Anthony Egan
TREVOR HUDDLESTON: A LIFE by Robin Denniston (Macmillan)
For a figure of such importance to the anti-apartheid struggle, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston has been largely overlooked as a subject for biography. His life has largely been told through his own writings – which combine Anglo-Catholic theology, militant anti-racism and an anecdotal style – or through brief pieces that illustrated only parts of his very varied and radical life. As the first serious attempt at a complete biography, Robin Denniston’s book deserves considerable attention.
Denniston is in something of a double-bind situation: to be true to his subject, he must – almost of necessity – be repetitive. The familiar material has to be covered to do Huddleston justice: his work as an Anglican priest in Sophiatown; growing involvement in housing issues; protests against forced removals; the networks Huddleston built with members of the Congress alliance; receiving the Isitwelandwe – the highest award of the African National Congress – for his work at the historic Congress of the People in 1955; his recall to England by the Community of the Resurrection, his religious order; his service as bishop of Masasi (Tanzania), of Stepney (London) and as archbishop of the Indian Ocean.
All this Denniston covers most adequately. Moreover, the well-known narrative is broadened and deepened through the use of Huddleston’s correspondence, his diaries, and the recollections of his wide circle of friends and colleagues. A picture emerges of a deeply complex human being, one who had an enormous capacity for love – and a relentless hatred of apartheid.
This loathing of apartheid was first and foremost rooted in his theology of the incarnation – that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ, and that any ideology which declared some human beings inferior to others, as as apartheid did, was a blasphemous attack upon God.
Though the author deeply sympathises with his subject, this does not prevent him from recounting Huddleston’s tendency to flare up angrily, even with friends, and his proneness to what would be diagnosed today as depression. It plagued him -as did ill health -on his retirement to Mirfield, the mother house of his order. His brief return to South Africa after the 1994 election was disastrous. By the end of his life he was deeply angry with the God he’d served as a priest, monk and bishop for so long, yet remained a deeply prayerful person.
Denniston has produced a very capable piece of work. The use of original sources is to be welcomed. At times rather sketchy, sometimes naive political analyses – and the occasional factual or typographical error – jar the flow of an otherwise very readable book that goes well beyond previous accounts of Huddleston’s life and work.
What is perhaps needed now is a more critical examination of the role played by priests like him in South Africa’s struggle – the political contribution of clergy as activists, their relations with the struggle movements, and their relations with their own churches.
The strength of this biography lies in the careful, respectful yet frank presentation of Huddleston as a highly complex character. Religious biographies tend towards hagiography – pious tales to inspire the faithful. This book goes a long way to present Huddleston in all his dimensions, as a very human, flawed person.
It is also a portrait of the complexity of priesthood: an angry priest; a priest who often found God extremely distant,even absent; who lived celibacy like his Roman counterparts and at times found it difficult; who was forced to place his vow of obedience to his order above his desire to remain in South Africa’s political struggle of the 1950s; in short, a sinner deeply aware that he was called by his God.