MUKONI RATSHIṰANGA | Tshenuwani Farisani: the cleric who broke barriers and fought tunnel visions

Tshenuwani Simon Farisani, the activist cleric who passed away last week at the age of 77, was a household name when my generation discovered the vowels of the political alphabet in the mid-1980s.

He was then a senior member of the Lutheran Church clergy, serving as Dean of the Beauster Mission at Maungani Village in Vhembe District, Limpopo, and popularly known as “Vho-Dean”, the Dean. Consequently, it was not until much later that some of us got to know “Dean” was a church title, not his first name.

Continuing on a long tradition of religious leaders, in South Africa and around the world, for whom spiritual salvation and the pursuit of social justice are inseparable, Farisani had notably also chosen the perilous path of political activism against apartheid. But how did this come about?

The world that produced him

Like all human beings, Farisani was shaped by the world around him. His life's trajectory is better appreciated in the context of the colonial and apartheid systems, the latter commencing merely three months before his birth on August 30 1948, and the alternative vision of a SA which belongs to all who live in it.

Farisani was born at Songozwi Village — a hairsbreadth from Louis Trichardt, a small town at the foot of the Soutpansberg mountain range — once the seat of the Mphephu Ramabulana Royal House. The royal court had migrated from nearby Luaṱame after the brief November 1898 Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) war against King Makhado’s successor, Aḽilali Tshilamulele Mphephu, over the latter’s refusal to submit to the ZAR’s authority, specially by way of paying taxes to the regime.

The war led to the establishment of Louis Trichardt roughly three months later in February 1899. The outcome of the war had been a quintessential example of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. It came after the 1867 defeat of Great Trek settlers in the Battle of Schoemansdal, 16km west of Louis Trichardt, by King Makhado. The vanquished settlers fled Schoemansdal, whereafter they founded Pietersburg, today Polokwane, in 1886.

Historian Johann Tempelhoff noted: “Pietersburg's founding in 1886 was considered a partial compensation for the white withdrawal from the [Soutpansberg] region two decades earlier.”

Overcoming the socioeconomic legacy of the Battle of Schoemansdal so exercised “the [ZAR] government” that it “went so far as to issue a notice as early as 1884 to the effect that the former residents of Schoemansdal would be entitled to free erven in the proposed new town (Pietersburg), based on the claims they had to land in Schoemansdal”.

Moreover, “the symbolic resettlement of the Soutpansberg district, in the south, was hardly of any significance if the resources of the rest of the district remained untapped”. This meant one thing and one thing alone: colonial incursions that led to the dispossession of the Africans.

By dint of the Voortrekkers’ religious fervour and the ghosts of Schoemansdal, the Church of the Covenant of Louis Trichardt became the second of only two South African churches founded on the strength of a religious vow. The first was the Gelofte Kerk in Pietermaritzburg, for which the trekkers swore before the December 16 1838 Battle of Ncome River.

The Limpopo Voortrekker vow was conducted on the evening of 16 October 1898 under the watchful tutelage of Gen Piet Joubert, commanding officer of the ZAR forces, before the assault on Aḽilali’s position. Tempelhoff recorded the attendees “promised that if the Lord enabled [them] to subjugate the Venda, a church would be dedicated to His honour”. They also “promised they would give part of the cattle taken from the Venda for the construction of the church”.

Oral accounts also assert the victors pillaged stones from the majestic Luaṱame infrastructure, which they reused in the construction of the church’s foundational structure. Visible on the building’s exterior, the stones are an affirmation of stonemasonry as a construction technique and art form, the architectural brilliance and a painful reminder of the humiliation that comes with defeat. After Aḽilali's fall, another ZAR commander, Stephanus Trichardt, positioned a company of 100 troops atop Luaṱame “to see to it that the Venda people did not return to their capital”.

Farisani was born 35 and 12 years after the passage of the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts, respectively. His family was later forcibly removed from Songozwi to the arid Ha-Madodonga village to the west. As had happened during the 1898 war, his family's livestock was also confiscated by the government. And, like other children his age, he became a provider of free labour on surrounding white-owned farms.

Barriers, tunnels and change

On November 18 1961, a year after Farisani began school at the age of 12 — and thanks to the good offices of a German missionary who plucked him out of the fields and sent him to school — the government's most prominent figure then called on the town. That day, prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid, addressed two gatherings, beginning with 3,000 white youths in the town, followed by an adult audience 22km north of the town for the official inauguration of two tunnels on the N1 highway that are named after him.

