South Africa has a long and complex history of entanglement between religion, tradition and political rule. Until the political transition in the 1990s, governance was not secular. Despite their many differences, successive regimes made use of Christian political theologies and what I will call here ‘things African’, a phrase introduced by John and Jean Comaroff (2004), to secure rule without democratic legitimacy. They attempted a subordination of black interests to white rule by instrumentalising traditional leadership, customary law, Christianity, violence and duplicitous forms of legality. The apartheid government claimed explicitly that South Africa was a Christian country, ruled, however perversely, in terms of Christian values.

The country was not secular prior to 1994, in a variety of ways. From the establishment of a national state in 1910, South African governments consistently espoused a political theology to legitimate white rule. The state instituted a variety of relationships with religious institutions, sometimes appropriating church resources, sometimes drawing close to churches for political legitimation and sometimes harassing and unleashing violence upon religious groups and leaders. Aspects of modern statecraft were turned towards the antidemocratic politics of white rule.

Writing in these areas requires the uncomfortable but necessary reproduction of the racist language of racial governance. Some of this chapter refers to primary materials of the colonial administration, missionaries and apartheid bureaucrats. The language of these documents is often offensive, referring to ‘Kaffirs’, ‘heathens’, ‘natives’, ‘Bantu’ and the like. They are referenced in this chapter because it was on these terms that religion and culture were racially marked across time; authorising violence, exclusions and techniques of subjugation.

DIFFERENTIATION AND SEPARATION

Religious Studies scholarship has repeatedly pointed out that the concept of religion as a universal category of human life is, in fact, modern (see, for example, Masuzawa, 2005) and the distinction between religion and other domains, such as politics, economy and culture, is a product of secularism (Jäger, 2007).