The best interviews are often those where listeners have a sense of eavesdropping in on an interesting conversation. That’s the feeling you’re sure to get from this podcast featuring anti-apartheid icon Peter Storey focusing on his newly published book, I Beg To Differ. Storey is as forthright now as when he was internationally famous for his Pulpit Activism during the darkest days of apartheid. It’s a fascinating discussion in which the former head of the Methodist Church in SA urges his theological successors to become more vocal – and to remember their Christian duty lies with supporting and representing the poor and downtrodden, and not to cosy up to the rich and powerful. Peter Storey is a former bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Duke University in North Carolina. Once chaplain to Nelson Mandela and others on Robben Island, he spent most of his 40-year ministry in inner cities, including District Six and central Johannesburg. He led the South African Council of Churches with Bishop Desmond Tutu when it was a fierce opponent of the apartheid state, chaired the National Peace Accord body intervening in pre-election violence in the Witwatersrand and served as a member of the panel that selected the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Storey founded Life Line SA and Gun Free SA and has preached and lectured in more than 160 cities around the world. He lives in retirement in Simon’s Town and sails on False Bay. He and his late wife Elizabeth had four sons and seven grandchildren. – Alec Hogg
I had a fascinating read recently of a book called I Beg To Differ. An autobiography by the Reverend Peter Storey of the Methodist church. I see it’s your fourth book, but the only one of its kind. The others being more focused on religion.
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Yes, they were sort of more theological books. There was a book of sermons preached during the apartheid era but that was published in America. It hasn’t been published here.
That’s a pity. It’d be nice to look back at history, because in those days – and we’ll talk about I Beg To Differ in a moment – the church played a very big role. People like yourself stood up and were extremely courageous in challenging the government. We don’t see too much of that nowadays.
There are a lot of factors that have played into that. I agree with you. I think that the church has been shamefully silent over most of the Zuma years and even more so before that, as the new democratic government came into power. I think there was a sense amongst many people, that once democracy came, the Kingdom of God had arrived and you could go back to your parish church business – which for me is pretty boring most of the time – and they were wrong. In the anti-apartheid days, it was church versus state, God versus Caesar and we learnt a lot about Caesar at that time. When the new Caesar arrived, he was a very nice guy and we all fell in love with him but the fact that Caesar has a very pleasant personality and perhaps is committed to justice, doesn’t change the fundamental DNA of the state and of government which ultimately is always prone to the temptation of overreach into people’s lives and overreach in terms of authority and power. So the Mandela era was in a sense, a little honeymoon – and he was a very typical Caesar – and his successors brought us back into what should have been a more typical church state relationship which should be one of careful distance. A lot of my friends in the church – especially black friends – became deeply involved with the ANC government. I saw that always as a danger. I don’t believe you should ever get too close to government. Government has a DNA which is fundamentally worth watching very carefully.
The interesting point is that it’s the same with journalism, in many ways during the apartheid era. You had former journalists – Hendrik Verwoerd was one of them – who went into politics and used journalism as a springboard, whereas if you’re not there as a bulwark for democracy, in the same way as the church has to be continuously speaking truth to power, then democracy does lose something. But why do you think the penny hasn’t dropped yet and the church hasn’t done what you guys were doing during the dark days of apartheid?
