South African Clerics Trace Bloody Looting Frenzy To ‘A Wounded Society’

South African church leaders marched for calm and peace during a week of violent protests, preaching about hope and reconciliation along the way. Photo provided by Apostle Trevor Molefe.

In the middle of South Africa’s violent protests last week, Apostle Trevor Itumeleng Molefe and a group of church leaders formed a buffer between two hostile sides: the police and Vosloorus community members trying to plunder the Chris Hani Mall on the East Rand in South Africa’s Gauteng province.  

“We prayed in all the major roads and shopping centers where the looting took place, prayed for our Police Service and also are pleading with the government to open churches,” Molefe told ReligionUnplugged. “Church may not make everybody better but they will never get worse attending church. The country needs the church. People are wounded, anxious, confused and depressed.”

Molefe heads Mercy Seat Family Fellowship in Villa Lisa, a township in the Boksburg area of Gauteng.  

The church leaders view peace-making as their religious duty and formed the “Enough Is Enough Movement” to try to end the days of violent protests and looting that rocked South Africa this month.

All around South Africa, clerics are trying to calm violence sparked by the July 7 jailing of ex-President Jacob Zuma for contempt of court after he refused to appear for a State-sanctioned judicial corruption inquiry. The mayhem, which started in Zuma’s KwaZulu-Natal home province, took cataclysmic proportions as it quickly spread to Gauteng province, South Africa’s economic heartland.

Just one week of violence left more than 200 people dead, hundreds hospitalized, more than 2,500 arrested, more than 200 giant shopping malls looted empty and burnt, and infrastructure worth billions of dollars destroyed. It was a level of violence not witnessed since the end of Apartheid nearly three decades ago, an event that forced South African church leaders – the nation’s spiritual guardians – to seriously consider their own shortcomings as Christians and leaders as well as the root of South Africans’ hurt and anger. 

Church leaders in South Africa prayed against violence during a week of violent protests and looting. Photo provided by Apostle Trevor Molefe.

A Wounded Society

Many South African clerics point to deep and rising economic inequalities and poverty driving people to loot, particularly when hunger has increased during an economic downturn due to lockdowns in response to the pandemic that have driven up unemployment to 75%.

“The extreme poverty of our people served as the dry wood ready to burn when the match is struck,” said South African Council of Churches (SACC) secretary general Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana in a statement. “We recognise the reality of poverty that encourages hungry people to not resist the opportunity to go and grab what they think will help them in the short term.”

One of the mandates of the SACC is: “To deal with the deep South African woundedness of racism, ethnicity, gender, family, brokenness, intersectional identity and the need for public consensus on national values and standards of being, towards a common national identity and constitutional culture.”  

The Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Reverend Thabo Makgoba, concurred that worsening poverty and inequality had played a role in the disturbances.

“As in many other countries, the market economy is failing to address poverty, inequality and unemployment,” Rev Makgoba explained. “The vast majority of us are good people at heart. But when people go to bed hungry, unemployed, dominated and marginalized, the good in us can be overwhelmed, especially if we see no end to our suffering and especially in times of instability when it seems all bets are off.”

Bishop Sithembele Sipuka of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) agreed that extreme poverty is driving the unrest and blamed the poverty on a “lack of efficient leadership in government and unethical business practices.”

“These are issues that our government, business and the corporate sector over the years have failed to address in a comprehensive manner,” he said in a statement. “What started off as difference of opinion has sparked off a wildfire of violence and looting because the ‘dry grass’ of poverty has been left to ‘overgrow’ over decades.”

Father Peter John Pearson, head of the Parliamentary Liaison Office of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference told Crux, a Catholic publication that the recent violence reflected “toxic mixtures of unequal society”. 

“There are many who are of the opinion that this might have begun as a protest against former President Zuma’s incarceration, but it is, in fact, an outburst of the pent-up anger at exclusion from the benefits of the economy, the deepening chasm between those who have and those who don’t, and all the toxic mixtures of an unequal society,” he said.  

