Addressing past imbalances

Time and experience have proven to be heavy ballasts for Deon Snyman. When we first met five years ago he spoke with a naive determination, now his words feel heavy, his ambitions scuffed and bruised but still resolute.

‘I am married to the idea of the symbolism of this place,” he enthusiastically told me in 2001. Then a minister with the Unifying Reformed Church, he was based in the ruins of a former Dutch Reformed mission in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Situated on a small hill, the mission overlooked Umgungundlovu, the burial place of Zulu kings and former royal residence of King Dingane.

‘Afrikaans people have a very, very big responsibility,” he said. ‘They must take the initiative, they must take the first steps towards reconciliation.”

To prove that his words were more than just verbiage, Snyman signed the Home for All initiative, a contentious (and now largely failed) declaration of collective guilt for apartheid initiated by a grouping of prominent white South Africans.

Five years on, and Snyman now lives in Cape Town.

‘I had to bury every friend I had, and then their girlfriends, later their friends too,” he despairingly explains. Unable to cope with the ravages of the HIV/Aids pandemic in his parish, he eventually opted for an office job, first with the Diakonia Council of Churches in Durban, now with the Restitution Foundation, a Cape Town-based organisation ­promoting a church-led model of restitution.

Previous and ongoing initiatives by the foundation include the creation of an education fund and receipt into trust of a white-owned farm near George.

‘The foundation members believe that, as Christians, they are called to go beyond confession, repentance and reconciliation to building relationships across the various divides and to implementing restorative measures and processes to address the injustices and inequities of the past and the pain that these have caused,” reads a model passage from the organisation’s website.

Snyman’s current position involves facilitating encounters between Cape Town’s racially divided church parishes.

‘I go to Afrikaans congregations and link them up with church groups in poor areas, to start the process of people getting to know one another so they can start talking about developing strategies for addressing the imbalances of the past,” he says. At present he has six such processes on the boil.

It wasn’t his idea, concedes Snyman, it came from white theologians of a more conservative mindset, but with direct experience of what has happened and is continuing to happen in Zimbabwe.

‘I enjoy what I do because I believe it is the right thing,” he says. ‘But so few people will listen.”

Typically, white parishioners will counter his call for restitution (as opposed to mere reconciliation) by pointing out that apartheid is dead, the playing field level, everyone now able to compete fairly for the economic prize. Meanwhile, in the township of Khayelitsha, he has encountered frustrated, young black church leaders who actively preach revolutionary doctrine, their argument being that Mandela and Mbeki have sold them out — a line similarly argued by John Pilger.

In his recent book Freedom Next Time, Pilger states: ‘The unspoken deal was that whites would retain economic control in exchange for black majority rule.”

In the face of such analyses, which Snyman experiences firsthand when he visits the opulent homes of white parishioners, is his argument that whites must atone meaningfully for the past.

In a public conversation skirting this issue, held in San Francisco earlier this year, artist William Kentridge remarked: ‘[T]he first thing to be said about white guilt in South Africa is its rarity — If you think of the scale of terrible things that were perpetrated by white people over three centuries on the other inhabitants of South Africa, it’s astonishing how little it’s felt as a national feeling.”

‘I agree,” remarks Snyman when I put it to him. The heft of Kentridge’s statement also neatly cues our discussion of former minister of law and order Adriaan Vlok’s apology earlier this year to the Director General in the Presidency, Reverend Frank Chikane.

‘It’s a little bit pathetic,” Snyman says then thoughtfully pauses. ‘I feel sorry for him — he has done what no one else did. Maybe white South Africans need to show their pathetic side, to be weak like Vlok.”