I think there is a difference. We’re living in a very different country, a country where we have rights. In our day the political opposition was either in exile or in prison. The churches almost had to step in and take their place under the leadership of people like Desmond Tutu. Nowadays there’s a very robust political debate and nobody is put in jail for what they say or think. We need to be clear in that it’s a very different South Africa than the one we lived in then. However, I still agree with you that the churches were slow in waking up – especially during the Zuma era and before that – there were massive issues during the Mbeki era, even during the Mandela era. The arms deal, there was the AIDS issue with Mbeki, there’s no question about it that the church should have been far more robust in calling out Mbeki for the absurdity of his attitude, for his intellectual arrogance at the time, which cost people’s lives. So instead, we saw people who were willing to put their lives on the line, where very often the church was silent on that issue. Then of course there were the Zimbabwean elections where we sent a group of people up there to watch over as Mugabe butchered people and as he completely twisted an election and in spite of their reports, there was a lot of silence from the broader church. There’s another whole reason for this of course and that is that the whole understanding of the Christian faith has gone down a very strange, completely blind alley. It has become individualised, it’s become personalised. It’s become materialised to an enormous extent and the growth of – what I would call credit card religion – has spread like a rash across our country. So many people who would claim an allegiance to the Christian faith have bought in to a materialistic, individualistic understanding of it. It’s all about me getting blessings from God and becoming more prosperous, it’s all about a ticket to heaven and it completely ignores the prophetic role of Jesus who came to bring good news to the poor, to set free those who are prisoners and to heal those who were bruised, to lift up those who were broken. That is irrelevant to the sort of credit card religion that is peddled by many of these sort of megachurches which we have around our country today and unfortunately the very people who used to be so profoundly engaged with us during the anti-apartheid struggle – with whom and among whom and alongside whom – we struggled for justice. These are the very people who are now being duped by this absurd brand of religion. We have that as well to deal with.
Getting back to the book – and it was a delightful read, very easy to read, quite long but you’ve had a long and full life – from the first page though, you get a feeling this is something different. You talk about yourself as a 9-year-old on the train, 1948 DF Malan won the election, apartheid was formalised and you lived in the house of a father who was a Methodist minister and clearly very devoted to the kind of Christianity that you’ve just described.
Yes, I believe I was fortunate. I grew up in a very robust kind of faith which was committed to justice and compassion in society. We lived on a large teaching campus – one of the many at that time. People didn’t realise that over 50% of black scholars in school in the 1940s, were being educated at church mission institutions and the impact of that on the lives of many who became leaders in in the struggle, like Mandela, Sisulu, Tutu and Tambo – and many others – was profound. It meant that we were producing people of – not just education – but people of character who understood the difference between right and wrong and who could bring that into their understanding of the struggle. So as a child I absorbed that and was living largely amongst black people at the time. I do believe that impacted me in ways that I was grateful for. I wasn’t living in the white bubble of privilege which, so many of my contemporaries were.
Kilnerton, tell us a little about that. It sounds like an extraordinary place which gave South Africa many graduates. That’s where your father was. Dr. McClanahan the home was the next two gentlemen that I’ve had the privilege of meeting who really have made great contributions to the country. How did Kilnerton come about and your story there?
The Methodist missionaries always took education with them. They didn’t just establish churches, they established schools and very often hospitals as well – and so did many other churches – Kilnerton was just one of those with a couple of thousand students established in the 19th century just outside Pretoria. We had a primary school, a high school and the teachers training college and that was the model that you found in many church mission institutions. We mustn’t be too sentimental about these places, they had many colonial aspects to them – when we look back we wonder why we had to be like that – but fundamentally they were committed to producing the kind of people who knew who they were, who understood their dignity as human beings and who came out of those institutions with a sense of vocation wanting to lift up their fellows in the country. So we owe an enormous amount to those institutions and of course the apartheid government coming into power saw them as a threat. We were educating people to a level that they were not prepared to accept and so they dedicated themselves to destroying every single one of those institutions around the country. And they did.
From your own journey – you didn’t go straight into the family business you went to the Navy first – can you share how you went from being a sailor into the ministry.
Well, I think I was press ganged. Most people in the old days were press ganged into the Navy, I was press ganged out of the Navy. I really did want to have a career in the Navy as a naval officer and I was on my way to doing so fairly effectively – I think I was fairly good at that, better than I’ve ever been a minister – and then I simply experienced one of those internal moments of conviction that I could not ignore. I heard a voice saying to me you will go to Rhodes to the ministry. It was a great disappointment to me but – as I say in the book – it’s probably the one time I did the right thing and I obeyed it and I came out of the Navy and went to Rhodes University where they were training Methodist ministers. It was not an easy transition. I was deeply unhappy for a long time. Sometimes when you decide to do something which you look back on and know it was right, at the time it’s much more uncomfortable and painful, but at some point it became clear to me that I was in the right place. This is where I belonged, this is where God wanted me to be.
