My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Twenty years ago I was chatting to Willem Saayman at lunch time in the Unisa cafeteria, and he told me something about his time as a Dutch Reformed Church missionary in Namibia. He was there from 1974-1978, and spent a year in the Okvango, and the rest of the time at Orumana, in the Kaakoveld.

It was fascinating to me, as it told the other side of a story to which I had seen a very different side. He also told me that the Tomlinson Report, which laid out the blueprint for apartheid in South Africa (and the Odendaal Report, which was the equivalent in Namibia) had provided much of the motivation for many in the DRC to become missionaries, and were seen as providing the incentive and the opportunity for Christian mission.

I went in Namibia in 1969, and was deported in 1972. Though we were not exact contemporaries there, it was close enough for us to have experienced the same times, the same physical, spiritual, ideological and political climate. In my experience the implementation of the Tomlinson and Odendaal reports, and the evil ideology behind them, were precisely the opposite to what Willem described to me. They persecuted the church, and obstructed Christian mission at every turn. Those who implemented them seemed determined to destroy the Christian faith and went to great lengths to prevent its spread.

Willem, it seemed to me, knew the story from the inside. He knew both the good and the evil intentions, the good and evil results. I urged him to write it down, to tell the story, because I doubted that there were many other people who were both willing and able to tell it.

In one sense, he has now done that, in this book.

It is short (150 pages), and it surveys the history of mission of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa from 1652 to the present.

Willem distinguishes four “waves” of mission in the DRC: From 1179-1834; from 1867-1934; from 1954-1976 and from 1990 to the present. Each of these waves, or upsurges in interest in mission, had its own characteristics and importance, but the one that interests me most is the Third Wave, from 1954-1976. That was the one that fell entirely within the apartheid period, and was bound up with the ideology of apartheid.

Willem points out that apartheid did not begin in 1948, that its roots began much further back, and that most whites in South Africa were generally in favour of racial segregation in one form or another long before then. But the soil in which apartheid flourished is one thing, the roots and fruits another. In the past, the matters dealt with by apartheid were not central. They were referred to by preceding (white) governments as “the native question”. Apartheid, however was the main plank of the National Party’s election campaign in 1948. They promised to make “the native question” the main question, and to solve it once and for all. Apartheid became the official state ideology, an outlook, a worldview, a totalitarian vision of society to which everything had to be forced to conform. It was both qualitatively and quantitatively different from what had gone before. In the book Willem tends to play this down somewhat.

He does show how the mission vision of the DRC both shaped and was shaped by apartheid, by showing how it developed in both church and state, and how church and government influenced one another.

And that, in itself, makes this a very important book.

In one sense, it shows the huge gulf that existed, and still exists, between different denominations in South Africa.

The missiology department at Unisa, like many others, has taught the history of Christian mission from the perspective of “the Constantinian Era”. I have my doubts about that, and think that is a simplistic judgement (see Notes from underground: St Constantine, Scapegoat of the West), but given its widespread acceptance, one could say that in the 1970s in Namibia, the Dutch Reformed Church was in the Constantinian Era, while at the same time, in the same country, other denominations, and especially the Anglican Church, were in the pre-Constantinian Era, the era of persecution, of government obstruction.

The Dutch Reformed mission in the Kaokoveld enjoyed government favour, and the government tried to smooth its path. In Windhoek a Dutch Reformed minister hosted a pastor from Romania, Richard Wurmbrand, who told of the difficulties of Christians in far-away Romania, while Christians in Namibia were facing the very same difficulties at that very time — see Notes from underground: The martyrs of Epinga.

A big eye-opener for me in Willem’s book was the story of black farm schools, which, it appears. were seen by the Dutch Reformed Church as a missionary opportunity. The Bantu Education Act in effect nationalised church schools for blacks in the 1950s. All black schools were put under the control of the central government, and most of the Christian churches that had lost their schools in this way thought that it was because the government wanted to be sure that the teaching in the schools was politically correct according to the apartheid ideology. An exception was farm schools, which were controlled by farmers.

From the Dutch Reformed point of view, the mission opportunity was provided by mission-minded farmers who opened the schools for Christian teaching, thus providing a mission opportunity.

My experience was somewhat different.

