INTERVIEW During his visit Bishop Huddleston kindly agreed to be interviewed by the Peterite editorial team:
minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, and within that context he was a reasonable person, but not in terms of his political views. And so the whole thing moved into a different gear altogether. Up till then, in the five years before the Nationalist Party came to power, there was a whole battery of laws which separated black from white, particularly the pass laws — which were the most vicious part and continued so until about three years ago — but when the present government came to power, they embarked on massive enforcement. In the first place, they expanded the security forces tremendously, so that they had control. Then they passed various laws, like the mixed marriages and immorality act, which made it a crime to marry or cohabit. But the worst of all, apart from the group areas act, which was already really in force because of the background to apartheid which defined eighty-seven per cent of the land in South Africa as white, was the Bantu Education Act. This prescribed a totally separate education for black children. They had of course never been able to go to white schools anyway, but this embodied in law an inferior form of education. It was quite openly admitted. In the debate in parliament, Verwoerd, who imposed this law said, "We've got to show the native people that they are being educated for certain forms of labour". The phrase he used was that "there are green pastures in which they have no right to graze". That was the Bantu Education Act, which has been ever since the cause of rebellion amongst the young and increasingly amongst their parents. It has led to the fiercest battles, and I can honestly say that I knew it would. When that law was passed, the then Bishop of Johannesburg and I, who had control of the church schools, closed all the schools, sooner than accept the education act. We were the only diocese that did this, and it caused a lot of rumpus, because we were accused of throwing thousands of kids on the street. It was true, but nevertheless we preferred to do it that way, and I think we've been proved to be right, because the Bantu education act has led over the last six years to the student body being at the very centre of the rebellion. Mandela said this in his first speech, in Cape Town. He paid great tribute to the young, because in effect they were saying to their parents, "You told us that if we were obedient and went to school, we would have the opportunities you didn't have. You've deceived us. It hasn't happened". And they had this great walk-out from the classrooms in 1976, when thousands of kids all over the country just walked out of their classes, refusing to accept this education. For weeks they were met with massive force: six hundred were killed, even young kids of twelve. And when the new constitution was passed by President Botha, de Klerk's predecessor, and it prescribed a tri-cameral parliament — one house for the whites, one for the coloureds, one for the Asians — with a complete right of veto in the white house and totally excluding the black majority, then the schools erupted
How did you first get involved with the struggle against apartheid? I was sent out to Africa. I belonged to a religious community, the Community of the Resurrection. When I was a novice, it was war-time, and I was professed in 1943. At that time we had five houses in South Africa, and I was sent out to look after the whole area which is today Soweto. We had several churches and a large number of schools, and so it was a very big assignment. But I lived with the community and I had their support, and many of them had been out there for quite a while and knew a lot about it. So I was in a sense thrown in at the deep end, because I had never been to South Africa, but I knew quite a bit about it because of the work of the community there. I was placed in a very interesting area, because what is now Soweto is the most politically active part of the whole country, so I had to come to terms with it very quickly. And apartheid was the dominant issue. You couldn't avoid it, because the apartheid laws were so restrictive and destructive that people were really suffering. And these were my parishioners, so naturally I had to decide how to take action. That was how it all began. What was the situation in South Africa before the present Nationalist Party came to power? That's a very important question, because the present government in South Africa has been in power now for forty-two years unbroken. When it came to power I had already been in the country for five years. The war was over, the government of South Africa under General Smuts was on the winning side, and there was a tremendous feeling that there would be a move in a liberal direction. After all, the war had a lot to do with racism — Nazism was racism — and there were large numbers of refugees from Hitler's Germany in the white community, many of them Jews. They were distinguished people, doctors and so on, who had come to settle in South Africa, but they then found racism mere. Smuts, who was really the architect of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights, had been outside his own country for a long time during the war as a member of the war cabinet in Europe and then at the United Nations framing the charter. But the expected move in a liberal direction never came, and meanwhile the Nationalist Party had been preparing very carefully for the election. You've got to remember that those people who came to power in 1948 were all pro-Nazi. They had been interned during the war as actively supporting Hitler, so their racism wasn't just local. They came to power, actually, with a leader, Malan, who, looking back, was, pretty moderate. He was a 26
