I recently completed a semester-long research project for my professional writing capstone course. I read various texts dealing with post-colonialism, rhetoric, and colonialism and had to compose a 12-15 page paper dealing with one or more of the texts I had read combining outside research and material from the texts in order to make a compelling argument. I chose to argue that apartheid forced one of the authors, Mark Mathabane, to reject Christianity and African tribal beliefs. Mathabane, instead of experiencing any miraculous happenings and seeing benefits for those who adhered to supernatural beliefs, experienced nothing out of the ordinary and saw that religious beliefs were detrimental to people holding them. Mathabane saw tribal beliefs and Christianity as fundamentally oppositional to blacks and caused them to distort reality. He also believed that Christianity was a lie crafted by whites to enforce apartheid and perpetuate injustice toward blacks. I investigate links between Christianity and apartheid and find that both were close cousins in South Africa.
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Mathabane, Apartheid, and Christianity