Читать книгу I Beg to Differ - Peter Storey - Страница 12

Reluctant Scholar

The first steps in the journey from the navy to the ministry took me to Grahamstown, and the Divinity Department at Rhodes University.

For those with a case against colonialism, Grahamstown makes an excellent target. Certainly, the nineteenth century Xhosa warriors resisting Boer and British settlement thought so; they attacked the town more than once and were repulsed with great difficulty. The sleepy ‘City of Saints’, so named for its many churches, is dominated by the Settlers Monument, a squat architectural reminder of the British interlopers – including both Elizabeth’s and my forbears – who began arriving in 1820. This is the town that many of the settlers, more at ease with trading than farming, built as soon as they could. Grahamstown became the commercial and cultural heart of ‘Settler Country’.

Nestling below the memorial is the campus of Rhodes University with its white stucco buildings and red tile roofs. In the 1950s, it was the smallest of South Africa’s universities. The campus was an intimate, self-contained village of lecture halls, faculty offices, playing fields and residences tucked behind the old Drostdy wall at the upper western edge of Grahamstown. The wall drew a line between town and gown, the High Street being the bridge. Among the shops and businesses stood three monuments to early settler faith, the Anglican Cathedral of St Michael and St George, Trinity Presbyterian Church and Commemoration Methodist Church, built to mark the 20th anniversary of the settlers’ landing. At the eastern end of the town the old main road climbed sharply as it exited toward East London, and cluttered across that hill was the black township of Joza, one of the poorest and most ramshackle in the land. In the 100 years since this seething frontier saw the last of its wars between Cape colony and Xhosa hinterland, little had disturbed the way the conquerors ordered matters of race and class. Black and white, poor and rich, lived in separate, desperately different worlds.

After WWII, the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational denominations struck a deal with Rhodes to train their candidates for ordained ministry. A Divinity Department was established and a dedicated residence – Livingstone House – was built. Between 60 and 70 theology students were to be found on campus each year, with Methodists outnumbering the students from the two smaller churches. As an ecumenical venture, it was ahead of its time and a resounding success, but as a response to South Africa’s original sin it never got to first base. We were all white, with our black counterparts housed 60 miles away in a small town called Alice, where the Federal Theological Seminary rose alongside the blacks-only Fort Hare University. Thus our first steps toward being Christian ministers were taken in a segregated bubble and the sadness is how little it seemed to bother many of us. The thought that women of any race might possibly be called to the ordained ministry was of course even further from possibility. It would remain a female-free zone for some time yet.

My first year at Rhodes was an uneasy one. I had been an enthusiastic volunteer for the Navy, but here I was an unwilling conscript. I counted myself fortunate at first not to be housed with the ‘Tokkelokke’ or ‘Theologs’ in Livingstone House, but rather in an ex-women’s residence named Olive Schreiner, on the edge of the female campus. The ground floor had been turned into lecture rooms and offices and eleven male students who were not straight out of school occupied the rooms upstairs. The absence of urinals in the communal bathroom was a mild nuisance, but there were ample compensations: out of our windows on nice days we had the pleasant distraction of our near neighbours sunning themselves on their lawns.

My mind, however, was mainly elsewhere. Eighty miles away in Port Elizabeth was a Naval Reserve Base, to which I was now officially attached while working my way out of the service. There were boats to play with there, so I hitch-hiked down whenever I could. I was still deeply torn, giving little attention to my studies. My heart simply wasn’t there. I felt myself a poor fit with the ministry and wished I could be as confident in my vocation as my fellows. There is of course something gloriously random and counter-intuitive about the call to ministry, resulting in many unlikely recruits. Those entering the Divinity School with me included a typewriter mechanic, an architect, an engineer, a travelling salesman, an Irish auctioneer and a London policeman. Yet, in spite of their widely differing backgrounds, I was conscious of a further, invisible gulf: they seemed to want to be there and I didn’t. This tension tore at me for a full eighteen months before God seemed to take pity on me. Sometime in my second year I had to conduct worship and preach in a small congregation that suffered the efforts of many student preachers. For some reason I settled on a Scripture passage that seemed to mock my own condition; it was all about knowing and being sure. The Apostle Paul was claiming two certainties: “I know him in whom I have believed,” he said, “and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed to him …”35 The sermon that emerged was titled I am persuaded … and it was in the preaching of it that it began to become true for me. John Wesley was once told to “preach faith until you have it …” and it seemed I was doing the same. I remember coming back to my room, sitting on the side of my bed and saying to myself, “I do belong. I’m meant to be here,” and to God, “You called me, so you’re going to have to put up with me now, for the rest of my life.” Something was settled that night. I was persuaded! Methodists would call it the gift of ‘assurance’.

