ABSTRACT
The apartheid history of South Africa serves as a case study to demonstrate the elements of a theology of violence. Segregation served as the practical reality of the South African community since the arrival of the first white settlers. During the 1940s, an official theology of apartheid was developed, grounded on the ideology of a difference in terms of levels of intellectual and emotional development between racial groups that justified the severance of people in separate communities. Neo-Calvinists viewed the ethnic group as a sovereign sphere and the ‘principle of diversity’ as the most important creation ordinance. Apartheid theology also combined some ideas gained from the German National Socialist ideology, the myth of the eminence of the Aryan race, the idea of the people as an organism and Darwin’s evolutionary theory. When people failed to maintain the purity of their racial blood they destroyed the soul unity of the people; cross-breeding was the most cursed of all crimes. Black people were the ones mostly affected by apartheid. Their suffering can in no way be quantified. They existed for historic reasons at the bottom of the social chain and received the worst facilities and services.
