CAPE TOWN - Stand up for the truth and work relentlessly for justice.
This was part of Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba’s Christmas message.
The archbishop of Cape Town called out government for the corruption that entrenches poverty and suffering for so many South Africans.
Midnight Mass – Christmas Eve
24th December 2025
Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba
Archbishop of Cape Town
Isaiah 62: 6-12; Psalm 97; Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2: 8-20
May I speak in the name of God who is Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. Amen.
What a joy it is to be with you once again on this, my 18th Christmas as your Bishop and Archbishop, for the beautiful act of worship which you invite Cape Town to join year after year. On this most holy of nights, welcome to you all, whether you are here in the Cathedral or worshipping with us online. I wish each and every one of you a blessed, safe and happy Christmas!
Thank you Moruti Terry, here for the first time in your new capacity as Dean, and to our new Sub-Dean, Chesnay, and all those, staff and members of the congregation, who have worked so hard to prepare your programme for Christmas, from the Verger to the Organist and Director of Music, to the Lay Ministers, the choir, the Church Wardens, Council members and sides-persons. On this holy night, on behalf of the Cathedral, the Diocese and the Province, I wish you a blessed and peaceful Christmas.
In that masterful opening line of the Christmas story, Luke manages in a few words to capture the heart, the very mystery of God coming among us. “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that a census should be taken of the Roman world…. And Quirinius was Governor of Syria.” From the outset, Luke affirms that the first Christmas was an event rooted in history, his account naming the governors, the processes of government and the political strategy at work: the operation of a census, the journeys it involved, and how it incorporated the whole Roman world; details that underline the essential truth represented by the Incarnation – that God came not to avoid history but to enter into it. Even more importantly, God enters the world as it is, and not as we would like it to be. As the South African theologian John de Gruchy reminds those of us who aspire to live a life shaped by Jesus, the “Christian faith is always lived within history and never above it.”
The Christmas story places God amongst human systems, entering a world and a context of empire, of taxation, of poverty, of displacement and of uncertainty. The message is clear: in the Incarnation, God made God’s dwelling amongst the ordinary people of that time and place, people whose lives were controlled and dictated by secular, worldly systems and forces. The powerful cry of “Emmanuel”, “God with us”, signalling that God has come to share our humanity, echoes across all humankind. The Incarnation is thus not an escape from reality but God’s decisive intervention in it.
In Jesus Christ, God came not only to be with the privileged, the influential or the rich. No, Jesus was born among those made vulnerable by forces beyond their control. God came to be with the marginalised and the displaced, with those millions of refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers who flee poverty and war, with the victims of gender-based violence, with those whose lives are disrupted by changing climate systems, with those for whom our economic systems make it impossible to move out of poverty.
For us in South Africa, who have suffered a long colonial history, apartheid, forced removals and enforced poverty, the implications of this Christmas message resonate deeply. Our 350-year history continues to cast a long shadow over us, meaning that despite our best efforts over the past 30 years, we continue to live with its legacy. And the nepotism, the self-dealing, the corruption and the theft from the poor which has now replaced apartheid in too many areas of governance, have extended the suffering of the past into the present.
Not only has it extended our suffering; it is threatening our democracy. Surveys by the leading African pollster, Afrobarometer, over many years show that Africans across the continent favour democracy above any other system as the form of government they want. But the degree of their support for it depends on whether it works for them, in other words, whether they see that democratic governance is improving their lives.
In our own country, Afrobarometer’s most recent survey of public opinion shows that that seven out of every 10 South Africans are dissatisfied with the way democracy works for them. Unsurprisingly, we see unemployment as our biggest problem, followed by crime, insecurity, a lack of reliable running water, failing infrastructure and corruption. The result is that, as the academic and commentator Imraan Buccus points out, “despair now defines much of South African life”. Just one of the consequences of this is that gambling has, to use his words “become a form of economic self-medication, a desperate search for luck in a society that offers no opportunity.” Recently I was shocked to learn from a prominent businessman that online betting – easily available to anyone with access to the internet – now contributes to 60 percent of the 1,5 trillion rand gambling industry, trapping millions of people in a cycle of problem gambling.
Disillusionment with government is undermining the confidence of South Africans in democracy. Very disturbingly, the Afrobarometer survey found that support for an army takeover of our government has surged in just the last three years, from just over a quarter of respondents in 2022 to nearly half, or 49 percent, in 2025. Moreover the survey shows that although support for democracy has grown a little in the latter years of the Ramaphosa administration, more respondents support military rule than the numbers who reject it.1 This revelation comes after a previous Afrobarometer survey conducted four years ago reported that two-thirds of South Africans would be willing to sacrifice regular elections if a non-elected government could impose law and order and deliver houses and jobs.
