The Hour After Midnight

AFRICA!

By COLIN MORRIS My particular destination was Chingola, the most northerly of the Copper towns, perched on the Belgian Congo border, built around Nchanga Mine, the Common- wealth's largest copper producer. I had expected, indeed naively hoped for, a certain pioneering hardship to characterise my life in Africa. There was the shock of anti- climax in my first sight of the town. Meticulously planned houses, tree-lined avenues, modern blocks of shops and offices and magnificent churches contrasted jarringly with the sprawling kraals which had always symbolised for me man's sole mark upon the great continent.

The picture of the white settler spending his unoccupied hours in a rocking chair on the stoep of his house, an empty whisky-glass in his hand, listening to the night sounds of Africa and dreaming nostalgically of home, belonged, I soon discovered, to the works of Somerset Maugham. The Nchanga miner can take his choice between first-class sports fields and swimming pools, a magnificent golf course claimed by Bobby Locke to be the finest in Africa, an air-conditioned cinema and an opulent club which has everything from a full-sized ballroom to a well-stocked library. (In Oxford I had been anxious to get hold of a rather rarefied volume by Herbert Marcuse called 'Eros and Civilisation.' The redoubtable Blackwell had to order it specially for me, yet it was the first book I set eyes on in the local club library.)

When I first arrived in Chingola it was literally true that the local mining company took care of one from birth to death, for should your life- span be short enough you might first see the light of the world in the maternity wing of the Mine hospital and make your last journey in a Coffin and hearse provided by the company. Later, the last seal of civilisation was set upon the town by the arrival of a firm of undertakers Who performed the last obsequies in morning Coats and top hats. The lavishness of the social services which the copper companies maintain is well symbolised by Chingola's mine hospital. It has seventy beds and is staffed by•a specialist surgeon, radiologist, six medical officers and thirty fully qualified nursing sisters—this for a tulvn of 4,000 European inhabitants, and all virtually free to employees of the mine. So much for hardship and peril!

On the fringe of these copper towns, too, 1 found African townships ('compounds,' the local term for them, is a grotesque misnomer) built by the companies for the thousands of Africans from all over southern Africa who have flocked to Claim their share of the untold wealth beneath the earth. Endless rows of neat houses, lighted streets, welfare centres, pleasant beer-gardens and football stadia, together with a comprehen- sive health service which includes well-equipped hospitals with clinics strategically placed throughout the townships, are tangible evidence (If the sense of social responsibility which the fling companies show towards their African Workers.

By the time that, after only one week in Africa, ! settled into my tin-roofed manse, I was becom- ing confused about the rights and wrongs of the racial issue. None of my neat pre-conceptions 8,,eelited to fit the actual situation against which Measured them, Father Huddleston's Naught Or Your Comfort, which had been my creed and textbook on race relations before coming °ut to Africa, lay on my bookshelf, forgotten. For one thing the climate seemed to neutralise high-pitched moral indignation. In the cold murkiness of the English weather all problems appear to take on the same sombre hue, and become invested with a lowering significance which it is impossible to recapture in the brilliant sunshine, cloudless skies and crystal-clear air of the Central African plateau. The metallic heat, too, lulls one into a somnolence which paralyses the brain and makes the drawing of fine ethical distinctions too great an expenditure of limited mental energy.

Most disarming of all, the African's charac- ter seemed to reflect the sunny disposition of his country. In Oxford I had met only the intense, bitter, articulate African political leaders, im- ported by courtesy of the Africa Bureau to address the various undergraduate societies and seminars whose special interest was the Federa- tion. Their obvious misery contrasted starkly with the irrepressible gaiety of their brothers whom I met everywhere in the mine compounds and municipal locations. With their electric smiles, their alternating indolence and vibrant energy, they sang, drummed and danced their days away, possessed by a deep zest for living which apparently made a mockery of the heated concern of their political champions abroad. To walk through one of their thronging townships, past endless rows of neat whitewashed houses, with the women living out their domestic lives in the public gaze of their front gardens and the air rent with laughter, singing, the screams of piccanins and the constant tinkle of bicycle bells, was to be struck by the utter incongruity of all talk of oppression and exploitation. In 1956 I did not know any Africans, 1 had only observed at long range, as do most White Rhodesians, their public front. And what I saw filled me with roseate reassurance rather than dark foreboding. I could not, for example, understand why the African National Congress should be organising forays into European hotels and bars—demonstrations that invariably ended ignominiously after a few straight words from the European police inspectors wlio would magi- cally appear on the spot whenever trouble threatened. It was difficult to see why any Afri- can would wish to desert the sunny conviviality of his own community for the stuffy, flyblown atmosphere of some European bar. At that time colour bar related in my mind to the Union of South Africa. The segregation of White and Black communities in Central Africa seemed a fact of life easily justifiable on the grounds of convenience and culture At the same time I was having my first en- counters with the 'colonials'—the civil servants, copper miners and businessmen who had emi- grated from Britain, South Africa and the Dominions to carve this great Eldorado out of the bush. I was prepared to dislike them in- tensely, for propaganda had assured me that they were the Bad Side in the melodrama of Central Africa. Instead, I was completely dis- armed by their generosity and charitableness.

