The theoretical methodology of this study highlights the need for emphasis on the historical and social context in which identities are constructed and represented.
Societies are transformed through their ability to respond to and accommodate the introduction of new ideas and worldviews. The latter in turn reflect the adjustments required for their clear articulation in the social context in which they are being presented. Colonisation, missionary activity and the four decades of National Party leadership in South Africa led to the establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion in the country, and, as a result, the birth of new forms of indigenous Christian expression. For over a decade prior to political transformation in South Africa, the country faced social upheaval and political violence and schisms as it moved towards a democracy that could take its place in global, political, social and economic spheres.
This process initiated profound questioning of the foundations on which South African society had been constructed, with attendant insecurities and uncertainties in all sectors of society. During this period of transition, the essential features of healing and transformation found in the New Age Movement gained many adherents who took its ideas and language into diverse sectors of the community. Essentially an alternative worldview to the predominantly Christian mainstream, the New Age Movement laid an important foundation on which the emergent Pagan movement could begin to articulate its own alternative and yet essentially different, religious identity. The fact that identities are constructed and articulated in a social context makes both the process of the Christianization of South Africa and the antecedence of the New Age Movement in society vital contextual aspects in investigating the
CHAPTER THREE
A BACKGROUND TO THE RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE OF SOUTH AFRICA PRIOR TO 1994
The visible emergence of the Pagan movement in South Africa precedes the formation of the PFSA. Itis difficult, however, to ascertain the very first Pagan activity in South Africa but certain individuals do attest to being involved in Pagan practices since the 1980s. International traditions and publications afforded some individuals contact with what were already thriving communities in Britain and America, and these ideas were being disseminated in the country many years prior to the establishment of the PFSA in June 1996. The formal establishment of this organisation was directly related to the religious freedoms afforded by the new Constitution. Change, however, is a process, and changes in the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours of a society do not necessarily accompany legislative change, but continue to carry the influences of the previous status quo.
No movements develop in a vacuum, and to gain any real understanding of the factors involved in the contestation of a Pagan identity in South Africa, it is essential to provide a background to the social climate into which this movement was born. In order to do so, I have identified four developments in South African society that I believe are pertinent to enhance an understanding of the Pagan movement that has grown so considerably in South Africa over the past decade. What is important to this study is that each has, in the past, and continues to, play some role in the contested nature of the central terms and concerns of the Pagan movement.
1. The 'Christianization' of South Africa, particularly since the later nineteenth century. The roots of the Christianization of South Africa lie in the colonization in the seventeenth century, but it is events in the twentieth century that most affected religious demo graphics in the country.
2. a) The development and growth of the African Initiated Churches.
b) Witchcraft discourses in the African Christian context and in indigenous communities.
3. Modernity and the secularisation of South African society.
4. The growth of the New Age Movement in South Africa since the 1980s.
The boundaries ofthese developments are blurred and there is a network of connections between them, many of which lie beyond the scope of this study.
South Africa's pluralistic society remains in the process of addressing apartheid's legacy oflabels and categories that divided its population through the second half of the twentieth century. The seeds of this system were sown during the colonial years;
the consequences of which are visible in the complexities surrounding identity issues in the new South Africa. The features of this history that are pertinent to this
investigation are discussed below.
The 'Christianization' of South African society from the late nineteenth century The category 'religion' is a Western construct and is itself a problematic one. What can be included in the category has changed alongside economic and political changes and has also been changed by exposure to religions other than Christianity through colonialism and associated missionary activity. Pratap Kumar points out that Hanna Adams was perhaps the first to write on the subject of world religions 'impartially',
but whose work "also suffered from the same hierarchy that the intellectuals of the eighteenth century provided" (1995: 45-6)I. To illustrate this point further, Kumar quotes Thomas A. Tweed's comments on Adam's work as follows,
... until approximately the second quarter of the nineteenth century the
religious world still was populated by Christians, Jews, Muslims and 'Pagans' or 'Heathens' For Adams and most of her contemporaries, the final category 'Heathens' or 'Pagans', included an extremely wide range of groups and peoples. Inthe entry under' Pagans' in her Dictionary for instance, Adams listed four subgroups of those who stand outside the traditions of the monotheistic West. The first two included the religions of various ancient people (Greeks, and Romans as well as 'Chaldeans, Phoenicians, and Sabians, etc ... '). Next came major Asian religions ('the Chinese, Hindoos, Japanese, etc,). Finally Adams listed the religions of the non-literate peoples (the 'barbarians' of Americas, the South Seas and Africa) (ibid: 6).
