Christian struggle for justice recalled

by Chris Chatteris SJ · April 6, 2010

JOURNEYING FOR JUSTICE: Stories for an Ongoing Faith-based Struggle. Jive Media, Pietermaritzburg. 2009. 144pp.

Reviewed by Chris Chatteris SJ

This attractively produced and illustrated book recounts the 30-year history of the Pietermaritzburg Agency for Christian Social Awareness (PACSA), a small, ecumenical NGO dedicated to the struggle for social justice.

Small but always punching well above its weight, PACSA played a key role in the Natal Midlands during the transition to democracy. As a young priest in Elandskop from 1985-92, I can testify to PACSA�s effectiveness in standing for the truth, and I recall its support with gratitude.

The key figure in PACSA�s history was Peter Kerchoff, after whom a street has been named in Pietermaritzburg and to whose memory a mosaic portraying him as the Good Samaritan was created outside the Anglican cathedral by Dina Cormick. A married man with four children, he quit his job as the chief chemist for the aluminium company Alcan in 1978 to become PACSA�s organising secretary.

Peter and his wife Joan set up an office in a room in their backyard with little more than an old typewriter. They approached Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban for funds, and his good offices brought them their first overseas financial support, from the German Catholic funding agency Misereor. It was from these mustard-seed beginnings that the organisation began and, as one contributor remarks, at the time the task before them was �almost laughable in its enormity�.

PACSA�s first project was to throw a spotlight on forced removals by documenting the plight of the people of KwaPitela, who had been banished to a bleak and remote place with the Orwellian name of Compensation Farm. In word and in photo-image, PACSA exposed the suffering of this community.

Since these early courageous beginnings it has never flinched from telling the truth. Reliable information was an important weapon, which PACSA gathered through a local ecumenical network.

In its factsheets and agape-based liturgies, PACSA�s initial aim was to challenge white South Africans to take the social gospel seriously in the raw context of what turned out to be the dying days of apartheid. At the time, of course, there was no guarantee that apartheid�s days were numbered. The state of emergency in 1986 suggested otherwise. This, however, did not deter the growing number of PACSA members, black and white, who expanded their activities into ever greater areas of need.

The well-informed PACSA became a thorn in the side of the security forces in the days of the �total onslaught�, and it suffered much harassment. Peter Kerchoff himself was detained in 1986, and some members paid the ultimate price, most notably peace monitor S�khumbuzo Mbatha, who was assassinated after a PACSA workshop on February 8, 1992.

After 1994, PACSA sought a new direction for itself. Peter Kerchoff�s dictum, �It�s not the new South Africa, it�s the real South Africa�, expressed the organisation�s sober assessment of the new situation. There was much yet to do � in monitoring future elections, in the fight for gender equality, in combating the �new apartheid� of poverty and Aids, and in countering xenophobia.

As a study in how an NGO adapts after successful radical change, this book makes very interesting reading, and also in how an organisation survives the departure of its founder member, for Peter Kerchoff was tragically killed in a car accident in 1999.

This is a beautiful book, evocatively illustrated with press photographs, maps, artwork, cartoons and symbols. It is a �democratic� book, in which much space is given to moving quotations from ordinary people and PACSA�s workers. There appears to be no single author or editor. The collective and inclusive production method portrays the organisation�s underlying community-based values.

Journeying for Justice is a nourishing blend of local history, liberation theology and spirituality in action.

The book is available from www.clusterpublications.co.za