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Chapter Nine:  The Finishing Touch, 1996 - 2006

 

 

I had a lump in my throat when the plane reached Zambia in the early morning of the 14^th of September and gently started to descend over the sleeping villages, basking in the rays of the rising sun. Did I ever expect to be back so early and in good health? I was aware that I now lived on borrowed time and had to carry through my plans as quickly as possible.

After landing I was joyfully welcomed by Brother Klaus Cieszynski, SJ, the Airport Chaplain, who ushered me through custom and immigration without much ado. My Permanent Residency Status was still valid, it seemed. Outside the arrival hall Edward Siame, the faithful houseman and collaborator of Brother Paul Donders, was there to drive me to Woodlands.

How poor and worn-out the country looked. The fat years of the first Republic of Dr Kaunda were a thing of the past and the people were in the iron grip of the World Bank and the I.M.F.

The house in Woodlands was chock-a-block with young novices on transit to the Spiritual Year at Lua Luo near Kasama. Paul Donders was engaged on shipping them through to the north so as to de-congest the house for other visitors. He gave me not only the keys of my room but also those of the archives! It was obvious that I had been given a task by the Regional Council. What it exactly contained I was supposed to find out.

After a good sleep I made a round trip to some of my friends to say that I had returned. The now elderly ex-District Commissioner of Isoka, John Hudson, was writing his memoirs on the Lumpa troubles. He showed me a set of horrible pictures of members of the Lumpa sect, killed in Paishuko near the Luangwa valley by the enraged youth of the United National Independence Party. These pictures had been taken by an officer of the C.I.D. who had taken them with him as part of his private collection to Wales in Great Britain. After his death they were almost discarded but someone had realized their historical value and had returned them to the archives in Zambia.

In a letter I heard from Julie Woolgar that her husband has gone to Dubai and had found work over there. “The house is like a grave”, she wrote. On the Jelles’ farm along the Chimfwema road on Leopards Hill,  Rachel Jelles, the younger daughter has married and started a horse stable. But there was sad news from the son, Mark. His marriage with Maggie was disintegrating and she planned to take the two boys back with her  to the U.K.

Fr. Edgar Pillet was building a new and bigger church in Kabwata and had extended his parish into Misisi compound near the town’s centre. At St Dominic’s seminary I happened to stumble upon Fr. Lufungulo Chashya, now appointed to the town of Mansa. Both of us were embarrassed to meet up like this  but we did our best to forget the past and greeted each other with joy. He told me that Fr Stan Chibwe had not managed to obtain his doctorate in Nairobi and had continued his task as a rector in Mpima seminary.

I met up with Steve Ellis, the partner of Gerrie TerHaar in Lusaka, Ridgeway Hotel who encouraged me to start writing as soon as possible.  Later Benny Bohan, my soul mate arrived from Kabwe. He had been given accommodation in one of its parishes  and worked steadily as chaplain to the local hospital and the high security prisons. He was of the opinion that, with Chilubula, the country was in the hands of professional crooks, who were happily engaged upon asset-stripping wherever something of value could be found. Merchant barons from abroad profited from the moral chaos that reigned every where. Later, in November the president Frederick Chiluba would gain a massive victory as some members of the opposition were bribed and joined the reigning party. Apparently democracy was not working and the common people had lost hope and were not interested any longer.

A few days later, on the 17^th  September, Fr John Flies, our Vice Regional arrived from Kasama.  He asked me to transfer the archives and library from Ilondola to Lusaka as quickly as possible. Since the death of Frs. Oger and Calmettes nobody was in charge of the Language Centre. The library had been left open day and night for all and sundry to browse through. It was said that especially books on Zambian history had disappeared. The final decision to bring all valuable documents, books and diaries both from Ilondola in the north and from Chikungu in the East had still to be taken by the members of the regional council, during their forthcoming meeting in  November but John encouraged me to take the first load as quickly as possible as the rainy season was near.

We left Woodlands for Kasama on 18 September, we, that is Fr.Maurice Gruffat and me. He would be my faithful collaborator during the next decade. After long years of teaching English in Lubushi seminary and pastoral work in the North, Maurice had been asked to help the Regional Jean Luc Gouiller, as secretary. They had never ‘clicked’ and both of them were a bit frustrated. I quickly realized that the seventy year-old Maurice, a Frenchman who had taught  English in Lubushi seminary for many years, could be of great help. Most of the old archival documents were in archaic French and, to make them more user-friendly to the people in Zambia, had to be translated into modern English, preferably with the use of a Word Processor.

First we decided to drive up in his car to Kasama and from there to Nondo in order to fetch his luggage. In Kasama we were given accommodation in the new house of the White Fathers, artistically decorated with matamina local stone. The house looked like a small paradise. The fathers had also purchased the adjoining plot, the house of which was occupied by Frs. Marois and  Lalonde and the Brothers  Black and Rodger. Fr Dan Sherry had come from the U.K. for a short visit in order to say goodbye to the people before retirement. He had the beginnings of the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease and I wondered whether he recognized me[1]. He made me think of the days in London and of the long journey to Kariba to meet up with Dan Eiffe.

 I visited Sr. Astrida Furlong, now crippled with osteoporosis and in constant pain. She told me that her sister Bianca, had joined the Pentecostal Church as their pastors did more in the ministry of healing.

The secretary of the Archbishop, the White Sister Hildegunde Schmidt, insisted that I paid a visit to the Archdiocesan Archives. These contained the original correspondence of Bishop Dupont with the B.S.A Company and, with the permission of Archbishop Spaita, I was allowed to take these documents with me. I also met some of my students whom I had taught in Mpima, now well occupied as pastors in the field.

 I talked to my confreres about my plans to start a Centre of Culture and Research in Lusaka. I did not call it NSIMA any longer as this acronym had been rejected by the White Fathers’ Council. Not everybody was enthusiastic. Some were openly cynical and called it a pipe-dream. They had become accustomed to the grinding routine of parish life and could not imagine White Fathers doing anything else.

We went to Nondo on the way to Mbala where we met Frs. Bakers and Willie Rothler. The former had been my ‘father’ figure in the minor seminary of Sterksel. After many years of missionary service he thought of retiring and spending his last years in The Netherlands[2].

Fr. Jean Flies offered me to give me a lift to Ilondola so as to transport some of the archival material to Lusaka in the car of the Language Centre. I enjoyed the trek through the bush, via the pontoon near the  historic Safwa rapids. Agriculture, and in particular fertilizer was not subsidized any longer and most of the people had returned to the old citemene. System. During the trip I had a long talk with Jean. He confided to me that he had found it very difficult to work with his counterpart, the Regional Jean Luc Gouiller, who had worked in the East, in the diocese of Chipata and seemed to have little time for the ‘Bemba North’.

“I agree that missions have to be handed over to the local clergy or to other missionary groups as quickly as possible”, he said “but why has it always to be the post in the North and rarely in the East?”.

He told me that he intended to go home to his native Luxemburg as soon as possible[3].

It struck me that the old ‘ tribal’ fracture line that had divided the White Fathers, working in Zambia since the beginning of the century, still existed, in fact it seemed to have widened.  It would not contribute to the ‘re-invention’ and the search for a new identity of the White Fathers.

In Ilondola I found only two persons in charge. Fr Pierre Le Moyne and Brother Paul Kaiser. The centre looked deserted and, indeed, all the doors of the library and the archives were left open and unlocked. I managed to get two cupboards with documents in the pick-up of the Language Centre.

Ilondola mission was in the grip of  Aids. I visited the graves of people I had known, especially the one of the teacher Tadeo Chintu, with whom I had worked so well in the late 1950s. Walking in the cemetery, I felt as though I was among the ‘living dead’ of the mission and that in some way Ilondola had become a traditional shrine again, as it had been before its foundation

Towards the end of the month of September I motored back to Lusaka, via Kasama. Gouiller had prepared a room for the storage of the archives. Good news was that Fr Maurice Gruffat had returned from Kasama with a very old P.C. given to him by Bro Jan Leenen.  He was ready to start and waited for my instructions.

The first steps towards a Centre had been taken.

It was October and the first rains were near. I encouraged Maurice to learn how to use the Computer. At first he refused almost vehemently but once we had unpacked things and I showed him the tricks of the trade, his technical bent took over and he became interested. I must admit to having had a hilarious time. As a Savoyard,  Maurice had a healthy mixture of Italian and French blood in his veins. At times I stood behind him holding his hands, to avoid him deleting programmes and almost crushing the monitor. But he was someone who learned very fast and once he had come to grips with all the technicalities, there was no stopping him. With the help of Marja and Eric, now established in Lusaka, he purchased two modern computers, one for himself and one for me. He installed himself in his big room and from then there was no hesitation any longer. He translated anything that was written in French, printed the result and collated the papers together into strong folios. He was a perfectionist, completed everything beautifully and ended up knowing much more about computers than I did.

 

But what about the transfer of the archives and the library? ‘Would it not be better to get everything done before the rains?’ I asked  Jean Luc. Unfortunately he did not want to do anything without the full agreement of the Regional Council meeting which would be held at the beginning of December. Bureaucracy seemed to have taken over from efficiency.

To keep myself occupied I began with the first interviews of the White Fathers, in particular those who were on the verge of retirement and planned to go back to the ‘home country’.  It was  the end of an era and I was of the opinion that the closure of the ‘Colonial White Fathers’ period should be made as dignified as possible.

In the middle of October I received a fax with the happy news that my sister, Fiet, would come and visit me from 10 December until the 11^th January.  She now seemed over her bereavement due to the death of her husband Koos. Her children were grown up and she had more time to do things she always wanted to.

It did not take long before I was ‘re-discovered’ as a possible resource person in the field of Zambian Culture and Traditional Religion and once my reputation had been re-established there was no end to the invitations.

The diocesan pastoral co-ordinator, Fr Eugene Reilly, asked me to give talks on inculturation to lay leaders and Fr Gouiller asked me to conduct a seminar with ‘les jeunes’ , the first vintage of ‘ young White Fathers’, now called, Missionaries of Africa.

November came with no decision about the transfer of the archives. Ginny Bond came to show me her first child, Cecilia, to us in Woodlands. With her parents and her elder sister and brother, she had grown up near us in Woodlands, during the 1970’s. After doctoral studies in Anthropology in the U. K. she had returned and married Robin Miller of Lilayi Estates.

It must have been at about that time that I was introduced to Tony and Gabriel Ellison. Tony had come to Zambia to work in the Police Force when, as Northern Rhodesia, the country was part of the British Empire. Gabriel was born and bred in Zambia. As an accomplished artist and writer, who had designed not only the national flag and the coat of arms of Zambia but also most of the country’s stamps, she would prove to be priceless in the years ahead.  Her father, Mr. Ryan had come to Northern Rhodesia in the 1910s  It was said that at the beginning of the World War I,  he and his brother had discovered the potentiality of radar by hanging a microphone overboard near Southampton harbour and so picked up the vibrations of the German submarines.

I was invited to assist the priests in Bauleni, St Matthias Mulumba parish, now firmly run by the Salesian priests of Don Bosco. The statue of Our Lady of Bauleni was still in the broom cupboard and the priests intended also to discard the locally carved Stations of the Cross.

The former Leopards Hill Co-operative Project had become a Pastoral centre. The hall, built on a shoestring and with such trouble, was now used as a chapel and the workshops had been converted in simple rooms. By now I was used to my successors changing the original intention of the donors and change entirely the aim of a project and focused on the positive results of my work in the 1970s.

Bauleni parish flourished. The place was well looked after and the youth were playing football and net ball  on the fields nearby. Next to the church, Sr. Elizabeth Dawson, of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, planned to initiate a development project for vulnerable street children. The project was called ‘the Bauleni Street Kids’. I transferred six hundred pounds from my British Bank to hers in order to give it a boost.

Their capable leader, Sr. Edith Woods gradually took charge of many of the mushrooming ‘ZOCS’, Zambia Open Community Schools in Lusaka. It was painfully evident that the country had geared itself for a long perod of coping with the onslaught of the AIDS Pandemic. 

The priests were deeply involved in the parish. The marriages of many couples were blessed, some of whom had been waiting for this happy moment for a long time. How infinitely patient the people were!

 

On 23 November the Regional Council gave permission to transfer the Archives, Library books etc., from Ilondola to Lusaka.  But, by then the rains had set in and transport in an open pick-up would be difficult.

On 10 December, my sister Fiet arrived. She stepped out of the plane, all set and determined, with  a ‘cams’ recorder’ in her hand. I took her to the wastelands of Leopards Hill cemetery, to Bauleni itself and other parts of Lusaka. From there we motored up to the north, to Serenje where Fiet tasted her first dry caterpillar, offered by the now old and slightly eccentric Dennis Bernardin, with whom I had arrived in the country in 1958. We traveled on to Kasama , were well received by Brother Jan Leenen and continued on to Mbala, the old headquarters of Bishop Fürstenberg.