Hanna Adams's four broad pagan subgroups crossed geographic and temporal boundaries, but finnly positions Paganism as a category ofreligion(s) outside of the Abrahamic traditions. David Chidester mentions that in the late nineteenth century, when F. Max Muller delivered his introductory lectures on comparative religion, the number of major religions had expanded to eight. These he noted as being
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, and Taoism (nd: 3). This reflected the tendency to include, in the tenn, the plurality of traditions with which Christianity had made contact. The intellectual climate of the nineteenth century imbued the developing study of world religions with meanings that began with the premis that Christianity was the most advanced fonn of human
religious development. Through missionary activity and colonization, this hierarchical categorization infiltrated the third world.
Religious development in South Africa from the late nineteenth century
Although missionary activity in South Africa was highly advanced by the late nineteenth century it was the entrenchment of Christianity as a state religion by the National Party-who came to power in 1948-that instigated important developments in the status of religion in society. During the apartheid years there was no separation between church and state. Nationalist rule (1948-1992) was based on a form of Calvinistic Christianity that pervaded all of society's institutions, particularly those of education, law enforcement and social welfare. It was, however, through education, that the religious demographics of South Africa were to change substantially in the twentieth century. Richard Elphick, in the introductory chapter in Christianity in South Africa: a political, social and cultural history says,
Because Christians have been so numerous and so politically influential, Christian doctrine, language, and sentiment are all so interwoven in the social and cultural history of South Africa (1997: 1).
The Union of South Africa became a member of the United Nations in 1945, and, in 1961, declared its independence from Great Britain. Under the apartheid system of the Nationalist government a Calvinistic form of Christianity was privileged in all social, economic, political and educational facets of South African society, as well as in the national media. Under this situation of 'Christian privilege' in South Africa, other established religions in South Africa were not accorded equal status, nor the associated benefits of religious liberties and opportunities for valid articulation and/or
expreSSIOn. Foundations for this 'privileged' position had been laid in the colonial interpretations of what indeed could be termed 'religion'. These interpretations had the consequence of what David Chidester called "the denial of religion"Z (1996: 92) for all religions that fell outside of Christian traditions. African indigenous religious forms had fallen victim to the colonial propensity to distinguish between religion and 'superstition', and by which distinction it was relegated to the latter category.
"Practicing a kind of comparative religion, these European observers acknowledged the existence of religious diversity in the world, but they denied the existence of any religion at all in this region" (ibid: 92). This conception of indigenous persons as having 'no religion' was to have widespread economic and social consequences.
Chidester argues that,
Denial of religion, I would argue, was a strategic intervention in local conflicts over land, trade, and labour relations, configuring a discourse about others as animals with no rights to land, as irrational as they failed to appreciate the value of trade goods, and as lazy savages, resistant to being incorporated as labourers, because they lacked the industry that supposedly came with religion (ibid: 92).
Where indigenous people were viewed as having 'no religion', other forms of religiosity were designated labels that hinted at 'recognition', but were latently accepted as also meaning 'no religion at all'. One example is that, despite tacit acceptance of Hinduism as a world religion, it was frequently designated as a 'pagan' religion by virtue of its polytheism and 'idolatry'. A 'pagan' in South Africa was broadly understood as 'not Christian', an 'unbeliever', in other words as having no religion, or as an individual who was not a follower of the 'true' religion. The fact
that it is not unusual for the label of 'pagan' or 'heathen' to be applied to, for
example, even Hinduism today, will be discussed in more detail further in this study.
