Wally Mbhele
The ashes of former leader of the Anti- Apartheid Movement Father Trevor Huddleston have been unceremoniously buried – more than a year after they were locked in a dusty safe at the Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown.
The British Daily Telegraph newspaper reported this week that Huddleston’s ashes were buried last week without ceremony in the churchyard outside Johannesburg, after a 16-month dispute over the location and cost of interring his remains.
The distinguished Anglican monk and pioneer of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement stated in his will that he wanted to be buried at the Church of Christ the King, not in the Yorkshire monastery where he died.
The Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, the order he joined in 1939, obeyed Huddleston’s wishes and flew his ashes to South Africa in July last year after a memorial service at Westminster Abbey. The ashes remained locked in a safe until last week.
A dispute between the British monks and the bishop of Johannesburg, the Reverend Duncan Buchanan, over where the ashes should go and who should pay for the burial led to the delay.
The Daily Telegraph says relations between Buchanan and the monks reached a low point when the bishop asked Mirfield for 15 000 to pay for burying Huddleston under the altar of the Church of Christ the King.
The monks refused to pay, arguing it would be an “inappropriate” use of church funds.
Buchanan reportedly asked an archdeacon, Father Makgoba Thabo, last week to bury the ashes “quietly” in a Trevor Huddleston memorial garden under construction in the churchyard.
Buchanan denied on Thursday there were any wrangles over Huddleston’s burial.
He stressed the whole procedure “was very amicable. It was a question of arriving at a decision of who was finally going to be responsible for the burial, what sort of memorial would befit Huddleston and where that memorial should take place.”
He confirmed his church had suggested that Mirfield make a contribution towards the establishment of the altar where Huddleston would have been buried.
“It was a suggestion, but they did not go along with it because it involved a lot of money,” said Buchanan.
He confirmed Huddleston’s ashes have been interred and said a ceremony blessing the memorial garden, with a plaque, will be held soon. According to The Daily Telegraph, the blessing is set for August 18.
Before he went to settle in Britain, Huddleston ran the respected St Peters school in Sophiatown, where luminaries like the late African National Congress leader Oliver Tambo formed part of the teaching staff.
Huddleston was instrumental in the fight against evictions when Sophiatown residents were forcibly moved to Meadowlands in Soweto. His courageous fight against forced removals caused the apartheid government to deport him to the United Kingdom in 1959.
During many of his public addresses, Huddleston vowed he would not die until apartheid was dead.That conviction was fulfilled when he passed away at the age of 84 in April last year – four years after South Africa attained democracy.
July
Link to the day
30 23 16 09 02
30