We have seen this phenomenon of support for military rule in other parts of our continent over the last 60 years. But seizures of power by armies are not an answer to our problems. In other African countries, people have often taken to the streets to welcome military coups, only to become disillusioned when they find out that colonels and generals are no more capable than politicians of improving their lives. And only then do they realise they have no way of removing the army from power.
The crisis of confidence in democracy which we face is not only one for South Africa. Nor is it only one for Africa, nor only for the Global South. It is a world-wide crisis. When we look at the industrialised countries of Europe and North America, we see that many men and women in the world’s most powerful and prosperous economies are just as much the victims of the greed of self-serving elites who wield economic and political power for their own benefit as the poor in the South. The devastating consequences of inequality and the hoarding of power and resources for the benefit of a few have given rise to extreme right-wing parties and populist oligarchies, supported by those who stand on the margins, watching elites prospering while their standard of living is eroded. As I remarked in an address in Rome recently, as a result we are seeing people in many countries, both rich and poor, turning to political solutions reflecting economic chauvinism, xenophobic nationalism, woven in with resurgent racism and even the stirrings of a new kind of fascism. We see our faith perverted and transformed into a narrow Christian nationalism which seeks to demonise “the other”. Like a cancer, economic inequality is metastasising across the world.
Against this backdrop, the Christmas story tells us of a faith which was brought to and grew among powerless and marginalised people, to people born into displacement, overcrowding and exclusion, echoing the story of marginal people everywhere. Christmas is fundamentally the story of God’s fundamental option for the poor and of our solidarity with those who preach peace on earth and goodwill among all people. It is also a story of what Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the “little people” of history, the “so-called ordinary people”, people who were not noticed by political and religious leaders but who brought fundamental change to the societies in which they lived.
The Christmas story asserts that change comes from the margins, from the testimony of the poor and from within their struggles for justice, from people on the ground. Across the globe today, this is borne out powerfully. On the ground, people on the streets and in grassroots organisations are those whose voices and energy keep critical issues in the public domain. Like those who witnessed the original Christmas, they may not own much in terms of financial resources, but they find creative ways to proclaim the truth, to offer people hope, to share alternative ways of seeing things and doing things. Throughout history that is so often what has made the difference, and if we take it to heart, it can make the difference we need in South Africa today.
To share the good news of Christmas, to offer hope in times of despair and in places where peace on earth is drowned out by the din of war and the angry sounds of weapons, is something each one of us can do. For it does not depend on the resources or talents we have, or whether we are socially accepted by the privileged and the powerful. It simply depends of our availability to stand up for the truth, and to work relentlessly for justice.
This is the stuff of Christmas, to announce that a different world is possible, waiting to be born, conceived in the hearts of ordinary people, announced by the excluded, linked in the angels’ song to a new possibility for peace and expressed in the vulnerability of a manger. As midwives of the future, we have as believers to hold in our hearts that tension of what is being birthed and a new age of peace.
It is in the area of “holding the tension” that Luke understands Mary. Many theologians have written that in this pivotal hour, Mary is the sign of attentiveness and of holding these things in her heart. The theologian Denise Ackermann has written of “a spirituality of waiting that resists despair while refusing false security.” In her attentiveness, Mary embodies a faith capable of holding the tension between promise and fulfillment, between hope and hardship, between joy and vulnerability. Luke speaks to how she pondered these tensions, allowing them to prepare for the threshold moments that still lay in the future, of the wedding at Cana – where Jesus performed his first miracle at his mother’s bidding – and of the threshold moments of the Cross, and of Pentecost.
The same is asked of us as was asked of Mary – to be attentive to what is happening around us, to the way history beckons us and prepares for what the future demands. We are told that after witnessing the advent of the Christ child, the magi, the angels and the shepherds all returned to where they had come from. As told in the words about the magi, they each went home a different way, different people filled with different perspectives and illuminated with new hope for all our tomorrows.
May we too go home this Christmas a different people because we too have stayed a moment at the manger. God bless each one of you, and again, a happy, a blessed and a peaceful Christmas to you all. Amen.
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A Tribute to a Lamplighter: Finding Hope and Comfort in Grief
FUNERAL OF THE Revd Canon Dr MONGEZI GUMA
Holy Cross Anglican Church, Orlando West
ARCHBISHOP THABO MAKGOBA
14th NOVEMBER 2025
Readings: Wisdom 13:1-9; Psalm 23 ; Luke 17: 26 - 37
May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, our comforter and sustainer whom Canon Guma so dearly loved and faithfully served. Amen
Sisters and brothers in Christ; dear Mrs Nomawethu Guma, your children, your grandchildren, Canon Guma’s siblings and the entire Guma and Somhlahlo families and friends, dear colleagues and guests from far and near:
It is heart-rending that we are here today to offer our condolences to you for the passing of a highly valued and distinguished veteran of our church, a husband, a father, a grandfather, a brother, an uncle, a colleague and a friend.