I could not help to be morose. Indeed: Sic transeat gloria mundi. The glory of the bishop Fürstenberg had vanished after his death as his successor, Bishop Telesfor Mpundu had transferred the diocesan headquarters to Mpika. I walked around in the now empty buildings, the abandoned garage, and the former cathedral.  Had we, as young missionaries, not been right when we objected to the erection of all these buildings, at the very north end of the diocese ? Had we not predicted that in the not too distant future the centre of the diocese would move to Mpika? Some of us had lost their missionary élan, even left the priesthood, disappointed as we were about the Bishop’s decision to do whatever he wanted[4].

I met my faithful George Simfukwe, with whom I had built Siavonga. He had not gone back to his village in Mambwe area, afraid as he was of witchcraft but, with my letter of introduction, had been given employment by the mission. He and his wife were overjoyed to see me. We sat together and talked about the old days near the beautiful Lake Kariba, 1200 km to the South.

I made use of this journey to interview more White Fathers. Then on we went to Mpulungu, to the Kalambo falls and to the Moto Moto museum of Fr Jean Jacques Corbeil. Via Nondo we reached the old place of Chilubula, where we found Sr. Astrida Furlong, in great pain, very ill and wanting to die.

“Continue working, Father Hugo”, she said with an encouraging smile on her face. “I will offer all my sacrifices for you”.

What a grand time we had had together in Mulilansolo, caring for the sick, transporting maternal emergencies to Isoka, building the shelter for the families. Both of us were  young then and tried to do our best.

We finally reached Ilondola where Fiet showed her determination and mettle when packing all the books, the papers, documents, archival material, getting it ready for transport to Lusaka. I remember these days very vividly because of an event that made me return to Lusaka very quickly. Fr Guido Steur, in charge of the mission, asked me to celebrate the High Mass on Sunday so that he could  visit an outstation. He instructed me to let the watchdog free in the courtyard to scare away any petty thief. When I opened the gate of the kennel, the fierce dog ran into me without warning and bit me severely in my leg.

I celebrated the Mass in great pain, wondering whether the animal had been inoculated against rabies. When Guido returned to the mission, he seemed unsure whether this was done. I went to Chinsali to a Dutch female doctor who re-assured me that the incubation time of rabies was quite long and that I had two weeks of respite.

The day before Christmas we reached Mulanga, now abandoned, smelly and dirty. Fiet was well received by the four female lay missionaries (A.L.M.) in their comfortable home near the rural hospital. Most of them came from Mexico. They were delighted to have a priest for the celebration of the Christmas Night and Morning Mass.

I slept all alone in that musty Fathers’ house and scenes of the past came back. Fortunately the Lumpa troubles had become part of history.

 Next morning the people greeted me with great joy. I visited the area  where the refugee camp had been. Someone had planted pine trees, which, probably due to the sewage discharge of all the people, had grown very quickly.

 It was as if everybody had  wiped away the tears of  that miserable time and now rather look into the future. It was also alleged that that since the arrival of the A.L.M. missionary ladies, even the spirits of the young princesses, buried during the 19^th century in the jungle nearby, did not drum and wail any longer during the night!

Later my sister said that in many respects this Christmas was for her the highlight of the journey. In the middle of the bush, so far away from home, these Mexican laywomen managed to create a real Christmas atmosphere by their singing, their mutual exchange of small gifts and their kindness. The ‘Third World’, young people from the South had taken over the momentum of our missionary apostolate.

On Boxing Day we decided to pay a quick visit to my first love, Mulilansolo. The road was fine, despite the heavy rains. But unfortunately the old car of the language centre started to give a great deal of trouble . Its brakes gave in and we had to go to a bush garage in Isoka  to get things right I called in at the mission, now in the hands of the local clergy. Nobody was at home. In the flower garden grazed a thin cow. In Mulilansolo itself we were well received by Fr Henk Vander Steen, who was set upon taking over the management of the Language Centre at Ilondola.

The wound, caused by the bite of that dog did not heal and my leg became swollen. We decided to return to Lusaka. The brakes of the car got worse and worse, the plates were touching the wheels. We stopped at Mpika but did not get much assistance. It was midday and we paid a quick visit to Bishop Mpundu. He sat alone at a well-endowed table and I hoped he would ask us to join him, according to Zambian custom. Nothing of this happened and I came away disgruntled. Perhaps my intervention during the trouble we experienced in Mpima seminary, had never been understood, let alone accepted.

We reached Serenje on the 28^th of December with our brakes burning. There they decided to disengage the brakes so that we drove back all the way to Lusaka with only a handbrake!

Brother Paul Donders was waiting for us, very efficient and ready with a set of anti rabies injections. Fiet phoned to her children and to her friend Dick to tell that she had arrived safely.

It had been, after all, an exciting trip and we entered the New Year with hope. The wound of the dog‘s bite healed quickly and the event came a thing of the past. We did not wait for the arrival of the New Year, 1997, exhausted as we were from that difficult drive down to Woodlands from the North.

 

In Woodlands three Tutsi Cistercian Sisters had come all the way from Goma in the Congo. They were refugees, and told us that they had been chased away by the Banyamulenga rebels. They were accompanied by Francis Kangwa, a young ‘stagiaire’. The sisters were on their way to Tanzania to settle down in one of their convents  and Francis to complete his placement. The countries between the Great Lakes were in trouble and we would experience the ripple effects for the next decade to come. For us it was difficult to know who was right and who wrong. From my Lumpa experience I had learned that during civil strife both sides carry some of the blame and  both side have genuine grievances. I noticed that the dear sisters were not inclined to visit their Rwandan (Hutu) compatriots, who studied for the priesthood in St Dominic’s mayor seminary.  

We, Fiet and I, drove down to Siavonga for a few days of relaxation. I went to the local hospital where the doctor gave me the last injection against rabies. On our way back we visited Maurice Diamond and his two orphaned children. During my sabbatical at the end of the 1970s’ we had become friends with him and his always smiling wife, Jenny Goodfellow. They had opened a restaurant and launched into the fishing (Kapenta) industry. Unfortunately Jenny had been killed in a car accident during a holiday in South Africa. Maurice had a severe mental break down during which he failed to pay back his loans and lost most of his assets. I met him now in a small guest house behind the Boma. He was determined to regain his property, especially his restaurant, if only to leave something to his two children. Some of the fishermen had done well in the kapenta business industry and seemed well settled. We visited the hydro-electric dam and went for a swim in one of the Hotels’pools.

We returned to Lusaka around the 10^th of January and filled the remaining days with short trips to the banks of the Kafue, and visits to the people in Misisi compound and Archbishop Munghandu. He had retired and  his place had been taken by Archbishop Medardo Mazombwe after a 25 years of continuous service as bishop of Chipata. Archbisdhop Mazombwe had one major target. He wanted to build a central cathedral on Pope’s square, the place where Pope John Paul II had celebrated the Eucharist and had laid the first stone.

“After that I will retire”, he said.

My sister left content in the middle of the month and when I waived her goodbye I hoped that she had enjoyed the trip despite all the ups and downs.

Life went on after she left. The Franciscan Friars approached me. They needed a lecturer in African Religion for their new Philosophy Institute in Makeni, dedicated to St. Bonaventure. Would I be available for one term each year?  After my enjoyable experience in Mpima I accepted the offer with alacrity. It was an assignment I would fulfill for the next four years. This was followed by an invitation by Fr. Brendan Carmody, S.J. to assist him with lectures at the University of Zambia. But I still had this dream of starting a Documentation and Research Centre and told him to hold on.. At the end of the month I received a letter from my mentor, Prof Richard Gray. He had had a car accident on his way to Italy and the right arm of his wife Gabriella was severely injured.

By February the rainy season was in full swing. The Ilondola Library and Archives had not arrived. I was told that the boxes, so carefully packed by my sister, had been dumped on an open lorry with only a piece of canvas as cover. I feared the worst but was not to be deterred. I transferred an amount of my personal money from Holland to the so called Nsima account and continued giving lectures and conferences in and around Lusaka. One of the best seminars on Inculturation was held in the parish of the Kafue Estate where the people took part creatively and with great enthusiasm.

On the 16^th of February I drove to the East, for a week of sessions in that diocese. When I reached Nyimba, beyond the Luangwa Bridge I had my car filled with petrol. When I rummaged in my satchel to pay the bill, I discovered that I had forgotten to take money with me. The Asian proprietor laughed and said:

“ No trouble, Father, you will pay me on your return journey”.

On my return I called in to pay my dues. The owner was asleep at the back of his shop and woke up when I entered.

“It is Ramadan”, he said half asleep and with a smile, “Give the money to the poor”.

Relation with our Islamic friends had always been excellent throughout the years I lived in Zambia.

In Chipata the Administrator and Vicar General, Fr George Lungu, gave me a  room in the Bishop’s house. It was a very quiet and wholesome place. With the hills in the background, it looked like a sanatorium in Switzerland. The central buildings were occupied by elderly White Fathers who had been in the Diocese of Chipata all their lives. Many of them would leave for their home countries in the years that followed.

Here it must have been where Fr. Adriaan de Veer had worked after World War II. During the war he often visited my parents, had become a friend of the family. I partly owed  my vocation as a White Father missionary to him. He had left Holland a few years after the war but around 1958,  he had gone back to the Netherlands for good, left the society and had  eventually married.

Fr Lungu, the vicar general of the diocese, and also the White Fathers, took me to various places and kept me very busy. More than anywhere else I got the impression that in fact the White Fathers, despite their age, still kept the strings firmly in hand and identified themselves almost entirely with the local church. Here there was no talk what so ever about ‘moving on’ or ‘trail-blazing’.

I had a long discussion with my confrere and contemporary, Antoon Buijs. After a twenty year of work in the Bemba North and a short period in the Regiment of Lusaka  he had accepted a post in the diocese of Chipata and now spoke Nyanja almost perfectly.

“The White Fathers here will never move”, he said. “They regard the East as their personal fiefdom”. It sounded very much like an ‘end-of-the-road’ situation.

 

Once back in Lusaka, I was told that the library and the archives had finally arrived. Some if it was crumpled, damp, even wet. After sorting out everything I discover that quite a few books were missing. Why had they not left this transfer to my personal initiative so that everything would have been completed well in advance of the rainy season? Well, it was no use crying over spilt milk.

 The remainder of the month passed quickly, occupied as I was with setting up the library and the archives in the rooms made free for them. Was the house not too small for all these documents and books, I wondered? In retrospect I was to ask myself whether I should have been more forceful and demand the purchase of another building in Lusaka. Little did I foresee how excruciatingly extended  the whole process of setting up a White Fathers Centre would prove to be.

As has been seen, the ‘White House’ as people called our home on the corner of Musi-o-Tunya and Mwapona Road in Woodlands, had originally been built for residential missionaries working in the parishes and the Catholic Secretariat but gradually it had become the central headquarters of the White Fathers. Young recruits began to arrive in Woodlands at regular intervals: probationers on their way to Serenje, philosophers who traveled to or arrived from abroad, stagiaires appointed to the dwindling White Fathers’ mission posts in Zambia, novices for the Spiritual Year in Lua Luo near Kasama, and finally those for the second cycle of Theology on their way to France or Great Britain. Bro Paul Donders was kept busy ordering tickets and obtaining visa’s for so many countries of the world. Besides all this extra work he insisted on giving accommodation to Dutch doctors, who seemed to have little comprehension of our spiritual work among the people.

Once my reputation as resource person had been re-established there was no end to the invitations for seminars, conferences, study-weeks and talks. I enjoyed doing them and did my best to make them as attractive as possible. I realized, however, that my teaching methods were outdated and that people expected visual aids, like video’s.

The year 1997 passed quickly. I got involved again with my beloved parish near Bauleni and assisted the hard-working Fr Joseph of the Salesians with the construction of a long wall around the church, parish house and pastoral centre and money for benches in the church. The people were happy to see me back and at Easter they showered me with lots of presents, including a screaming goat!

My brother Jan and his wife Jeanne visited me together with Marja and Eric. We enjoyed a peaceful time in Siavonga where Jeanne helped me to pack the last of my belongings. In Lusaka they went to the Tayali Art Centre and accompanied me for Mass to an outstation near State Lodge in the Leopards Hill area.

During the week after Easter, the Superior General, Fr Gotthard Rosner, arrived for a  visit and informed us that all surplus money would be saved and destined for the training and sustenance of future ‘Missionaries of Africa’, the young White Fathers. The Society’s priorities seem to be focused almost entirely on the recruitment of new members and a growing number of suitable confreres were taken out of the Apostolate in order to become ‘formators’. According to me, they would wield a considerable amount of power in the years to come.

 After Easter I taught for two weeks to the Sisters at the International Kalundu Training Centre but had to leave the country for another medical check up in the Netherlands in May. When I landed in Heathrow Frank Carey was there with a big smile to give me a lift to Oak Lodge in the north of London. We talked for hours in order to catch up with the news. I also met the professors Paul Clifford and Louis Brenner at my ‘Alma Mater’, the London School of Oriental and African Studies.

I boarded a National Express Coach to Leeds in the north for an appointment with my friend, the ex White Father, Brian Garvey and his wife Kamanzi. My main aim was to ask him if he would be ready to write the History of the Catholic Church in Zambia. He was not unwilling but wondered whether there would there be sufficient finance to sign a comprehensive contract with him?  Brian had a wife and three studying children to care for and was now unable to do things on a shoe string as he did as a missionary. Via a quick visit to the Hannah’s in Burford I returned to Oak Lodge near London.

