Trevor Huddleston:
Makhalipile—The Dauntless One

I meet Archbishop Trevor Huddleston at Bishopscourt during his first visit to South Africa since being recalled to England by his Church in 1956. The interview ends with an ageing Huddleston, cane in hand and purple vestock, nostalgically reflecting on the portraits of the former Archbishops of Cape Town hanging in the drawingroom.

Among the portraits is one of Geoffrey Clayton, Archbishop of Cape Town from 1949 to 1957. "I had my differences with that old man," he observes, pointing upward over his shoulder.

The Church's engagement in the fight against apartheid is almost synonymous with the life and work of Trevor Huddleston. Often referred to with a measure of pride by Christians wanting to promote the image of the Church as an agent of struggle, the image is both institutionally strained and yet theologically correct.

Huddleston ascended the rungs of the ecclesial ladder to become Archbishop of the Indian Ocean, which located him in Mauritius. "Nothing humble about the Church," quips Huddleston. "Like Britannia, it aspires to rule the waves!" Yet, despite his clerical status, Huddleston still regards himself as standing outside the Church establishment. "I am somewhat strangely Anglican; I actually hate the establishment of the Church with a passion. . . My theology at the same time tells me that what I stand for is what the Church is supposed to be." Years earlier, at the height of the resistance to the forced removals in Sophiatown, he observed: "The hardest thing (in life) is . . . to stand by the principle to the end—and having done all, to stand." Reminded of these words which he penned in Naught for Your Comfort twenty-five years earlier, he smiles. "I now have a stick but I am still standing. There were times when it seemed as though that was all that was possible for anyone to do."

Perhaps the most prominent member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement anywhere in the world, Huddleston of course did more than 'stand'. He acted. He did so with determination and expectation, in the belief that obstacles are there to be overcome. "I have always maintained that apartheid would be dead long before me. I am now very near the end of my life, so the South African government, the ANC and everyone else concerned better get on with it so that my prophecy can be fulfilled. All I need is another two or three years. If the Almighty denies me this time I shall certainly have a word to say to Him." He smiles: "I still find it difficult not to think of God as a 'Him'. I shall have to work at it."

Learning to Love and to Hate

Huddleston speaks, with deep affection, of the relationships he forged with the people of Sophiatown during the seven years in which he ministered there:

In addition to my responsibilities as a priest, I was expected to trace husbands, wives, brothers, sisters and other family members who were arrested because of violations of the pass laws and other pieces of apartheid legislation. Many were, in turn, caught up in petty crime, gangsterism and alcoholism. My mission was to rescue people, knowing that each one of them is a child of God—filled with enduring vitality and infinite gifts. The gospel is about directing and sometimes redirecting these resources in a creative and responsible manner.

I was awakened to the plight of black people in South Africa. They lived with danger every hour of the day and every day of the week. I came to recognise apartheid as an intolerable evil. I saw it as a crime against humanity, an evil, a demonic power which violated the image of God in people. In this sense it is a blasphemy, needing to be eradicated at almost any cost.

My time in Sophiatown taught me what it meant to love and to hate. The problem is that some Christians seem to think that in order to be spiritual they need to eliminate passion from their lives. People need to know what it is to love and to hate, to show pity and to weep, to laugh and to triumph. The tragedy is that by withdrawing from the rough and tumble of life where passion flows, the Church has been unable to teach its followers to be passionately human.

The people of Sophiatown called him Makhalipile, which means the dauntless one. Fearless in his stand against the wrath of the state, his willingness to risk himself in parts of Sophiatown where few felt entirely safe won the respect of virtually everyone. "Father Huddleston walked alone at all hours of the night where few of us were prepared to go," Nelson Mandela told me when I spoke with him about Sophiatown. "His (Huddleston's) fearlessness won him the support of everyone. No one, neither gangster, tsotsi nor pick-pocket would touch him. Their respect for him was such that they would not have tried—and if they did it could have cost them their lives. His enormous courage gave him a quality that commanded the respect of the place."

