Archbishop Trevor Huddleston
"If you could say that anybody single-handedly made apartheid a world issue then that person was Trevor Huddleston" - Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Father Trevor Huddleston died on 20 April 1998.
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The Life and Work of
Archbishop Trevor Huddleston
"If you could say that anybody single-handedly made apartheid a world issue then that person was Trevor Huddleston" - Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Father Trevor Huddleston died on 20 April 1998. |
Like thousands of children who were born before the First World War - and I was born just before it in 1913 - many of us had parents overseas.
In fact my own father was in the Indian Navy and was therefore abroad when I was born. I didn't see him until I was seven but that wasn't really a hardship. I was brought up by an aunt and my older sister in Hampstead, just opposite Hampstead Heath.
We were very lucky because in those days the roads were not made up and we could go off on to the Heath for picnics and walks quite freely. I can remember those days very well. I can remember, for instance, going out with a nurse and seeing a German Zeppelin making a daylight air raid over London. And I can remember the sound of the bugles calling 'take cover' and 'all clear'.
So I was a wartime child, but I was also a child of the Raj, you might say, like thousands of other kids, so it wasn't very strange to me that I didn't see my father. He and my mother wrote to each other. Sometimes she had to be with him and later on, when the war came to an end, she would spend more time in England and then go back out to him.
That was my origin. It was a very comfortable life. I think I was fairly well spoilt. I had all the traditional blessings (if they are blessings) of a good education. I can remember going to my dame school, just up the hill, and then moving on to a prep school in Hendon which is now no longer there. Of course, that wasn't such a good experience because just after the war food was exceedingly short as we were still under rationing. Nevertheless, I think as a child of seven or eight, and I was seven when I went to school as a boarder, you take things as they come. You are not familiar with anything else, anyhow. I was able to come home for the weekends occasionally.
It was a very happy childhood. It is difficult to express nowadays: people always seem to have deep psychological traumas about neglect, but I never felt that in the least and I really enjoyed my school days. I wasn't a great scholar. I don't think I was distinctive in any kind of way, in fact I'm sure I wasn't, at prep school anyhow. But it was a good time.
I can remember when my father retired. He retired early from the Indian Navy, which he commanded at one time.
He really didn't like India because it meant being separated from us, from the family and from his relations, and he also felt the weight of the establishment in India. He felt it was a very artificial life. My mother was very different from him in some ways. She loved India, for the right reasons as I think. She loved the people. She was a very good Christian. I got my religion, certainly, mostly from her. She loved to talk about the ordinary people in India, although she wasn't there all that long. I suppose, looking back ( she died when she was in her early fifties), India was part of her life as it was for all those thousands of people who were in the Indian Civil Service or the Navy or the Army. Even my grandfather is buried in India.
I can remember a strange little incident, which I suppose is revealing. When I was about twelve or thirteen and my father was home and we had our own house in Hampstead Garden Suburb or just near it, one evening around Christmas - the night was quite cold and dark - the bell rang and I went to the door and I saw an old Indian looking in through the glass pane. I opened the door and my father then came out and he said - not roughly, because he wasn't that kind of a person - 'No, there's nothing here for you. ' I remember that incident to this day. It seemed to me a terrible thing, not only because he was black but because he was poor, and I couldn't believe that at Christmas time you could turn anybody away. And the fact that this incident has stayed in my memory so long shows that it must have meant something important to me, I suppose.
Otherwise it was a totally uneventful childhood. I then went to my public school, which was Lancing, a church school and a very typical English public school, except that I think it had moved quite a long way beyond the normal because relationships with the staff were particularly easy. There was no feeling that one was being kept down and we were allowed a great deal of freedom for those days. It was a marvellous place on the South Downs, and you had all the room in the world to move around in. It didn't put enormous emphasis on games which I was never much good at. I quite enjoyed playing rugger (although it was a soccer school) as it was easier, and if you're not any good at it soccer is rather a boring game; and I ran a bit.
Lancing, I think, was a place that allowed me to grow very much to be what I wanted to be. Because it was a church school, religion was very dominant.
The chapel there is one of the finest modern Gothic buildings in England, and the fourth highest, and . dominated the whole school.
We used to have to go to chapel twice a day, and three times on Sundays. But again, in those days there wasn't any sense that this was peculiar: it was just something you accepted as part of the system and you went along with it. And enjoyed it, in fact. I enjoyed the music. Peter Pears, the singer, who was a bit older than me, was also at the school. He was an alto in the choir. There was a high standard of music.
Then I became interested in writing and I became the editor of the school magazine and I contributed to another literary magazine. I don't think I was in any way exceptional as a writer but it gave me a kind of fulfilment.
During those years the school had what was called a 'mission' down in Camberwell, which in those days was one of the very poorest slum areas in London. I used to go there with one or two friends, as we were invited to do, to stay down there and see how the other half lived you might say. It certainly had an impact on me because the kids were barefoot and obviously lots of them had rickets and were malnourished. So it was quite an eye-opener for somebody who had been brought up in Hampstead, and it certainly did something to turn my mind to the social divide in this country.
I can remember a general election, in the 1920s. One of the candidates was a man called Shapur ji Saklatvala who was an Indian and a Communist. We held a school election at the same time - there was great political activity although it was all terribly immature.
It wasn't really until I got to Oxford in 1931 that I became politicised. I was at Oxford from 1931 to 1934 at Christ Church, which is a fairly wealthy college - not that I had all that much money. It was by that time clear that I ought to be ordained into the ministry of the church and it was the time when unemployment was enormously high. The hunger marchers, men from Jarrow, from South Wales, from the coalfields, from the docklands, marched to Westminster. Not in a militant way: they were just desperate for food.
I saw them as they came through Oxford. They had to sleep in town halls, wherever they could get accommodation. And their plea was just to have a reasonable standard of living. You may remember that the settlement of the General Strike in 1 9 2 6 was the most extraordinary and iniquitous ever because the miners were left with less pay than they had before it started.
