Synopsis: Scott meets an Anglican priest named Father Huddleston, who has fought to improve the living conditions- such as lack of adequate housing- for native south africans living under apartheid. He also had led a "defiance" campaign; he critiques apartheid laws and gives his suggestions for a long term plan that would end apartheid. 

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa.–Four of us were newspaper men–the others from the Philadelphia Bulletine, the Chicago Daily News and the Wall Street Journal. The fifth man was the conscience of South Africa. 

We sat in the busy dining room of the Carleton, one of the richest hotels of a fabulously rich city. A string trio played in an alcove. 

Under the glittering chandeliers there was the murmur of polite conversation, an occasional pop of champagne corks, the glam of silver. Richly coloured cut flowers made bright splashes above the snowy white table cloths. 

The real South Africa, the South Africa of sweating, enslaved black men who make this wealthy display possible, seemed a million miles away, and as the fifth man at our table talked in his quiet way the whole incongruity of this vast slave camp came home to us. 

Diners at the nearby tables glanced curiously at the tall man in the sombre black ankle-length habit of his Anglican order and turned to whisper to each other: "Father Huddleston." 

You could read neither respect nor lack of it in their glances. Father Huddleston is simply beyond the understanding of 99 percent of white South Africans. 

As the priest in charge of the order known as the Community of the Resurrection, Father Ernest Urban Trevor Huddleston is closest of all South Africa's white men to the native. 

He has fought to improve their "housing" in the tin-and-cardboard shanty hovels of Sophiatown, Orlando and Pimville, organized uncertain charities to feed their undernourished children in their crowded schools, attacked each of the "apartheid" acts in language so trenchant that everyone wonders why he is allowed to continue. 

That was one of the questions we put to him. 

"I am as surprised as anyone," he agreed. "I've seen those who feel as I do being 'dealt with' one by one. I suppose it is only a question of time before they will find some way to deal with me." 

Return to Barbarism 

Did he feel that a member of the church was on sound ground in taking such a strong stand? Was that not better left to the politicians? 

"The rights of mankind are at the roots of Christianity," he said. "In this country we're seeing a return to barbarism, although very few whites recognize it for such. 

"We pray in our churches for the guardianship of Christianity. We do not practice it in our lives. Our whole social structure is being brought down in ruins. Christianity is coming down with it. 

"That is why I feel justified in taking the stand I do." 

I said to Father Huddleston that in my short month in South Africa I had begun to suspect my own feelings of right and wrong. 

In the face of the massive acceptance by the white population of laws that reduce the black man to the status of animals, it was sometimes hard to resist the easy drift of non-resistance. 

Father Huddleston looked around the ornate room. At a nearby table a champagne corn came free with a small explosion and eight expensively-dressed diners laughed brightly. The diamonds on the hands of the women and the jewels in their ears glinted in the soft light. 

"I still firmly believe," Father Huddleston said gravely, "that every white man and woman in  South Africa lives with a conscience that knows guilt. I do not think this is a case of ignorance or inhumanity, as it might seem, but a case of the irrational force of fear. 
"Men are afraid of speaking the truth or of acting on principle because they are afraid of the consequences in their political or civic life. They cannot put it off forever, of course. Someday each man and woman will have to take a stand. 

There'll Be Bloodshed

"We're seeing the native's liberties being taken away one by one," he went on, "but what we have not yet recognized is that our own liberties are going with theirs. South Africa has been going full-blooded Nazi and it may be too late now to stop it." 

Did that mean that he was pessimistic about South Africa's future? 

"I am afraid that it is now too late. At one time I felt that there were enough Liberals so that we might continue to earn the respect of the African and so have him patient enough too a long-term plan. Now we have neither. 

"The Liberals are going or gone. There is no long-term plan. The African has lost any respect the the might have had for white leadership." 

What were the likely results of that? 

"South Africa is not a country that encourages easy prophesy," Father Huddleston said, "but I fear that we will have, perhaps within the next five years, the same kind of thing that you see in Kenya with Mau Maus. 

"The Mau Mau, of course, is anti-Christian and violently anti-European. We do not have that fanaticism here. 

"But the African is like a sleeping giant. Each day there is some affront to the dignity that he wants most of all. When he wakes there will be violence." 

"Against the whites?

"Yes. Why, here in Johannesburg alone there are more than 50,000 Africans without homes. That brings things down to their fundamentals. 

" I have watched a growing political awareness on their part–a growing knowledge of their own strength. It is now just a question of time and, more than that, a questions of leadership." 

Rebels Risk Prison

We asked Father Huddleston about his own leadership in the "defiance" campaigns largely organized by the African National Congress and the Indian Congress. 

"I was not a leader," he explained, "but I gave it my support and I still do, whatever the consequences." 

He spoke warmly of the example of Patrick Duncan, son of the first government general of South Africa, who had abandoned a career in the colonial administration to take part in the movement against apartheid. 

With others–notably Manila Gandhi, son of the late Mohandas Gandhi–Duncan was arrested last year for deliberately entering a native "location" without the required permit and was subsequently fined and given a suspended sentence. Should he participate again in such a protest–and many of this friends here think it likely–he will go to prison. 

Were such acts really worthwhile, we asked. 

'It is all we can do," Father Huddleston replied. "We are not against any racial group, but against the laws. 

"The great majority of white men accept these laws. They never visit the locations, they never contribute to educational facilities, never question the right of the state to thwart and oppress a whole race which outnumbers them five to one. 

"Such people often ask me, 'Who is to decide if a law is right.' And I believe that it must be decided in the conscience of the individual. We have not decided it that way and we have thrown away any claim we had to leadership." 

Native 'Just a Child'

What would Father Huddleston's own long-term plan be, we asked, if he felt that there was still time? 

"No one believes that it could be done overnight," he said, "but there are many ways in which we could be getting a start." 

"First of all we need to wipe out the great mass of apartheid laws which keep the native in fear and which lead him to hatred. Then, we must have compulsory education and adequate housing. The whole pattern of social existence is destroyed here by a lack of homes and the security of family life. 

"I, myself, would give the vote first to all natives who are university graduates or who own their own property. That would seem a small beginning, but if there were equal opportunities for education we could swiftly bring the mass of the native population to an acceptance of the responsibility of the franchise. 

"There should also be free-hold land tenure and, above all, the abolishment of the pass laws. Then we would be on our way.

"Instead," he went on, "we have our people saying the native is 'just a child'–a 'child' by the way, about whom they have no compunction in lashing for breaking the most unreasonable laws. We have the complete inability to accept the fact that the African is a member of the human race." 

Father Huddleston sat back to finish his coffee and once more we were aware of the gracious living around us. A waiter came up and presented us with our cheques and I noticed irrelevantly that mine was just about exactly the week's salary of the highest paid black man in the gold mines.