During the apartheid years, although South Africa was not officially a Christian state, the ruling party legally embedded the advantaged status of Christianity in most areas of the Constitution. A direct consequence of racial segregation in South African society was segregation in the religious, political, social and educational spheres of life. The fact that the apartheid system was as much aimed at racial and social
segregation as it was at the promotion of Calvinistic Christianity, can be evidenced in excerpts from a letter3written on the l ihFebruary, 1954, by then Prime Minister D.F.
Malan to Reverend John Piersma of the Oakdale Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Although the purpose of the letter was to clarify the relationship between Christianity and apartheid, it also is a clear indicator of the denial that indigenous persons indeed had a religion at all. In this letter Malan states that,
" ... Apartheid is based on what the Afrikaner believes to be his divine calling and his privilege to convert the heathen to Christianity without obliterating his national identity." Malan then provides a series of statements in an attempt to clarify the Dutch Reformed Churches' position on the envisaged racial segregation policy.
Below are certain points taken from some of these statements.
• Missionary work has been practiced in this country from early beginnings as being the Christian duty of the Settlers to the heathen. Only afterwards were the
principles formulated which govern the racial policy of the state and of the established churches here.
• The Church believes that God in His wisdom so disposed it that the first White men and women who settled at the foot of the Black Continent were profoundly
religious people, imbued with a very real zeal to bring the light of the gospel to the heathen nations of Africa.
• The Bible is accepted as being the Word of God and the Dutch Reformed Church accepts the authority of Holy Writ as normative for all the political, social, cultural and religious activities in which man indulges. The Church acknowledges the basic rights of the state as a particular divine institution to regulate the lives and actions of its citizens.
The privileged status of Christianity from the time Malan's letter was written, has changed form through the political changes of the nineteen eighties and early nineties.
Despite this, much of this study will address the way in which its position of primacy has not dissipated with the change in dispensation, but has rather been entrenched by other factors. Some of these preceded the apartheid years.
Education in South Africa in the apartheid years
Itwas in the field of education through the twentieth century that Christianity was to exert a powerful influence over the values, attitudes and consciousness of the South African population. Italso was the primary means by which racial, religious and cultural identities were constructed and reinforced in society.
According to Johann Kinghorn (1997: 135-154), an independent theological school had been established in Burgersdorp before the end of the nineteenth century, and which later became the Potchefstroom University of Christian Higher Education. In the early years of the twentieth century, in terms of rapidly emerging Afrikaner Calvinistic theology, Christian education was seen as,
... the study of all the sciences based on the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, the creator and maintainer of all things. This perspective was deemed
necessary in view of the perceived ungodly challenge of "humanism" to the sovereignty of God, the root of eighteenth-and nineteenth- century disorders such as the French Revolution, Darwin's evolutionary theory, campaigns for human rights, and so on (Kinghorn 1997: 136)4.
Tension between this view and the 'humanistic' ideas of the British that were
presented in some Transvaal schools after the Anglo-Boer Wars were to result in the 1902 Commission for Christian National Education6(hitherto referred to as CNE).
The meanings that underpinned the agenda of this commission were to last through the twentieth century. The most salient of these was, as Kinghorn further adds, "The title "national" was significant, implying that humanist ideas were by definition alien"
(ibid: 137). The privileged status of Christian education in South Africa was to be a reality for the next 92 years.
Mission schools
Missionary activity in South Africa was undertaken in the nineteenth century by most churches representing the diverse immigrant population to the colony. These included Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist and others, all of whom
established mission schools that focused on one or another of the indigenous communities in the colony.