When I received the news of Canon Mongezi's passing whilst away from home, I was deeply distressed, but at the same time moved in a special way. Distressed because like you, I always find it difficult to accept the loss of a loved one. But also moved because of the singularly prominent role that he played in our church Province of Southern Africa, in Botswana and in the United States, in both the church communities which he so dearly loved and in communities beyond the church. And, I have to say, I was also sad because even in his senior years, there was still more that he could offer the church and our nation.
International Meeting for Peace
Community of St Egidio, Rome
October 26th to 28th 2025
Forum-Africa: Land of the Young Generation
The Most Revd Archbishop Thabo Makgoba
“An Unequal World: What Alternatives?”
Firstly, I want to say how much I appreciate the invitation to join you, and to thank and congratulate the Sant’Egidio Community for your ministry of birthing and nurturing peace in our world.
Kwame Nkrumah, an elder statesman of the first wave of liberation in Africa, wrote in the early 1960’s, “The resources are there, it is up to us to marshal them in the service of our people.”
His words encapsulate the dilemma which we face particularly acutely in South Africa, where the Gini Coefficient, the World Bank index which measures income inequality, shows that we have the world's biggest gap between the rich and the poor. And the way in which our society works is not addressing the crisis this causes, because typically the sons and daughters of the wealthy enjoy a good education and employment, while the sons and daughters of the poor are caught in a self-perpetuating spiral of inadequate education, too few jobs and debilitating poverty.
Sadly, we have allowed wealth to mirror our vanity rather than be a window of opportunity. As someone once said, Africa’s young people, our greatest natural resource, often stand at the gates of opportunity, invited to look in but never invited to participate.
While the problem may be seen at its worst in South Africa, we are by no means unique. Across Africa, the dreams of our liberators, from Nkrumah to Nelson Mandela, have not been realised; in the words of Langston Hughes's poem, our dreams have been deferred, and our multiple social pathologies have ballooned.
We ignore the youth cohort at our peril. We are the youngest continent, with more than 60% of our people under 25 years old. In sub-Saharan Africa about 70% of our people are under 30 years of age. Estimates are that by 2035 more young Africans will enter the workforce each year than the rest of the world combined, with no guarantee there will actually be jobs for them.
The figures are frightening. The stark reality is that our large African population already constitutes a demographic burden, as it is called, with that demographic facing high unemployment, a mismatch of skills to jobs, a reliance on informal work and exclusion from economic decision-making.
This is a lethal combination. There is an old African proverb that haunts me in all of this dysfunction, which says “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down in order to feel its warmth.” This is a prospect we cannot afford even to contemplate. The young need to be embraced now with opportunity, with dignity and trust, and we must create equality of opportunity.
To marshal the resources of our countries in the service of our people, we need to break what economists call the “resource curse”, the paradox in which nations blessed with minerals, oil, and other commodities exploit them successfully but fail to spend the ensuing riches on development, meaning they remain poor in education, jobs and justice. As a theologian, I call this a “a failure of stewardship.” When wealth becomes concentrated, it stops being a blessing and becomes a form of bondage, holding back the young instead of setting them free. In Luke's Gospel (Lk: 12:48), Jesus says that from those who have been given much, much will be required. Africa has been given much, yet the question hangs over us: have we used the much to build up the next generation?
Our challenge is not only one for Africa; it is global. In 2016 I attended in Hong Kong an Ecumenical School on Governance, Economics and Management, where we looked at how we might distribute resources and income more equitably in a restructured global economy. My primary focus at the time was on the way in which the skewed allocation of resources affected the Global South. Now when we look at the Global North, it has become clear that we in the South are not the only victims of the current ordering of the global economy. We now realise that what Desmond Tutu used to call the “so-called ordinary people” – “so-called,” he said “because in my theology, nobody is ordinary, all are created in the image of God” – that average men and women in the world's most powerful and prosperous economies, are just as much as the victims of the greed of self-serving elites who wield economic and political power for their own benefit as the poor in the South.
The global financial crisis of 2008 gave us some warning of this, but it is especially since 2016 that the devastating consequences of inequality and the hoarding of power and resources for the benefit of a few have become apparent in economically developed nations as well. Populist oligarchies have risen to power in countries which we imagined were democracies – flawed democracies as they might have been, but democracies which aspired to reflect the views and the interests of all their people. Across the world, now including in Europe and the United States, we see the phenomenon of what we might call the “left-behinds” – those who stand on the margins, watching elites prospering while their standard of living is eroded. We see them turning toward political solutions reflecting economic chauvinism, xenophobic nationalism, woven in with resurgent racism and even the stirrings of a new kind of fascism. We see our faith perverted and transformed into a narrow Christian nationalism which seeks to demonize “the other”. Like a cancer, economic inequality is metastasising across the world.
