Ministry Amidst Racial Injustice in South Africa

Welcome to The Table, we discuss issues of God and culture. And my guest today is Neil Henry, who has come to us all the way from Cape Town in South Africa. So he’s had a long swim. And Neil is a pastor in Lavender Hill, which is a part of a suburban township in Cape Town, is that right?

So Neil will just dive into the story, if we can. Tell us a little bit about your family background, and as you do that, tell us briefly about the ethnic mix that your family is. And I’ve got to go through some terminology first. In South Africa, the term “colored” is a technical racial term for people of mixed racial background.

For the next number of years of my life, we had a – I grew up in a primary school that was in a colored community, but reasonably well sourced. High school, much the same. But the area was racially segregated, and so we had a new railway station, but there were two sections to the station. You had a white section and a non-white section. And we were never allowed to use the white section of the station. There were facilities nearby. There was a post office that was segregated, and we would have to use the non-white section of the post office. And all amenities had been segregated.

So those early Apartheid rules, several of them, Group Areas Act, Mixed Marriages Act, the government had prohibited the marriage of people of color with white people. And then when people of color and white people live together, they then passed a law called the Immorality Act. So it outlawed any kind of relationship across the color boundary. There was a race classification register, which brought about those designations: white, Indian, colored, and black, or Bantu was the term used back then. And your identity document would carry that kind of classification as well. People of color had to carry a special document called a passbook. And that passbook was your document to be able to move out of your designated area into areas that were occupied by white folks.

Other laws included the Suppression of Terrorism Act. It was a law to help protect the nationalist party government against any kind of anti-Apartheid protests, or action against them. The Separate Development Act, which – Job Preservation Act. These were all laws that entrenched the separate development of white people from people of color.

The following year, we had the outbreak of the June ’76 riots. School kids in Soweto rose up against the government. They didn’t arrange, didn’t tell their parents, but a mass protest took place in Soweto. And kids marched from every corner of the township towards their local police station. And they were really protesting the substandard education system. They were protesting the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Bear in mind, Afrikaans at that stage was regarded as the language of the oppressor, and had been made the official language of the country, I think back in the 1930s, by this nationalist party government. And then of course these – in the black schools, kids were also made to learn Afrikaans as a language. So being the indigenous languages was not their first language, Afrikaans was made to be your first language.

And then behind it all, there was also the protests and calling for the police – for the release of political prisoners. At that stage, all political organizations, anti-Apartheid organizations had been banned. Leaders were imprisoned on Robben Island in Pretoria and elsewhere. And many others had been driven into exile. So that was the climate in 1976. And the thing that we would do was to avoid getting signed up in military training – because then, I had to sign up as a colored person to join what’s called the Cape Corps. It was a colored division of the South African Defense Force. There was no way I could go fight a war and defend the borders of the country for a nationalist government. So I’d applied and went to University.

University of the Witwatersrand was one of two universities that would take students of color. And we’d have to apply for special ministerial consent from the minister of the interior to be able to go. And they only took a certain number. And – but those were two universities that would take us, and so I went and I enrolled, I started studying law. Got involved around on the campus, and suddenly you discover that you’re now in an environment where students are highly politically conscientized. And I’d wandered into a mass meeting with students had been protesting – the black students had been protesting the arrest under the Terrorism Laws of a number of their leaders. There was mass pandemonium, and I opened my mouth, I suggested a sit-in, a protest of classes, a boycott of classes, a march to demand their release, send a telegram to the Prime Minister of the country. Went up to Charleston Street Post Office with this march, and them promptly got arrested for the first time by the security police.

There was a law that had been instituted under the Terrorism Act, the Suppression of Terrorism Act, called the Internal Security Act. It was sort of a subsection of a law, and they called it Section 22. It was notorious, because with this law, you could be incarcerated without being charged, without the rights to receive bail, without appearing in a court, without the rights to representation, legal representation. No visitation rights. No district surgeon. And you’d be tossed into a cell for as long as the police would want to interrogate you.

