Memory Is The Weapon

Chapter Nine - Father Trevor Huddleston

84 chapter nine On Sundays Sophiatown underwent an almost mysterious transformation . The streets seethed with a great mass of people who moved about restlessly and rapidly as if driven by unseen demons and angels who may have been competing for the possession of their souls. Up and down they moved in search of themselves and of God; when only the night before, and until the early hours of magical Sunday, they had swooned and danced the sexual, indigenous famu or Marabi dance – a dance of carnal love and passion in which the seductive eyes of the woman glowed, while she shook her body in its short, scanty dress to the delight of the half-drunk man who would take her and pay the price. Marabi and the staring eyes were silenced by the ringing of early church bells. Time for cleansing; time for Jesus as men, women and their children marched to church to be made whole of their sinning and debauchery, and then returned for another Father Trevor Huddleston Father Trevor Huddleston 85 week of sin and debauchery. This was Sophiatown on a Sunday; a spectacle of clean clothes and big, colourful hats and fancy handbags, and proud fathers who carried their children or held their hands. I was inside Shorty’s Fish and Chips reading the Anti-Removals Committee’s pamphlet, when an Indian property owner I knew entered the shop. He saluted thumb raised and the people responded ‘Mayibuye!’ He left and crossed the street towards the Odin cinema. A huge, noisy crowd had gathered and the usual police pick-up vans shot past, blaring their hooters so that people jumped onto the pavement .Alarge bird flew into the shop and frightened the customers.Women screamed and dashed outside. A burly man who owned a carpentry shop at the corner of Victoria and Gerty Streets trapped the bird and wrung its neck so that its hot blood dripped through his thick fingers. He threw it into the gutter and trampled it viciously until it was a pulp of blood and feathers. Someone shouted: ‘That bird had no business here, it was sent by the enemy!’ A woman nodded: ‘Must be; for what does a bird know about fish and chips?’There was a loud, slow murmur. People nodded in approval. This was Kofifi; cruel and superstitious. Sunday brought out the best and the worst in people... Robert Resha of the African National Congress had asked a group of us to hand out the anti-removals pamphlets and had promised to pay. Up Good Street, where the cinema was situated, into Victoria Street and along Annadale Street we walked and handed out the papers until we reached Edward Road which ran parallel to Victoria Street. Then back to the cinema. People would not refuse pamphlets given to them by street thugs like myself; it would be risky. At the cinema we distributed more. The people were entering like thick, black syrup with specks of whites, Indians and Coloureds in an almost carnival atmosphere. Cameras clicked incessantly. It was the big day in February of 1955, and my fifth year of street-fights and public violence and intermittent arrest. The crowd parted suddenly as if to form a guard of honour. Some men took off their hats, and young and older women moved back silently, almost in reverence. Here was the man, loved respected and revered. Agiant who strode high, hard and heavy through the pews and corridors of influential places, and yet touched the earth with the humility he was endowed with through his faith and calling as a servant of God. 86 Memory is the Weapon Father Trevor Huddleston, was born in Bedford, England in 1913. Before he came to South Africa in 1943 to head the Church of England’s Community of the Resurrection in Sophiatown, he was a missionary in Ceylon and India. Father Huddleston, whom children in Sophiatown used to call ‘Faadaa’, was ordained as a priest in 1937. I was familiar with the Anglican Church of St Cyprian’s where my Tswana family had worshipped , and where as a child I had accompanied them to collect parcels of food rations. A priest called Singleton had sent my cousin Dutch and I to the Margaret Ballinger Home in Roodepoort beyond Sophiatown, west of Johannesburg. And as the people gave way for him to pass, I remember moving towards him and I stood...