On the 17^th of May Maxine Woolgar and Chris, her partner at that time, collected me in their car and together we drove to the Netherlands in time for the Family Camp at Pentecost. Maxine made an excellent impression with her friendly smile and outgoing approach. When they departed she made a point of saying goodbye to everybody. Nelty and Cor invited me to their holiday place near the Kager Lakes. They had bought a mobile home and a brand new yacht. Danny, their son, had completed his training as a hairdresser and intended to open his own shop in The Hague. Everybody of Nelty’s family was healthy and happy at that time.   

After a quick check-up the urologist, Dr Langeveld, told me that everything was in order and gave me the green light for Africa for another year. In Boxtel I had to sign a couple of documents in preparation for my pension as I was approaching my 65^th year. Did I not want to put a full stop behind my work in Zambia, people asked? Some suggested an appointment in The Hague where the White Fathers had started a project among the Immigrants and Refugees. But I did not regard my task in Zambia as completed. I had not given up the idea of a Documentation and Research Centre plus, now, the idea of  writing myself the history of the Catholic Church of Zambia.

When I booked for my return journey to Lusaka at the beginning of July, British Airways was paralyzed by an all-out strike. My flight was diverted to Rome with KLM then to Johannesburg  with Alitalia and from there to Lusaka with Aero Zambia! The journey went without trouble. I was not expected in Lusaka but a kind Japanese ambassador gave me a lift to Woodlands.

There I found  Maurice still behind the computer but complaining of ulcers and a worn-out hip. He left for France in August. Jean Luc always seemed always occupied with arranging journeys for ‘les jeunes’,  the new candidates. All of these young men looked well groomed and perfectly equipped, a bit like executives of an international company. Are these young Missionaries of Africa the same as the old White Fathers, I wondered? Or was I becoming an old man who never approved of the generation coming after him?

In my room I found a list of invitations for more talks and conferences but, to my dismay, the Conference of Religious Major Superiors did not want to sponsor the writing of the History of the Catholic Church in Zambia.

Meanwhile all the archival material from the Chipata diocese had arrived and I spent weeks trying to get things sorted out and preparing future conferences and seminars.

Theo Bakers, my friend and ‘elder brother of seminary days’ had finally decided to take a single ticket and return to the Netherlands for good. When I took him to the airport in August, he still doubted whether he had taken the right decision and spoke to me nervously in a mixture of Bemba, English and Dutch. He left all his possessions in the country and took only one little, worn-out bag as luggage. He was an example to me and I vowed to do the same when my turn ‘ to go home’ would come, one day[5].

Marja and Eric had come to Zambia after six years in  Zimbabwe. They arrived at the end of the year and never looked back.

I was informed about the sudden death of Aylsa Boedeker, at the end of July, two weeks after my return from Europe. I was upset not to have been told. Despite all the tensions she remained faithful to Geoffrey until the very end. She wanted to be cremated and her ashes to be buried in the rose-garden of the Lusaka Show grounds, the place where she worked for so long, until her last day.

I came to realize that Regional Council of the White Fathers  in general and Jean-Luc in particular were not very interested in my project of Documentation and Research. I became dispirited and drove one day out of Lusaka in northern direction to brood lonely behind a termite hill, wondering what to do.

Happily duty took me to Ibenga mission, near Luanshya for more conferences. The Copperbelt had become one string of ghost towns with, seemingly, little copper production. I conducted a workshop to forty Franciscan sisters, who were all very keen and enthusiastic. At the end I spoke to their Provincial, Sr Eufrasia Chanda and confessed being depressed about the whole situation.

“You will have to carry the pain of always being one step ahead, of seeing the future more clearly”, she said and added. “We need people like you as, at the moment, we have hardly a vision any more and are stuck in a rut”.

 

Most of us had become used to the endless row of burials that passed our corner house from Musi-o-Tunya Road onto Mwapona Road in Woodlands  on the way to the cemetery. The pandemic of AIDS hit me ‘under the belt’ The parish priest of Kabwata had asked me to say a Requiem Mass for one of his parishioners. The coffin was placed near the altar but during the celebration of the Eucharist I noticed that silent and sad men brought in other coffins and filled up the entire passage from the altar to the door. They had not the money to pay for a private burial but wanted a prayer and a blessing before interment. Before the final prayers and blessing I had to ask for their names from the family present.

When they opened the little hatchet on top of the coffins, for the traditional body viewing, I became depressed and mourned the utter waste of such young and beautiful men and women! 

When would it ever end?  

Each morning desparate women thronged the door begging for help. Our policy was to refer them to the members of St Vincent de Paul in Regiment or Kabwata parishes. One sleepy afternoon, however, the bell was rung by a emaciated woman who begged me for money to buy medicine for her child. I told her to go to Regiment parish but when I was closing the door, I saw her picking up a little bundle from among the shrubs nearby. It was the small body of a dying baby from under a shrub.

The past years in Mulilansolo, when we worked so hard with Sr Astrida in order to save the lives of mothers and children, came back to my mind. That seemed so very long ago. I asked myself whether I did well by burying myself in books and archives?  I told the mother to jump in the car and drove her to the hospital. The nurses were kind and tried their best but the whimpering child died that same evening.  

 

I tried to convince myself that there were sufficient sisters, carers and nurses to cope somehow with this horrific situation. But someone had to write down its history for future generations.

I read Louis Oger’s books, a man who had remained committed until the end of his life. Later I talked with Frank Carey, who already then suggested to me to create an ‘independent base and work from there in all freedom’.

The car of Theo Bakers was left in Kasama for sale and I decided to acquire it.  I remember having arrived in Kasama on the 16^th of  October, the 66^th birthday of my beloved sister Toos. From 1958 onwards, since my early arrival in Northern Rhodesia, she used to send me long and detailed letters, writing the way she chatted and giving me detailed news of her family. But since the death of her youngest son, Jeroen,  she had stopped. I had that premonition that something serious had happened to her.

Once I had taken possession of the car, serviced and cleaned by Br. Bernard Black, I made a similar tour as I had done a year before. I visited Sr. Astrida in the convent, and brought her some painkillers. From there I went to Ilondola and collected more books and magazines from the library. Fr Henk VanderSteen asked me to give a couple of talks to his students. Ilondola had been connected with the main grid in Chinsali and had electricity.

I drove back to Lusaka in one day but discovered that Bakers’ car consumed a terrific amount of petrol After a few days of rest I motored to Monze, to the pastoral centre, St Kizito, where I was  well received by Sr. Mary Naughton in charge of a two year course for parish-sisters. This was an experiment, sponsored by Mission, in Germany and managed by the Zambia Association of Sisters. It aimed at rendering sisters pastorally as capable as the parish priests[6].

One of the first results of the recruitment of younger members was Fr Charles Obanya from Kenya. After his stay in Zambia and his ordination, he was appointed to Chinsali in the North. He would remain part of the missionary scene until 2006.

At the end of November Fr Wolfgang Schonecke invited me to give a talk during a meeting of the AMECEA  National Pastoral Co-ordinators in Nairobi in Kenya. These pastoral workers came from English-speaking countries in central Africa  and it was wholesome to exchange notes and to learn from one another experience. I noticed that in many respects the Catholic Church in Zambia was ahead in the field of Small Christian Communities partly due to the peace and freedom the country had enjoyed since Independence.

In between we were taken to various sites. In the AMECEA house itself I met our Fr. Peter Lwaminda, now its Secretary General. I remembered that he had been reprimanded by the Nuncio some then years ago because of some of his theological tenets. He had also been allegedly involved with the so called ‘Fratucci’ group that was formed in Rome in the mid 1970s and was frowned upon by the expatriate clergy[7]. Had he been side-lined by Rome without  a chance to become a bishop?

In the White Fathers’ house I met Fr Reginald Carrière. After his success with the Rising Stars in Lusaka, he had accepted a position in a well know Music Study Centre, where his contribution was highly regarded. Then there was also Henry Menoud who, after his spell in Mpima, was now in charge of the White Fathers Hostel for Theology Students. We visited the Tangaza college and a beautiful Carmelite Centre. Politically the country seemed in turmoil as the elections were near but the opposition seemed  terribly divided.

The well known Malawian priest, Fr Alex Chima also contributed to the week-long meeting and we had some fruitful discussions together. We attended an Ecumenical Bible Assembly in the city’s Uhuru park. President Moi graced it with his presence but, as a smart politician, used the occasion to promote his own political cause. There was lots of dancing, singing and liturgical symbolism and I greatly enjoyed it.

More dramatic was a trip to a poor compound called Kolongochi built on top of  rubbish and garbage heaps. A Comboni priest, Felix Zonatelli was the parish priest and welcomed us with joy. We concelebrated with him and tried to follow his very ‘inculturated’ Mass with blessings of the sick, driving away of the devils and libation of milk on the altar. Despite their obvious  poverty the ladies of the parish had prepared an excellent meal for us. I came away deeply impressed but also with the conviction that Lusaka’s compounds were poor but surely not so miserable as those in Nairobi.

 

A few days before the celebration of Christmas my niece Marja and her husband Eric arrived to start a fresh period of their life in Zambia. It felt to me as if I had reached  a milestone in my life. They stayed a few days in the house of John and Gretta Hudson who were away on a visit to their children. Later they joined another young White Father, Bernhard Udelhoven on a trip to the north.

‘Never a dull day in Zambia’ some people say. Politically the country in general and President Chiluba in particular had become jittery after the staging of a coup on 28 October, led by rebel officers under the command of Captain Stepehen Lungu. On Christmas morning the venerable Dr Kenneth Kaunda, father of the Nation, was arrested under emergency powers and imprisoned by President Frederick Chiluba!  Later he was placed under house arrest and accused of having failed to report in advance  to the authorities some details allegedly know to him of this attempted coup[8]. All this took everybody, including the donor countries, by surprise and many people were of the opinion that this augured the beginning of the end of President Chiluba.

Towards the end of the year Frank Carey left for the U.K. where he had accepted a prestigious assignment at the Von Hügel Institute at the University of Cambridge.

The year 1997 became part of history with little progress in so far the establishment of a White Fathers  documentation centre was concerned.

 

The year 1998 passed in a similar way as the previous year with the exception that I celebrated my 40^th anniversary of priesthood. There  seemed to be no end to the interest of various church groups in what I had to offer as regards  Traditional Religious Culture and within a short time I had to be careful not to become over-booked. The well known Journalist. Ed Djoekotoe asked me to give a few talks to young trainees at the Zambia Communication House near the Ridgeway Campus and I was invited to give a week long course on Witchcraft to lay people in Livingstone . The sisters in Kizito Pastoral Centre invited me again, this time to teach the rudiments of Anthropology. Sr. Diana became appointed to the Catholic Secretariat and asked me to help her with her course on Catechesis. The Franciscan Friars at St Bonaventure wondered if I could give a course on ‘Humanities’ to their students of philosophy. And could I be available for a week to the volunteer catechists in the Marian Shrine in Chelston? Later, in February, the new Dean of the Anglican Cathedral, David Ndlovu, asked me if I could give a retreat to a number of their priests. This was certainly not my forte and I suggested to apply to the Jesuits.

Meanwhile Marja and Eric went to Harare to fetch the remainder of their belongings. On their return Marja came out of the Airport buildings, with a happy smile, flourishing a bunch of keys.

‘I got myself free accommodation in Chilanga for the time being’, she exclaimed. This was, indeed, very good news as renting houses within and around Lusaka had become ridiculously expensive. During her flight she found herself seated next to someone, who introduced himself as Opa Kapigimpanga and told her that he worked in Zimbabwe but came originally from the Western Province of Zambia. Marja told him about her and Eric’s plan to settle down in Zambia in order to start a small business in the Computer and Engineering field but also complained about the high rentals people wanted for average if not poor accommodation. With an understanding laugh ‘Opa’ had pushed a bunch of keys in her hands and offered her the use of his empty home in Chilanga. Later she heard that Opa was married to, but lived separated from a Danish lady and had two teenage children, who all had gone back to live in Denmark. He was an Agent of an Aid and Development Agency with its main office in Harare and did not need his house for the time being. It was a tremendous stroke of luck and put Marja and Eric firmly on the way to becoming part and parcel of Zambia.

 

After the death of Aylsa Boedeker, her husband,Geoffrey Boedeker, needed more and more care and attention. He became chronically ill and we heard that a tenant, who lived in the little guesthouse at the back of his garden, tried to persuade him to swap Geoffrey’s big house with his small cottage. An Irish lady, Brigit Mullaghan, smelt a rat, made me aware of it and together we told the man that Geoffrey had the right on his house until the very end of his life.

 I also paid a visit to the home of Gabriel Tonga who had been the National President of the Young Christian Workers in the 1970s. He had been made redundant as a civil servant but his paltry pension was not enough to keep him, his wife and his growing number of dependents alive. He had always been a sober man who, as a certified accountant, had used his income very wisely. He owned and rented property in various compounds of the city and so made ends meet. Later he helped me in organizing a Reunion of the Y.C.W, now many of them grandfathers, who contributed to the running of their parishes. 