In 1976-77 I was an Anglican priest in Utrecht in northern Natal, and found myself manager of several farm schools. These schools were held in Anglican Church buildings, but since the church was no longer allowed to run them, a farmer had to be found who was willing to become the “owner” of the school, and most farmers were not interested and not willing. The Bantu Education Department was forever on our case because many of the schools were on church land, and they said they must be on the farm land. And only children from that farm could go to them, whereas in fact children from several surrounding farms came. In one case the church building was on farm land, and the farmer was an absentee landlord, who owned several farms in the area, and one day he visited the farm and closed the church at gunpoint, and all along the road to the farm were armed police.

So there was a distinct apartheid between the Constantinian and the pre-Constantinian Church in South Africa, and neither side really saw the other. And in Namibia in July 1971 the Lutheran Church crossed from one to the other when it issued an open letter criticising the policy of apartheid, and supporting the position of the World Court that South Africa was occupying Namibia illegally.

In his book Willem barely mentions Namibia, and that is why I gave this book four stars rather than five. It is a very important book, and important to read. But I think the full story has not yet been told, and I still hope that Willem will tell, in the form of a memoir and narrative theology, the story of his time in Namibia. The generation who experienced that is passing, and only they can tell the story.

In 1976 I found

View all my reviews

Over lunch one day I chatted with Stuart Bate, who wanted to know what the “neoliberalism” that everyone was talking about meant. And for that I could refer to a blog post of mine (one in which I myself say “I’m not an economist but…”), which in turn refers to someone else’s blog post that no longer exists: Notes from underground: Liberalism, neoliberalism and neocons. To put it crudely, as I understand it, classical liberalism put political liberalism first, and economic liberalism was secondary. In neoliberalism, economic liberalism is all, or at least dominant.

Foucault points out that if classic liberalism, resting on “the historical experience of an overtly powerful and absolutist state”, had seen in (the state) the role of ‘defining’ and ‘monitoring’ market freedom, this conception is “inverted” under the neoliberal model. Here, rather than the “state supervising the market,” the market becomes the organising principle underlying the state…(n)eoliberalism removes the limiting external principle and puts a regulatory and inner principle (of the market) in its place”.

So in neoliberalism, rather than the “state supervising the market,” the market becomes the organising principle underlying the state.

Or, to put it in more theological terms, in neoliberalism the market (unlike the Sabbath) was not made for man, but man for the market.

But with all these theologians and missiologists talking about economics (prefaced by the disclaimer that “I’m not an economist but…”) I wonder what might happen if the next SAMS Congress were to arrange a panel discussion between a couple of Christian economists. I would find such a discussion between say, Azar Jammine and Arnold Mol very interesting indeed. I think that some of their ideas might turn out to be very different from each other, and that would give the missiologists something to get their teeth into.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A couple of years ago I read Love is the measure by Jim Forest, the biography of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and I wrote a review of it, which I posted on my blog, here.

All is grace is a revised and updated version of Love is the measure, based on more sources, including Dorothy Day’s letters and diaries. I have little to add to my original review, other than to say that this one is bigger and better and even more worth reading. Dorothy Day, and anarchist, pacifist and communitarian, was one of the outstanding Christians of the 20th century and in 1998 the process of having her declared a saint in the Roman Catholic Church was started.

Jim Forest was himself a member of the Catholic Worker community in the 1960s, and editor of the Catholic Worker paper, and is now the bosser-up of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship.

If you would like to know more about it, please check my original review of Love is the measure.

Perhaps I could add that this week I have been attending the annual congress of the Southern African Missiological Society (SAMS), which is on the theme of Religion and Empire. And listening to the papers being read, and the discussion on them, I think that if anyone knew anything about “Religion and Empire” it was Dorothy Day. So I really recommend this book to anyone who is interested in that topic.

View all my reviews

It has always been one of the more frightening ironies of Afrikaner life that people like my father, who with Smuts and Botha had fought and actually suffered in the war, could forgive and begin anew, whereas others, alive today, who were never in the heart of the conflict, can still find it so hard to forgive an injury that was not even done to them, and how can there be any real beginning without forgiveness?

I noticed something similar in my experience with war crimes officers, who had neither suffered internment under the Japanese, nor even fought against them. They were more revengeful and bitter about our treatment and our suffering in prison than we were ourselves.

I have so often noticed that the suffering which is most difficult, if not impossible to forgive, is unreal, imagined suffering. There is no power on earth like imagination, and the worst, most obstinate grievances are imagined ones (Van der Post 1964:26).

