Boesak: Global Christians can learn lessons from South Africa

South African activist Allan Boesak addressed the Baptist World Alliance annual gathering in Birmingham, Ala. (Photo / Ken Camp)

image_pdfimage_print

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—Global Christians can learn lessons from South Africa’s struggle to dismantle apartheid—including what South Africa still has failed to accomplish, activist Allan Boesak told the Baptist World Alliance annual gathering.

“A revolution that does not make room for reconciliation is an incomplete revolution,” said Boesak, a Reformed minister who was instrumental in forming the United Democratic Front.

He delivered the keynote address and also participated in a panel with Randall Woodfin, mayor of Birmingham, Ala., and Andrew Westmoreland, president emeritus of Samford University at the BWA annual meeting.

“There is a witness to be borne,” Boesak said. “I have seen and shared the suffering of my people under apartheid. In their cries, I have heard the voice of God.”

“Reparation and restoration” are essential to achieve “reconciliation that is real, radical and revolutionary,” he said.

The ‘heresy’ of white supremacy

Boesak described the principles that provided the foundation for apartheid as “heresy” and a “pseudo-gospel,” because white South Africans saw themselves—and only themselves—as bearing the image of God.

An idolatrous understanding of white identity prevents those who accept it from seeing their own sinfulness and need for forgiveness, he said.

“It is so hard for white people to ask forgiveness, because the sacralization of white supremacy means that white people have turned themselves into God,” Boesak said.

Following that line of thinking, he continued, if white people are God, then nonwhite people could not possibly be their equals.


Sign up for our weekly edition and get all our headlines in your inbox on Thursdays


“If we are not equal, reconciliation is not possible,” he said. And without reconciliation, “healing and wholeness are not possible.”

Christians in South Africa who resisted apartheid grew to “understand racism in its historical, structural, systemic dimensions and manifestations,” he said.

“Dealing with racism means dealing with power relations and with domination, subjugation and exploitation,” Boesak said.

In time, the anti-apartheid movement came to understand race as “no more than a social construct designed for political control, psychological manipulation and social engineering,” he said.

‘Fight for the freedom of those who oppress us’

As the prophetic church in South Africa grew in its understanding of the image of God, it also became more committed to seeing how whites needed emancipation from the bonds of racism that shackled them, he said.

“We cannot fight only for ourselves,” Boesak said. “Our revolution is only complete if we fight for the freedom of those who oppress us, as well.”

He insisted healing and reconciliation cannot be achieved unless the oppressor acknowledges his guilt and takes steps to repair the damage caused by oppression.

Boesak pointed to the story of Zacchaeus in Luke’s Gospel as a model for reconciliation that is “real, radical and revolutionary.”

When the little Jewish tax collector who worked for Rome encountered Jesus and hosted him in his house, he acknowledged to Jesus his guilt and the rights of his victims to restitution, Boesak noted.

When Zacchaeus offered to pay back four times what he had taken from others, he essentially was removing himself from the position his wealth provided him and placing himself on the level of those he oppressed.

“There is no reconciliation without equality,” Boesak said.

When Zacchaeus pledged to make reparations to those he abused and oppressed, “it was not only a pivotal moment; it was a transformational moment,” Boesak said.

Jesus said: “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.”

Jesus was declaring that by making reparations, not only was Zacchaeus restored to the covenant community, but also his household was released from the curse of generational guilt, Boesak said.

‘When we say Jesus, we say justice’

During the session in which he appeared on a panel with Woodfin and Westmoreland, Boesak described how he left the pulpit of a South African Dutch Reformed church to enter public service at the invitation of Nelson Mandela.

In addition to Mandela’s powers of persuasion and the opportunity to help turn what he had been preaching about into reality, Boesak said, he “read the Bible”—noting particularly the examples of the Old Testament prophets.

“You’re not a preacher until you take what you say in the pulpit out into the streets,” he said.

Most of all, he grew to see he could carry out the command to “seek justice” by entering public service, and in doing that, he was following Jesus.

“When we say Jesus, we say justice. When we say justice, we say Jesus,” Boesak said. “The more we say Jesus, the more we have to say justice. The more we have to say justice, the more we have to say Jesus.”


We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.

Send comments and feedback to Eric Black, our editor. For comments to be published, please specify “letter to the editor.” Maximum length for publication is 300 words.

More from Baptist Standard