Sarah Maxey on Religion as a Political Institution in South Africa

By: Sarah Maxey

April 14, 2008

For a foreigner attempting to understand a new culture, the multiple levels of diversity and tension found in South African society make integration a daunting task. However, where every other sphere of public and private life contains some form of overt conflict, religion is one area where South Africans have succeeded in striking a balance. There is an accepted and respected diversity of religious belief and practice visible on the streets of Cape Town, from a steady alternation between Catholic and Protestant churches, to Muslim-owned businesses whose hours reflect breaks for prayer, to museums dedicated to the role of the Jewish community in the apartheid struggle, to the weekly Rastafarian television show broadcast on one of the three nationally-owned channels.


Religion in Cape Town is thus both highly prevalent and personal, serving as an important factor in people’s lives without being the key determinant of social interaction. However, the comfortable fit of religion into South African society does not mean it has been delineated to a role of passivity. While the specifics of one’s religion are open to personal choice, religion as an institution has played a role of major strategic importance in the political and social struggles faced by South Africans in recent history.

During the height of the apartheid regime and resultant resistance movements in South Africa, protests and political assemblies were prohibited under the government-declared state of emergency, and attempts to defy the ban were met with intense repression and violence. In order to organize resistance while avoiding repression, mass funerals were used as a form of protest and an outlet through which members of the black community and other communities of color could express political grievances. Such religious services combined members of innumerable different churches and beliefs. Services were led by ministers, who were charged with the responsibility of balancing the need for political protest——the majority of deaths addressed in this manner were a result of government violence——with the correct amount of religious content to honor the dead and comfort their families. Thus, religion, while maintaining its personal nature and source of comfort for relatives of the deceased, was also used as a strategic instrument of political protest against the apartheid government.

In addition to its use as a framework for resistance, the institution of religion has also been used as a sustaining and uniting factor within communities affected by apartheid legislation.

The residents of Ocean View, after being forcefully removed from their homes in Simon’s Town as a result of the Group Areas Act, used their religious communities as a base for establishing a new residential community. Today, the community contains large populations of both Christians and Muslims, each with a vastly different range of experiences and world perceptions. While there is some separation between the two groups as a result of the different institutions around which they initially organized, today the two coexist with no signs of conflict or confrontation (my host parents were anxious to explain their belief that Jesus, Mohammad, and Moses were all prophets sent to help different groups of people at different times—) and amicably use their differing religious traditions to tackle common present-day social ills.

The Cape Town of my study abroad experience faces a number of severe social ills and conflicts that demand attention. However, rather than using religious differences as a point of antagonism, religious institutions as a whole are instrumentally used to confront such issues as they are capable. The similarities of struggle allow for a broad acceptance and respect of tremendous religious diversity.
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