So I was there at the time and it was a time of considerable political ferment. There was the great debate in the Oxford Union that `This house will in no circumstances fight for king and country which was won, It caused a tremendous upheaval. People said it was disgusting and disgraceful, and Winston Churchills son came and tore the minute out of the minute book.
This was my first real taste with a system which I regarded as unjust and this led me into Christian socialism. Many of my contemporaries had the same feeling.
I found myself involved in a very interesting summer school: it was called the Anglo Catholic Summer School and the subject was 'Marxism and Christianity'. We had some very distinguished speakers and I can remember them although many spoke in foreign tongues. Nicholas Berdyayev was a Russian Orthodox ex-Marxist and Julius Hecker came over from Moscow specially to address us and I believe T.S Eliot was there. It was quite high powered.
I think that got across for me, in a kind of academic perspective, what things were all about in Britain at that time. It was encouraging, really that kind of issue was so much at the top of the agenda in Oxford in my day. I can say that my real commitment to Christian socialism came eventually in action rather than in conferences. And of course, it didn't really flower until I got to South Africa itself. But before that, I was drawn very strongly to a religious order in the Anglican church called the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in Yorkshire, which was founded by a very remarkable Anglican bishop, Charles Gore (who is still commemorated by an annual lecture in Westminster Abbey), and who declared himself a Christian socialist and remained one. The community he founded always had that element in it. I, of course, didn't go there immediately to try my vocation but I went to visit it, and I was much impressed by the feeling of the community: the way the brethren were very aware of the world. It was not a reclusive community, it was an active missionary order. In its early days it was regarded by the Church of England as very left wing indeed because we invited
Keir Hardie - one of the leaders of the Labour Party - to come and address a great mass meeting in the quarry at Mirfield. And always, even in my day, when general elections came up, the brethren were quite free to go and talk on Labour Party platforms, or wherever else they wanted to go.
So that socialist element was there. And it was very, very congenial to me. I can't say that then I knew terribly much about it in practice; nevertheless, that was my background from then on. I am still a member of the Community, it's still basically my home, and I hope to die there one of these days.
However I came down from Oxford and I had a few months to fill in before going for my theological training. My aunt who had brought me up, left me £500, quite a lot for those days, and I went off on a tramp steamer, first of all to what was then called Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and then on a major trip through India to see the places where my father had lived and worked. In the course of it I went across to Burma and up the Irawaddy and right up to the Chinese frontier. At that time Ceylon, of course, was still part of the Raj. In the church it was very highly multiracial: every community of Sinhalese and Tamil and Burgher (as the white settlers were called) worshipped together. It was a very great experience of inter-ethnic worship. It certainly impressed me very much. I think it was almost a unique church in those days.
Then, having done that grand tour, I came back. In the Church of England part of your training is to go as a curate - it's called your 'title' and you do two or three years in a parish before you do anything else. Some clergy of course decide they want to be chaplain to a university but they're all supposed to do a stint in a parish. Luckily for me - and again, this was through the Community because two of our members had worked in that parish - I was sent to St Mark's, Swindon. Swindon in those days was the real working headquarters of the Great Western Railway. All the people who belonged to the parish where I was a junior curate (there were seven of us) were employed by the Great Western Railway: they got up when the hooter blew; they knocked off when the hooter blew; and they went for their holidays two weeks at a time when they were told to. It was a marvellous working-class parish.
These experiences in Swindon didn't do anything to undermine my interest and concern in socialism. My time there ended early in 1939 and I knew then that I must go to Mirfield to the Community of the Resurrection and test my vocation to see whether they would have me, and whether I would have them. That is what is called a 'novitiate'. I landed up there in about February or March 1939 - and of course within six months war was declared. So I was in a community that was cut off from its missionary work in Southern Africa, which was very considerable: we'd started educational work in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at the end of the last century. We were responsible in South Africa for the Anglican Church's work in primary and secondary education; and in Rhodesia we had a big secondary school and a teacher training college. So there was plenty of scope.
Although I didn't get to South Africa for four years, there were a lot of the brethren in the Community who had been out there. I couldn't get out there because we weren't allowed to (it was very difficult to get a passage), and they couldn't get home. Nevertheless, the South African background was very real, and when I took my vows after two and a half years - the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the traditional vows - I knew the chances were that when the time came I would be sent to South Africa, because all the younger brethren were asked to go there to get experience.
I can remember very well the day that I left for South Africa. The war was still on. I had to sail in convoy from Liverpool and I can remember throwing my gas mask over the side when I got on to that boat - and of course I never saw the war again because South Africa was never hit in the same way by the war as Britain was. It was a remarkable thing to sail into Cape Town and see all the lights on and to go to a club and have a most marvellous meal.
Anyhow, my beginnings in South Africa were extraordinary really. I was pretty young - just thirty - for the job I was asked to do. The new Superior who had done the job before me sent me to Sophiatown, a black residential area in Johannesburg. It was separated by a few miles from what is today Soweto, the largest black township in South Africa. Sophiatown was much closer into the centre of the city.
I didn't know when I first arrived there how I was going to cope with it at all because I had this vast parish to look after with about seven churches and a large number of schools, including the largest primary school in South Africa, St Cyprian's. I can remember on the day I arrived there, the doors of the church opened and about two thousand kids poured out.
And I thought, 'How the heck am I going to get to know any of them?' There were so many, of all different ages. For the first year or two I just had to find my feet. I had to run the place and I had to report to the bishop. I obviously knew very little.
It was Sophiatown and Soweto that matured me, because I felt apartheid, as it affected the people I was looking after (particularly the young and the old), when I saw every day of my life what apartheid did to them. In those days particularly, it was the housing conditions, the pass laws and all that went with them - the segregated society which had been there for generations.
I soon discovered that Sophiatown was a most vital place to live in, it was alive in a special way - because it was very crowded but the they were a real community.
At that time there were some very notable African leaders living in or around Sophiatown: for instance, the President of the African National Congress (ANC), Dr Xuma, lived just up the road from me, I knew him very well, and Selope Thema, who had been a member of the first Native Representative Council, and by this time was a kind of elder statesman. The presence of many such political leaders meant that we were automatically politicised.
