What colour is Jesus Christ?

The Black Christ

ED (DStv channel 190)Sunday, 1pm and 9.05pm

What colour is Jesus Christ? No one knows, but it is very unlikely that he was white, which seems to be the way he has been portrayed for centuries.

In 1962, during the height of apartheid, a young artist depicted Jesus as black, an act that was seen as shocking and nothing less than blasphemous.

DStv’s ED channel is showing two screenings today of a powerful documentary on the painting The Black Christ.

Ronald Harrison, a 22-year-old coloured South African artist, was the man behind The Black Christ. But not only was Harrison’s Jesus a black man, he was painted to look like apartheid struggle hero Chief Albert Luthuli, while the soldiers on his left looked like then prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd and Verwoerd’s right-hand man, John Vorster.

Mother Mary was depicted as coloured and St John as Asian.

The painting was a political statement – that the suffering and persecution Luthuli was experiencing at the time was akin to that of Christ, and that Luthuli’s apartheid-era persecutors were like the Roman centurions who persecuted Jesus.

It is an easy enough message to comprehend today, but during apartheid, Harrison’s painting was seen as nothing less than a direct attack on Verwoerd and Vorster, and an act of rebellion against the National Party-led government.

As the documentary’s description reads: “The painting was interpreted by various sects of the white ruling class as both blasphemous and subversive, since it managed to foreground the social paradox of a racist state purporting to hold Christian values.”

The painting was duly banned, and Harrison became a target. Through his narration, the documentary reveals the brutal interrogation and torture that the young artist underwent over the next seven years.

Viewing becomes excruciating at this point, as we learn about the sadistic, inhumane and shocking things that were done to this young man. I must warn you, the content is upsetting, but it’s important to see to get the full picture of the paranoia of the apartheid government at that time, and the horrific treatment apartheid dissidents had to endure.

The fact that Harrison, who died in 2011, is still a relatively unknown figure today shows that we are in serious need of more documentaries like this