They turned out to be incredibly nice people. They did not stalk about the place arrogantly, tapping sjamboks against their boot heels. They did not kick Africans off the pavements nor beat up their house servants. On the contrary, with the inevitable exceptions, they treated the Africans who worked for them with a paternal concern which was touching; and their children played barefooted in the sanitary lanes with African piccanins.

No one from the outside who desires to understand the Central Africa situation ought to discount, as an important factor, the eminent reasonableness of most white Rhodesians. Those who represent them as devils incarnate not only do them an injustice but miss completely the true essence of the tragedy being played out here. One may question their wisdom, as I have again and again been forced to do, but it is churlish to underestiniate their sincerity.

Socially, the only encounters between the two races took place in the various multi-racial clubs and societies which were then having a vogue on the Copperbelt. I found these first tentative experiments in partnership a disillusioning ex- perience. I went along for duty's sake to a num- ber of multi-racial groups of one sort or another. They seemed a complete waste of time. We draped ourselves around a room, perching cups of tea on our knees and laughing over- heartily at each other's weak jokes, grimly de- termined to be all pals together. We trod delicately around any of the issues which were a real cause of difference and went home ex- hausted from the effort of trying to pretend that there was the slightest common ground between us. We listened to talks which ranged from 'African Tribal Customs' to 'My Visit to England,' whilst the European members ex- pounded on `Jam Making,' The Cultivation of

(Continued on page 420) Cacti' and 'Missionary Work in China.' It was all terribly nice and utterly futile, as we dis- covered when the membership dwindled to nothing.

The Copperbelt at this time was a veritable cemetery of religious, social and cultural multi- racial groups. They failed for a number of simple but fundamental reasons. In most cases, we tried to come together on the basis of a unity which did not exist except in our imagina- tions, and ignored those great areas of political, cultural and economic difference between us which were the hard realities of our situation. Possibly these groups were launched by the wrong agencies, for the churches, mines and municipalities which sponsored multi-racial ac- tivities were generally so terrified of controversy that they banned all the subjects which were likely to lead to that cut and thrust of con- flicting opinion which is a genuine form of con- tact. Equally important, Africans and Euro- peans were just not prepared to be absolutely honest with each other. They were unwilling to risk giving offence to the other race for the sake of the truth. Our self-conscious politeness was a subtle form of racial discrimination. There was not between us that brutal frankness which is one of the characteristics of true friendship.

I found, too, that I was just not getting on well with Africans. I felt acutely uncomfortable in their presence. I lacked both the social grace to assume a cordiality towards them I did not feel and the humility to see that there was some- thing to be gained in a closer relationship. The few educated Africans I met did not have the poise and maturity of West African intellectuals I had known at Oxford. With their pedantic English, charcoal-grey suits and the inevitable brief-case, they seemed caricatures of the suburbanites on the morning train to London. And disillusioned in my half-hearted attempts to find common ground with the African people, I immersed myself the more deeply in the Euro- pean community. It was in 1956 that African Christians became for the first time bitterly articulate about the colour bar in European churches. Within two days of my arrival in Chingola a crisis de- veloped on my own doorstep. Two prominent members of my church stalked out of my in- duction service in a fury because half a dozen elders of our African, sister-church had been invited to attend it. And a handful of European members, catching a glimpse of this row of rather self-conscious African Christians, turned away without entering the church. This distress- ing happening gave me a lively respect for the strength of my congregation's feelings about racial mixing, and during my first year as minister I saw to it that no other Africans set foot in the church.

If I needed any further evidence to justify my caution it was supplied in a widely discussed incident which took place in a local Anglican church. Apparently, an African policeman who had been attending communion regularly was taken ill with a disease subsequently diagnosed as leprosy. . . .