One day stays in the memory very clearly. That was the day when I was invited to go to a meeting of the African National Congress in a big hall in the centre of Johannesburg. It happened to be a Sunday because that was the day when they could meet because they were all working on other days.
I had to do my religious duties in Sophiatown and then push off to the middle of Johannesburg for this meeting. I can't remember the exact occasion but it must have been a rather special meeting. It was certainly very crowded. But I can remember it so clearly because it was then - and as a direct result, I suppose, of a build-up in myself of the necessity to act rather than just to observe, to act in a political as well as being a pastor in a caring way as far as one could do this - it was from that moment that I identified with the ANC, and that led on in future years, after the Nationalists government came to power in 1948, to a different kind of battleground altogether.
I would say that in the first years, between 1943 and 1948, I could see clearly the way things were going. But nobody at that time really believed that having won the war, a war which was ostensibly against racism, Smuts would not do anything to bring about some change in his own country. After all, he was one of the architects of the United Nations Charter.
And so there was a great feeling of hope in the air. I want to convey this because immediately after the war there were movements in the white community like the Torch Commando* (which I remember blessing when it left on its journey to Cape Town from the City Hall steps).
The Torch Commando were World War II veterans opposed to the Nationalist government's attacks on the constitution, in particular on the limited voting rights still held by some black South Africans. They took their name from the torchlit processions of protest they organised.
All that, of course, came to an end in 1948 in the general election of that year when the National Party came to power and when Smuts himself not only lost the election as leader of his party, but lost his own seat. He never got back into the mainstream of politics again. I can remember that. I was ill with flu and I listened to the radio and I heard every result coming through with this extraordinary reversal. Smuts thought that because the war had been won, he would certainly get back into power. They were totally complacent, the so-called United Party.
So that was a crucial moment. And it was then that almost all the major legislation which today is structured apartheid, was passed. And yet from 1948 to 1956, when I left South Africa, it was still possible to hold massive protest meetings.
We began, of course, in Sophiatown itself.
I can remember meetings in what was then the Odin cinema. It was in those days a very posh cinema for Sophiatown, and a very good meeting place. It was the one place I can remember where Nelson Mandela and I were on the same platform. It was a very crucial meeting because the police were ringing the building - there were thousands of people inside and thousands of people outside - and we really thought there would be bloodshed. We had to calm the people down.
I've got a photograph of myself with on of the Asian leaders - with the police intervening.
Similar political events took place in Freedom Square in Sophiatown.
Other protests were held in Johannesburg by the white community, protesting against the major legislation of that time, like the Group Areas Act, the Bantu Education Act, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, and the Immorality Act.
Such laws were never passed without protest, and I was certainly part of that protest.
There were very few white people in those days who lived in a black township. We were the only ones apart from a small Roman Catholic mission just up the road. Michael Scott, who was a great pioneer of rebellion, had been a chaplain at an orphanage not very far from where I lived, and I worked with him.
At that time, too, the great squatter movement broke out in Orlando when thousands and thousands of homeless people built shacks on the edge of what was then called Orlando and Meadowlands, and which today is part of Soweto.
Those were years of intense commitment leading up to the great day of the Congress of the People at Kliptown, just outside Johannesburg.
This story has been told many times, but it was a very great meeting because it was the largest multiracial gathering ever held in those days.
Also it was a meeting with a vital function. It had to pass the Freedom Charter clause by clause.
This was a great historic moment.
When people talk about the ANC as a 'terrorist' organisation, they haven't any understanding of its history, which goes back to 1912.
When the Native Land Act was passed in 1913 Sol Plaatje and other leaders decided that they must make their protest at Westminster. A later delegation in fact was able to see the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and make their protest. But I am sure Kliptown will always be a real landmark in African history. Everyone was there who could get there. Of course Chief Luthuli was supposed to be there - he was then the President of the ANC - but he wasn't allowed to be there as he was restricted and banned. Yusuf Dadoo of the Transvaal Indian Congress was unable to go for the same reasons.
I suppose I was the only one of the Isitwalandwe(* Isitwalandwe is the highest honour awarded by the African National Congress.) award winners who was able to get there, because I was white and because I was a clergyman. At that time I think clergymen were regarded as harmless. But I have tried to alter that in the course of my life!
I had matured both in my socialism and in my commitment: I believed most strongly that fighting apartheid was a moral battle against something profoundly evil. It didn't come to me through academic reading or study. It came to me through seeing apartheid in its impact on the people who I had responsibility for as a priest.
And the marvellous thing to me has always been that those kids that I looked after are still in the forefront. Desmond Tutu is one of them. He was thirteen when I first knew him. He had very bad tuberculosis and he was on his back for two years in hospital. I used to visit him every weekend and take him books.
Another of the great excitements of Sophiatown in the years that I was there was the opportunity to build up a real cultural concern because the people were starved of music. There was a marvellous man called Joseph Tarneck who ran the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra and he brought his entire orchestra out to Sophiatown. He became a regular visitor and a very great friend. They used to come on a Saturday afternoon and play in the school playground. And then, when visiting artists came from abroad under contract to white entrepreneurs, I used always to invite them to come and play in the church. The first, I think, who ever did was Yehudi Menuhin. He came and gave a concert in our church, which was packed. The Amsterdam String Quartet, which was very high powered, came and played in our little nursery school to an evening gathering, and they told me afterwards they'd never played to a more musical audience. This inspired me a great deal.
When I was promoted in my Community to be Provincial (that is I had to look after all the houses in the Community), it meant leaving Sophiatown physically and living in a place called Rossetenville where our big secondary school, St Peter's, was. I never really left Sophiatown, though, because the Community was still there and I was able to go there whenever I wanted to.
Here was another challenge. That school was very special in many ways. Oliver Tambo was a schoolmaster at St Peter's when I first knew him. Ezekiel Mphahlele, the writer, was another schoolmaster. People like the author Peter Abrahams were old boys of the school. It was obvious that we had a nucleus of children, both boys and girls, who were the future.