As we look for alternatives, these developments create for us a new and critical challenge. We cannot only focus on fighting inequality within each developing country; we cannot only focus on how to fight inequality across the African continent; we cannot only focus on how to fight inequality between the developing and the industrialised worlds.
The devastating consequences of inequality within industrialised countries are already being seen in the drastic cuts in foreign aid and assistance to the developing world. We now need to operate within a new, holistic paradigm, which recognises that inequality within all nations, rich and poor, threatens the future of humankind.
Our crisis is not merely political or economic; it is spiritual. When wealth becomes detached from justice, it ceases to be a blessing and becomes a temptation. When power forgets compassion, it turns prosperity into oppression. Pope Francis spoke regularly about the economy that kills, an economy where profits are more important than people and where the young are treated as disposable.
The key questions we need to ask are not only for Africa, but for the world. How can our riches serve the common good? How can we ensure that the young inherit not debts and disillusionment but dignity and direction? We must transition from accumulation to allocation, from privilege to participation. This will not fall out of the sky, it has to be struggled for. We need to ensure that we use every pulpit and platform to instruct, to teach and to prioritise this quest for justice for the young. We need to educate for justice. We need to mobilise, call people out, demonstrate and initiate activism to grow awareness and signal our strength. We also have to act where there is leverage for change, in the places where decisions are made, where policy is considered and decided upon. This theory of change needs to be a part of our strategy to realise our dreams for the young, for a just economy and a world that deeply respects the other and repairs our planet.
Simply put, as people of faith – or at least as people of conscience who follow the Golden Rule – our calling is to reclaim the moral purpose of wealth, to put it back in service of the human purpose, and not the other way round.
God bless you. God bless Africa. God bless this community, and God bless the world.
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The Archbishop's letter to the laity of Cape Town in its newsletter, Good Hope:
Dear People of God,
It feels like yesterday that I last wrote to you! Since then, the Gaza ceasefire has come as a great relief – although we have already seen breaches. Please keep Gaza in your prayers as people return to their homes, many of which have been obliterated by bombing. It is easy to destroy, but much harder to rebuild, not only infrastructure but especially trust of one nation by another.
For me, both the Lord who made heaven and earth and Jesus, the Son God unites us with, agonised over the starving and killing of children in this war. The war industry which profitted off the drones and bunker buster bombs tested my soul and left me struggling for words to pray. We continue to wait upon the Lord, reassured by Martin Luther King Junior's words that although the arc of the moral universe is long, it does bend towards justice.
In London for meetings this month, one of the things I did was to spend some time in a Lambeth Palace boardroom with an artist who wanted to measure my face, my nose and my head for a portrait! It was good to be forced to be still, and also to pray for our worldwide Anglican community as we engage once again in robust debate about who we are and want to be.
I also met the team from the Anglican Communion Office which is preparing two webinars on the Lambeth Call on Reconciliation in November. The call, issued by the last Lambeth Conference of bishops, will enable Anglicans from around the world to share insights from their work in peace and reconciliation ministry. Anyone can register and take part. I invite you all to join, which you can do here >>
In London I also joined an annual meeting of the Mining and Faith Reflections Initiative, the dialogue I have been part of for the past 12 years in which faith leaders mainly from the Vatican and Methodist and Anglican churches engage mining communities on how they can best serve the common good.
Back to South Africa, and to Pietermaritzburg where I presided over the consecration of Bishop Amos Nkosi as the new Bishop Suffragan of Natal. I love these services, which are always inspiring and glorious, especially the music from all our Anglican traditions. Scroll down on our Provincial Facebook page for the congregation's rendition of the Nicene Creed!
Finally, home in Cape Town for the glorious dedication of our new church in Crossroads. During the 1970s and 1980s, when women living in defiance of the pass laws were expelled from their homes, church activists lay down in front of bulldozers to stop their homes from being destroyed. When they were made homeless, churches across the Diocese gave them refuge. Later, when the state fomented conflict within communities, the then Bishop Desmond Tutu flew to Cape Town to mediate between the “comrades” and the “witdoeke”. For many years the congregation worshipped in effect in a shack, which was once burned down during violence. When they regrouped, they called their church Eluvukweni (Resurrection) believing they would rise again. Thank you to all of you who helped them, and I urge others to donate during Advent via the Diocesan Office.
Now our communities have new challenges: gang violence and crime, and to follow up on the extensive coverage Good Hope gave to that struggle last month, I urge you to redouble your prayers and practical efforts to combat that scourge.
Elsewhere in this edition you will read about the latest Anglicans Ablaze – congratulations to Growing the Church for another successful celebration of our faith! Finally, our warm congratulations go to Bishop Sarah Mullally of London, who will be the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and in our own Diocese to the Ven Mcebisi Pinyana, who will be consecrated as Bishop of Grahamstown in Makhanda on November 22.
