When in the summer of 1974, Martin Weil
asked that haunting but prophetic question: “Can the Blacks do for Africa what the Jews did for Israel,”4 it seemed
apartheid South Africa was impregnable, Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) irreversible, and
Portuguese colonialism in Africa indestructible.
Yet today, apartheid is ended; Zimbabwe
is free; and the Portuguese colonial system is finished - thanks to the courage and resilience of the African liberation
movements and the human and material support they received from sympathetic governments and organizations in Africa,
Europe and America.
Prominent among the groups involved in the anti-colonial
struggle in Southern Africa in the U.S. were Trans-Africa, labor unions, and American churches, especially African
American churches, and numerous other organizations.
That African Americans played the leading role in the defeat
of apartheid is not surprising.
Just like other Americans of foreign (though not slave) descent, they “have sought
to use American power in the interest of their ancestral homeland.”5 Indeed from the day that
Dutch ship forcibly brought the “First Africans” to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 as “indentured servants,"6
from the emancipation of their ancestors in 1865 to the enactment of the CAAA in 1986, Black American were never
ever oblivious of the land of their ancestors. For neither slavery nor
Jim Crow, neither segregation nor oppression, not even the Ocean, had the power to separate them totally from the
cultural and biological bonds that bound them to the land of their forbears. Consequently, Black Americans
have maintained over the centuries before they began to gain a measure of political power- consciously or unconsciously-
a “symbolic cultural and biological PanAfricanism.” Indeed other than the "symbolic
cultural-biological PanAfricanists," there has also always existed within the Black community
an anawin (a remnant) - made up mostly of conscious African American professionals
- scholars, lawyers, doctors, pastors, and others - who vocally and organizationally - kept the links with Africa
alive in America.7
These “ties that bind” were manifested in several sustained
efforts for physical return to Africa. The
first successful of those attempts led to the “emergence of a significant Diaspora settlement in Sierra Leone.”8
But Black attachment to Africa was not only expressed in efforts to escape slavery and return to
Africa but also in “songs, poems, legends and myths.”9 Malcolm X acknowledged the power of the African connection when he said:
“I’ve got ghosts of Africa swimming in my blood"10 And refusing to be “exorcized”,
these primeval “ghosts,” like eternal and ubiquitous African ancestral spirits, are still “swimming” in the blood
of African Americans: In their color and physique, in their songs and dances, in their rhythm and rhyme, and most
importantly, in their religious experiences, liturgical expressions, and incredible resilience.
In his seminal work, The Myth of the Negro Post, Melville J. Herskovits, a cultural anthropologist interested in culture contact and acculturation,
after doing research on Blacks in Dahomey, Brazil, Haiti, Trinidad, Surinam, and the U.S., found that the
African cultural heritage had survived enslavement in America, and that
“Africanisms” or African cultural patterns could be found among U.S. Blacks in “family life, motor habits, religious
practices, and music.”11 “Africanisms” were strongest in African American religious life12. Lorenzo Turner's Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect investigated African “survivals” in the U.S.
and discovered that among the large number of words “in fairly general use… especially in the South” were Africanisms like goober (peanut), gumbo (okra), ninny (female breast), tote (to carry), and yam (sweet potato)13 He also found several hundred African names among Americans on the Southside of Chicago, including
the following: “Bobo, one who can not talk (Vai),
Geeji, a language and tribe in Liberia, Agona,
a country in Ghana (Twi), Ola, that which saves (Goruba), Zola, to love (Congo)14 For Frazier, Herskovit’s most articulate
critic, it was, however, not African culture but Christianity that was the “source of social unity and meaning
binding together fragmented aggregates of slaves into communities.”15
He called “Africanisms” a “forgotten memory.”16 Mintz and Price have also attacked the concept of African “survivals”
in America, insisting that the “increasing knowledge of West African complexity suggests that many of these allegedly
widespread West African cultural “elements,” traits, or complexes, are not at all so widespread as Herskovits suggested.”17
All the same, by the 1980’s, historians
like John Blassingame, George Rawick, Eugene Genovese,
Sterling Tucker, and others, after making the slaves “speak for themselves” through slave narratives, Black autobiographies,
fugitive slave accounts, found not only mere “retentions” but that African culture indeed shaped African American
culture.”18
The impact of “symbolic PanAfricanism” is also evident in the names the “first Africans” in America gave their first institutions in the New World. Allen and his compatriots felt no shame founding the Free Africa Society (FAS) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Thursday, April 12, 1787, a day that Lerone Bennett, Jr. called “the Founding of Black America.”19 From the
1780’s to the 1790’s, branches of the FAS were formed all over the northern states of the country – in Boston, New York, Newport, Rhode Island, and in other cities.