Quite accidentally I hit on a way of mobilising culture for that generation. There was an epidemic of flu and I went up to the dormitory and there was a small boy called Hugh Masekela, who was recovering. He wasn't very ill but I just said to him, 'What would you like to make you better quickly?' And he immediately answered, 'A trumpet.' I couldn't go back on my promise so I went and got him his first trumpet.
Then of course everybody in the school wanted an instrument. I spent about a year begging instruments. I hadn't got any money - I had to beg the money as well as the instruments. And gradually we built up a really first-class jazz band. Hugh Masekela was the trumpeter. He really taught himself: the only thing I did was to get a Salvation Army trumpeter to show him how to blow because he was making such a filthy noise I thought the neighbours would break us down! Jonas Gwangwa was the trombonist, and Churchill Jolobe was the drummer.
At the same time, there were also young boys and girls who were heavily politicised. I suppose I did quite a bit of the politicising - I hope I did, anyhow. Their names, of course, are not so familiar as Oliver Tambo's but there were quite a number of others who in time found themselves committed to struggle.
Those St Peter's years led me to the important understanding that one way of mobilising world opinion against South Africa was to plead for a cultural boycott: to say to artists of every kind, "If you come to South Africa you are in fact supporting apartheid because you will only be playing (as they were in those days) to white audiences. So don't come." And I wrote an article in the Observer (I've still got a copy of it) which I called "The Church Sleeps On", and attacked the church for not being active in a world sense, and particularly in Britain, in support of the struggle.
I came back to Sophiatown at a particularly critical time when the government was determined to remove all "black spots" (as they called them) from white areas and they picked on my parish. This was a population of something like 60-70,000 people. As soon as their plan (known as the Western Areas Removal Scheme) was promulgated,
We knew we had to take action and we formed a protest group.
It was at that time that the people I'd known best to be involved in the struggle really came into their own. Nelson Mandela, needless to say, was one of them on the African side. But I also got to know Ruth First pretty well - she was a frequent visitor; so was Hilda Bernstein whom I knew exceedingly well - Violet Weinberg and Helen Joseph. They were all visitors to my office in Rossetenville and Sophiatown. And I think the Western Areas Removal Scheme did something else: it was the first time that the media from Britain sent their top correspondents to cover what was happening. So we had all the major 'heavies'. We had people like Cyril Dunne from the Observer, Rene McColl from the Daily Mail - everyone in fact who was in that line of business, whatever the political party their paper represented, was there. So we got an enormous amount of media coverage in Britain for the Removal Scheme.
That went on right through 1955 when the people were removed from their homes and their homes were bulldozed out of existence.
They were dumped on a bit of open veld in Meadowlands on the edge of Soweto,
and there was nothing that could be done because the force used to remove them was very massive. But don't forget, that removal was just part of the population removal which has been going on ever since. Up till now, 3,500,000 people have been uprooted and moved.
So it was a very critical historical moment and I am thankful to have been there on the first day that it happened. I remember going out there early in the morning -
lorries were all lined up . . .
...and the police were there in great numbers.
They got the people out of their homes...
And Started Bulldozing Them Straight Away.
This was the end of Sophiatown.
It wasn't the end of the community in Sophiatown because that moved over in the end, basically, to Soweto. And they went with their political commitment. I knew very many Soweto people like Walter Sisulu and Albertina Sisulu: they were part of my parish. And all these people came into greater prominence because here was a focal point, something which everybody recognised as the hard cutting edge of apartheid - as it has proved to be.
I would say that Removals and the Bantu Education Act were the two major issues.
I did write about this very clearly at the time, and I tried to arouse world opinion on this issue because it seemed obvious to me that Verwoerd and 'grand apartheid' would take over and destroy so many people.
Even so, I knew - and I'm not saying this with hindsight - that we had such a quality of leadership in the African community, really great people, as the Robben Island prisoners have shown; as Oliver Tambo has shown, that we would be bound to win.
When I was recalled from South Africa by my own Community, I thought at that time I'd never get back to Africa again.
And in fact, I had a special job to do which is not always very easily understood outside church circles: I was made what they call 'guardian of novices ' in my own religious community.
I had been away for over 13 years and I hadn't a clue about the generation of men who were seeking to try their vocation in a religious order. So I had to learn all that. At the same time my book Naught for your Comfort had just been published.
I was called away again and again to address public meetings all over England.
It was a very difficult thing to hold together: a job which really required me to be with about 20 young men I was training, and at the same time go off talking about South Africa. It was very painful having to talk about South Africa all the time. However, thank God, after a couple of years I removed to London for a brief period and then, quite out of the blue, came the news that I'd been elected bishop of the diocese of Masasi in Southern Tanzania. So I heard a great sigh of relief to be able to leave England and to go back to Africa.
Of course, the Africa I went back to was totally different from the great urban African townships of Johannesburg and the Reef. This was an entirely rural area. The people that I came to serve were peasant farmers. Ninety per cent of them were reliant on good weather for their crops: if they had a good year they would sell what they grew, they could raise their living standards a little; if it was a bad year, they had nothing. And quite often in that very part of Tanzania the rains failed, the drought came, and it was a very, very difficult time for the whole community. Whole villages sometimes just had to get up and move because they hadn't got enough water.
So it was a very new experience and at the same time I was bishop for the first time. I had overall responsibility for a diocese the size of England. It was also a scattered diocese. We had only two major small towns - they were on the coast, the port town of Mtwara and the port town of Lindi. Otherwise all the parishes that I looked after were in little country villages scattered over that great area. It was a fascinating and marvellous experience to have to adapt to rural Africa. I had to learn from scratch the real meaning of rural life. I had been brought up in a town, after all, in England and I had worked in a town in Johannesburg. Now I was in a rural area.
In addition to that, I had to learn the language, Swahili, because without it I couldn't even talk to my own clergy. Swahili is a marvellous language but it took me at the age of 49, which I was then, about three years to become fluent in it. I think when you're that age it's much more difficult. When you're young, you have the opportunity of just moving around and listening. I got stuck into learning the grammar but then I invited children to come to my house so that I could practise my Swahili - I didn't mind making mistakes with kids and they enjoyed it. And, of course, they also spoke the purest kind of Swahili.
