More on child witches in Africa

The UK Channel 4 programme on child "witches" in Africa broadcast last week has reignited debate on the topic. I keep a database of African independent churches and church leaders, to try to build up a coherent picture of African Christianity, but the media reports on this phenomenon, which has been reported mainly from Nigeria, the DRC and Angola, usually raise more questions than they answer.

According to Tracy McVeigh of "The Guardian" (9-Dec-2007) "it is American and Scottish Pentecostal and evangelical missionaries of the past 50 years who have shaped these fanatical beliefs".

What I would like to know is which American and Scottish missionaries these were. What are their names, their background? Who sent them to Nigeria, and when? Which denominaations and mission agencies sponsored them? What was the source of their teaching, and how did they influence those who are propagating these beliefs in Nigeria today?

These seem to me to be very important questions for missiologists and church historians to be asking. We have international academic discussion forums for researchers on African Independent Churches and New Religious Movements, but if anyone is doing research into those topics they aren't saying. Possibly some sociologists have been doing research into it, but if they have, I haven't heard of it. An interdisciplinary study would be useful.

In the absence of such studies, all one can do is try to read between the lines of the newspaper reports and try to guess what is going on.

According to some reports this phenomenon -- accusing children of being witches -- did not exist in Congo (DRC) in 1994, but it was common in 1999.

One of the denominations reported to be most active in witch hunting is the Liberty Gospel Church, founded in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria in 1992 by Helen Ukpabio, a former nurse.

She has apparently said that if children cry a lot and are fretful it is a sign that they are witches. Now I'm not a fundi on Nigerian witchcraft beliefs, but I do know that in most parts of Africa if a child is ill and feverish and cries a lot people may suspect that the child has been bewitched. Witchcraft has often been seen as a cause of illness. But it seems that Ukpabio has reversed this, and instead of seeing these as symptoms that a child is a victim, she teaches that it a sign that the child is a perpetator of witchcraft.

Maybe there is some precedent for this kind of thing in Nigerian culture -- if there is, I hope someone will enlighten me. But it seems to me like a new twist on the "blame the victim" game.

And if Helen Ukpabio and others like her really got their theology from American and Scottish pentecostal and evangelical missionaries, it might be quite important to know which ones. I think it may, however, be a bit more complex than this.

In Central and West Africa there seems to be a growing interest in exorcism; though such beliefs may have been around for a long time they seem to be growing stronger. Many clergy seem to have specialised in it. I met a student at the Orthodox seminary in Nairobi who had been a Roman Catholic and gathered a congregation of about 500 people in Douala, Cameroun, who had mainly been attracted by his ministry of exorcism. He became Orthodox when the Roman Catholic bishop sought to inhibit his ministry of exorcism, which he continued with the blessing of the local Orthodox bishop.

Another student at the seminary, who was from the English-speaking northern part of Cameroun, had become a Rosicrucian at the age of 16, and had tried an amazing number of religions, including Wicca and Ekankar, before settling on Hinduism, which he studied for some time under a guru in India. On returning to Cameroun he was told by his spirit guides to worship the Triune God, and walked into town and the first Christian Church he came across was the Orthodox Cathedral, so he decided to join the Orthodox Church. But at the seminary he believed that the teaching staff were withholding important information from the students, such as which variety of incense was best for driving out which kinds of demons.

But there is also the possibility that the excesses of people like Helen Ukpabio could actually kill off African witchcraft beliefs altogether.

Something similar happened in the great European witch craze in the 16th and 17th centuries. In early modern Europe there was, in some places, a great increase in witchhunting and witchcraft accusations. As time passed, however, the accusations and the beliefs about witchcraft became more and more bizarre and over-the-top, until people could simply no longer believe them, and eventually the entire belief system crumbled under its own weight. Perhaps Ukpabio's teachings are a sign that this is beginning to happen in Africa.

