Nyasaland 1963

England

During our cold January month in Britain I was first timetabled to meet staff of the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA). This was the missionary society formed in 1857 in response to the challenge of David Livingstone to the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham to help supplant the slave trade in Central Africa with Christianity and legitimate trade.

The Society supported work in what was then Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Portuguese East Africa, Zanzibar and part of Tanganyika. One year after our visit, UMCA merged with another missionary society, the 260-year-old Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and USPG – the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel – was formed.

In London our hosts were Ernie and Margaret Southcott, old friends from the 1930s at Mirfield and in the AYPA (Anglican Young Peoples’ Association), from whom I had learned more about communicating the gospel to the young than Mirfield itself was able to give. Ernie was then Provost of Southwark Cathedral and we stayed in the ancient Provost’s house on the edge of the Thames, our bedroom having a magnificent view across the river to St Paul’s Cathedral. One day we had the thrill of seeing a red-sailed Thames barge sailing by. Ernie and Margaret generously arranged a glorious gathering of old friends and we shared and partied in true Southcott style.

The most alarming experience was a press conference in Fleet Street. I was expecting a handful of journalists from the church papers but walked into a room full of journalists representing all the national daily papers and the international press agencies, the lot! Unbeknown to me, Bishop Frank Thorne’s ‘murder letter’ had made headlines in the Daily Mail (mentioned in chapter five).

The first question was a googly from the Daily Mail. “You will know that ‘Messiah’ is being used of Nkwame Nkrumah, the President of Ghana. We now hear of similar language being used of Dr Banda. What are your views?” I felt the earth opening up under my feet. Anything I said would undoubtedly appear in tomorrow’s CAT, – the Central Africa Times, then hostile to the independence of Nyasaland. It would also be on Dr Banda’s desk. I murmured something about African politicians using biblical expressions because many had been through church secondary schools. This went on for ten minutes and suddenly the room was empty. I remember being comforted by the Vicar of St Bride’s, who had arranged the press conference.

While in London we met Bishop Stephen Bayne, an American who had just become the first Executive Officer of the Anglican Communion. I was relieved to know that he approved of Dick Young, the priest organising our visit to the United States. Also in London we met Stuart and Sue Brand, former colleagues of Jane when she was teaching in Stepney. Stuart was vicar of a parish in Notting Hill but he and Sue came with their family at the end of 1963 to serve in Blantyre.

We travelled north from London through thick snow to visit the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, whose old students had been the mainstay of the work in Swaziland. At York, we met John and Alison Leake who were to serve so well as UMCA missionaries at Chilema in its most creative and formative years.

In York, we also met Ann Fox, who, by a strange chance, was already well known to both Jane and me. Ann knew my family in Malaya and in Worthing before we emigrated to Australia and maintained contact with my mother. She was also Jane’s godmother, having been a friend of her mother for many years and often staying at their home in Devon.

Making friends in the US

Two days later we were in a plane headed for Chicago. When the air hostess passed round the papers we noticed that Moscow’s temperature was –14^oF, the coldest in Europe. But in Chicago it was –22^oF. Below us the gold of the setting sun on the Welsh mountains was so beautiful that we forgot the figures, totally entranced as we travelled west in a sunset that seemed to go on for hours.

A very able but eccentric priest who ran a student centre in Chicago, Canon Dick Young, looked after our visit to the USA. Dick was a member of the Order of the Good Shepherd and knew George Braund, a priest who was at one time on the staff of UMCA. He knew many people across the States and was genuinely interested in the new Africa. In four and a half hectic months, Jane and I visited twenty-five States and averaged two and a half talks a day between us. We had two goals: to raise awareness amongst Episcopalians (Anglicans) in the United States that there was an Anglican church in Africa other than in Liberia, and to raise funds needed for the church in Nyasaland to develop.

