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In 1935 the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) accepted its federal mission policy which had racial segregation enshrined in it as a core and divinely sanctioned principle. As the foremost missiologist within South African church circles during the middle half of the 20th Century, Gustav Bernhard Augustus Gerdener was the chief formulator and disseminator of this policy. Convinced that the future fate of South Africa's multi-racial society rested squarely on evangelisation, white guardianship, and mission work, Gerdener lobbied for secular racial theory to be based on the formula of the DRC mission church. By 1946 this racial theory espoused by Gerdener, as well as the majority DRC, was internationally questioned by the post-World War Two onset of general human rights and rapid decolonialisation spearheaded by the newly constituted United Nations Organisation. This paper sets out to track the influence Gerdener had on the formulation of the DRC mission policy. It will make the case that as advocate of this policy and through his position as chairman of the DRC Federal Mission Council Gerdener played a critical role during the incubation years of the apartheid ideology leading up to the nationalist's political victory in 1948. Finally, it will aim to elucidate the justification for apartheid which Gerdener's racial theory afforded to a religious nation. A justification which formed the moral bedrock of South Africa's opposition to the broader international context of decolonialisation and advocation of a domestic social system guised as one geared toward equal, albeit separate, development but which ultimately proved to be a new strain of colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an approach to museum re-definition dilemma by looking at why museums emerge today, to which end, by which means, and how they engage with their stakeholders. I present a case study based on District Six Museum and neighborhood from Cape Town, South Africa. The museum was developed and maintained as a community museum in the post-apartheid era, by a community that has been forcibly removed and no longer exists as such. My study presents the Museum as it is today and relevant background information, together with an overview of traces of recent histories in the surrounding neighborhood. Together with literature findings on the role of this Museum in South Africa, these constitute the base of final reflections on how knowledge is produced and re-produced under overt and covert oppression regimes, i.e. before and post-colonial and post-apartheid, and how museums can and should rise from community engagement in order to mediate and interpret negative history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]