Religion
Missionary doctor
Martin Sullivan
I have just put down a book which I hope everyone who reads this column will go out at once and buy. It is Daylight Must Come by Alan Burgess (Michael Joseph), the story of Dr Helen Roseveare, who as a doctor and a missionary has served since 1953 in the Congo. It is an unforgettable tribute to the triumph of the human spirit, another testimony to lay alongside those which came out of the concentration camps and torture chambers of the last war. Dr Roseveare is a committed Christian; and yet her conversion to a living faith was quite unspectacular and her hold on it, from time to time, almost precarious. She does not therefore appear as a propagandist, or even as an ardent preacher. Her life devoted to her African friends was her religion. She gave herself utterly to them, in her hospitals, in their villages and in their schools. Today the central station she founded with its flying doctors, teaching departments and operating theatre is unique in Africa. To reach this point, literally she. gave her blood, her sweat and her unremitting toil. She saw everything she had lovingly and carefully created smashed by the feet of screaming rebels, and the humanity she had come to serve and re-create behaving like devils on the one hand, and treated on the
other as if they were wild and savage animals.
During the crisis of 1964 she refused to leave the Ibambi Mission Station, her headquarters, situated in a remote corner of the Congo. In the end she was thrown out. The experiences of her colleagues and friends at the hands of the Simba forces in their revolt against the Central Government make almost unbearable reading. All their prisoners were killed by the terrible `Eommande torture.' They were bent backwards, wrists tied to ankles, kicked about as if they were footballs, heavy planks laid across their bodies to make see-saws, and then finally murdered with heavy machete knives.
No one escaped. Gentle nuns and other women missionaries were raped and brutalised, men mercilessly beaten up and killed, property pillaged and looted. In the middle of it all was this dedicated woman. Taking refuge in a convent, she grew to admire the Mother Superior who withstood her savage captors with courage and audacity. On one occasion she sought Helen Roseveare's help over a special problem. Two of the younger attractive nuns were constantly used by officers and soldiers, and one in particular was now in the clutches of the rebel colonel. The Mother Superior was concerned for the girl's sanity and begged Helen as a doctor to counsel her.Despite all that Helen could say the girl remained desolate. 'You don't understand. You can't understand. Unless it has happened to you, how can you?' But it had, Helen gently told her, and more than once. Now the girl understood. This English doctor-lady was a comrade.
My own faith was enormously strengthened as I closed this book. Helen Roseveare felt more than once that God had forsaken her, that indeed there was no God at all. I felt that also. And then once more she saw the light shine and her hope was restored, and somehow even the appalling savagery could be understood. She left Africa, resolved never to return: but back she went, to 'build the old wastes and to raise up the former desolations.'
This woman neither seeks our praise, nor needs it. With no pretentions whatever she is a modern witness to the everlasting qualities of goodness and truth.
Martin Sullivan is Dean of St Paul's
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