South Africa's 'Black Christ' on display in Cape Town

Published: 2004-06-16

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (CNS) -- The National Gallery in Cape Town "is a fitting home" for South Africa's "Black Christ" painting, said a South African church official. The eight-foot-high oil painting, which spent four decades in exile in London before coming home after apartheid, is a symbol of South African resistance to apartheid rule, said Father Peter-John Pearson, who heads the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference's Parliamentary Liaison Office in Cape Town. "It is time the art establishment here recognized the significance of this early local expression of resistance art," he told Catholic News Service. The painting "has an air of resistance" and "inspires people to think more deeply about the link between struggle and faith," Father Pearson said. In 1962, Ronald Harrison, then 22, painted Christ on the cross in the likeness of Nobel Peace Prize laureate and African National Congress leader Chief Albert Luthuli.

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