Christianity in the Twentieth Century by Stanley Brian;

Author:Stanley, Brian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400890316
Publisher: Princeton University Press

II. Apartheid and the Churches

Delegates attended the Notting Hill consultation from many different parts of the globe, and its concerns covered racial and indigenous issues in all continents. Participants included Cath Walker, an aboriginal Australian woman, and Hector Martinez, a Peruvian Indian anthropologist. Nonetheless, southern Africa, and South Africa in particular, were the most prominent objects of the PCR in the first twenty-five years of its history. Others present at Notting Hill included such strong supporters of African interests as the New Zealander Garfield Todd, who was a former Churches of Christ missionary and prime minister of Rhodesia from 1953 to 1958, and Michael Scott, a former Anglican missionary to South Africa who had in the 1940s helped to organize a nonparty group called the Campaign for Right and Justice before being expelled from the country in 1950. The first speaker at Notting Hill was Scott’s close associate, Trevor Huddleston (1913–98), who at the end of 1955 had also been forced to leave South Africa, though in his case he was recalled by his religious order, the Community of the Resurrection, before he was pushed out by the government. Huddleston, author of a fearless exposé of life in the Johannes-burg slum of Sophiatown, Naught for Your Comfort,19 served as bishop of Masasi in Tanzania from 1960 to 1968 before being appointed bishop of Stepney in the east end of London.20

With Canon John Collins of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Scott and Huddleston were the prime movers in the early British campaign against apartheid. Collins first became involved in South African affairs as early as 1952. In 1956, in response to the arrest for treason of Nelson Mandela and 155 others, he set up the Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, a forerunner of the Anti-Apartheid Movement formed in 1960.21 Collins is also of note as one of the founders in February 1958 of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Scott and Huddleston—and to a lesser extent Collins—were Anglo-Catholics, heirs to the Victorian Christian Socialist tradition that emphasized the radical implications of the incarnation of Christ, which gave sacramental value to the material world. Another controversial adherent of that tradition who soon became a thorn in the side of the South African government was Ambrose Reeves (1899–1980), bishop of Johannesburg from 1949 to 1960. Through a letter to the Rand Daily Mail and a subsequent book, Shooting at Sharpeville, Reeves publicized the truth behind the Sharpeville massacre on March 21, 1960, when, in a mass demonstration against the pass laws, which required Africans always to carry a pass legitimating their presence in “white” areas, 69 Africans were shot dead (mostly in the back) by the South African police, and 186 wounded.22 The government responded in September 1960 by deporting Reeves: he was the first Anglican cleric to face such a sanction. Later, in 1985, Desmond Tutu, then secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), would be appointed as the first black bishop of Johannes-burg. As spokesman for the SACC, then as

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