My childhood church was deeply racist in its theology, behaviours, and attitudes. While there will be some who will dispute this, the history of the Full Gospel Church of God in South Africa tells the sad tale of racial segregation and discrimination. Most Pentecostal churches were in cahoots with the Nationalist Government of the day. When the Church was asked by the government how the church felt about the then-new Apartheid policy, an official of the Full Gospel Church could state with glee that it ‘was already practising it’.1 This was the church of my childhood and the church in which I decerned a call to ministry.

At eighteen, I went to study theology with Calvinist Professors at Johannesburg University. The University was established in the mid-1960s to serve as the bearer and interpreter of Afrikaner thought and to educate the new generation of Afrikaner leaders—supposedly, people like me. 

Abraham Kuyper's words, "in isolation lies our strength”, taken out of context, provided the subtext for much of my theological education and entrenched my lack of theological integration. I learned that separation, not inclusion, was God's way. Like Israel, we needed to be racially pure, separated in all walks of life from the sons and daughters of Ham. Africans, we were told, are the descendants of Ham because blackness was Ham’s curse. Racial purity was our salvation; it was decreed by God. I happily participated in this knowledge, and my world seemed complete, but it was fundamentally flawed.

Desmond Tutu, a young bishop in the early 1980s, came to our Afrikaner university. He already had a reputation as a troublemaker, and I joined those who attended his lecture intending to disrupt his speech. But within minutes, I was captivated by his eloquence, humour, gentleness, and ability to integrate faith and public life. As he spoke, I felt the pain of the disintegration of my naively held beliefs. A crack appeared in my universe. Many years later, when I watched the movie "Matrix the Trilogy", I could describe what I experienced on that day with Desmond Tutu. In the film, Morpheus tells Neo, “You know there is something wrong in the world. You don’t know what it is, but it drives you mad. It is like a splinter in your mind.” 

Desmond Tutu observed that Apartheid lacked integrity; it was supposed to be a policy of "separate but equal development", but instead, Apartheid was a brutal political system designed to dehumanise the majority of South Africans. I knew all too well that Apartheid was not just government policy; it was the theology that gave "meaning" to my life. He explained that millions of Indigenous African people were uprooted and dumped in arid, inaccessible ghettos of poverty and misery. They became inexhaustible reservoirs of cheap labour. He said, “I have visited many such dumping grounds and will never forget the little girl who said that when there is no food to borrow, they drink water to fill their stomachs". In the name of God, I realised, enabled by theological answers, that people were starving in a land of record crop surpluses. How could that be?

My lack of theological integrity was exposed as a Graduate student at a Pentecostal Seminary in Cleveland, Tennessee. It was during a clinical placement as a chaplain at Egleston Children’s Hospital that I met a little black boy who displayed the classic symptoms of acquired foetal alcohol syndrome. His face and head were severely malformed, and he suffered from mental retardation. James was the Quasimodo of the ward, and I had to care for him. As much as his malformations disgusted me, matters were only made worse by the colour of his skin. Deep down in my twisted mind, I concluded that this little boy was suffering like this because black people were all the same: they needed Europeans to take care of them.

But on a destined day, James and I met in the long and wide corridor of the Egleston Children’s Hospital. There was a thunderstorm outside that day, and James came out into the hallway, frightened by the thunder. I was surprised, even shocked, by his presence. Before I could do anything, a petrified, slobbering, shaking little black boy was holding onto me. Many thoughts flashed through my mind, but to my shame, the dominant feeling was that I needed to get him off my clean pants. My disgust for the little boy and all he represented was coming to the surface. I managed to get him back onto his bed, still doing everything I could to free myself from his boyish grip. As I peeled his last finger from my arm, he swung around, holding on to a stuffed toy animal. His eyes were cold, and I looked away.

James’ action exposed my lack of integrity, my racism, my inhumanity. This boy, who needed a human to hold and love him, found in me only disgust and an inability to respond. If his mother was addicted to a teratogenic drug and it produced a little ‘monster’, then my motherland was also on drugs to create that kind of behaviour in me.  I was so locked up in my mind of racial prejudice that I could not even compete with the stuffed toy animal. I knew then that I was a prisoner in my mind. I needed to get the splinter out of my mind to be free. I needed to be spiritually and theologically whole.