'There you are!' exclaimed European opinion triumphantly.

'That is the risk you run when Africans sit next to you in church.'

The fact that leprosy, contrary to popular be- lief, is not a contagious disease, and that Euro- peans go down every day with nasty infections caught by contact with other Europeans, was neither here nor there. European fears had been vindicated.

I went about my business as the fairly popular and successful minister of a growing church. I rejoiced particularly in my congregation's opinion of me as a hard-headed realist where racial matters were concerned. They compared me, to my credit, with 'dangerous' men like Canon John Collins, who, they claimed, was unable to open his mouth in the pulpit without thundering doom on the white settlers of southern Africa from a position of comfortable remoteness.

Central African churchgoers never tire of de- manding that the Church should speak forth- rightly on great issues, provided, of course, that these issues dp not impinge too crosely on their own lives. This, surely, is human nature and no particular condemnation of Rhodesians. Many Christians enjoy what they call 'fighting' sermons and the harder the parson lashes out, the better they like it. One can sense their appro- val as they deflect a shaft aimed at them on to their erring neighbour in the next pew!

For my first year, I made certain that my sermons gave no cause for offence. I kept strictly to 'the Gospel_ To all intents and pur- poses I ran my church as though it were situated in the centre of Birmingham or Man- chester rather than at the very heart of Africa. This is not as difficult as it might appear. The white and black communities of the Copperbelt move serenely along their predestined courses, the only real link between them being the swarm of house servants and manual workers who cycle, whistling, out of the African townships every morning to put in their day's work in the European municipality, retreating at sundown to their infinitely remote and self-contained world on the wrong side of the colour line. My church was filling nicely. I liked my white Rhodesian congregation and did not want tc lose any of them, so six months after my arrival in Africa I rose to my feet in the Northern Rhodesia Methodist Synod to oppose a motion calling for racial integration in church services and throughout the community gener. ally. The conditioning process was complete. Ir a long and angry speech I put forward argu. ments which many of the Federation's clergy and ministers would find convincing today and which determine their racial policies. For this reason they are worth recording.

In the first place, it seemed to me then fool. hardy for the minister of a European churchi to thunder doom upon his congregation for theft unwillingness to fraternise with Africans. Surely there was only one way to get people to change their views on an issue as fundamental as this and that was to win them to a greater love and understanding for the members of other races by slow and painstaking persuasion. But to dc this one would have to make common ground with them and get their confidence and trust A rigorous and unyielding stand on the race issue would undoubtedly drive them out of the church, and once this happened they would be completely beyond the sphere of one's influence And what seemed to me worse, in their bitter. ness at having been, as they thought, excluder from the Fellowship, they would hate Africant all the more. The net result would be the lost of a fair slice of the congregation and an in crease in racial tension.

Then, it appeared to me that there was a fun damental theological objection to forcing the pace of integration within the Church. Was the right attitude to race a necessary condition p salvation? I asked. The preacher's primary tasi surely was to offer his congregation the Gospel not foist upon them what amounted to a semi political programme for Central Africa, or mat" his personal view of a controversial issue manda tory for membership of his church.

African ministers, who wait expectantly fo the views of every new missionary in the hopi that they might be gaining a supporter, listenet wearily to my catalogue; they had heard so after of the practical obstacles in the way of inte grated worship—that Africans do not mall] want to mix with Europeans, they are fa happier amongst their own people: that till great gulf of language and culture which yawn between the races makes the ideal of a multi racial church a vision for the future and nothim more: that Africans have lovely churches o their own (many built with European money in which they can worship in their own languag! and at the very heart of their own communities Was it not wiser, I concluded, to wait unti the gap between the races had narrowed througi an increase in African education and a decreas1 in European prejudice before trying to throv a bridge across it? There must be a natural tiro for coming together. That time would be deter mined by history. To anticipate history must bi to stretch racial tension to breaking point an( bring disaster on us all.

When the history of the Church in Centra Africa is written, her African clergy will wii special honour' for their amazing patience an forbearance. Year by year they have pleadee ha synods and presbyteries for some action to be taken which would show to the world that the Church's protestation and practice are all of a piece, and have been told: 'Wait, the time is not yet. Perhaps next year. . . .' And they have returned wearily to their increasingly em- bittered people to face the scorn of political agitators and the rebelliousness of their mem- bers. Truly, a whole calendar of saints could be compiled of names like Matthew Lucheya, Gideon Chinula, David Ramushu, Isaac Mutu- bila and John Sikazwe—black-faced saints in faded clerical collars and patched suits, men of transparent goodness, unassuming dignity and unshakable courtesy who were, and still are, treated as second-class citizens in the land of their birth.