The police organization back then was known as the Bureau of State Security. B-O-S-S, very appropriately, the BOSS. And that was the first of several incarcerations that I’d endured. Over a period of two and a half years, I’d never been sentenced in a court of law. But I’d had several times that I’d been picked up, beaten, interrogated, for various bits of information. And spend a fair amount of time in a number of different police sells. Amongst them, the notorious John Vorster Square. In our news at the moment is the story of Ahmed Timol, whose case is – the police reported that he’d committed suicide, he’d jumped from the 10th floor of the building. He’d obviously been thrown, as many others had. And so that case has come up in the courts at the moment. I’d been in John Vorster Square, I knew the place.

Brixton Police Station was known as the workshop. That was the nickname for it, and you could figure out why it was called workshop, ‘cause you certainly got a working over. I’d been in Kruger prison, it was on the outskirts of the city. And then the one that I remember most clearly was Mother B. It was a small prison just outside Benoni, the proud place where I’d actually grown up. In total, over a period of two and a half years, I’d had 182 days that I’d be in and out of police cells. Varying periods, sometimes for 14 days, sometimes – 28 days was one long stint, and then the longest was a 52-day stint. Others were shorter, make a weekend, three or four days.

When you’re arrested and taken to Mother B, it was obviously to interrogate you for information around the leadership of the movement. The movement, obviously, that I had then become a part of was known as the Black Consciousness Movement. And this had flowed out of the Steve Biko era. He was in fact one of the early propagators of the Black Consciousness Movement.

You were placed into a cell. The building was very odd, because it was built below the ground and there bars on the inside, but the walls really were just corrugated zinc all the way around. And the cells were nine by six, so you basically had space to lay your mattress down, and a space almost the same size as the marriage alongside of it. Bare concrete. The windows were at ground level, and so there would be a grill where the glass would be.

What they would do is, they would begin to disorient you by feeding you three meals a day. You went on what they call spare diet. And spare diet would include breakfast, lunch, and supper. The way that I knew the difference was, breakfast always had – it was all mieliepap, it’s a sort of grits porridge that we were given. So you would have mielie pap in the morning, and you know that was the morning meal because it had golden syrup with it. The lunch meal had sort of a soup with it. Or you’d be given a drink called pusamandra. It was a sour-ish drink that was loaded with protein. And then the third meal would have a block of animal fat with it, and so you knew that was dinner.

So you had breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but they bring it to you at odd hours. So you could receive breakfast at 6:00 in the morning, lunch at 8:00, and then your supper at 10:00. And then you’d starve until the next time breakfast comes, and that could be at 5:00 the next morning. And then it could be 5:00 and 7:00 and 9:00, and then it would switch and go to 11:00 and 1:00 and 3:00. And so they would do that just to disorient you. And in between, you’d be fetched for interrogation.

So the process was to wear you down. You’d lose any sense of time. In order to stay focused, and this was a government who believed that they were doing what was Christian, and so they would give you a page of the bible with your meal. And they tear the whole bible apart, and you’d get a page, but each day you’d get a different page. You could have a page from Habakkuk today and Revelations tomorrow and Ephesians the next day. And that was very confusing. So I wasn’t a Christian, so I’d read, but yeah, just didn’t have an idea as to what it was about.

A couple of other things. The police would often bring Polaroid photographs of what the students were doing while we were languishing in the cells. And I think unfortunately with a mob, you find that when your leaders are gone, the guys go partying. And that would be brandished in your face. And then I had a number of friends who had disappeared. Just disappeared, never heard from again. Their bodies were found in the bush, shot, buried, sometimes you’d never hear of them. And a very dear friend of mine had been killed by the security police. And that negatively affected me. So slid into a bit of depression. And for four years after – for three years after I’d left through the university, just floundered around with that depression.

