Defaming
Adventism in South Africa by Ron Lawson Reviewed Koot van Wyk,
Kyungpook National University, South Korea, Conjoint lecturer of Avondale
College, 27th of October 2020.
When Thutmosis
III scratched out on monuments the cartouche of Hatsepsut, his stephmother,
after her death, it was with hatred. He was the illegal child of Iset and
Thutmosis II, the husband of the young Hatsepsut. When he was born, it was
exactly the same time that Moses at the age of 12 arrived at the Palace. It is the same
question we need to ask about Ronald Lawson, an Emeritus professor in the USA:
what prompted him to erase proper Adventism practices, ethical and moral
stances, music standards? Why is there an ax to grind? Why must Adventist be compared
to the Davidic sect and other sects and then analyzed and criticized? Why did
he undertake this article on the history of Adventism in South Africa? Queens College,
where Lawson was affiliated with, had a history of involvement with civil
rights activism since the 1960’s and 1963. They are proud of that. I presume if
you want to be a professor at this College, you need to write your articles
with civil right feelings and visions in mind. Thus, historiography should be
apologetic historiography towards civil right ideals, or cynical and critical
of the opposite identified ideal than civil rights, or otherwise the person
cannot teach there. I am looking
for ingredients of opportunism in the writing style of Lawson that caught my
eye. The excessive judgment that the church institutions and leaders and people
of South Africa failed their prophetic mission, and citations of claims towards
that aspect, is prove of some form of attempts to “impress a certain audience
for alter motives.” That is one
scenario. Normally, a person cannot be moved to make these sacrifices of proper
conscience and I am talking about the judgment that the historiographer makes
about data selected and parked in such a way that it is window-dressing of what
his audience is going to like and what he is going to convey in such a way that
they are going to like it. No matter what. It is this last element that bothers
me about the treatment of the data by Lawson. The role of
stereotypes in the background of the author trying to produce historiography,
is very important. The populist and media paintwork of “Apartheid” is an aspect
that needs reconsideration. Apartheid is not a static motionless application in
politics for self-gratification. Apartheid is fluid and it grows and it changed
and it transformed over time and this change in colors are very important
because they were the building stones of the mind of Mandela. Mandela was
educated while in jail and articles like prof. Esterhuizen from Stellenbosch,
the economy emeritus professor in Die Burger in the 1970”s and 1980’s were
contributive to a transformation of the thoughts of the Afrikaner intelligentsia.
Every successive president became different. Churches, and that includes the
Seventh-day Adventist church, leaders became more and more convinced that as the
wealth and needs of the Afrikaner was beginning to be met, the same need to
happen to the other races as well. They were worried that the pace was too
slow. I know, because I was there. I do not know if Lawson was there? Is he an
outsider view of South Africa? Maybe he should look at a series of doctoral theses
that were completed between 1976-1990 and I am sure that in the political arena
of South Africa, he will have to rewrite his article. I repeat, the static view
of Apartheid is the greatest myth of modern historiography on South African politics
of this era. I watched the other night the videos of Jan Smuts, D. F. Malan,
Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster, P. W. Botha, Pik Botha, F. W. De Klerk and I
can only say, if you think everything was static watching this, you were
sleeping. If you think they were monsters who hated the blacks with
hate-speech, I ask examples. I can afford many to the opposite expressed in
public. Lawson’s first
opening statement already is problematic: “During the
Apartheid period in South Africa, the Seventh-day Adventist Church not only
failed to critique the discriminatory system, but it formalized the
establishment of internal apartheid within the Church, with two (and for some
time three) separate race-based organizational structures that had very little
contact with one another, and segregated congregations, schools, and welfare
organizations.” Discriminatory
system? At Helderberg College Sam Baduza was living across the hall from me and
we showered together in the public men’s bathroom nearby and later Naidoo moved
in when Sam moved out. Whether it is Bloemetjie, Lawrence Wolf (Jewish), and a
list of names between 1975-1983, these were all in the men’s dormitory with us.
The same at the girls dormitory. We ate together, play together, pray together,
worship together, work together, studied together. “Failed and discriminatory
system?” to use Lawson’s words? Sources. The
sources that Lawson is using are good and opportunism in the writing of Hartley
and Bainbridge are factors that you need to keep in mind in their phraseology
and choice of words particularly strongly focused on the audience and its
consequences for their own future employment in Australia and Canada at that
time. People say what others like to hear, if it will benefit themselves, that
is. Then we come to
an internet factor about Lawson that is absolute important to put on the table
as a reason for the excessive over-reacting heated conscience about actions of
the past in Seventh-day Adventist history in South Africa. Before I mention the
factor, let me outline the words of a Calvinist Philosopher of South Africa,
Hendrik Stoker in 1938 in his book Oorsprong and Rigting Volume 2: He
said that the way you live, determines the way you think and the way you think
determines your methodology and your methodology determines you product. In essence,
when I criticize Lawson for his manner of historiography of the South African
scene and the Church and its institutions, it is because he fails in the first
of these: the way Lawson lives. People may say do not play the man. Play the
ideas but that is exactly what Stoker said we must not be misguided by. Now the factor
that is online available: Lawson is called a “gay Adventist”. This factor
colors the cynical historiography at a civil rights college in New York for me
with very clear paint that he supplies himself. Suddenly, data is not given the
changes to present themselves, data are polished and arranged in such a way
that they with beautiful phraseology mesmerize the reader into his agenda for
some form of gain, recognition, honor, empathy, motives towards inclusion,
hunger to cut loose from being called “white racist” even if he is not. Even though
Lawson has produced numerous papers on topics in Adventism, unfortunately all
his data needs reconsideration and re-evaluation. To defame Adventism in South
Africa for his own fame in New York and the American scene is not the prophetic
role that God had in mind for such a gifted individual as he is.