Journal articles on the topic 'Post-apartheid land reform'

For the past two to three decades, since the transition to democracy, policy orientation in South Africa has predominantly been centred on redressing the inequalities and legacies of the apartheid regime. This was broadly defined as social justice, with the land question often treated as a highly state-centric matter reserved for government, until Julius Malema became president of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) and then leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). This article explores some of the dominant narratives around the land question in post-apartheid South Africa and presents some recommendations on how the issue of land should be dealt with in the immediate future.

This paper uses the case of South Africa’s latest land redistribution strategy known as the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy, to explore whether, and how, research can have direct and positive impacts on beneficiaries of land reform. The study is situated within the practice of action research: to explore how it can generate knowledge that can be shared back and forth between stakeholders, as well as how it may ignite changes that the participants desire. The findings are that Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy is not meeting the overall goals land reform. But action research has allowed the beneficiaries to emerge from the process with new knowledge about their rights, as well as what options they have to move forward in their fight for secure land rights and decent livelihoods. We introduce a concept of a ‘learning and action space’ to explain our practice of action research. The paper concludes that action research is a desirable approach for land reform, but while it succeeded in educating beneficiaries, it is only one ingredient in ongoing struggles to challenge power relations among citizens and between citizens and the state.

Femke Brandt and Grasian Mkodzongi (Eds.), Land Reform Revisited: Democracy, State Making and Agrarian Transformation in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2018, pp. Iii + 288, ₹49.90/USD 59.00, Paperback, ISBN 978-90-04-36210-9.

ABSTRACTIn 2004, a long-awaited piece of post-apartheid legislation, the Communal Land Rights Act – to reform the land tenure of those living in the former ‘homelands’ of South Africa – was passed into law unanimously by parliament. This unanimity, however, conceals the extent to which the process towards this moment was deeply contested. Exploring the efforts by land sector NGOs to secure legitimacy in their engagements with this process reveals the extent to which wider power relations and contestations have determined their positioning. Those within the non-governmental land sector who opposed the legislation pitted themselves against African National Congress politicians and high-profile traditional leaders. However, the adoption of a Mamdani-inspired discourse to contest such politics and oppose the proposed legislation contributed to reinscribing narrow readings of knowledge considered to be legitimate. Their engagements were also shaped by changes in the NGO sector. Reduced funding for land sector NGOs and an increasingly ambivalent relationship between them and government contributed to contestations between NGOs and among people working within them. Their strategic engagements in such wider and internal politics influenced both the frames within which such policy change could be debated and the ways in which individuals working for NGOs consequently positioned themselves in relation to their constituents.

AbstractLand claims and contests have been central to the construction of political authority across the African continent. South Africa’s post-apartheid land reform program aims to address historical dispossessions, but the program has experienced numerous obstacles and limits—in terms of pace, communal land access, productivity, and rural class divides. Drawing on archival and newspaper sources, Kelly traces how the descendant of a colonially-appointed, landless chief manipulated a claim into a landed chieftaincy and how both the chief and the competing claimants have deployed histories of landlessness and firstcomer accounts in a manner distinct to the KwaZulu-Natal region as part of the land restitution process.

When Nelson Mandela took office on 10th May 1994 as South Africa’s first democratic president, he pledged that out of “an extraordinary human disaster” would come “a society of which all humanity will be proud”. Since then, South Africa has been praised for overcoming racial division and hatred in a peaceful manner while developing economic growth. This positive picture of post-apartheid South Africa has been compromised in recent years by rising crime, xenophobic violence, unemployment, and service-delivery protests. My research looks at how the new democracy has redistributed land and why less than 1% of the population still own the majority of the land. To understand the slow pace of land reform, I have examined the policies of the ANC, the polarised public debates on land reform, and the constraints on economic transformation. In order to achieve justice and ultimately reconciliation, problems with redistribution must be addressed. This requires not ...