Verwoerd bemoaned “a barrier” that “has been put in the way” by a wider African continent that could not be reconciled with apartheid. With no sense of irony, he asserted the “mental barriers” were caused “by hate, by envy, by enmity, by ignorance and by enlightenedness” on the part of the Africans. “But the barriers are not in our minds. With us, the tunnels are open.”

Verwoerd’s speech in the hinterland of Louis Trichardt followed two important events that left a lasting impression on the psychological imagination of South Africans and the world. These are the 1955 adoption of the Freedom Charter, which, contrary to the logic of apartheid, asserted SA belonged to all who lived in it.

British prime minister Harold Macmillan's “Wind of Change” speech was made to the whites-only parliament in February 1960, in which he stated, among other things, that “the wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact”.

Macmillan and Verwoerd’s speeches also preceded the July 1963 Rivonia Raid, which culminated in the treason trial and life imprisonment of the accused in June 1964.

As he grew and matured, Farisani, who had been excluded from Verwoerd’s youth rally for reason of his race, increasingly found himself up against barriers and tunnels constructed by a Verwoerd who, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, lorded it over Africans, believing they were hewers of wood and drawers of water.

Farisani discovered his political consciousness in the vortex of these historical processes and events, and came to oppose Verwoerdian barriers and tunnel visions in favour of an inclusive SA undergirded by respect for human dignity.

Bitten by the bug of national consciousness of which Macmillan had spoken in 1960, Farisani and his generation of activists would, in later years, become a crucial link in an intergenerational chain connecting the Rivonia Trial cohort, what has come to be known as the June 16 1976 detachment and subsequent activist corps who became the foot soldiers who ultimately rendered apartheid ungovernable in the mid-1980s. In this sense, Farisani, and his fellow travellers, were products and makers of history.

Black consciousness and liberation theology

Gifted with a sharp intellect, Farisani earned a first-class matric pass, after which he enrolled to read theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Maphumulo, KwaZulu-Natal. He also came to be influenced by two philosophical schools of thought which gained traction in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first was black consciousness and its variant of black theology.

The other was liberation theology, which originated from the second Latin-American Catholic Bishops’ Conference in Medellín, Colombia in 1968. Spearheaded by Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, liberation theology emphasised solidarity with the poor and the disenfranchised, urging the church to immerse itself in struggles for progressive social change.

One is inclined to think it was Farisani’s commitment to social justice immanent in liberation theology that led him to join the SA Communist Party (SACP), a decision which would have elicited much philosophical debate in a different era. However, this evinced his preparedness to go to the ends of the earth to secure a just world. Farisani may therefore have agreed with the late Brazilian liberation theologian, Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, when he said: “Solving social problems is the proof of whether we are civilised or not.”

The logic of the situation made it inevitable for liberation and black theology adherents like Farisani to lock horns with their religious leaders and the country's political authorities. He was soon expelled from the seminary and completed his studies through Unisa before being ordained in 1975.

By the early 1970s, Farisani had cofounded the Black Evangelical Youth Organisation with figures such as [current] President Cyril Ramaphosa, Lawrence Khorommbi and Tshifhiwa Muofhe, who was murdered in detention by the Venda security police on November 12 1981. From 1973 to 1975, he served as president of the Black People's Convention and closely worked with eminent personalities such as Steve Biko and Saths Cooper.

Farisani’s dual identities as a minister of religion and a political activist served as a shield and a spear, providing him the necessary cover to confront apartheid from the relative safety of the pulpit. He asserted that since all human beings were created in the image of God, which the supporters and captains of apartheid, who were also Christians, could not dispute, it followed their position was in opposition to God.

With a hypnotic, resonant voice and an impeccable command of the Tshivenḓa and English languages, Farisani captivated audiences, continually expanding the social and political forces that eventually defeated the National Party in 1994.

The clash that led to Farisani's expulsion from the Lutheran Theological Seminary foreshadowed trouble with the security police a few years later. In the decade between 1977 and 1987, he was detained by the police on four occasions and brutally tortured each time. Then, in 1987, he fled the country for exile in the US, only to return in 1990.

