am increasingly convinced that Harrison’s highly unsettling paint brush is biblically sound – “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you? Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” (Matt. 25:44-45). But during my current attempt to face my historical complicity more thoroughly, I felt a sense of betrayal, rising, again, like heartburn. Something deep inside me was resisting. A shadowy part of me was protesting against a whole-hearted acceptance of the idea that Oupa Hendrik was indeed also that soldier in the Black Christ. Had the milk from Oupa’s hand and Pa’s love for his father soaked more fully into the marrow of my bones than I wanted to acknowledge?
Oupa Hendrik could not be escaped in my family home. At the entrance to the large living-dining room a large portrait painting of Prime Minister Verwoerd is still on prominent display. The Verwoerd family crest, carefully designed by my father, hangs around the corner. The motto is my grandfather’s well-known political slogan: “Create your own future”. In my father’s spacious study, every available book about Dr HF Verwoerd is shelved next to the large wooden writing desk, at which his father used to work until the early hours of the morning during his eight years in office from 1958 to 1966.
My father is a scientist, a retired geology professor. He is a man of few words and he shows little emotion, as is the case with most Afrikaner men from his generation. As long as I can remember I was, however, quite aware of his deep admiration for his father as political leader. He is now in his late eighties and still has a resolute determination to defend his father against critics. He still has most of his hair, turned white-grey like his father’s, and many older people have remarked to me how much his face reminds them of Dr Verwoerd’s.
From my childhood, we only gathered as an extended Verwoerd family for Ouma Betsie’s significant birthdays. I vaguely recollect such a gathering at Stokkiesdraai (my grandparents’ house near Vereeniging, on the bank of the Vaal River). It must have been in 1976, because it was Ouma’s 75th anniversary. I was twelve years old. We all sat together and watched a few black-and-white 35 mm films of key moments in Oupa Hendrik’s political career. The tens of thousands of people at Jan Smuts Airport (Johannesburg), enthusiastically welcoming the prime minister and his wife back from London in 1960, after South Africa withdrew from the British Commonwealth, left a strong impression. Ouma and his seven children also shared some warm memories – his principled, fully devoted life as a statesman, his love for his family and especially grandchildren, his concern about the well-being of those who worked for him.
Ouma Betsie always gave her grandchildren Afrikaans storybooks as birthday presents. When Prof GD Scholtz published his two-volume Afrikaner Nationalist biography of Dr Verwoerd, every grandchild received a copy. On the front page of Volume 1, Ouma wrote, next to each offspring’s name: “Look to the rock from which you were hewn.” (Isaiah 51:1)
Criticising the rock from which one is hewn feels like a fundamental betrayal.
But I also suspected that my discomfort with Oupa Hendrik as the Soldier with the Spear had a different source: the bloody nature of his death. After all, Dr Verwoerd “sacrificed his life for his volk”. This inherited, inner-circle meaning given to the spilled lifeblood of a beloved leader is probably the main source of my persistent reluctance to name the political blood on his hands.
Blood.
Oupa Hendrik’s blood in my veins.
Dr Verwoerd’s sanctified, sacrificial lifeblood.
Apartheid blood on the hands of Verwoerd.
A decade’s worth of peace work in other countries has prepared me to face these facts full-on now. As has my friendship with Alistair.
I met Alistair Little, a working-class ex-prisoner and former member of the militant Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF),6 shortly after my arrival in Ireland, at the Summer School of the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. I was immediately drawn to his intense, self-critical participation at this event in the Wicklow Hills, a beautiful place, but for him still unsafe enemy territory.
One evening, we all ended up in a nearby pub. He told me how he had become involved in violent opposition to the IRA7 as a twelve-year-old. His home town had been rocked by a number of IRA bombings. Family friends had been killed. The British Army and the local police appeared ineffective. He joined the UVF when he was fourteen. Three years later he shot a Catholic man in a retaliation attack, for which he,