Loony tunes

It is not unusual for organisations to receive letters from nut-cases, but it is rather strange for them to pass them on to the news media, and for the latter to publish them in full, without comment. This one was apparently sent to the Evangelical Seminary of Southern Africa. It's a strange strange world we live in, Master Jack.

The Times - My power and glory, your faith everlasting:

I will, however, need more than a gun and a Bible to reconstruct these Pyrrhonian backsliders. The Dogon believe they were created by gods who came from the sky in space ships. They are madder than Tom Cruise and I will need 20 crates of single-malt whisky, 500 condoms and a thousand aspirin if I am to convince them that it is not the god Lebe, but the Almighty Himself who visits them at night in the form of a serpent and licks their skins in order to purify them and infuse them with life.

As one of your newest recruits, my motto will be: Convert Or Die. I have already printed the T-shirts so you have to give me the job or I will sue your holy ass to kingdom come.

Reviving the Russian Soul

One of the most popular recent films in Russia is Ostrov (The Island) which indicates that despite the dominance of the communist and capitalist visions of materialism, interest in spiritual life continues to grow. As the authors of this review point out, "Ostrov’s story of repentance and faith in God hardly seems to be the stuff that blockbusters are made of" -- at least not in the West. I noted my own response to the film here, but this article describes the effect on Russian culture, and the response of the actor who played the protagonist is also interesting, since he is apparently a hermit in real life.

Reviving the Russian Soul, by Mike Kauschke and Elizabeth Debold.:

The story of the film’s principal actor Pyotr Mamonov may offer some explanation. Back in the eighties and nineties, Mamonov was the lead singer in an avant garde Russian rock band that reached cult status. But these days, he lives as a religious hermit near Moscow, and apparently it took a great deal of effort to get him to commit to make the film. Ostrov director Pavel Lungin says: “In a certain sense, this is also a movie about Mamonov’s life. He transformed from being a rock star embroiled in scandals into a deeply religious man.” Lungin realizes that both Mamonov’s life and the life of the monk he plays are resonant for Russians today. “The times of perestroika are over and we need to think about things like eternity, sin, and conscience,” he observes. “These have disappeared from our lives in the rat race for success and money. But people can’t just live for material things alone.”

Saving Africa's Witch Children

The disturbing new trend of witch-hunting, apparently sponsored by Neopentecostal Churches, continues to get publicity, but unfortunately the media reports are not very informative.

Channel 4 - News - Dispatches - Saving Africa's Witch Children:

In some of the poorest parts of Nigeria, where evangelical religious fervour is combined with a belief in sorcery and black magic, many thousands of children are being blamed for catastrophes, death and famine - and branded witches by powerful pastors. These children are then abandoned, tortured, starved and murdered - all in the name of Jesus Christ.

This Dispatches Special follows the work of one Englishman, 29-year-old Gary Foxcroft, who has devoted his life to helping these desperate and vulnerable children. Gary's charity, Stepping Stones Nigeria, raises funds to help Sam Itauma, who five years ago, rescued four children accused of witchcraft. He now struggles to care for over 150 in a makeshift shelter and school in the Niger Delta region called CRARN (Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network).

Is anyone doing any research into this phenomenon, on the origins and spread of these beliefs, and who is holding and propagating them?

Roy Campbell, the Bloomsbury Group and C.S. Lewis

I've been reading Virginia Woolf's A writer's diary, and got curious about why it never mentioned Roy Campbell, the poet, who had at one point been associated with the Bloomsbury group, and so got out Joseph Pearce's biography of Roy Campbell to refresh my memory, and found I had almost completely forgotten the tangled web of relationships -- that Roy Campbell's wife Mary was in love with Vita Nicholson (nee Sackville-West) and that the Campbells had gone to live in a cottage on the Sackville-West estate.