At the time I was living in semi-exile in a bed-sit in Streatham, South London, and working as a bus driver for London Transport. At the time I read it I wrote in my diary (4 June 1966):

This seems to touch on the core of a rather big question of human behaviour, One is that we so often find it easier to forgive those who injure us than those who injure others; and this imagination business. Reading about life in Nazi Germany conjures up all sorts of horrors, but they are imaginary horrors, I have never experienced them. In South Africa there are probably the same horrors, but one gets used to them. This is why so many people emphatically deny that South Africa is a police state, because it does not fit their mental image of a police state. But Germans probably felt the same 30 years ago.

I seem to recollect Trevor Huddleston in his book Naught for your comfort saying how much harder it was to forgive things done to other people, because one can only imagine how they feel. And John Aitchison, questioning the value of Liberal Party rural meetings, because you know that you go to encourage them in the face of SB intimidation, but by going you only encourage the SB to step up their campaign of intimidation. But it is a selfish martyrdom attitude — a sort of “I alone can bear the suffering” kick. But they too must bear their share of suffering — we are not the ones to deny it to them. It is their privilege as members of God’s kingdom.

It is so also among the Jews. The ones who keep harping on the Nazi concentration camps are not the ones who suffered there, but those whose relatives did. In a way this is the root of altruism — a willingness to suffer for others. But it can also be selfish and self-glorifying.

It is something which deserves further thought.

And 45 years later I wonder what further thought one can give it. A lot has happened since then, not least the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where the sufferings of many people were laid open to the world, and closed up again and shelved, and stored away out of sight.

A phrase from the Psalms keeps repeating in my mind as I write this: “Oppression and fraud are in its marketplace.” And some things seem in some ways not to have changed over 45 years.

Some things have changed though. Nowadays people use the word “closure” in relation to suffering, though no one seemed to use it 45 years ago. It started with journalists asking people, usually those who were close to thise who had suffered, whether they had “closure”. Now the people who are interviewed by the journalists seem to expect the question, and often answer it before it is asked. “We are looking for closure,” they say, or “now we have closure.”

I wonder about this “closure”, and what it means to those who say it, and what it means to those who asked about it. Does it mean that they are closing the book, and putting it away on the shelf, where it can stay dusty and unread, like the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in the novel The shadow of the wind, which I read recently?

Forty-five years ago we did not have the word “closure” as part of our vocabulary. No, I lie; we did. At a meeting when there was a debate and people were making interminable speeches and repeating the same old points, someone would propose “closure”, and, if accepted, the chairman would take the names of those who still wanted to speak, and when they had had their say the debate would be over, no more speakers would be allowed.

But that is not the same as the “closure” mentioned by journalists and those they interview. The new closure seems to mean something like forgetting, and 45 years ago we did not know that meaning of the word. Or perhaps it does have a similar meaning: that once you have had your say, there is to be no more talking about it.

Laurens van der Post’s thoughts seem to indicate one reason for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission being better than a war crimes tribunal. Forgiveness and reconciliation are important, but closure? Closing the book on it and forgetting it is not so good. What we forget, we will be doomed to repeat.

Forty-five years ago another saying would churn around in my head, and it seemed to mean the opposite of closure. It was a saying of Kierkegaard: “Only one thing can be remembered eternally: to have suffered for the truth.”

At requiem services we sing, of those who have died: Memory eternal!

And especially of those who have suffered for the truth: May their memory be eternal.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A bookseller takes his ten-year-old son to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books in Barcelona in 1945, where he is allowed to choose one book. The book he chooses is The shadow of the wind by an almost unknown novelist, Julian Carax.

The boy reads the book and enjoys it, and tries to find other books by the same author, but they are impossible to find, and he soon discovers that others are interested in his book, and he is made several lucrative offers, one from a person named after one of the characters in the book. He refuses them all.

As he grows up, he becomes more interested in solving the mystery of the book, and what happened to its author, and it soon becomes apparent that such a quest is dangerous, and that there are powerful people and forces intent on stopping him.

To say more would be a spoiler, and it is otherwise difficult to describe this book: a literary detective story, a tale of star-crossed lovers, a fantasy novel, an adventure-thriller. It’s a cross between Romeo and Juliet, The Eyre affair and the film Pan’s labyrinth, and more besides. At times, with the description of encounters with the police of the Franco era in Spain, it felt familiar, like the old apartheid South Africa, with echoes of A dry white season.

A very good read indeed. I recommend it.

View all my reviews

Here’s an excerpt:

Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 63,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Christina's great grandson, Vincent, lights candles on her birthday cake

Today the oldest member of our Mamelodi congregation, Christina Mothapo, celebrated her 86th birthday, so we had a little celebration after the service in her house.

