Crackdown in South Africa

"No one who hasn't lived in a police state can understand what living in one is like," says Father Colin Davison. An Anglican priest in South Africa for seven years, Davison ran the educational program of the ecumenical, multiracial Christian Institute there. He was told to leave the country last month and is now back in England. Davison is not alone in his plight. Since Feb. 1, twelve clergymen, all foreign nationals, have been ordered out of South Africa in a harsh silencing of clerical voices that have been raised against apartheid.

The U.S. State Department has already protested on behalf of Americans who are being expelled, including three Methodist missionaries and a Roman Catholic priest. But deportation is only one of the government tactics. Last week, South Africa's leading black clergyman, the Right Rev. Alpheus Zulu, Anglican Bishop of Zululand, was arrested at a church center outside Johannesburg and questioned at a police station for hours. He was finally charged with failure to have with him the passbook required of all blacks, but refused to pay a $7 fine and instead demanded the right to appear in court. Bishop Zulu, one of six presidents of the World Council of Churches, is a vocal opponent of apartheid. Other South African clergymen have lost their passports; they can also be detained and charged under the country's Suppression of Communism Act. That was the fate in January of the Very Rev. Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, dean of Johannesburg's Anglican cathedral. Recently, as ffrench-Beytagh's trial was postponed for "further investigations," police of South Africa's special branch, allegedly seeking connections with "subversive" organizations, swept through church offices, headquarters of Christian organizations and homes of church officials and other individuals.

Bitter Pill. The police raids constituted the latest, most serious development in an increasingly bitter confrontation between some South African churchmen and the racist government of Premier Johannes Vorster. While Vorster has repeatedly warned clerics to stay out of "politics," clergymen, especially a number of outspoken Anglicans, have steadfastly refused to ignore apartheid. Two events late last year exacerbated the conflict. After the World Council of Churches voted a $200,000 grant to "antiracist" liberation groups in Africa and elsewhere (TIME, Oct. 5), W.C.C. member churches refused to accede to Vorster's demand that they quit the organization. Then came a visit from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Arthur Michael Ramsey, who not only refused to counsel the clergy away from politics but urged Christian action to counter apartheid. Vorster warned that the churches were "headed for a showdown."

So far the showdown has been directed not so much against a denomination as such as against individual critics and anti-apartheid organizations like the Christian Institute. Aggressively promoting multiracial cooperation, the institute has been a particularly bitter pill for the government; it is led by Christiaan F. Beyers Naude, an exile from the country's dominant, pro-apartheid Dutch Reformed Church.

The churches themselves--with the exception of the Dutch Reformed--may soon be more actively engaged in the fray. "The great majority of white Christians have felt that they could combine Christianity with apartheid," notes Roman Catholic Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban. "But as some Christians become more sensitive to the basic incompatibility between the two, they will force other white Christians to decide where they stand." That may already be happening. One group of Johannesburg Catholics petitioned their bishop for "clear direction . . . before Christian witness is silenced forever."

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