This first secular Black American Freedom organization
subsequently gave birth to two all Black churches: the African Church of St. Thomas (1794), and the first authentic independent Black American denomination,
the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1794)20. James Varick and his followers founded the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in New York (1821). There was also an “Ethiopian Church of Jesus Christ” 21 in Savannah, Georgia, during the Revolutionary War period. But the era of symbolic
PanAfricanism would end with the unleashing of new forces in America and Africa.
Bellah and Brill have identified “two important moments” when American
churches had significant influence on U.S. Foreign Policy22. The first occurred during
the “Evangelical Revival or Second Awakening” of the early 19th century, when America deliberately maintained a low global military and political profile, while “Uncle Sam’s” missionaries
transmitted his values abroad 23.
The second was the “moment of social responsibility,”
when the churches decided that the struggle against poverty and injustice in the U.S. must go hand in hand with efforts to bring justice and equality to the world 24. The need for a more proactive church involvement in the positive transformation of human society
was elaborated by Walter Rauschenbusch, an early 20th century exponent of the “social gospel.”25 A social
reformer, he had argued, “religion must be relevant to real world problems and that the church should be actively
involved.” 26 Martin Luther King, Jr.
was attracted to Rauschenbush’s call to social activism and wholeheartedly embraced his optimism
as well. 27
But in South Africa, the relationship between American churches and white supremacy
and colonialism may be divided into these periods: (1) Almost total consensus on U.S. support (1834-1948), (2) Opposition to U.S.
policy and support for absolute non-violent tactics (1949-1959); (3) qualified support of armed resistance (1960-1986).28
As stated earlier, one of the most powerful
forces that influenced the dynamics of politics in Southern Africa as
well as U.S. policy toward the region was the missionary explosion of the 19th
century in which both Black and White religious groups participated. However, their reactions
to the issues of racism and colonialism varied. The period between 1834 and 1948 was a time when white American missionaries virtually gave total support to the U.S. government in its pro-Euro-colonial
policy and pro-Boer racist domination of Africans, entered into an alliance with Cecil Rhodes, the architect of
British imperialism in southern Africa, who often gave them land violently taken from the Africans to build churches,
29 and even gave a copy of the American constitution on which the Boers “based their Volksroad (elected assembly).” 30 At the same, US missionary interests were buttressed by strong economic
relations by the presence in South Africa of American multinational companies like Mobil (1897), General Electric
(1899), and later by Honeywell and Alice Chalmers, which helped
Pretoria to become a nuclear power. 31 Indeed as early as 1896, the year
that Turner made his maiden visit to the country, “ half of South Africa’s mines were run by American engineers, one of whom John Hays Hammond, had become
the dominant force in South African mining two years before. American engineers brought with them to South Africa
American equipment and American capital, which combined to establish an American foothold in South Africa’s nascent economy.” 32
Black American missionaries, on the other
hand, were less tolerant of European and Boer domination of southern Africa. In fact they played a pivotal role in “proto-opposition” to white supremacy in the region. This opposition could be traced to the birth of Ethiopianism in South Africa and the crucial connections it established with African-American
churches in the U.S. Ethiopianism, which is not merely a product of the African’s quest for ecclesiastical independence, but also
of a desire “to be somebody…to initiate, to enjoy the sense of proprietorship in homestead, business, school"
traces its origin to a situation not unlike that of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC) about a century
earlier. It was born in 1892, when Rev. Mangena Makone, an African minister of the white-controlled Wesleyan Church in Pretoria
