John Matshikiza:WITH THE LID OFF
They say nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. But it’s worse than that. In most cases we can’t even remember what we used to be nostalgic about.
It was that kind of feeling in the Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown last Sunday, May 9. The occasion was the launch of the biography of Trevor Huddleston, written by Robin Denniston. The venue was Father Huddleston’s old parish church, probably the only piece of Sophiatown still left standing after the dismal removals of 1955.
Yes, we can forgive, but we can’t forget. The younger people present, my generation and younger, stood inside the old red brick building wondering where all this vibrant culture our parents had boasted about was. It was impossible to imagine that it had ever been there. It is not possible to imagine what Sophiatown was like. In the glum suburban architecture of Triomf that surrounds the old church, there is no hint that colour and smell could once have had a place on this soil. Could our parents have been lying to us?
Then our parents and their generation came slowly into the church, in ones and twos or in little groups. The pain and the wonder were tangible. It should have been a moment for tears. Instead, it was a series of whispered moments of memory, tiny smiles playing round the corners of the mouths.
Their eyes looked upwards into the tall well of the ceiling, trying to put this thing into context. Stompie Manana and George Rantau sought me out to tell me about what was right and what was wrong with the old church. They were not looking me in the eye. They were looking at the walls.
“No,” said Stompie, “what’s going on here? This is the wrong place. This place is too small. What have they done to it?”
There used to be chapels off to the side, he said, a feeling of space and depth. Now the walls were flat and functional. The famous altar was gone. The murals that had decorated the rear walls behind the altar were also gone. There was sacrilege where before there had been sanctity.
The most awful signal of the triumph of Dr DF Malan was the fact that, even though this building had been standing all these years, fear and prohibition had kept these people away from it. This was the first time in 45 years that most of them had even seen it from the outside. Now they were stepping into their own history, shocked at the discovery.
Of course this wasn’t just a church. It was a community within a community. The Fathers of the Community of the Resurrection didn’t just preach a distant gospel here. They lived in a house attached to the church, cheek by jowl with their predominantly poor and black neighbours. The doors of the house, like the doors of the church, were always open, and the white priests in their black cassocks and stout boots could be seen eating their supper and smoking cigarettes around the wooden table. There was wonder in Sophiatown, and there was hope.
Trevor Huddleston was crucial to that sense of hope. In this place he had found his mission in life, and had given a new and sparklingly honest redefinition to his trade: that of being a missionary. He all but lost his English identity and became one of the people. Even when he was exiled, sent into the wilderness by his own church when he became too much of a thorn in the side of temporal authority in South Africa, he remained a South African. I think he had even quietly converted to being black.
You must be a pretty effective priest if you can draw a full, mixed congregation of decent people and sinners on a Sunday afternoon, and from beyond the grave, at that.
Huddleston has been dead a year. He had been his restless, laughing, angry, motivated self right to the end, the dauntless warrior for freedom who had inspired such love and such hatred. All these people had come to Christ the King because of him.
It must have been nostalgia for the man who used to walk into the police station and tell off the bull-necked Boer cops for harassing his black schoolchildren. For the man who phoned and knocked on the doors of as many privileged white folks as he could find and got each of them to donate a measly pound until he had enough money to build a swimming pool for all the children of Orlando. For the man who was wracked with self-doubt but never lost sight of what was right. It was a kind of nostalgia for the struggle, and the focus a man like Huddleston gave to it.
And of course it was nostalgia for Sophiatown and days that will never come back. It was a nostalgic journey for those of us who had never been there in the first place.
Huddleston’s ashes will be buried at his old church in the next few months. But in the absence of the Sophiatown that he loved, will his spirit ever be at rest?