We arrived at Bishop Anderson House in Cook County, Chicago, at 9.00 pm local time – 3.00 am English time. An interesting link was that Dr Banda had trained as a doctor in Cook County Hospital before taking further qualifications in Scotland. It was a five-storey building, open to university students until the small hours of the morning. Food and drink were free. Counselling with Dick Young on the 5^th floor was also free, all paid for, it seemed, by generous benefactors. Dick never wasted time, so, after our first introduction to a home-delivered pizza, he drove us around Chicago for over an hour. We eventually collapsed into bed at midnight – 6:00 am English time.

Dick was efficient down to the last detail. He was horrified that I had no episcopal robes, so the next day bought some on approval from clerical tailors in New York and then asked his secretary, who was a competent seamstress, if she and her friend could copy them. The originals were returned to New York the following day and I still wear Dorothy’s handiwork, forty-three years later. Dick seemed to be on first name terms with every bishop in ECUSA (Episcopal Church in the United States of America) and for the next four and a half months arranged our travel programme, often conducting two conversations at the same time with a telephone in each hand.

Our first agenda was a visit to Nashotah House, a seminary on the Canadian border, where the temperature was –34^oF and the icicles hanging from gutters 18” long. Three of the students were interested in working in Nyasaland – two, Jeff Schiffmayer and Louis Luchs, actually came and did good work.

An early and most productive conference at which I was a speaker was that of the Overseas Mission Society (OMS), the brainchild of Sam van Culin, a Hawaiian priest, who later became Secretary General of the Anglican Communion. Episcopalians were proud of the ‘Episcopal Jurisdiction’ in the Anglican world. Sam had the courage to say that it did not really exist. We were told it was part of our job to help widen understanding of the Anglican communion.

At that time, the ‘Jurisdiction’ only consisted of the Philippines, where members were outnumbered about ten to one by the Philippine Independent Church and handful of dioceses in Central America, almost all having fewer confirmations each year than many ‘outstation’ churches in Nyasaland, in Africa, there was only Liberia, with 120 confirmations a year, most of them in the hinterland where the Cowley Fathers were at work.

Sam wanted to break down the walls so that every diocese in the world in real need could benefit from resources of the whole Anglican Communion. Sam van Culin and Stephen Bayne were both on fire with the theme of John Newton’s hymn,

Let every nation rise and bring

Peculiar honours to our king.

Asia, Africa, Latin America and the West all had something to offer the world. This was crystallised in a conference in August 1963 at London, Ontario, into the clumsy but prophetic phrase ‘Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence’, known by its code name of MRI. More on this later.

Texas

On to Houston, 900 miles south and centre of the Diocese of Texas, Stephen Bayne’s choice as a possible partner for Nyasaland. We stayed with the bishop, John Hine, who had taken an uncompromising position on racial equality. This was six months before Martin Luther King’s speech “I have a dream.”

We arrived just as their Convention (diocesan synod) began. John’s stance had provoked stormy opposition. I was on the floor with convention members and found myself in the centre of a small group of very angry laymen advancing on John Hine and chanting, “You communist! You Communist!”. After that, I wondered how people would react to John’s proposal that the dioceses of Texas and Nyasaland should enter into a companion relationship. John won out however and Ecclesia, our diocesan monthly newsletter, recorded:

The Texas Diocesan Convention, equivalent to our Synod, decided unanimously that we should be a companion diocese for the next three years.

I believe this was the first time that any American diocese had formed a companionship outside the ‘Jurisdiction’. Such links were for three years and could be renewed once only. It brought an immediate grant, backed and doubled by Episcopal Church headquarters in New York, which enabled us to wipe off past debts and to move the Diocesan Office from Mponda’s to Malosa.

John Hine was elected Presiding Bishop of ECUSA a year or two later and gave a powerful lead in committing ECUSA to the human rights campaign.

The three years grew to twelve and, in an unofficial way, the friendship still exists 40 years later. The real credit for the companionship getting off to a good start goes to a priest, George Carlisle, secretary to the link, and to Milton Richardson, the Suffragan Bishop who made Malawi his special cause, and who later became Diocesan Bishop. They both visited Malawi.

