Living Towards Shalom in South Africa Today – Allen Goddard
(Allen Goddard is the Director of A Rocha South Africa)
The idea that keeping and making peace are often mutually exclusive processes became important for me to investigate in the early 1980s as an undergraduate at Wits in Johannesburg. My first year there was the year Piet Koornhof, Minister of Home Affairs in P.W. Botha’s regime, was chased off campus by angry black students. It was the year that I saw the flag I had loyally saluted as a high school pupil, burnt, as fellow students protested South Africa’s role in Namibia and the Angolan war. I was undergoing a radical change of worldview. It had dawned on me that many truths I had accepted in high school history lessons were shameless lies, in one of history’s most sophisticated propaganda successes. What focused my quest for the Bible’s teaching about war and peace, at that time, was my imminent conscription to Kimberley’s Third Infantry Battalion in the SADF.
My decision to object to serving the SADF came as a result of attending the Students’ Christian Association’s 1984 Discipleship Course, where for three weeks two dozen senior students and staff of SCA grappled with the question, “What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus Christ in South Africa today?” In particular, three days with Peter Kerchhoff of PACSA in which we visited “Black Spot” communities which had been forcibly removed from their freehold farms, in Roosboom near the N2, to ghetto-like camps in Ladysmith, and at the end of a 60 km dirt road in Ekuvukeni, convinced me that I would never commit to being part of a military defence of the Apartheid regime.
1985 was a tough year of preparation to face the consequences of my decision to conscientiously object to conscription the following year; I faced a military court tribunal for recognition as a religious objector, or jail if my application was relegated on political grounds. A good friend, Sally Welch, introduced me by correspondence to Dr. Alan Kreider, a Mennonite at the London Mennonite Centre. Corresponding with Alan helped me to think more biblically about the real difference there is between peace-keeping as the U.N. attempts it, and the Bible’s witness to God’s Shalom. Sally lent me her Mennonite books, Millard Lind’s Yahweh is a Warrior, and Jean Michel Hornus’ It is not Lawful for me to Fight, and a book that tested the just war theory called, Time to Choose. Beside the personal support that I needed, to take the formal steps to object, these books that linked Anabaptist traditions to the Bible’s unequivocal witness to peace and peace-making and the early Christian traditions of conscientious objection, helped me to see that I was not alone in my decision, but part of an ancient and living tradition of Christian witness to Jesus as peace maker. I submitted an 18 page treatise, to the Board for Religious Objectors, expounding what I had learnt.
Only three years of my six year community service sentence as a “religious objector” transpired, before all prisoners of conscience, and those sentenced to community service were released with Nelson Mandela in February 1990. That April I left for travels in Europe for two years. During that time I attended four Cross Currents Weekends with Don Kraybill and Alan and Eleanor Kreider at the London Mennonite Centre. It was my first of many experiences of Mennonite hospitality and community.
This is the heart of my journey towards an Anabaptist way of following Jesus. I could focus on other parts of my story, like the significance of my decision to be re-baptised by full immersion as a 13 year old, or of having to work through my own complicity in different situations of conflict. Or I could speak of deepening friendships with Mennonites who have showed me over many years, that radical peace-making is meaningless unless it is lived. All these many elements in my journey have only brought me closer to the conviction that peace-making as a way of life is what Jesus calls me to, so that I can most fully express my life in him.