Was Huddleston a 'political priest'? "Yes, I suppose I was in the sense that soon after my arrival in South Africa I came to realise the extent to which institutionalised racism or apartheid is incompatible with the gospel. My calling was, however, pastoral. My commitment was to care for the souls and lives of my people. The fact that this placed me at loggerheads with the government said as much about their system as the gospel I preached."

The fact that the institutional Church was reluctant to provide him with the kind of support he had hoped for, elicited his wrath and despair at times. This led to open clashes between him and other clergy; not least with Archbishop Geoffrey Clayton, who regarded Huddleston's views and actions, especially in relation to the Bantu Education Act, as excessive. Huddleston's views have not changed.

I am still convinced that the Bantu Education Act was the most iniquitous of all apartheid laws. It sought systematically to destroy the potential and therefore the image of God in innocent children. I still believe that if only the Churches had dug their heels in and spoken with a single voice the horrors of Bantu Education could have been curtailed. Instead, there was a whispering within the Church against those of us who opposed the bill. This convinced the authorities that the Church would capitulate. They were right.

For him the witness of the Church sank to an all time low when a banning order, under the Suppression of Communism Act, was served on Oliver Tambo, a graduate of St Peter's College and a faithful worshipper at the Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown. "The Church's silence, indifference and submission were deafening," recalls Huddleston. His words, published in the Observer under the rubric "The Church Sleeps On", have haunted the Church ever since. In the article he quoted G. K. Chesterton's "The Ballad of the White Horse":

I tell you naught for your comfort
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher

"The Church sleeps on," he wrote. "The Church sleeps on—though it occasionally talks in its sleep and expects (or does it?) the government to listen." Huddleston recalls that Clayton was very angry. "He disapproved of my outspokenness, believing that my antics were making white South Africans ever more intransigent."

Probing the character of the imperious Archbishop and his relationship with this troublesome priest, Alan Paton suggests that Clayton did not really trust anyone's wisdom except his own. The Church was for him the creation of Christ, and he would have preferred Huddleston to limit his criticisms to people who failed to live up to his expectations. "In one particular sense," Paton explains, "Clayton

was the Church." He took Huddleston's criticisms personally. Distrust eventually became incompatibility. "What Clayton thought of the young prior," writes Paton, "apart from the recognition of his energy and devotion, is one of the secrets of the grave. It is improbable that he would have taken him as a holiday companion. As Huddleston became more and more of a public figure, and more and more the subject of public controversy, Clayton began to withdraw from him."^[1]

Recalling those days, Huddleston states: "The Church which I was involved in at the time quite frankly lacked passion. It was too cautious, too discreet and too moderate." Correcting himself, he puts his case differently: "It was the leadership of the Church, which was invariably removed from the squalor of black township suffering and rural starvation, that was too cautious, too uninvolved and too passive." Asked how, given his convictions, he managed to survive and even prosper within the leadership circles of the Church, he responds: "By prayer. By clinging to a vision of what the New Testament requires the Church to be. By mixing with the poor who in their suffering instinctively understand the message of the poor man Jesus. If, on the other hand, I were to have taken the social reality of the institutional Church too seriously, I would have become a total cynic."

Huddleston is visiting Bishopscourt for the first time in more than thirty years. What is his view of the Church today? "Oh, things have changed. During my time in Sophiatown no-one had heard of liberation theology. The Church hierarchy was white. The voice of Africans was scarcely heard within the Church. So, while the Church is still not what it is required to be, neither is it what it once was . . . Desmond (Tutu), Frank Chikane and others have done a great deal to sensitise the Church to the contextual demands of the gospel."

Convinced that it is important to take sides in the struggle for a democratic South Africa, he stresses the need for the Church to learn again what it means to love the poor and to hate material greed. "The Church is simply too moderate and lukewarm. There is not enough fire in the belly."

Our conversation turns to the theological legitimacy of armed struggle.