and fifty followers, broke away from the church because of racism. They were soon to be joined
by other African ministers among who was James Dwane, another Wesleyan
minister. The role of those African Independent Churches (AIC) was largely
ignored until the publication of Bengt G. Sundkler’s Prophets in
South Africa. The connection between
the AMEC and Ethiopianism in South Africa was providential and coincidental: It was the fruit of relationships developed by Charlotte Manye, a member of a group of South African singers from Kimberly who had left to sing in Britain and America. After their U.S. tour, Manye stayed behind in the US and met Rev. Beverly Ransom, who facilitated her entry into Wilberforce University, an AMEC institution, where she lived with Bishop Arnett. Impressed by the work of the AMEC and using stationary carrying the name of Bishop Henry Turner,
she wrote her sister Mrs. Kate in Johannesburg lauding the achievements of African-Americans; and soon Bishop Turner
was corresponding with Rev. Makone. As a result of this contact,
the Annual Conference of the Ethiopian Church
meeting in Pretoria on March 17, 1894, passed a resolution for the merger of the Ethiopian and AME Churches. James Dwane and Jacobus Xaba, leaders of the Ethiopian church, were sent to the U.S. to affect the union.
Fully aware of the great opportunity the moment
presented, Bishop Turner convened a special session of the North Georgia Conference of the AMEC in Atlanta on June 19, 1896, which
consummated the union and appointed Rev. Dwane General Superintendent
for South Africa 33
The merger of both churches set in motion
a chain reaction of events and relationships in the U.S.
and South Africa whose impact was felt in the anti-apartheid movement in both countries. “The amalgamation of the Ethiopian and AME Churches culminated a remarkable historical convergence between Christians on opposite corners of the Atlantic.
For African-American Christians, the opening
of the African mission field helped salve the pain of the past: slavery, for all its horrors and brutality, had
been progressive, a part of God’s unfolding plan for the redemption of Africa. For Mangena Makone and his comrades,
their humble rebellions…resolved themselves into stuff of prophecy. As Jacobus Xaba put it, the prophecy predicted by Psalm 68 approaches its perfection:
And Ethiopia shall stretch out its hands to God” 34
In 1898, barely two years after Ethiopian
forces defeated the Italians at the battle of Adowa, Bishop Turner went on five-week blitz through Cape Colony, Transvaal and Orange Free State
Republics to formally visit the AMEC in the region. His visit is symbolic of
some of the immediate benefits of the Ethiopia-AMEC connection as well as a more humane and symbiotic approach
toward the racial problems in southern Africa. On the religious plane,
he praised the Ethiopian spirit that inspired South Africans to “discover that churches of their own race would
be of far more benefit in a pragmatic measure than worshipping among white, where they are compelled to occupy
a subordinate status.”
Consequently, he promoted Rev. Dwane from superintendent to vicar bishop of the South African district of the church; he also ordained
as AMEC ministers thirty-one elders and twenty deacons. Turner broke South Africa’s white supremacist laws: Traveling, living, and eating “wherever
he wished without incident, and visiting and shaking hands with Paul Krugger, the Afrikaner
president of Transvaal, who conceded that “you are the first black man whose hand I have
ever shaken.” In his public speeches, he hid his political inclinations and seemed
to blame the black South African victims rather than the colonial system that had oppressed them for so long. But before private and all-black congregations, the AME bishop showed his true color: It was Turner,
the “arch-critic of U.S. imperialism and racism and outspoken emigrationist,” who emphasizes the “need for the international solidarity of blacks, the efficacy of assertive
and concerted action to redress their common grievances, and the necessity for defensive violence.” 35 Thus, by
promoting the unity of the Ethiopian and AME churches and by identifying the sufferings of black South Africans
with those of black Americans., Turner played a leading role in the promotion of Evangelical PanAfricanism36
and “proto-opposition” by an African-American church to European colonialism in Africa.