I went from job to job during that period, and every job, I’d either lost it or I walked out in anger after striking somebody, and normally the white boss. By 1984, just couldn’t handle it any longer. Met a friend who had come from Cape Town, and decided I’m gonna go to Cape Town to turn over a new leaf. And so I hiked to Cape Town with two rand, 37 cents in my pocket. Left all my belongings behind. Said to my mom, “I’m leaving, I’m going to start a new life.” I hike to Cape Town, and I promptly landed in the home of a Christian family in a _____ –

This family shared the gospel with me. I came to faith a week later, and then I lived with them for six months. And that began the first days of my Christian life. I met my wife that very year, they took me to a youth camp. And we met, she was a Capetonian girl. We – a year later, 1986, we got married. And then we worked with an interdenominational outreach group called Mission to Youth for a number of years. And it was really just visiting folks in various communities, sharing the gospel, door-to-door campaigns, open air services, tract drives. And we went down to a town called George. It’s outside the Cape, about 300 kilometers, and visited a hospital in a colored township that was for terminally ill patients. And the idea was to visit the beds of these patients, read scripture, pray with them. And we sort of split up into – there was a whole team of us, so we split up into ones and twos. And we went from bed to bed, and I –

Well, there he was, I took him by his hand and shook him. Fairly violently, because all that anger just spilled out. And I asked him if he remembered me, I asked him in Afrikaans. And he sort of shrugged his shoulders. And that upset me, that he couldn’t even remember who I was. And so I shook him again, and I gave him the nickname that he’d given me. And the moment I said the nickname, he acknowledged. He then put his hand on mine, and with tears rolling down his face, he looked at me and in Afrikaans he said to me, “Sir, would you please forgive me.” Of course I was shattered. I fell apart. I broke down, I was weeping. He was weeping.

And the crew came along, and they wanted to know what’s happening here. And so my wife came, and she’d sort of figured out this had something to do with something back in the past. And it wasn’t detail that I’d bothered to share with her. It didn’t seem that important. I mean I’d become a Christian, I’d dealt with this, I’d moved on, and so this was in the past. And all she said to the others was, “Go away, I’ll deal with this.”

And she opened her Bible and she just began to read Philippians Four, “I plead with you Syntyche and Euodia to be at peace with one another.” And she just read all account of Paul helping these folks who were in conflict. And then she read, “Rejoice in the Lord always,” and the one thing that was gone was any sense of joy. I’d never felt more miserable at that time. “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice, for the Lord is near.” And I’d not – five years I’d been reading the Bible, had not clearly heard that line. “The Lord is near, be anxious about nothing, in everything by prayer and supplication make request known to God, and the peace of God, which passes all understanding.” And she read the entire passage, and went back and read it again. And again I heard that line, “The Lord is near.”

And it suddenly struck me that the Lord could be standing in the doorway of this ward, wanting to step into our lives, and here I am in a shattered relationship with a man, and angry and bitter with him. And knowing how much I’d been forgiven, and I couldn’t find it in my heart to actually express forgiveness to this man. I broke down and wept, I stepped outside into a little courtyard, and Trish played. We’d left there a couple of days later, we traveled home, and it bothered me for two weeks. I just wanted to be with this man. I wanted to go see him. I realized he was alone and destitute, and Trish agreed that we’d go back and visit.

And when we got back there, he’d passed away. And because his family hadn’t come to claim his body, he was given a pauper’s burial during that week that we were there. And Trish and I stood at that open gravesite. Tractor came, dug a big hole, they put all these bodies in there. The state brought these bodies, laid them in there. The tractor closed the hole, a priest had sprinkled some holy water over the site. Not a prayer was prayed, not a hymn was sung, not a scripture was read, not a word of obituary was given. Just absolutely no dignity whatsoever, and he was buried that way.

I tried to go to the nurses afterwards, and it was very interesting that these nurses had no idea that this was that policeman, that had such a notorious reputation. Because in the time he was in the hospital, they could not understand. This was just a sweet old man that was suffering, and his family had rejected him. And I have no doubt that the Lord must have done a work in his life. But that moment was absolutely necessary for me. Providentially, the Lord gave me that so that I could confront just some of the issues that I’d been grappling with. And even though I’d been a Christian for so long, there were just pent-up issues that I’d never dealt with. A lot of that was sitting inside me, and that moment really just cut the skin and revealed what needed to be revealed in my own heart.