The Church has never had too many problems with armed struggle. Just War theology is a tried and tested part of our tradition. Christians have through the centuries gone to war against the aggressor. Our churches are overflowing with monuments and flags mourning the death of soldiers and celebrating military victory. . . As far as I am concerned there is more or less an open and shut case for interpreting the eventual resort to armed struggle by the ANC as an act of just war or rebellion. . . There is nothing wrong with pacifism. My problem is those who condemn the oppressed masses who rise in rebellion, while condoning the violence of the system by their silence. The irony is that many of those who have shouted loudest against Umkhonto we Sizwe, have also opposed economic sanctions and other nonviolent attempts to bring the tyrant to book. . . Christians are obliged to condemn defensive violence and armed struggle as a last resort against the oppressor less harshly than they condemn indifference to those who suffer; if only because the latter can never be an expression of love.

A Socialist and a Christian

Born into a privileged and religious home in Bedford, England in 1913, his education at Christ Church, Oxford coincided with the great depression of the 1930s. "It was here, from my position of privilege, that I observed the marches of people in and around Oxford demanding food." Attending the Anglo-Catholic Summer School of Sociology where he was required to wrestle intellectually with the relationship between theology and socialism, he became convinced that the New Testament story of Jesus and the fundamental principles of socialism were somehow related. "The School was thoroughly Anglo-Catholic in its ethos, while totally committed to social issues in the wider sense." Attracting a range of distinguished scholars, the school was for Huddleston "the socialist womb that gave me birth". Here he met the famous communist priest Conrad Noel who "hauled up the Red flag every All Saints' Day," recalls Huddleston. A devout high Anglo-Catholic churchman, Noel was firmly committed to the working-class movement. He introduced Huddleston to the writings of Marx and Engels, encouraged him to read the fathers of the Church and taught him to inwardly digest the Christian socialism of Charles Gore (a founder member of the Community of the Resurrection which Huddleston would later join). "I was like a babe in the woods, required to make sense of complex economic and political theory on the one hand and erudite Christian doctrine on the other. . . Conrad

Noel helped me put the two together. For me, Christianity and socialism have ever since gone together—forming a unity which makes sense in a manner that does not make sense when considered apart. Socialism provides an economic programme, the gospel empowers, and together they constitute a vision. I am convinced that to be a Christian is to be a socialist, and I like to tell my socialist friends it will do their souls good to read the New Testament story of Jesus." In 1939 Huddleston entered the Community of the Resurrection. It was here that he discovered a disciplined spirituality that has remained essential to him. "It is the engine that drives my life."

Spirituality

In an essay entitled "Huddleston: A Sign", Nadine Gordimer tells of a photograph which hangs above her work desk. The photograph was taken by David Goldblatt at a Newclare squatter camp in Johannesburg in 1952:

It is a night scene, lit only by a tin brazier. The light from lozenges of incandestine coal brings forward out of the dark a pair of gaunt, tightly-clasped hands, the long fingers tautly interlaced, making a great double fist. They are the hands of a white man. Above them there is darkness again, until the furthermost reach of light leaps on the bright white clerical collar, and, more softly, brings from oblivion the three-quarter face. There is a pointed ear standing alertly away from the head and lean jaw, and the tendon from behind the ear down the neck is prominent and tense. The ear is cocked intently and the eyes are concentrated.

The man is the young Father Huddleston. He is listening to and looking at someone you can't make out. . . But the man, the black man, is there; he is there in the extraordinary, still, self-excluding attention of the young priest. . .