There also appeared in Natal, South Africa in the 1890’s a group called the African Christian Union, which listed some of its officers as residing in the U.S. One of their aims was to
solicit funds from Europeans to “restore Africans in America
to their fatherland and to pursue steadily and unswervingly the policy of Africa For The Africans, and look for the forming of the African Christian Nation” 37
Another fruit of the AME-Ethiopian church
connection was both educational and political and facilitated the freedom struggle in southern Africa.
After Charlotte Manye’s graduation from Wilberforce University,
she returned to South
Africa and was
followed by many African students who attended all-African American colleges and universities in search of the
“golden fleece.”
From the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
“at least forty mission-educated Christians went on to higher education in the United States…Many African leaders came to feel that they could learn much from
the Black experience in the U.S.A.” Soon, the AME was
not only building churches but also establishing schools among which were Bethel Institute in Cape Town, which was run by Rev. and Mrs. Allen Hattaway, and Wilberforce
Institute, which was started by Charlotte and her husband after returning from the U.S. Indeed the greatest attraction
of the AMEC for Africans was neither its theological profundity nor its doctrinal superiority. It was rather the educational opportunity it provided to a people whom the white establishment would
have preferred to wallow in ignorance. One appeal from South Africa to the AMEC is indicative of this appeal: “Give us…a college or
an educational institute that will enable us…to stand upon the same platform as the white race…the same as the
Negro is doing in America.” 38
However,
the AMEC educational system was unique and its impact subtle. Unlike the few black white-run
schools, it prepared its students for leadership that would confront white supremacy in South Africa just as African-American colleges in the U.S. have historically produced leaders that fought against colonialism and racism in America and other parts of Africa. Both Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah led the independence
struggles in Nigeria and Ghana
respectively. They also had two other things in common: They were their country’s
first presidents as well as Lincoln University
alumni. These African graduates of Black-American schools were imbued with
authentic Christian values, which was the “source of political ideas," that “furnished a language of protest”,
and taught a brotherhood that meant a shared, if racially diverse, society. It was, therefore, not
surprising that about half of the dozen men who launched the South African Native Congress, the precursor of the
African National Congress (ANC), “had been touched by the AME church and by the broader traffic with black America which the church facilitated.” 39
Alfred Xuma, a product of Tuskegee
and North Western University Medical School,
became the head of the African National Congress in 1940, and resuscitated, unified, and financed the fragile but
venerable organization and used it as a platform for the promotion of African political rights and the condemnation
of racism and segregation in South Africa.
All the same, the need for an in-depth
study of the impact of Black Americans on Africa was reiterated by Professor Joseph Harris of Howard University at the 2nd International Conference of African Histonans held in Dar
es Salaam, Tanzania in 1963. He said that African Americans
“had helped to shape the course of events in Central and Southern Africa and
that the story of how this was done had to be investigated.” 40
Harris' challenge was taken up by two
scholars: Walton Johnson studied the role of African American missionaries during the colonial period in Africa. 41 Richard Ralston traced
the early careers of southern African students who studied in the U.S. before 1940. 42 Both concluded that African
Americans were extensively involved in Central and Southern Africa and
that contact with Black America was an important episode in the education and development of modern African leaders.
