For Justice

The black Africans around Johannesburg have a special name for the tall, gaunt Anglican priest. They call him Makhaliphile (Dauntless One), and they sing: "Please, please pass this way, Makhaliphile, please, please come and save us. You give our children food to eat . . . You help our people rise. The whole race thanks you, Father Huddleston."

The South African government calls the Rev. Trevor Huddleston a "dangerous agitator," and even some of his fellow churchmen feel that he has gone too far. Says the Anglican Archdeacon of Johannesburg: "You can fight something, but once it's law you must as a citizen obey it. You can't go around urging people to burn down City Hall."

"The Time Is Coming." Trevor Huddleston has not called for the torch. But he has called upon all white Johannesburgers to gather in protest against the government's forced evacuation of native families from the city to make room for whites (TIME, Feb. 21). When the police come with their clubs and trucks to herd the natives, 150 families at a time, out of their Sophiatown community and into a rural settlement, Father Huddleston is up at dawn to walk among them, lecturing quietly to little knots of Africans: "Do not fear. The time is coming when these madmen will regret this fiendish, evil act."

Ernest Urban Trevor Huddleston, 41, the son of a naval officer, was born in Bedford, England. He took honors at Oxford's Christ Church, entered the ministry, and was posted to South Africa in 1943. As the apartheid storm mounted, Huddleston, like most of his colleagues, opposed it from the pulpit, sending his congregations home of a Sunday content in their Christianity for having listened to Christian talk. But one night, late in 1953, when he was speaking in Sophiatown, the police arrested a member of his audience; Huddleston suddenly realized that words were no longer enough. "I remembered how late the churches in Nazi Germany waited--and made up my mind."

In 1953, under the Bantu Education Act, the government ordered the mission schools to submit to government dictation of their curricula or lose their subsidy. Father Huddleston announced that his St. Peter's Mission School would close down rather than let the government educate African children to be servants for the white man. "It is still happily possible to prefer death to dishonor," he said. "My school will die."

In Good Company. Father Huddleston has high hopes that the anti-apartheid forces in Johannesburg are about to join, as he has long advocated, to organize effective nonviolent resistance to the evacuation program. Last week he met with two top members of the African National Congress to discuss joint action with two Sophiatown groups--the Rate-Payers Association and the Anti-Expropriation Committee. When the time for resistance comes, Anglican Huddleston has made no secret of what he will do: "I shall walk onto the front porch of a house scheduled for removal, and let them tear it down over my head, or arrest me and haul me off to jail."

Huddleston's white supporters, most of them silent ones, say that he is already in danger of being slapped into jail. "I am quite prepared to accept the title of agitator, and I'm satisfied I am in good company," he says. "All the Old Testament prophets were agitators."

In one of Johannesburg's sprawling slums a native Bible teacher recently quizzed his pupils on St. Stephen. "Who was Christianity's first martyr?" he asked. "Who spoke out against the authorities and defiantly affirmed his faith in God and Christ?" The answer came: "Fod Huddson! Fod Huddson!"

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