I have no religious faith, but when I look at that photograph of a profoundly religious man, I see godliness in a way I can understand deeply, I see a man in whom prayer functions, in Simone Weil's definition as a special form of intelligent concentration.^[2]

A deeply devotional person—almost mystical at times, Huddleston's

spirituality is directly related to his engagement in life. "For me not to pray is to take life less than seriously. It is to be superficial and shallow. In prayer and devotion I concentrate my mind on the problem before me. In so doing I seek to discern the presence of God and understand the will of God in relation to my engagement in life. To neglect prayer is for me irresponsible; it is to cut myself off from that energy which enables me to engage life. Prayer is the pith and marrow of my existence." In accordance with his vows, Huddleston celebrates the Eucharist daily, meditates and prays four times a day—in the morning, at midday, in the early evening and before retiring for the night. "Although not legalistic regarding specific times, I have not often failed to honour this discipline. I feel totally ill at ease if I neglect my devotions."

Doctrinally I am a fairly conventional Anglo-Catholic. I regard the doctrines of creation and the incarnation as central to all that I believe. In essence I believe this is God's world. The more I think about it, the more am I convinced that there are natural and moral principles that hold the world and humankind together. Either we learn to conform to these principles, which in sum require us to live in mutual respect and concern for one another and the natural environment, or we will destroy one another and the world in which we live. The choice is ours. Through the incarnation God has, in turn, endowed all of humankind with divine dignity and infinite value. This means that everyone—however wretched, despised or rejected is of infinite value. This is the marvellous contribution which religion makes to the human rights struggle. It is to boldly declare, that any attempt to marginalise people, reducing them to an underclass status or regarding them as expendable in the interest of some or other ultimate cause, whether Verwoerd's apartheid or Stalin's brand of state socialism, is tantamount to blasphemy. To subordinate people is to subordinate God.

In brief, Huddleston's spirituality is a people-oriented spirituality. It emerges out of his understanding of the ministry of Jesus, which focuses his attention on people. "It's all very simple really. My spirituality is grounded in the New Testament teaching which tells us that it is not possible to love God without loving people, and the example of Jesus shows us that we must begin by loving those who are most in need of love and human dignity. Prayer is a meditation on the meaning of love and what it requires of each of us in a given situation. It is to empower us to go and do what needs to be done. It is also to receive forgiveness and to try again when we fail to do the loving thing."

Huddleston is slightly ambivalent about institutional worship. He regards formal worship and the liturgy of the Church as an important ingredient of his spiritual life. "I cannot see how people can live without the liturgy," he argues. "Yet even after I became an archbishop I was unable to regard this as the sum total of fulfilling my vocation. There is more to the Christian life than 'going to church'. If worship does not drive us into the world to heal the sick and liberate the oppressed it is sheer escapism. The Church is called to be an instrument of God's creative and redemptive work in the world. If it ceases to be this, becoming preoccupied with doctrine, Church order and the niceties of worship alone then, as Father Michael Scott (a fellow priest, declared a prohibited immigrant in 1950) used to like to remind us, 'the salt would have lost its savour and be fit only for the dung heap'."

From Mirfield to Sophiatown

Huddleston has perhaps always had a bent in favour of the working-class and the poor—taking on himself a lifestyle of simplicity and poverty. "Like Jeremiah, this is more or less how I came out of my mother's womb."

During his university vacations, while at Oxford, he worked with the hop-pickers in Kent. He spent time with the under-castes of Hindu society in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and, after ordination to the priesthood in 1937, he worked as a curate in the working-class area of Swindon in Kent. Here he met and "immensely liked the railwaymen of England". In 1939 he joined the Community of the Resurrection, with the mother house being moved from Pusey in Oxford to Mirfield in the industrial North of England, in order to be in closer proximity to the poor. Founded to reproduce the life of the early Church as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, it required the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. "To talk of these vows in terms of 'calling' and 'vocation' misses two very important ingredients of what they entail. The one is freedom . The freedom to take hold of life and do something about it. It is to seize the moment. The other is perseverance . It is to persevere in the work of living and not give up. It is to refuse to either grow complacent or to capitulate before the enormity of the task before one. It is to hang in there."