It was an extraordinary journey and I really would urge people to read the book – not just to learn more about Peter’s story – but to get a sense of the times and the work he did – not only within the church where you rose very rapidly as a young person, to extremely senior posts – but with the political activists on Robben Island. Robert Sobukwe, you talk of his isolation.
Oh yes. Robert was put in a little hut. It’s not the place that visitors see now. His first house was a little wooden hut facing Cape Town and he was alone there. There was a fence around it and the only people he was allowed to see at any time were the guards or a doctor, or in fact the chaplain who at that time was myself. Later on perhaps things were eased a little bit but at that time that’s the way it was. I was awe struck. I was a young minister and I was always struck by the dignity of this man and the sense of togetherness. He was a whole person. The way he treated me, he was polite, he had no reason to trust this young white guy who was coming to visit him, but he treated me with dignity and hospitality. The times I spent with him grew in me, an enormous respect and regard for the person who I found to be very thoughtful, very deep, very compassionate and free. On one occasion when I was leaving him I was frustrated and said “you know Robert I feel so ashamed, I can get on a boat and go back to Cape Town and into freedom and you have to stay here”. He actually pointed towards Cape Town and said you need to know this. I’m not the prisoner they are. I am a free man and I guess he was pointing towards Parliament. That’s the kind of person he was. Then there was Mandela – on the island – and the others who had just arrived, I was their first chaplain. I was not allowed to take them into a room to hold a service with them. The only way I can could preach and share a service with them, was to walk up and down that passage – which so many millions of people have seen now in the maximum security block – and look into each cell as I passed and tried to engage eye contact with those within. Although that was a very constrained and limited engagement, I still began to recognise what a remarkable group of people these were and the absurdity of prisoning people like this who could have made such a contribution to the transformation of our country long before it happened.
Were they generally people of faith?
Yes they were because they were products of the mission colleges. You gained that impression immediately as soon as you announced any one of the vernacular language hymns or the English hymns. Suddenly the cellblock roof was nearly lifted off. These guys knew their hymns. Kathrada was there, he was a Muslim and he was very gracious and interested in the services. Mandela struggled for a long time to get Kathrada’s religion recognised by the prison authorities. These were people of such calibre, they in fact planned a New South Africa on that island I guess.
And in the initial stages, things were beyond everyone’s wildest dreams – post 1994 – but not quite as happy today. When you look back on the times and you look at where we are today, do you feel that the sacrifices were worth it and that we can draw strength from those examples and the sacrifices?
The sacrifices were immensely worth it – there’s no question in my mind about. What happened in 1994 took us out of a very dark and ugly place and not only that, but in those magic years that followed while Mandela was our president and the early years of Mbeki’s presidency. I travelled a lot around the world and spoke in many places and I want to say to South Africans who are very depressed and disillusioned, you will never know what the transformation in our country meant to people around the world especially people in places where some kind of struggle for liberty and freedom and justice was still going on. Those were magic years and there’s no reason why they should have been thrown away except for the sheer greed, avarice and lack of moral character among some of the people who came into leadership. We always knew that there were those who used to say to us – even during the struggle – I’m not in the struggle to be poor in the future. I’m in the struggle to be rich and they sicken me frankly. I can remember a radio interview where I – very early on in the new dispensation – attacked the salaries which are now going to be paid to people in Transnet and other parastatals and said this was a disgrace that people who had struggled for freedom and for the uplifting of the poor, would now take a page out of the book of the whites, who used to run this country and think that they had to be paid these obscene salaries, with these big black cars and things. I remember one of my previous – if you like comrades in the struggle – phoning the radio station outraged (I won’t name him) but he had just taken the managerial role in a parastatal saying why should we take less? And the answer is “well why not”. There’s no law that says you’ve got to live in luxury just because you run a big company. That’s what the people in the apartheid regime did. Can’t you live differently? And then came the dreadful Zuma years and the systematic plundering of what was already a fairly fragile economy. Zuma and his circle of thieves. The sadness in me was that we for some reason could not rise up against that and hold the wall against the tide of avarice and corruption. I guess what many of us feel is it may be too late now.
