WHY A VALLEY OF OLIVE TREES MATTERS FOR SOUTH AFRICA’S FUTURE.
By Deon Snyman.
If you follow the winding road into the Riebeek Valley early on a summer morning, you may miss one of the most important acts of public memory in South Africa today. It is not happening in Parliament, nor in a museum, but on a rural hill beside a modest interfaith chapel. Each December, people gather at Goedgedacht to plant olive trees—not as decoration, but as defiance.
This year’s gathering took place on Sunday, 7 December 2025, when families, activists, theologians, and community members once again came together to honour those who defied apartheid under the Christian Institute (CI).
What happens here is far more than ceremony.
It is an act of political recovery.
Dr Thami Gamedze (speaker), Fr Michael Lapsley and Dr Frank Chikane (speaker) at the Christian Institute Event.
A Grove Where Memory Refuses to Die
South Africa forgets too quickly. The apartheid state attempted not only to silence dissidents but to erase their names, their stories, their communities. At Goedgedacht, that erasure is being undone—tree by tree.
Three years ago, the idea felt fragile:
A grove of olive trees, one for each CI member or moral witness whose courage carried the struggle between 1963 and 1977.
On the day of the first gathering, portraits of Beyers and Ilse Naudé, Theo and Helen Kotzé, Rick Turner, June Chabaku, Christmas Tinto, Bennie Khoapa, Peter Randall, Anne Browne, and many others lined the chapel walls. Families who had not met in decades embraced. Activists long exiled from public conversation stood with quiet tears.
Someone whispered:
“We thought we were forgotten.”
Twenty-seven olive trees were planted that day.
Each tree stood for a story.
Each story for a wound.
Each wound, at last, was witnessed.
A Name Is a World—and South Africa Needs Its Names Back
To speak a name aloud is a political act.
Especially Steve Biko.
When Biko’s name is spoken at the grove, the crowd grows still. His legacy, intertwined with the Christian Institute through shared friendships, moral clarity, and State repression, reverberates across generations. His philosophy of Black Consciousness shaped the very defiance that the apartheid state feared most.
But the grove honours not only the well-known.
To speak the names of Tsankie “Ali” Modiakgotla, Des Adendorff, Trudy Thomas, Alex and Khosi Mbatha, or Bishop Patrick Matolengwe is equally an act of justice. Modiakgotla’s fragile, handwritten testimony of torture—kept alive only through family memory—was read beside his tree. Under another tree, a daughter touched the bark and said only:
“Finally.”
In a country drowning in amnesia, the grove answers with stubborn clarity:
Memory must be replanted.
Why Olive Trees and Not Statues?
At the 2025 gathering, Dr Thandi Gamedze—a scholar, educator, and poet at UWC’s Desmond Tutu Centre whose work explores how theology, culture, and justice intersect—offered a striking insight:
Statues tower above us: cold, fixed, dominating.
Olive trees root among us: fragile at first, then stubbornly alive.
In an era when statues are toppled, defended, weaponised, or ignored, olive trees offer a different politics of memory—one grounded in renewal, humility, and responsibility.
And, as Gamedze reminded the gathering, memory is not local.
From Sudan to Palestine to Cape Town’s own forced removals, our struggles echo each other.
When Memory Becomes Confrontation
The afternoon on 7 December 2025 was not a soft space.
Dr Frank Chikane—theologian, anti-apartheid activist, and former Director-General in the Presidency—delivered this year’s keynote with characteristic clarity. He warned that South Africa is again in danger: corruption, violence, inequality, and political decay threaten the moral foundations of democracy.
“It is not only remembrance,” Chikane said.
“It is instruction.”
His warning was followed by Mike van Graan, the acclaimed playwright and cultural leader whose body of work has shaped African theatre for decades. Reading from Samaritan, he confronted Gaza, empire, and the weaponisation of religion.
These were not comfortable speeches.
They were necessary ones.
A National Archive Growing in a Rural Chapel
Inside the Goedgedacht barn, the Christian Institute Justice Library is taking shape:
– Christine Crowley’s charcoal portraits
– Letters from Berlin, Auckland, Vienna, Johannesburg
– Biographies of activists detained, banned, exiled
– Stories of families who carried memory alone for decades
The SADOCC Centre in Vienna wrote:
“A well-deserved tribute to people of hope.”
This library is becoming the archive South Africa failed to build.
The Grove Refuses Religious Borders
Though rooted in the CI’s story, the grove refuses confinement to one faith tradition.
The CI included Christians, agnostics, Muslims, Jews, and secular radicals.
Future trees may honour Imam Abdullah Haron or Franz Auerbach, the Jewish educator who fled Nazi Germany and spent his life fighting for justice in South Africa.
This is not a grove of dogma.
It is a grove of courage.
Where Young People Learn the Names
Some of the most powerful moments each year are quiet ones:
A teenager reading every line of a portrait.
A girl from Riebeek West saying,
“I want to bring my class here.”
A grandson whispering,
“Now people know who she was.”
This is how a country heals—through inheritance, not instruction.
Horst Kleinschmidt’s Challenge to the Present
Former CI leader Horst Kleinschmidt, whose energy drives this project, warned that South Africa is again “skating on thin ice.” Unrest rises daily. Inequality is intolerable. And justice, once more, feels fragile.
Repression never succeeds, he reminded us—but nor does nostalgia.
Memory must become mobilisation.
Justice Must Be Replanted in Every Generation
At the centre of the grove stands a dedication:
Remember. Reflect. Honour. Learn. Act.
These are not gentle suggestions.
They are instructions—carved from the lives of those who stood for truth and bore scars for justice.
One day, long after today’s crises fade, a child will sit beneath these olive trees and ask:
“Who were these people?”
And the grove will answer.