Women of History: Dorothy Maubane

Dorothy Dipuo Maubane (1943–2004) was a barrier-breaking, accomplished businesswoman who became a Christian Science practitioner, teacher, and lecturer. Her spiritual activism helped people overcome political upheaval, violence, poverty, fear, anger, and grief. Where others saw violence, oppression, and injustice, she saw opportunities for establishing order, compassion, and justice—changing her own and others’ lives in profound ways.

She was born and raised in Pretoria, South Africa, in a time when by law Black South Africans did not enjoy the same rights and freedoms as whites. In 1948 the all-white National Party came to power and immediately set about formalizing new laws enforcing segregation between different races, as well as existing legal restrictions, in a system known as apartheid (Afrikaans for “apartness”).¹ Maubane was no stranger to the impact of the laws of apartheid. She said of her experience, “I suffered discrimination because of my skin color, my race, my sex, my religion, my inability to speak the language of the governing power, and what I felt was my being deliberately assessed as either not qualified or overqualified for a job.”² 

She found Christian Science through her husband, Moses Maubane, who was a new student of the religion when they were married. She was at first opposed to it, until she experienced a healing of her swollen ankle.³ Not long after that, she had a pivotal healing that set her on the path toward being a peacemaker. Praying about employment with the help of a practitioner, she felt led to mention that she hated Afrikaans, which she considered to be the language of the oppressor. The practitioner spoke to her “at great length about God and His government and my purpose in this spiritual government.” Soon after that, Maubane was hired for a job—only to learn that it was for an Afrikaans-speaking company. This turned out to be an important experience that helped her to see all people as God’s children, no matter their skin color, politics, or behavior, rather than as humans who could be capable of either great kindness or great cruelty: 

While working for this company I learned to see the Afrikaaner as a child of God, loved by Him like those of my own race. I exchanged hatred for love. I was then able to see good amongst the Afrikaaner people I became friends with. And I started speaking the language without prejudice.⁴ 

With that, she began her journey to become, in her words, a “spiritual activist,” praying to invoke God’s law, rather than human law, to displace anything that wasn’t right or just.⁵ 

In radio interviews Maubane explained that for her the most powerful and effective form of activism didn’t come from people marching together in solidarity, or staging protests or riots. Instead she saw real change as resulting from individual commitment to answering problems through prayer—not the “muscle of numbers.” She also described how, in the early 1980s, her family prayed about unjust land ownership laws, specifically for their own situation. This led them to be the first family in their area to receive an adequately sized plot of land. When others saw the practical footsteps that prayer led her family to take, they all began to follow suit—resulting in benefits for everyone.⁶

Maubane had a rich business career, including service as general secretary of the Black Consumer Union of South Africa and as vice president of the Women’s Black Chamber of Commerce and Industry.⁷ She was also a translator of children’s books. Sometimes she did translation work for The Mother Church in Boston (The First Church of Christ, Scientist). 

In 1989 Maubane entered the full-time practice of Christian Science, committing all her time to helping others to find healing through prayer.⁸ More than 20 years had passed since she was introduced to the religion. A year later she was elected to the Christian Science Board of Lectureship, and went on to give talks on healing throughout the world for many years.⁹ In 1994 she became a teacher of Christian Science, instructing others to be healers themselves.¹⁰ 

But even before she was listed in The Christian Science Journal as a practitioner, Maubane had been overcoming great challenges and helping others through prayer. 

For example, when she decided to receive Primary class instruction,¹¹ she asked that the course fee be waived—both she and her husband were out of work, and she had an infant to care for. But the teacher refused. “Instead,” she remembered in an article she wrote decades later, “he told me he would pray to help me prove that God provided everything I needed.”¹² This resulted in immediate blessings. First, her husband suddenly found work that paid weekly, and she made the tuition payments in two installments. All of the other logistical issues were resolved, which included finding methods to satisfy specific legal mandates concerning her presence in the city where the class took place. More importantly, as a result of this experience she found she was able to shed her own self-identification and labeling as “poor, disadvantaged, deprived.”¹³ “I no longer thought it acceptable to take charity without giving back anything in return,” she realized. “In this case, what I gave back was my trust, steadfastness, confidence, and time spent in spiritual study, all of which brought to light for me the impossibility of being cut off from God’s goodness.”¹⁴ And she was a generous giver, especially in this last regard. In a 2003 article for the Christian Science Sentinel, she described her spiritual study habits:

