Moravian Church case at the heart of indigenous peoples' land rights

Descendants of the indigenous people who lived on the land, predominantly Khoi and slaves, want to be able to control and govern the land their forefathers worked

- Ilham Rawoot

The rural town of Goedverwacht, 145km west of Cape Town and home to about 2 000 people, is not like any other town in the area — it is a Moravian mission station, one of 11 in the Western Cape.

It is also one of a number of mission stations where the residents are in the middle of a legal battle with the church over land, and the meaning of “ownership” in the context of a history of slavery and apartheid.

These battles, which will be precedent-setting, go straight to the heart of land reform and indigenous peoples’ rights in South Africa.

The Moravian Church doesn’t only have church buildings, bells and Sunday mass.

Rather it controls entire towns — mission stations — and hundreds of thousands of hectares of land. It even has its own financial services and property management company, MCiSA Holdings.

The church, which considers itself the owner of these small towns around the country and the surrounding agricultural land, where residents pay it taxes and levies, and live under its laws, has left many people dispossessed and disenfranchised.

Known formally as Unitas Fratrum or Unity of the Brethren, the Moravian Church is one of the oldest denominations of the Protestant Church, founded in 1457 in Bohemia in present-day Czechia.

The missionaries who came to South Africa as early as 1737 were German.

The church has congregations around the world, with more than a million members. South Africa, with 103 000 members, has one of the largest congregations.

German Moravian missionaries set up their first South African mission station in Genadendal in the Western Cape, and their aims immediately conflicted with the colonial authorities.

They welcomed people of all races to the church, and to live in safety in their mission stations at a time of genocide, forced evictions and displacement of people of colour by the colonial powers, and in direct opposition to the authorities’ dehumanisation of these peoples.