The renewing of the companion diocese link coincided with the creation of the new Diocese of Lake Malawi in 1971 comprising the Central and Northern Regions, and the ECUSA allowed a new link to be formed with them. Somehow, this continued until the early 1980s. The Diocese of Texas underwrote the building of a new diocesan centre in Lilongwe, which had become the capital of Malawi in 1972. They rightly felt that the diocesan bishop should not have his headquarters one hundred and twenty miles from the capital.

A Texan on the Lakeshore

In 1963 at Nkhotakota we were joined by George Carlisle, the new Malawi secretary for the Diocese of Texas and chaplain to the NASA space station near Houston. I had met him in Texas and now he had been given the job he longed for. George was a heavy weight in every sense and I warned him that the parishes we would be visiting involved considerable walking but he was determined to come. We travelled to the Bua River in a pick-up and crossed over in canoes.

The next twenty miles – and back again – would be on foot. By mid-morning the group had split into small parties and someone came running up to say, “The bwana from America has collapsed!” We rushed back a quarter of a mile and there was George on the ground with three or four people fanning him hats and grass. I was beginning to think this was the end of the Texas link when one of our party arrived with a cup of tea. By an extraordinary chance, someone had started a tea-shop on this path. We were perhaps the first outsiders to use it. The tea restored George, but he looked relieved when I suggested he should go back at his own pace and cross over the Bua to Nkhotakota where we would meet up again in a few days. George dined out on the story back in Texas and became a dedicated promoter of the Malawi cause, doing much to help the new diocese of Lake Malawi.

Meeting people and States

The general pattern of our four and half months in the States was to spend around a week in each of the twenty-five States and dioceses we were visiting. The people and bishops who drove us around on the days we spent in their diocese were always aware of the agenda. The OMS message was seeping through. The dioceses stretched from New Mexico in the south-east to the San Juan Islands on the borders of Canada in the north-west. They included Utah and Salt Lake City, where Episcopalians felt themselves a minority in a Mormon State; several mid-Western dioceses; New Mexico, and the Pacific coast from the San Juan Islands down to San Diego on the Mexican border.

The San Juan Islands were all one parish and the rector took us out to some of them in his boat. We chugged our way to three of them where the welcome was warm and sincere. One of the small groups we met remained faithful supporters of Malawi for the next twenty years. An abiding memory is of the humming-birds hovering outside the rector’s kitchen window, feeding from the syrup he put out for them.

Typically we would have a TV or radio interview and lunch-time and evening meetings, together with visits to other centres in the diocese. Often Jane would go off to speak in one direction and I in another. Wherever we went, we were enveloped in American hospitality. The beds were enormous by Mponda’s standards and very soft, something Jane’s back did not appreciate, so often we slept on the floor, much to the consternation of our hostess. And the steaks: it was sometimes hard to show the proper enthusiasm when a 12 ozs steak at lunch was followed by a 16 ozs one at dinner 50 miles away!

Interspersed between parishes and diocesan meetings were visits to a number of seminaries where both seminarians and staff usually showed particular interest. From Sewanee Seminary in Virginia, Jack Biggers came to work as a parish priest in Lilongwe. Several years after moving back to the States, he returned in 1995 to become the first Bishop of the newly formed Diocese of Northern Malawi, retiring in 2000.

In a university library, we asked if they had any maps of Nyasaland. The librarian looked puzzled and then asked, “Now what State would than be in?” No one was to blame. A typical mid-Western newspaper might allocate two of its seventy-two pages to foreign news. This was not so true of the west coast of California, but was so in the Mid-West. The reaction to our message was almost invariably one of deep gratitude. Some of the parishes we met remained generous supporters for years, fed only by monthly mailings of Ecclesia.