Pierre Dil and his South African wife still worked in the Makeni Ecumenical Centre but, to my dismay, he had become increasingly ‘right wing’, whatever that meant. He was dead against the ordination of women and preached almost fanatically against any form of homosexuality. Later he and his small congregation became members of the ‘real’ Anglican church and isolated themselves from the main church in Lusaka.

In the Netherlands not everything went smoothly with our ever growing family clan. I received a tearful letter from Nelty with the sad news that the marriage of her son Pim and his wife Anneke was disintegrating. Later, on leave, I would learn how serious the situation was.

I received a letter from Julie, still alone in her cottage in Lyes’Green, with the sad news that Charlie Sampson, her Jewish friend had died of a massive heart attack after he had been divorced by his wife.

 

Marja and Eric took me to ‘their’ home in Chilanga. They had been extremely lucky , not only with the house and surroundings but also with their neighbours. Next to them lived Valerie, who was born on the island of St Vincent in the Caribbean and had been sent by the British Overseas Development Agency to Zambia to train nurses in psychiatric care. After her contract expired she settled down in Zambia with her Zambian husband, Mike, a budding architect. Due to shortage of work and development  the latter had opened an office in Zimbabwe.

Ginny Miller-Bond departed for the U.K. for the defense of her doctorate and to give birth to her second child, this time a boy, called Luke.

While all these young people seem to be on the crest of the wave, I struggled along in an ever less understanding atmosphere in Woodlands. When the White Fathers decided to do something, they usually go for it almost fanatically. All attention, all focus, and seemingly all finances, including some income from the pensions of the elders, went to the recruitment and the formation of new members. Nobody spoke any longer about a Documentation or Research Centre. When on a rainy day in February I heard that the elderly White Fathers had acquired a house in Chipata, in order to decongest the Diocesan Headquarters I knew that the chances for the construction of a Centre in Lusaka had dwindled down to almost nothing.

 

In Bauleni Fr Joseph, the Polish Salesian parish priest, asked me to continue with the training of the voluntary catechist. I enjoyed this very much as I knew most of them from the early days, way back in 1973. My fellow White Fathers recommended sessions in the field of Inculturation, in particular for the young stagiaires and I tried to comply. Sr. Lucia Wetzel insisted that  I make time for her ‘Youth Alive’ group. I expected a small group but when I entered one of the rooms of the Evelyn College, I was greeted by a huge group of fine looking young men and women. She was doing a sterling job in the city of Lusaka.

I left again for the Netherlands on the 7^th May and found my family and acquaintances making preparations for my 40^th anniversary of priesthood. But before that date I flew to Athens in Greece for a delightful holiday with my friend, Benny Bohan. We hopped from one island to the other, from Siros to Paros, via Tinos and Makanos. I enjoyed the festive and inclusive celebration of the Eucharist by the members of the Orthodox church. Greece had been in the hands of the Ottoman Turks until 1730 but no trace of Islam was to be found anywhere.

An horrific storm reminded me of St. Paul being shipwrecked near Malta.

The Minoan civilization, the drawings on the marble floors and the wall paintings, all reminded me somewhat of the chevrons of Bemba initiation art. It also struck me that the origin of Christianity as a house religion occurred in and around the sunny Mediterranean. Its message was one of joyful tidings.

On the ferries we met and discussed with American tourists of the Orthodox Church. They argued that the Roman Catholic Church ‘at home’ had become too American,  and was not interested in the affairs and the religious culture of Europe. We ended up in Crete and attended a healing ceremony, conducted by a Greek monk I learned from him that the word: ‘spirit possession’ was not an exact translation.  In Greek the spirit mounts the patient as a rider jumps on a riding horse. The person is beset, is set upon. Moreover Daimon was a creative spirit and, like in Africa, could be cajoled into submission, even into a new way of life.

We returned to Athens from Crete by night ferry and said goodbye to each other. Benny decided to travel to Ireland by ferry and train via their house in Rome while I boarded the return plane to Amsterdam and from there to the urologist who told me that everything was in good order and that I should come back for a check-up after two years in the year 2000!

The family camp was a mixture of joy and sadness. The marriage of Pim and Anneke had irretrievably broken down and also the marriage of Jaap, the second son of Stef and Nel, seemed on the rocks. All of us now realized that with such a big family, (we counted well over one hundred people present) we would not always be free from the wear and tear of the modern world and that we had to learn to assist and heal rather than to judge.

In the middle of June I crossed to Channel for a quick visit to my friends the Woolgars and the Hannahs. Maxine Woolgar and Chris, her partner, had restored ‘a miners’ cottage in Clyddach (Wales) very beautifully and we admired her reclaim work in Marthyr Tidwell. We walked through misty caves and the  tunnels of abandoned railways and peeped in collapsing signal houses along an abandoned railway. The coal industry had gone long ago and trees, flowers and grass were reclaiming their right of place  in nature. In a small village near Bath we listened to excellent concerts and to a Welsh choir in the local churches.

It was during this stay that  Justin Woolgar phoned from South Africa with the information that he and Elize intended to settle in the U.K..

 “My two children will have a better chance in life”, he said curtly.

 

I tried my luck again at A.M.A., the office of Consultants for missionaries. Louis Verhoeven had been replaced by a younger layman, Mr Kees Ton. He seemed much more objective and charming while he listened to my plea for financial support, as regards training sessions for the church workers in Zambia.

 

My anniversary of 40 years of priesthood on the 12^th of July was a great success. Everything went according plan, except, of course, the weather. We celebrated the occasion in our St Paul’s church with a wonderful choir and a well attended reception. Afterwards the family paid a visit to the museum in Loosduinen, where Fiet explained the exhibited objects and Toos gave me a neecktie with the coat of arms of that village. In the evening  all my brothers and sisters with their consorts met in the big sitting room of Carla and Henk in Zoetermeer where our caterer, Tony Lutz, the son of Fiet, had prepared a lovely meal. 

 

The remainder of the month passed quickly with visits to my brother Jan and Jeanne, the parents of Marja. After his retirement Jan became a sculptor and became a respected member of the old guild of Sculptors in the Netherlands. My father celebrated his 92 birthday and was fit enough to dance with his granddaughters during the wedding party of Yvon and Herald, de daughter and son in law of Marian and Wybe. In the morning I had blessed their marriage and baptized their first son, Lars.

On the 27^th of  July I embraced my father and said goodbye. He shed a tear, said that life would be a bit lonely without me but encouraged me to stay in Africa as long as I was healthy enough to continue working.

When I touched down in Lusaka 30 nuns from all parts of Africa were waiting for me to give a course on Anthropology, that was to go on for two weeks.

Life continued with courses and seminars as if I had not been away I tried to resuscitate the Nsima project as Kees Ton of A.M.A. had been so encouraging. But this was to no avail for the time being.

The present I had been given at the occasion of my anniversary was money for the extension of the walls around the properties at Bauleni. I ordered a lorry full of bags of cement and sand. The eager young men of the parish made the blocks for little remuneration. We finally demarcated and constructed a wall around a huge area for sports fields and other activities. The aim was to occupy the youth as much as possible, and not only to preach about avoiding AIDS by  ‘sexual abstinence and behavioral change’. Their slogan went: ‘Better to play football than sex ball’.

The whole project was received very well and I loved joining them from time to time if only to get away from the routine of giving talks and conducting seminars.

Meanwhile Marja and Eric had really settled down. They purchased a plot of land in front of  ‘Opa’s’ house, big enough for a couple of dwellings and a garden, that stretched down to a swampy source of a small river.

I must admit that, by then, I envied them, as everything they wanted succeeded, but everything I wanted, failed. Jean Luc Gouiller, our Regional told me that the NSIMA project had been definitely wiped off the map and that the house in Woodlands was destined to become the headquarters of the White Fathers. He asked me to shift all the magazines and documents from the room ,which I had cleaned so thoroughly, so that it could serve as an office for the vice regional. In fact he wanted me to leave the house and had appointed me and Fr Antoon Bujjs  to the parish of  St Joseph, a sister foundation of Regiment Church.

In Siavonga a young treasurer of the Archdiocese of Lusaka bulldozed the cottages near the shore of the lake with the aim of constructing a dull and unattractive utility building. The picturesque and photogenic  ‘hovels’ disappeared for ever. He left the country soon afterwards and went back to his native Poland, unaware what he had done.

 

The transfer of the archives to another, smaller, room in the house was a good occasion to sort out the documents and to draw up a catalogue. I drove to the Jesuits along the airport road where Fr Vincent Cicecky was in charge of the archives to acquire suitable boxes. We talked as old friends and on parting he asked me again if I was prepared to take the gigantic task of writing the History of the Catholic Church on my shoulders. I was honoured, but also taken  aback at the same time and referred him to the Bishops Conference and my Superiors. I also wondered where the finance for such a daunting project would come from. I had now on a state pension from The Netherlands but during the first five years all of it was claimed by the administration of the White Fathers.

Not long afterwards Archbishop Medardo Mazombwe approached me on the same matter. Marja, my niece encouraged me to accept the challenge and promised me her expert help. Nobody mentioned any financial support for this daunting task.

The month of September became the summit, the peak of all my talks, seminars and conferences. The Zambian Association of Sisters and the Conference of Male Religious Superiors organised a week’s course of their formators with as main subject ‘Inculturation’. It was held at the National Resources Development College along the Great East Road. I had prepared the one-week course very carefully and expected a small group of some twenty participants.

When I entered the conference room I faced an expectant group of not less than 120 persons.

I rose up to the occasion and the seminar became a success, mainly due to the work of a team of excellent facilitators. I remember that week as one of the most successful in my life as a lecturer and resource person. I enjoyed  the long days  from the very beginning until the very end.

Not one of my White Father confreres was present. During one of the lectures I looked through the open windows and saw my Regionial mooching around. I sadly wondered why he never came in and join the participants if only for one session.

I was not to be deterred and continued my rounds through the country. Bishop Dennis DeJong asked me to help him with a draft on a pastoral letter on Inculturation. I gave two talks to the Jesuit superiors in Lusaka and addressed the members of the National Commission of Catechetics,  organised by Sr. Diana Hess. From there I went to the monastery of the Poor Clares sisters in Chelston  and then  back the Franciscan friars at St Bonaventure in Makeni. I traveled to Kaoma on the way to Mongu where Sr. Teresita of the Presentation Sisters asked me to teach the leaders of the Small Christian Communities. The Capuchin Friars wanted to hand over the parish and asked the White Fathers if they were interested. Much later  they would accept the offer and established  a new foundation, in Mushakende, near Mongu itself.   

I went again to Livingstone, invited by Sr. Sarah for a course on the Sacraments in the parish of Dambwa. It was not easy as the place was very noisy but somehow I worked myself through these six days with lots of visual aids, hand-outs and activities. During the celebration of the Eucharist in an outstation near Palm Grove, a troupe of curious monkeys peeped through the open doors and windows to see what we were doing. The faithful seemed to be used to this and did not even bother to scare them away.

In Lusaka Eric and Marja were very busy trying to get their feet on the ground financially. They had a plot of land but little money for a house. Eric established himself in the Industrial Area of Lusaka, on the way to Matero, with the renting of a room and the establishment of a small enterprise, called Summum Engineering. Marja made money by giving piano lessons. It was tough going for them and I could not help comparing their hard work with the seemingly cushioned life of our future Missionaries of Africa, the White Fathers.

I talked about my pet project with Fr. Benito Underagga, one of the General Councillors from Rome who was on a visit to our Region. He seemed tired and I got the impression I was not getting through[9]. The only result of my conversation with the Powers-that- be was that our little committee on ‘Inculturation’ was changed into a committee on ‘Culture and Religion’ and became part of the ‘portfolio of the Regional team’ whatever that meant.

Sad news came from the U.K. Maxine Woolgar and Chris had split up after a decade of living together. Chris was reported to be deeply depressed and Maxine was in tears. Also Miles was not doing too well, marital-wise. They asked me if they could come to Siavonga for a week in order to have a rest and to get themselves sorted out.

The year 1998 had almost come to an end. The Catholic Secretariat still situated in Unity House along Freedom Way  asked me for help with the setting up of their archives since the beginning in 1965. I started with cleaning the office and trying to get all the files and documents together. After a quick visit to the Netherlands and the U.K. Marja was kind enough to bring me my card system and a few books from Oak Lodge in North London. I continued with my talks, this time to fifty women of the ‘Home Based Care’ group in Lusaka, an assembly of Franciscan sisters at Cheshire home and the community of Salesian sisters in Northmead. I was becoming overworked and realized that I had to cut down on all these commitments.

 

Then, a few days before Christmas, a young scholar arrived who would play an active role in my and Marja’s lives. He was an Italian Jew, called Giacomo Macola He arrived with letters of recommendation by both Prof. Richard Gray and Prof. Andrew Roberts. We give him plenty of assistance for his research on the people in the Luapula valley.

