ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the final stage of the DRC’s twentieth-century anticommunism, from the mid-1980s until the end of white minority rule in 1994. Increased internal and external pressure in the early 1980s forced the DRC to rethink its commitment to apartheid, and in 1986 the church, now led by young pragmatic theologians, officially abandoned apartheid theology. This chapter discusses how the church’s shift away from apartheid initiated a process to rethink a future South Africa without apartheid or Afrikaner nationalism. It contends that in this process, the DRC recast anticommunism in such a way that it reinforced notions of a ‘new’ democratic South Africa. Fear of communists now made way for democratic notions of tolerance – while simultaneously opposing communist ideals to ensure the material safety of its members. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 accelerated this process. The chapter confirms the interdependence of anticommunism and apartheid; with the fall of apartheid came the unceremonious fall of anticommunism. The chapter does, however, indicate the discrepancies between the DRC leaders’ notion of anticommunism, and how it was received amongst the laity of the church. It concludes that decades of anticommunist indoctrination still shaped the Afrikaner imagination, as South African entered a new democratic dispensation.