With that, an enormous load of uncertainty and resistance was lifted, but there were other battles to fight. I still struggled with what was to be a lifelong anxiety about academics. While I had no problem engaging with the lectures or grasping the content of set-books by simply skimming them, I battled to retain what I had read. I could hold an intellectual argument with the best, but could quote no authorities to back it up because my memory had already mislaid them. Also, my difficulty with languages other than my own still haunted me. Theologs were expected to major in Systematic Theology and Biblical Studies, New Testament Greek being cast-iron requirement for the Biblical major. After a few weeks of Greek I panicked and cast about desperately for an alternative. The dean of the faculty finally suggested that I replace Biblical Studies with Philosophy. “You’ll escape Greek,” he said, “but you’ll sweat like you’ve never sweated before.” All theologs had to do Phil I and it didn’t seem so bad. Our professor was a delightful gentleman named Barret who had been gassed in the trenches of WWI. His lectures were held in Olive Schreiner at 8 am, a challenging time to be awake, so I often met my colleagues coming out of the lecture while I was fetching shaving water from the bathroom. When I ran into the professor taking tea one day in the students’ union he invited me to join him. “Haven’t I met you before, young man?” he asked. I confessed that I was one of his first year students, but that I was not very good at attending his lectures. Unfazed, the former Oxford don said, “Well, if you can pass without attending my lectures, you’re the kind of gentleman we need. Now, do you take milk and sugar?” I loved him for that.

In Philosophy II, Professor Barrett was succeeded by someone who was to become specially beloved. Daantjie Oosthuizen was small in stature and big of heart. His humility co-existed with massive intelligence and a gentle but incisive humour. He offered his students genuine respect but no intellectual quarter. He was an Afrikaner unafraid to question apartheid and this made him an early target of the Security Police. The Philosophy Department was not known for sympathy to religion but Daantjie was an unapologetic Christian. A colleague once confronted him, wondering why someone of his obvious intellect should bother to follow Jesus. Daantjie thought for a moment, then squinting at him through his thick spectacles, said, “Who else would you recommend?” He was a Christ-like man absent of all religiosity and I will always be grateful for the two years spent with him. It was as tough as my dean had promised. There were three students in the second year, and only two of us survived to Phil III. No more slipping into the back of the lecture theatre, nor escaping rigorous intellectual engagement. I would not have survived had it not been for Daantjie’s kindness. He recognised the struggles, but also the potential in me, and seemed to think me worth nursing. It was in his classes that I learned how to think, and to lean into the tough questions without fear when they threatened my faith. In fact, quite the opposite happened: Jesus seemed to manage quite well without my dubious assistance and engaging with the great minds and spirits of human thought confirmed for me the pre-eminence of this Jewish carpenter.

Mixing with students beyond Divinity’s church-conditioned community kept my feet on the ground. We are told that Jesus was heard gladly by common people but theologians and the religious have done their best to reverse that. To this day I still have no time for religiosity, nor for what William Sangster used to call the ‘language of Canaan’ – the arcane code-words that the religious use to communicate with each other. I also enjoyed a brief foray into Sociology, another required subject. Professor Irving, burdened with too many theologs in his class, felt the need to remind us that: “You ‘gentlemen of divinity’ focus on what ought to be; here we study what actually is,” another warning about the way faith and the church could lose touch with the real world.

The other subjects – including two years of Biblical Studies and Church History and three of Systematics – were all more or less easily managed and began to be fun. Our teachers, we discovered, could be fun too. When fellow student Ken Carstens used his ‘crit’ sermon to lambast South Africa’s whites with the vivid image of “two million white plutocrats being rowed by fifteen million sweating black slaves up the economic stream,” Professor Hewson responded with just one remark: “Kenneth,” he said, “it must have been some boat!” When I critiqued theologian WR Matthew’s Christology, saying that he was “barking up the wrong tree”, Professor Maxwell returned my essay, remarking in the margin: “Comparing the Dean of St Paul’s to an over-enthusiastic and misguided puppy is an impertinence – unless it is indeed the wrong tree.” The generous mark he gave me indicated that we agreed about trees. All too late in the day I had begun to thrive and though I was to struggle with reading and memory retention for the rest of my ministry, for the latter half of my three-year sojourn at Rhodes, the classroom became a place of pleasure instead of pain.