Towards the close of the century, mission schools were prolific in rural areas, and alongside teachings of Christian universalism, provided training in new agricultural technologies, ideas of democracy, and colonial systems of values and attitudes. By
1911 when the government census revealed that more than a quarter ofthe African population was Christian, most of these had received their education in a mission school (Kinghom 1997: 156). Although the three hundred Christian National schools were closed by 1907 as funding from the Netherlands was depleted, the quest for Christian Higher Education was once more invigorated in 1918 at a church conference in Pretoria (ibid: 137). Kept alive by church initiated parent bodies for the next thirty years, it was in 1948 when the National Party came to power that,
Christian Nationalism became the official education policy for South Africa, implemented, particularly, in the Bantu7Education Act of 1953 that
introduced into black schools, as in white schools, compulsory religious instruction (that is, Christian, Reformed, evangelization) at all levels (ibid: 137).
CNE was implemented by the South African National Party in 1948 as a means of justifying apartheid ideology. This was a system of segregation that advocated separate educational facilities for different racial groups, whilst simultaneously appealing to exclusivist Calvinistic theology for support. In 'white' schools, Religious Education was a compulsory module for all students and was singularly reserved for the teaching of Christianity. Education in the 'non-White' population was spread between poorly subsidised, Christianised state education and mission schools that were partly state subsidised prior to the implementation, in 1953, of the Bantu Education Act. By this Act, subsidies were to be withdrawn, and mission schools were to be registered with government departments. The Act also introduced compulsory religious instruction of the Reformed8tradition into 'black' as well as 'white' schools. A goal entrenched in the Act was that students were educated in accordance with Christian morals and values.
For Blacks in rural areas a mission school education had been, for many, the only education option available. The Bantu Act of 1953 not only entrenched CNE, but is regarded to have had other implications, namely its role in the secularisation of South Africa. The essential point, however, is that there was" ... a massive growth of Christian adherence among Africans in the twentieth century" (Elphick 1997: 7). The education system was one of the primary factors in this growth. The system that had been designed to further Christian education in all of the diverse sectors of the population was later, however, to be the site of retaliation and violence in the 1970s9. Itwas from within education that a strong resistance movement to apartheid was born, and for which the slogan 'Liberation before Education' embraced a far wider appeal for change.
In 1994, the newly appointed government of the African National Congress adopted a constitution that endorsed fundamental human rights, including freedom of religion.
According to Section 14(1) of the Bill of Rights, as it related to freedom of religion, it states that,
1. Every person shall have the right to freedom of conscience, religion, thought, belief and opinion, which shall include academic freedom in institutions of higher learning.
2. Without derogating from the generality of subsection(1), religious observances may be conducted at state or state-aided institutions under rules
established by an appropriate authority for that purpose, provided that such religious observances are conducted on an equitable basis and attendance at them is free and voluntary.
The position taken by the African National Congress, whilst remaining non-negotiable on religious equity, has nonetheless undergone numerous revisions over the past ten years. The religious population of South Africa is more Christian than it was a
century ago, and it is mostly from some Christian sectors of South African community that calls for a single faith approach to teaching religion in schools are still heard.
Over and above the long-lasting implications of CNE, there was another development from early in the twentieth century that contributed to a massive conversion to
Christianity amongst the indigenous population. This was the growth of the African Initiated Churches.
The Development and Growth of the African Initiated Churches.
Alongside the influence of mainstream churches was the rapid growth of the African Initiated ChurcheslO,hitherto referred to as the AICs. These churches-that were a response to the growing urbanisation and secularisation in society-were a syncretism of Christianity and African indigenous beliefs and practices.
Numbering well in the thousands, these churches can be broadly divided into 4 categories, namely, the Ethiopian, the Millenarian, the Shembe or Nazarite, and the Zionist". These categories, or typologies, are not static, but, as Pretorius and Jafta state, " ... should be regarded as archetypal categories, for they can scarcely deal fairly with changing historical factors in a complex context" (1997: 212). A brief overview of these churches is provided.
1. Ethiopian Churches This grouping was an African initiative in the establishment of ethnic churches that based themselves on the Thembu National