It’s an interesting point that one. Going back to the kind of people who are running the show now. I did an audiobook on the Cyril Ramaphosa’s biography by Anthony Butler and it’s a very long – 21 hours in fact of audio – but in there, Butler writes that from a very young age – being very religious – he was always seen with the Bible under his arm and a Lutheran and very proud of it. When he goes back to Soweto he often visits the Lutheran church. I also see in informal moments – particularly outside of the country – a connection with a higher power with God which didn’t exist in the previous regime. Is this not something to be hopeful about?
Yes it is. I knew him even when he was a young man during the 1976 uprising and that strong thread of faith and moral strength was there and it was evident. I do believe that our president is fundamentally a good person with a very clear sense of where we ought to go as a country. I fear however that he is constrained by being surrounded by villains and people who are so compromised morally and in other ways, that they have so much to lose that they will do anything to stop transparency and truth and justice being done in our country. Unless he can shake loose from those chains that are binding him, I think he’s lost and we’re wondering and waiting and hoping, but so far it seems as if he has not been able to do so and that’s what worries me. Those around him have a vested interest in no change in a continuation of this downward spiral where just a few are enriching themselves at the expense of the many.
It reminds me of 1993 following Mandela and De Klerk around the United States and where they were calling for the end of sanctions and getting the kind of reception you spoke about earlier – that most South Africans don’t appreciate – how the rest of the world celebrated the end of apartheid. Speaking to the late Derek Keyes at the time – and he expressed very forcefully – he felt it was divine intervention to get to where we were. Is that what we need now, some more divine intervention to get South Africa back on track?
I don’t think there are many countries that have so many proofs of intervention. I think time and again, our chestnuts have been pulled out of the fire by fairly miraculous transformations in individuals or situations. So yes, I have not lost hope because I think the basic decency of most South Africans – in spite of the dreadful conditions under which so many people are living – is still there. What I think we need now, is a mobilisation of both anger and commitment against the small core of crooks who took over our country and so we wait with bated breath for some of these people in the highest positions to go to jail. We know that they’ve done wrong. Unfortunately it’s a little bit like the Republican Senate of last week. Everybody on the Republican side of the Senate knew darn well that Donald Trump had overreached and had done wrong and had committed a high crime and misdemeanour and voted for him to be acquitted, because their interests – their own feathering of their own nests – was more important than the truth.
What troubles me is – as somebody who believes that faith is all about trying to live truthfully and compassionately – that we’re living in a post truth generation where people, without batting an eyelid, just keep on lying and get away with it. Unless we can rediscover the importance of living ethical lives, they’re going to continue to do so. The behaviour goes down the chain. Zuma and his behaviour – the worst tragedy about South Africa – gave permission to all of us in this country for the dark side of our characters to come to the fore. When Mandela was in control of this country, he made us all feel that we wanted to be better people. Zuma did just the opposite as Trump is doing in the United States. So we’re living in a world – a post truth world, a post morality world – where the sort of normally agreed standards of a decent life, I’m not even talking about a religious life, I’m not asking people to be religious necessarily, I’m asking them to be just human, decent, honest, upright. That’s what we need to do to recover in every part of our life in this country and for me that is frankly a spiritual matter. It’s a matter about character and spirit and who we are as human beings and how we are meant to live. And that’s what we’ve lost. I think yes, it’s certainly the job of the churches – and hopefully many many others – to try and emphasise that in the days to come.
Peter Storey author of his autobiography I Beg To Differ I’d urge you to read it, it seems just what South Africa needs right now.