Back I came to my congregation, convinced that I had struck a blow for justice. It seemed a happy coincidence that the just line should also be the popular one. For popularity meant every- thing to me. It is strange that we clergy, even though we have the clear warning of our Lord -----`Marvel not that the world hate you . :— Manage to persuade ourselves that we 'shall be failing in Christian charity if our words and actions cause dissension amongst our people and bring upon us the wrath of the community. Yet how can we hope to confront men with the Painful demands of our Lord without shatter- ing their complacency, challenging their atti- tudes and probing the raw nerve of their be- setting sins? If we do this uncompromisingly, We have no right to expect them to love us.

I wonder in retrospect at the pathetic ease With which I was able to blind myself to stark injustices and discount glaring facts which chal- lenged my racial position. Obviously I preferred to be loved than to be right.

One steaming wet March day in 1957, a &Manly dressed African arrived on the manse doorstep to interview me for the Nchanga Drum, the newipaper which the mining company pub- lishes for its African workers. His name was Sokota Wina. Tall, with the angularity of the he was about my own age, and that rare African who is good-looking in a Western way.

n of a Barotseland prime minister, Wina's nistory was already a stormy one. He had been e,sPelled from Fort Hare, the African university in.the Cape, for taking part in a students' strike.• 4Is education interrupted and a university de- gree denied him, he had been forced to scale d,"wit his driving ambition and bend his con- siderable literary gifts to the nondescript work 0f a small-town newspaperman—phrasing stern Warnings about litter in the township and inter- viewing Mr. Moses Banda, who had just been blessed with his tenth child.

Sokota Wina is now a professional politician in the classical nationalist tradition. In a midnight POlice swoop in March, 1959, following the ban- ning of the Zambia African Congress, he was at.r,rested and rusticated to a remote rural village. lying proof of the stupidity of government PbtTheY in packing off nationalist leaders to the _nth to coddle their hate and brood upon their al or fancied grievances, Wina returned to "tte Copperbelt after his release bitter and 'tiggressive and joined Kenneth Kaunda's United National Independence Party, in 11'01 he now holds high office. He called on me once after his return. We were strangers. He had left behind him in detention camp his gentle humour and urbane manner. He confronted me, a hard, unrelenting nationalist, complete with toga and 'Nkrumah' haircut. We had little to say to each other, the common ground between us had been devastated by his experience.

But in 1957 Wina was a polite personable African intellectual, whose manner was smooth, but in whose heart, 1 discovered, there burned indignation and fierce pride of race. We fell to talking, and as the hours passed it seemed the most natural thing in the world that I should invite him to share my evening meal. He was the first African to sit at my table, but so quietly assured was his manner that I had no sense of the significance of this event. Unlike most of the educated Africans I had met up to that time, he did not, in his dealings with Europeans, veer unpredictably between abject servility and overweening arrogance. Completely without self- consciousness in a European environment, his demeanour defied one to treat him with other than absolute equality. Indeed, I was a little in- timidated by his wider experience and fluency of expression.

We struck up a genuine friendship, and he became a frequent visitor to the manse. We talked by the hour and he gave me my first insight into the facts of life on the other side of the colour barrier. We were able to discuss the most explosive subjects frankly and without heat. He never retired hurt when a shaft struck home about the shortcomings of the African people, nor did he allow politeness to deter him from exposing the hypocrisies and thoughtless cruelties of Europeans in their dealings with other races. With gentle irony he tore to shreds my misconceptions about Africans and laid bare the racism which was at the root of much of my thinking.