But Virginia Woolf was also in love with Vita, and had written her Orlando in a fit of jealousy over Vita's relationship with Mary Campbell. None of that comes out in the (edited) version of the diary. And when he found out about the affair, on 6 November 1927, Roy Campbell went off by train to London, to drown his sorrows in drink. He met C.S. Lewis in a pub, and drinking with him, told him all about it (Pearce 2001:90), and when Lewis remarked "Fancy being cuckolded by a woman" Campbell rushed back to Kent in a rage, and thereafter came to despise the Bloomsbury group, and drew closer to Evelyn Waugh and D.B. Wyndham Lewis, and told Lytton Strachey, who advocated detachment, "Strachey, you are about as detached, morally, physically and intellectually as the animal you most resemble". "What is that?" asked Strachey. "A tapeworm," replied Campbell (Pearce 2001:95).

Your school chum's not asking about you: Classmates.com sued

Everybody hates me, nobody loves me
I'm going to go and eat worms
Big fat juicy ones, little itty bitty ones
See how the big ones squirm
First you bite thier heads off
Then you suck the juice out
Then you throw the skins away
Nobody knows how I can thrive
On worms three times a day.

Did you sing that, or something like it, at school, when you thought no one was your friend?

Well, guess what -- in spite of advertising by some social networking sites, they're still not your friends.

Your school chum's not asking about you: Classmates.com sued:

San Diego resident Anthony Michaels had been a free member of Classmates.com since last year. However, the site—like dating sites that offer paid membership tiers—doesn't let you do anything all that interesting with the free tier. In order to see who has been looking at your profile and read messages from other members, users must first upgrade to a Gold Membership. That's when Michaels said he was tricked. He said that he began receiving messages from Classmates.com claiming that old classmates of his had been looking at his profile and trying to get in touch with him through the site. If only he would fork over some cash for a paid membership, he could see those messages and reconnect with that old high school crush!

Who could resist such a temptation? Michaels couldn't, and that's why he finally paid up in hopes of reading all those messages that his classmates had been sending him. Upon doing so and logging in, however, he was greeted with crushing disappointment. Not a single message was waiting for him in his Classmates.com inbox, and none of the people who had been viewing his profile were ones he knew or was familiar with.

Clasmates.com is not the only or even the worst of such sites. There is also the Names Database, and Alumni.net, and several others. Many of them practice sneaky advertising of one kind or another. The Names Database, for example, offers to give you some of the interesting information, provided you give them the e-mail addresses of 20 or more of your existing friend so that they can spam them (I don't know if they sell the addresses they harvest in this way so that others can spam them too).

There was one called Word of Mouth, which I think has now disappeared. They invited people to give information about others anonymously, so that they could post malicious rubbish if they wanted to. Then potential employers could pay them to consult the gosspip -- and they could keep spamming to say that someone has written about you, come and see what they've said -- but of course you had to pay to do that. Entering malicious gossip was free, reading it was for subscribers only.

Some such sites are actually quite useful. One of the better ones is ZoomInfo, which just collects stuff from the web. They charge business users, but don't charge people for simple people searches. Not all the information they collect is accurate, but you can sign on and organise the information that is really about you for free.

Another of the better reuniting old friends sites is:

I've not actually found any old friends using their site, but I like their style.

The Times - Few will turn 50 in SA

According to this report, South Africa's life expectancy has dropped drastically in the last 10 years.

The Times - Few will turn 50 in SA:

MOST South Africans will not live to celebrate their 50th birthday, just like people living in strife-torn Somalia and impoverished Ethiopia.

A UN Population Fund report puts the life expectancy of the typical South African man at only 48.8 years; women are not expected to live longer than 49.6 years.

This is drastically lower than a decade ago, when the US Census Bureau’s international database put life expectancy at 55.5 years for South Africans.
---
The most recent estimate of South African life expectancies was less than for people living in Brazil, the murder capital of the world, or for people in war-torn Iraq.

The report, UNFPA State of World Population 2008, states that South Africa has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world, with 21.8 percent of all women aged between 15 and 49 being HIV-positive — the fourth-highest rate globally. Only South Africa’s less populous neighbours — Swaziland (32 percent), Botswana (28.9 percent) and Lesotho (27.1 percent) — have worse prevalence figures.

