Geoff Moorgas RIP

I've just learned of the death of an old friend. Geoff Moorgas died on Saturday 26 March 2011, according to a brief message just received from another old friend, Mark Ramsden. Both Geoff and Mark were originally from Durban, and both were recently living near Oxted in Surrey, England.

I first met Geoff when, as a student in Pietermaritzburg, I visited some friends in Durban one weekend and went to a gathering of Durban Anglican Youth (DAY), on 4 August 1963, where young people from parishes all over Durban gathered for a kind of sports day. We first went to a service at St Raphael's Church in Sydenham, which was then one of the High Church parishes of Durban, and it was followed by hockey and soccer matches between the various parishes. Geoff Moorgas was one of the organisers.

I didn't really get to know him until 1969, when I was living in Durban, and, at the urging of Beyers Naudé, had formed some Christian Institute youth groups. Geoff became involved in these, and mentioned at one meeting that he had been asked by a group of young people in the parish of Greenwood Park to help them form a band. He agreed, and helped them to get instruments and became their manager. Then I was asked by the priest at St Columba's, Greenwood Park, to lead a couple of services there while he was on leave. He said they didn't have traditional Anglican Evensong, but had, with the permission of the bishop, "experimental services." I asked if would be ok if the Christian Institute youth groups got involved in planning and leading the services. He agreed, so we got the band youngsters to take part as well, but they were not accomplished musicians and it took a great deal of practising in Geoff's house to get them ready for the service, which was also their first public gig.

One result of the service (which you can read about at Notes from underground: Psychedelic Christian Worship -- thecages if you are interested) was that I got fired by the Anglican bishop of Natal and lost touch with Geoff again for a while when I went to Namibia. Three years later I saw Geoff again, after being deported from Namibia and banned to Durban, but he was then very busy running a shoe factory, so I did not see a great deal of him.

Several years later I heard from Geoff again -- a letter arrived out of the blue, saying that he was in Namibia -- an Anglican priest in Luderitz. He wanted to live a monastic or semi-monastic life, but he suffered from ill-health and went to England, where he lived as a hermit of sorts, and Mark Ramsden, whom I had known from Durban North days, visited him a few times.

It would be good it people who knew Geoff write some of their memories of him as comments.

May his memory be eternal.

A liberal underground in South Africa

A recent comment on South African history by Paul Trewhela suggests that if the Liberal Party had gone underground 40 years ago, instead of disbanding under government pressure, it could have strengthened the liberal democratic tradition in South Africa today.

Politicsweb - FEATURES - The battle of ideas in South Africa:

The prime opponent in South Africa of both the European tradition of racist rule, embodied principally but not exclusively in the government of over forty years of the National Party, but also of totalitarian state despotism of the Soviet type (represented by the SACP), was the Liberal Party of South Africa. During the apartheid period, members of this party showed great courage and gave outstanding moral witness. But the Liberal Party existed for only 15 years, between 1953 and 1968, when it dissolved itself.

By that act of self-extinction, in that most bleak period of despotic rule under the heavy hand of Prime Minister Balthasar John Vorster (former paramilitary leader of the Ossewabrandwag), the Liberal Party discounted itself as a serious contender for the allegiance of black people, deprived of a vote, and handed primacy of position in the argument for the criterion of non-racialism in politics to its rival and enemy, the SACP.

In another article, Gus Gosling asks whether it would have been possible for the Liberal Party to have gone underground, and gives some reasons why he thought it could not.

Politicsweb - FEATURES - Why was there no liberal underground?:

In effect the NCL-ARM was the (premature) act of underground resistance from the Liberal Party. The final, aberrant, tragic act of the NCL-ARM on 24 July 1964, an expanded increasingly paranoid state security apparatus, combined finally with Liberal openness ensured the near impossibility for any second act of underground resistance from Liberals.

So why, despite all this, do I still think that Paul Trewhela has a point? The Liberal Party's real failure was that, outside Natal, it was perceived and received as a party of white privilege. (In Natal the Liberal Party had support among rural blacks facing eviction from 'blackspots'.)

I think that Gus Gosling has got it right there. As I've noted elsewhere (Notes from underground: A new history of the Liberal Party?), I have little first-hand knowledge of the Liberal Party outside Natal, but within Natal, I can see no way that the party could have gone underground. The party had operated openly and publicly. Its members and leaders were well-known to the Security Police, who would not have had to be very bright to have noticed underground activity. Their izimpimpi were still active, and long after the Liberal Party had disbanded they continued to report contact between former members of the party to the Security Police.

It was easier for the South African Communist Party to operate underground for reasons noted by Gosling and Trewhela, and also because it saw itself as a vanguard organisation, which the Liberal Party did not. The Liberal Party tried not only to talk about democracy, but to practise it in its own organisation, which meant meeting not as secret cells, but publicly as party branches, and having regional, provincial and national congresses.

So I believe it would have been pretty unrealistic to expect the Liberal Party to go underground.

But there is a related question that is worth asking.

While it would have been almost impossible for the Liberal Party to operate underground, some of its members, including me, were quite interested in the history of the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, and we did see the possibility of a confessing church in South Africa. So the question to ask is why nothing came of the idea of a confessing church.

When the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer were published in English in the 1960s, they struck a chord with South African readers, who could see many parallels between South Africa in the 1960s and Germany in the 1930s. In 1963 the Christian Institute was formed, and its associated journal Pro Veritate published articles asking if the time had come for a confessing church in South Africa.

I and others have covered this in some detail in a collection of essays Oom Bey for the future: engaging the witness of Beyers Naude edited by Len Hansen and Robert Vosloo (Stellenbosch, SUN Press, 2006: ISBN 1-920109-29-3). One of the things that I was concerned with was that the Christian Institute should try to recruit former members of the Liberal Party (most of whom were Christians belonging to various African independent churches), and, as an interdenominational organisation, provide the basic structure for them to continue to work together.

In the end, for various reasons, this did not happen.

Nevertheless, a Christian "underground" was a far more feasible project than a Liberal Party one, and if it had come off, it could have performed at least some of the functions that Trewhela and Gosling think an underground Liberal Party could have done.