For a monk the late Father Trevor Huddleston certainly seems to have sown a lot of wild oats in his early days. He might not have left his physical resemblance lying around the African continent, like many missionary forbears, but he sure left a lot of mothers certain that they did not want their first-born sons named after anyone but him. That, and the good works he left behind, are part of his huge legacy.
The Right Reverend Trevor Mwamba is one of these — named after Huddleston, the campaigning Anglican priest who made it his lifetime mission to challenge injustice in the world, and especially in Africa, in accordance with the gospel attributed to Jesus Christ and his disciples.
Currently Bishop of Botswana, Mwamba was born in Zambia and his devout parents became close personal friends of the legendary Huddleston. This would have been long after Huddleston’s tumultuous Sophiatown days, which came to an end when the Anglican Church bowed to the will of Caesar, as represented by the nationalist government of the day, and transferred him out of the country.
His legend had preceded him, however, and by the time he came to post-independent Zambia, probably around the time he was reluctantly serving time as a bishop in Tanzania, he was pretty much a household name on the fiery continent.
It is an interesting completion of a historical circle, then, that Mwamba will deliver the Women’s Day sermon at the church of Christ the King in Sophiatown on August 13.
Christ the King will always be remembered as ‘Huddleston’s church”, and is the only remaining symbol of the rowdy old Sophiatown that drew Huddleston into the exciting milieu of urban South African energy. It was an energy that stood out against the weight of apartheid, and Christ the King was an island of serenity and hope in an increasingly repressive South African regime.
Its significance could not have gone unnoticed as the flood of freedom washed over the African continent — nascent Zambia being no exception.
By the time Mwamba was born in the Seventies, the southern quarter of the African continent, Huddleston’s beloved South Africa included, was more or less the only unliberated region of the continent. Its increasingly intense struggle for liberation was seminal and inspirational to the freedom generation growing up in the north.
Mwamba’s sermon will spring from the idea that Women’s Day and the events surrounding it in this fiftieth anniversary year partly sprang from the inspiration bubbling out of the church of Christ the King all those years ago. It will be about the liberation of women, and, equally appropriately, about women as liberators — not forgetting that there is still a long way to go.
But the additional value of his sermon (and I am not a churchgoer, don’t forget) will be the humour and humanity of how he puts his message across.
This is captured in his small volume called Dancing Sermons. Mwamba’s style is to open up with the modern-day equivalent of a par- able — a passing reference to personal incidents remembered or reflective quotes from literature — not necessarily the Christian Bible, and sometimes from Judaic or Islamic scriptures or even the profound prose of Lebanon’s Khalil Gibran.
All very significant in this day and age. It draws us back to the root of what faith is about, for those who are lucky enough to have it — not lip service, but, in this down-to-earth exploration of it, careful reflection on the human condition, and what we can do about it in these days of war and ongoing injustice.
In the Seventies and Eighties Huddleston’s brand of revolutionary evangelising bred a new generation of preachers, such as Barney Pityana and many others, who hitched their wagon to the new wave of ‘liberation theology” that was sweeping across other parts of the world, particularly Latin America.
Mwamba and his peers represent a newer wave — the sophisticated, highly educated, no-chip-on-the-shoulder perspective of another generation. It is still a kind of liberation theology, since there is still so much to liberate. But it comes equipped with the weapons of a new, digital age.
Dancing sermons indeed. No matter how far out we go on this digital journey, the lust, the sheer ability to dance is still what grounds the human spirit. Believe what you will, articulate it however you wish to articulate it — when it comes down to it, we all come from the same root and have the same needs, and suffer the same failings.
That is the gentle message of the witty Bishop of Botswana — not that I’m gushing or anything.