There is something overwhelming about Ordination. It is a moment made holy by its reminders of call and commitment, of love and service, of duty and sacrifice. Stern words are spoken, vows are made, prayers are prayed and hands laid upon your head. You rise from your knees knowing that you have joined a two-millennial-old Order – the ‘Ministry of Word and Sacrament’ – and are wedded to it for the rest of your life. Moments in the service still live powerfully with me: the sense of panic when the congregation replied to the question about our worthiness to be ordained with a full-throated, “They are worthy!” How did they know? If only they knew …! And then, feeling the crushing pressure of seven pairs of hands on my head: this was not a gentle benediction. It was a heavy, heavy transmission of gift and task. I specially missed my dad that day. He had been ordained exactly 30 years previously and his had been a sadly truncated ministry. I knew that he had kept faith with his vows. Would I? In the moment of my Ordination when the Presiding Bishop prayed, “Father, send the Holy Spirit upon Peter …” it was very much as if those pressing their hands upon me were urging a new measure of God into my frail soul.
9
The Island
It lies there like the just-visible hump of a submerged leviathan, barnacled with a sprinkling of ugly buildings and smelling of kelp and sea-growth. Just seven miles from the mainland city of Cape Town, it might as well be in the middle of the South Atlantic.
Robben Island.
There is nothing beautiful about this place. Exposed to driving Atlantic gales in winter and the hot summer South Easters, the island is ringed by treacherous black rock shoals and thundering surf. Apart from a few gum trees its vegetation consists mainly of the rapacious Port Jackson willow which has triumphed over the indigenous fynbos. It is traversed by old military roads made of a blinding mixture of crushed shells and white limestone. A rutted landing strip is located at one end. At the other a small harbour provides the only safe approach from the sea.
Ever since Europeans came to the Cape of Good Hope, the island has symbolised white domination and been chaptered with human suffering. Variously a leper colony, a place of exile, a mental asylum, naval garrison and prison, it has always offered cold comfort. It has been a graveyard for unwary shipping and for the hopes of those transported there. When I set foot on its shores in 1962 I was not the first Methodist minister to preach to prisoners there. Some 140 years before, the great Methodist pioneer Reverend Barnabas Shaw visited the Island, “preaching on Captain Peddar’s veranda to such as understood English, and afterwards in the prison to the convicts in Dutch.”43
Among the 1963 arrivals there was Nelson Mandela, who most people do not realise had two introductions to the Island. His first had been via the degrading route that introduced most Robben Island prisoners to their new home, the prison launch Dias. Seasick and desperately trying to keep their balance while shackled to one another in the stinking, rolling hold of the launch, prisoners often endured white prison guards returning from the mainland urinating on them through the skylight above. Mandela’s first stay was short; within months he was taken back to Pretoria to join the rest of the Rivonia treason trialists, so called because they had been netted by a Security Police swoop on the secret headquarters of the African National Congress in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia. Those captured were, in Mandela’s words, “the entire High Command of Umkhonto we Sizwe”,44 the fledgeling armed wing of the ANC. The long trial that ensued, the guilty verdict and the sentence of life imprisonment, is now part of the lore of the liberation struggle. The day after their sentencing in mid-1964, Mandela and his colleagues were secretly flown from Pretoria to the Island airstrip to begin the incarceration that was to make the Island notorious throughout the world. They had narrowly escaped the hangman’s noose and when they asked what their sentence of life imprisonment actually meant the answer was, “You will be here until you die.”
The previous year had already seen the arrival of Robert Sobukwe, leader of the banned Pan-Africanist Congress, whom Justice Minister John Vorster liked to call “public enemy number one”. It would be a while before I could make his acquaintance.
As the first Methodist chaplain there, I was also the first minister to visit them. That exposure was to have a huge impact on me. It dramatised the great gulf between white and black realities in our land. Each crossing in the prison boat transported me between worlds that could not have been more different. My congregation of white Camps Bay families expected me to preach to them, to teach them and to minister to their needs within the context of a comfortable faith. The adults worked in banks, insurance companies and other ‘normal’ businesses just over Kloof Nek in Cape Town and their children spent the carefree after-school hours surfing the breakers that rolled in from the west. A few miles out into that same ocean was a different universe, a bleak and hellish prison-house prepared for those who dared to challenge the status quo upon which Camps Bay and every other comfortable white suburb was founded.
When I first arrived, the new maximum security cell block was being completed by common law prisoners and this is where the Rivonia trialists ended up, becoming the most prominent of thousands of political prisoners to experience the horrors of the Island over the next thirty years. Looking back, it seems absurd – even irresponsible – that someone as inexperienced as I should have been entrusted with the sensitive responsibility of being their minister. What could a kid in his twenties do for people of this calibre, and in such straits?
The fact is that the full weight of what was happening on Robben Island had not begun to dawn upon my superiors, nor myself. It would be good to be able to claim that the Methodist Church had the foresight to ensure the best possible pastoral care to these incarcerated men who were obviously leaders of the future, but that would be less than truthful. In what was then a largely white-run denomination, the national significance of people like Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and the others had yet to become evident; it was sufficient that a very junior, recently ordained minister could do the chaplaincy job.
The journey in the prison launch Dias lasted forty minutes – longer in bad weather. As it wallowed through the swells, I travelled on the upper deck with returning warders and their families, experiencing a huge sense of alienation. There was a bizarre disconnect between their bantering chatter and our cruel destination. I learned later that many prisoners who had never seen the ocean before had also to struggle with the terror of this alien element. Ex-prisoners still recall their fear on hearing the mournful hooting of the Mouille Point foghorn for the first time, and their hatred of the gulls’ mocking cries.
On my first visit I was met at the small dock by a warrant officer in a pick-up truck and driven through the entrance archway crudely painted with the Prisons Service crest and motto, ‘We Serve with Pride’. I wondered if this officer or his fellow guards saw the similarity to another arched gateway in Poland, where the mocking words ‘Arbeit macht frei’45 greeted the train-loads of victims herded there by other claimants to a master-race ideology.
The white limestone road led to the Church of the Good Shepherd, also known as the Leper Church. Built in the leper colony days and designed by famed architect Herbert Baker, it is a church of beautiful proportions, but its lovely stone exterior belied the emptiness within. It had been stripped of altar, font and pulpit, as if not one single symbol of the grace of God should be permitted to penetrate the lives of