Apostle Trevor Molefe preaching against violence in July 2021. Photo provided by Molefe.

Legacy of Apartheid 

South Africa has a very complex history that makes its problems equally complex. Centuries of brutal exploitation under colonization that was later highlighted by the policy of Apartheid kept black South Africans under the White subjugation, laying the foundation for the glaring socio-economic inequalities that have persisted to this day.

The unemployment rate in South Africa is 32% (majority of those unemployed being youths) and more than half of the country’s almost 60 million population live in grinding poverty. In the poor areas where the riots occurred, looters stole food, electronics, liquor and clothing from malls.

In 2018, the World Bank listed South Africa as the most unequal country in the world, meaning that Africa’s most advanced economy does not equally benefit all of its citizens. While it accounts for the largest number of millionaires and billionaires of any nation in Sub Saharan Africa, the report showed that the richest 20% of people in South Africa control almost 70% of the available resources. To make matters worse, race has always played a bigger role in the inequalities. Although they are only a small minority, White citizens control most of the land in the country, a situation that has always been regarded as ticking time bomb.

The recent events in the country could not have come as a surprise at all to Reverend Allan Boesak, a South African civil rights activist, theologian and professor of Black Theology and Ethics at Pretoria University. Boesak has always emphasized the need for genuine reconciliation to heal those hurt by past policies and actions.

In a recent webinar on “Race, Reparations and Reconciliation,” Boesak – who worked alongside Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu to bring Apartheid to an end – insisted on the need for real, radical and revolutionary reconciliation similar to that shown by Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1-10.

According to Boesak, Zacchaeus acknowledged his personal complicity, experienced remorse and recognized that those he had harmed had a legitimate right to justice through restitution and reparation. He emphasized that offering justice is “a way of asking forgiveness.” It restored Zacchaeus’ broken relationship with God and others, especially those he had hurt through “arrogance, greed, violence, lust for power and domination.” After Zacchaeus took action to set things right through tangible acts of reconciliation, not only was he released from the sins of systemic oppression and exploitation, but his whole family and generations to come were transformed as he took hold of his new identity as “a son of Abraham.”

To Boesak, this type of genuine reconciliation is what has always been lacking in South Africa.  

“Reconciliation not only changes the way we feel, it transforms us and our identities as agents of God’s love, God’s justice and God’s reconciliation,” Boesak said. “For us, it means that White South Africans, instead of remaining children of colonialists and imperialists and the bringers of Apartheid, can become brothers and sisters and children of the same soil.” 

White Monopoly Capital?

These emotive issues are interpreted differently by different sections of the South African society. Politicians – more specifically the pro-poor Zuma faction– blame what is generally referred to as “White Monopoly Capital” for the inequalities and injustices in the country 27 years after the end of Apartheid and beginning of democratic rule in South Africa.

As President Cyril Ramaphosa has vowed to pursue the “enemies of democracy” that he accuses of plotting his downfall, clerics are not just mobilizing citizens to clean up the debris from the weeklong destruction, but they are also seeking to weed out possible future seeds of bitterness from taking root. Knowing what long-term effects the wholesale prosecution of the tens of thousands of looters could have on future relations, the SACC has suggested that a conditional amnesty be granted to those that participated in the looting. The clerics are pleading that the underlying causes of the deeper socio-economic issues be holistically addressed to pre-empt future outbursts of violence.

“People lost their jobs, took salary cuts, had to shutdown small businesses and are locked-down… expected to stay home and watch the news depressing them even more,” Molefe told ReligionUnplugged. “People are hungry. It started in KwaZulu-Natal and others saw an opportunity to get something to eat.”

For Apostle Molefe and his colleagues, divine intervention is what the country needs, and they have taken the opportunity to demand that COVID-19 restrictions on in-person church services be lifted so that believers can gather and pray for this “Rainbow Nation”.

Cyril Zenda is a Christian African journalist and writer based in Harare, Zimbabwe.