Evelyn Mase was a Jehovah’s Witness. She defended her right not to be involved in politics for religious reasons throughout her whole life.
by Massimo Introvigne*
*A paper presented at the webinar “A Time to End All Discrimination: FoRB, Intolerance, and the Tai Ji Men Case,” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on July 18, 2023, Nelson Mandela International Day.
The Tai Ji Men case started on December 19, 1996, as part of a political crackdown on religious and spiritual movements accused of not having supported the candidate of the ruling party, the Kuomintang, who had sought and obtained to be re-elected in the first democratic presidential election of Taiwan’s history. Some of the other movements that were targeted by the crackdown had explicitly supported other candidates. Tai Ji Men had taken no political positions. However, the simple fact that it had not actively supported the Kuomintang candidate made it a victim of the repression.
This is a typical feature of authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes. It is not enough to be neutral. You should explicitly support the powers that be—or else.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses are one religious organization that is often persecuted for this very reason. They interpret the Bible in the sense that their sole allegiance should be to the Kingdom of God. They do not become members of political parties, do not serve in the military, and do not vote in the elections. As American scholar Holly Folk has observed, this does not mean they are uninterested in the well-being and happiness of their fellow human beings. On the contrary, they are passionate about sharing their way to happiness in this life and beyond with all. Only, the way for them is religious rather than political.
On Mandela Day, this choice and the problems it may create can be illustrated by telling the story of a little-known figure, Nelson Mandela’s first wife, Mama Evelyn.
Evelyn Ntoko Mase was born in Engcobo, Transkei, on May 18, 1922, in a devout Christian family. By the age of twelve, she had lost both her parents. She moved to Johannesburg and trained as a nurse. Through her first cousin Walter Sisulu, later an important political figure, she met Mandela, and married him in 1944. They were very poor, and it was Evelyn’s salary as a nurse that enabled Mandela to complete his studies and eventually become a lawyer, and the couple to buy a home in Soweto, now restored as the historical Mandela House (Holly Folk, Karolina Maria Kotkowska, Peter Zoehrer and I visited it in January this year). Between 1945 and 1954, Evelyn also bore to Mandela four children.
While Mandela became increasingly involved in politics, Evelyn cultivated her main interest in life, religion. She became interested in the Jehovah’s Witnesses and became one of them in 1954. As Mandela later told the story in his autobiography, “The Jehovah’s Witnesses took the Bible as the sole rule of faith and believed in a coming Armageddon between good and evil. Evelyn zealously began distributing their publication The Watchtower, and began to proselytize me as well, urging me to convert my commitment to the struggle to a commitment to God. Although I found some aspects of the Watch Tower’s system to be interesting and worthwhile, I could not and did not share her devotion.” He could not stay away from politics and believed that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ attitude of not joining political parties carried a risk of encouraging “passivity and submissiveness” among black South Africans.
Mandela wrote that this was the main reason for their divorce in 1958, although the fact that he was a well-known womanizer and not always faithful to Evelyn nor to his subsequent wives—something he was not proud of but honestly admitted—was also a factor. He always praised Evelyn as a good wife and mother, and when she died in 2004, he attended her funeral together with the highest authorities of the country.
Evelyn continued in her proselyting activities on behalf of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, trying not to take advantage of nor to engage in discussions about her years with Mandela. She used her birth name Mase and in her later years the last name of her second husband Simon Rakeepile, a Soweto businessman and a fellow Jehovah’s Witness she had married in 1998.
Her positions about Mandela remained ambivalent, although she rarely discussed them. She commented once that, as she went door to door proselytizing, she found in many homes portraits of her former husband, which she condemned as idolatry and putting a man in the place of God—and a man, she added, who had moral flaws she knew better than anybody else. However, she also said that God can use for the common good of a country even men who are not perfect.
Evelyn has been largely excised from the Mandela epic as told in countless books, novels, and movies because the attitude of the Jehovah’s Witnesses of staying away from politics was not popular with her former husband’s party. Not supporting the political struggle of black South Africans was perceived as treason, and several Jehovah’s Witnesses were badly beaten and even killed.
They were victims of a heated political climate, but also of a misunderstood notion of freedom. In Japan today members of the Unification Church/Family Federation are criticized because they are active in politics, and we read that a “cult” has “infiltrated” the leading Japanese political party. This is a blatant violation of the right of all citizens, including those who belong to minority religions, to participate in political life. But there is also a right “not” to participate in political life, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses do, based on what they believe are Biblical reasons, and Tai Ji Men did in the 1996 elections.
When supporting a certain party becomes a pre-condition for being granted freedom of religion or belief, there is no democracy and there are no human rights. Similar violations of FoRB and human rights have haunted the Jehovah’s Witnesses in several countries. They are also at the origins of the 1996 persecution of Tai Ji Men.
Source: Bitter Winter