Most of the other members of our small Mamelodi congregation were away for the long weekend, but the numberes were made up by members of Christina’s family who had come to celebrate her b irthday. She had ten children, sixc sons and four daughters, though some have died, and she has numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren. Her great grandson, Vincent Allies, acted as the reader for most of the service. He is one of the three members of the family (including Christina herself) who have been baptised in the Orthodox Church. He told us he is looking for a job. He had a job at a mine near Rustenburg, but the contract came to an end.

It was a verry joyful celebration, and St Nicholas Parish in Brixton had prepared some Christmas food parcels which we distributed to members of the congregation afterwards.

Christina Mothapo with family on 86th birthday

Using computer programs and mathematical formulas, Richard Conn Henry, an astrophysicist in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and Steve H. Hanke, an applied economist in the Whiting School of Engineering, have created a new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one which came before, and remains that way from one year to the next in perpetuity.

Under the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, for instance, if Christmas fell on a Sunday in 2012 (and it would), it would also fall on a Sunday in 2013, 2014 and beyond. In addition, under the new calendar, the rhyme “30 days hath September, April, June and November,” would no longer apply, because September would have 31 days, as would March, June and December. All the rest would have 30. (Try creating a rhyme using that.)

I have serious doubts about this, not least because, if their calculations say that Christmas would fall on a Sunday in 2012, then their calculations are seriously wrong already, before we’ve even started with their proposed new New Calendar. Old Calendar Christmas falls on a Monday in 2012/13, and New Calendar Christmas falls on a Tuesday in 2012. If they start with a wrong assumption, how much else could go wrong?

But even apart from the possibility of errors, how boring it would be if Christmas always fell on the same day of the week, or if Pascha always fell on the same day of the month?

But I’m sure bureaucrats will ove it. Life should, after all, be as monotonous and predictable as human science can make it.

I had just read a fat book called Theological Education by Extension by a guy called Ralph Winter. It described a means by which the church could rapidly expand its leadership. It had been tried by Presbyterians in Guatemala, and was beginning to be used in other places as well.

On 9 December 1971 the Diocesan Standing Committee of the Anglican Diocese of Namibia met, and I presented them with a proposal to use Theological Education by Extension (TEE) to train leaders for the church in Namibia. It would start with lay ministers — evangelists, teachers, pastors. Then it could go on to self-supporting deacons and priests as well, so that every parish in the largely rural diocese could have teams of priests, deacons, evangelists, pastors and teachers.

Somewhat to my surprise, this plan was accepted in principle by the Diocesan Standing Committee, and they asked me to be convener of an education-subcommittee to implement it.

We already had a diocesan library in Windhoek, which was being developed as a support centre for correspondence students, and something similar would need to be set up in Ovamboland, along the northern border with Angola, where most of the Anglicans in Namibia lived. The library was being developed by Toni Halberstadt, a teacher who had been kicked out of Ovamboland by the government, and John Witherow, an overseas volunteer who had been refused a permit to go and teach in Ovamboland.

The project did not get very far, since three months later, at the beginning of March 1972, Toni Halberstadt and I were deported from Namibia, along with the bishop (Colin Winter) and diocesan secretary (David de Beer).

On leaving Namibia I went straight to a meeting of the Department of Christian Education for the Anglican Church in Southern Africa, and there met Richard Kraft, who had established something similar, on a small scale, in Zululand, training self-supporting deacons and priests. I spend the next four months travelling round South Africe promoting the idea of TEE, until I was banned inn July 1972, and so was out of the loop for the next four years.

About 40 Anglican deacons were ordained in Ovamboland on Sunday 11 December 2011 (photo by Nancy Robson)

But last Sunday, almost exactly forty years after I had proposed this thing, there was an ordination of 40 deacons at Odibo in Ovamboland. Nancy Robson describes the scene:

The President and the Queen joined the procession to the church, probably well over 100 people in the procession.  The 40 to-be deacons and 2 already deacons to be priested were all part of the procession as were 2 Lutheran bishops, the bishop from Angola, our 2 retired bishops as well as our own bishop and the Arch.  Stoles for many of the ordinands were made by the sewing Project at the mission while some of clergy stoles had been made here previously.  A very colourful sight.

Having been deported from Namibia in 1972, and having only been back for one brief visit since, the realisation of that vision of forty years earlier had nothing to do with me. But I still found it interesting that it had come to pass, almost as I had envisaged it back then.