For the last month of our visit, our agenda was to try and find companions for the other three Central African dioceses – Mashonaland and Matabeleland in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). This idea appealed to Jim Pike, the fiery Bishop of San Francisco, and a great champion of the under-privileged. When the service in Grace Cathedral ended at which I had preached, he made an impassioned plea to his people to become involved. As we were leaving, one of the wardens said to me, “I’ve seen Jim on fire before, but never like this.” Jim was as good as his word and companions were found and bishops did visit Mashonaland, Matabeleland and Zambia but no lasting links grew out of them.

New Zealand

Having reached the west coast of the States, and wanting to introduce Jane to my mother and family in Australia, we boarded ‘The Mariposa’ in Los Angeles and sailed across the Pacific to Sydney. We called in at Tahiti, where we snorkeled inside the reef and marvelled at the fish and coral; Raratonga, where the singing was magical; Bora Bora, where the Catholic priest shared his grief over the death of Pope John XXIII by giving us a beautiful carved fish, and Auckland. Unforgettable experiences, enhanced by a generous fellow passenger stalking across the dining saloon on the first night to give us a bottle of wine and instructing a waiter to keep us supplied until we reached Auckland!

In New Zealand, we hired a little red mini car and in twenty-four hours covered much of the North Island on the most glorious May day imaginable. There had been six weeks of solid rain and this was the first day of sun. The sheep looked as though they had been freshly laundered and set out in emerald green pastures. We drove the thirty miles down the eastern side of Lake Taupo watching the most glorious sunset we shall ever see. A volcano in Indonesia had erupted some weeks earlier and the stratosphere was filled with volcanic dust. It was a salutary reminder that we are one family on God’s earth, though at the time we did not know this prosaic ‘explanation’ of the glorious evening sky.

We spent the night near the southern end of Lake Taupo and decided to get as far up Mt Ruapehu, a smouldering volcano, as we could. Just as we reached the turning point half way up, there were two punctures in quick succession. The first was easy to cope with the spare wheel. When the other tyre went, we had a problem. Auckland was 190 miles away and The Mariposa sailed at 2.00 pm. By the time kind passers-by had come to our rescue and mended the second puncture, there were only four hours left to reach Auckland. Jane enjoys this kind of challenge. I am not so sure about the sheep or myself. But we made it – just!

Australia

We ended our two weeks on The Mariposa in Sydney and spent two days with my elder brother Mike, his wife Elizabeth and my nieces Patricia and Paula. Mike’s first wife, Zetta, had died in 1934 following the birth of Rosemary. Mike, still a farmer at heart, lived on a small-holding and was supplementing his income by teaching. Then we were on the overnight train to Brisbane.

It was seven years since I had seen my 83-year old mother who was living in her own home in Brisbane. My other brother, Felix, a paediatrician, and his extended family were nearby. This was the first time they were able to rejoice in meeting Jane. It was good to be able to have some family time together.

The ever-generous Felix arranged for us to spend a few days at the incredible family-run O’Reilly’s Guest House, high up in the rain-forest on the Macpherson Range, which separates Queensland from New South Wales. This huge area of rainforest has Antarctic beeches that are over two thousand years old and an amazing range of birds, flora and fauna.

We walked for miles under the high canopy of the forest, fascinated by what our guide was telling us about turkeys that hatched their eggs by controlling the temperature of a mound of leaves; bower-birds who surrounded their bower with anything blue, from clothes-pegs to bottle-tops; trap-door spiders who let down the door once a juicy insect was inside, and much else. Walking on our own, we had just finished our picnic lunch on a lonely cliff looking towards the Great Dividing Range, when a five-foot goanna – Aussie for iguana – emerged from inside a hollow tree alongside and ambled off.

Two weeks later, we sailed on the Southern Cross for Durban. She called in at Melbourne, giving us just enough time to visit Mike’s daughter, Rosemary. Rosemary and Warren had a house full of five cheerful children Roslyn, Sue, Mike, Marion and Peter, who gave us a lively welcome. And then on through some very stormy seas in the Australian Bight to Durban. Jane’s trophy from the voyage was a silver spoon for winning the deck-tennis championship!