In political terms, Farisani had remained truly Makhado’s grandchild; an embodiment of the cause of freedom. He had been harassed, detained and tortured at the hands of Venda Bantustan leader, Patrick Mphephu, whose treachery perverted the institution of traditional leadership into a vassalage of oppression. Like Makhado before him, Farisani’s local political activities were imbricated into the national liberation process.

Consequently, Farisani’s rise to national prominence was never the result of self-promotion. He earned the confidence of the people for his loyalty to their cause, forever articulating their hopes and aspirations. Those of us who grew up in Vhembe District in the 1980s owe our political consciousness to him, among other personages.

It was no surprise that after 1994 he was repeatedly elected as a public representative on behalf of the ANC, which he had joined during the years of its illegality, when doing so also meant he could be signing his life away.

Though Farisani retired from formal politics in 2009, he remained involved in ANC-SACP activities and his community, specially after the establishment of The Reverend Dr Tshenuwani Farisani Foundation in 2022.

Sufficient stock of attributes

Several interrelated attributes set Farisani and his generation of activists apart from many that followed, certainly those of my generation. First, and foremost, Farisani had a social conscience — he lived for a cause greater than himself and his family.

Reflecting on the ideal of selflessness more than a decade ago, American civil rights activist Rev Alfred Sharpton Jnr said: “The only thing that will matter two minutes after you’re gone is what you’ve done for more than yourself. What did you stand for? What was your purpose? That’s what you need to ask yourself every day. Am I fighting the wrong fight? What am I here for? What is my life about?”

Sharpton had also stated, rather dramatically: “The hardest job of a black preacher is to preach the funeral of an irrelevant negro. They roll the body down the aisle and we're supposed to hallucinate a life you never lived.”

Far from irrelevant, Farisani’s life was decidedly people-centred to the end. In recent times, he vigorously campaigned for justice for VBS Mutual Bank depositors who lost their entire life savings due to the embezzlement of R2bn by bank executives and their rent-seeking politician partners in crime, our latter-day traitors.

Farisani understood that the job of an activist is to change society for the better. So, he always asked himself: “How do I (and) we change society for the better?” He also appreciated that stating and reiterating political claims, no matter how valid or appealing, is meaningless if they are not carried out.

He and his fellow travellers agonised over matters theoretical and practical because they recognised the world is ordered on theoretical assumptions and paradigms. The struggle essentially entails a contest of competing alternatives. If they were going to steer society in a certain direction, it had to be one with which their consciences would countenance. If they committed mistakes, as inevitable as mistakes are, they must have done so in good faith.

Farisani was naturally opposed to the strident calls to annul the post-apartheid policy rubric because he appreciated the outcome was injurious to the interests of black and white South Africans alike: the causal link between the country’s social and political stability and redressing the legacy of colonialism and apartheid cannot be gainsaid.

He also saw through the absurdity in the assumption that social justice is the property of an ANC, whose defeat would amount to ridding the country of an infernal nuisance. SA has been down that cul-de-sac, and it bears reminding that Farisani was but a mere 16-year-old when apartheid condemned the Rivonia trialists to life imprisonment on Robben Island, believing they had stumbled upon a silver bullet to SA’s problems.

Farisani and his companions understood it was not called “struggle” for nothing. Change would never come on a silver platter; it required effort, and they were ready to take what pain came their way for their convictions. As practitioners shaped by the trials and tribulations of the struggle, they understood that wittingly or unwittingly, revolutionaries can sometimes outperform counter-revolutionaries in their offensive against the cause through acts of commission and omission, which sooner or later get weaponised to delegitimise the cause itself.

Whether they were men or women of the cloth or not, Farisani and his companions had a strong moral compass; they lived by deep visions and morality. To them, the struggle embodied greater ideals. In the words of Oliver Tambo: “A revolutionary behaves in a certain kind of way and is distinguished and is distinguishable from the criminal, from the vigilante, and from the enemy agent.”

Farisani radiated true patriotism and an unwavering devotion to the national cause. He remained opposed to barriers and tunnel visions inasmuch as he did not equivocate in his commitment to building the SA envisioned in the Freedom Charter and the constitution. What now that he is gone? It is a significant, but open-ended question, at least for now. But how about non-fictional monologues, discussions, national dialogues and enquiries into how we compare to Farisani and his generation in all their essential public aspects?

Adieu, comrade Dean Farisani.

• Ratshitanga is international relations adviser to Deputy President Paul Mashatile. He grew up in Vhembe District, Limpopo, and occasionally interacted with the late Farisani.

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