This theoretical paper seeks to make an empirical contribution to the Land Reform discourses. The paper argues that the pace of land redistribution in South Africa is undeniably slow and limits livelihood choices of relatively most intended beneficiaries of land reform programme. The primacy and success of the programme within rural development ought to measured and assessed through ways in which the land reform programmes conforms to and improve the livelihoods, ambitions and goals of the intended beneficiaries without compromising agricultural production and the economy. In addition, paper highlights the slow pace of land reform programme and its implications on socio-economic transformation of South Africa. Subsequently, the paper concludes through demonstrating the need for a radical approach towards land reform without disrupting agricultural production and further to secure support and coordination of spheres of government. The democratic government in South Africa inherited a country which characterized by extreme racial imbalances epitomized through social relations of land and spatial distortions. Non-white South Africans are still feeling the effects of colonial and apartheid legal enactments which sought to segregate ownership of resources on the basis of race in particular. Thus, successive democratic governments have the specific mandate to re-design and improve land reform policies which are targeted to reverse colonially fueled spatial distortions. South Africa’s overall Land Reform programme consists of three key elements and namely are; land redistribution, tenure reform and land restitution. Concomitantly, spatial proponents and researchers have denounced and embraced land reform ideology and its status quo in South Africa. The criticisms overlapped towards both beneficiaries and state due to factors like poor post-settlement support, lack of skills, lack of capital, infighting over land claims and land management.

In reaction to the unequal land ownership brought about by decades of apartheid, the first democratically elected government embarked on an extensive land reform programme - a programme consisting of the three constitutionally protected pillars: restitution, redistribution and tenure reform. The aim of this programme is not only to provide for restitution to persons who lost their land as a result of racially based measures, but also provide previously disadvantaged South Africans with access to land in order to address the unequal land ownership. This research focuses on the restitution and redistribution pillars of the land reform programme. The progress made in terms of both these sub-programmes has been disappointing. With reference to redistribution the government has set the target to redistribute 30% of white owned commercial agricultural land to black persons by 2014. To date, less than 10% of this target has been achieved and all indications are that the overwhelming majority of land which has been redistributed is not being used productively or have fallen into a state of total neglect. The state of the redistributed land can be attributed to a variety of causes, with the main cause being the government's inability to provide proper post-settlement support to land reform beneficiaries. Against this background it is clear that alternative options have to be identified in order to improve the result of land reform. This article identifies corporate social responsibility (CSR) as one of the missing ingredients in the recipe for a successful land reform programme. The article introduces CSR and discusses the business case for CSR; identifies its benefits; considers its possible limitations; and examines the major drivers behind the notion. From the discussion of these topics it will become evident that an assumption of social responsibility by businesses in especially the agricultural sector might contribute to an improved land reform programme.

In terms of apartheid policies, the people of Riemvasmaak were forcefully removed in 1973/74 to Namibia and the Eastern Cape. Efforts to bring the people of Riemvasmaak back to their land gained momentum in 1993. Finally the decision to give the entire 74 000ha back to the people was taken in February 1994, and Riemvasmaak was registered as a Presidential Launch Project, one of the first land-restitution projects in post-apartheid South Africa. Most of the original residents returned to their land at the end of 1995 and in 2002 the people of Riemvasmaak received the title deeds to the plots on which they were living. While this is a noble project, the people of Riemvasmaak originally faced serious problems such as abject poverty, poor soil quality, no secondary schools, no tar roads, poor access between settlements, inadequate transport and limited access to water. However, in the last eighteen years, a great deal of impetus has been placed on agrarian transformation, rural development and land reform, which included improved economic and social infrastructure. This oral research study will therefore undertake to analyse the everyday lives of the people living in Riemvasmaak, the improvement in quality of life in the area as well as what regaining their land has meant for these people if seen against the backdrop of the history of forced removals in South Africa.

Abstract In addition to challenges facing South Africa’s overall post-apartheid land reform, group rural land claims have particularly proven difficult to resolve. This paper explores the role that the state plays in shaping the outcomes of rural group land claims. It analyzes policy statements, including from policy documents, guidelines and speeches made by politicians during ceremonies to hand over land rights to rural claimants; seeking to understand the possible motives, factual correctness, as well as impact, of these statements on the trajectory of the settled land claims. The paper concludes that land reform as practiced in South Africa is functionally and discursively disembedded from socio-political histories of dispossession, because land has come to be treated more as a commodity, rather than as something that represents multiple meanings for different segments of society. Like many processes leading up to a resolution of a rural claim, subsequent statements by government concerning particular ‘successful’ land claims convey an assumption that local claimants have received just redress; that there was local consensus on what form of land claim redress people wanted, and that the state’s lead role in suggesting commercial farming or tourism as land use options for the new land rights holders is welcome. The paper shows that previous in-depth research on rural land claims proves that the state’s role in the success or failure of rural land claims is controversial at best.