Durban

We arrived in Durban in mid August and I was startled to find a letter from Archbishop Oliver Green-Wilkinson asking me to fly to Toronto the next day to attend the Toronto Anglican Congress on behalf of the Province. This would be the first Anglican world Conference in which lay people would predominate.

My feelings were mixed. We had been away from the Diocese for eight months but there was no time to argue. So Jane travelled on her own to Zululand, hopefully to be met at midnight on Glencoe station by Dr Anthony Barker of Nqutu Hospital. We had both been due to be their guests for a few days.

I had hardly read a theological book since leaving England twenty years earlier. The war, the cultural isolation of Pretoria and the remoteness of Swaziland meant that I had little idea of who were the movers and shakers in post-war Christianity. Hans Küng, one of the sources of inspiration for the Second Vatican Council which had just begun, had been in Chicago two days before we arrived in January and had filled the main auditorium at the university twice over. It was the first time I had even heard his name. I knew about Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom but had never even seen his Letters From Prison, said to be the most influential Christian book being read by students worldwide. The main benefit of conferences is that they provide opportunities for people to meet. The last major conference I had attended had been with the Student Christian Movement at Swanick in Derbyshire, twenty-five years earlier. This was a belated chance to catch-up.

Toronto Anglican Congress

The Congress was huge. Clement Marama, a leading layman, represented the Diocese of Nyasaland. Maurice Carver from Southern Rhodesia was also there, at his own expense. It was two days before we found each other.

The pattern was two talks each morning, group discussions in the afternoon, and in the evening fun events such as going off in bus-loads to the Shakespeare theatre in Stratford, Ontario to see Troilus and Cressida – the first time I had seen Shakespeare in modern dress. On the Sunday, I preached passionately about Madagascar, which I had only just heard about from two Malagasy laymen in our group. In the afternoon, there was an outdoor Eucharist in which 16,000 people participated. Ideas were being floated by Australian delegates that I had never heard of, such as lay celebration of the Eucharist. It is still under discussion in Sydney diocese 40 years later.

Two main themes emerged. The first was the vital importance of lay people. John Lawrence said that our strategy should be to ensure that trained lay people were seen and supported in places where minds are influenced and decisions made. Bishop Leslie Newbigin of South India sketched a caricature of the Church:

“It exists manifestly on Sundays, is in a kind of suspended animation from Monday to Saturday, and unlike most animals, hibernates in the summer.”

My reflection in Ecclesia, our diocesan monthly newsletter, when applying the critique to our diocese, was – “What a difference it would make if we thought of our job being done by 10,000 active communicants rather than by thirty-four clergy and four lay staff.”

The second theme was interdependence. This was summed up in the conference message to the whole Anglican Communion:

The Church that lives by itself will die to itself.

The most fruitful conversation I had at Toronto was with Janet Lacey. She had been, I think, an actress, and then was involved in resettling some of the millions of refugees in Europe after World War II. Recently she had helped found Christian Aid and was its Director. We discussed the growing chasm between health needs in Malawi and the poor state of most church hospitals and health centres. She said, “The longest way round is the shortest way home. Don’t ask for financial help. Ask the World Council of Churches in Geneva to send someone to look at the Churches’ health work.” The Christian Council of Malawi did just this.

London, Ontario Conferences

The Advisory Council on Mission Strategy

From Toronto I went 120 miles to two conferences in London, Ontario. The first was The Advisory Council on Mission Strategy. This meeting seemed to have two objectives. The first objective was to persuade the Anglican Communion to do more about Latin America. As I recall, we spent a long time watching presentations and listening to lengthy papers.

Here I met John Taylor, a young priest from the Church Missionary Society (CMS). I was not aware until then that he had already published perceptive studies of the Church in Uganda and on the Zambian Copperbelt. None of us knew then that after many years as General Secretary of the CMS he would become Bishop of Winchester and that he would write some of the finest theology that the Anglican church produced in the twentieth century, such as The Christlike God, and The Go Between God. His Monthly Letters, written for CMS missionaries in the field, were a constant source of inspiration to me over the next sixteen years.

