July 12 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Shortly before the election of Thabo Mbeki as South Africa's new president, evangelical leaders asked for his support in making the country's historic efforts at racial reconciliation more than amnesty for those who publicly confessed their misdeeds.

Led by Moss Ntlha, head of the Evangelical Alliance of South Africa (TEASA), the team urged Mbeki, a suave, scholarly technocrat who in June succeeded the revered Nelson Mandela as South Africa's second black president, to maintain the climate of truth-telling. They urged him to maintain the momentum for national reconciliation, not just among the races, but also among social and economic classes.

The truth and reconciliation process, South Africa's bold Christian experiment for finding healing instead of chaos from its violent past, has received worldwide praise (CT, Feb. 9, 1998, p. 18).

But evangelicals think Mbeki can improve on this achievement of Mandela's five-year rule. "Reconciliation," Ntlha says, "is not cheap grace, but is attended by a willingness to suffer in solidarity with victims."

Ntlha believes the "burden for the nation's reconciliation project was inordinately carried by the poor and most vulnerable victims of apartheid."

It favors those who need amnesty, he argues. Amnesty was specifically mandated by the 1993 interim constitution; reparation was not. The process has been effective in achieving truth-telling and amnesty, and in giving priority to reconciliation rather than revenge.

But some African victims of apartheid see the process as a political mechanism for peace at the expense of justice. "Dreams of revenge," observes Cindy Easterday, an American Presbyterian on the staff of African Enterprise, "costly as they may be, are hard for a newly free people to ...