Arriving in Swaziland

I drove the two hundred and fifty miles from Pretoria to Swaziland in the new Bedford half-ton pick-up to begin my work as Director of the Usuthu Mission in September 1951.  Apart from Wilmot Jali, the parish priest, his wife Rosina and the few labourers employed on the mission, I found the congregation at the Mission on strike.  They had vowed never to enter the church again.

The Diocese of Zuluand, based at Eshowe, three hundred miles away in Natal, was congratulating itself on its decision to keep only 120 acres for the mission and to sell the other 5,000 acres to the Swazi Nation at half the normal price.  The nation was far from being grateful.  The diocese was unaware that the land had been given free of charge to Jekeseni (Jackson, missionary at Usuthu in the 1890s) by Mbandzeni, the Paramount Chief and the father of Sobhuza II, who succeeded him in 1900 and remained Paramount Chief until the 1980s.  They were saying, “Your neighbour’s wife has a new baby but she has no milk.  You lend him a cow.  Two years later, the baby is weaned.  Does he then sell it back to you?”  Everything depended on good relations between the Church and the Swazi nation. I sent a telegram to the bishop saying “Please cancel sale or I will return to Pretoria.”  He did so and I stayed.  The strike was over. 

The Usuthu Mission was responsible for the work of the Anglican Church in half the country.  Its centre was a small church in the Malkerns Valley built before World War I, a primary school and two new rondavels (round huts).  One was to be our living quarters.  The other our bedroom.  Later we built a small house.  The Usuthu had been closed as a mission station in 1913 because of malaria and was now an outstation of Manzini, the Place of Waters.

This was to become the home of the Mirfield Old Students’ Mission to Swaziland for the next ten years.  The first Old Student to serve was Anthony Molesworth who had been a curate at St Mary’s, Blyth, in Newcastle diocese.  He was a great linguist and storyteller but not all his stories were printable.  Others who joined later were Peter Burtwell and Anthony Salmon. 

Paramount Chief Sobhuza and Donald

Sobhuza was a wise ruler in an age when autocracy was already out of date.  He moved with ease in an out of traditional Swazi culture and language into the modern world.  Fortunately he agreed to attend my unveiling and came with his indunas (advisers) in colourful Swazi dress and an appropriate wife out of the hundred he had acquired.  He spoke perfect Swazi and English.  Sobhuza graciously welcomed me but said pointedly that the Anglican Church had so far done very little with the land his father had given us.  His followers seemed to agree.  I chose a Swazi proverb with which to open my reply.  ‘The mouth can cross even a river in flood.’  If your people and we can work together, there may be something to see in a few years’ time.  Six years later I referred to this meeting when speaking at the official opening of St Christopher’s school.                                     

The Malkerns Valley was dramatic.  To the west, the slopes of the Drakensberg mountains, which Usuthu Forests was just beginning to cover with pine trees.  Eastwards you looked across the lowveld to the Lebombo mountains, 50 miles away marking the border of Mozambique.  Alongside us flowed the Great Usuthu River, which provided us with constantly replenished building sand.  Work was just beginning on the Malkerns irrigation scheme, which was to turn the whole valley into rice paddies and citrus orchards.  Over the next 20 years the trees would provide all the electricity the country needed and also irrigate vast acres of rice.

A Zulu priest, Wilmot Jali was in charge of the parish.  His wife Rosamund was the very competent head of the primary school.  Bit by bit we managed to get the church going again.  The parish covered the southern half of Swaziland but little was happening except at the Usuthu, Mankaiana and Hlakikulu.  There was an old and decrepit mission station at Endlozana, just across the Transvaal border in South Africa.  I had a motor scooter and went off on a 120 mile trip once a month.

Many Swazi were polygamous.  Most men went as migrant labourers to the Johannesburg gold mines, which then employed 350,000 men, creaming off the most go-ahead from Swaziland, Lesotho, Zululand, Mozambique and Malawi.