Deacons, bishops, Queen, Archbishop of Cape Town & President of Namibia (photo by Nancy Robson)

After my ban was lifted in 1976 I went to Zululand and worked with Peter Biyela and Theophilus Ngubane on the scheme that Richard Kraft had started, and thirty years ago, in 1981, I was again travelling the coutnry, this time for meetings of an Anglican Commission on the Diaconate. After much effort and expense we produced a report, which was rejected out of hand by the Anglican Provincial Synod, meeting in Port Elizabeth in 1982. Nevertheless, thirty years later, 40 deacons were ordained in Ovamboland.

I still have a dream.

Perhaps, after another 40 years, it will come true, and forty deacons will be ordained in the Orthodox Church in South Africa. The Orthodox Church doesn’t do mass ordinations, so they would have to be ordained one at a time — perhaps one a day during the Nativity Fast. I won’t be around to see it, of course, but I can still dream, can’t I?

Notes and References

Winter, Ralph D. (ed) 1969. <CITE>Theological Education by Extension.</cite> South Pasadena: William Carey Library.
A collection of essays giving the history of the
Theological Education by Extension movement, a report on
a workshop, and an extension seminary manual. .

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Go is generally regarded as the first novel of the Beat Generation, written between 1949 and 1951, and first published in 1952, nearly sixty years ago. I first read it when I was 20, fifty years ago, and rereading it after all that time is a rather strange experience.

It is set in the late 1940s, and that was another generation, a generation that I don’t connect with. They are the people who came home from the war, whom I used to meet in bars around Durban, those boozy old men. In 1972 I used to go for lunch at the Grosvenor Hotel in Soldiers Way across the road from Durban station and sip my solitary beer and eat my 15c curry for lunch, and hear them talking about Smiler Small, who used to frequent the bar in Malvern, and I used to look at all the World War II memorabilia decorating the bar. It never occurred to me that those people, who frequented bars like that, were the Beat Generation, and yet they were. Jack Kerouac was the same age as my father-in-law, who occasionally used to go drinking at the Malvern Hotel.

Yet it was only ten years later, in 1960-61 that I was reading their books, envying their life, and wondering if had really happened the way John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac described it. But they are the generation I associate with alien things like Frank Sinatra, and males in suits and hats, and women wearing lipstick and nylon stockings, and people trying to get back on their feet after the war. So reading Go is very strange. It was only 20 years before 1970, yet 1970 is now forty years ago. And the Durban station is no longer there, and Soldiers Way is probably called something else, and if the Grosvenor Hotel is still there it too is probably called something else now.

But then I remember that I too was like that, even when longing to be like that and thinking it must be different somehow, and somehow more exciting. But it only sounded more exciting than the lives we lived in the 1960s. We too experienced that restless rushing around in the, rushing to Meadowlands to see Cyprian Moloi, or to Springs to see Noel Lebenya, travelling many miles to see if a friend was home, and finding that they were out, travelling many more liles to see another. Not as many boozy parties, and no one was writing a book, but perhaps our conversations were even more intelligent, even when we smoked pot, which was rare. And that was only fifteen years after it all happened in Holmes’s book. Fifty years ago somehow seems quite close to the present, yet ten years earlier, when Holmes wrote, seems another world, another eon, another universe. In the sixties Holmes’s world of New York seemed like some magic golden age, and looking back from now to the sixties, that seems like the real golden age. The times Holmes wrote about, I realise now, were different, not just because it was another generation, but another world and worldview.

And rereading it fifty years later, I see that Holmes actually tried to create the new vision that made us look back on his world with rose-tinted spectacles. What he longed for became part of our vision.

The essence of the book is summed up in the dream of one of the characters, Stofsky (a thinly-diguised version of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg). Stofsky dreams that he meets God, in a rather shabby dusty room, sitting on a very shabby throne, and God tells him to “Go, and love without the help of any Thing on earth.”

For us in the sixties, that was the starting point. It was a kind of presupposition. It was the presupposition with which I read Go the first time. And so it all seemed rather wonderful, transported out of its time and place into some kind of beautiful timeless realm. I could not imagine them as part of the same world as the suits and hats and nylon stockings.

But rereading it fifty years later, I see it in a very different perspective. Another of the characters in Go, Paul Hobbes (who represents Holmes himself) doesn’t have dreams and visions like Stofsky, but gradually comes to realise that their values and their life of endless boozy partying are rather shallow. He thinks of his friends, including one who had died, and wonders if anyone had actually loved them. And it is in this seeting of lovelessness, hopelessness, selfishness and despair that God appears to Stofky in a dream and says “Go, and love without the help of any Thing on earth.”

View all my reviews