The Social Mission of the Church in South Africa

Extract

Some day no doubt an attempt will be made to probe the roots of the colour bar in the psychology of certain European nations. The colour bar did not originate in South Africa. It came with Dutch and British colonists. But it found a vigorous stimulant to its growth in the formidable challenge of that very thing, the black skin, in the dread of which it consists. It has been suggested that the list of capital sins needs amplification, for it contains no reference to one of humanity’s worst failings, the tendency to restrict the scope of the connatural love of the species to a particular community constituted by language, lineage, race, religion, politics, economic interest or colour. In our days, colour is one of the most fiercely sundering of these restrictive elements.

Colour dominates the South African social scene. It would be a mistake, however, to simplify the picture and put all the blame for the country’s ills on White oppressors. There can be no denying their guilt, but we need not add to it by making them responsible for all the tensions that have resulted from the meeting of Western sophistication and African backwardness. White colonizers have probably made all the mistakes in the book; but even without colonial conquest there would have been conflict a-plenty arising from the impact of Western dynamism on the social stagnation of Africa.