In the wake of apartheid, South African protected areas have come under increasing pressure to reconcile a wealth of natural resources with the acute social and economic needs of the black rural majority. Demands for land reform, poverty alleviation and job creation have all had profound implications for the conservation and management of the nation's protected areas. An attitudinal study was conducted within three diverse South African communities, and among employees of the Kwa Zulu-Natal Nature Conservation Service (KZN Wildlife) to assess how the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park (GSWP) and the authorities charged with its management are perceived in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. Despite significant revisions to South Africa's conservation policies in the post-apartheid era, attitudinal research has continued to focus on rural black communities, leaving white residents, urban black populations and the conservation authorities themselves largely under-represented. As a result, the relationships between local communities, protected areas and conservation authorities remain largely unknown and outdated. Qualitative analysis of 90 semi-structured interviews indicated limited support (5%) for the abolition of the GSWP. The potential loss of the GSWP was associated with negative economic (88%) and environmental (66%) impacts by all respondents, regardless of race, gender, age or residency. Contrary to previous research conducted during the apartheid era, an overwhelming majority of Zulu respondents perceived a positive association between nature conservation, tourism and improved local economic welfare. Thus, local attitudes towards protected areas appeared to be improving. There remained however a discrepancy between support for the GSWP and the management authorities, particularly among respondents with limited contact with conservation staff. This is consistent with previous surveys where residents expressed support for the concept of conservation, but significant hostility towards local conservation authorities. The distinction is critical, as negative attitudes towards conservation authorities are often misinterpreted as a lack of support for conservation in general. Local residents (regardless of race or socioeconomic status) also expressed high expectations of KZN Wildlife to address issues of unemployment, poverty and tourism in the region. If these expectations are not met, support for the GSWP, as well as the conservation authorities, is likely to decline dramatically.

Historical aerial photography has become a valuable commodity in any country, as it provides a precise record of historical land management over time. In a developing country, such as South Africa, that has undergone enormous political and social change over the last years, such photography is invaluable as it provides a clear indication of past injustices and serves as an aid to addressing post-apartheid issues such as land reform and land redistribution. National mapping organisations throughout the world have vast repositories of such historical aerial photography. In order to effectively use these datasets in today’s digital environment requires that it be georeferenced to an accuracy that is suitable for the intended purpose. Using image-to-image georeferencing techniques, this research sought to determine the accuracies achievable for ortho-rectifying large volumes of historical aerial imagery, against the national standard for ortho-rectification in South Africa, using two different types of scanning equipment. The research conducted four tests using aerial photography from different time epochs over a period of sixty years, where the ortho-rectification matched each test to an already ortho-rectified mosaic of a developed area of mixed land use. The results of each test were assessed in terms of visual accuracy, spatial accuracy and conformance to the national standard for ortho-rectification in South Africa. The results showed a decrease in the overall accuracy of the image as the epoch range between the historical image and the reference image increased. Recommendations on the applications possible given the different epoch ranges and scanning equipment used are provided.

After the wasted decade of the Zuma presidency, Cyril Ramaphosa promised a renewal in South Africa in 2018. The post-state capture condition of the former economic and moral champion of the continent did not favor to regain either the confidence of the voters or of the investors. While the country had been prepairing for the sixth free general elections (25 years after the fall of the apartheid-regime), most of the domestic socio-economic problems remained unsolved. Inequality, unemployment, education, corruption, land reform and provision of public services are still the most important topics of the public talk and determined the focus of the campaign. The publication introduces the party structure of the country, the leaders of the biggest South African parties, what is more the causes and the consequences of the sixth consecutive success of the African National Congress (ANC). The article includes an analysis of the results of the national and provincial elections and beside the electoral analysis the author tries to introduce the dynamics of power within the factions of the ruling African National Congress party, adding an outlook on the members of the new Ramaphosa Cabinet. Last but not least the publication describes the most important authorities and bodies who tackle the thriving corruption in the ANC and in the subsystems of the state.