The second objective was to sharpen up the concept of mutuality in mission which had emerged from Toronto. How could the world-wide resources of the Anglican Communion be released for all the Churches struggling to meet the many new opportunities as the ‘winds of change’ turned into a gale? Country after country in the former British, French, Dutch and Portuguese empires were winning their independence.

The concept had been given the name Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence (MRI) by Stephen Bayne. The group I was assigned to was not enthusiastic about the name but in the brief time available, nobody could think of a better one. MRI it remained. The most obvious result was the circulation of the MRI project list every year. Although often despised as ‘shopping-lists’, they enabled numerous plans in the least-equipped Churches in the world to emerge from the dream world to reality.

Conference on Voluntary Clergy

This second meeting held at London, Ontario was led by David Paton, a former missionary in China and now Secretary for Mission for the Church of England. He subsequently visited Malawi. David had recently republished a forgotten book by Roland Allen, St Paul’s Missionary Methods and Ours. We became good friends and later, when he was prematurely attacked by Parkinson’s, we used to visit him in Gloucester.

Roland Allen was a prickly mission priest in China in the early 1900s, who resigned after a few years and spent the rest of his life writing about how not to conduct mission. His thesis was that churches grow only if they trust new Christians and the Holy Spirit. The mission to China, he said, had largely failed because it had tried to transplant a western-style church into a Chinese culture.

St Paul, on the other hand, used to stay only a couple of months, or maybe a year, and then let the Holy Spirit take over. He might occasionally revisit them briefly or write them a letter or two. That was all.

As Mark Gibbs said in his book God’s Frozen People, what did the Church do when it had no buildings, no finance, no New Testament, no theological colleges, no paid clergy – none of the things we regard as essential? It converted the Roman Empire.

The church in developing countries, said David Paton, was taking the best educated men it could find – sometimes women, but not often – and sending them away to a theological college, often separating them from their families for two or three years. If they did well in their exams, they might also be sent off to another country to do a degree in theology.

This diagnosis certainly applied to Nyasaland. When the Diocese became part of the Province of Central Africa in 1953, joining with dioceses in Southern and Northern Rhodesia, (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), the vernacular college on Likoma Island was closed. The new students were sent off to Lusaka, the bustling capital of Northern Rhodesia, 700 miles or more from home. All training was in English. There was no chance for local leaders to celebrate the eucharist in the church they might have helped build with their own hands. Very often, the growing point of a parish is the out-station with a charismatic local leader. This was clearly demonstrated by some of the men in Nyasaland who trained for the priesthood in the vernacular in the late 1960s.

I was reminded of Stephen Makandanje, the voluntary priest from Nyasaland who had built both the church and the congregation at Hlatikulu, in Swaziland. He had shamed me by saying, “I can’t be paid for being a priest. It would spoil it all.”

Africa bubbled with new energy, eloquently described in Trevor Huddleston’s speech at the newly-formed All Africa Conference of Churches at Kampala in April 1963:

“A great new day is dawning, not only for Africa, nor for Africa’s Church, but for the Church throughout the world, to share in an outpouring of charity and sacrifice which will be, not the end of the missionary era, but its lovely new beginning. This is the real message – and the challenge – of Kampala.”

Nairobi

On my way home I stayed with Paul Chadwick at Trinity College, Nairobi.

It was good that in Nairobi they were offering clergy a chance of updating and relating their theology in an African context. They learnt how the church could work effectively in the new towns of Africa.

It was also a chance for clergy from different parts of Africa and different traditions to meet and work together. Three of our clergy were later able to benefit by attending the College before it switched to using Swahili as the medium for teaching.

I was also impressed by a mobile book-van organised by the Church Army from their Centre for training evangelists. They showed me a nursery school, an adult literacy centre, engineering and homecraft training-schools and a family life centre. Clearly we had a lot to learn.

