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I HAVE COME A LONG WAY
JOHN W. DE GRUCHY
Lux Verbi
FOREWORD
Emeritus Archbishop of Cape Town
Desmond Mpilo Tutu
The World Council of Churches (WCC) provoked the anger of the vast majority of white Christians in South Africa with its Programme to Combat Racism (PCR). This anger was stoked further by the grants the programme made to what the majority of blacks regarded as liberation movements and the nationalist Afrikaner government and most whites regarded as terrorism. The government wanted the churches to withdraw from membership of the WCC. The prime minister, Mr John Vorster, agreed to meet a delegation of church leaders to discuss this hot topic in August of 1970. To prepare for this crucial meeting, this delegation gathered at St. Peter’s Theological College – the Anglican seminary run by the Community of the Resurrection – in Rosettenville, a white suburb to the south of Johannesburg. John de Gruchy, working for the South African Council of Churches (SACC), was the organiser of the gathering. He invited me to give one of the Bible studies, and I think I met him then for the first time. As it happened, the meeting with Mr Vorster never took place. But little did we know back then that John would become such a magnificent scholar with a very impressive international reputation.
When I went to work for the much maligned WCC as an associate director of its Theological Education Fund based in Bromley, Kent, in the UK, I invited John to become a member of its Africa Committee, an invitation I was glad he accepted. He was at ease hobnobbing with rising theologians like himself from South America and Asia, as well as more established figures from the UK, Europe and North America. His stature as a theologian and writer, especially as an authority on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was growing in quite a spectacular way. In my view, nothing attested to this more than the holding of the Seventh International Bonhoeffer Congress in Cape Town in 1996, thereby proclaiming that South Africa was no longer the world’s pariah state following the accession of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected president of a free South Africa.
John has held visiting professorships at prestigious universities overseas and given lectures in many of them. At home he was a professor of Christian Studies and held the Robert Selby Taylor Chair at the University of Cape Town. He was sought-after as a lecturer, both in South Africa and in many other parts of the world. His rise was indeed amazing and meteoric. We could not have imagined anything so electrifying when we sat in the garden of St. Peter’s College all those many, almost light years ago.
Isobel, his wife, was meanwhile carving out a niche for herself as a writer and publisher of poetry, and as a painter. John’s autobiography quotes from this poet at some significant moments in their lives. They are a remarkable couple, these descendants of immigrants from France and Jersey, England, Cornwall and Germany. After a very full life, they intended to enjoy the quieter pace at Volmoed, a community that offers retreats and opportunities for personal growth and renewal.
But their bliss was shattered by the death by drowning of their son Steve, who had been prominent in the anti-apartheid struggle, and who had followed John as a writer, teacher and theologian. Isobel lost a loving and beloved son. John lost a son and a theological colleague and collaborator, with whom he was planning another joint publication. Isobel turned to her poetry and painting to find solace and healing. Contemplating such a devastating loss, John wrote Led into Mystery to try to produce a satisfying theodicy.
I believe John has spent many a long hour churning over and over again: “If only.” He is not the man he would have been had Steve been alive. I think he weeps often; it has been a shattering and devastating loss for them, and for us. What he has said about facing such a traumatic experience has helped to help others. And for this we give thanks to God. Many of us also give thanks for John’s intellectual brilliance and outstanding scholarship. But most of all, I give thanks for the humility of revealing his vulnerability.
Prologue
Who do I think I am?
Is it vanity to write the story of one’s life? Partly, no doubt.
But partly not. For it is also the story of millions of people, and they are my countrymen and women.
(Alan Paton)1
Isobel and I were waiting for our flight from Cape Town to London. It was January 1993. An Anglican priest and activist friend, Clive McBride, greeted us in the waiting lounge and asked where we were going.
“To Oxford for a sabbatical,” we replied, “and to explore family roots in Cornwall and on Jersey Island. And you?”
“I am going to Indonesia for the same reason,” he said to our surprise, given his surname.
The changes taking place in South Africa were sending us in opposite directions in search of our ancestral roots. For whereas our grandparents arrived in South Africa as European settlers in the nineteenth century, Clive’s maternal forbear was brought here as a slave. As a result, we were classified “white” and he “coloured” under apartheid laws. This made a huge difference to our status and prevented us from knowing much about each other’s story. Racial identity either opened doors to privilege or slammed them shut in servitude. Ours meant opportunity and possibility; that is why our grandparents came to South Africa. In doing so, they needed neither visas nor the approval of the people of the land, for the Cape colony was part of their empire. In our recent past, the question “Who do you think you are?” was a challenge to such racial arrogance. Today it also motivates a quest for an identity that might bind us together, prompting self-reflection about what I am doing here.
I cannot understand my story apart from that of the many others I have met on my journey. My life is inseparable from family, friends and fellow travellers to whom I am variously connected. For that reason their names recur in telling my story, though I cannot mention them all. I would also not be who I am if I had not been born and brought up in South Africa in the mid-twentieth century. So in telling my story I have to locate it in the country’s narrative as well. But my story also goes well beyond these shores, for it is entwined with many others in faith, action and mutual interests the world over.
Much of my life has been spent in writing, but this book is presumptuous by its very nature and different from anything I have written before. An autobiography is, after all, about the person writing it; a story constructed by the author even if based on fact. The challenge is to tell it with due humility but not false modesty, suitable honesty yet appropriate reserve, and in a way that makes it worth reading. I can only hope I have succeeded.
What has spurred me on in this quixotic task has been the fact that, for the past few years, I have often been asked to speak about my life and have been interviewed for oral history projects and the like. I have also received some unexpected honours. I presume that is because my life and experience is of some interest. But if it is, it is chiefly so because I have lived through interesting times in an interesting country, travelled to many interesting places, and been accompanied along the way by interesting folk.
The latter inevitably leads to name dropping. I make no apology for having some well-known friends and excellent mentors, and for rubbing shoulders with celebrated people. In group photographs there is always someone partly hidden in the background or sitting at the feet of others more illustrious. That is often me, but at least I am in the picture, if not the most prominent. So it gives me pleasure to acknowledge all who have been within the frame of my life, and I apologise in advance for inadvertently or out of necessity leaving some out of the narrative.
Looking back, I have often thought about my own role in