In 1943 Robert Raynes arrived as the new superior of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield, having served for several years in Sophiatown. One of his first tasks was to appoint Huddleston to his former parish. "It was wartime you know. The convoy in which I was

travelling was bombed off Portugal. All very exciting!" Arriving at his parish located in an exposed and exploited black township outside of Johannesburg, Huddleston saw within it something which, "only those who knew and understood its complexity could ever understand, let alone love". Speaking of the human suffering involved in the destruction of Sophiatown, he continues: "It was torn to the ground and its people resettled in what is today Soweto, to make way for the white suburb of Triomf (Afrikaans for Triumph)—that disgusting expression of satisfaction at having destroyed the homes of African people. I recall reciting to myself a line from one of Robert Brooke's poems: 'Something which cannot be built again so easily or so fair'."

Huddleston knew the dark side of Sophiatown. "It was a place where human suffering, iniquity and gangsterism abounded." Thinking for a while, he continues:

You need to understand, for me there was a certain ecstasy in the agony of Sophiatown. I loved that place more than any other in my life. When Sophiatown was obliterated South Africa lost more than a place, it lost an idea. Sophiatown was a remarkable community of people who amidst the chaos of suffering thrust on them by racism and greed, had learned what it meant to triumph over the most adverse odds. Given the freedom, the resources and the opportunity, Sophiatown could have built on the goodwill and creativity that characterised so many of its people, to make a lasting contribution to a better South Africa. By destroying Sophiatown the sense of community which was its characterising mark was destroyed. People's initiative was killed and their hopes shattered. As a consequence social problems multiplied, while the wisdom and hidden beauty of the place was undermined. What held Sophiatown together was the belief that people, however poor and exploited they may be, have the right to live where they like, to build themselves a home, to be themselves and to sustain one another. Take that away and you have social chaos. . . Think of the musicians, poets, artists, writers and the like that came out of Sophiatown. In killing that place the government killed a certain creativity, an African idea of what it means to be human. . . Yet, thank God, such ideas can never be totally extinguished. Such ideas need to be raised from the ashes of the many Sophiatowns of this country, because these are the ideas that we may yet need to put the country back together again.

Huddleston's ministry in Sophiatown ended in 1956, a year after he was given the Isitwalandwe award (the ANC's highest honour) at the Congress of the People—the only white person ever to have received

this distinction. The reason his Church recalled him has never been clear. Speculation abounded and some still wonder exactly who was behind the decision. "All I wish to say is that this decision was the most demanding test of my vow of obedience I have ever been asked to face," Huddleston observes as he looks back on those tumultuous days. The government was delighted to see him go. The people of Sophiatown, mourned his departure. The Bishop of Johannesburg, Ambrose Reeves (who was himself expelled in 1960 for his role in exposing the Sharpeville massacre) and a small group of priests and friends, including parishioners who could get time off work, were at the airport to bid him farewell. "I stood at the entrance to the plane and waved my farewell. I thought my very reason for existence was being taken from me. . . I had come to South Africa and in a short while the cause of the victims of apartheid had become the all consuming passion of my life. 'Was there anything else worth living for?' I asked myself."

Huddleston personifies the outrage which every decent human being ought to experience when confronted with the realities of apartheid. The tragedy is that too many whites have protected themselves from this reality, while others regard it as beyond their dignity to act with too much outrage.

A New Task

Huddleston, the dauntless one, soon found there was every reason to exist. The opening scene of this new phase of his life was the publication of Naught for Your Comfort shortly after his return to Britain. It was a desperate and enduring cry to the world to heed the extent of the apartheid monster; a book that today still reads as one of the most moving personal testimonies to the iniquities that marked a period of South African history that must never be forgotten. Together with Julius Nyerere, Huddleston was the main speaker at the launch of the Boycott Movement (later to be known as the Anti-Apartheid Movement) within months of his return. He threw himself into the work of the movement. Almost forty years later, he looks back, observing: "I had the honour of being the first to propose a cultural boycott, cultural sanctions, and I did that as long ago as 1955. I only hope that the lifting of those sanctions is not premature." Among the most formidable advocates of economic sanctions and the armed struggle, he tirelessly gave new expression to the cause for which he had fought during his years in South Africa.