Men and boys did the ploughing with oxen, other agricultural work was done by women.  As the boys were herding cattle for the five months when the maize was growing, few of them got very far at school.  The top classes were mainly girls:  western culture came into Swaziland through women.  It was the other way round in Malawi.  Gardens there are tilled by hoe and that is women’s work, so the boys went to school.   

LONDON BLITZ 1940

I was ordained priest in London in 1939 when I was 23.  A year later, on the first day of the London blitz, the planes arrived at 6 o’clock in the evening whilst it was still light.  I was visiting a sick woman, she was in bed and her husband was also in the room.  Suddenly there was an almighty row from aeroplanes and falling bombs.  The man dived under the bed and I found myself holding the hands of both of them, the woman in the bed and the man under the bed.  When the noise stopped I went outside into the street expecting to see devastation.  Boys were playing football, one shouted out, “Hey, Mister, your church is on fire!”

The planes had dived through the canopy of barrage balloons and dropped a canister of incendiary bombs on top of the church.  This was quite deliberate.  It had a spire and being on a hill, was a prominent building about four miles from Rotherhithe.  The plan was that when the bombers were over the fire the crew would press the release buttons and then the high-explosives would fall on the dock area.  The Old Kent Road gas works was also set on fire.  Every fire brigade in the district was sent there and the church was left to burn.  The congregation managed to pick up all the incendiaries with shovels, except for one that lodged in the peak of the wooden roof of the high Victorian gothic building.  There it smouldered happily for two hours with no way of getting near it.  Finally it burst into flames and the whole of it caught fire.  The fire brigade arrived a quarter of an hour later, just as the roof crashed in. 

At 8 o’clock the proper air raid began.  Fortunately an Air-raid Wardens post had just been completed in the church grounds, built to withstand light bombs with deep concrete foundations.  Some hours later, when the raid ended, I went out to have a pee and nearly fell into a big hole bored at an angle underneath the shelter.  We discovered later that the hole went 15’ deep into the back-filled earth where it failed to explode.  It was still there at the end of the war.

Early the next morning we prepared for the 8 o’clock Communion service in Haberdasher Askes School across the road.  I recall being reprimanded by the Vicar, Fr Bill Fenton, for being improperly dressed.  Somehow my green Leeds BA hood had disappeared in the turmoil of the night.  I have never worn one since.  About three weeks later our temporary church at the school was bombed and blown to pieces so we moved back to the vestry, the one part of the church that had not been burned out.

Many people in the parish lost their lives.  I remember one night when the Christmas Club was having its pay-out and the men were all in the pub.  The basements of the terraced houses opposite had been shored and joined together to form a common shelter.  The women and children were there.  A bomb fell on the pub killing about sixteen of the men.  In the shelter opposite, where I was, none of them know till the next morning who was dead, who was alive, who was in hospital.

One of the images I will never forget was when a lone bomber dropped a bomb on a house early in the morning.  Rescuers knew there was a woman in it.  The house was just a pile of rubble.  They dug down.  The woman had been in bed on one side of the room and a baby in a cot on the other side.  In the instant between the bomb hitting the house and exploding she had thrown herself right across the room and spread-eagled herself across the cot in order to try and protect the baby, sadly to no avail.

On another occasion I was conducting a funeral.  We were processing from the chapel to the grave when the sirens went and German planes came overhead.  I kept on walking but had the feeling that nobody was following me.  I turned round and found I was alone with the coffin, the pallbearers had all jumped into another open grave, I could just see their heads sticking out.

Amazingly people adapted to the situation.  They were quite put-out on nights when there were no raids.  They would be sitting in the shelter and they would say, “What’s going on, it’s eleven o’clock?  I’m going to bed!”

With the church burned down and the children and many of the adults evacuated, it was decided the new curate was bad luck and I was told I was free to look for another job.