Abstract South African land matters today emanate from the past racially based land dispossession of black communities, which furthered white settler capitalism. Post-apartheid regimes have developed many policies to reverse this legacy, but with little effect. Political parties have blamed the Constitution for the slow pace of land reform, arguing for the need to amend it to clarify ‘expropriation without compensation’. Based on a broad literature review, this article suggests some political, economic and social lessons for South Africa’s land reform. It aims to understand how other countries have dealt with land acquisition for land reform and urban housing development projects, the post-acquisition stage and the reasons for failure and success of some land reforms. This article calls for an alignment of land stakeholders, inclusion of urban land in land reform policies and increasing the powers of provincial officers to improve support for beneficiaries and the subdivision of large farms.

The issue of land reform lies at the heart of African pride and dignity. However, colonisation leads to the systematic deprivation of land among the conquered people, as Ramose calls them. Ramose states that colonisation and racism were a dehumanising product of an unjust system, land deprivation being a sub-product of that system.1 Ramose calls it a double injustice in an unjust war. A system of injustice where the conquered was denied the basic courtesy of humanity by the conqueror. Apartheid and colonisation were the draconian systems that denied an entire people the ability to be regarded as an equal. However, the most tragic legacy left by apartheid and colonisation is the denying of conquered people their unique way of life and culture which is intertwined and dependant on land. The focus of this article is ascertaining what an African perspective to justice is and why it is needed as the primary premise in resolving land reform matters. Most importantly I will be looking at case law to assess whether South African courts are starting to turn to an African perspective to justice when dealing specifically with land wars in post-apartheid South Africa. I will also emphasise the need for our judicial system to re-imagine land and reform outside from what it is ordinarily understood to be in European norms.

Land was one of the ways the colonialist venture as well as the apartheid regime used to divide people, as well as being a catalyst for superiority. Over hundreds of years, from the beginning of colonial rule until the end of apartheid in 1994, the indigenous people of South Africa were dispossessed from the land. With the end of the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings, it was clear from suggested actions that there should be restitution in South Africa to begin to correct the spatial and resultant economic imbalances. Churches in South Africa embarked on setting declarations on land reform ecumenically and within their own walls. However, little information is available on final reform measures that churches have taken after several ecumenical meetings in the 1990s. Additionally, there is little development in South African theology circles on a theology of land justice. Moreover, a praxis on land justice for churches has not been openly developed or discussed post-1994. This study aims to look at the history of the land issue in South Africa, particularly from 1948–1994, and will include the history of land ownership in the Roman Catholic tradition. In addition, it will look at examples of land reform in the Roman Catholic Church from 1999 until the present in the Diocese of Mariannhill. Furthermore, the article will consider the emerging praxis of spatial justice based on a hermeneutic view taken from black liberation and contextual theology. The article concludes with a look at how these examples and new praxis can develop the ecumenical church’s quest for a prophetic voice and actions in land South African land reform.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the engagement of farm beneficiaries in South Africa in the governance of restituted farms through communal property associations. The South African government has already spent millions of rands on land restitution to correct the imbalance of the past with regard to farm ownership by the African communities. Various methods of farm management to benefit the African society have been proposed, however, with little recorded success. This article argues that the South African post-apartheid government was so overwhelmed by political victory in 1994 that they introduced ambitious land reform policies that were based on ideal thinking rather than on a pragmatic approach to the South African situation. We used qualitative research methods to argue that the engagement of farm beneficiaries in farm management and governance through communal property associations is failing dismally. We conclude that a revisit of the communal property associations model is required in order to strengthen the position of beneficiaries and promote access to land by African communities for future benefit.

In this paper, I critique the manner in which law rationalises Black subordination and white supremacy through its assumption of racial neutrality and ontological equality.4 I seek to postulate the need for a culture of critique within South African jurisprudence and further challenge hegemonic liberal notions of ‘justice’ and the existing ‘reconciliation’ discourse. The calls for a ‘race conscious’ and general jurisprudence shall be advanced through the epistemological paradigm of Critical Race Theory which offers a politicised account of the law through the acknowledgment of the centrality of race in law and through debunking claims of law’s neutrality and objectivity.5

