3 - Seeing beyond apartheid
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2021
Summary
Lord Jesus, if I love and serve my neighbour
out of my knowledge, leisure, power or wealth,
open my eyes to understand his anger
if from his helplessness he hates my help.
When I have met my brother’s need with kindness
and prayer that he could waken from despair,
open my ears if, crying now for justice,
he struggles for the changes that I fear.
Brian Wren, September 1973Brian Wren was a Congregational Church minister in Essex, England, working for Christian Aid and serving as Programme Secretary of the Churches’ Committee for World Development, when he made a CFT study tour to South Africa in 1973. He was an Oxford scholar and a poet, and was moved to express his response to his exposure to apartheid in a poem, ‘Pilgrimage of Confession’ (quoted in part above and was later published as a hymn), which opened his report on his visit. He reflected on the distance and proximity between his home country and South Africa from the moment he got on the plane at Heathrow:
The plane is over two-thirds full. One Jumbo a day, each way, between London and Johannesburg – a symbol of the deep-rooted ties between South Africa and the United Kingdom. No doubt some of my other fellow-passengers are businessmen shuttling between head office in London and one of the 500 subsidiaries of British firms operating in the Republic.
I clutch my passport, health certificates and the South Africa House fact sheet assuring that I don’t need a visa because I am one of the citizens of the United Kingdom who is of ‘pure European descent’.
Brian met with members of the SACC and CI, with Beyers and Ilse Naudé, and with members of SASO – and grappled with the concept of Black Consciousness and recorded in his report: ‘To be white is not to know what it is to be black, in South Africa. I can never know what it is like to carry a pass, live in Soweto, be raided at three o’clock in the morning, tortured in prison, banned and silenced.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Secret ThreadPersonal Journeys Beyond Apartheid, pp. 29 - 43Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2018