Three days after Christmas Maxine and Miles, together with his friend Charlie, arrived from South Africa where they had visited Justin and Elize. They met up with Ginny Bond and Ruth and Rachel Jelles, whom they had known as children during their stay in Zambia. Ginny took us for a drive through the little game reserve near Lilayi lodge. On New Year’s Eve we went down to Siavonga where we talked and prayed together until deep in the night. Later we realized that these few days under the starry sky was the beginning of a new period for all of us present.

I decided to cut down the number of talks, seminars and conferences and accept the challenge of writing the History of the Catholic Church in Zambia.

But that was easier said than done as I was booked to continue with talks well into 1999. Fortunately I received unexpected help from the capable Sr. Monica Orange, F.M.D.M. with the setting up of a historical committee. She made her St Clare Convent on Mwalule Road available for regular meetings and assisted us in all kinds of ways. The White Fathers committee on Inculturation faded into oblivion, especially after the now almost worn-out key word  ‘Inculturation’ was changed into the one of ‘Dialogue’.  

A few glimmers of hope appeared on the far horizon from time to time. I addressed the assembled Bishops in February and was enthusiastically supported and applauded by the then Apostolic Pro-Nuncio, Archbishop Guiseppe Leanza. In fact, he was a Papal Nuncio we all dearly remembered as he was so open and approachable. He made it its task to go around and listen to us with understanding and genuine interest.

At the same time I became aware that some fellow priests were questioning the veracity of my theology during these talks on Inculturation. Was Rome clamping down on anything that seemed to divert from the old, trodden way of doing theology?  Had any new research, any experimentation come to an end?   

Someone was honest enough to address me personally on this matter. I replied that I did not mind people questioning my talks, seminars, etc as long as people did not do this behind my back, but rather come out into the limelight for a genuine discussion. But, due to an increasingly severe attitude of the Sacred Congregation on Doctrine in Rome, all theological discourses  became almost  a taboo. As a matter of fact, to avoid trouble and to be able to continue the work of evangelisation, many missionaries and local priests moved  into the more neutral field of  Social and Economic  Development, or buried themselves into the demands of day-to-day parish work This seemed to be the final result of a too restrictive approach of  Cardinal Ratzinger, the prefect of the Congregation of Faith and Doctrine.

 

The second part of February 1999 was spent entirely in the diocese of Chipata for seminars on witchcraft in Chikungu, a day of talks in Lundazi to the Stagiares and young missionaries  of Zambia and Malawi and a seminar to laypeople in Minga.

I noticed that the Great Eastern Road and the one from Chipata to Lundazi were awash with lorries loaded with maize. I was told that these vehicles belonged to an Asian company called Sable. After the total collapse of the National Co-operatives and the subsidized Namboard, followed by unremitting privatization, the small and hard working framers were at the mercy of private businessmen, who profited from an unregulated market. Mgr George Lungu was deeply concerned and encouraged the people to return to the more traditional crops of groundnuts, beans, etc. The church leaders of that diocese gave me a very down-to-earth and practical impression. They attended the seminars not just to hear what I was saying or to pass time but to search and find new ways of helping their people. The diocesan archivist, Henk van Kessel, gave me also  a number of old books for the library.

The trip to the East was followed in March to a journey to the North. The first a seminar to the sisters took place  in the diocesan pastoral institute for lay training, now called Ichengelo, near Mpika. As mentioned above, Bishop Mpundu has moved his Headquarters from Mbala to Mpika and with money from Germany and the savings of the late Bishop Fürstenberg, he was now building a brand new cathedral and diocesan offices on a hillock nearby, along the road to Kasama.

During a conference  in Chinsali boma I was told that ‘BanaGoodshade’, the mother of Emma Goodshade, wife of Mwelwa Francis Chibesakunda, had died at the age of 88. I remembered how valiantly she had assisted me during the Lumpa upheavals in 1962-64 and decided to attend her burial in Mulanga. The house of the priests happened to be unoccupied but both Lombe Chibesakunda and Chibesa Kankasa were received hospitably in the convent of the ALM. Missionaries. The burial  became a beautiful and dignified ceremony and we came away with the feeling that a saintly layperson now prayed for us in high heaven.

Later, in April, I was asked to celebrate the funeral Mass for Mrs. Emerentiana Kasolo the sister of the late Fr. Pascale Kakokota and the wife of Mr. Peter Kasolo. The young White Father, Chris Chileshe, now serving the Region for a term as vocation animator, was also there. It became a genuine “Catholic Bemba” event with the presence of Mr. Sata, the children of Simon Kapwepwe and, of course, those of Peter Kasolo. The parents could be proud of them as all their children had done very well in life, either in Zambia or abroad.

Back in Lusaka I found a sad letter, written by my sister, Toos. Janneke her second daughter, had been divorced by her husband. After the birth of their two children, Tommie and Linda, Jan had been very successful as a ‘word-artist’, especially when composing the right sentences for advertisements on radio and TV. She was certainly not left penniless but, as usual, the separation with its painful legalities caused a big wound. This did not improve the mental health of my sister.

I also was told that Fr.Gotthard Rosner, had been appointed to Woodlands after his six years’ mandate as Superior General in Rome. He arrived towards the end of April after a course on spirituality in the USA. He told us that he had experienced many upheavals in his life, in particular as a refugee in East Germany during the war, as missionary during the reign of terror by the dictator Amin in Uganda and, lately, in Rome as Superior General during the horrific genocide in Rwanda. By then the financial administration of the Region was to be moved from Kasama to Lusaka.

The ex-district commissioner John Hudson published his memories on the Lumpa troubles in a book entitled, A Time to Mourn. All these events would play a part during the coming millennium.

 

The Catechist of Moomba, a rural parish near Lusaka, on the road to Kabwe, came to plead with me for help during the Holy Week in April He had been sent by the Vicar General, he said.

I agreed as I longed for a bit of parish work after all these seminars, and talks. The pandemic of AIDs was now in full spate, especially along the main roads. The empty priest house in Moomba had been taken over by the members of ‘Home Base Care’. I slept outside but told the parish council to make a little room free for me on the next occasion. On my way back I called in at Kabanana parish to greet the well-known Kiltegan missionary, Mgr John Roche. As Episcopal administrator of Mzuzu diocese in Malawi he had assisted his fellow bishops with writing the famous pastoral letter that rocked the absolute hegemony of the life-long President  Dr Kamuzu Banda[10]. Consequently he had to flee the country incognito but, after the publication of that letter, the days of Dr Banda were numbered. I thought he could be of help at the Catholic Secretariat in Zambia but his heart was still in Malawi, where he hoped to return as quickly as possible[11]. 

I continued faithfully with my seminars, this time to the Franciscan sisters of the Da Gama house it Luanshya. But by then I suffered  a chronic cough and could hardly made myself audible. I knew  that I had come to the end of my strength as regards giving these long courses. I visited my confrere Reinhold Bloching in New Koloko, a parish near Ndola and came away impressed by the stamina with which he mustered the lay people together when constructing the beautifully decorated church, the local school and other buildings. The flowing Sunday I attended the Eucharist in the Ndola Cathedral, celebrated by another confrere, Fr John Ben Henze. I arrived twenty minutes before time, eight o’clock but already then the church was chock-a-block. After Mass I interviewed the people, asked them why they came in such great numbers.

“We like his Mass for three reasons”, was the answer. “He always starts on time, gives a very good sermon and does not allow any longwinded announcement after the final blessing”. 

 

On the sixth of May Kees Ton, the representative of A.M.A. arrived and from then onwards the curve of my life moved upwards. We got on with each other like a house on fire. During our trips to various places he let me talk and talk while driving the car. We went to the Copperbelt, to Monze, Chikuni and Kizito pastoral centre. He was present at one of my seminars, at the Christian Brothers. When I became ill and feverish, Kees completed his heavy schedule on his own by making use of public transport. He left on the twenty second of May and when the plane swung away into the blue sky, I knew that I had made a good impression and that things were on the upsurge. But I needed a rest and combined the blessing of the wedding of Ingrid Pfeiffer and Mike Puffett, young friends of mine and  Marja’s, with a holiday in Livingstone.

Gradually Marja and I became a team. The month of June found us working steadily together in the archives of the Catholic Secretariat. She proved to be an excellent organiser who knows how to make use of other workers to do the donkey work.

One day a young American woman arrived who introduced herself as Maura Mitchell from the  Atlantic University in Florida with a letter of recommendation from the White Fathers in Washington. I could hardly refuse and allowed her full freedom in the archives. But during her stay she took a lot of liberty in the house and became quite demanding. When she left, she promised to send me a copy of her research and further publications. She never send a letter of thanks, let alone any copy of her academic achievements.

I mention this as she would not be the only person who came to Zambia to get material as easily and cheaply as possible and later publish, and pursue an academic career  without any reference to the White Fathers. Why is it that people see Africa as a continent to exploit for personal profit without giving any due to those who live there?

Slowly but surely the ‘History Project’ was taking on more form. I composed a suitable heading: History and Research Catholic Church while Gabriel Ellison drew an attractive logo. I drew up the first lay-out of the chapters and made a final application to A.M.A. for a small grant. We managed to get a subsidy from the Netherlands Embassy for the proper setting up of the archives at the Catholic Secretariat. I also received a grant from the Missionary Transport Aid Agency, M.I.V.A. for a new car and consequently ordered a small Opel Isuzu pick-up that was brought on the market by Action Auto from South Africa.

The interviews with elderly missionaries continued now not only with White Fathers but also Jesuits and Franciscans. I wrote a memorandum in the bulletin of the Catholic Secretariat, encouraging the dioceses and the religious orders to set up their own archives and write their own history. The Jesuits were  kind enough to lend me some of their diaries.

On a Sunday, after a lovely celebration of the Eucharist in Moomba, a delegation of the parish council approached me and asked me shyly to become their parish priest and live nearby along the road in Manjuni. They promised that they would care for me and I would never be hungry. I was charmed and deeply moved. But I had really to start writing and, however alluring, I could not allow myself to be entirely taken up by parish work. Nevertheless I became more involved in pastoral work for the Moomba  parish[12]. One cold Sunday I tried to reach two far-flung outstations but regretted  having done so as I became stuck in a very small chapel with two punctures in the tires of my brand new car, due to the thorn trees.  

Brother Paul Donders had been the manager of Woodlands for more than 12 years. Before that he had been twenty years in the much bigger White Fathers guesthouse in Musumbura, Burundi. During the past years  his work load had been considerably increased by the paper work demanded by the placement of ‘les jeunes’ At a given moment a young confrere was waiting for weeks to get a visa for India, another was mooching around trying to get into France and a third had to be helped to get a work permit for entry into Zambia. All this was a bit too much for him and he decided to return to the Netherlands for a less demanding assignment[13]. 

The months before the new millennium passed peacefully, almost uneventful.

I conducted another course on Inculturation in Mongu. At the end of it, Mgr. Paul Duffy, the Bishop of this new diocese, came to close it with a short talk and his blessing. I was a bit upset when he talked  exclusively about social and material development and seemed to have little interest in what I and the eager lay participants had been talking about.

At the Catholic Secretariat we drafted a pastoral letter on ‘Grabbing’ for the Bishops’ Conference. It was properly edited and widely published but it was an ‘one-off’ with no follow-up concerning the far reaching moral implications.

In September I flew to the Netherlands for a quick medical check-up. To my surprise I was met on arrival by most of my family who used the occasion to stage a party! My sister Toos was also there but I noticed that she looked strained and  seemed confused from time to time.

The appointments with the doctors in Weert passed favourably. The polyps in my bladder seemed to have disappeared completely.

While in Heythuysen I had a conversation with  some retired missionaries who had previously worked in Chipata. I mentioned the difficulties I had  with my regional, Jean Luc Gouiller as regards the establishment of a White Fathers Centre of Documentation and Research. The old Fr Stef Wellens was sympathetic and understanding. He confided to me that nobody really wanted Jean Luc back in Chipata diocese after having worked internationally in Kenya and that they all voted for him to become the vice-regional so that he would not come back to the diocese but disappear in Lusaka. This struck me as an extremely strange policy and it betrayed to me that for many of my confreres ‘their’ rural diocese was more important than work in the urban areas. According to me this attitude put the White Fathers way behind the approach of other orders and congregations, that were now coming to work in Zambia.

I  met also one of my classmates, Jan Rademaker, who worked in the diocese of Kasongo, near Bukavu in the Congo. His mission had been attacked and plundered three times by various rebel groups, fighting each other. At the end of it he found himself, sitting on a mat in the bush with his only possessions the clothes he was wearing. He had seen boy soldiers walking around with heads of women on sticks, blood trickling over their drugged faces. Jan told me with glee how finally he had managed to free himself and walked through the enemy lines. He possessed two ‘Harlequins’, puppets on a string and when he gave these toys to the heavily armed but  bored soldiers at the road blocks, he was allowed to pass and so reach freedom. Jan seemed to have no trauma and planned to return as soon as the situation improved. He had little interest in the work I was doing in the field of Inculturation and Traditional Religious Culture.

