The ministerial committee decided that I should go the next year to Rhodes University in Grahamstown, about a nine-hundred kilometres to the east of Cape Town, where an ecumenical Faculty of Theology had been established in 1947. This would enable me to finish my BA begun at UCT, and to take some pre-theological subjects before proceeding to the Bachelor of Divinity (BD) – the equivalent of today’s Master of Divinity. I was excited by the prospect.
My sister, Rozelle, married Ramon Dempers from Windhoek in January 1957. I was one of the best men at the wedding, and was fitted out for the occasion in a tailor-made suit. At the wedding, I met a young woman who had recently moved from Johannesburg to Windhoek. She told me to look out for her close school friend Isobel Dunstan, who was now studying at Rhodes. The consequences of this conversation would be life changing, but I had little premonition that this was so at the time.
Late that January, along with James Elias – a Presbyterian friend who was also going to Rhodes – I left home and caught the Union Castle mail ship to Port Elizabeth. Rozelle and Ramon happened to be on honeymoon on the same boat. I didn’t see anything of them during the trip, but then I was only on board for one day and night. It must have been very sad for my parents to say farewell to both of us at the same time, but my sights were set on what lay ahead. Arriving in Port Elizabeth, we took an overnight train that stopped at virtually every siding along the way for the last hundred kilometres to Grahamstown.
Situated in a hollow in the hills, Grahamstown had something of the charm of an English country town. After all, it began as a British and largely Methodist and Anglican settler village in the early nineteenth century, soon after the arrival of the 1820 Settlers. These unsuspecting arrivals were sent to the Cape at the end of the Napoleonic Wars to become a buffer between the expanding colony to the south and the Xhosa-speaking peoples to the north-east.
When I arrived, the legacy of that conflict was still apparent in the architecture and social stratification of the city, with the majority of blacks living in poor townships, struggling to find employment in town and at the university. The “coloured” population fared better, but not by a great deal. In contrast, the “white” Settler city boasted many churches, fine boarding schools, an Anglican theological seminary, as well as the university and the regional law courts. Settler Grahamstown was conservative and racist, with pockets of liberalism an exception to the rule.
There were two Congregational Churches in town, both situated on its outskirts as a result of segregation. I preached at one of them several times, but it was a long walk to attend regularly, so I worshipped at the “white” Methodist and Presbyterian Churches, along with my fellow theological students, or “toks” as we were known. In those days, going to church on Sundays was the norm for most people, even students, though that was changing by the time I left. During vacations, it was not always possible to go home, so some of us went to run evangelistic missions at churches in nearby towns, under the banner of the Varsity Trekkers.
In 1957, Rhodes was a small English-speaking university of eight hundred students. Largely segregated like all South African universities, it was twinned with the University of Fort Hare in Alice, where Nelson Mandela had once studied, some 160 kilometres away. Given its modest size and geographical isolation, Rhodes had some remarkably able and progressive professors, whose work was internationally acknowledged.
The theological students’ residence was named Livingstone House after the LMS missionary explorer David Livingstone. Although it was reserved for senior students, I was placed there from the outset to make up the Congregational quota and, as always, was the youngest in the residence to begin with. The majority of the seventy or so students in the Faculty of Theology were studying for the Methodist or Presbyterian Churches. There were a few Anglicans (they had their own St. Paul’s College across the valley) and only a handful of Congregational students, as the majority were at Fort Hare.
Apart from a few rather pious fellows, the “toks” were a boisterous bunch of men (there were no women in the ministry then), most of them older than the average student. Some had a fair amount of life experience behind them. I recall one had been a London policeman, and another a champion wrestler. Both of them were part of a group of English Methodists sent to South Africa for training before serving in local churches. I will remain silent about the pineapple punch we brewed and sold to other students, but I will say that I learnt to play squash and became reasonably good at it.
I soon settled into the routine of Livingstone House. Our regime was by no means as strict as St. Paul’s Anglican College across the valley. But it was obligatory to attend evening prayers each day in the chapel, wearing our black academic gowns, which we were also required to wear in the dining hall. Lectures were given every morning, so most afternoons we were free to study or play sport. On the weekends, there was not much to do in Grahamstown apart from going to church, except going to the two small bioscopes to see outdated movies (but never on a Sunday), playing sport, or courting female students – a major pastime for most of us. Only one student in Livingstone House had a car during the four years I was there, and as there was no public transport in the town, we walked everywhere.
I 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