He met there, too, Brother Khourrie, a little Lebanese who’d once been sacristan in a church by the seaside and who had led a blameless life until he was granted a vision of the Redeemer. Khourrie and Blanchaille sat on the veranda of the big house staring across the baking, shimmering country which ran away into the blue mountains: huge boulders stood stark among the thick burly vegetation. The nearby hills appeared to be made almost entirely of rocks, some split from the main mass, seamed, pitted, cleft, the colour of sand, lying among the thorn trees where they had rolled thousands of years before. Christ was a boy of about eighteen, Khourrie confided, in ragged shorts, carrying the T-piece of his cross slung across his shoulders, his arms outstretched and hanging over the beams to steady it. He was tall with blond hair worn rather long, and his skin was golden. He must have been lying down shortly before Khourrie saw him because sand had covered his back and stuck in the oil with which he had rubbed himself. He was gleaming and encrusted with sand and oil and sunlight. A shining man. Very gently and diffidently Blanchaille suggested it might have been a surfer he saw, but Khourrie was firm — to those with eyes to see he was plainly the Messiah. He had proof. The proof he produced was novel. He explained to Blanchaille that the Jews too had identified the Boy Messiah. That was why they had bought flats along the beach front and why they continued to do so in such numbers. Nearly all the flats which followed the curve of the sea shore were owned by Jews. The Jews always knew, said Khourrie. Naturally he’d reported the matter to the Church. Their response had been unforgivable. They had dispatched him to Pennyheaven. The reasons he was quite clear about, the Church and the Jews were in league. Neither wished it to be known that the Messiah had returned to earth.
After Pennyheaven, Blanchaille had been appointed to St Peter-in-the-Wild. The church was so new it still smelt of cement and the walls and ceiling were painted sky blue. The whole place was severely angular with pews of pale natural pine and a baptismal font at the back made of stainless steel, deeply shining, rather like the wash-basins found on trains. In a pulpit of steel and smoked glass with its directional microphone Blanchaille talked of Malanskop, his first camp. It had been, he said, a most terrible garden full of deadly melodies, a music of wonderful names: kwashiorkor and pellagra, enteritis, lekkerkrap and rickets. How they rolled off the tongue! How lovely they sounded! Children in particular found the music irresistible. They listened and died. Every day ended with perfunctory funerals. No less euphonious afflictions decimated the adults: tuberculosis, cystitis, scabies and salpingitis, cholera, typhoid… The red burial mounds grew up overnight beyond the pit latrines as if an army of moles had passed that way. Later the little graves were piled with stones to keep the jackals off and finally came the clumsy wooden crosses tied with string, the names burnt into the wood in a charred scrawl, dates recording the months, weeks, days, hours, in the brief lives of ‘Beauty’ and ‘Edgar’, ‘Sampson’, ‘Nicodemus’ and ‘Precious’.
The Church half emptied after this first sermon. Blanchaille began to feel rather better about his new appointment. At the second sermon he tried to encourage the congregation remaining to recite after him the names of the camps and perhaps to clap the beat: ‘Kraaifontein, Witziesbek, Verneuk, Bittereind, Mooiplaats…’ The microphone gave a hard dry sound as he clapped his way through the litany. No one joined him. ‘I want to suggest that in the foyer of the church we build models of these camps, of the shoe-box shantytowns, the tent villages, that we show their corrugated iron roofs, the towns built of paraffin tins, the three stand-pipes on which thousands of people relied for their water, the solitary borehole and of course the spreading graveyards. Everywhere the graveyards. We might use papier mâché.’
At his third sermon the congregation had shrunk to those few who he later realised constituted the Consensus Committee: Makapan, the two Kretas, and Mary Muldoon. Mary wore a hat with bright red cherries. Her flower arrangements, he noticed, had not been changed since his first sermon. Before the altar the hyacinths were dying in their waterless brass vases.