I began to see our society for the first time through the eyes of a cultured and sensitive Afri- can. He shared with me his shame and hurt at the humiliations which were his daily experi- ence: the pass he must carry when moving around at night; the insults he must shrug off, directed at him by Europeans who were his cul- tural and educational inferiors:. the salute 'Boy!' to which he was supposed to answer when ad- dressed by anyone from a shop assistant to a seven-year-old child; the grotesque myths about Africa and Africans he must listen to respect- fully when expounded by his superiors, men who for the most part had neither his back- ground nor intelligence, but the colour of whose skin conferred upon them infallibility He spoke with amused tolerance of the occa- sion he had been ejected from the dining saloon of a Rhodesia Railways train. He had asked politely for something to eat and was ordered `to get back with the Kaffirs where he belonged' —and this, he added cynically, on a transport system under the direct control of the Federal Government, the great apostles of 'partnership'! He described the occasion he and his brother Arthur, a university graduate and at that time the highest-ranking African in the Territorial education service, had got involved in a fracas at one of the Federation's airports when they had gone into the restaurant to buy cigarettes They were removed forcibly by the manager with the enthusiastic assistance of some Euro. pean customers. The police arrived and the Wina brothers spent the night in gaol, whilst the Euro. peans went back to their drinks, highly delighted at having put two more 'milts' in their places Sokota wanted to know what logic or justice there was in a state of affairs where he and his brother could fly half-way round the world, receiving courtesy and consideration every mile of the journey, to be humiliated and insulted when they arrived in their homeland. I couldn't tell him, but I put that precise question to my European friends. They shrugged theit shoulders and agreed that it was tough on people like Wina, but they claimed that to lower the barriers for the mere handful of educated types would be to let in the whole backward horde. Wina and his like, they said, must mark time until their more primitive brothers caught up with them, then Europeans would be prepared to do some serious talking about removing the colour bar.

What surprised me more than the answer itself was the self-evident fact that hardly one of these Europeans had ever talked with an educated African except within the confines of a strict business relationship. I began to realise just how little reliance could be placed on statements such as: 'I have been here twenty-five years—I know the African!' When I pressed these old hands to tell me just what they knew about the African, their dogmatic statements gave place to vague generalities about unreliability, dishonesty and ingratitude, illustrated by graphic accounts of the perfidies of Jonas, their houseboy, or Mulenga, their reprobate old African capitao.

In most cases it appeared that the African they knew was a walking extension of a shovel or dishcloth. The thought Processes of a Sokota Wina were as foreign to them as those of an Eskimo or an ancient Aztec. Because James, their family retainer who had been with them for twenty years, was perfectly content with his little house in their garden and his weekly binge at the beerhall, it followed therefrom that all the African people were happy with their lot ex- cept when stirred up by power-drunk agitators. When I pointed out that men like Sokota Wina, far from being happy with their lot, were be- coming more frustrated by the day, out came the clinching argument: 'It's all a matter of culture,' they said. 'It has taken us all of 2,000 years to reach our present level. These johnnies will not do it in less for all their university degrees and smart suits. They are just down from the trees. Scratch a BA and you will un- cover a cannibal!' My protestations that this 'culture' theory was neither true historically nor tenable sociologically were received with dis- believing smiles. They assured me they knew the African.

Thinking back on my conversations with Sokota Wina I am not the least surprised that he and his brothers are now militant nationalists. The surprising thing is that they were prepared to wait so long, caps in hand, for someone to grant them the rights and privileges which would have been accorded them immediately in a colour-blind society on their merits as human beings. What no one was prepared to offer them —a square deal—they are now pledged to taking away. Indeed, so greatly has the pace of events increased that were Europeans to offer them now the concessions for which they humbly pleaded three years ago they would spurn them. The psychological relationship between the two races has undergone an irreversible change. The key question is no longer 'what are Euro- peans prepared to offer?' but 'what are Africans prepared to accept?'

With the help of Sokota Wina I got to know a small group of Copperbelt African leaders, some of whom were to become my firm friends, and others political opponents. There was Francis Chembe, the Federal MP, a most con- fused and confusing figure politically, who oscillated with alarming frequency between rabid nationalism and sweetly reasonable multi- racialism—nevertheless, a charming and intelli- gent individual. There was Godwin Lewanika, a member of the Barotse Royal House and founder of the NR African National Congress, who then surprisingly joined the European- dominated United Federal Party, and with this powerful patronage won a seat in the Federal House. A most untypical African thinker, whose thought processes are tinged with the ideologies of Moral Rearmament, Lewanika has been con- demned to wander in the rapidly reducing hinterland between two nationalisms, rejected by his European mentors and despised by thousands of Africans who dismiss him, quite wrongly, as a traitor to his race. A case could certainly be made out that he has been the enthusiastic tool of subtler political intelligences anxious to give a multi-racial front to a basically uni-racial party, but no one who talks to him could doubt his sincerity or his sense of utter isolation. And there was Lawrence Katilungu, jovial, volatile and shrewd, at that time President General of the African Mineworkers' Union; by far the most accomplished trade union leader in Cen- tral Africa, a master diplomatist with a nice sense of timing, whose rugged independence and obvious responsibility have led Europeans to trust him without his being cast out by his own people as a 'stooge.'

