Black to Head S. Africa Church Group

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — The Rev. Frank Chikane, a 36-year-old black clergyman from Soweto who once was tried for treason and acquitted, will head the influential South African Council of Churches, an umbrella organization for the country’s English-speaking denominations that has been at the cutting edge of anti-apartheid activism.

On July 1 he will replace the Rev. C. F. Beyers Naude, the 62-year-old rebel Dutch Reformed pastor who shocked his fellow Afrikaners in 1963 when he left his congregation to head the now-banned anti-apartheid Christian Institute and a month later resigned from the secret Afrikaner society, the Broederbond, rather than abandon his opposition to racial segregation.

Chikane, general secretary of the Institute of Contextual Theology and a member of the Apostolic Faith Mission, is a former black consciousness follower of Steve Biko, who died in prison in 1977 after allegedly being tortured.