Midwives of South Africa's Rebirth

"Alan Paton: A Biography"

By Peter F. Alexander

Oxford University Press, 510 pp.; $35

"Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela"

By Nelson Mandela

Little, Brown, 558 pp.; $24.95

Two striking incidents from these estimable books intimate the depth—but also the ironies—of Christian faith in modern South Africa. Alan Paton (1903-88) won worldwide renown when in 1948 he published "Cry, the Beloved Country," an intensely powerful novel of interracial antagonism, murder, despair, and (at the end) forgiveness. When in the 1950s and 1960s he helped guide South Africa's Liberal Party as a voice for nonviolent, multiracial reform, he was subjected to serious harassment from the South African government even as he won the support of many reformers inside and outside of his country.

Before he became widely known through his writing and political activities, however, Paton had served as the superintendent of a juvenile prison for nonwhites at Deipkloof, south Johannesburg. As a humane and largely successful administrator, Paton tried to promote inner direction, as well as outward conformity, in his charges. To that end, in 1935 or 1936 he introduced a daily half-hour of Bible study. Not long thereafter one of the boys was accused of stealing fish from a nearby store. When Paton asked his black staff for advice, they urged him to use corporal punishment to get at the truth. But after only a few cuts of the cane, the lad sprang up and accused Paton of "crucifying me." He then called the African warder who was accusing him "Judas," the black vice-principal "Herod," and Paton "Pontius Pilate." Paton was deeply moved, apologized profusely, and let the boy go. Later the same afternoon, Paton went searching for the lad to offer his apologies again, but when he found the boy, he was eating a hunk of a stolen fish.

About 20 years later, Nelson Mandela (b. 1918) was on the road. A few years earlier he had qualified as a lawyer and had established, with his partner Oliver Tambo, the first African legal office in the city of Johannesburg. Increasingly, however, Mandela was drawn toward political activism through the work of the African National Congress (ANC), a multiracial organization that had already been in existence for nearly half a century. Now, in the fall of 1955, Mandela was traveling through Natal and the Cape Province to encourage local ANC units to resist the policies of the Nationalist government, which had come to power in 1948 and had immediately begun transforming South Africa's hereditary racist conventions into full-scale, legal apartheid.

When Mandela arrived in Cape Town, he was welcomed into the home of Walter Teka, pastor of a Wesleyan church. Mandela's guides for much of his stay were Johnson Ngwevela and Greenwood Ngotyana, who were Communists as well as members of the ANC. The first Sunday of Mandela's visit he arose with the expectation of making another foray into the countryside, but he was surprised to learn that all ANC business was called off. Why? The Communists Ngwevela and Ngotyana were also ardent Wesleyans who kept the Sabbath strictly. As Mandela sums up the episode: "I protested, but to no avail. Communism and Christianity, at least in Africa, were not mutually exclusive."

These incidents illustrate the treasures to be found in the two books, which tell us not only about Paton and Mandela, but also about the volatile mix of religion and society in an intensely Christian, but also intensely divided, region of the world. The biography by Peter Alexander (an Australian academic who knew Paton personally) is not as powerful as the best of Paton's own autobiographical writing (especially the first volume of his autobiography, "Towards the Mountain," 1980). But partially because Alexander shares the modern fixation on sex and the details of private life, this account is more complete than anything Paton wrote about himself. Moreover, Alexander's interest in Paton's private life does not undermine his ability to make persuasive positive judgments about both Paton's writing and his politics.

Mandela's autobiography began as a clandestine narrative that he wrote while a prisoner in the 1970s on Robben Island off the coast from Cape Town. After the April 1994 election that brought Mandela and the ANC to power, he took up the memoir again, this time with the help of many ANC colleagues. As might be expected for such a book from such a person at such a time, contemporary political considerations influence its perspective. Yet it still offers a remarkable narrative of nearly superhuman patience, fortitude, and determination, as well as considerable self-deprecation.

At the end of the volume, Mandela says he never gave up on human nature, through 28 years of imprisonment and despite the most vicious Nationalist resistance to reform. He saw hope for change even in the warders on Robben Island who treated political prisoners with special venom. In his own words: "Even in the grimmest times in prison, when my comrades and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going. … It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed." This is a very good book from a very great man.

