Priest Militant
FOUR out of five books on Africa are sheer grind. Father Huddleston's book, by contrast, although it is about human misery and frustration and despair, is sheer joy. This has nothing to do with literary merits, in which Father Huddleston is not much interested. His book is a succession of episodes, drawn from his life in South Africa—chiefly in Sophiatown, a suburb of Johannes- burg—fused by his love of what he knows, written in the context Of his 'sudden, unwanted, but inevitable departure.' Why is this a book altogether out of the common run? Partly because everything that Father Huddleston says about South Africa springs from a coherent theology. He is a member of the Community of the Resurrection, an Anglican monastic order founded by Bishop Gore, and belongs by conviction to the militant tradition within the Church not-so-militant, 'It was Father Basil Jellicoe . . . who first inspired me with the thought—which has since become a passion—that it is a mockery of God to tell people to be honest and pure and good if you are making these things impossible by consenting to the evil of bad housing.' The belief that the meaning, or part of the meaning, of the Kingdom of Heaven is the struggle for social justice here on earth shook complacencies in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
England. But in contemporary South Africa where the barbarism of a class-ridden society is overlaid and intensified by the barbarism of a race-ridden society, and the frontiers of class and race are scarcely distinguishable—and the mixture is labelled `White civilisation'—the Church Militant (in Bishop Gore's or William Temple's sense) is bound to be regarded as totally subver- sive of good order and discipline. To go about—as Father Huddle- ston went about for twelve years—not merely preaching that Jacob Ledwaba, or Tryphena Mtemba, or Ma Malunga, ought to be treated as unique human persons rather than as aspects of 'the Native Problem,' but actually treating them as persons, and interfering (as far as humanly possible) with the normal oper.ations of the White Man's State when it refused to treat them as persons —this was evident sedition.
Naught for your Comfort has also a quality of truth that is often missing in reports on Africa, even by honest, intelligent observers—the kind of truth that is associated with participation. While there is no attempt to minimise the degree to which African man is mocked and degraded by a State which segregates him in a 'location'; controls all his movements by Pass Laws; insists that he should be educated to accept his inferior, Bantu, station in life; surrounds his world with a barbed wire fence, and condemns him to perpetual non-existence as a 'Communist' if he tries to break out of it—it is made quite clear that even in hell there is poetry and pleasure. Some of the best writing in the book is about
Sophiatown, Father Huddleston's home and battleground, which is now (under the Western Areas Removal Scheme) being rooted up—ostensibly as a slum-clearance scheme, but in fact because 'White Johannesburg had encroached upon black Johannesburg
and so, naturally, black Johannesburg must move on.' Sophiatown, recalling 'Sancta Sophia, Holy Wisdom, and the dreaming city
where her temple is built,' was in fact named after the wife of Mr. Tobiansky, who bought the land on which the suburb stands some fifty years ago; called the streets after his children—`Edith and Gerty and Bertha and Toby and Sol'; and, since Europeans wouldn't buy, sold plots to Africans. For all its squalor, 'Sophia- town is [or was] a community,' in which children play; girls grow up and get into trouble, boys scrape to get through matric, or get drawn into 'tsotsi' gangs; young men struggle against TB; the `Sophiatown Scottish' all-female band parades on Sunday after- noons, dressed in tartan kilts, and all the people dance behind them. Indeed, it is not the existence of hell—which has its own gaiety and beauty—that Father Huddleston finds terrifying, but the insidious habit of tolerating hell, which has enfeebled the European community—and its Churches.
Poor Mr. Bate. His title gives him away. Father Huddleston
begins with a clear statement of purpose—What I shall try to avoid is that most common and persistent error in all such assess- ments—the attempt to be impartial.' Mr. Bate, I am sure, genuinely intends to write 'without prejudice' : It is singularly unfortunate that for a hundred years South Africa has been a Tom Tiddler's ground for prating prelates and lesser ecclesiastical fry who collectively have stirred up racialism to the detriment of the doctrine of goodwill and brotherly love which it is their function to propagate. . .
All the old tunes are here— 'Don't be beastly; we have a unique problem; outsiders can't understand; outside criticism only makes everything more difficult.' Thank God for one turbulent priest.
TIIOMAS HODGKIN
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