There was also time for fun – probably too much of it. I had moved into Livingstone House in my second year and occasional cross-town raids on St Paul’s Anglican college were returned in force. Livingstone House had to be defended, sometimes with water hoses, and when the battle was over we were to be found on our knees, like kids with a jigsaw puzzle, trying to refit the parquet flooring blocks that had floated away in the fray.

First year students were known as ‘Inkettes’. One of them – whom I liked very much – was trying to raise Rag funds with her Phelps House associates by offering male students coffee for a shilling, plus a kiss for two shillings. They were still falling short of their target so she and I looked for a stronger incentive. In those days – disgustingly colonial as it may seem in the more enlightened present – students could leave their shoes outside their rooms for polishing, so in the small hours of one morning I crept down the Livingstone hallways stealing the left shoe of each pair. I delivered a boxful of left shoes to my Inkette friend and a notice soon appeared in Livingstone House announcing that anyone wanting their shoes back should go to Phelps bearing one more shilling. As streams of Livingstone men rummaged through the big box for their missing shoes the Inkettes raked in more money with their ‘coffee and kiss’ trade. However, when they finally closed the door on the last Livingstonian and began to clear up, they discovered that most of their teaspoons were missing. Next day a notice appeared in Phelps House announcing: “Teaspoons available at Livingstone House for 6d an item.”

While I was at Rhodes, Dad became the leader of the Methodist Church in Southern Africa. In those days we followed the British pattern of electing a ‘President of the Conference’ each year, which had the disadvantage of inconsistent leadership, but did prevent leaders from getting too big for their boots. The President’s year began with the Annual Conference in October, over which he presided, and then consisted of visitations to all the Districts, offering inspiration and leadership. All this happened without any let-up in his local church responsibilities. Dad’s Conference was to be at East London, so I hitch-hiked the 100 miles to hear his Presidential Addresses dealing with the national spiritual and political landscape. I was incredibly proud of him of course, while trying not to show it. He had become steadily more trenchant in his critique of the government, describing apartheid as slavery in another form and morally indefensible. He now confronted it head on. Apartheid, he said, when pushed to logical conclusions, ran into theological conclusions. It was a sin against God: “The government’s view is that while one white man (sic) and one black man are friends, apartheid will have failed; the Church’s view is that so long as one white man and one black man are not friends, the Church will have failed.” The Church, he declared, was therefore on a collision course with the regime. It would disobey certain laws and government pressure to conform: “We will not place the Church at the disposal of the State.”

I came away from East London quietly thrilled with Dad’s clear witness, but also shocked by the reaction of some of his colleagues. While black Methodists warmly welcomed it, many white clergy were either lukewarm or openly hostile. I was thinking that my father would not have an easy year in leadership, but it turned out that he would not have the year at all. A longstanding heart problem wore him down and halfway through his Presidential year he was forced to hand over the reins and sail to England for one of the early open-heart surgeries pioneered at Guy’s Hospital. What he had achieved, however, was to lay the ground for South African Methodism’s most critical decision, taken a year later. During the 1950s some conservative white church leaders, encouraged by the government, argued that the MCSA should accept the new apartheid realities and, much like the Dutch Reformed Church, break into racially defined segments. There was a real danger that this view might prevail. My father, together with some others, saw a very different vision: after meeting with top black Methodists Seth Mokitimi, Ezekiel Mahabane, Gabriel Setiloane and Jotham Mvusi, he urged instead “frank and free discussions about the appointment of an African President”. Presaging the debate that would dominate the following Conference, he roundly rejected any separatism: “Let our motto be, ‘Let us go on together in the name of the Lord,’” he declared, “‘and in the name of the Lord, let us stay together.’” He was too ill to be present at that Conference, but was thrilled when it pronounced its conviction that, “it is the will of God that the Methodist Church remain one and undivided.”36