My daily prayers start each morning at 3:00 a.m.… But my prayers are not restricted just to those early morning times of quiet. During my busy schedule, I take moments of quiet contemplation of my morning prayer to gain inner peace, calm, and tranquility.¹⁵ 

Years after Maubane’s class instruction, when riots were common in her area, she and her family faced down a daunting threat that their home would be burned down—something not uncommon for successful Black families during this time. Black students were also frequently barred from attending school. The family prayed together and, even though their house was threatened, nothing happened, nor were their children prevented from attending school. How they prayed demonstrates Maubane’s spiritual activism. She explained that they prayed to free themselves of fear:

When fear in a country becomes extreme, people sometimes withdraw into themselves, becoming indifferent to the evil that confronts them…. Rather than be withdrawn into self, why not reverse the process, turn the fear inside out, and be drawn outward into greater expressions of love?

 

In my own country of South Africa, this is certainly the great need. Whether we are black or white, we can open up and extend a hand of friendship across the color line. Just because apartheid laws have separated people for decades, this doesn’t mean we can’t make friends and get to know one another. After all, don’t we all have one Father, even God? And doesn’t Christian Science show us that God only makes one kind of man—spiritual man? On this basis we can recognize and feel our brotherhood and sisterhood with all people, regardless of race or color.¹⁶ 

In another article where she recounted the same story, she emphasized a 1909 statement by Mary Baker Eddy: “… I do not regard this attack upon me as a trial, for when these things cease to bless they will cease to occur.”¹⁷ Maubane wrote:

People ask how we can live in the township where crime, lawlessness, and so forth, are so rife. But we always answer that it is there that we are needed most to contribute prayerfully for the good of mankind. The conditions prevailing in South Africa at the moment are conducive to spiritual growth, and we feel that it is not a coincidence that at this point in time we should be residing, as blacks, in this part of the world where there is so much trouble.¹⁸ 

Emerging from humble beginnings, Moses Maubane was a successful banker, and a rising star in the South African business community.¹⁹ As chief executive of the only Black bank in South Africa, he saw a need for the African Bank to become involved in corporate banking, where only whites had expertise.²⁰ So he prayed and was led to hire two white men to lead the bank in this new direction. However they defrauded the South African government for millions of rands and framed him for the crime. The family’s assets were frozen and then given over to the government.²¹ He was quickly exonerated, and those responsible were imprisoned. But he fell ill and passed away before he could see justice done. Maubane was left a grief-stricken widow, and initially had no financial assets, until they were eventually returned and her husband’s name was cleared. “I was thrust into a mental wilderness, and great fear engulfed me,” she wrote. “Grief, self-pity, depression, hurt, shock, and blame traumatized my thoughts and feelings.”²² On another occasion she remembered: “People thought I would either commit suicide or become alcoholic. But prayer carried me through the loss of this loved one, the loss of financial assets, friends, confidence, and respect.”²³ 

It was during this time of deep prayer and reliance on God that Maubane became a Christian Science practitioner and was soon afterward appointed to the Christian Science Board of Lectureship. An outpouring of love and generosity from friends, both Black and white, buoyed her and helped meet the family’s needs. Her children’s education was never interrupted.²⁴ 

As for the two Afrikaner men who had framed her husband, she felt that forgiveness was needed. This was not easy, but she sought to follow the teachings of Jesus about forgiveness.²⁵ Holding firm to the idea of loving all, regardless of color, she found peace.²⁶ 

In an unusual development, Maubane was invited to visit the two Afrikaner men in prison. Black people did not typically visit incarcerated white people. Her planned 30-minute stay extended to three hours—so long that the prison captain made her tea. And in that time she reassured the men of not only her own forgiveness but that of her whole family. ²⁷ When they were released after serving four years of their 14-year sentences, Maubane invited them to her home for a barbecue. The families became friends, and the men were always happy to come by and help her out with things around the house.²⁸ 