After spending time as the Master of Novices in the Order of the

Resurrection, he was appointed Bishop of Masasi in Tanganyika (Tanzania) in 1960, sharing in Nyerere's vision to provide for the needs of the poor through his Ujamaa programme. In 1968 Huddleston returned to England as Suffragan Bishop of Stepney in the East End of London where he came face to face with a different kind of racism—against Asian immigrants. In 1978 he was elected Archbishop of the Indian Ocean.

Returning Home

"South Africa is in a very real sense home to me. It was suggested to me that I be buried in Sophiatown. I only hope nobody objects to restoring that honoured name to the place. Provided they do that, to be buried there is quite appealing."

"My night on the flight home contained little sleep. I saw the African sun rise and I returned to my place of departure—unforgettable and unforgotten." Explaining that he did not often fail to begin his day without the Eucharist, he saw this particular day as different. "The love of God which I usually celebrated in the sacrament of Holy Communion, I this day experienced through the human communion of friendships restored. As I embraced Nelson (Mandela), Walter (Sisulu), Oliver (Tambo) and the others who were at the airport to meet me I discovered yet again the extent to which the love of God is radiated and communicated to us through people, through struggle and through the celebration of just victory. When I thought about this a little later I realised that I had indeed started my day with a Holy Communion. This celebration I shall never forget. Theology, liturgy and the sacraments are means of God's grace to us, but God's grace is never limited to such ecclesial things."

Into the Future

How does he see the future in South Africa? What are his fears and for what does he hope? "I have seen, witnessed and shared in a range of experiences and events during these past weeks," he replies. "I have experienced hope and I have known despair. My visit has brought back memories and echoes from the past. It has also introduced new visions and forebodings. All this reverberates in my mind as my visit comes to a close."

My fear is that the country could be engulfed in violence. The burden of past oppression, exploitation and apartheid divisions has sown fear, suspicion and anger. There are also forces at work which are ready to promote and exploit these realities. I fear petty

Bantustan leaders who owe their existence to apartheid; who are reluctant to surrender their power. There is the right-wing. There is also the question whether the National Party will ultimately settle for genuine democracy, bearing in mind that some of its leaders have in the past shown a capability for corruption that makes some of the worst black leaders of this continent look like paragons of virtue. De Klerk has no more than three years before a freely-elected, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic parliament must be in place. To delay beyond that could be too late.

When, on the other hand, I look at the progress we have made since I left South Africa in 1956 and the advances made since Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, then I have hope. Now, hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism is transitory, hope endures against all adversity. Theologically, hope is the sure and certain knowledge that this is God's world and that God's righteousness will prevail. . . We are looking for irreversible change, and international and internal pressure must continue until that happens. We are all both sinners and people made in the image of God. We are capable of doing both the wrong and the right thing. My theology and politics intersect at the point of devising a strategy to ensure that right triumphs over wrong to the extent that this is possible in this world. On balance I am mildly optimistic that within a few years there will be a democratically elected government in South Africa—if only because all the major players realise that it is in their own interest to settle now rather than later.

Asked if he had one last request to make of God what it would be, the two sides of Huddleston's character emerge yet again. "If I were to know that I were to die tonight and were given a personal request, it would be that I go to heaven, there to be united with God and the people I love. If it were a last request of God for South Africa, it would be for a Constitution that eliminates all forms of discrimination and takes care of the poor."

Huddleston returns to the role of the Church: "I have positively no doubt that God's first and foremost expectation of the Church is that it care for the poor and exploited. That is the basis of all that I read in the Bible. My most earnest and sincere prayer is that the Church will rise to this calling. Should it fail to do so it is likely to be thrust aside by history. God is quite capable of finding an alternative agency through which to work."

He recalls the ups and downs of his 79 years, observing: "You know, I actually become more radical every moment that I live."

[Full Size]

PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Mayibuye Centre, UWC