During apartheid, he was one of the country's most prominent black clergymen and preached anti-apartheid liberation theology from his diocese in Venda and Transvaal.
[2][4] Farisani was a "brilliant" student and enrolled in theological college to prepare for ordainment as a minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
[5] By then, Farisani was a prominent activist in the burgeoning Black Consciousness movement and frequently travelled the country conducting a mixture of political mobilisation and Christian evangelism.
[9][10][11] According to the Washington Post and Africa Report, he was considered a frontrunner to succeed Beyers Naudé as secretary general of the South African Council of Churches.
[13][14] On the first occasion in March 1977, he was arrested and detained for two days in Howick, Natal on suspicion of fomenting the 1976 Soweto Uprising and helping activists flee the country into exile.
[9] His third detention began in November 1981, when he and nineteen others (including three other clergymen) were arrested in connection with the bombing of a Sibasa police station in October of that year.
[9][16] Tshifhiwa Muofhe, a friend of Farisani who had been arrested with him, died in detention;[16] an inquest in July 1982 determined that he had been tortured to death by policemen.
[7][9] In 1986, at the request of Amnesty International, he travelled to Europe and the United States to testify about his torture, telling several audiences, including an American congressional subcommittee, that he had been beaten unconscious and given electric shocks by the Venda security police.
[4][10] In February, the apartheid government declared him a "prohibited immigrant", a designation which effectively confined him to the Venda bantustan, obliging him to apply for a visa if he wished to cross into white South Africa.
[27] He denied rumours that he had been pushed out to free up the seat for a younger ANC politician, saying that he had resigned voluntarily to devote more time to his ministerial duties.