So Southern Africa generally is the region suffering most from HIV/Aids.

In view of this, one wonders why South Africa seems to attract so many immigrants, legal and illegal.

Book review: The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World - Scotsman.com

With such a broad subject as witch-hunting in the Western world, it is a pity that this book was not broadened still further to include the whole world.

Book review: The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World - Scotsman.com:

Book review: The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World

Published Date: 08 November 2008
By Germaine Greer
THE ENEMY WITHIN: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World

By John Demos

Viking, 336pp, �17.99
JOHN DEMOS HAS BUILT A formidable reputation with his five scholarly books on early American history. His new book, The Enemy Within, is very different. Not only is it intended for a broad readership, but its putative subject, as indicated by the sub title, is no less than '2,000 years of witch-hunting in the western world.' Demos tells us in his introduction that the plan for the book came from his publisher, but he does not really explain why he accepted the challenge. To paint so vast a picture requires a broader brush and rather more intellectual arrogance than Demos has at his disposal.

The review itself has come in for criticism. Letters - Witch Hunts - NYTimes.com:

I have not yet read John Demos’s new book on witch hunting (“The Enemy Within,” Oct. 12), but your reviewer, Germaine Greer, reveals an astonishing lack of up-to-date knowledge concerning a topic that has undergone a revolution among historical researchers over the last 40 years.

And I have a minor quibble of my own, when later in the review Greer says: Book review: The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World - Scotsman.com:

This reader would have been intrigued to find out what Demos, with his in-depth understanding of the events in Salem, would have made of the judicial murder of Joan of Arc, whom the British would have tried as a witch if only Anne of Burgundy, Duchess of Bedford, deputed to examine her, had not testified that she was a virgin. Joan was tried as a heretic instead, found guilty and burnt alive at the age of 19. Like the teenagers in Salem, Joan could cite spectral evidence. Whether her voices would be classed as saints from heaven or goblins damned depended on her judges. The British burned her; 25 years later the French retried her and declared her saint and martyr.

Many of the female saints of the early church behaved in ways that in a different setting would have brought an accusation of witchcraft. Many had relationships with birds and beasts identical to those that witches were thought to have. The seventh-century saint Melangell, for example, sheltered a hare beneath her skirts as she knelt praying in a wood and when the following hounds caught up they fell back whining; later, witches would be thought to inhabit the bodies of hares.

Interesting stories, but rather spoilt by the anachronistic references to "the British" -- it was the English, surely? The story of St Melangell is interesting, though rather tangential to the main topic. I've blogged about that elsewhere at SAFCEI: Saints and animals.

But to return to witch-hunting, I'd like to see more comparative studies between the Western world and elsewhere. Perhaps they will prove or disprove my hypothesis that witch-hunting seems to increase in societies where premodernity meets modernity, as in early modern Europe, and much of Africa at the present day. Maybe it's just that I've been over influenced by the title of the collection of essays by Comaroff & Comaroff: Modernity and its malcontents: ritual and power in post-colonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), ISBN: 0-226-11440-6, Dewey: 303.4, but the comparison is long overdue.

Understanding the Dark Side

An interesting review of Christopher Partridge, Understanding the Dark Side: Western Demonology, Satanic Panics and Alien Abduction, Chester University Press, (2006).