Through constant discussion with Africans of this calibre my thinking underwent a radical zhange. The arguments of my European friends began to weigh less and less with me as it became clear how remote they were from any sustained contact with articulate Africans, and as 1 was privileged to share the hopes and fears of a group of men whom anyone would have been proud to hail as friends.

Even more than their burning sense of griev- ance, their charitableness and freedom from bitterness impressed me. They rejected absolutely the view that Europeans are innately bad, recog- nising that the social set-up allowed them little latitude to be anything else.

The basic change in my perception hinged upon the fact that having earned the confidence of some Africans it became even easier to regard all Africans as human beings. Just that. The root of my racism was a psychological rejection of Africans as personalities in their own right. Unconsciously 1 had been consigning the Afri- can people to a sort of half-category in my system of values between household pets and responsible human beings. I, in common with most other decent European citizens, had been prepared to treat them kindly, doctor them when sick, feed them when hungry and even lavish upon them an indulgent sentimentality. But then I did as much for my well-loved dog. It was the acknowledgment of, and respect for, basic human dignity which had been lacking in my relationship with Africans. I just did not regard one African life as being of equal value to one European life—African feelings were not equally to be respected, African desires equally to be considered, African, rights equally to be cherished with those of my own race—a shock- ing admission for any Christian to have to make.

Preoccupied during the day with the routine business of the church, I spent nights agonising over the inexorable progression of my thinking towards a position which must put me at odds with the greater number of my European con- gregation. I was anxious to delay as long as possible my commitment to a stand on the racial issue which would inevitably bring dissension to a happily united church. Accepting, as every minister must, the Bible as the final court of appeal on all moral issues, I pored over it in order to put the matter beyond doubt and find some line of action for which I could claim the highest Authority.

Wherever I turned throughout the Bible my eyes seemed to light upon yet one more declara- tion of the essential unity of all men. At the very beginning, for example, the Book of Genesis makes it clear that God set the stamp of His image and likeness upon all men, as a symbol of their worth and status in His eyes and the fundamental ground of their equality. He did not select certain races for this honour, nor did He give it to men as a prize on attaining certain standards of culture and civilisation.

Moving on to the New Testament I was con- fronted with our Lord's astonishing claim that anyone who can utter with sincerity the invoca- tion 'Our Father' is thereby admitted to one great family circle, to be equal sharer in the inexhaustible parental Love of God, and equally entitled to all the privileges and responsibilities of family life. And even if the African child happened to be backward and unformed, this could never, on the analogy of the Divine Family, justify unequal treatment of him. For wherever true family love is found, the child handicapped from birth, far from being despised, is loved all the more by his parents and is cherished and helped by his more fortunate brothers and sisters. .

And what of the teaching of our Lord? I discovered that the most cursory reading of the Gospels revealed discrimination to be a nega- tion of the genius of Christianity and a denial of all that Christ taught. Take the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example—particularly relevant, since the Jews of our Lord's day prac- tised discrimination against their Samaritan neighbours. Yet Christ not only made a despised Samaritan the hero of His story, but pointed a moral to the clever young lawyer that there is a law in human affairs which transcends all differences and antagonisms—the binding law of human need. So, in measuring racial discrimina- tion in any of its forms against the standards of the Gospel, my conviction grew that it was a grievous sin.

One practical rule emerged with crystal clarity from my study of the Bible's attitude to race. My policy of discouraging Africans to attend worship in my church was utterly wrong. Yet although my conviction was now over- whelming, I still delayed, haunted by visions of endless rows of empty pews testifying to my rashness in dogmatising on the most explosive of all subjects after less than a year in Africa. I imagined the reproachful looks of my Elders, stormy Council meetings, and, worst of all, the abandonment of the £20,000 church building project upon which we had just embarked, con- fident in the support of our greatly increased membership. The foundations of a beautiful new Chingola Free Church had been laid, and massive portal frames were already pointing skywards. It looked as though the skeletal struc- ture might end up by being a monument to my irresponsibility.

I was becoming more and more remote from my people, and my preaching suffered as 1 lost all rapport with them. As I went on mY pastoral rounds, I was reduced to a state of miserable dumbness whenever the conversation turned to the inevitable subject of race. Eventu- ally I could prevaricate no longer. On the first Sunday in Lent, 1957, I announced that mY subject for the next three Sunday evenings would be 'Christianity and the Racial Situation.' I was committed.