The white community in South Africa was understandably worried by the African American connection. The South African graduates from U.S. black colleges, they complained, “returned indoctrinated with
the “dangerous” poison of race hatred which they spread to their gullible and uneducated brethren” Black American
notions of democracy, liberty, equality, education and self government,” they said, made Africans “difficult to
control.” Moreover, Turner’s activities during his visit to South Africa - only two years after the Ethiopians
had defeated the Italians at the battle of Adowa- and the discovery
of a letter by a Haitian domestic servant predicting, “ultimately Africans would “whip” the British back to the
Thames as the Haitians had repelled the French,"43 only inflamed their fears. There were also rumors
among whites that African Americans were buying large tracts of land in central South Africa to establish a nation governed by blacks.44
The
real and imagined dangers of the AMEC/Africa links led to a white backlash. African-Americans were blamed for everything,
“from the fractious behavior of chiefs to an apparent epidemic of “native insolence” on the highveld farms.”
Calling AMEC ministers “American agitators” hiding
under the “guise of religion,” some state governments cancelled their sacramental licenses. While a government inquiry found no evidence of seditious behavior on the part of the AMEC ministers,
they were, nonetheless, made to feel unwelcome in the region. White South Africans were
especially disturbed by the proprietary attitude of AMEC ministers toward Africa as they saw
themselves as the “true sons of the soil.” It was, therefore, not
surprising that African-American missionaries would soon be banned from the area and declared “persona non grata in southern Africa” even until 1926. For there was indeed a
genuine fear among whites, especially the missionaries, who saw the AMEC ministers as “missionary raiders” with
an unscrupulous habit of taking advantage of their color, would “steal” most of their converts, who had hitherto
looked to the white church for guidance and inspiration. Moreover, there was also
trepidation that unless this incipient relationship was “nipped in the bud,” it could foment an African revolution
against the colonial system. 45
John Chilembwe also represents the impact of the anti-colonial Pan-African spirit promoted by some African American
missionaries and one of the worst nightmares of European colonialism. He was converted to Christianity
and sent to the U.S. by Joseph Booth, a John Brown-type English missionary. Booth was a White PanAfricanist who had promoted an organization called the African Christian Union, which was an attempt “to involve all of Africa extraction
the world over to unite in the organization of a semi-benevolent joint stock company for the commercial occupation
of Africa. Like Garvey, he advocated economic PanAfricanism: “Let the African,” he called out, “be his own employer, develop his own country, establish his
own manufactures, run his own ship, work his own mines, and conserve the wealth from his labor for his God-given
land for the upliftment of the people and the glory of God. Let the call be loud and
clear to everyone with African blood coursing in his veins…Africa for the Africans”
46
As a result of his radical views on race,
the colonial authorities had Booth deported from Africa on several
occasions. However, his greatest disappointment would come from his African
disciple: After Chilembwe’s education at Lynchburg Seminary in Virginia, ordination as a minister,
return to present day Malawi in 1900, and alienation with Booth, his mentor, it was obvious that he had returned
from America as “a John Baptist making a path for American Negro ministers.” 47 He purchased 93 acres of land where he set up the Providence Industrial
Mission (PIM) for educating his people in the arts, crafts, and Christianity. Two years later, he was
joined by two African American missionaries, Rev. Landon N. Cheek and Miss Emma B. Delaney, who were sent by the
National Baptist Convention (NBC).
With funds from NBC headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, the P.I.M. expanded, building a network of churches, schools, developing
home craft classes for women and commercial farming of coffee, cotton, pepper and rubber. P.I.M., modeled after
Booker T. Washington Institute at Tuskegee, Alabama and emphasizing self-improvement, soon attracted large numbers of
Malawi youths long denied wholesome education by white missionaries and
colonial officials.
Chilembwe and the youths
protested white takeover of arable African lands, the harsh conditions under which African laborers worked at white
estates, and racial discrimination.
And in 1915 this African Freedom Fighter and
Nat Turner-like character led a small army of Malawians in an uprising against the British colonial system killing
three whites, wounding others, and at least, momentarily, threatening to stem the tide of settler expansionism
in Southern Africa.