Understanding the Dark Side:

Although the subtitle promises to be a survey of western demonology, Satanic panics, and alien abduction Partridge’s survey is more a deconstruction of UFO religion and the eclecticism of its sources. The extra-terrestrial religious ideas may have had their origin in theosophical strains of Eastern thought but the religion of groups such as Heaven’s Gate is in fact more rooted in western demonology, specifically the adaptation in popular culture of the idea of the nephilim (Gen 6: 1-4). In the space of a short lecture Partridge has done a good job at delineating the dialectic between theory and popular culture and so, from the perspective of those interested in alternative and fringe religions the author has done a good job in charting the field. However, for those like my self who do not spend much time thinking about the theology of the Raelians a more interesting phenomenon - why as the stranglehold of ‘Christian’ understandings of the world been dissipated have these religions relied on parodies of Christian demonologies. In understand that popular culture is tapping into a latent understanding in invoking such ideas from Christian sources - however, the fact that the UFO religions have followed suit strikes me as a far more interesting question both theologically and sociologically.

Father Seraphim Rose, a Western convert to Orthodoxy, in his book Orthodoxy and the religion of the future maintained that UFOs were in fact demonic manifestations.

UFOs, however, are one area where I'm inclined to be modernist rather than postmodernitst or pre-modernist; in fact I'm altogether prosaic and literalist about them. As I see it, if you believe that you have established that UFOs are demons, or creatures from another planet, they are no longer UFOs but IFOs -- Identified Flying Objects. A thing cannot be both identified and unidentified at the same time.

A few years ago I was visited by a member of an Old Calendrist group, Paul Inglesby, who seemed quite obsessed with UFOs, and was trying to drum up support for his campaign of appealing to governments to do something to stop the abductions by space aliens that he was convinced were taking place. He simply didn't see my point at all when I said that if he had identified them as craft of space aliens they could no longer be UFOs (he pronounced it "you foes"). It wasn't exactly a UFO cult he was advocating, more like a conspiracy theory.

He asked me if I "believed in" UFOs. I said I didn't believe in them, though I had seen one. He asked me what I thought it was, and I said if I knew that, it wouldn't be a UFO. For what it's worth, here's what I wrote about it at the time, on an autumn evening in 1964, when I was at university

In the evening I went over to the Union to phone Fr Hallowes. It was about 6:00 pm, and as I walked across the car park I saw a red object travel across the sky from south to north. It was almost due West of the Union, and then it looked like an artificial satellite, moving slowly across the sky, very much as I saw the first Sputnik moving, nearly seven years ago now. That was the only satellite I had ever seen before, and I almost stopped looking and went on to the Union, But then I stopped, because when it was almost due west it seemed to stop, and then moved in a series of jerks. Then it started to move round a star -- at least that's what it looked like to me, but parallax probably meant that it only looked like it. Neil Perrett came along then, and we both watched it. It was higher up in the sky moving back more or less the way it had come, still in jerks, and it seemed less bright. Obviously it was not an artificial satellite, but must be an aircraft of some kind. Too far away for a chopper, but it may be a fast plane, very far away, but somehow it didn't look like it. Not a satellite, not a plane, what the hell can it be? A piece seemed to fall off it, and then it was travelling back, moving north to south, when it dropped a few more pieces, and finally disappeared -- disintegrated altogether. I went on to the Union, and Neil went back to res.

Not a bird, not a plane, not an artificial satellite, not an alien spacecraft, not a demonic manifestation, simply an unidentified flying object - a UFO.

nourishing obscurity: [remembrance sunday] the armistice story part 1

The 11th of November is sometimes known as Poppy Day (in case you've wondered why Brit TV announcers have been decorated with red poppies for the last few weeks), and sometimes as Armistice Day. This is linked to the cessation of hostilities in the First World War 90 years ago today.

James Higham has a good background post on his blog, explaining how the war started and why the poppies: nourishing obscurity: [remembrance sunday] the armistice story part 1:

We all know about poppies, the day is celebrated around the world and yet do you know the actual story? The aim of this post is to bring together the story in one package.

It is also one of the primary reasons I see no justification for wars being declared. This is not to say we shouldn't be prepared - we should and with the best equipment.

I'm referring to the ruling donkeys deciding that a jolly good war is in order and to hell with the lives of countless young people. Sorry if this makes me hot under the collar.

It's worth a read.

