day in 1948, when the National Party came to power on the ticket of its apartheid policy and Smuts was ousted. I was vaguely aware that something ominous was happening.
My father, a follower of Smuts, declared that the results were disastrous. He was no political liberal (nor was Smuts), but he had experienced the influence of the secretive and powerful Afrikaner Broederbond at his work, where he was denied promotion in favour of younger broeder colleagues he had taught. He had learnt Dutch at school and could speak Afrikaans reasonably well – he had to, in order to progress at work. But he thought I needed to improve my ability in this regard, so one holiday I was sent to a farm in Citrusdal for this purpose. I recall picking oranges every day and sleeping in a bed with three other boys every night. I am not sure my Afrikaans improved.
My parents were probably more bothered by the rise to power of Afrikaner Nationalism than they were by the new apartheid laws. After all, racial segregation was nothing new, and their heritage was colonial. What was new, was the strict racial classification and obsessive racial controls that changed the social fabric and demographic face of Cape Town. When I turned sixteen, I had to register as a “white person”. I then received my identity document, which was my passport to privilege. By then I had already witnessed the segregation of our street and the buses, which now had a limited section at the back for those deemed “coloured”. I felt embarrassed, as I had always been taught to stand up and let older people, irrespective of who they were, have my seat. As a “coloured” Capetonian wryly observed, “Only roads and telephones were allowed to remain non-racial.”5
In SACS High, where I started in 1952, I received a classical education, which included Latin, and was selected to play cricket and hockey for the first teams when I was only in standard eight (now grade ten). I was good at table tennis and learnt to play chess, but I was bored to death by religious instruction, which, in my first year, meant reading the Bible in class from beginning to end. We never seemed to get beyond Leviticus and Numbers.
Many of my classmates were Jewish, mainly the children of families from eastern Europe, who had fled pogroms early in the century. There were also boys from St. John’s Orphanage, and many more whose families were struggling to make their way after the Second World War. Several of my teachers had served in the army, and we all knew families who had lost someone in combat.
We were all drafted into the cadets, and I joined the band and learnt to play the bagpipes – badly. We attended school in cadet uniform on a Tuesday, when we were on parade for an hour to the sound of bugles, drums and pipes. Once a month, we also had shooting practice with antiquated .22 rifles.
Outside of school, I became a member of the Cape Town Photographic Society, and could amuse myself for hours on end in my darkroom at home. I also went on photographic expeditions, invariably the youngest in the group, and with somewhat primitive equipment compared to that of the others. As a Sea Scout, I spent many Saturday afternoons rowing boats in Cape Town’s harbour, Duncan Docks, and learning to tie an endless series of knots.
In 1952 we celebrated the Van Riebeeck Festival – the tercentenary of the establishment of “white” South Africa. In the evenings, I went with friends to watch motorbikes race on a cinder track in the stadium erected for the festival. In the exhibition hall nearby, we gaped at real-life Bushmen on exhibit. The idea that they were “first-nation people” did not vaguely occur to us, or tally with what we were celebrating as a white nation. But the festival was regarded by most English-speakers as an Afrikaner celebration, so no one in our circle was particularly involved.
By the time I was in high school, Rozelle had a life of her own. Family holidays, few and far in between at the best of times, became rarer. Instead I was sent off to spend holidays with cousins old enough to be uncles and aunts, or to innumerable Scout camps. But then, at the invitation of my closest school friend, Rodney Dinan, I went to my first Scripture Union camp and, at age fourteen, I became a “Christian”. This happened one evening around a camp fire on the mountain slopes above Rooi Els, looking down on False Bay. I guess peer pressure played a large part in my decision; after all, as captain of both the cricket First XI and the rugby First XV, Rodney was a good role model. Adolescence, in any case, is a peak time for commitments and enthusiasms of all kinds. Or perhaps my Methodist genes had at last caught up with me.
My parents found it all a little odd, as I already was a Christian – or so they told me. I had been baptised, attended Sunday school, had been confirmed, and my name was John Wesley, for God’s sake! My father, more so than my mother, was bewildered by this “religious” turn of events. It was beyond his frame of reference, and that of his friends and the wider De Gruchy family – if not the devoutly Methodist Hurd one. But according to some of my close school friends, I had become a real Christian.
Whichever way I now assess what happened, it changed the course of my life. I do not regret that for a moment, but I do regret the extent to which I was then drawn into a legalist, fundamentalist Christianity, which made me feel guilty about youth’s peccadilloes, narrowed my perspective on life, and insisted on an understanding of Christian faith and the Bible that became increasingly untenable; though none of this was obvious to me at the time.
I was now part of a new “gang” of teenagers in Cape Town who had made the same commitment, attended rallies organised by Youth for Christ, watched Billy Graham movies, and went to Saturday night house fellowship meetings. I read my Bible every day, aided by Scripture Union notes, and tried to pray. I joined and became a leader in the Student Christian Association (SCA) at school, and, under Rodney Dinan’s influence, I briefly attended a Plymouth Brethren assembly where I was re-baptised, much to my parents’ consternation. But I soon became disenchanted with the narrowness of it all, so different from my home church, though I wished that the latter was more evangelical.
In any case, I determined to remain a member at Union Congregational Church, even though I had little guidance there in negotiating my adolescent faith. Fortunately I was embraced by others who offered the nurturing I needed, even if the explanations given, reinforced by chapter and verse from a narrow selection of biblical texts, soon proved inadequate. I had walked through a narrow door and embarked on a spiritual journey without knowing where it would take me or what it really meant. I still had a long way to go to find out.
3
Studying Theology and falling in love
Anyone who thinks or acts, prays or worships, as if there is some ultimate mystery known by many names but often as “God”, is a theologian, however rudimentary or sophisticated. But not everyone who does such things or believes in God discovers that doing theology can become a personal odyssey driven by a passion that can become all-consuming.
(From A Theological Odyssey)6
I matriculated in 1955 at the age of sixteen, a year below average and with average grades, and registered at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for a BA with English and History majors. I was the first in my extended family to go to university. Nobody, except my mother, thought I would succeed – not with my matric results. I must confess that I did not think so either. As there was a possibility that I might go into the ministry, I added Greek to my list of courses, along with Philosophy. My Philosophy professor, Martin Versfeld, was an Afrikaner convert to the Catholic Church and an authority on Plato and Augustine. To the surprise of everyone, including myself, I received high marks in the subject at the end of the first semester.
I joined the university’s Student Christian Association (SCA), which, at that time, was becoming more politically liberal, though it remained conservative evangelical in ethos. On some Sunday afternoons, I would go with other students to District Six, a predominantly “coloured” area not far from the city centre, to teach Sunday school. I recall the trek up Harrington Street to the small semi-detached house in Ayre Street where the class was held.
Little did I know that District Six