I had one enormous advantage in going to Tanzania because I had already met Julius Nyerere who was leader of the party which at the time of independence took over as the government. He was Chief Minister when I arrived in Tanzania but I had already met him in London. In fact he and I were on the platform at the launching of the Anti-Apartheid Movement so, as it were, w e understood each other very well. In the years that I was there in Tanzania I had plenty of opportunities for meeting him and getting to know him better.
This was a great advantage because I was there, after all, at a crucial time. I arrived in 1960, a year before independence I was there, therefore, in the last year of what you might call the colonial regime. So for a year I was there under the old administration, and this was very interesting because in Tanzania, unlike some other colonies, relationships with the administration, the British Colonial Service, were very good. I think it was because Tanzania is such a marvellous country that many of those who were sent to administer it fell in love with it and really enjoyed the people, as they should.
They are wonderful people, the Tanzanians, as they have proved over and over again in the struggle against apartheid by being a Front Line state which has just done everything to support liberation movements. In fact, during the time that I was in Tanzania, our border, of course, was the Mozambique border, and Frelimo, the liberation army, and Samora Machel were actually training in my diocese.
There were about 30,000 of them. I didn't know at the time that Machel was my next door neighbour because it was all top security. But I did meet Eduardo Mondlane, the founder of Frelimo who was later assassinated, more than once.
My concerns were really to get to understand what it would be like to live in a country which was discovering its own identity as a free, independent and sovereign state. This was very exciting. When I went to Masasi, we had the usual set-up: District Commissioner, Assistant District Commissioner, District Medical Officer, District Veterinary Officer, all of them white. After independence in 1961, they withdrew within a few months. They didn't withdraw altogether from Tanzania because quite a number stayed on in the capital, but not in the rural areas. This is the biggest criticism that I would make of the colonial administration: that it was an administration which did nothing, absolutely nothing, to prepare the people for independence and sovereignty. And so, when the British colonial civil servants withdrew (and I can say this with absolute accuracy), the only really educated person in the administrative headquarters in Masasi was an Asian filing clerk.
Think of the colossal job President Nyerere really had to face: to provide an administration for a country of that size. Tanzania is twice the size of France. They had to use all those people who could be found, in education, for example - school teachers - to build on until an effective administration could be built up.
I was there also for the most important and significant political event, which was the very remarkable Arusha Declaration - Arusha is a large town in the north of Tanzania. Nyerere, who by then had become President, an Executive President, had worked for a long time on the principles of the Arusha Declaration.
In fact, when he became, as he did at first, Prime Minister, he resigned and retired for a whole year from political life. He didn't know whether he'd be reelected, he didn't know whether he would come to the very top again, but he was determined to think out the principles on which Tanzania should develop.
The Arusha Declaration was a very important milestone, not only for Tanzania but I think for the whole of Africa. Zambia, particularly, picked up on some of the elements in it. The two main elements, in Swahili, were 'ujamaa', which Julius Nyerere defined as African Socialism, and 'kujitegemea' which really means 'self reliance'. On those two principles he tried, and in many respects succeeded, to build the new country. I was there for that process.
It was fascinating, because I had been in confrontation with a white minority government all the time I was in Johannesburg, and in South Africa
I had to confront apartheid because of its evil impact on individual people. Now I was in a country with an African government, freely elected by the democratic process. We, the white community in Tanzania, were a very small minority, yet it was marvellous to be able to work one hundred per cent with the government because I believed fully in the principles on which it was based. And I say that as a Christian leader, too. My job really was to activate the Christian community as far as the Anglican church was concerned, to recognise that in those two principles of African Socialism and self reliance, they were actually able to build their country on sound lines.
Of course, there are many, many more things I could say about Tanzania because I learnt so much from the people there, and still do. I am President of the Britain - Tanzania Society and we've got a lot of rural projects in Tanzania still. So I am able to go there and see how things are developing. And I've been able to keep up my friendship with Julius Nyerere. It was wonderful to have had the opportunity of those eight years discovering what it meant for a new nation to find its identity.
Obviously there were problems, as every new country has problems. But I believe still that Tanzania has made a major contribution in the struggle for liberation in Southern Africa. At every point it has opened its doors to those who were leading the liberation struggle, whether they came from Mozambique or from what was Rhodesia or from any other neighbouring country seeking liberation. Tanzania was both a model and a friend, and it remained so because the African National Congress has strong educational bases in Tanzania, and no doubt it will play a very important role in the next decade or so.
However, I knew that my job in Tanzania was to train African leadership in the church - that my job was to work myself out of a job, in fact - so that there would be an African bishop, an African education secretary for the diocese and so forth. And that time I expected would be about ten years. In fact it was only eight and I came back to England at the invitation of the then Bishop of London to be assistant bishop, or suffragan bishop as it is called, in the East End of London, in Stepney.
I can't tell you what the culture shock was like, coming out of a country like Tanzania with a peasant farming population in a very poor area of a very poor country, and coming back to the urban area of London which was always described as the most deprived area of London, the East End. My area of jurisdiction as a bishop was three boroughs, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Islington, and today Hackney and Tower Hamlets are the most deprived boroughs in London. But I came back and I saw shops bursting with goods. I had kids who said they were going to get Christmas presents costing 70 quid, and so forth. And that was a year's wage - if it was a good year - in Masasi. I didn't know what had hit me! I couldn't believe that people could say they were poor. The children in Masasi never had more than one meal a day. The greatest treat I could give to kids was to go in the Land Rover with them down to the sea, stop on the way, and the meal that gave them most delight was just a plate of rice and some fish and the gravy the fish was cooked in. That was a treat. And every child would have to come to school, not on a full belly at all, but waiting until school was over to walk home, perhaps two or three miles, before they got their main meal. So you can see, deprivation means different things wherever you are.
I came to learn during the ten years I was in Stepney a great deal about deprivation. And I think deprivation in an affluent society is infinitely worse than poverty in a Third World society which has marvellous values of community, of sharing and all that goes with it.