Also worth noting, perhaps, is that the armistice was signed in France, and the day was the feast day of a French bishop, St Martin of Tours, who could be described as the patron saint of conscientious objectors.Some bloggers, like Alice In Blogland: November, will be wearing white poppies, to remember conscientious objectors as well as combatants.

The Times - Military believe judge was ‘bewitched’

The case of a military judge who has claimed that she was bewitched has really set the cat among the pigeons.

The Times - Military believe judge was ‘bewitched’:

A Senior military judge has escaped prosecution for attempting suicide because some of the SA National Defence Force’s top brass allegedly believed her claim that she had been bewitched.

The defence force’s first black female judge, Colonel Phildah Nomoyi, 41, doused herself with petrol and set herself alight in her garage in June.

Now Thaba Tshwane — the military complex in Pretoria that is home to thousands of personnel from privates to generals — is buzzing with gossip about how Nomoyi escaped being booted from the force.

Not only is the unfortunate judge in danger of being sacked for "shooting herself in the foot" (as the saying goes), but the South African Pagan Rights Alliance (SAPRA) have said they will lodge a formal complaint with the Minister of Defence, SANDF Legal services, SANDF Chief and the Defence Secretariat, against "the spurious religious prejudice and defamation demonstrated against Witchcraft by Colonel Phildah Nomoyi" and (according to reports) "supported by the SANDF in their refusal to remove Nomoyi from her Judicial position or charge her with conduct unbecoming."

Which quite frankly seems utterly ridiculous. Or do SAPRA have evidence that Philidah Nomoyi has accused them, or any of their members, of bewitching her?

I believe that, however the case turns out, the SA Pagan Rights Alliance owe Colonel Phildah Nomoyi an apology for accusing her of "spurious religious prejudice", unless they have evidence to show that she specifically accused them, or any of their members, of bewitching her.

It appears that they are confusing two very different things -- the modern religion of pagan witchcraft, and premodern African witchcraft beliefs. As the historian Ronald Hutton has pointed out in his book The pagan religions of the ancient British IOsles,

By assuming that witchcraft and paganism were formerly the same phenomenon, they (Wiccans) are mixing two utterly different archaic concepts and placing themselves in a certain amount of difficulty. The advantage of the label 'witch' is that it has all the exciting connotations of a figure who flouts the conventions of normal society and is possessed of powers unavailable to it, at once feared and persecuted. It is a marvellous rallying-point for a counter-culture, and also one of the few images of independent female power in early modern European civilization. The disadvantage is that by identifying themselves with a very old stereotype of menace,
derived from the pre-Christian world itself, modern pagans have drawn upon themselves a great deal of unnecessary suspicion, vituperation and victimization which they are perpetually struggling to assuage.

Now I am sympathetic towards neopagans who have been maligned in this way, and have suffered vi8ctimisation as a result. But it is disingenuous to claim that Colonel Phildah Nomoyi had the slightest intention of doing this. It is confusing two very different concepts, and has the effect of victimising Colonel Phildah Nomoyi in the same way that neopagans have themselves have been victimised. She clearly has problems, and deserves sympathy rather than persecution.

Inexpensive progress

Let's say goodbye to hedges
And roads with grassy edges
And winding country lanes
Let all things travel faster
Where motor-car is master
Till only Speed remains.

So wrote John Betjeman in his poem Inexpensive progress (c1955) -- about the time that Britain got its first motorway. I'm sure he didn't foresee the congestion and the joys of sitting stationary in freeway traffic jams.

About 25 years ago the mailships between Britain and South Africa were phased out in the name of "progress". Containerisation had killed them and made then uneconomic, we were told. So overseas surface mail became subject to the erratic and uncertain sailing schedules of container ships, and letters that could previously be guaranteed to arrive within two weeks could take six weeks to two months, or even longer. And now airmail usually takes at least two weeks.

And now Chessalee notes the passing of another milestone in the stalled rush of progress -- the British night mail trains.

