The Rustenburg Declaration

National Conference of Church Leaders in South AfricaNovember 1990

The declaration of the conference of South African church leaders held at Rustenburg in November 1990. Its signatories reject apartheid as a sin and confess the parts their churches played in practising, supporting or failing to resist it.

The preamble says that the participants, from a wide variety of backgrounds, were not in full accord on everything but were all agreed in rejecting apartheid as a sin. The confession that follows denounces apartheid as an evil policy and distinguishes three kinds of guilt: some misused the Bible to justify apartheid, some ignored its evil and took an allegedly neutral stance, and some condemned it boldly but resisted it timidly. Later sections treat restitution and a programme of action.

The archive’s introductory note says that delegates of 85 churches attended, that the conference came about on the initiative of the state president, F. W. de Klerk, and that at it the Dutch Reformed Church publicly confessed its support of apartheid, a confession which Archbishop Desmond Tutu accepted in a spirit of forgiveness. That note is the archive’s own. See the Churches and Apartheid.

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