I came to Stepney at an interesting time. It was in 1968 and it was the time when the Pakistanis from East Pakistan (as it then was, today it is Bangladesh) were coming into that area which has always been a great immigrant area in Britain. If you read history at all, you know that those who were refugees from religious persecution or whatever kind of persecution it was, came up the Thames, landed in the poorest area in London, and got a foothold there simply because they were so poor. We have had waves of immigrants over the last three centuries, starting with the French Huguenots, who were refugees from religious persecution in France - remarkable people in their own right, but very poor when they landed in Stepney. They had to make their way, and they did it by setting up silk weaving. In my house in Commercial Road I had a mulberry tree which was planted by them all over the East End of London.
I came just at the time when a very nasty and very sinister upsurge of racialism was taking place - "Paki-Bashing" it was called. At that time in 1968 the Pakistanis were desperate, because they were so poor that they easily identified by their colour. They were identified in other ways too - by their religion, by their language - and they had to find a foothold. And don't forget, that part of London has always been a base for fascism and racialism. It was Oswald Mosley in the 1930's who recognised this, when in fact the immigrant community, although it had been a very long time, was the Jewish immigrant community which had fled the Tsarist persecutions in Russia and Poland. And Mosley thought that he could use his racism to best effect by attacking the Jews. There was a march he planned, and there was a great battle, still remembered in the East End very vividly, the "Battle of Cable Street", which the police were unable to control and the fascists became the victims of it, because the Jews and the Irish combined to bash them.
And that has never been forgotten.
But these poor Bangladeshis or Pakistanis came into that sort of situation. So in my first couple of years I was very heavily involved in protest meetings and leading delegations to the House of Commons, in doing the sort of thing I was able to do in my first years in Sophiatown before the present Nationalist government came to power in South Africa and imposed much more repressive laws.
I am sad to say that element of racialism still persists, although the Bangladeshis have well established themselves and they are a very large community now.
So it was a challenging time to be there from that point of view. It was always very exiting for me to be in the area where the church was a small minority and where in fact we had to try and build up a community. In other parts, in Hackney and in Islington, the Caribbean community had settled in very large numbers. So it was a multiracial as it ought to have been because I am afraid one of the ways in which the establishment of the Church of England operates is to make people who come from overseas, who are devout members of the Anglican communion, feel a kind of cold shoulder at going into churches which are too "respectful" or too Western in the wrong sense of the word.
After ten years in Stepney I decided it was time for me to go as I was already 65. Quite unexpectedly, out of the blue, I received an invitation from the Diocese of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean to come and help them. The first Mauritian bishop died within six weeks of being made a bishop - he was quite young - and they didn't know where else to look, I suppose. They'd heard rumours that I might be available and of course for me this was a marvellous new chance, and so I set off for Mauritius.
When I got there they had to elect an Archbishop, so within a couple of weeks of being in Mauritius I was made an Archbishop and that meant I had to look after the Anglican church in the marvellous island of Madagascar and the islands of the Seychelles as well as in Mauritius. I had a pretty wide brief and I was called Archbishop of the Indian Ocean which caused a lot of ribald comment - because most of my parishioners were fish, I suppose they thought.
Mauritius is unique in that it was an uninhabited island with no aboriginals. The population came with colonialism and as they had no labour they got slave labour from India. Sugar was the basis of the economy. So the population, from Africa, Asia and Europe, is a microcosm of the world, with all the world religions - Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists and a minority of Christian churches, mainly Roman Catholic because of the French colonial influence. And so for me it opened up a completely new vista of what I would call inter-cultural inter-faith relationships
Madagascar is exiting in a different way because I suppose it is one of the least known countries in the world. It has enormous potential and is very beautiful and vast. I lived in Mauritius but I visited Madagascar quite frequently and moved around the country. I had three diocese to look after there. It was while I was in the Seychelles that the strong, long arm of South Africa came into play because, towards the end of my time, the South Africans decided to try and overturn the government which was not in their favour, as it were. They were quite determined to do so and so they sent a mercenary force. Because of a very alert customs officer, a woman, who spotted the barrel of a gun sticking out of their luggage, they were caught and stopped in their tracks. It is a very interesting example of the policy of destabilisation and how it reaches right into the Indian Ocean - and still does, of course. Strategically it's very important to the major powers. You've got the two - on the one hand the Soviet Union with a vast navy in the Indian Ocean, and on the other hand the Western powers with their navies. Frequently, you would have war ships coming into Mauritius on courtesy calls.
I remember a garden party in the Governor General's house in Mauritius. In one corner of the garden was a bunch of Russian naval officers; in another comer there were the Chinese; in another corner there were the British and French. Of course, South Africa is an Indian Ocean state in the sense that it has a border on the Indian Ocean. The South Africans were very alert in trying to destabilise the Seychelles because it's got a very important international airport and harbour. So I didn't escape apartheid policies there either.
My time in the Indian Ocean was a wonderful experience. I came back to England completely convinced, from the religious side particularly, that what we'd got to do was to have dialogue with people of other faiths.
I launched a series of evenings in my own house - there was a vast veranda and dining room in the bishop 's house there, it would seat 100 people. I chose the subject 'What is Man?'. I got a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, even a Marxist view, because I had a rather distinguished Marxist staying there at that time. And people came in great numbers because they'd never really had an opportunity to discuss these things. I was very glad to be there.
I was in Mauritius for five years. They went very quickly and I learned an awful lot there. And my greatest joy was my visits to Madagascar and to the islands. It was very rewarding in every way. When I went there I decided that I was not going to stay more than five years as I would be 70 by then. So I left and came back to London.
I went back to my Community up in Yorkshire at Mirfield but I found that impossible because I was spending all my time on the train to London commuting. I had become Chairman of the International Defence and Aid Fund and President of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and I didn't want to be a nominal president, stuck away up in Yorkshire. I wanted to take part in the activities and so, luckily for me, a great friend of mine, who knew the rector of St James's, offered me accommodation there. So I got a very delightful little flat at the top of the rectory. I couldn't have been in a more central place than St James's Piccadilly. It's a very lively community, full of movement all the time and it's so central for people to come and see me, easy to connect up with the main line stations, to travel to the airport and so on. Of course, I'm independent as I'm not part of the staff at St James's so I don't have to be there every Sunday. So I get the best of both worlds.