Night train that turned post into poetry makes its final delivery - Home News, UK - The Independent:

The 'Night Mail', the train that W H Auden and T S Eliot made famous in rhyme, and the 1963 Great Train Robbers made famous in crime, is being replaced by a much less romantic means of getting letters from one end of the country to the other:lorries.

The trains, officially known as travelling post offices (TPOs), had specially-constructed carriages that allowed post to be sorted on the way. They first ran in 1838, but they have gradually been replaced in recent years, and now the last 10 trains are being axed in a cost-cutting plan to save Royal Mail �10m a year. A Royal Mail spokesman said yesterday: 'Travelling sorting offices were a Victorian solution to a Victorian problem ..., before the era of motorways and air travel. Like mail coaches before them, TPOs are now part of the Royal Mail's history.'

Incredible change

More evidence that Barack Obama's "Change you can believe in" slogan rings hollow.

OpEdNews -- Conned Again:

If the change President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America's wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama's choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama's selection of Rahm Israel Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that change ended with Obama's election. The only thing different about the new administration will be the faces.

Rahm Israel Emanuel is a supporter of Bush's invasion of Iraq. Emanuel rose to prominence in the Democratic Party as a result of his fundraising connections to AIPAC. A strong supporter of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, he comes from a terrorist family. His father was a member of Irgun, a Jewish terrorist organization that used violence to drive the British and Palestinians out of Palestine in order to create the Jewish state. During the 1991 Gulf War, Rahm Israel Emanuel volunteered to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. He was a member of the Freddie Mac board of directors and received $231,655 in directors fees in 2001. According to Wikipedia, 'during the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities.'

The hollowness of the slogan became apparent as soon as he had secured enough votes to win the Democratic Party nomination (see Notes from underground: Oh well, so much for peace and Notes from underground: Why Clinton Lost and why Obama won). Change didn't end with his election, it ended with his nomination.

Many people last week said Barack Obama's election gave them hope, but it's proving to be a very false hope indeed.

Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria on ecumenism

There's an interesting and wide-ranging interview of the Orthodox Bishop of Vienna and Austria by Peter Bouteneff. I think that the whole interview is worth reading, but what the bishop said about ecumenism certainly rang bells for me.

Dr. Peter C. Bouteneff -- An Interview with His Grace, Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria:

After more than thirteen years of intensive ecumenical involvement I can declare my profound disappointment with the existing forms of “official” ecumenism as represented by the World Council of Churches, the Conference of European Churches and other similar organizations. My impression is that they have exhausted their initial potential. Theologically they lead us nowhere. They produce texts that, for the most part, are pale and uninspiring. The reason for this is that these organizations include representatives of a wide variety of churches, from the most “conservative” to the most “liberal.” And the diversity of views is so great that they cannot say much in common except for a polite and politically correct talk about “common call to unity,” “mutual commitment” and “shared responsibility.”

I see that there is now a deep-seated discrepancy between those churches which strive to preserve the Holy Tradition and those that constantly revise it to fit modern standards. This divergence is as evident at the level of religious teaching, including doctrine and ecclesiology, as it is at the level of church practice, such as worship and morality.

Hat-tip to Ad Orientem: Bp. Hilarion (Alfeeyev) Speaks

I have plenty of pale and uninspiring texts mouldering in files and on shelves, produced by ecumenical gatherings, and the only thing that stops me throwing them out is the thought that I might need to quote something from one the following day. And I've been to plenty of ecumenical gatherings where talk is cheap and action non-existent. A few have been worth attending, not for what they achieved, but for the insight they gave into the reasons for non-achievement.

One of the latter class was a meeting of the South African Council of Churches a few years ago on Zimbabwe, where members of the South African observer team of the Zimbabwean elections confessed that they had been persuaded to sign a statement declaring the elections free and fair when it was pretty evident that they were not, and at the meeting they spoke of their remorse at having thereby exacerbated the problems in that unhappy country instead of helping to solve them.