48 A colonial governor’s inquiry into the causes
of the rebellion found out the Chilembwe had imbibed "dangerous political notions from his Africa-American
connections and that his attitude toward race relations had been influenced by a certain class of American Negro
publications that he had been importing on a regular basis.”
All the same, the actual impact of the
Ethiopia-AMEC connection should not be overexaggerated. After all, many African American missionaries in Southern Africa were
rather conservative in their challenge to white supremacy. There were more Booker
T. than Garvey M. ln fact some of them supported British imperialism in Africa, and saw
their role in a similar manner as primarily a “civilizing mission,” an opportunity to bring millions of Africans
out of “ignorance, degradation and barbarism.” They opined that the “African
had to prove himself worthy of being placed on a par with “civilized” peoples by improving himself morally, intellectually,
and financially.” Indeed some AMEC ministers displayed “an overt and covert sense of cultural chauvinism that went
to an extreme.” Dwane, who became an AMEC bishop, severed his connection with the Church because most African-Americans
churches preferred light-skinned ministers to dark-skinned ones. Moreover, the colonial
authorities treated Black-Americans differently from the Africans, giving them certain special privileges, which
racism had denied them in America. Such treatment was patently
evident during Turner’s visit.
Indeed it is interesting to note that white America treated African students in America
in a similar manner in the days of Jim Crow: They often gave them certain privileges denied their American cousins.
One AME bishop called the African American presence in South Africa outright imperialism.
After WW11, the racial climate in South Africa deteriorated. This period may be divided into two parts- 1949 to
1975 and 1976 to 1986. With the introduction of apartheid as the official government policy in 1948, the white
minority regime used extra force to maintain the status quo. Black resistance also rose. The Group Areas Act (1950) was imposed on the country leading to an ANC sponsored mass labor strike
during which 18 people were killed by police and 30 wounded. This period also saw the
organization by the ANC of its first nationwide campaign of resistance, the Defiance or Unjust Laws Campaign (1952) in which Mandela played a key role. The police responded by
killing 40 people and arresting 8,000 demonstrators. The ANC launched the Freedom
Charter, created Unkonto We Siwe-Zulu for the "Spear
of the Nation" (1961), which carried out its first bomb attack in Johannesburg on December 16, the Day of the Covenant (“holy day”) when Afrikaners celebrate their victory over
the Zulu at “Blood River.” The post WWII era also saw the creation of “Poqo.” (“Alone” in Xhosa the language of Mandela’s ethnic group), the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the rise of the South African Students Organization (SASO) and of its Black Power
group, Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement.
In the U.S. various African American groups and individuals sought to counter the violence in South Africa in a variety of ways. One of them, the Council
on African Affairs, founded in 1937, less than two years after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia,
was described as the “longest lived and most influential American organization of its kind.” 49 With members like Ralph Bunche, who became Associate
Chief of the State Department’s Division of Dependent Affairs and a UN Deputy Secretary General, Paul Robeson, world class actor and singer, Mordecai W. Johnson, Howard University President, Max Yergan, a YMCA official with seventeen years of experience in Africa, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the Harlem
Congressman, Dubois, and an elite group of Ph.D.’s, the Council was guaranteed a high degree of access to U.S.
political institutions and policy makers. It advocated independence
for African countries and in 1950, made an unprecedented demand for South Africa’s expulsion from the United Nations 50 A group, American for South African Resistance, was formed in 1952.
The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) was organized in 1962 to promote civil rights in America and independence in Africa. 51
Other African American leaders like Martin
Luther King also spoke out against apartheid in South Africa. Indeed while King’s civil rights activities in the U.S. are well known, little is known about his contributions to the antiapartheid movements. In fact most people think that he was so preoccupied with the struggle against racism and segregation
in America that he had no time to make a contribution to the struggle against
racism and white minority rule in South Africa.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Right from the very beginning of public ministry, King recognized the connection between the civil
rights and antiapartheid movements; and he acted by seeking the upliftment of the poor
and oppressed in South Africa in the 1950’s and 1960’s by (1) developing a friendship with Albert Luthuli, and admiration and respect for antiapartheid activists like Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe.
