RELIGION BULLETIN-WCC: Churches Provided Education For Many, Mandela Says

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

HARARE, Dec 20 1998 (IPS) - South African President Nelson Mandela paid tribute to the World Council of Churches (WCC) for its role in providing the financial and material support to help his generation receive an education during the colonial era.

“Without the missionaries, I would not be here, ” he told the Eighth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare on Sunday.

“The colonialists didn’t care,” he said, “but the church bought the land, built the schools and educated the African children.”

Mandela, 80, said he left behind important issues in South Africa and flew to Zimbabwe to also say “thank you” to the World Council of Churches for “everything” that was done for the Blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era.

He said the World Council of Churches was dreaded in South Africa during the apartheid years (1948-1994), and that its name had instilled “fear” in apartheid’s leaders.

The dismantling of apartheid, Mandela said, heightened 30 years ago when the WCC initiated the programme to combat racism, and created a special fund to support liberation movements like the African National Congress (ANC), which now rules in South Africa.

Mandela, who was released in 1990 after spending 27 years in prison, said the WCC’s programme, which embodied the noble ideals and values of religion, had strengthened the ANC during the difficult period of apartheid.

“Whenever the noble ideals and values of religion have been joined with practical action to realise them, it has strengthened us, and at the same time, nurtured those ideals within the liberation movement,” Mandela said.

“It is therefore a matter of pride to us that democratic South Africa has a constitution that embodies those values and ideals…,” he added.

Mandela’s address to the WCC had a friendlier tone than that of his Zimbabwean counterpart, Robert Mugabe, who had accused the church of double-standards in Africa.

While Mugabe thanked the Church for its contributions in ending colonialism in Africa, Mugabe also reminded it of its “shameful” support for colonialism and apartheid.

“In Zimbabwe, as in most countries on the Africa continent, the Church played midwifery to colonialism and even recreated colonial relations within its own ‘theocratic settlements’,” the Zimbabwean leader said when he addressed the religious gathering on Dec. 8.

Mugabe said the Church often confused “evangelisation” with “westernisation”. “In our region and perhaps more than anywhere else, the Church at one time succumbed or even voluntarily “ceded’ our God to colonialism and apartheid.”

More than 4,500 delegates attended the 12-day WCC assembly, which ended on Monday. The conference dealt with Africa’s debt, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) pandemic, and the assembly discussed the five-month-old conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Mandela said African leaders were working “24 hours a day” to end the crisis in the Congo where rebels began a campaign to overthrow the government of President Laurent-Desire Kabila on Aug 2.

He said the conflicts in the DRC, Angola, the Sudan and elsewhere on the continent, were of great concern. “In a world as interdependent as ours, they (conflicts) impact not only on those directly involved, but on neighbours and whole regions, bringing instability, displacing people and diverting resources away from social services,” the South African leader said.

“Such conflicts have the capacity to set back all our efforts to meet the urgent needs of our people, to deal with the world’s highest incidents of HIV/AIDS, to advance and entrench democracy, to rout out corruption and greed, and to ensure respect for human rights,” he added.