I knew, of course, when I got back to London that I would be the President of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in reality instead of just on paper, but I didn't realise how quickly I would get involved in the struggle within South Africa. Within a year of my arrival in London, it was announced that the Prime Minister was inviting President Botha to visit. Chancellor Kohl and various others had also invited him - but she had invited him to talk with her about his plans for the reform of apartheid - which of course were no reforms at all. What they were, in fact, was the promulgation of a constitution which provided a tri-cameral legislature of three houses, one for the white minority, one for the Asian minority and one for the Coloured minority, and none for the African majority.
I got an appointment with the Prime Minister before Botha's arrival. I am bound to say she was really quite generous with her time. She was very busy because there was a major miners' strike on and I remember her coming into 10 Downing Street in a fury because she had met some of the pickets on the way. However, we settled down with a cup of tea and I was able to talk very freely about my experience in South Africa. I said to her, 'You know, I'm not talking about Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo as if they were symbolic figures; they are my friends and I'm just not prepared to accept that this situation should go on indefinitely.
'She then said, 'Well, how would you end it, and when and how do you think apartheid will end?' I said, 'As to when, we ought to have done it years ago; it's not a matter of tomorrow even. But, as to how, we do it by an effective sanctions policy.' She challenged me on the issue of sanctions. And I was able to say to her that the only effective way of bringing apartheid to an end is by sanctions.
To which she replied as usual, 'Sanctions don't work.' I said 'Prime Minister, it's very strange for you to say that because two years ago you went to war with Argentina over the Falklands and the very first thing you asked for was sanctions. And you got them rather reluctantly from the united States of America(USA) and from the European Economic Community (EEC) and the Commonwealth. How come sanctions don't work if you yourself asked for them?" "Oh," she said, "that was a war situation." I said, "Isn't there a war situation in South Africa where you have a whole country - Namibia - occupied illegally by 100,000 troops from South Africa for ten years? When you have them marching into Angola and occupying a province, bombing towns in Zimbabwe and BoTswana and Zambia, is that not a war situation? We didn't get any further, needless to say, but her position on sanctions has remained unaltered and so has mine, because looking back I see it has been the use of various forms of sanctions that has been the one effective means of focusing world attention on apartheid as a moral challenge - and that's what sanctions are all about.
Sanction's aren't an end in themselves; sanctions are for the purpose of bringing to an end and totally destroying apartheid by putting maximum pressure on the South African government - not on the South African people, on the South African Government - and that is what Mrs. Thatcher refuses to recognise.
In 1986, after the Nassau meeting of the heads of the Commonwealth, the Eminent Persons Group (EPG) was set up, which was a Commonwealth group representing, through seven distinguished public figures, the whole Commonwealth. I thought, and I think most other people thought, that this wouldn't achieve very much because it was just another group, but in fact it achieved far more than we ever dreamed it could. I had a great deal to do at that time with Sir Shridath Ramphal, then Secretary General of the Commonwealth, because he was responsible for the EPG. This gave us an opportunity to bring home to people in this country the fact that Britain was isolated in the Commonwealth on the issue of sanctions, that, unanimously, the rest of the Commonwealth voted for an effective sanctions policy with only Mrs. Thatcher and her government standing in the way. We were bound to go on keeping up the pressure on the government. Not that it was very fruitful in this instance, nevertheless it's something that I will continue to try and do. I've had more interviews than I care to remember with the Foreign Secretary on this same issue. Nevertheless, the EPG laid down a programme which, if it had been followed, could have been the first major advance towards the end of apartheid. It was based on the fact that the white minority would not give up voluntarily its domination inside South Africa.
This would only come about through pressure from outside forcing them to get round the conference table. Even Mrs. Thatcher had to concede certain very limited sanctions. The EPG perspective had its impact on the USA as well because the US banks came in and Congress opposed President Reagan's policy of so-called 'constructive engagement' with Pretoria. And so it widened the whole international field. I found myself having to go across to the USA to talk about disinvestment in universities, even on Wall Street. This was a very important part of the job and very soon I found that my journeys overseas really amounted to visits to governments, particularly Commonwealth governments, to try to persuade them, if they needed persuading, to put more pressure to get a change over the policy of mandatory economic sanctions, under the United Nations.
So, recently, I've been twice to India, where of course I found enormous support from Rajiv Gandhi. I've been to Australia two or three times and, again, from the government there we've had massive support. And so it's gone on. But it has meant of course that the job of President of the AAM has become, I might say, almost a full time job. It would be full-time, except that there are other jobs to do connected with the whole issue. As I said before, I am President of the Britain Tanzania society - Tanzania being a Front Line State and President Nyerere, as he then was, being really the voice of the Front Line States for about the last twenty years, ever since he became Head of State there. So I've been around the Front Line States; I think I've been to every one except Angola. Really my job is an international job as far as the struggle is concerned.
The President of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, has been a very close friend, I suppose my closest friend in Africa, for more than 40 years. When I went off to Tanzania in 1960 he had just come abroad in order to organise the ANC world-wide, in order to get the whole thing on a proper footing. And his achievement has never had the respect and encouragement that it ought to have had, because he has had to carry the main burden all through those years. He's had to be separated from his wife and family, and for the first ten to fifteen years he didn't get much support. It was only through his steady persistence that he built up a reputation for and with the ANC, which is now of course well established. It is now a 'government in exile' and that is almost all Oliver's work and I really do want to express this because he certainly deserves all the recognition that can be given.
The AAM is a very high profile movement - it's clear what it stands for and there has never been any movement, launching mass rallies and promoting the whole battle against apartheid in every conceivable way. I am also Chairman of the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa (IDAF), which was founded by Canon John Collins over twenty years ago. That has as its objectives three things: first of all, to ensure the defence in the courts of political prisoners; secondly, to aid their families; and thirdly, to keep the conscience of the world alive by publications, by every conceivable means of communication.