“We will have to re-start from scratch”, he said a bit sadly “There is not much traditional culture left in the Congo among the youth”.

In October I made some preparations for the writing of Zambia’s Church History by browsing in the archives of the White Fathers in the Netherlands and flying to Rome via Paris to get myself acquainted with the Archives in the Generalate of the White Fathers. In the plane from Paris  I saw a church dignitary with a pectoral cross on his chest in the business class. I introduced myself to him but he had no interest in my work as a missionary and declined to give me a lift to Via Aurelia. At times I wondered whether we were working for the same Kingdom of Jesus Christ!

Fortunately my contemporary, Fr Pierre Féderlé, was there with a broad smile, to give me a lift to the Generalate. We had been together in ’s-Heerenberg, but he had been called up into the French army for service in Algiers and got ordained much later. He was a well-built man who, as a professor of theology, had played rugby for the French in London during his stay in St Edwards, along Totteridge Common.

The Generalate was a real White Fathers house, except much bigger. It had four stories with broad corridors and an expansive basement. The rooms were rather dull and very simply furnished. There was not much beauty around except in the dark chapel with the shrine of Lavigerie and other White Father memorabilia. I was told that thieves had stolen his pectoral cross and other antique objects. The house was built in the 1950s when the society of the White fathers has reached a peak in numbers and importance. Since the Second Vatican Council Vat II their number had dwindled at an almost merciless pace.

The food was very good. All of them spoke French  and were surprised that I did not. I met one of the councillors, André Simonart, who dutifully showed some interest in what I was doing. It was clear that also here the main focus was on the young saplings, newly ordained Missionaries of Africa, studying in one of the Papal colleges in Rome.

The Archives were in excellent order, kept up as they were by the Australian archivist, Fr Ivan Page. I made arrangements for the photocopying of all the diaries that had been sent from Zambia to Rome immediately after Independence in October 1964. The hard-working Maurice Gruffat would translate all of them in the years that followed.

I talked with Fr François Richard, then the Superior General He proved to be highly interested in the writing of the history and was very much in favour of a White Father Centre in Lusaka.

“I wish I could change places with you”, he said. Little did I foresee how prophetic and determined he proved to be. At that moment I did not foresee that after his tenure in Rome, he would take the baton over from me in Lusaka.

I ventured into the hectic traffic of Rome and walked to the St. Peter. It seemed not new to me as I had seen it so often on pictures. Only a vague memory remained of the audience with Pope John XXIII in December 1958 and the Mass I had celebrated in December 1958 in one of the side chapels. So much had happened since then. It was a mixture of the beautiful and the ugly, as life normally is.

Elderly monsignors passed me in their colourful cassocks, some rather severe looking, others with a devout smile on their wrinkled faces. Young clerics went in and out, intent on serving the Church as well as possible. Were they living in a cocoon of their own, or did they really know what was going on in the wide and often violent world? The great danger for church people is that they loose touch with raw reality. But it was moving to realize that all this splendor was the result of the life of a Jewish carpenter some 2000 years ago who sometimes had called himself the son of God but more often the son of Man.

 

There happened to be three Dutchmen in the Generalate. Fr Piet Horsten, in charge of Canon Law, Fr Cor de Visser in charge of formation and Fr Henk Bonke, the Secretary General. The latter invited me for a long walk through Rome, and from him I picked up some of the opinions that were whispered in the corridors of power. Henk had served the Catholic Church in Ghana as Secretary General at the Catholic Secretariat. Later he had lectured at the university in Strasbourg and had been disappointed when the students were transferred to a small, inward-looking theologicum in Toulouse. He was of the opinion that there was too much stress on spiritual formation and not enough on academic rigour. According to him all future White Fathers had to become professional ‘Africanists’.

Well, he was talking to someone already  converted.

He wondered whether the staff in the Head Quarters really knew what was going on in Africa and advised me not allow myself to be taken over by others but to do what I wished to do.

“We must become broader-minded and more interested in the academic world in Africa”, he said “Yes, start a foundation, or a centre, to which Africanists of all backgrounds will contribute”[14].

These were most encouraging words.

 

On the Sunday before my return to Holland I attended a Eucharist in the St Peter. When the door opened for the Mass, a procession of limping and shuffling monsignors appeared for the Concelebration. The entire Mass was in Latin and I could join in the singing of the Missa de Angelis to my heart’s content. I felt again like a young choir boy in the Schola of Sterksel with Fr Ruud Hensen in charge. But I wondered what impression these old monsignori gave to the crowds of young tourists from all over the world.

Back in Amsterdam, at  Schiphol Henk and Carla were waiting for me. They told me that they would love to come and pay me a visit in Zambia, now that their three sons had become adults. In the Kokosnootstraat my father was there with his beady smile, and a lovely cup of coffee. He felt healthy and hoped to reach the year 2000.

I did not do it on purpose but booked my return to Zambia on the 16^th of October, the birthday of my sister Toos. She was very disappointed, tried to understand this but said sadly “O well, it does not matter”. Little did I foresee that it was the last time I would see her, healthy, still on her feet, chatting happily away as she had done all her life.

I reached Lusaka via the U.K. There I heard that the Indian sister from Kerala, Sr Analisa had suddenly died. A combination of diabetes and cerebral malaria had caused a coma from which she never recovered. Of all people, she had shown great understanding when I made my ‘sabbatical’ in Siavonga at the end of the 1970s.

A couple of days before the on start of the new Millennium I went for a short holiday to Siavonga where the sisters invited me for a memorial Mass.

On New Year’s Eve Marja & Eric and Mike & Ingrid Puffett also came and invited me for a day of water skiing on Lake Kariba. I did not do too badly but should have protected myself against the blazing sun. All my face became burnt and I lost some of the pigment on my forehead forever. It could have been worse but I realized that I was getting old.

We entered the new Millennium in silence but with hope for the future. 

 

 

The year 2000 started badly. I received news from my sister Nelty that her beloved son, Pim, had suffered from a total mental break down and had ended up in a physiatrist home. My father became listless after he had finally reached the year 2000 and needed constant care from a district nurse. In Lusaka the eminent lawyer and politician, Edward Shamwana, who during Kaunda’s time, had been condemned to death on the accusation that he with others had plotted the President’s overthrow, was said to have committed suicide.

Heavily armed criminals attacked the Puffets and murdered Tom, the husband of Jean, the father of Kevin and Mike, in cold blood. Marja dealt with the situation very efficiently by taking the corpse to the police and hospital for a post-mortem. I conducted the memorial service after he was buried at the foot of a hill on his own property near the Kafue flats. A week before this took place his neigbour, John Roberts had also been killed

The evening of the 19^th of January my sister Toos phoned me. There had been something very wrong with her and she suffered from severe headaches. The doctors had diagnosed similar trouble from which her son, Jeroen had died: She had tumors in the brain. They told her that she had only a few months to live.

She talked and talked but I could hardly believe what she said, that  it was going to be the end of my beloved sister, whom I had known from my earliest memory? The happy-go-lucky girl, always in trouble at school because of her ebullience, and zest for life. The young mother who had always shown such interest in what I was doing in Africa, and who wrote long letters with all the detailed news about her five children.  Despite her plight of being as it were condemned to a relatively early death, she remained concerned about Chris her husband. Could he live without her?  He might disintegrate and become confused. Would he look after himself?

She said that she had finished her work; she had educated her children and afterwards traveled all over the world. She had studied, became a professional social worker and had reached what she wanted to reach  There were as yet no tears. I asked her to send me some photo’s as a souvenir. She did so but they never arrived, as the  were probably stolen by the post.

I asked her if she wanted me to come home and be with her. But she replied that it might be a slow process, that the doctors would apply chemo-therapy and prescribe pills to palliate and slow down the effects of the tumors. She first was going to  phone everybody as she wanted to tell this bad news herself.

 Next day Julie Woolgar phoned from the U.K as she had heard  about the murder of  Tom Puffett. I gave her the  sad news about Toos.

I went on with my weekend services to the parishes of Moomba and nearby Mwanjuni, along the main road but the image of my dying sister remained constantly in my mind.

The preparation for the writing of the Church’s history continued.  I met the capable Lynn Shumaker for the first time. She lectured at Manchester University but hoped to visit Zambia regularly for anthropological research around the Bangweulu swamps.

Together with Marja we interviewed Fr Desmond O’Loghlan, SJ, Fr Vincent Cichecki, SJ, and Fr Joe Komakoma. The latter was delighted as he always wanted the Church to do more research and allow evaluation. The so capable Fr Peter Henriot asked me if I wanted to become member of a Task Force o on Inculturation. I accepted his invitation with alacrity as anything done in this field was a step forward.

 

The ministry of health and the one of Education had become notorious due to their failure to pay salaries. Sometimes they delayed payment for more than six months and caused the hard working teachers and nurses literally to starve. Many of the local congregations of sisters, like the Handmaids of Mary or the Sisters of the Holy Spirit depended entirely for their sustenance on the little money the sisters earned in the schools and hospitals. During a visit to Mazabuka with Mr Kees Ton, one of the sisters admitted that she had not eaten since the early morning and that her congregation could afford only one meager meal a day. The Zambia Association of Sisters called for a general meeting and it was resolved to demonstrate publicly and, if necessary, to call for the ‘downing of tools’ by all the nuns if the government did not pay its dues.

It might well have been the first time in the Zambian  church history that such action was taken by  militant nuns. The local police refused them the permission to go on the streets of Lusaka to hold a public demonstration. The sisters were not deterred and announced to the whole city that they would hold a private demonstration in the extensive grounds of Kalundu Study Centre, where their office was established. They got more publicity and attention than if it had been staged publicly. It caused great hilarity when the TV evening news showed a determined and grim procession of very old and very young nuns of all kinds and plumages walking around in a circle in front of the Kalundu building, singing, shouting slogans  and waiving bill boards.

Almost 30 % of the official healthcare of the country was done by the Churches, especially in the rural areas. The ministry of Health and Education soon buckled and came up with the money to pay all the arrears.

In February I managed to find a priest for the thriving parish of Moomba-Mwanjuni. Fr Decan, a diocesan priest from Ireland, and an associate of the Kiltegans was on his way to Zambia to give a few years of his life to the Archdiocese of Lusaka, where he had worked before. He spoke Nyanja almost perfectly, came with the promise of financial support from his home parish near Dublin and was ready to build a priest house in Mwanjuni. I left everything in his capable hands, and was pleased that the  active and generous people of Moomba had their priest for the immediate future.

Sr. Dianne, the national pastoral co-ordinator, made me a  member of her  Jubilee committee. She planned a series of ceremonies for the month of August on the occasion of the new millennium. I became more involved with her department at the Catholic Secretariat and took my regular turn saying Mass for its personnel  on Wednesday mornings. Soon I found myself drafting pastoral letters and other publications for herself and the bishops.

Meanwhile my sister Toos kept on phoning me regularly. After her first chemo treatment she sounded more cheerful and gave the impression that the treatment was halting the progress of the tumors. We all clung to the hope that something miraculous would take place and that our eldest and firstborn sister would be restored to health.

After the success of the wedding of Mike and Ingrid, Marja came with another couple she asked me to bless. They were Joost Van Dijk and Octavia. Joost had been engaged before but his Dutch fiancée had been killed  in a car accident near Kabwe. After a long spell of bereavement he had met Octavia, a young lady from the south of Zambia and both wanted to receive the sacrament of matrimony. After due preparation their marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church of Chilanga. The wedding itself was a happy mixture of Tonga tradition and Dutch food. Later the couple left for the Netherlands.

Chilanga parish had a couple of excellent priests. Fr Peter Banda, a pupil of mine of the Mpima days, was in charge and the Italian Fidei Donum priest from Milan, Fr Olinto combined his duties as curate with his task as Archdiocesan Treasurer. In the six years ahead he would be of great help to Archbishop Mazombwe in making the latter’s dream of building a central Cathedral in the middle of Lusaka a reality[15]. 

By now I had seriously started with the first drafts of the History.

Dr John and Jane Jelles invited me for a lunch during which they introduced me to doctor Hilary Robinson, a dame of the Holy Sepulcher. She intended to divide her work as a physician with eight months in the UK and the rest in Zambia.

The boys and the bricklayers had worked hard around Bauleni and by then the long wall-fences had been completed with very little expense Archbishop Mazombwe came to have a look, thanked me cordially and decided to ‘nationalize’ one chunk of the walled terrain for the future Yatsani Radio Studio.

Andrew, the new Polish parish priest consoled me by saying that it was all for the good for the people. But somehow I felt uneasy about the way things were taken for purposes not originally intended by the donors, in this case me, who had sacrificed his anniversary present for the parish and not for the Bishop’s Radio Studio.

Toos phoned again. She had to go to hospital again and had been told that her days were numbered. She hoped to see me before her death and had started to prepare her own burial ceremony.

At the beginning of March there were huge floods in Mozambique after the gates of the hydro-electic Kariba dam had to be opened. The TV showed a picture of a mother on the point of giving birth to her child high  in a tree, just before being rescued by a helicopter.

 

I had that strange premonition that the year 2000, the start of a new millennium, would be very doleful. 

