BLOOD RIVER: The Passionate Saga of South Africa’s Africaners and of Life in their Embattled Land, by Barbara Villet, 1982, Everest House, New York, 255 pages, clothbound $16.95.

A few weeks ago an old friend called to suggest that we ought to review this extraordinarily good book, observing that a wider acquaintance with it might have kept the last C.R. Synod from deciding what it did about South Africa. Although I had previously bought the book and carried it along on a vacation trip, I had not read it. This recommendation prompted me to discover what a superb introduction veteran journalist, Barbara Villet and her South Africa–born husband, Grey, a photographer, have given us to this remarkable country.

The praise that the book deserves should not lead one to overlook the usual gross caricatures that appear every time the writer has occasion to refer to John Calvin and the convictions and creed of the Calvinists. She betrays no sympathy for and virtually no understanding of these, even when she attempts to analyze them in some detail in a manner reminiscent of Freud or Weber (pp. 39ff. 87ff.) . Despite this glaring deficiency, this 16–year veteran reporter for Life magazine, by becoming familiar with the history and carefully interviewing a wide variety of people, succeeds in conveying a sympathetic understanding of that troubled land that is rare in the reports and information that we usually encounter concerning it.

The title, Blood River, is taken from the battle of Dec. 16, 1838, when 500 Africaners withstood the attack of 15,000 Zulu warriors determined to annihilate them. The author early observes that the general condemnation ofSouth Africa and its apartheit policy (in which our synod has now joined, denouncing it as a “heresy”) is “simplistic,” disregarding both “the awesome complexity of South African life” and “the ironic truth that in the last twenty years the land of ‘apartheit’ had done more to advance the cause of black development than any other nation on the continent” (p.16). This policy had proposed ‘“to give to blacks and other nonwhites precisely what the Africaners had always wanted for themselves: political independence and racial isolation.” “As I had moved among them,” said the author, “I had realized that no matter how contrary to my own liberal predilections the politics of ‘apartheit’ might be, the Africaners were not a nation of brutal cynics, wholly concerned with the preservation of their economic privilege, but zealots, committed to what they believed to be a just if not holy cause. Persuaded that order must prevail if black as well as white South Africans were to be saved from the kind of regressive chaos that had begun to overtake much of the rest of Africa, and cognizant of the special risk they faced as the last ‘white tribe on the continent, they had worn their convictions like an armor against both their fears for South Africa’s future and the world’s condemnation of their policies” (p.17).

The writer’s development of her subject reminds one of James Michener’s The Covenant in that she tries to portray faithfully the centuries of history and the roles of leading participants, but her readable and vivid account is much briefer and often seems fairer than Michener’s fiction. By means of interviews with a variety of people we are given some idea of the complexity of the problems of the nation and its peoples.* The obvious injustices and the real movement towards their correction are plain, but so are the political forces seeking to exploit and promote conflict instead of fair solutions. The question that concerns South Africans and ought to concern the world is whether the forces seeking constructive correction can win against those promoting revolutionary destruction in the intensifying struggle of that land.

In our November Outlook New Zealand delegate to the Reformed Ecumenical Synod, Rev. G.I. Williamson, describes the unique opportunity which that body has had to exert a constructive influence on the Africaner churches in their need to deal correctively with the apartheit problem. Because of the determination of the Christian Reformed delegates to join those of the liberal Dutch churches in blindly condemning the Africaners, they have destroyed that opportunity and discredited the synod. It is ironic that Mrs. Villet’s book, plainly devoid of sympathy for the faith ofCalvinists, should deal far more fairly and sensitively with these South African matters than do our Reformed churches who are supposed to share that faith.

Our delegation to the ecumenical synod, like our own synod in dealing with the same matter, instead of trying to treat it Biblically and fairly, insisted on simply parrotting the irresponsible judgments of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the World Council of Churches, which in Africa as elsewhere works to advance the AntiChristian Communist movement. How does one account for such foolishness? How does it come about that our synod—while persistently refusing to even recognize the real heresy that is tearing apart our churches, the compromise of the Bible’s authority –hastily and without troubling to ascertain facts or to give any significant Biblical grounds, brands the South Africans as guilty of heresy? Answers to such questions are not hard to find if we consider these actions in the broader historical context of our time. The Liberal movement in the churches, hav ing lost faith in Christianity and its doctrines as a religion, has replaced them with a social program (a “social gospel”). Since man has replaced God in the churches’ concern, the sciences of man, psychology and sociology, have replaced theology in its studies. Forty years ago my room-mate in a brief Navy assignment, a Presbyterian chaplain, remarked that the only way we deal with God is through our fellow men. He could not see that sin should be considered important either. When I asked him what he intended to preach and teach, he answered that he had been taught some excellent psychology with which he hoped to help people make better adjustments. Within our churches, perhaps few even now would state things quite as bluntly as my Presbyterian colleague did, but the continuing movement in this secular, humanistic direction within Liberal church bodies and their World Council is unmistakable.

Our church executives, educators, and missionaries appear increasingly eager to join, or at least establish their credentials with, this ecclesiastical “mainstream.” If the current fashion in the church world is to concentrate on social and political matters, should we not join in that discussion? Calvinists are supposed to have a “world and life view” and Christ came to “liberate.” If people today are interested in this as liberation from poverty and oppression is it not prudent for us to also stress such social and political implications of the gospel? Thus one can rationalize our churches’ joining instead of opposing the current secularization of the Christian faith. That is what they are at present more and more plainly doing. Their action regarding South Africa is a rather glaring example of such, undoubtedly well-intended blundering. As G.I. Williamson observed, we ought not to support apartheit, but neither should we support the enemies of Christ in their efforts to destroy His gospel and church in South Africa and elsewhere even when they call it “liberation.” May exposure to some of the facts about South Africa, as the Villet book effectively presents them, help us recover from our churches’ policy that in today’s world supports the Lord’s enemies rather than His Gospel and people.

*We can get some appreciation of the magnitude ofSouth Africa ‘s problems if we consider that in the U.S. where we may have to deal with racial minority populations of perhaps 20% we are still far from resolving the problems of achieving equitable treatment for all. Consider that in South Africa the percentages involved are the reverse of ours. There is a 10 to 20 percent white minority who have led and developed the society and economy over centuries, facing the problems of how to organize a society and economy that will equitably accommodate the rapidly increasing 80 to 90 percent who are comparable to our minorities (pp. 102ff., 123ff.). Our answer is to argue, “Hay don’t they do the obviously fair thing and convene immediately to giving each individual an equal vote?” The answers that are offered are that if that is done it will precipitate an immediate civil war, not so much between black and white as between the black tribes to determine who will now rule the count1y—a civil war that may be expected to destroy the society and economy on which all depend, entailing starvation and massacres just look at the tragedies and atrocities that have occurred in other countries of Africa in recent years. Is that the direction in which we are telling them they must go? Our official answer is to ignore such considerations, saying, in effect, that they are of no concern to us. Our synod has now simply decreed that if anyone does not vigorously reject the policy of the South African government he is a heretic!