dumped on the Cape Flats – one of the many apartheid crimes that destroyed the lives of communities and families around the Peninsula. Long before that, Africans had been excluded from living within the “white” areas of Cape Town, so there already existed poor black townships on the city’s perimeter, which served white interests. Not everyone who lived in Cape Town was a privileged Capetonian enjoying the mountain, the sea and its many other attractions.
At this stage, there were handfuls of “coloured” students on the UCT campus who challenged our prejudices. There was also a lively political debate among sections of the university community. Anti-apartheid student protest action was beginning, and would gather momentum over the next few years.
After teaching Sunday school in District Six on Sunday afternoons, I would sometimes stand on the Grand Parade and listen to anti-apartheid speeches by leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). Within a few years, these gatherings became illegal, but I have often wondered whether I heard some of the great liberation leaders speak. So my political education began at the same time as I was being introduced to Aristotle, Kant and the existentialists, and while I taught Sunday school.
My father was not keen that I should go into the ministry, but my mother thought it a good idea. In the end, they left it up to me to decide. And so, during that first year at UCT, when Basil Brown, pleased by my examination results, asked me if I was serious about the ministry, I confidently answered in the affirmative and was invited to preach at our church one Sunday morning. My sermon, the first of many to come, was on the healing of Naaman the Aramean (2 Kings 5). It is a wonderful story of prophetic insight and the humbling of power, but I doubt whether I understood that at the age of eighteen.
I was subsequently interviewed by another senior minister, Noel Tarrant, a wise and venerable man, who probed my intention with searching questions. I was adamant (perhaps even too self-assured) that this was my calling, and my application was approved by the Congregational Union of South Africa (CUSA). Today that would be impossible: There is now a minimum age requirement and a lengthy process for testing vocations.
By this time, I was aware that CUSA was a predominantly coloured denomination – at least in the Western Cape – even though the majority of congregations that I knew well were all-white. From time to time, ministers from other racial groups preached at our home church, and I would attend meetings or services at theirs, but it was all rather paternalistic. Being a majority black denomination did not mean that the majority was in control. I also discovered that most of the white ministers were expatriate Englishmen who had little knowledge of the church on the other side of the tracks, and no knowledge of Afrikaans and Xhosa – the main languages spoken there. They could just as well have been ministering in Manchester, Birmingham or London. I was, in fact, one of a small handful of South African-born white candidates for the ministry in CUSA.
The ministerial committee decided that I should go the next year to Rhodes University in Grahamstown, about a nine-hundred kilometres to the east of Cape Town, where an ecumenical Faculty of Theology had been established in 1947. This would enable me to finish my BA begun at UCT, and to take some pre-theological subjects before proceeding to the Bachelor of Divinity (BD) – the equivalent of today’s Master of Divinity. I was excited by the prospect.
My sister, Rozelle, married Ramon Dempers from Windhoek in January 1957. I was one of the best men at the wedding, and was fitted out for the occasion in a tailor-made suit. At the wedding, I met a young woman who had recently moved from Johannesburg to Windhoek. She told me to look out for her close school friend Isobel Dunstan, who was now studying at Rhodes. The consequences of this conversation would be life changing, but I had little premonition that this was so at the time.
Late that January, along with James Elias – a Presbyterian friend who was also going to Rhodes – I left home and caught the Union Castle mail ship to Port Elizabeth. Rozelle and Ramon happened to be on honeymoon on the same boat. I didn’t see anything of them during the trip, but then I was only on board for one day and night. It must have been very sad for my parents to say farewell to both of us at the same time, but my sights were set on what lay ahead. Arriving in Port Elizabeth, we took an overnight train that stopped at virtually every siding along the way for the last hundred kilometres to Grahamstown.
Situated in a hollow in the hills, Grahamstown had something of the charm of an English country town. After all, it began as a British and largely Methodist and Anglican settler village in the early nineteenth century, soon after the arrival of the 1820 Settlers. These unsuspecting arrivals were sent to the Cape at the end of the Napoleonic Wars to become a buffer between the expanding colony to the south and the Xhosa-speaking peoples to the north-east.
When I arrived, the legacy of that conflict was still apparent in the architecture and social stratification of the city, with the majority of blacks living in poor townships, struggling to find employment in town and at the university. The “coloured” population fared better, but not by a great deal. In contrast, the “white” Settler city boasted many churches, fine boarding schools, an Anglican theological seminary, as well as the university and the regional law courts. Settler Grahamstown was conservative and racist, with pockets of liberalism an exception to the rule.
There were two Congregational Churches in town, both situated on its outskirts as a result of segregation. I preached at one of them several times, but it was a long walk to attend regularly, so I worshipped at the “white” Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, along with my fellow theological students, or “toks” as we were known. In those days, going to church on Sundays was the norm for most people, even students, though that was changing by the time I left. During vacations, it was not always possible to go home, so some of us went to run evangelistic missions at churches in nearby towns, under the banner of the Varsity Trekkers.
In 1957, Rhodes was a small English-speaking university of eight hundred students. Largely segregated like all South African universities, it was twinned with the University of Fort Hare in Alice, where Nelson Mandela had once studied, some 160 kilometres away. Given its modest size and geographical isolation, Rhodes had some remarkably able and progressive professors, whose work was internationally acknowledged.
The theological students’ residence was named Livingstone House after the LMS missionary explorer David Livingstone. Although it was reserved for senior students, I was placed there from the outset to make up the Congregational quota and, as always, was the youngest in the residence to begin with. The majority of the seventy or so students in the Faculty of Theology were studying for the Methodist or Presbyterian Churches. There were a few Anglicans (they had their own St. Paul’s College across the valley) and only a handful of Congregational students, as the majority were at Fort Hare.
Apart from a few rather pious fellows, the “toks” were a boisterous bunch of men (there were no women in the ministry then), most of them older than the average student. Some had a fair amount of life experience behind them. I recall one had been a London policeman, and another a champion wrestler. Both of them were part of a group of English Methodists sent to South Africa for training before serving in local churches. I will remain silent about the pineapple punch we brewed and sold to other students, but I will say that I learnt to play squash and became reasonably good at it.
I soon settled into the routine of Livingstone House. Our regime was by no means as strict as St. Paul’s Anglican College across the valley. But it was obligatory to attend evening prayers each day in the chapel, wearing our black academic gowns, which we were also required to wear in the dining hall. Lectures were given every morning, so most afternoons we were free to study or play sport. On the weekends, there was not much to do in Grahamstown apart from going to church, except going to the two small bioscopes to see outdated movies (but never on a Sunday), playing sport, or courting female students – a major pastime for most of us. Only one student in Livingstone House had a car during the four years I was there, and as there was no public transport in the town, we walked everywhere.