In addition to many common acquaintances and relatively common politics, Paton and Mandela also shared a deep immersion in the Christian faith. Paton was raised, quite strictly, as a Christadelphian by his parents, who were immigrants from Scotland, but he embraced the Anglican church as an adult. To the end of his days, Christianity was Paton's moral anchor. As Alexander is at pains to point out, Christian concerns infused the heart of "Cry, the Beloved Country" and Paton's two major biographies, of the politician Jan Hofmeyr and the Anglican bishop Geoffrey Clayton.

It was Christianity that kept Paton's reformist politics nonviolent and that estranged him from the South African Communist Party, some of whose members he otherwise admired for their resistance to the regime. It was also the soul of his motivation in founding the Liberal Party. As only one of many such examples, Paton's objection to the Group Area Act of 1950, which uprooted hundreds of thousands of Indian, black, and coloured families from their homes, was specifically Christian—he could not fathom how Afrikaner Nationalists, whose Calvinism was integral to their ideology, could so callously violate biblical injunctions to love their neighbors as themselves.

Paton was no saint. He sometimes drank too much, especially in his later decades. He had at least two affairs. But he realized, as he told his younger son shortly before his death, "I'm a sinner. I'm a terrible sinner." And he found in the person of Christ and the ministrations of the Anglican church balm for his soul and direction for his public life.

Mandela's introduction to Christianity was through the Wesleyan mission church to which his mother belonged and that provided his early education. Although Mandela, unlike Paton, has not been an active churchman, he refers throughout his memoir to the Wesleyans as "my church." In the mid-1980s, when Mandela was interviewed by two American journalists who chided him for links to the Communist Party and for not maintaining Martin Luther King, Jr.'s position on nonviolence, Mandela replied emphatically: "I told them that I was a Christian and had always been Christian. Even Christ, I said, when he was left with no alternative, used force to expel the moneylenders from the temple."

Through decades of fending off accusations of fomenting terrorism and abetting communism, his constant reply was that, when nonviolent methods do not restrain a violent oppressor, no recourse is left except to respond in kind. On this point, Paton's pacifism may seem more virtuous. Yet Mandela's painstaking move from the ANC's traditional position of nonviolence to an acceptance of tactical violence against the violent South African regime actually follows closely the standard Christian arguments for a just war. Christians in the United States, for example, have never justified their participation in any of their country's wars with as much ethical care as the ANC justified in its use of selective violence against the South African government.

In addition, some of Mandela's closest friends and lifelong colleagues, including Oliver Tambo (who led the ANC from exile during Mandela's years in prison) and Chief Albert Luthuli (an earlier leader of the ANC and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace who died in 1967), were active, dedicated Christians.

The saddest lines in the memoir—at least, from the perspective of lost Christian opportunities—are those in which Mandela gives his rationale for not abandoning the ANC's alliance with South Africa's Communist Party, even when denouncing the Communists could have earned his release from prison: "It is perhaps difficult for white South Africans … to understand why experienced African politicians so readily accepted Communists as their friends. But to us the reason is obvious. … Communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals; who were prepared to eat with us; talk with us, live with and work with us." As thorough as the Christianization of South Africa had been, it still left "the children of light" with much to learn from "the children of darkness."

These two books contain much, much more. Especially valuable is Alexander's sharp assessment of Alan Paton's inner struggles—particularly between ambition and humble service, as well as between sexual energy and the domestic conventions that he wholeheartedly embraced. Even more poignant is Nelson Mandela's repeated testimony to his painful regret at the ways in which commitment to political reform made it impossible for him to fulfill traditional African responsibilities to mother, spouse, children, and extended family. Extraordinary as each is in his own sphere, Mandela and Paton are not paragons. Yet their lives illustrate the profundity of the statement made by Chief Albert Luthuli when he was dismissed from his post as a government-recognized Zulu chief for refusing to resign from the ANC: "The road to freedom is via the cross."

In the summer of 1995, much in the world is amiss. Yet it may help those who doubt the power of suffering found in the Cross to remember that over 10 million copies of "Cry, the Beloved Country" are loose in the world, and that Nelson Mandela, who as recently as February 1990 was in prison, is now the president of the Republic of South Africa.

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