OPSOMMING Hierdie artikel kontekstualiseer, verduidelik en beoordeel die ontwikkeling van politieke regte vir "Kleurlinge" in Suid-Afrika, tot 1979. Dit word gedoen vanuit die teoretiese perspektief van beleidsentrepreneurs wat verskillende persoonlike, professionele en ander sosiale netwerke tot hulle beskikking gebruik om direkte beleidsbeïnvloeding te doen. Die artikel skets eers kortliks die teoretiese uitgangspunte en kenmerke van beleidsentrepreneurskap en -netwerkbeïnvloeding en som dan die ontwikkeling van politieke regte vir die "Kleurlingge-meenskap" in die land op, tot PW Botha die leierskap van die Nasionale Party oorgeneem het. Die artikel kontekstualiseer en fokus veral op die aanloop tot en die afloop van die Erika Theron-kommissie, wat 'n direkte rol gespeel het by die uiteindelike instelling van 'n fun-damentele nuwe staatsbestel in die land. Die ondersoek illustreer die toepassing en impak wat doelgerigte individuele beleidsentrepreneurskap en -netwerkbeïnvloeding deur strategies geposisioneerde individue, groepe en netwerke op fundamentele samelewingsverandering kan hê. Dit illustreer en staaf verder die belangrike kumulatiewe effek wat beide interne en eksterne politieke druk op beleidsverandering kan hê. Dit het belangrike implikasies vir huidige en toekomstige beleidsaanpassings in Suid-Afrika en in ander demokratiese beleidsveran-deringsprosesse. Trefwoorde: algemene sake, apartheid, driekamerparlement, eie sake, magsdeling, politieke transformasie, PW Botha-komitee, SABRA, Theron-kommissie, Westminsterstelsel ABSTRACT This article contextualises and assesses the development of and changes in political rights for "Coloured" South Africans, until 1979. The research was undertaken from the theoretical perspective of policy entrepreneurs who use various personal, professional and other social networks at their disposal to engage in direct lobbying and policy influencing of political decision makers in government from their power bases inside of or close to government, instead ofjust voicing opposition to existing policies from an outside perspective. The article first briefly outlines the theoretical tenets and characteristics of policy entrepreneurship and network influence and then summarises the development of political rights for the "Coloured" community in the country, until PW Botha took over the leadership of the National Party. The article contextualises and focusses especially on the run-up to and the fall-out of the Erika Theron Commission, which played a direct role in the eventual establishment of a fundamentally new constitutional dispensation in the country. The research comprises a case study of attempts during the period 1960-1979 to improve political rights for the "Coloured" community in South Africa. During this period of time a significant attitudinal policy change occurred in the South African government that initiated a gradual erosion of the ideological tenets of apartheid. It created an experiment with restricted power-sharing of whites with two other racial minority communities in the country during the early 1980s. This experiment failed, but ironically created crucial facilitating conditions for the start of political negotiations between the NP government and black liberation movements that eventually led to the current post-apartheid society in South Africa. These changes were largely triggered and facilitated by a number of more "liberal-minded " reform-orientated individual academic policy entrepreneurs and activists within or close to the ranks of the governing NP elites. They used their professional positions and politically legitimate personal and career networks to influence or lobby political decision makers in government from the inside in strategic ways to try to persuade those decision makers to change their minds and to accept the proposals that the policy entrepreneurs tried to sell to them. Many of these policy entrepreneurs were the main drivers behind the Afrikaner Broe-derbond's establishment of the South African Bureau for Racial Affairs (SABRA) as a conservative nationalistic counter to the more liberal South African Institute of Race Relations. These and other academics in Stellenbosch, SABRA, were instrumental in developing, expanding and consolidating the NP government's apartheid policy from 1948 to 1961 through various direct interactions with government decision makers. The efforts of individual Stellenbosch academics, supported by a number of others elsewhere in the country, to try to improve the political rights of "Coloured" South Africans via SABRA in the run-up to the appointment of the Erika Theron Commission are then summarised. Their 1960/61 recommendations to SABRA for direct political integration of "Coloured" voters in existing (white) government decision-making bodies were rejected outright by SABRA and the NP establishment in 1961. This led to the side-lining and eventually the resignation of most of the Stellenbosch SABRA members. The direct policy impact that these events had on the findings and recommendations of the Theron Commission on the future of the "Coloured" community in South Africa 15 years later, and ultimately the establishment of a fundamental new ideological political order in the country, form the core focus of the rest of the article. In 1976, a younger generation of more "liberal" (moderate) Stellenbosch academics resuscitated the 1961SABRA proposals and fed them directly into the NP government's policies via the Erika Theron Commission (1973-1976). The majority of the Theron Commission supported the inclusion of a vaguely worded general recommendation for the extension of direct political participation of "Coloured" voters in mainstream political processes, in the Commission's report in 1976. Although the NP government did not accept this recommendation, the controversy around the issue started a process of open debate about the merits of racial integration in South Africa, which had been explicitly rejected by the NP until that point in time. This debate eventually resulted in the acceptance of restricted political power-sharing with white, "Coloured" and Indian racial communities in the country in the form of the 1979 draft Constitution, as refined in the form of the 1983 Tri-Cameral Parliament. This system, however, still excluded participation by black South African citizens, which led to their rejection of it in principle, as well as by most of the international community. The research illustrates the impact that deliberately targeted policy entrepreneurship and networking, frequently carried out by relatively legitimate insiders, can have on fundamental societal change. The most important finding of this assessment of policy influencing initiatives in South Africa during this period suggests that internal interventions into governmental policy-making processes by a small number of relatively legitimate individual academic policy influencers and entrepreneurs facilitated the undermining of this ideology over time. It weakened the NP's refusal to accept the principle of political power sharing with other racial communities by confronting and pressurising NP decision makers from within the governmental system with the inevitability of limited political power sharing, even if only between two or three racial minorities in the country, in order to try to ensure the future political power base ofwhites. This selective and limited power sharing among racial minorities, however, ultimately failed, because it excluded the overwhelming majority of black South African citizens. Despite this failure, the contributions of these individuals did indirectly contribute in a significant manner to the eventual implosion of apartheid and its replacement with a more acceptable liberal democratic system of government. It further illustrates and substantiates the important cumulative impact that both internal and external political pressure can have on policy change. The political transformation in South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s was not only the result of external pressure on the NP as many critics of apartheid allege, but also a consequence of increasing, direct internal pressure from legitimate intellectual Afrikaner leadership and support groups for change to the prevailing political policy paradigm regarding "Coloured" political rights during the period under assessment. In summary, the findings confirm that direct, internal pressure for change by credible policy influencers and entrepreneurs is an indispensable requirement for the evolutionary constitutional transformation of any democratic society. The findings further illustrate the importance of policy influencing initiatives being exercised by just a few strategically positioned, legitimate individuals, groups and/or networks from inside policy change processes, supported and strengthened by additional external pressures for policy change. This has important implications for current and future democratic policy changes in South Africa and other societies. Keywords: apartheid, general affairs, own affairs, political transformation, power sharing, PW Botha Committee, SABRA, Theron Commission, tri-cameral parliament, Westminster system