Return to Nyasaland

It was almost the end of September before the diocese saw me again after a nine-month absence. The diocese was fortunate in having the superb Christopher Lacey as Vicar General. He had served in Nyasaland for twenty-six years, was forward-looking, equally at home with Malawians and expatriates and fun to be with. He was full of energy and constructive ideas. (see Appendix).

Jane had moved into one of the Malosa Secondary School houses adjoining the site for the new diocesan centre. This was an area of 500 acres known both as Malosa, from the 5,000’ mountain ridge on its western side, or Likwenu, from the river that ran through it. To the east, Lake Chirwa shimmered 15 miles away, and on a clear day you could see beyond it five mountain ranges in Mozambique, the furthest 120 miles away.

I wrote to my mother:

“It’s a magical place. At 4.00 am the dawn chorus begins all around us and during breakfast all sorts of interesting birds keep popping out of the bush, purple-headed louries and green-winged pytilia and cordon-bleu finches. A few days ago an anteater – the first we had ever seen – brown, just under a metre in length with a long snout – emerged from the bush and snuffled around the ground while we were eating.

The first letter I read after my return was the resignation of Guy Carleton, Archdeacon of Nkhotakota and the Central Region, where over half our church members lived. He also asked me to go to Nkhotakota to help solve problems in the congregation.

So I set off on the hundred miles to Lilongwe on an earth road that was in need of a grader to smooth away the corrugations. There, Guy collected me in an ancient pick-up in which the cylinders fired intermittently.

At dusk, we gave a lift to a hitch-hiker. Around eight in the evening and by now totally dark, we started up a long hill. Half-way up there was a hammering on the window, “Faster bwana, faster!” We looked back and could just see the huge shape of an elephant trotting a couple of yards behind us. Guy leaned forward, accelerator hard down. His face was a study! The speedometer reached 10m.p.h.. The hammering and the shouting reached a crescendo. Finally, we reached the top of the hill and the elephant wandered off into the bush.

Guy, like Christopher Lacey, was a missionary who had a clear vision of the church in independent Africa. Arthur Rawlings, a layman at Nkhotakota, was another and our building team grew out of his ideas. One of his students was Dunstan Mzokomera.

One of Guy’s special enthusiasms was that the language in our liturgy should be in the form of Nyanja/Chewa used throughout the country, not in the Lakeshore dialect spoken only on Likoma island and in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).

He had, on his own initiative, translated and published the entire hymnbook in standard Chewa. This had been warmly welcomed by those using it throughout the Central Region.

Guy was aware of his shortcomings and said, “My trouble, father, is that I am paternalistic.” So he went off to the West Indies, from where he wrote to me later, “I have learned my lesson and am heart and soul in Antigua’s battle for independence.” Unfortunately, he picked the losing side and was deported to another island, and finally had to return to the UK, where he died comparatively young.

Heading towards Malawian Independence

In the national political scene, the first cracks were beginning to appear in the Cabinet. The country was still in the run up to independence. Dr H. ‘Kamuzu’ Banda, as he liked to be called, was Prime Minister and Sir Glyn Jones was Governor General.

No outsider could easily know what was going on. Even then, the radio was controlled by the Government and at moments of crisis would go off the air. There were no newspapers except the CAT (the Central Africa Times) edited by a European. For us, the BBC Worldservice was, at that time, difficult to get as we were in the shadow of Malosa mountain.

As a Church we had little opportunities of input. I had been living in Malawi for almost two years, but at Mponda’s, with no telephone and erratic post, communication with the world around us was difficult. The inter-church network was fragmentary and each church operated through its own links. Anglicans were at a severe disadvantage.

Almost all of the Cabinet and Malawi Congress Party (MCP) leaders belonged to the Church of Central Africa Presbrytarian (CCAP). The two exceptions in the Cabinet were John Msonthi, the son of one of our priests but himself a Catholic, and Henry Chipembere, the son of Archdeacon Habil, at Mponda’s.