In a letter to Luthuli, he wrote: “Our struggle for freedom in the U.S. is not fundamentally different from that going on in South Africa. We share a common destiny.”52 Luthuli’s letter to King shows the strong bonds between the Blacks of Africa and America: “My Negro friends,”
he wrote, “were eager to hear about South Africa, and their readiness to help resolved itself many times to the
question: Can we come over there to assist you. 53 (2) Lending support to antiapartheid
groups: In 1960, King condemned the Sharpeville massacre and asked the U.S.
government to impose diplomatic and economic sanctions against South Africa. 54 Together with the African Committee on Africa (ACOA), he called
for the recall of the American Ambassador in Pretoria, the mobilization of U.S. public opinion, and consumer boycott
of South African goods, pressure on U.S. private companies in South Africa and on U.S. policy makers to compel
South Africa to abandon apartheid, and, finally, to raise legal defense and welfare funds for victims of apartheid.
55 In 1964, King and the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa
(ANLCA) appealed to the Johnson administration to “take a firm stand against South Africa, prohibit future American investments there, and endorse an unsponsored oil embargo against the apartheid state.” 56
The tradition of African American opposition
to apartheid continued in the 1970s among Black secular and religious organizations. At Howard University in May 1972, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) sponsored an ANLCA
meeting, which inter alia, “proposed the establishment of a national black strategy on Africa and a nationwide
program of support for African liberation struggles.” 57
1976 and 1986 and the years between them
were crucial in the efforts of antiapartheid groups to dismantle the apartheid system in South Africa. Between those two years,
powerful and dynamic social, political and economic forces propelled by unpredictable historic forces, coalesced
and conspired to change forever the “realities on the ground,” and ultimately and unalterably, transformed the
liberation movement in South
Africa and the
antiapartheid forces in America.
In South Africa, the crucial event was
the Soweto Massacre of June 16, 1976 when the South African police shot into
a group of 15,000 school children in Soweto peacefully protesting the government’s ruling that half of all classes
in secondary schools must be taught in Afrikaans,” the national language of the Boers, the creators and apostles
of apartheid. About 1,000 pupils were killed and over 5,000 injured. 58
The fallout from the Soweto massacre
was felt both in the U.S. and South Africa.
Within South Africa it led to: (1) the hardening of the belief of black students and
adults that violence was necessary to end apartheid. (2) It led to the exodus
from South Africa of about 10,000 students for guerilla training. 59 in Tanzania, Angola, and Mozambique or education in Europe or America.
(3) It shifted the focus of resistance to a younger
generation and a more dispersed leadership.
Soweto’s impact in the U.S. was equally remarkable, and led to the application of more pressure on Pretoria by American antiapartheid activists, especially African American secular and religious organizations. In 1976, the Congressional Black Caucus “produced the Afro-American Manifesto on Southern Africa, a document that allied Black Americans to the goals of African liberation in that region.” 60
In 1977, Rev. Leon Sullivan introduced the Sullivan Principles, a code that “asked U.S. companies in South Africa to desegregate facilities, pay equal wages to Blacks, improve job training and
advancement and the quality of their workers’ lives.”
But the Sullivan’s Principles were vehemently
condemned by some African American church leaders. At a summit meeting of
black church leaders in New
York in 1979, Rev. William
Jones, Jr., of the Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC), decried the Sullivan code as “well-intentioned
but no longer sufficient,” especially since “the very presence of United States corporations in South Africa serves to legitimize the apartheid system of white supremacy.” In a paper entitled “A Theological Basis for Armed Struggle,” the PNBC president, justified resort
to violence in South
Africa because:
“Genocide, on a massive scale, is being practiced in South Africa