 

From 2000 to May 2006.

 

The year 2000 started rather badly. I received news from my sister Nelty that her beloved son, Pim, had suffered from a total break down and had ended up in a mental home. My father became listless after he had finally reached the year 2000 and needed constant care from a district nurse. In Lusaka the eminent lawyer and politician, Edward Shamwana, who during Kaunda’s time, had been condemned to death on the accusation that he with others had plotted the President’s overthrow, was said to have committed suicide.

Heavily armed criminals attacked the Puffets and murdered Tom, the husband of Jean, the father of Kevin and Mike, in cold blood. Marja dealt with the situation very efficiently by taking the corpse to the police and hospital for a post-mortem. I conducted the memorial service after he was buried at the foot of a hill on his own property near the Kafue flats. A week before his neighbour, John Roberts had also been killed.

The evening of the 19^th of January my sister Toos phoned me. There had been something very wrong with her and she suffered from severe headaches. The doctors had diagnosed similar trouble from which her son, Jeroen had died: She had tumors in the brain. They told her that she had only a few months to live.

She talked and talked but I could hardly believe what she said, that  it was going to be the end of my beloved sister, whom I had known from my earliest memory. The happy-go-lucky girl, always in trouble at school because of her ebullience, and zest for life, the young mother who had shown such interest in what I was doing in Africa, and who wrote long letters with  detailed news about her five children, was as it were condemned to an early death. But she remained relatively calm and seemed more concerned about Chris, her husband. Could he live without her?  He might disintegrate and become confused. Would he look after himself?

She said that she had finished her work; she had educated her children and afterwards traveled all over the world. She had studied, became a professional social worker and had reached what she wanted to reach  There were as yet no tears.

I asked her if she wanted me to come home and be with her but she replied that it might be a slow process, that the doctors would apply chemo-therapy and prescribe pills to palliate and slow down the effects of the tumors. She first was going to  phone everybody as she wanted to tell this bad news herself.

I went on with my weekend services to the parishes of  Moomba and nearby  Mwanjuni, along the main road but the image of my dying sister remained constantly in my mind. I had a feeling that difficult times were ahead  of  us.

The preparation for the writing of the Church’s history continued.  I met the capable Lynn Shumaker for the first time. She was American but lectured at the Manchester University, U.K. She hoped to visit Zambia regularly for anthropological research around the Bangweulu swamps.

My niece Marja defended her Thesis at the prestigious University of Utrecht on the 9^th of January and  obtained her doctorate with success[16]. When she returned to Zambia  she continued to be of assistance to her husband Eric with the construction of her house in Chilanga and with the administration of his fledging business of computer engineering. At the same time she took it upon herself to arrange a series of interviews which I needed for the writing of the History of the Church in Zambia. Together with her we interviewed archbishop emeritus Adam

Kozlowiecki, SJ, Fr Jo Komakoma of the Catholic Secretariat, Fr Desmond O’Loghlan, SJ, Fr Vincent Cichecki, SJ, and the ex prime minister Mainza Chona. The latter was delighted as he always wanted the Church to do more research and allow evaluation. Fr Peter Henriot asked me if I wanted to become member of a Task Force on Inculturation. I accepted his invitation as anything done in this field would be a step forward. Meanwhile we were decorating, and painting rooms both in the Catholic Secretariat  and in the provincial house of the White Fathers in Woodlands in view of installing the archives and the library. The house was too small, one room had to be vacated for the use of the provincial staff. Franciscan sisters gave me an old container in which I had rows of shelves installed. By then I had seriously started with the first drafts of the History of the Church.

The ministry of Health and the one of Education had become almost hated  due to their failure to pay salaries. Sometimes they delayed payment for more than 6 months and caused the hard working teachers and nurses literally to starve[17]. Many of the local congregations of sisters, like the Handmaids of Mary or the Sisters of the Holy Spirit depended entirely for their sustenance on the little money the sisters earned in the schools and hospitals. During a visit to Mazabuka  one of the sisters admitted that she had not eaten since the early morning and that her congregation could afford only one meager meal a day. The Zambia Association of Sisters called for a general meeting and it was resolved to demonstrate publicly and, if necessary, to call for the ‘downing of tools’ by all the nuns if the government did not pay its dues.

It might well have been the first time in the Zambian church history that such action was taken by  militant nuns. The local police refused them the permission to go on the streets of Lusaka to hold a public demonstration. The sisters were not deterred and announced to the whole city that they would hold a private demonstration in the extensive grounds of Kalundu Study Centre, where their office was established. They got more publicity and attention than if it had been staged publicly. It caused great hilarity when the TV evening news showed a determined and grim procession of very old and very young nuns of all kinds and plumages walking around in a circle in front of the Kalundu building, singing, shouting slogans  and waiving bill boards. Almost 30 % of the official healthcare of the country was done by the Churches, especially in the rural areas. The ministry of Health and Education soon buckled and came up with the money.

My work load was heavy but in February I managed to come upon a priest ready to take over the running of the budding parish of Moomba-Mwanjuni. His name was Fr Decan, a diocesan priest from Ireland, and an associate of the Kiltegans, Missionaries of St Patrick. He came to Zambia to give a few years of his life to the Archdiocese of Lusaka, where he had worked before. He spoke Nyanja almost perfectly, came with the promise of financial support from his home parish near Dublin and was ready to build a priest house in Mwanjuni. I left everything in his capable hands, and was pleased that the  active and generous people of Moomba had their own parish priest.

Sr. Dianne, the national pastoral co-ordinator, made me a  member of her  Jubilee committee. She planned a series of ceremonies for the month of August on the occasion of the new millennium. I became more involved with her department at the Catholic Secretariat and took my regular turn saying Mass for its personnel on Wednesday mornings. Soon I found myself drafting pastoral letters for the bishops and  other publications for her.

Meanwhile my sister Toos kept on phoning me regularly. After her first chemo treatment she sounded more cheerful and gave the impression that further progress of the malignant tumors had been halted. We all clung to the hope that something miraculous would take place and that our eldest and firstborn sister would be restored to health.

In February, after the success of the wedding of Mike and Ingrid, Marja came with another couple she asked me to bless. They were Joost Van Dijk and Octavia. Joost had been engaged before but his Dutch fiancée had been killed  in a car accident near Kabwe. After a long spell of bereavement he had met Octavia, a young lady from the south of Zambia and both wanted to receive the sacrament of matrimony. After due preparation their marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church of Chilanga on the 19^th of February. The wedding itself was a happy mixture of Tonga tradition and Dutch food. Later the couple left for the Netherlands.

Chilanga parish had a couple of excellent priests. Fr Peter Banda, a pupil of mine of the Mpima days, was in charge and was assisted by an Italian Fidei Donum priest from Milan, Fr Olinto. He managed to combine his duties as a curate with his task as Archdiocesan Treasurer. In the six years ahead he would be of great help to Archbishop Mazombwe in making the latter’s dream of building a central Cathedral a reality[18]. 

As the founder of  Bauleni Parish , I was not going to be let off by the team of Polish Salesians that was in charge. They not only asked me to write its history right from the beginning in 1972  but also, if possible, to assist them with the construction of a huge wall fence around all the buildings that had risen out of the red soil since then. A couple of days each week I joined the volunteers in making concrete blocks[19]. It was a welcome relaxation from the dusty archives and all the writing behind the computer. It took me back to the good old days when I was in daily contact with the people. Everybody worked hard and the long wall-fences was  built with very little expense. Archbishop Mazombwe came to have a look, thanked me cordially but also decided stante pede to ‘nationalize’ one chunk of the walled terrain for his future Diocesan Radio Studio. I felt uneasy about the way things were going. The 100 acres’plot had originally been destined by Archbishop Milingo to serve the needs of the local people and now it was gradually being taken by the Archdiocese. Andrew, the new Polish parish priest, consoled me by saying that in final resort it was all for the good for the people.

Toos phoned again. She had returned to the hospital and had been told that the chemo treatment had not been successful. She had started to prepare her own burial ceremony and hoped she would see me before the end.

The house in Woodlands   was not any longer the sedate dwelling in a peaceful part of the city of Lusaka as it used to be in the 1970’s . The crossroad in front of the house had become a throughway, connecting the mushrooming compounds to the east. From early morning until late in the evening  packed ‘minibuses’ and old cars passed by, belching black smoke and soot. The rooms of the house was almost always occupied with visitors and it was evident that the cleaning staff could hardly cope. Many of the visitors were White Fathers students on their way to formation houses in and outside the country. The flow of ‘missionary vocations from Europe and Canada had dried up but the one from the southern  parts of the world, in particular from the African continent, was on the increase.

Amidst the happy noise of these young students it was not easy to create an academic book, let alone write on 100 years of history.  I must confess that I had also my adverse opinion about the seemingly lax way the new recruits were treated by the so called ‘formators’ who were in charge. It was all too chummy and lay back, according to me and to my contemporaries. But it was not easy to dialogue with the in-group of  formators, who were inclined to create their own network.

The easy-go-lucky way of the students and their teachers seemed also in contrast with the horrific situation of the poor people. By then HIV Aids was rampant, up to almost 20 % of the population. The devastation was accompanied by an increase of Tuberculosis, Malaria and other related diseases. The average life expectancy had dwindled from 54 to 39 years. Mentally it appeared as if the long suffering people could not cope any longer. They continued to search for the cause of all this fatality and seemed to ‘bark up the wrong tree’ by mutual accusations of witchcraft. Especially elderly men and women who were still healthy and had a bit of a pension, or other possessions, were the likely victims of whole-scale witch hunting sessions. Some of the White Fathers missionaries in the field became heavily involved as by these wild accusations the poor not only seemed to rob the poor but made any step  towards further progress almost impossible. Men, like Fr Robert Lavertue, discovered that the witch hunting was conducted by a gang of criminals who knew how to deposit the proceeds of their loot on banks outside the country and so launder their stolen ware. Bob provided me with a set of clear cases, an so d showed how the simple people were cheated. Later on I used these for a presentation  paper during  a Conference in Durban[20].  That Zambia was by now in criminal hands was even felt by the General Secretary of the Catholic Secretariate, Fr Ignatius Mweebe during a discussion on ‘Zambia as a Christian Nation’. He mistrusted the whole exercise of a ‘covenant between God and the Nation’. For this a clear conversion and repentance would have been necessary. “I would love to believe that the President has personally repented but have all Zambian Christians undergone such a transformation”, he asked the audience sarcastically. He called the whole declaration a ‘partisan affaire’ and accused the government of abuse of office. Public money was transferred out of the country at a terrific rate.

 

In The Hague my sister Toos became increasingly confused, even suspicious and hostile towards her surroundings. It was evident that the end was approaching but nobody was certain when that would be. It became April with Lent, the Holy Week and Easter, always a busy time for us. On Good Friday Stef, one of my brothers and his wife Nel arrived in Lusaka after a holiday in South Africa. I took them straight from the airport to Moomba parish where the people were waiting for the service and the Stations of the Cross. The whole ceremony made a deep impression on them. The parish was situated along the main road from Lusaka to the Copperbelt and from there to the north of the Continent. It was also known as  a promiscuous  stop for the lorry drivers and Aids plus other related diseases had infected a major part of the population. The Holy Week, and in particular Good Friday was regarded as a cleansing time during which Jesus the Saviour took away the sins of the world. Some of the emaciated prostitutes implored me to hear their confession. This was frowned upon by the diocesan authorities as they certainly would continue with their profession after Easter. But could I refuse these young women who were so close to death?

The mournful prayers, hymns and the various rituals were painstakingly done, followed by a wake that lasted until deep in the night. It was a moving start of my visitors’ stay in Zambia. Later, on the eve of Easter they came with me to Kabwata parish where hundreds of adults were baptised. On Easter Sunday I showed them all that had been done in Bauleni since the 1970s. By then Sr. Elizabeth Dawson was firmly in charge of  the project for the street kids. She had started a special unit for mentally and physically handicapped children. This kind of work she had done in Great Britain until being pensioned after which she had decided to do similar work in Africa. It was obvious that her approach was done very professionally. She intended to add another project, namely a skill training centre for young adults, in particularly for young men. Their listless and  irresponsible way of life was one of the causes of the spread of Aids and she wanted to give them a more positive attitude by making them from unemployable employable. It made me think of  the work I had done for the Anglican parish of St Peter in Kabwata, together with the Jamaican Deaconess Venice Guntly in the 1970s. It had been a success and most of the young men had not only found simple employment but had used their skills as stepping stones to a higher standard of life.

After Easter we, Stef & Nel and I, went together for a rest to Siavonga  and then  rounded off their visit  with the annual Queen’s birthday party at the Dutch Embassy. Their stay had been short but impressive and once back in Breda, in the South of the Netherlands, Stef  persuaded the local members of the Catholic Caritas group to organise an action for Sister Elizabeth’s dream. It became a great success, especially after the Sisters of Charity of Schijndel  promised that they would double whatever was collected. It enabled Sr. Elizabeth to purchase all the tools necessary and even a small mechanical saw and woodplane. The skills training  became eventually self supporting and, again, many young men found their way in life because of what they learned in this centre.

