A personal tribute to Archbishop Trevor Huddleston 1913-1998

As a young adolescent in New Zealand, I read Father Trevor Huddleston's Naught For Your Comfort. It was published in 1956 and told the story of forced removals in South Africa by the Apartheid State. Trevor Huddleston had been sent to South Africa by the Community of the Resurrection in 1943 and was recalled to England by his Community in 1956. Naught for Your Comfort blew the whistle to the international community about what was really happening in South Africa and attacked the moral evil of racism and apartheid. The book made an indelible impression on me and helped to shape my values and my theology.

Huddleston's arguments were simple and compelling. "Any doctrine based on racial or colour prejudice and enforced by the State is therefore an affront to human dignity and ipso facto an insult to God himself ... There is no room for compromise or fence sitting over a question such as racial ideology when it so dominates the thought of a whole country" (Naught for Your Comfort).

Huddleston's partisanship inspired generations of freedom fighters from within and without the Christian community. In the process he got under the skin of church people who thought that the Church belonged on the sidelines or in the middle. In a way he embodied the relationship between faith and politics. Huddleston's theology was incarnational. He took very seriously that the Word had become flesh. Indeed he described his own religious community as a commitment to a way of life which would proclaim the relevance of the Gospel to the modern world.

Huddleston lived the words of the Letter of James that faith without works is meaningless. Huddleston was an indomitable and formidable freedom fighter for the cause of freedom for all South Africans.

The Apartheid State always claimed that it was Christian and sought theological justification for its racist ideology and practice. For decades, Huddleston unmasked them and exposed the Apartheid State as morally illegitimate. He made the fight against apartheid a world issue. However, he was not simply against apartheid. He was for liberation. In 1955, at the Congress of the People, the African National Congress gave its highest award, Isitwalandwe, to Trevor Huddleston. Trevor was invited back to South Africa 45 years later by the ANC. He came as a voting member and to give the opening speech at the ANC's first Congress after its unbanning which took place in Durban in 1991.

During those 45 years Trevor Huddleston had worked as a Bishop in Masasi in Tanzania, as a Bishop in Stepney, as Bishop of Mauritius and as Archbishop of the Indian Ocean. When he retired from Mauritius he became President of the Tanzania British Society, President of the International Defence and Aid Fund and President of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. In the last years of his life he became a peer of the realm. South Africa gave him its highest award posthumously.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has often told the story from his own childhood of the young white priest wearing a cassock and a large black hat who walked past him and his mother outside the hostel where she worked as a cleaner. He stopped to doff his hat to his mother. The priest was Trevor Huddleston.

I first met Trevor Huddleston in Mauritius where he had been elected Bishop in 1978. By that time I had already been expelled from South Africa and had also joined the ANC. I found in Huddleston someone whom I not only trusted and admired but was able to turn to during crises in my own life. Although he was already an Archbishop, I experienced him as a parish priest. I once heard Sonny Ramphal, at the time Secretary General of the Commonwealth, describe Huddleston as the Parish Priest of the 20th century.

It was in Mauritius that I first saw Huddleston's love of children and the mutual delight when he was in their company. Mauritius with its great mixture of faith traditions was also the place where Huddleston began to campaign actively for interfaith dialogue. He saw peaceful dialogue between differing faiths as the only hope for humanity at the end of the twentieth century. The Mauritians were rather startled when he told them that he had always been a socialist.

In his last years, Trevor Huddleston made more than one attempt to come to South Africa to settle. It was not easy for him to stomach the degree to which the old order lives on in the midst of the new. Whilst formally we have become a non-racial democracy the struggle to transform our society and deal with the legacy of the past will take several generations.

President Nelson Mandela helped Huddleston to accept that his final years should be in the United Kingdom by asking him to continue to work for the interests of the new South Africa whilst staying with his Community in Mirfield.

In the United States, an organization then called Episcopal Churchmen for South Africa was founded by the lifelong antiapartheid activist, the late Bill Johnston, in 1956. The inspiration for the organisation came from Michael Scott, Alan Paton, Bishop Ambrose Reeves and "the passionately involved monk, Trevor Huddleston." Appropriately Nelson Mandela's farewell visit to North America in September 1998 included a Memorial Service for Archbishop Huddleston.