Afrikaans ministers who proved it’s never too late for reconciliation

There are moments you witness that stay with you for the rest of your life. I have been thinking recently about two such moments, separated by more than 20 years. Both involved Afrikaans ministers who came from deeply conservative parts of the Reformed tradition, and neither was somebody from whom one would necessarily have expected what happened.

The first was Dr Danie Rosslee of the Dutch Reformed Church. The second was Reverend EG Fourie of the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afrika. I happened to be present on both occasions.

In November 1990, Professor Willie Jonker caused an uproar when he stood before the Rustenburg Church Conference and confessed his own guilt and that of the Dutch Reformed Church for apartheid, daring also to confess on behalf of the Afrikaner people. The response from conservative parts of the church was immediate: who had given Jonker the right to speak for them?

The reaction was particularly strong in the then Wes-Transvaal Synod of the NG Kerk. The following year I attended one day of its synod meeting. Dr Danie Rosslee, a former moderator who had long been regarded as theologically and politically conservative, was there as an elder.

‘A liberated person’

Rosslee stood up and did something nobody expected. He expressed his support for Jonker’s confession and, as I remember it after all these years, said that Jonker had not gone far enough. What I remember particularly well is the silence in the hall. People simply could not believe that these words were coming from Danie Rosslee.

Years later I discovered that Jonker himself had written about that moment. He described Rosslee as doing something “wat niemand verwag het nie”. Rosslee associated himself with Jonker’s confession, made his own confession and challenged the argument that Jonker’s words could be dismissed because he had not received a mandate from the church. For Rosslee, this was a confession before God and could not simply be reduced to a church procedural question about who had the authority to speak.

In the years that followed I got to know Rosslee better. Whenever I was in Potchefstroom I would try to visit him, and we spoke more than once about what had happened to him and why his views had changed.

He told me that it was the prophet Amos who had changed him. After a lifetime in the church and decades of reading and preaching from the Bible, Amos’s insistence on justice began to challenge convictions Rosslee had carried for much of his life. I have always found that remarkable. Here was an old theologian reading a biblical text he must have known very well and allowing it to disturb the theological and political world in which he had spent most of his life.

The change cost him dearly. Rosslee told me that some old friends no longer wanted anything to do with him. Sometimes he would pass people he had known for many years and they would pretend they had not seen him. It was painful for him that long friendships simply came to an end, but I never heard him express regret about the position he had taken. He later described himself as “‘n bevryde mens” – a liberated person.

A church in the ‘slow class’

More than 20 years later, in October 2014, I witnessed something that brought Rosslee back to mind. I was at the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch University for a re-enactment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Faith Communities Hearing. Faith communities were being asked to reflect on what had happened since the original hearings in 1997 and on the commitments they had made.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was there, together with former TRC commissioners Yasmin Sooka, Hlengiwe Mkhize, Glenda Wildschut and Piet Meiring. I attended on behalf of the Foundation for Church-led Restitution and handed Archbishop Tutu a collection of short reflections we had gathered from theologians and church leaders on the theological basis for restitution in South Africa.

Among those who spoke was Reverend EG Fourie of the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afrika. The Hervormde Kerk came from one of the most conservative parts of the Afrikaans Reformed tradition and its theological support for apartheid had run deep. The church had not made a submission to the original TRC Faith Communities Hearing in 1997. Even in 2014 Fourie was not there with an official mandate from his church but participated in his personal capacity.

Fourie did not try to defend his church or make its history sound better than it was. He spoke about its difficult journey away from the theological justification of apartheid and used a phrase that I have never forgotten. He said that, when it came to reconciliation, his church was in the “slow class”.

He described his church as consisting of “late bloomers”. There was no attempt to pretend that the Hervormde Kerk had arrived at a place where others had been waiting for it for many years. He acknowledged how slow the journey had been and asked others not to give up on them.

Fourie became emotional as he spoke. At the end people stood and came forward, and Archbishop Tutu walked across the room and embraced him. There was something about that embrace that has remained with me. Fourie had not come asking to be declared innocent or trying to persuade anybody that his church had been misunderstood. He had simply acknowledged where they were and asked that people continue walking with them.

Afterwards I spoke to some of the former TRC commissioners about the different presentations. They remarked particularly on Fourie’s humility. Their impression was that some of the other presentations had spent too much time explaining or justifying where their churches stood and what they had done. Fourie had done something different. He had simply acknowledged how painfully slow the journey of his church had been.

A place for late arrivals

Over the years the Rosslee and Fourie moments have increasingly come together in my mind, although they are different stories. Rosslee’s is a story about change, Fourie’s perhaps more about humility. Together they leave me with a question that still matters in South Africa: do we still believe people can change?

Neither man should now be turned into an anti-apartheid hero. That would be dishonest and unfair to those who recognised the evil of apartheid much earlier and often paid dearly for opposing it. Rosslee and Fourie arrived late, but surely there must also be a place in our history for people who arrive late.

Rosslee taught me that it is never necessarily too late to change. Fourie showed that it is possible to arrive late without pretending that you arrived early. One allowed Amos to challenge convictions he had carried for much of his life, even when it cost him old friendships. The other stood before people whose churches had travelled much further and acknowledged that his church was still in the slow class.

Perhaps that is why I have never forgotten either moment. Justice requires us to be truthful about what people believed, defended and did, but reconciliation surely becomes impossible if we cannot also recognise when people change.

I was fortunate to witness both moments: an old conservative in a synod hall saying something nobody expected, and more than 20 years later a minister from another deeply conservative Afrikaans church admitting that his church was a late bloomer before Desmond Tutu got up and embraced him. Neither man got there first, but they got there, and perhaps that too deserves to be remembered. DM