Stephen Makadanje and voluntary ministry

One of our ‘bush-brotherhood’ team was a Malawian, Stephen Makandanje.  He had walked 1,000 miles to Swaziland in search of work in 1915 and had worked all his adult life as a hospital orderly.  He built a church in Hlatikulu with his own hands, having asked to be on night duty at the hospital so that he could work on the church during the day.  It took a year to mould and bake the bricks, another year to build the church building and a third year to build up a thriving congregation.

I thought Stephen would make an excellent priest and asked him if he would like to be ordained.  He said. “No, that would spoil it all.”  I asked him. “Why?” He said “The work of God has to be done from your heart.  To be paid for it would spoil it.”  I replied, “If I asked the bishop to ordain you as a priest and promised to pay you nothing, would you accept?”  “Father, that is what I have always longed for.”

Stephen inspired me with the idea of voluntary ministry.  Years later when in Malawi, diocesan synod welcomed the idea and when we finally left in 1981, many of the clergy were voluntary priests.  

Usuthu pineapples

I was due to go on leave in 1956 to Australia – I had not seen my family for seven years.  We had just planted a quarter of a million pineapples.  I was Chairman of the Swaziland Pineapple Growers Association. 

I was doing most of the farming and it was essential that somebody be found to look after the farm for the six months while I was away.  We had an excellent Swazi foreman but we needed someone to make crucial decisions, pineapples were a totally new crop for Swaziland.  Anthony Molesworth said he knew a chap who used to be in his scout troop in Tyneside, a surveyor who worked for the Coal Board.  He had just been doing his military service in Kenya. 

I said he sounded ideal for fruit farming in Swaziland, write and see what he says!  We had no reply.  Then came a cable from the Canary Islands saying “On the way.  Arriving in Cape Town next week.”  And so arrived Jack Dobson, Jack-of-all-trades.  He was later ordained and became Archdeacon of Swaziland.   He and his wife Jean now live in active retirement in Swaziland.

The pineapples have done very well and 55 years later the industry is the fourth largest employer in Swaziland.  Jane and I flew into Swaziland in 2005 and much of the country seemed to be blue-grey with pineapples.  

Holiday in Australia - through India 1956

For my leave in 1956 I headed for Australia, leaving Anthony Molesworth in charge with Jack Dobson looking after the farm.  The Usuthu semi-brotherhood was good but something was lacking.  Perhaps we could learn from the ashrams (mini-communities) of India, and from the West Queensland Bush Brotherhood, where I hoped to spend a fortnight. 

I was keen to see something of Asia, where our family history began.  I sailed for Australia on a White Star cargo ship via the east coast of Africa, to Bombay (now Mumbai ).  Two miles off Zanzibar the wind already carried the scent of cloves. 

At Mombasa, Arab dhows were in the harbour.  I watched one being repaired.  The Arab boat-builder was using a drill operated by a bow, rather like that for a violin.  The bit span backwards and forwards as the skilled craftsman moved his hand left to right, with the cord wrapped round the drill bit.  I saw later  exactly the same technique being used in Penang harbour.  Arabs had been trading on both sides of the Indian Ocean from the time of Christ.  The bow-drill, like Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia and East Africa, was one of their legacies, as was the Swahili language, made up from Arabic words and Bantu grammar.  At Karachi an enormous squatting camp provided a kind of temporary home for perhaps a hundred thousand Muslims, some of the millions who had left India for the new state of Pakistan established in 1947.

At Tiruppattur station – mid-way between Bangalore and Madras – I was glad to find an ashram bullock-cart waiting for me.  The ashram church was in the style of a South India Hindu temple.  It had a white tower covered with carvings, not of Hindu deities but of trees and wildlife.  I found nine members of the ashram, but some were out in villages.  They lived in a community of eighty or more, the rest being students, mostly Hindu, who had come to spend their vacation working with members of the ashram.  The two founders, one Scots and the other Tamil, were both eye-surgeons and had met during World War I.  From time to time the ashram divided into small groups who would each stay in one of twenty or so villages, looking for new patients with eye problems  and helping with other community needs, such as clean water.