‘I wish to remember today, dear brethren, my third and final camp, Dolorosa, that tin and cardboard slum in the middle of nowhere which has since become so famous. In my day, the mortality rate for dysentery was a national record, the illness carried off three-quarters of the newborn in the first month after the camp was set up. People in their tin hovels with their sack doors died of despair, if they were lucky, before the more regular infections removed them. Dolorosa, as you know, is important because it caught the imagination of the country and the Church. It was called, in one of those detestable phrases, “a challenge to the conscience of the nation.” Individuals arrived there in their private cars with loads of medicines and milk. Rotary Clubs collected blankets and bread. This charitable effort grew and teams of doctors and nurses, engineers and teachers made their way to Dolorosa. But more than anything else Dolorosa became the camp which the Church took up. It became, in the words of Bishop Blashford’s episcopal letter, “the burning focal point of the charitable energies of the Catholic Church….” A hospital was opened. Then a school. And a fine new church in the beehive style, this being judged as reflecting best the tribal architecture of the local people, was erected and dedicated. What was sought… What was sought? Oh yes, I remember, what was sought was “a living, long-term commitment” — they actually said that! Farsighted superiors in distant seminaries saw the potential. Could not such a place, these wise men asked themselves, provide a training ground for their priestlings? Give their chaps a taste of real poverty, they said, by billeting them on me for short periods. The spiritual directors of these seminaries took to visiting me by bus and helicopter. They brought tales of increasing interest among their novices. Inspired by the new direction the Church had found, these young men wished to live, for short periods, a sympathetic mirror existence with their brother outcasts, to embrace Mother Africa. A small pilot scheme was begun and proved to be extremely popular. It was likened to young doctors doing a year of housemanship. Parcels of young priests arrived simply crackling with a desire to do good and discover for themselves the vision of the suffering Christ of the camps. Well, of course, the word got round and before long other sympathisers and wellwishers asked if they too could take part in this scheme in a more practical way. It was one thing to drive down every weekend with a load of powdered milk in the back of the Datsun — but that was no substitute for actually “living in”… And if the priests were doing it, then why not the laity? The Church, keen to involve the faithful, agreed. Rather than to drive down to Dolorosa once a week with a fresh supply of saline drip, maybe people should get a taste of dysentery for themselves? A conference of bishops recognized the desire evident among the laity, and in their famous resolution called on them to “make living witness of their deep Christian concern for their dispossessed brethren by going among them, even as Our Lord did…” Well, you can imagine what happened. The accommodation problem at Dolorosa, and I believe at other camps, became suddenly very acute. Sociologists, writers, journalists, health workers, students, nuns, priests, all began crowding in. I found I had to ration the shanties, the lean-to’s and huts. I had to open a waiting list. Soon we were doubling up on our volunteer workers, five or six to a hovel, three or four to a tent, up to half-a-dozen in the mobile homes donated by the Society of St Vincent de Paul on the proceeds gathered from a number of sponsored walks. Even so it wasn’t enough. It became increasingly difficult to separate the races as the laws of the Regime required that we do, and harder still to keep the sexes apart, as morality demanded. Who hasn’t heard of the tragic case of the Redemptorist Brother accused of raping an African girl behind the soup kitchen run by the Sisters of Mercy? Of the nurse who died of dysentery? Of the Dominican novice taken to hospital suffering from malnutrition? Of the infestation of head lice among a party of visiting Canadian clergy? For a while it seemed as if the whole project of “embracing the poor” was in serious doubt since the faithful seemed unable to resist the very diseases they came to relieve. As a temporary measure all inhabitants, both victims and volunteers, had to be moved into tents miles away from the infected zone while the entire shantytown was fumigated by volunteers from the Knights of Columbus wearing breathing apparatus supplied free of charge by a local firm. At the time the problem seemed insurmountable but with that particular genius which has triumphed through the ages, the Church found a solution. The answer, as we now know, was the careful demarcation of areas of infection. This was achieved by driving sanitary corridors between the healthy volunteer forces on the outside and the infected slum people within; these were the so-called “fire breaks against infection”, a kind of Hadrian’s Wall of Defensive Medicine buttressed at strategic intervals by the SST’s, camp jargon for the scour and shower ablutions, obligatory for all personnel passing between secure areas and infected zones. It was, according to the Bishop’s Conference, a pioneering effort in disease control, a highly imaginative protective health measure sufficiently flexible to take into account the varying degrees of resistance (or lack of it) existing among the ethnic plurality of groups which made up the rich diversity of Southern African peoples…’