My own first act of public protest was in 1959. Rhodes faculty and students in academic regalia marched through Drostdy Arch and down the High Street protesting the Extension of University Education Act, which meant exactly the opposite. The act banned black students from registering at ‘white’ universities. That year I also wrote to the Minister of Justice, Mr CR Swart, and organised a group of Divinity students to join me as signatories registering our “vehement protest” at his treatment of ex-Chief Albert Luthuli. The Nobel Peace Laureate and President of the ANC had been banned for five years in 1954 and now a further five years had been slapped on him. My concern had a personal dimension because I had met Luthuli in our home in Cape Town when Dad was organising the Defence and Aid Fund.37 I was in awe of this bluff Zulu giant, who exuded warmth, strength and conviction. It seemed absurd that such an obviously good person should be treated thus. In his reply the minister decided to do Bible study with us, suggesting that seeing we “had already delivered judgement on the poor misguided sinner, the Minister of Justice, it would perhaps be wise of [us] to read and digest the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican …”38

There was also a foray into student politics, beginning with something of a necessary humiliation. Elections for the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) were beginning to reflect national politics and becoming increasingly bitter. A crisis split the SRC and forced the resignation of some of the incumbents and in the ensuing rough and tumble I joined the name-calling, labelling one of the candidates named Rudolph Gruber a “megalomaniac and a Nat” which, given the state of politics today, might seem fairly tame, but not so in 1959, when we still referred to fellow students publicly as ‘Mr’ or ‘Miss’. Whatever I felt about Mr Gruber, I had no proof whatever for what I had said. My conscience gnawed at me over the weekend and at a mass student meeting on the Monday, having already written to him personally, I offered a public apology to him and for being one of those who had contributed to the chaos. I then pleaded that we all reject the hate and malice that remarks like my own had stoked and rather focus on facts and principles instead. This seemed to have a positive effect on the rowdy meeting. In the election that followed some students put my name forward and I found myself on the SRC. Mr Gruber went on to become prominent in the South African Foundation, an organisation established to promote SA interests overseas. I do not know whether he was a Nat after all, but he wasn’t a megalomaniac and we kept up a friendly contact over many years. My shame at having so easily smeared another person in the heat of the moment led me to decide that whatever fights lay in the future, I would not descend to that sort of behaviour again. I have tried not to.

At some point, I also became an assistant editor of the student newspaper, Rhodeo. The editor was Hugh Lewin, son of an Anglican priest and a courageous and principled person who was later to serve seven years as a political prisoner and record his experiences in the powerful book Bandiet. Our claim to fame as Rhodeo’s editorial team was to print an issue carrying big blank spaces denoting the stories that government censorship had forbidden. Soon, in the humourless logic of our rulers, it became illegal to leave blank spaces in newspapers.

SRC membership also thrust an entirely different duty upon me, that of organising the traditional Casbah evening during Rag Week of 1959. Casbah was a fête, with various stalls, games and competitions to raise Rag funds. I decided that this year would be bigger and better than anything before and we moved the whole event out of the safety of a university hall onto the Rhodes Great Field. As evening came, the field was a fairyland of coloured lights with students and townsfolk milling happily around the stalls. Our centrepiece was a floodlit ring where a boxing display would climax the evening. My fellow tokkelok Ken Eddie and I sat in the commentator’s box in the grandstand, taking in the tranches of cash delivered to us from the stall-holders, and all was well until the Graham Hotel downtown closed and male students in the later stages of inebriation arrived on the field. For some reason the brightly lit boxing ring attracted them and it was soon filled with drunks – far too many of them – swinging wildly at each other. The structure itself began to teeter and sway drunkenly, the poles and floodlights above it describing ever-widening arcs through the night sky. When the end came it was impressive: the ring collapsed, drunks were flung in all directions, sparks hissed and crackled and a large portion of Grahamstown was plunged into inky blackness. We had tapped into the town’s power grid to light the Great Field and our impromptu boxing exhibition had blown it. On the field, darkness and chaos reigned and Casbah was no more. By the glow of Ken’s cigarette lighter we scraped all the takings into one bag. Ken grabbed some bottles of wine donated as prizes, and we slipped out of the box and down to his old black MG parked behind the grandstand. We got to it without being seen and before anybody could miss us we were back behind a locked door in Ken’s room in Livingstone House, wondering how we could wriggle out of this disaster. Running out of ideas, we got quietly tipsy – a first for both of us – and waited for the morning.

