remember my first week of lectures well, because Isobel Dunstan, about whom I had heard at my sister’s wedding, was sitting right behind me in one of my classes. She was in her second year and, out of interest, was doing a course in New Testament while studying for a Science degree in Mathematics and Botany. We soon went on several dates, but she was not particularly interested in me. She did, however, invite me to meet her family during my first Christmas vacation when she heard that I planned to spend six weeks in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs, working in a new church extension project. Isobel, who was of Cornish and Methodist stock, had meanwhile started going out with John Borman, a Methodist theological student. I myself had several girlfriends, though none of those relationships lasted very long.
Visiting the Dunstan home was an enjoyable diversion from walking in the summer heat to innumerable houses guarded by large dogs and separated by extensive gardens, to invite largely uninterested people to come to church. Another welcome distraction during that long, hot summer was watching South Africa play Australia at cricket at the Wanderers. In addition, I began Hebrew lessons with a sage-like Jewish scholar and, for the first time, experienced the awe with which Orthodox Jews regard the name of God given to Moses at the burning bush. Soon, however, it was time to return to Rhodes for my second year.
Our professors and lecturers were mainly expatriates, and the curriculum was based on the traditional Scottish model: Systematic Theology, Church History and Biblical Studies, each divided into various sub-disciplines. In addition Biblical Studies required Hebrew and Greek. I came to understand the Bible with fresh eyes, relishing the prophets and wisdom literature. It was an eye-opener to learn, for example, how the Synoptic Gospels came to be written, and how such knowledge helped one to comprehend them.
There were some attempts to give us training in pastoral care, but as this was not part of the university curriculum, it did not amount to much.
Looking back, I now know that our courses could just as well have been taught in Edinburgh, Zurich or New York, for there was little attempt to relate them to South Africa; although I did learn much about our social and missionary history, as well as the wrongs of apartheid, from Leslie Hewson, a South African Methodist.
Despite the curriculum’s shortcomings, I received a reasonable theological grounding and was introduced to some of the major themes and challenges facing Christian faith in the twentieth century, such as the relationship between faith and science. I was also encouraged to read widely and well. I enjoyed the work of the Scottish Congregationalist theologian P.T. Forsyth and that of another Scot, John Baillie, who, I later learnt, had been one of Bonhoeffer’s teachers at Union Seminary in New York. The major European theologian I studied was the Swiss Emil Brunner, whose controversial disagreement with his compatriot Karl Barth over the problem of natural theology exercised our minds. I also read Brunner’s massive book on ethics, The Divine Imperative, which was on our reading list. Barth himself, the most significant Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, was not a big part of the curriculum, and Bonhoeffer was an unknown name. It was only during my final BD year that I read the latter’s The Cost of Discipleship as part of a student reading group convened by Peter Storey, who went on to became a Methodist bishop and president of the SACC.
During my final two years, despite being part of a denominational minority, I was elected chair of Livingstone Fellowship, which comprised all theological students and represented them more widely. Livingstone Fellowship did much to foster a sense of ecumenical belonging, even though denominational identities were strong. It also brought me personally into contact with theological students at Fort Hare who would later become church and political leaders. I travelled there on several occasions – a two-hour journey by car – in order to discuss issues that threatened to destroy the already tenuous relationship between us at Rhodes and those studying Theology at Fort Hare. Although I always felt welcome, anger at both the injustices of apartheid and our liberal white paternalism was palpable.
Another task allotted to me as fellowship chair was attending the centenary of the Faculty of Theology (or Kweekskool) at Stellenbosch University in 1959 at the invitation of the Students’ Council. This turned out to be the beginning of a long relationship, which was uncomfortable at first, but enriching eventually. I went to the celebrations with James Elias, my Presbyterian friend from Cape Town. We were, I think, the only English-speaking guests among the students who joined the procession from the stately Kweekskool to the nearby and beautiful Moederkerk (Mother Church). There I listened to Professor B.B. Keet, doyen of the theological professors, who gave an overview of Reformed theology during the past century. Keet was one of the few Dutch Reformed theologians who had openly criticised apartheid, notably in his book Suid-Afrika – Waarheen? (Whither South Africa?), which I had read the year I was at UCT.
I made many friends in Livingstone House and by my third year, Isobel Dunstan and I had also become good friends. By this time she had broken off with her Methodist suitor, John Borman, and it was he who suggested that I should court her again. It was 1959 and Isobel was now in her final honours year. We began going out again, grew closer, felt attracted to each other, and discovered that we shared a similar spiritual journey and sense of humour. We were, in short, falling in love.
One weekend, I had to go to preach in Port Elizabeth, so we went together. We borrowed the minister’s small car on the Saturday evening, and went out to have supper on the Humewood Beach front. All we could afford were hamburgers and chips. It was then, in that “romantic” setting, that I proposed. Isobel later told me that she had anticipated my doing so. That evening we were young and I impetuous, the moon was full, and the future stretched invitingly before us.
Over the years of our now long marriage, Isobel and I have often commented that both our upbringings mitigated against expressing romantic feelings in overt ways. We had difficulty baring our souls or hugging and kissing exuberantly in public, simply because that was not done in our families. But reserve did not mean that love was absent or intimacy avoided. Years later, Isobel expressed this in a poem:
Mine was a loving, caring home
but not of demonstrative love …7
It is true that on the night I proposed to her I did not have a love poem to recite or a bunch of roses to give, nor did I fall on my knees; nor was her response a spontaneous hug and sensuous kiss, such as we had already shared aplenty while we walked and talked and lay on the grass on the hills above Grahamstown. Instead her response was a thoughtful pause and a request for time to think. She kept me hanging on a thread for two days. Then she accepted with hugs and kisses. Many years later, while looking back, she captured our relationship in another poem:
My love for you never was
an exotic brilliant-hued bloom,
or a heady-scented rose,
never a story
to catch the imagination
of the whole world.
Not Iseult loving Tristan,
nor Juliet with Romeo.
More like an acorn,
or the fleshy, round seed
of a yellow-wood,
small and insignificant,
but falling on dark, rich soil
and growing to a mighty tree –
deep-rooted and firm,
stretching arms to pluck
the rainbow from the sky.
Isobel’s