Wonderful moment, I think that I treasured because, I think without that, I’d probably still be grappling with bitterness. It dealt, it dealt with a lot of the bitterness that I had. It dealt with my attitudes towards people that were fairer skinned. It dealt with my insecurities where I’d thought of others as more superior than myself, and that I’d been underprivileged and disadvantaged because of my skin color. And interestingly, several years later, the church that I ended up pastoring down in our community was a largely white church. And many of those, that very experience just gave me the opportunity to be able to deal with that ministry more effectively.

So I’ve had wonderful opportunity over the years who have been in that situation. And from both sides of the line. I mean these days, remember, we have a generation of younger people growing up that can’t make this connection to the past. These are events that happened in history, and the way that history books have been written has always been slanted. And so this has been an opportunity to be able to share some of these things and help this generation connect the dots of history. That these were real events that they really took place, and there were people that were affected, and are still affected today.

I made a comment the other day that I’m beginning to think that our new evangelistic strategy is funerals. And I could easily end up doing a funeral a week, sometimes more. And it’s normally violent death, young people between the age of 15 and 35. For folks in our community, they live with poverty, unemployment, and obviously where there’s poverty and unemployment, there’s crime, there’s theft, muggings, and then of course gangsterism which brings drugs and prostitution and dysfunctional families with high levels of child abuse and neglect. Lot of single parent families, teenage pregnancies.

What’s absolutely abnormal has become normal life in a community like that. Gunshots are every day. We’re currently in what we’re calling a ceasefire. There seems to have been some peace made between the gangs, and there hasn’t been an outbreak of shooting for almost two weeks. But years over, you remember that there was shooting. We canceled a big bible study, because shooting was very close to the church. I’ve heard shooting, I’ve heard gunshots while I’m preaching. We’d labor through services, there was a period where our numbers dropped almost by 40 percent, because folks just cannot walk through these areas on a Sunday morning to be able to get to church.

I find that the focus of a lot of what we have to do is just helping folks just instill hope, folks do despair. We have families who have become accustomed to sleeping on the floor, because when the gunshots ring out, they all drop off their beds and bullets will be flying wildly. You know, when somebody says thank you, when they thank the Lord for the safe night, that they’ve come through the night, they’re thankful that they still have a coffee cup in the morning that hasn’t been shot up during the night. So the levels of violence are high. People do despair, and hope is waning. There’s a lack of confidence in the police system, in the judiciary. And so there’s not a lot of collaboration with the community and the police to eradicate the problems.

And the gangsters had used the youngster to hide it away for them, and so this innocent kid, he was only in grade seven – grade eight. He would be the runner. So when they needed something, he’d fetch it. The police would never raid that home, that’s a fine lady’s home, and the kids are not involved with drugs. Anyway, this youngster was running the stuff. So she’d spoken to me about what she should do, and I then consulted with some senior policemen about what the avenue would be. Do we turn this over to the police? And the tension would be that if she did, and she was hesitant to do that, because she was so afraid that maybe there’s corruption within the police system, and the drugs would end up back in the street again, and she’d then be victimized for having done that by the gang.

And while I was still consulting with that, she actually came to see me and said, “Pastor, just leave it. I’ve actually gone to see the gang leader, I’ve given him back his drugs and asked him to stay away from my family.”

And when we look back on the number of times that the Lord has providentially shown us his care, his provision, you know, in some ways, we regularly just erect memorial stones each time the Lord has done something amazing for us. And we look back and remind ourselves of God’s grace over a period of time. And that’s really what motivates us to keep doing. And the Lord has been faithful in all of this. The number of opportunities we’ve had to minister to others who have been broken and shattered, and it’s really just been just our own experience of God’s grace that has enabled us to be able to share and encourage others as well.