In 1985 when storm clouds were gathering over South Africa, and a state of emergency was declared, a group of members of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) Family, clergy as well as laity, founded an organisation, Reforum. The two-fold aim of Reforum was to provide a prophetic witness against apartheid, calling the DRC to take leave of its theology of apartheid, and, secondly, to work towards the reunification of the DRC Family. The article researches the original Reforum documents, minutes, reports, conference material and letters, that hitherto laid untouched in the DRC Archive, in Pretoria. The programme of Reforum, especially the national and regional conferences held by the organisation over the 7 years of its existence, is discussed. The initial negative reaction of the DRC officials and synods, as well as the critique from some in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church and the DRC in Africa that Reforum was not radical enough in its approach, are recorded. The summation, at the end, is that Reforum did play a significant role, albeit humble and short lived, in the annals of the DRC’s apartheid saga. Relevance: The DRC’s apartheid saga, the story of a church that had over many years lived with apartheid and even provided a theological argument for separate development, eventually came to the point where the DRC not only repented of its past, but declared apartheid and the theology of apartheid a sin and a heresy, continues to fascinate historians, including church historians. For South African Christians, clergy as well as laity, it helps explain their often troubled past, as well as present. The often neglected story of Reforum and the role and contribution of the organisation in this process needs to be recorded. Original research: the author provides original qualitative research, using material that had lain untouched in the DRC Archive for three decades. This may be considered to be a preliminary study. The archival material merits more and deeper attention. It may well provide material for post graduate research.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The research is of value for the study of South African general history, South African church history, ecumenical studies, and practical theology.