With the reputation of a quietly spoken priest dedicated to the upliftment of the marginalised, Thabo Makgoba, the newly elected Archbishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, is expected to be as effective, but much less high-profile, than his predecessors.
He will assume the position when Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane retires at the end of this year — a position previously filled by the likes of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner in 1984.
His legacy is set to be no less profound: in meeting the challenges of poverty, HIV/Aids and giving moral leadership within Southern Africa; or in debates in the global Anglican Communion over scripture interpretations relating to human sexuality and over a long-brewing power struggle between its traditional centre in the global North and the South, where the number of believers is much larger.
”He has been a wonderful gift to this diocese. He is a compassionate, thoughtful and very humble man — in the best sense of the word — who has always led by example, like encouraging all of us to go for public HIV tests. His mission is not to create a bunch of Christians but to empower people with their rights and responsibilities,” says Suzanne Peterson, vicar general of the Grahamstown diocese, which Makgoba will be leaving on January 1 to assume his new position.
At 47, Makgoba will be the youngest archbishop to assume this position. He was elected last week over Unisa principal Barney Pityana and Jo Seoka, the Bishop of Pretoria. After four years in Grahamstown, his parish will soon number more than three million worshippers and includes South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Namibia and the island of St Helena. The Anglican Church is estimated to have more than 77-million believers.
Battles ahead
With Africa and conservative elements in the United States the main drivers of an anti-gay agenda within the church, it is here where Makgoba’s progressive touch will be felt — and where some of his toughest battles are set to be fought.
The Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa has regularly referred to ”a crisis of doctrine and crisis of leadership” within the church. Its spiritual head, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has found it increasingly difficult to bring together the church’s disparate movements as it struggles to define a post-colonial identity while meeting secular challenges such as the issue of homosexuality among its brethren.
The church has been under threat of a schism since the Episcopal Church, the American branch of Anglicism, consecrated its first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003. This was in apparent contravention of a resolution on human sexuality taken at the Lambeth Conference in 1998.
The conference, held every 10 years, is a gathering of Anglican bishops from the church’s 38 self-governing provinces around the world. Makgoba was part of the team that outlined major issues for next year’s meeting.
Prof Gerald West, from the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s school of theology and religious study, says Makgoba’s experience in the struggle against apartheid and freedoms being entrenched in the new dispensation means ”he understands the position of social justice and the African position and he is equipped to offer leadership in this regard. He will work quietly, behind the scenes.”
Makgoba signed a ”Call for a more Pastoral Response to Gay Christian Partnerships of Faithful Commitment from the Anglican Church of South Africa” this year.
The call, in the wake of South Africa’s recently promulgated Civil Unions Act, highlighted the ”need to avoid the assumption of dogmatic certainty, and [to] leave room for the diversity of convictions on these matters”, that ”homosexual orientation is not regarded as somehow sinful” and that ”gays need not change their sexuality (even if that were possible)” to be Anglicans.
Conscience
Makgoba is expected to be as much of a conscience to the government as Tutu was. In an address to the launch of the Eastern Cape Moral Regeneration Movement in August this year, he criticised the increasing gap between the emerging rich and the majority who remain ”extremely poor”.
”Rural development is not on the agenda, or if it is, there is lip service paid to it. National and international efforts to achieve the [United Nations] Millennium Development Goals are not obvious,” he said, proceeding to call for a more equitable distribution of wealth and saying that ”talking about moral regeneration movement is an anomaly… we should perhaps now be talking about the spiritual reconstruction of our society”.
Addressing the Anglican Students’ Federation 2006 conference on a theological and socio-economic and political rationale of why we should be involved in poverty alleviation and development, Makgoba challenged students to critique the government’s transition on economic policy from the Reconstruction and Development Programme to the present Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa — why it happened and whether the transition was properly addressing issues of development and economic transformation of the lives of the poor.
Having initially joined the Grahamstown diocese in December 2001 as a suffragan bishop, ministering mainly in the northern part of the diocese, Makgoba was elected bishop of Grahamstown upon the retirement of Bishop David Russell and installed in February 2004.
His experience in one of South Africa’s most impoverished and underdeveloped provinces has undoubtedly sharpened his dedication to those who suffer.
Social issues
At the news of his election, Makgoba, who is currently on sabbatical at Harvard University, told reporters that his passions are ”theological education, rural development, alleviating unemployment and maternal and infant deaths”.
According to Grahamstown vicar general Peterson, Makgoba has worked tirelessly to set up the Tshwaranang Centre in Queenstown, which started as a safe-house for Aids orphans and has developed into a training centre for child-care workers. Likewise, he has worked in the rural villages of Ilinge and Ezibeleni.
On a visit to the diocese of Toronto, which enjoys a companion relationship with Grahamstown, Makgoba spoke passionately to the Anglican Journal about the very real effects of HIV/Aids on the community. ”Our ministry is to the dying,” he said. ”Priests are spending time at funerals, setting up home-based care for parishioners, spending time helping child-led families because parents have died … new infections have also involved grannies [contracting the virus from their grandchildren when] they wash them and they have cuts in their hands from working in the farms.”
It was no understatement when South African Council of Churches president Tinyiko Maluleke said Makgoba’s election bode well for the ”ecumenical movement and South Africa’s young democracy and development [because] we are faced with new challenges which demand new, alternative and creative ways of theological action and thinking”.
Faced with increasing deaths related to traditional circumcision ceremonies in the Eastern Cape, Makgoba and his diocesan council called on Christian men to stop criticising the ritual but rather to become traditional surgeons and nurses to stem the flow of deaths, according to the Daily Dispatch.
Acknowledging the tradition as an important rite of passage, Makgoba said: ”Brothers in the church who have expertise on the rite must avail themselves … But they must be recognised by both the community and the health department. We cannot sit down as church leaders while people are dying, but must roll up our sleeves and be hands-on.”
Gender equality
He has also been vocal on gender equality. According to Peterson, Makgoba was ”delighted when Katharine Jefferts Schori was installed as presiding bishop [head] of the Episcopal Church” — the first woman to hold such high an office within the Anglican Church.
Following the defence team’s line of interrogation during the Jacob Zuma rape trial last year, and the behaviour of pro-Zuma supporters outside court, Makgoba’s department of social responsibility of the diocese of Grahamstown issued a strongly worded communiqué to, among others, the office of the state president, the chief justice and the General Council of the Bar of South Africa.
The resolution regarded the ”detailed examination of the accuser with regard to her life prior to events of the trial and the minute medical detail are an affront to both real justice and human dignity”.
On the behaviour of people outside court, the resolution ”express[ed] deep concern” that the ”ongoing intimidation and denial of basic human rights” could have repercussions on ”a wider front”. It also criticised ”the massive silence of the political parties of the land, some youth organisations, the HIV/Aids organisations, many women organisations and indeed most faith communities of South Africa”.
From Limpopo, Makgoba, who is married with two children, grew up in the Johannesburg townships of Soweto and Alexandra. He completed his theological training at St Paul’s College in Grahamstown and holds a master’s degree in educational psychology from the University of Witwatersrand.
He is registered for his PhD in business administration at the University of Cape Town, where he is also involved in the emerging-leaders programme in the centre for leadership and public values at the graduate school of business. He has previously taught at Wits and the Johannesburg School of Education and was rector of the Christ Church Sophiatown and an archdeacon before moving to Grahamstown.