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Tightening the Grip
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11500 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1986 |
2,108 Words |
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Herbert London
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DISPENSATIONS
The Future of South Africa as South Africans See It
Richard Neuhaus
Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Erdmans Publishing Co., 1986
317 pp.
There was a 1982 South African news story of a python that attacked a young black boy in Kwazulu. The snake's body had the youngster entrapped, but before it could come in for the kill the boy bit the snake in the neck, chewing out its throat until the snake was dead. Fighting for survival, the snake tightened its grip on the boy's body. The only question that remained was whether it would kill the boy before it died. This is the South African dilemma. By general agreement the snake of apartheid has been mortally wounded. Now one can only wonder whether in the act of dying, it doesn't destroy the emerging new state of South Africa as well.
That this parable has simplified the South African story is somewhat beside the point. What is very much to the point is the evolution to a South Africa without apartheid. Richard John Neuhaus, the author of Dispensations: The Future of South Africa as South Africans See It, does not have any facile answer on what is in store for South Africa. He simply allows the variegated voices in this troubled nation to speak for themselves. What this produces is not a Tower of Babel as one might imagine in a land with so many diverse people, but a powerful statement of aspiration, fear, dignity, religious fervor, and international intrigue. In a strange way South Africa has become - perhaps unfairly - the cauldron of world problems, that microcosm on which future extrapolations of international events will be drawn. Après l'Afrique du Sud, le deluge. The title for the book, as Neuhaus illustrates, is in itself idiosyncratically South African. If refers to concessions the government has made in loosening the bonds of apartheid. It may also refer to Christian dispensations as in the divine re-ordering of human affairs. A reflexive religious imperative is cultivated on the sides of the apartheid. It may also refer to Christian dispensations as in the divine re-ordering of human affairs. A reflexive religious imperative is cultivated on both sides of the apartheid issue.
The Dutch Reformed Church has cast Afrikanerdom not as the work of man but as providential will. Blood River, where the Afrikaner stood his ground against fifteen thousand Zulu warriors in 1938, is considered "holy ground." Here was the place where Christian civilization in Africa was established. The trekkers responded - so they say - to God's will. They made the sacrifices for God, church, the white race, and their own ethnic destiny. It is not coincidental that the trekkers identify with the story of Exodus in the Old Testament. They thought and still think of themselves as a chosen people fulfilling biblical destiny.
Opposing this view of God's will are other voices, from the South African Council of Churches, Bishop Tutu, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, a host of reformers, and even some members of the Dutch Reformed Church who contend that apartheid is an affront to Christian traditions. They speak with different voices, but all believe that apartheid is a moral abomination that challenges the very essence of Christian teachings.
Yet this view of polarity in South
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