At sunrise each morning all of us – Hindu volunteers, ashram members and myself as a guest from Africa – spent an hour in silent meditation, cross-legged on an inner verandah that surrounded a patch of grass and a palm-tree.  I think I felt nearer to Jesus and his Twelve than at any time of my life.

Gandhi once visited Tiruppattur.  When he left, he said to the Hindu members of the group, “This is the kind of Christianity you should be afraid of!”  The rest – symbolised by the very English parish churches I saw, even in villages, would have no future. 

I left by bullock-cart after three days, caught another train and in Madras met a South Indian Bishop.  I disgraced myself by calling him “My Lord” and trying to kiss his ring.  I thought this was what one did to bishops.  I received a gentle rebuke, “This is the Church of South India.  We don’t have Lords.”

By train again down the Coromandel Coast (what a lovely name!) and then the long Adam’s Bridge that spans the 20 miles of the Gulf of Mannar between India and Sri Lanka.  Sri Lanka had just won its independence and my hostess took me to the top of a mountain overlooking the beautiful city of Kandy.  The results of the election of Sri Lanka’s first President were about to be announced.  There, 500 feet below us, the whole of Kandy was in party mood – fireworks, music and dancing.  Then the news broke - Sri Lanka’s first Prime Minister would be Solomon Bandaranaike, leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party.  He was succeeded by his wife.  Then by ship to Fremantle.

St Christopher’s Secondary School

 We built a secondary school, which is still going today.  When I was in Australia in 1956 people generously gave enough to get the school started.  Jack Dobson was in charge of the building as well as the farming.  The school was built on a steep hillside and we had to excavate huge amounts of soil with just a Ferguson tractor.

Jack built St Christopher’s for 120 boys for something under £10,000.  The Paramount Chief came to the opening of the school in 1959.  We were very glad that he had marked the occasion by sending one of his sons as a student.  In my speech of welcome and thanks I said, “When I arrived, Nwgenyama (Lion), you asked me why the Church had done nothing with the land your grandfather gave us 70 years ago.  I replied, “It is easy to talk.  ‘The mouth can cross even a river in flood.’  If your people and we can work together, there may be something to see in a few years’ time.”

Impopotha: Bernard Wrankmore

Fifty years ago one of the early missionaries found a little coloured boy, the son of an English colonial officer and a Swazi woman.  He put him on his horse, clothed him, taught him and when was grown up sent him off to find his way in the world, just saying: “When you get a chance, do something for the Church in return.”

This man, now grey-headed, said that he had bought a little farm and wanted to give a piece of it to the Church.

So we built the little church of St Anthony on the small hill overlooking half of Swaziland.  At one end is the round apse in the chancel.  It was closed off by two big doors so that it could also be used as a school.  Outside the building was whitewashed so it could be seen from miles away with its great cross of sky-blue tiles.

On one visit Ruth, the mission land rover, was towing a big trailer picked up on a scrap heap and we nearly got stuck in the mud several times but Ruth carried on for 30 miles.  It was nearly dark when I arrived at Mpopotha, a hot meal was waiting at William’s house.  The number of church congregations grew from two to twenty-five.

We welcomed a variety of people and groups to work with us.  One of the most colourful was Bernard Wrankmore.  A letter came from the Archbishop of Capetown saying, ‘We have an excellent but unusual man in mind for ordination.  Could he come to you for some of his training?’  So Bernard joined the team.  He had worked in several countries, amongst other things he had been a camel-driver, organiser of prize-fights and country-dancing.

I travelled with him to Capetown and found myself sitting in a small dinghy while Bernard searched the seabed for abalone – large edible snails.  I was given a hand-pump to supply him with air.  He had no mask and told me there was a limit of thirty seconds without air, after that he would be drowning.  It was a terrifying experience.