However, that was not the only time Maubane reached across the color line to extend an olive branch. In a 1996 Sentinel article, she wrote about another instance when she hired a young Afrikaner to install a home security system. She could have gone with a big-name company, but instead felt led by God to help this young man, despite his lack of experience. The first day on the job, he mentioned that he had just been released from the army, where he had been serving in Katlehong—a black township near Johannesburg. Maubane remarked, “But that is the place where atrocities of the worst kind were committed by the army against black people, even after the interim constitution was in place around 1993.”²⁹ He agreed. “I was quiet,” she remembered. “Here was a white Afrikaner connected to killing my own people under very cruel circumstances. I was struck by his honesty.”³⁰ 

She told him about her practice of Christian Science and explained, “If I don’t love people, I can’t heal them.”³¹ She shared with him that “Christ Jesus promised us ‘Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy’ (Matt. 5:7).… When we express, and recognize in others, these same qualities of love, mercy, meekness, honesty, we find it easier to forgive wrongs.”³² The young man said he had been having nightmares ever since his days in the army, but that after talking with her, he confessed to his family and to a priest all the things he had done. With that, the nightmares ended, and the young man was transformed. Maubane assessed what she felt had happened:

I believe that this man was rehabilitated by the power of the truth of God and man that we shared. I had first to see the truth for myself, in order to be able to show him my own sense of freedom, which so touched his consciousness that he, too, was healed. He then faced his sins, seeking forgiveness and reconciliation with his family and with God. I had offered him love in action. He had responded to its healing touch, and it freed him.³³ 

Maubane wrote emphatically about her gratitude for the very tangible benefits she attributed to her forgiveness of and love for others: 

Forgiveness, truth, and reconciliation represent a commitment to a way of life commissioned by God. This commitment to living in unity opened up great freedom for me and my own family. For the first time in my life, I had not only the right to vote, but also the right to choose where I would live. My prayer was for a home that would provide security, happiness, neighborliness, and beauty. And God answered me by giving me such a home in the heart of Pretoria. My neighborhood is 99 percent Afrikaner, and the rest is English and other. At the moment mine is the only black family. What a choice God gave me! To find security, love, happiness, beauty, neighborliness, unity, and togetherness with those who might be considered my previous oppressors! Yet I have been showered with such love and kindness! We listen to each other more and more and marvel at the similarities of our backgrounds, experiences, and spiritual beliefs. We find we have more things in common than are different.³⁴ 

This spiritual activism applied to more than just situations in her own sphere. She was an active participant in world events, including youth meetings held in 1990³⁵ and a women’s peace conference in 2002.³⁶ Her articles and interviews in the Christian Science periodicals are peppered with references to important world events, such as the end of South African apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, political unrest in Northern Ireland, struggles in the former Soviet Union, Kosovo’s armed conflict in the late 1990s, and peace in the Middle East. 

In the early 1990s, Maubane gave a talk in East Jerusalem. An advisor of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat had been told to attend the talk. At the end he immediately challenged her. She remembered, “The man wanted to know what authority I had to speak about forgiveness when Palestinians had to walk every day past their homes that they had been forced out of many years ago.” He asked her, “How can you forgive the Israelis occupying your home when you left with only the clothes you were wearing?”³⁷ She briefly recounted to him her own experiences of being forcibly removed from her home and having her citizenship revoked because of her ethnicity. Then she turned to a more spiritual foundation for her claims, explaining the need to let go of anger, fear, hatred, and revenge.³⁸ She said Arafat’s advisor listened to her and eventually came to see that, in her words, “because I had forgiven, I had the right to speak about forgiveness and love and to encourage these attributes among both the Palestinians and Jewish people who had attended the talk.” And she concluded, “…I truly feel that it’s no mere coincidence that, a few months later, Arafat’s camp was willing to negotiate with Israel in America.”³⁹ 

Dorothy Maubane was driven by a deep sense of justice, forgiveness, and love for God and humanity, based in her practice of Christian Science. In a 2001 article, she wrote this: 

Generally speaking, one receives in proportion to the measure one gives. If you give with judgment and limitation, your life is likely to be judgmental and limited. Such miserly giving courts poverty. The remedy is to give not from your surplus, but according to what is right before God.⁴⁰ 

That describes what she did—and how she lived a rich and fulfilling life that blessed countless others.

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