In Philosophy II, Professor Barrett was succeeded by someone who was to become specially beloved. Daantjie Oosthuizen was small in stature and big of heart. His humility co-existed with massive intelligence and a gentle but incisive humour. He offered his students genuine respect but no intellectual quarter. He was an Afrikaner unafraid to question apartheid and this made him an early target of the Security Police. The Philosophy Department was not known for sympathy to religion but Daantjie was an unapologetic Christian. A colleague once confronted him, wondering why someone of his obvious intellect should bother to follow Jesus. Daantjie thought for a moment, then squinting at him through his thick spectacles, said, “Who else would you recommend?” He was a Christ-like man absent of all religiosity and I will always be grateful for the two years spent with him. It was as tough as my dean had promised. There were three students in the second year, and only two of us survived to Phil III. No more slipping into the back of the lecture theatre, nor escaping rigorous intellectual engagement. I would not have survived had it not been for Daantjie’s kindness. He recognised the struggles, but also the potential in me, and seemed to think me worth nursing. It was in his classes that I learned how to think, and to lean into the tough questions without fear when they threatened my faith. In fact, quite the opposite happened: Jesus seemed to manage quite well without my dubious assistance and engaging with the great minds and spirits of human thought confirmed for me the pre-eminence of this Jewish carpenter.
Mixing with students beyond Divinity’s church-conditioned community kept my feet on the ground. We are told that Jesus was heard gladly by common people but theologians and the religious have done their best to reverse that. To this day I still have no time for religiosity, nor for what William Sangster used to call the ‘language of Canaan’ – the arcane code-words that the religious use to communicate with each other. I also enjoyed a brief foray into Sociology, another required subject. Professor Irving, burdened with too many theologs in his class, felt the need to remind us that: “You ‘gentlemen of divinity’ focus on what ought to be; here we study what actually is,” another warning about the way faith and the church could lose touch with the real world.
The other subjects – including two years of Biblical Studies and Church History and three of Systematics – were all more or less easily managed and began to be fun. Our teachers, we discovered, could be fun too. When fellow student Ken Carstens used his ‘crit’ sermon to lambast South Africa’s whites with the vivid image of “two million white plutocrats being rowed by fifteen million sweating black slaves up the economic stream,” Professor Hewson responded with just one remark: “Kenneth,” he said, “it must have been some boat!” When I critiqued theologian WR Matthew’s Christology, saying that he was “barking up the wrong tree”, Professor Maxwell returned my essay, remarking in the margin: “Comparing the Dean of St Paul’s to an over-enthusiastic and misguided puppy is an impertinence – unless it is indeed the wrong tree.” The generous mark he gave me indicated that we agreed about trees. All too late in the day I had begun to thrive and though I was to struggle with reading and memory retention for the rest of my ministry, for the latter half of my three-year sojourn at Rhodes, the classroom became a place of pleasure instead of pain.
There was also time for fun – probably too much of it. I had moved into Livingstone House in my second year and occasional cross-town raids on St Paul’s Anglican college were returned in force. Livingstone House had to be defended, sometimes with water hoses, and when the battle was over we were to be found on our knees, like kids with a jigsaw puzzle, trying to refit the parquet flooring blocks that had floated away in the fray.
First year students were known as ‘Inkettes’. One of them – whom I liked very much – was trying to raise Rag funds with her Phelps House associates by offering male students coffee for a shilling, plus a kiss for two shillings. They were still falling short of their target so she and I looked for a stronger incentive. In those days – disgustingly colonial as it may seem in the more enlightened present – students could leave their shoes outside their rooms for polishing, so in the small hours of one morning I crept down the Livingstone hallways stealing the left shoe of each pair. I delivered a boxful of left shoes to my Inkette friend and a notice soon appeared in Livingstone House announcing that anyone wanting their shoes back should go to Phelps bearing one more shilling. As streams of Livingstone men rummaged through the big box for their missing shoes the Inkettes raked in more money with their ‘coffee and kiss’ trade. However, when they finally closed the door on the last Livingstonian and began to clear up, they discovered that most of their teaspoons were missing. Next day a notice appeared in Phelps House announcing: “Teaspoons available at Livingstone House for 6d an item.”
While I was at Rhodes, Dad became the leader of the Methodist Church in Southern Africa. In those days we followed the British pattern of electing a ‘President of the Conference’ each year, which had the disadvantage of inconsistent leadership, but did prevent leaders from getting too big for their boots. The President’s year began with the Annual Conference in October, over which he presided, and then consisted of visitations to all the Districts, offering inspiration and leadership. All this happened without any let-up in his local church responsibilities. Dad’s Conference was to be at East London, so I hitch-hiked the 100 miles to hear his Presidential Addresses dealing with the national spiritual and political landscape. I was incredibly proud of him of course, while trying not to show it. He had become steadily more trenchant in his critique of the government, describing apartheid as slavery in another form and morally indefensible. He now confronted it head on. Apartheid, he said, when pushed to logical conclusions, ran into theological conclusions. It was a sin against God: “The government’s view is that while one white man (sic) and one black man are friends, apartheid will have failed; the Church’s view is that so long as one white man and one black man are not friends, the Church will have failed.” The Church, he declared, was therefore on a collision course with the regime. It would disobey certain laws and government pressure to conform: “We will not place the Church at the disposal of the State.”
I came away from East London quietly thrilled with Dad’s clear witness, but also shocked by the reaction of some of his colleagues. While black Methodists warmly welcomed it, many white clergy were either lukewarm or openly hostile. I was thinking that my father would not have an easy year in leadership, but it turned out that he would not have the year at all. A longstanding heart problem wore him down and halfway through his Presidential year he was forced to hand over the reins and sail to England for one of the early open-heart surgeries pioneered at Guy’s Hospital. What he had achieved, however, was to lay the ground for South African Methodism’s most critical decision, taken a year later. During the 1950s some conservative white church leaders, encouraged by the government, argued that the MCSA should accept the new apartheid realities and, much like the Dutch Reformed Church, break into racially defined segments. There was a real danger that this view might prevail. My father, together with some others, saw