N.C. State’s Department of International Studies and Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies co-sponsored a presentation Tuesday about the role Catholic activism played in Apartheid South Africa.

Guest speaker Catherine Higgs said she wanted to inform the audience of 30 students and faculty about how a small group of Catholic Sisters helped change the social landscape of a nation at ends.

Higgs, an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville said it became clear the South African government led a closed society when the victorious Afrikaner national party took control on its apartheid legislation in the 1948 general elections.

National party leaders said they believed the country was made up of four distinct racial groups:  white, black, colored and Indian. 

Further division came when the party recognized 13 racial federations. The division was fueled by several laws, passed in 1949 and 1950, clarifying the government’s views on interracial marriage and the mixing of races.

“Families were literally split apart by these laws,” Higgs said.

Higgs said she thought the Catholic Church in South Africa seemed complacent before the passing of the Second Vatican Council in 1965.

Higgs said she thought the church may have had some reservations about supporting a social justice cause that was not religiously-inspired.

“It was a still a male-dominated hierarchy within the church,” Higgs said.

From her research, Higgs said Catholicism was modernizing in the 1960s and 1970s.  This trend was especially noticeable when it came to the style of clothes priests and nuns were wearing.

Higgs showed old photographs of nuns dressed in the traditional “black surge” in her PowerPoint presentation.  She then contrasted those images with photographs of Nuns clad in summer dresses 20 years later.

Higgs said the Nuns in South Africa had embraced an image change.  They were Nuns no longer. They were Sisters.

Higgs said Sisters Immaculata Devine and Mary Bernard Ncube were among this select group of religious women.

“This type of transformation would not have occurred prior to the Second Vatican Council,” Higgs said.

Against the wishes of the government, they began to open schools to educate children of all backgrounds.

Higgs said the United States and South Africa faced very different situations in their own respective struggles against racial inequality.

The major difference was that the United States dealt with African Americans as a minority during the civil rights movement. 

“In South Africa, black African-Americans were being segregated despite the fact they were the majority of the population,” Higgs said.

According to Higgs, the Dutch and British descendents whose ancestors had originally colonized the region made up a small portion of the population and wanted to maintain a pure line.

The official reign of apartheid in South Africa ended with the 1994 general elections.

Adrienne Brooks, a senior in international studies and political science said she attended the event because of her “general love of history and being able to relate it to current affairs.”

Brooks said she was also interested in the presentation because she comes from a Catholic background and had taken a trip to South Africa.

Higgs said more information about the role of this select group of religious women will be available in the release of her new book called “Sisters for Justice: Religion and Political Transformation in Apartheid South Africa.”