I remember standing, in those last exile years, in the garden of the Jamaican ambassador to England, and witnessing a confrontation between Trevor Huddleston and Anthony Sampson.
Why is this of any interest? Well, both of these very English Englishmen had been around in my life for as long as I could remember. They had both been living and working in my native Johannesburg at the time of my birth (that’s 50 years ago, ma-gents and chickies) and were both close friends of my parents.
I don’t know about the vicar Huddleston, but Sampson, my father’s boss and buddy at Drum magazine rolled into one, had certainly been present at the little church in Orlando West when I was christened and, as such, became my honorary godfather.
My own influential role in their destinies aside, they had also surely been together during those fateful, early morning moments when Sophiatown was being torn down, and apartheid was putting its most arrogant and defiant stamp on how it expected the world to be run from then on. And here were two white Englishmen striding out, bare-headed, into the streets of Softown, not expecting to be able to make any major difference, but just needing it to be noted that they were there, protesting with the people when the chips came down.
Now they have both moved on—to a better world, some would say. Or to dust, just like Sophiatown, as others would have it.
But the confrontation on the lawn of the Jamaican ambassador’s London residence was an interesting one for me to witness. Huddleston, still with his trademark, short cropped grey hair, had grown irascible, frustrated as much by his own forced removal from the souls of Sophiatown as by his now declining health. He was walking with a stick and he didn’t like it. And, gracious as he continued to try to be, under the circumstances, something was sure to come up that would allow him to give vent to his ungodly irritation with the world.
Anthony Sampson, a fellow guest at that afternoon party, unfortunately happened to be the first thing that came across his gaze.
”If it hadn’t been for you liberals,” the archbishop launched in, both barrels blazing, without so much as a ”how d’ye do?” ”we’d have sorted things out much quicker in South Africa.”
This was, of course, round about 1990, when we, and the world in general, were finally able to breathe a sigh of relief and slowly start to think about heading home. The party in the ambassador’s garden was essentially to celebrate that very feeling of excitement — the unbanning of liberation movements; the freeing of Sisulu and Mandela; the belated unleashing of the spirit of Sophiatown, Guguletu, District Six and Mkhumbane.
But as far as Huddleston was concerned, it had all come too late. And the easy-going, wildly successful writer Sampson seemed in his head to embody all of these frustrations.
Sampson was backfooted in the encounter, if not entirely discombobulated. He put up a weak defence, not being a chap for an all-out confrontation.
”I’m not a liberal,” he said, ”and we did everything that we could to make change happen. You know that very well.”
And indeed he had. His definitive description of the best of the Drum years (Drum: An African Adventure and Afterwards) had not only launched his own dazzling journalistic and writing career, it had been influential in telling the world about South Africa and some of the amazing personalities that inhabited it. As indeed had Huddleston’s Nought for Your Comfort.
For his pains, he came to be regarded with loathing and suspicion among many of his peers. ”That Anthony Sampson: he must be a communist,” a very conservative Englishman said to me in an unguarded moment at another kind of cocktail party in another part of town in another time. After all, Sampson had, by then, produced his devastating critique of the British social and political hierarchy, Anatomy of Britain, and several other tomes that went to the heart of matters facing the world — the fanatical, irrational, all-powerful international arms industry, the shenanigans of the oil giants and their cosy relations with ruling powers, and so on.
Later on, he had also produced a book about his extraordinarily bohemian grandfather, a poet and intellectual, who also had a thoroughly organised Irish mind (which you might think is a contradiction in terms, but read on) and dabbled in a friendly fashion in the ways of the world. The book was an understated exploration of Sampson’s own intellectual origins, entered into late in life.
And all through this time he never forgot his seminal South African experience — the kick inside. The Sophiatown period was his political awakening. And, for sure, he never turned back — dangerous as this path was in the paranoid, post-war, post-Hitler, post-Stalin, Kim Philby-like world of the Britain he chose to live in, gracefully succumbing to his own fate. The bleary, quick-witted, endless nights in Can Themba’s ”House of Truth” in Kofifi never left him. ”Tell the truth.”
And so he told the truth. He thought the truth. And in all the interactions I had with him over those 50, tiny, Tony years, we felt through the truth. Or as close to it as we could get.
It is hard to believe that he is gone. Just as it was hard to get over the fact that Huddleston, the irascible, irritable, iridescent priest who gave the stubborn Boers such a hard time on their own turf, and shared a sense of humanity with so many black people, is also gone.
So Huddleston shook a stick at Sampson in the Jamaican ambassador’s garden over the how’s and why’s and wherefores of South Africa there in England.
Yet they were both on the same side — ”our” side, whatever that is. But the struggle does funny things to people.
Hamba kahle, Anthony.
And thank you, in case I forget to say it.