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South African Apartheid Essay

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While the ecumenical church focused on preventing a post-World War apocalypse, they neglected a cultural genocide in South Africa. From 1948 through 1994, a legalized forced separation of white and blacks took place. Apartheid, literally meaning a “state of being apart”, was racial segregation instituted by the National Party that kept a minority white population in power over the predominantly black indigenous population.
The ideology behind the apartheid arose during the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The West Indies Company, a subsidiary of the Netherlands had a colony in South Africa. When the slave trade ended, the Dutch offered up South Africa to all of the displaced white slavers. The Dutch …show more content…

The United States, and other Western powers, felt that although the South African apartheid was idiosyncratic, they valued the economic relationship they had with the Afrikaans. At the height of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, some of Africa was being influenced by Communism. South Africa was the key for Western powers to maintain capitalistic ideals on the African continent; likewise, the thriving capitalistic economy in South Africa prevented the United States from interfering with the apartheid. And during this time, blacks were marginalized and oppressed in the name of economic unity and white supremacy. For fifty years this apartheid looked unbeatable, if not for the perseverance of the ecumenical …show more content…

After the televised coverage of the Sharpeville massacre, in which sixty-nine peaceful black protestors were murdered, the WCC lambasted the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa for their support in the apartheid, pleading with them to denounce this injustice. Many in the Dutch Reformed Church reversed course only to be criticized by the Afrikaans for not upholding the sanctity of the apartheid. But the enlightened converts, along with the blacks of South Africa, understood that bringing about reconciliation and justice requires sacrifice and pain. The oppression and dehumanization requires intervention that was not void of conflict. Willem Adolph Visser’t Hooft, the General Secretary of the WCC, in 1967

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