A liberal underground in South Africa

A recent comment on South African history by Paul Trewhela suggests that if the Liberal Party had gone underground 40 years ago, instead of disbanding under government pressure, it could have strengthened the liberal democratic tradition in South Africa today.

Politicsweb - FEATURES - The battle of ideas in South Africa:

The prime opponent in South Africa of both the European tradition of racist rule, embodied principally but not exclusively in the government of over forty years of the National Party, but also of totalitarian state despotism of the Soviet type (represented by the SACP), was the Liberal Party of South Africa. During the apartheid period, members of this party showed great courage and gave outstanding moral witness. But the Liberal Party existed for only 15 years, between 1953 and 1968, when it dissolved itself.

By that act of self-extinction, in that most bleak period of despotic rule under the heavy hand of Prime Minister Balthasar John Vorster (former paramilitary leader of the Ossewabrandwag), the Liberal Party discounted itself as a serious contender for the allegiance of black people, deprived of a vote, and handed primacy of position in the argument for the criterion of non-racialism in politics to its rival and enemy, the SACP.

In another article, Gus Gosling asks whether it would have been possible for the Liberal Party to have gone underground, and gives some reasons why he thought it could not.

Politicsweb - FEATURES - Why was there no liberal underground?:

In effect the NCL-ARM was the (premature) act of underground resistance from the Liberal Party. The final, aberrant, tragic act of the NCL-ARM on 24 July 1964, an expanded increasingly paranoid state security apparatus, combined finally with Liberal openness ensured the near impossibility for any second act of underground resistance from Liberals.

So why, despite all this, do I still think that Paul Trewhela has a point? The Liberal Party's real failure was that, outside Natal, it was perceived and received as a party of white privilege. (In Natal the Liberal Party had support among rural blacks facing eviction from 'blackspots'.)

I think that Gus Gosling has got it right there. As I've noted elsewhere (Notes from underground: A new history of the Liberal Party?), I have little first-hand knowledge of the Liberal Party outside Natal, but within Natal, I can see no way that the party could have gone underground. The party had operated openly and publicly. Its members and leaders were well-known to the Security Police, who would not have had to be very bright to have noticed underground activity. Their izimpimpi were still active, and long after the Liberal Party had disbanded they continued to report contact between former members of the party to the Security Police.

It was easier for the South African Communist Party to operate underground for reasons noted by Gosling and Trewhela, and also because it saw itself as a vanguard organisation, which the Liberal Party did not. The Liberal Party tried not only to talk about democracy, but to practise it in its own organisation, which meant meeting not as secret cells, but publicly as party branches, and having regional, provincial and national congresses.

So I believe it would have been pretty unrealistic to expect the Liberal Party to go underground.

But there is a related question that is worth asking.

While it would have been almost impossible for the Liberal Party to operate underground, some of its members, including me, were quite interested in the history of the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, and we did see the possibility of a confessing church in South Africa. So the question to ask is why nothing came of the idea of a confessing church.

When the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer were published in English in the 1960s, they struck a chord with South African readers, who could see many parallels between South Africa in the 1960s and Germany in the 1930s. In 1963 the Christian Institute was formed, and its associated journal Pro Veritate published articles asking if the time had come for a confessing church in South Africa.

I and others have covered this in some detail in a collection of essays Oom Bey for the future: engaging the witness of Beyers Naude edited by Len Hansen and Robert Vosloo (Stellenbosch, SUN Press, 2006: ISBN 1-920109-29-3). One of the things that I was concerned with was that the Christian Institute should try to recruit former members of the Liberal Party (most of whom were Christians belonging to various African independent churches), and, as an interdenominational organisation, provide the basic structure for them to continue to work together.

In the end, for various reasons, this did not happen.

Nevertheless, a Christian "underground" was a far more feasible project than a Liberal Party one, and if it had come off, it could have performed at least some of the functions that Trewhela and Gosling think an underground Liberal Party could have done.