TUESDAY, 12.00NOON:
ARCHBISHOP Trevor Huddleston, the Anglican priest who spoke up for the poor of Sophiatown in the 1940s and 1950s, then became leader of the international Anti-Apartheid Movement, has died in London, aged 84.
Huddleston’s book Naught For Your Comfort played a key role in alerting the world to apartheid during the mid-1950s.
Posted to South Africa in the 1940s, Huddleston became a South African citizen and voted against the National Party when it came to power in 1948. Huddleston was prominent in the resistance by Sophiatown residents to the bulldozers sent to flatten the area and turn it into a white suburb. He formed close friendships with many African National Congress leaders, including Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela.
Expelled from South Africa in 1956, he continued to fight apartheid from abroad, becoming a founder member of the anti-apartheid movement in 1959, and its president from 1981 to its dissolution in 1994. He was knighted four months ago for his role in bringing an end to apartheid.
“If you could say that anybody single-handedly made apartheid a world issue, then that person was Trevor Huddleston,” said Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu in a BBC radio interview.
Huddleston died at the Community of the Resurrection in Yorkshire, where he took his vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in 1941. He had been prevented from returning to South Africa by illness.