Now that, of course, in one sense, had to be a low profile organisation simply because it was banned inside South Africa for 24 years and anyone proved to have received funds through it was automatically criminalised. The work of IDAF is absolutely vital work and we have the task of raising millions in order to see that the work goes on, and that all those inside South Africa who need legal defence get it.
With Glenys Kinnock at the launch of the International Conference on Children , Repression and the Law in Apartheid South Africa.
As I said earlier, I had the honour of being the first to propose a cultural boycott, cultural sanctions, and I did it as long ago as 1955. I urged a total cultural boycott of South Africa. The cultural boycott spread and spread and became a really powerful instrument for isolating the South African regime from the rest of the world.
It was supported strongly and out of it grew the sports boycott which, I suppose, in some ways has been the most popular boycott because sport is a most popular thing. Everybody knows that now South Africa is isolated from world sport in a very big way, it is desperate to get back into the field.
But the most important sanction is economic, and this, as I said, was recommended by the EPG, and supported to various degrees by the US into the South African economy. Nevertheless, Great Britain continues to invest in South Africa and to trade with South Africa, in spite of the recommendations of the EPG, in spite of our isolation in this way.
Its not the only country that does, of course: the Federal Republic of Germany does the same, France does the same and Israel does the same. Nevertheless, Britain has got the longest history of total commitment to South Africa economically, so we have never let up on the battle to bring about sanction there.
One of the most important sanctions which we haven't yet been able to achieve is the sanction against gold, and that involves, of course, the country where the banks are all important in that respect
Switzerland is the centre of that particular trade. And so, not long ago, I went to quite an extraordinary meeting in Zurich. I've been to various shareholders' meetings in Britain but at the Zurich meeting there were over 2,500 individual shareholders! It was a meeting addressed by the president and he had all his directors on the platform and an enormous TV screen above his head, so that his face could be magnified twenty times, and he controlled the meeting from beginning to end. As I had a share I had my name put down to speak. Well, I got away with it for about ten minutes. When I was heckled half way through, I'm bound to say in fairness that he stood up and said, 'No, we must hear him out.' But when I came to the real crux of the matter which was to say that dealing with South Africa in the way the Swiss banks were doing was immoral, then the chopper came down. He shouted at me to stop speaking at once, as Switzerland had diplomatic relations with South Africa.
I replied that Britain also had diplomatic relations with South Africa but that didn't stop me speaking there. However he switched the microphone off and then showed a very tendentious film on the TV screen which showed only those blacks and whites who opposed sanctions. He then told the audience that this was the true voice of South Africa. So the question of sanctions has been a very major issue and it's been backed up in our case by massive rallies which have had much bigger consequences than just focusing on sanctions.
We had one a few years ago on Clapham Common which was attended by more than a hundred thousand people. Even the underground railway stations came to a halt because there were too many people pouring through them. We had a great mass concert there, which was a multi cultural affair with people like Hugh Masekela and other great groups like Spandau Ballet who were prepared to support us. It was a marvellous day, very hot with a picnic atmosphere, and I had to address this massive crowd. It's always very difficult when people are really enjoying the music to know how you break in and how you get them to just pause for a second to listen to the message.
But they've always been very responsive, I must say. And then, of course, in 1988 we were focusing on the release of Nelson Mandela for his 70th birthday.
And there we had two great events in London. We had the Mandela concert at Wembley stadium which was televised worldwide and I am told about a billion people saw it or heard it. I was there and so was Oliver Tambo as were many others.
And so many great pop stars of the world gave their services. This was not a fund-raising effort - it was very specifically to focus on Mandela, to focus on the release of all political prisoners and on an effective sanctions policy to persuade or to convince the South African regime that it wouldn't get.
We also had a rally in Hyde Park and Archbishop Tutu spoke at that one, as I did too, and that was even bigger than the one on Clapham Common. So having a definite goal to isolate the Pretoria regime, and to do so by means of an effective sanctions policy while reaching out to the mass of people, particularly the young, has been our objective. And I don't think we are doing too badly. Sometimes people ask me what the AAM has achieved after thirty years and I can say that it has made apartheid known world-wide as something basically evil, which cannot be reformed, which has got to be destroyed. I'm certain I speak for the majority of the world's population when I say that message has been taken
Only the other day I spent a week in Nigeria and I've never ever had such a reception in any country, African or otherwise, an official reception sponsored by the government. At every place that I went to we got massive support. So one is comforted by that, although I'm not too comforted because still apartheid goes on and we've got to end it.
There is no question, of course, that what has happened in Namibia is of absolutely crucial importance to the struggle. One thing is certain, that South Africa, having occupied the territory illegally for so many years, had no business to be the controlling power over the run-up to the election, that ought never to have been allowed.
The fact that their administration really dictated the terms under which the election took place is a tremendous criticism of the United Nations. The resolution to reduce the UN's election monitoring force from 7,500 to 4,600 troops, which we pleaded very strongly should not be reduced but increased in the light of what had happened in Northern Namibia, was a totally inadequate United Nations response. Whatever view you take of SWAPO's determination to be on the ground when the process started, it was met as always by South African aggression and determination to use the maximum force that they could find. But the process for the liberation of Namibia did go forward and now Namibia is free we have the remaining task of the liberation of South Africa, and that shouldn't take long.
I want to make it clear, as clear as I can, that the only way to view the struggle against apartheid inside South Africa is to recognise that apartheid is basically evil and that it has to be destroyed. There is no question whatsoever of compromise at any level because apartheid is the source of everything that is destructive - it proves itself in the way it destroys the lives of people. As a result of apartheid you have constant oppression, and constant determination to destroy the peace of the whole region and to establish South Africa as the regional power. All of this springs from the one evil, central, dogma of apartheid. So don't lets have any more talk about diplomatic and political engagement, that will not get rid of apartheid. We have to have the political will to recognise a moral evil and to determine that it is wiped off the face of the earth.