Struggle against ‘a blasphemy’

ANGLICANS AGAINST APARTHEID 1936-1996, by Bob Clarke. Cluster Publications, Pietermaritzburg. 2008. 594pp

Reviewed by Paddy Kearney

In the preface to this book, author Bob Clarke indicates that he wrote Anglicans Against Apartheid to record the Anglican Church’s witness against racial discrimination and to “suggest that this made an important contribution to the liberation of South Africa from apartheid”. He quotes Nelson Mandela’s comment that the Church of the Province “has pride of place in that historic line-up of churches which were opposed to apartheid”.

The period Clarke covers, from 1936 to 1996, saw eight Anglican archbishops of Cape Town come and go — starting with Francis Phelps’s election in 1936 and ending with Desmond Tutu’s retirement in 1996. Clarke chose 1936 as his starting point because that year Africans were removed from the common voters’ roll, the beginning of the sharpest decline in their fortunes.

Most of the author’s attention is focused on these eight archbishops, but he also records the efforts of some of the most notable Anglican activists during these years, such as Michael Scott, Trevor Huddleston, Bernard Wrankmore and David Russell, “whose special contribution to developing a theology and praxis of Christian resistance to apartheid was notable”.

One of the fascinating aspects of Clarke’s meticulously researched study is the opportunity it provides to compare the Anglican Church’s relationship to government in the late 1930s with that of the late 1980s. In 1939 when Francis Phelps was archbishop and the annual garden party held at Bishopscourt was a top hat affair attended by the Governor General.

In the late 1980s, Desmond Tutu was archbishop and, as the cover shows, he and other protesting bishops were scattered by water cannon spraying purple dye as they lined up for an illegal protest march outside Cape Town’s St George’s cathedral.

The saintly Phelps was not made for the cut and thrust of challenging government on the race issue. That task he left to lay leaders like Edgar Brookes. Phelps’s successor, John Russell Darbyshire, was even less likely to engage in such challenge. He did not spend his time “re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”, but in arranging flowers for the cathedral.

From the time of Darbyshire’s successor, Geoffrey Clayton, the Anglican archbishops of Cape Town were very different — all outspoken opponents of apartheid and household names: Joost de Blank, Robert Selby Taylor, Bill Burnett, Phillip Russell and, most notably, Desmond Tutu. Though I’ve included Burnett in this list, it should be noted that he was rather more outspoken before he became archbishop: his enthusiasm for the charismatic movement greatly tempered his relish for statements about apartheid injustice.

A simple comparison of the number of pages Clarke devotes to the more famous of these eight archbishops, namely Clayton (64 pages), de Blank (78), Taylor (84) and Tutu (190, about a third of the book), speaks volumes about the outstanding contribution of Tutu to the Anglican struggle against apartheid.

Many other things struck me as I read this remarkable history, of which I can only mention two. The first is that it was not the bishops or archbishops who first recognised the inadequacy of simply denouncing apartheid in sermon, statement and resolution: it would have to be actively resisted. This was the insight of Michael Scott who was not much loved by his superiors for his fearless involvement in active resistance especially during South Africa’s first defiance campaign in the early 1950s. If only that campaign had won the involvement of top church leaders in the way that the second defiance campaign of the late 1980s drew the vigorous participation of people like Tutu and Boesak.

The second insight that struck me most forcefully was a conclusion reached by Trevor Huddleston, that any form of racialism was “a blasphemy against the nature of God who had created man in his own image”.

Tutu in his youth was profoundly influenced by Huddleston. He echoed these words some years later: “I have tried to show that apartheid is intrinsically and irremediably evil. For my part, its most vicious, indeed its most blasphemous aspect, is not the great suffering it causes its victims, but that it can make a child of God doubt that he is a child of God. For that alone it deserves to be condemned as a heresy.” Tutu, of course, was the first of these archbishops who could speak on the basis of personal experience of the effects of racial discrimination.

Readers of this book will be grateful to Bob Clarke for his profound analysis of the Anglican Church’s struggle against apartheid. A retired Anglican priest of the diocese of Grahamstown, he has long been involved in this struggle and gives his text a particular ring of authenticity through recounting some of his own experiences, especially in the latter days of apartheid.

The foreword to the book is written by the present archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, the youngest person ever to hold that position. He describes Anglicans Against Apartheid as “fascinating, well written and succinct” and says that it “captures key historical milestones in an accessible manner and indeed makes history come alive” — high praise, with which I entirely agree.