Henry was 33, a graduate of Fort Hare in South Africa, and had been Assistant District Commissioner of Kasupe, the area where we were now living. He was a powerful and sometimes intemperate speaker. He had been treasurer of the Nyasaland African Congress and was the most powerful and intelligent member of the Cabinet. It was he who had invited Dr Banda to return to the Nyasaland he had never seen since he left it as a young man in the early 1920s. Henry and his wife Catherine were both from Likoma Island

Henry and Dr. Banda had been in prison together for 13 months in Gwelo in Southern Rhodesia. They were moved to Zomba prison and released in 1960, but Henry was again imprisoned under British rule for two years until January 1963. Dr Banda never visited him during this second imprisonment but I did, and found him in a very cramped cell with no amenities. We were in England when he came out. He told Dr Banda, in a letter not released at the time, that he wanted to assure Europeans that he intended now to be ‘a man of peace’.

Orton Chirwa, the Minister and lawyer who had attended my consecration, and who was generally held in high regard, chaired the MCP committee which elected Dr Banda Life-President. With hindsight, this set an unhappy future for Malawi and a disastrous precedent for other newly independent countries. But none of this did we know at the time. The stakes were high.

Travelling the Diocese

Much of the remaining three months of 1963 was spent in confirmation tours covering the whole country and the ordination of six deacons and one priest. Four new ordinands were sent for training to St John’s, the provincial seminary in Lusaka.

Travelling was not easy. The roads were almost impassable to ordinary cars once the rains began in November and we had no Landrovers. No tarred road existed anywhere north of Zomba, except in the town of Lilongwe in the Central Province and one mile in Mzuzu in the Northern Province, where the Queen Mother spent a night on an earlier visit.

Congregations on the lakeshore north of Nkhotakota for the next 50 miles could be reached only on foot. The Bua river, ten miles to the north, had to be crossed by canoes. To reach Likoma and Chizumulu Islands, after the diocese’s “boatie” Paul came to her sad end, we were entirely dependent on the sometimes erratic timetables of the Ilala, the passenger/cargo ship run by the Nyasaland Railways that steamed around the Lake.

Laity and Worker Priests

Lay leadership was a key issue. The UMCA system had been to train teacher-catechists working in Anglican schools. They were responsible for teaching on weekdays and on Sundays for looking after out-station churches – preaching, teaching, burying and preparing people for confirmation.

This had come to a sudden end when teachers became employees of Government and employed for school work only. A few teachers in an Anglican school would perhaps be Anglicans and might volunteer to look after a church on Sundays – but as teachers could now be posted to any school, it was very unlikely that the few Anglican teachers would end up in Anglican schools.

Rapid remedial action was needed: training local leaders in pastoral work, appointing an Education Secretary who could recruit Anglican teachers and build up relationships with Government. There was no immediate solution. One day, Chilema Lay Training Centre would be able to help but it was still in gestation.

We had not lost sight of the Toronto emphasis on the laity. Clement Marama, in his report to the diocese, put this at the head of the things he had learned at Toronto. He wrote in Ecclesia:

“I am convinced that the most urgent need for the enrichment and invigoration of the Church is an honest look at the position of laity. The time has come for real action to listen to the voice of laity. This is urgent if we want a closer relationship with other Churches”

Maurice Carver, a layman who had made a huge contribution to education in Southern Rhodesia had asked if there was anything he could do in the diocese and we welcomed him with open arms. At his own expense, he had attended the Toronto Congress. Following Clement’s report, Maurice contributed an article for Ecclesia on the tent-making ministry, the reference of course being St. Paul, himself a tent-making layman. Maurice quoted an instance in South India where six men – a tanner, two drummers, a wood-cutter, a foreman and a teacher – were ordained presbyters while continuing to earn their living in the village communities to which they belonged. The result was a quadrupling in the number of village congregations.

I was glad that 1963 ended with a joint meeting of lay people from the Blantyre Synod of the CCAP and the Anglican diocese and a three day Lay Retreat which I was asked to lead.