Mr. Smith Takes a Black Parish

White Afrikaner clergy confront South Africa's apartheid

Just months ago, he was comfortably established as a theology professor at one of his country's leading universities. Now, after a substantial salary cut, he has become the pastor of a black-slum church, where worshipers sit on rude benches rather than in polished pews. Many clergy have made such sacrifices to spread the Gospel. But in the tense racial politics of South Africa, the decision of the Rev. Nico J. Smith, 53, is a dramatic moral challenge to the longstanding church support for apartheid.

South Africa's racial policies have been denounced by black and mixed-race clergy and by many English-speaking white Christians. But that has had little impact on the dominant Afrikaners. Their three Dutch Reformed churches, especially the large Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (or N.G. Church), have conferred a consistent moral endorsement on racism. "The church was the bastion of white supremacy, especially after the Boer War and the Depression," says Smith.

As a young clergyman, Smith was loyally progovernment. "I truly believed we had found the solution," he recalls. We were going to separate the people." Smith became successively a pastor in the N.G. Church, a missionary to black regions, the church's missions director and hen a professor at Stellenbosch, the harvard of the Afrikaners. He was also invited to join the Broederbond, the powerful secret society of Afrikaner elite.

Then, ten years ago, he began to see the segregationist system as "an illusion" and quit the Broederbond. Last December, Smith gave public vent to his changed views with the publication of Storm-Kompas, a booklet in which 24 prominent Afrikaner clergy and writers attacked apartheid on religious and moral grounds. Smith was the volume's principal editor. Within the ironclad code of Afrikaner society, the book's viewpoint was shocking. The publication was only a warmup. Last month Smith was prominent among the 123 N.G. Church clergy who issued a fierce, indeed historic, protest against the regime's policies of racial separation and discrimination, terming them immoral, indefensible and unbiblical.

Such church protests have occurred before. Twenty years ago, the last major Afrikaner rift was led by the Rev. C.F. Beyers Naude, a founder of the multiracial Christian Institute. The government eventually crushed the institute and has severely restricted the activities of Naude, 67, under a political banning order that ends this October.

Whatever the long-range prospects for dissent, Smith knew as soon as he went public that his own political apostasy would probably lead to his removal from Stellenbosch. Pondering what to do, "I prayed to God to show me a way," he says. "The very next day I received the call in a telegram. As I read it, I burst into tears." A 1,000-member church in Mamelodi, a black township outside Pretoria, was inviting him to become a pastor. Smith immediately said yes.

"I feel I am starting my life over again. I have a wonderful opportunity to get to know the black people, their hopes and their fears," he says. "According to Christian principles, the present policy is not justified. There must be change." Perhaps it will come in the future. For now, however, Smith and his wife have moved into a modest house in a whites-only section just beyond Mamelodi township. He would like to live among his parishioners, but his new church is located in an area restricted to blacks.

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