Marianne Merten
Prayers will be heard again for the first time in 70 years at the Anglican church on Robben Island when it is reconsecrated next Friday.
Says Cape Town Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane: “We want it to be a place of pilgrimage to the island for the worship of God and reflection on the island’s history of banishment, imprisonment and punishment. We need symbols to remind ourselves: never again should this place be used for the incarceration of outcasts.”
>From its establishment in 1895 to minister to male leprosy patients to becoming a warehouse, the Church of the Good Shepherd survived while other buildings were torn down in the process of turning Robben Island into a prison. The church was left standing because it was built on land belonging to the Diocese of Cape Town.
Throughout its history, the church symbolised God’s presence among outcasts who challenged the colonial order and later the apartheid regime, and those rejected by society, such as leprosy patients and the mentally handicapped.
Ndungane spent three years on the island in the 1960s after his arrest for leading an anti-pass protest march in Langa.
The restoration of the church – one of the first buildings Sir Herbert Baker designed in South Africa – began in 1994 when activist Terry Crawford-Browne first raised the possibility. Earlier this year, funds were raised and work got under way in conjunction with the Robben Island Museum.
The building was in surprisingly good condition: teak panelling had to be stripped, the asbestos roof replaced and glass windows repaired. A new statute of Christ the Good Shepherd is on its way from Oberammergau in Bavaria, the town from which the original was imported. The original statue and the church bell disappeared during the period that Robben Island was a maximum security prison.
The furniture in the reconsecrated church will be a mix of replicas and functional, as one of the aims is to hold workshops, seminars and retreats there.
Crawford-Browne says the reconsecrated church would be a beacon of hope to symbolise the transition from a place of despair to one of hope.
The island management wants to include the restored church in its broader development plans – they are waiting to hear if Robben Island will gain the specially protected status of a world heritage site next month. The church would be part of a pathway across the island where visitors on self-guided tours could light candles in memory of specific people or for peace and reconciliation.
Ndungane says he hopes the next Anglican synod will be held at the church from where it could make its proclamation for the new millennium. The church will also be used as a resource to teach children and visitors about the history of the island, country and continent.
“It’s going to be that kind of place, not just for Anglicans,” he says.