Between mediation and critique: Quaker nonviolence in apartheid Cape Town, 1976–1990
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| Author | MTC Shafer |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885117721414 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
EJPT
Article
Between mediation and
critique: Quaker nonviolence
in apartheid Cape Town,
1976–1990
MTC Shafer
Yale University, USA
Abstract
In the final years of legal apartheid, the small community of Quakers in Cape Town,
South Africa sought to apply their tradition of political and theological nonviolence to
the systematic injustice of their social context. Drawing on archival evidence, this article
examines the writings of Hendrik W van der Merwe, a prominent white Afrikaner
sociologist, activist, and Quaker. I argue that van der Merwe developed an unusual
account of Quaker pacifism that cast nonviolence in terms of engaged mediation
rather than civil resistance or critique, and I demonstrate how this ethical and political
position required a specific conceptualization of ‘‘violence’’ as an idea in order for its
account of peacemaking to be intelligible as an interpretation of that Quaker tradition.
The study of the development of van der Merwe’s ideas has a twofold significance: it
uncovers a form of anti-violence politics that has been widely neglected within political
theories of nonviolence and pacifism, and it illuminates the concrete political stakes of
ongoing debates about ‘‘narrow’’ and ‘‘wide’’ definitions of violence.
Keywords
Apartheid, Hendrik W van der Merwe, nonviolence, pacifism, Quakers, violence
In the final years of apartheid, the tiny community of Quakers in Cape Town,
South Africa, found themselves caught between the ever more urgent imperatives
of their political situation and the never more immediate obligations of their theo-
logical worldview. Heirs to the oldest continuous tradition of pacifism in the
Anglophone world, these mostly white, mostly English-descended members of
the Religious Society of Friends found that tradition to be newly complicated in
a context of colonial violence and racial hierarchy far removed from the conditions
European Journal of Political Theory
2020, Vol. 19(4) 593–613
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885117721414
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Corresponding author:
Matthew TC Shafer, Department of Political Science, Yale University, 115 Prospect St., New Haven,
CT 06511, USA.
Email: matthew.shafer@yale.edu
of its origin. Insulated from the bluntest effects of the white nationalist social order,
the white Quakers of Cape Town were slow to respond to the harsh reality of
apartheid institutions. Even when they did so, moreover, their responses were
not unitary, and the question of how best to reject violence amid systematic injust-
ice was hotly contested.
This article examines the writings of Hendrik W van der Merwe (1929–2001), a
South African Quaker, sociologist, and conflict mediator active in these debates.
Over years of political activity, van der Merwe’s views on political positionality and
his conceptualization of violence shifted dramatically. Although always deeply
sympathetic to the kind of solidaristic, oppositional nonviolence typically identified
with the work of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, van der Merwe by
the end of the 1980s developed a striking reinterpretation of the meaning of the
nonviolence of the specifically Quaker tradition, one that emphasized mediation
and reconciliation rather than critique and resistance. I argue that the case of van
der Merwe as an episode in the history of anti-violence
1
has twofold significance for
contemporary theorists interested in conceptual problems around violence and
nonviolence. First, his interpretation of the demands of Quaker nonviolence in
terms of mediation rather than critique illuminates a form of anti-violence politics
that has been almost entirely neglected by the theoretical literatures on pacifism
and nonviolence and that exists outside the common dichotomy between the
militancy of ‘‘civil resistance’’ to oppressive government and the passivity of sect-
arian withdrawal from an unjust society. Disavowing power but not politics,
van der Merwe’s conceptualization of ‘‘priestly peacemaking’’ as an alternative
to ‘‘prophetic’’ critique reveals concrete possibilities for social action that are
enabled by the rejection of violence and that are analytically distinct from, and
politically supplementary to, those that have received more well-known attention in
the writings of political theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Dustin Ells Howes, and
Karuna Mantena. Second, the story of his intellectual development demonstrates
how tactical and ethical choices in situations of conflict can require not just a
transformation of political practice but also a reconfiguration of fundamental con-
ceptual commitments, for his turn to imagining ‘‘nonviolence’’ in terms of medi-
ation rested on a shift in his conceptualization of ‘‘violence’’ as well. This
dimension of his work illuminates the stakes of the continuing debate over whether
the concept of ‘‘violence’’ ought to be understood in narrowly interactional or
instead in widely ‘‘structural’’ terms.
I focus on van der Merwe’s writings of 1976–1990, the decade and a half
between his formal conversion to the Society (and thus admission to membership
of its local community, the Cape Western Monthly Meeting, CWMM) and the year
in which the release of Nelson Mandela signaled the irreversible momentum of the
impending transition to democracy. An Afrikaner from a conservative family, van
der Merwe grew up in the rightwing Dutch Reformed Church, and his early life and
education left him well connected among the white elite (Van der Merwe, 2000:
46ff.). After completing his doctorate at UCLA, he eventually became the inaug-
ural director of the Institute of Inter-Racial Studies, which was affiliated with the
University of Cape Town and soon thereafter renamed the Centre for Intergroup
594 European Journal of Political Theory 19(4)
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