The following day an outraged Vice-Chancellor demanded that the entire Rag Committee appear before him, together with the SRC. Things were worse even than we thought. It turned out that not only had we ruined Casbah and subjected half of Grahamstown to a blackout, but unknown to us a student couple had been exploring their very close relationship under the boxing ring when it collapsed and had been fortunate to escape with their lives, if not their dignity. Vice-Chancellor Tom Alty tore into us and announced that he was cancelling Rag, and considering the facts, his parting words were memorable: “Next year, maybe you should get the theologs to organise Casbah, so it ends up half decent.” I made myself as small as I could while SRC chair John Benyon loyally failed to mention that Alty’s suggestion had already been tried and found spectacularly wanting. Professor Hewson, responsible for Methodist students, a thoroughly gracious person and a close friend of my father, was furious. “You could be sent down for this,” he hissed when I stood before him, “we have all been shamed.” My misery deepened as I waited for the axe to fall, but was saved by the liveliness of the student body. They poured into a protest meeting that sent a suitably servile resolution to Dr Alty, pleading for the restoration of Rag in return for a ban on any future Casbahs. Alty relented, the Rag procession went ahead, and I survived. Also, my policy of ensuring regular deliveries of cash takings to the commentary box meant that we could chalk up a record Casbah income in spite of the disaster. It had indeed been a very different – but final – Casbah.

On 21 August 1959, just as we were bracing ourselves to prepare for our final examinations, my world fell in. In the small hours of that morning a hand on my shoulder shook me gently awake. It was Prof Hewson telling me that my father had died. The person I most loved and admired was gone. In something of a daze I got myself ready for the drive to Port Elizabeth, and then onto a Vickers Viscount – my first flight on a commercial aircraft – to Cape Town. I found my mother and sister at the home of friends, Mom lying in a darkened room, silent and stricken. Dad was only 58 when he died and being ten years younger than he, a long life of loneliness lay ahead of her. At the funeral in Rosebank Methodist Church, my sister and I sat on each side of her, listening as good people spoke, but I recall little of what they said. I had slipped into the church an hour before the service. The coffin was already in place and I had spent a little time beside it, thinking and saying what I needed to, and regretting all the things left unsaid between us. My recollection of that moment is of a strange counterpoint of pain and certainty: pain that he and I would now never break through our mutual reserve into the closeness and comradeship of an adult father-son relationship, and the certainty that whatever now occupied that coffin, it was no longer my dad. “He’s not here,” I whispered to myself. “That’s no longer him in there.” In the desolation of it all, and without much mature faith to turn to, the gift of that moment was an existential one – another moment of ‘being persuaded’, a deep assurance of Resurrection life.

The return to my last couple of months at Rhodes wasn’t easy, though my fellow students were very kind. I wrote my exams robotically, my only anxiety being that I had not mastered enough of Ryle’s Concept of Mind and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to get through Phil III. In the end I got the degree, not very well, but probably better than I deserved.

I left Rhodes at the end of 1959 with a fairly good theological and biblical grounding, but I’m not sure how confident I was about the work that lay ahead. We had received limited instruction in the actual practices of ministry, so the work of ‘caring for souls’ would have to be learned on the job. Nor, frankly, had there been enough emphasis on nurturing our own inner spiritual lives; that too, it would seem, was a DIY matter. But we had at least become a cohort of colleagues: the three-year journey had bonded us, and in my case, a couple of closer friendships had begun to penetrate my habitual solitariness. Yet I doubt any of us realised how poorly we were equipped for the ‘secular 60s’ that were almost upon us. We were about to enter a decade when confidence in religious belief would sink to its lowest ebb in 200 years. It was represented most sensationally by Time magazine’s famous April 1966 cover: large red letters on a solid black background, asking, “Is God Dead?” In ten years, the graduating class photograph we proudly posed for would be a bit like that of a World War I infantry company entering the trenches: half of those smiling young men would be gone from ministry, casualties of a seemingly unassailable assault on their faith foundations.

Meanwhile, a telegram from the Methodist Conference which had my life in its hands informed me that I was now the Probationer Minister appointed to Bellville Methodist Church, Cape Town.