Later Stef and Nel’s name became engraved on the wall surrounding the parish church  when the artistic Salesian Father Tandeo painted the stations of the cross on it.

 

On their way back to the airport we talked about the imminent death of our eldest sister children and  tears came in Stef’s eyes. He told me that another sister, Riet, had been diagnosed to have a serious heart condition that needed an urgent operation. He himself had just overcome a long spell of sickness and disease.

The thirteen children of the Hinfelaar family of the Kokosnootstraat 85  had reached that stage of life when health and good cheer could not be taken for granted any longer.

Back in Woodlands I buried myself in constant work together with my faithful confrere, Maurice Gruffat. As written he had accepted the task to translate into English all the archival material that had been written in (often archaic) French. It proved to be a huge job that needed the patient of a monk but he rose up to the occasion wonderfully well. Every page, every document was clearly printed and covered in thin plastic film. During all those final years he went through all the diaries and notebooks.

We also asked  Fr Ivan Page, the general archivist in the Generalate in Rome to make photocopies of documents which we missing in our collection.

 

Our work was not going to last very long. On the 4^th of May Chris, the husband of Toos, phoned me with the sorrowful news that the end was near, and that she again had been taken to a hospice of the terminally ill, called Vrederust. It was the same place where she had worked so enthusiastically for so many years. I managed to buy a ticket on the same day and once in The Hague on the following day I went straight to her bed. She groaned with recognition but was very restless. Together with Chris we decided to stay near her as often and as long as possible and hold her hand.

What can one write about these last fateful days? I had been present at people’s deathbed  at many occasions and in many places but this time the emotion went much deeper. We had always been very near each other and , besides my parents, I had known her the longest, from very early childhood. I talked to her about our youth, the jokes, her sayings as a child, her support she had given me all those years, and even sung together the little songs she had composed herself in early days. I had often envied her because of her artistic talent, her love for music and her ability to make rhymes. After the war she had even won an award when she produced a poem on the ration coupons.

I will never know why but one moment she insisted on eating a fresh herring. We wheeled her outside the room to the hospice’s restaurant and got two of them. She swallowed them in one big gulp and laughed. I asked her if she wanted to receive the Eucharist  but at first she refused. The harsh treatment of  ‘Our Mother the Holy Catholic Church’ might have taken its toll and  had made her very disenchanted with ‘the pope and the bishops’ I knew that she did not want an official church burial but preferred a simple ceremony  in the small cemetery chapel. Later, on the 10^th of April, she agreed to take the Eucharist, possibly to please me. rom then onwards any contact ceased. She became quiet and peaceful. I was called to the hospice on the early morning of  the 12^th of May 2000 and was told by the nurse that the end was very near. I bent over her and heard her saying: “It has been good. I have done my best”.

She slipped away for ever at 8.30 at the age of 68, surrounded by Chris and all her stunned children.

 

My father had waited anxiously for the final moment of his first child. I walked back to him in a daze and told him that Toos had died peacefully. He broke out in a long wail crying: ‘Oh my little daughter, we were so proud of her. She was such a bright baby, always with a little smile on her face’. The older children in the Vaalrivier street fought to be allowed to push her pram. She started to babble at an early age and loved to sit behind me on the bicycle, chatting happily away all the time. And now she has gone!

He looked a broken man and I felt then that also for him the end of a long life might now be very near. It is said that the death of one’s child is the greatest suffering parents have to bear.

I went back to the hospice but was told that she had been already been taken back to her home. There I found her, well made up by Eveline, the widow of Jeroen, the youngest son of  Toos and Chris. The interval between a person’s death and his or her burial is one of the hardest times but one has to but wait  and give everybody the opportunity to come and say goodbye.

I  placed my rosary on her hands as I  wanted  it to stay with her in the grave if only to keep a link with her.

 

The burial itself on the 17^th of May  was short and well done. The little chapel on the St Joseph’s cemetery in Loosduinen was full. One of the most beautiful moments occurred outside when the coffin was lowered  slowly into the grave and the harmony band, of which she had been a member as a flutist, played  the last tattoo. The scent of the first blossom along the lane hang in the air. Not far away I could see the steeple of the Abby church where Cisterciënser nuns had worked and prayed since the beginning of the 13^th century. To the right  were the, now abandoned, school buildings where both of us had learned how to read and write at the beginning of the war and where she, my vivacious sister, had been such a handful for most of her teachers.

When I was back in the Kokosnootstraat to be with my almost inconsolable father I opened my mail and read that on the 7^th of May Tony Ellison, the husband of Gabriel, had also suddenly died of a heart attack in Zambia’s University Hospital. Death was all around us.

 

I was back in Lusaka on the first of June to try and resume my work. Life went on and  I was expected to produce the History of the Church in the not too distant future. I went straight to Gabriel to offer my condolences. She appeared quiet and controlled. It had all happened very suddenly. Tony had been taken to hospital as he did not feel so well. Once there his situation improved and Gabriel expected him to be discharged within a few days. She had even taken some of his clothes back to the house. Next morning she was told by the night nurse that her husband had died in his sleep.

Another representative of the Federal days had gone. He had come to Northern Rhodesia with the intention to serve in the army and the police force for some years. He had settled down in the country  without  any difficulty by marrying Gabriel Ryan, a young lady who was born and had lived in Northern Rhodesia all her life. Independence had come, the country changed its name and became Zambia, with Dr Kaunda as its President. Together they had taken all these developments in their stride without much trouble. Despite all the ups and downs of a young nation, Zambia  proved to be a welcoming and open country that tried to treat each person equally and with respect. Gabriel had become a public figure as, among other artistic endeavours, she had designed not only the country’s flag and coat of arms but also all the stamps, right from the birth of the nation.

The establishment of the White Fathers Archives, the Cultural heritage and the Church’s library continued as before. Sr Monica Orange, a member of the Franciscan Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood, became a hard working and trustworthy collaborator. She was the person who had provided  a container, enlisted the help of Faith, a newsreader of the Zambia Broadcasting Corporation, to make cuttings of all the news and articles that concerned the Catholic Church and also organised regular meetings in her convent for our small Committee of Historical research. Together with the presence of  Marja and her assistant Natasha  they caused this initial work to be consistent and precise. In a poor country where oral transmission of events are not always reliable, and where history is inclined to remain shallow  partly due to a low life expectancy, this work,  done by the church workers, became soon very valuable.

There remained a great deal of work to be done for the Archives at the Catholic Secretariat. Meanwhile the national Pastoral Co-ordinator,  Diana Hess, a White Sister from Switzerland  was very busy organising the Jubilee year of Reconciliation. I helped her with position papers and conferences. I remember making the acquaintance of a very capable Catholic group, called Emmanuel. The name of one of its subgroups was Fidesco, that consisted of professional and very devoted  accountants who helped the Secretariat to become financially healthy. I became impressed to their matter-of-fact religiosity and celebrated regularly the Eucharist for them.

 

One of them had paid a visit to the high security prison, had become extremely concerned and prevailed on me to go and have a look. With the help of the prison chaplain, the White Father Dave Cullen, I obtained an entry card  and after the usual unlocking and locking of a series of doors I found myself on a relatively small yard where hundreds of weary and sickly looking men roamed around. As in the remand prison in Lusaka its yard was surrounded by huge cells used as dormitories. They had been built during federal days when each cell was supposed to have not more than 10 persons. Now they contained more than 70 persons each. The men told me that during the night they could never stretched out on the concrete floor because of lack of space  but merely squatted on their heels, and leaned against each other. At times the prison wardens wanted to knock off early and would lock them up in these miserable common cells as early at 16.30 hrs. Disease was rife, and often dying people were seen to be carried off on a stretcher, never to come back.

I am slightly claustrophobic and could not stand to remain there for long. Once outside, I breathed freely again but I would never forget this horrible scene. My ‘soulmate’ Beny Bohan, a Kiltegan missionary of St Patrick, was the chaplain of the maximum prisons in Kabwe. I spoke to him about it all and he told me that he, and many other church leaders were trying their utter best to get things improved[21]. Later, a condemned Dutchman, Roul Goosen,  was confined in these prisons for years. The horrific circumstances in which the prisoners lived, became international news. Whatever the cause might have been, in 2007 things improved considerably and  Benny wrote by email:

 

‘I was in the Maximum Security Prison yesterday morning and said Mass in the Condemned Section and they welcomed me back. The big news in prisons is that President Mwanawasa ordered that they be de-congested before October and it is being taken seriously. Already 400 have moved to Kamfinsa which leaves more room for the rest. On Friday last 100 men were moved out of the Condemned Section and given lesser sentences. Then today, I met 6 men who had been released outright and they seem to be the first fruits of the new policy. It looks as if we will be busy in the  Good Samaritan Centre’[22].            

 

August came and with it the month for which Sr Diana Hess the Reconcilation Conference had planned. It was held from the 4^th to the 7^th of August It became a great success and I never felt so near the now mature Christian Communities as during those days. All the bishops of  the ten dioceses of Zambia were present, each one with a team of laypeople. As the representative of the White Fathers I asked the people for forgiveness and pardon for all the mistakes we had made since our arrival in 1891. We had often trampled on their culture and traditional religion. The people nodded in agreement, especially the women, but in their kindness told us that we were human beings who were bound to make mistakes like all people on God’s earth.

Later in the month, on the 24^th, Cardinal Martini, SJ from Milan Archdiocese came for a visit and made himself available without stint. Through him one felt that “Another Catholic Church was Possible”, a community of forgiveness, understanding and love. People listened to him for hours and could not get enough of his conferences. Only too soon did he say farewell. He left us with an optimistic  breath of fresh air. Here was a person who did not condemn us because of Aids, Ignorance, or Backwardness or would lecture us on some medieval piece of doctrine but gave us hope and courage to move on, despite all the odds against us.

 

It seemed almost inevitable, and I was not surprised,  when I received a phone call from the Netherlands with the sad news that papa had reached the end of his tether and  had been given up by the physicians. This time it proved to be more difficult to obtain a cheap ticket from British Airways. The lady in charge told me to wait until the last moment and remain in the booking office with my luggage. Finally only two hours before departure she nodded and off I was, just in time. The flight was via Johannesburg  but I did not mind. I arrived in Amsterdam at 16 hrs next day, the 11^th of  September.

The young Doctor had just remarked to my sister that things were coming to an end and that his son, had to be quick in arriving when I appeared before the window. When I entered the room he opened his eyes with joy and smiled. His bed was in front of the window “for the little children to see how opa dies” he had said before. The doctor left with tears in his eyes, gave me a set of morphine plasters and left further care to the ‘terminal’ nurse. She came from Surinam and soon told me that she had been working in a Catholic Hospital in Malawi for three years. We had lots in common to talk about. My father remained alert for some days , but did not talk  and when he groaned and whimpered of pain we applied a plaster. At times he looked at me and whispered the words I had heard so often: “Doorzetten, Keep on, Do not give up”. Children’s heads popped up from below the window and chatted about opa who had given them sweets and plenty of attention in the past.

 On the 14^th of September the death struggle started but my dear dad did not want to go, did not want to leave his many grand and great grand children. All night we stayed at his deathbed, while I admonished him to let go and be ready for the great journey. He looked at me rather suspiciously with his brown eyes but finally  fell into a peaceful sleep. In the morning he woke up and whispered in broken German: “It is gut. Ich habe es gut getan”. Did he find himself in front of  the German brothers who had educated and trained him in Roermond as a young boy?  We started to say the rosary, the prayer we had said so often together during the war.

He died peacefully on the 15^th September which year .. at 8.40. A long and eventful life had come to an wonderful end.

I phoned my brothers and sisters, especially Jan and Jeanne who had done so much during the last months and had travelled regularly up and down from Amersfoort to The Hague. All the grand and the great grand children arrived to pay their respects to ‘kleine opaatje’ our little granddad. The small children looked at him with big eyes and great awe. Most probably it was for many of  them to first time they saw a dead person, pale and stiff.

That night I remained behind, all alone, for the wake in the small house. I looked around, roamed through the rooms. If only the walls could tell what had happened throughout all these years from 1935 onwards. It had not been easy, there had been tensions but also happiness and laughter and all of us had been well educated.

 

The burial took place on the 19^th of September. It consisted of a simple Eucharist in the parish church of St Paul, with the service of the Word well conducted by Jan. From there we went again to the St Joseph cemetery in Loosduinen, this time to the family grave where our mother was buried more than 13 years before. When she died we all feared that he would follow her soon but this lover of life had picked up the thread, had made many trips and journeys abroad and in the country, had kept a close contact with all his children, grand and great grandchildren, never forgot a birthday was always ready to give them a smile and a blessing. He had left for us a booklet to read in which he had entrusted all his memories from early childhood onwards.

 The following day we,  all his surviving children, came together to divided the few possessions we found in the house. They were of little value but each one of us wished to have a keep-safe, a souvenir of his delightful presence on earth. It was quickly done, conducted by our youngest sister Carla  to everybody’s satisfaction Archival material, photo albums and souvenirs went to Stef, whose eldest son Stef junior had enough room in his loft. There was a series of small things to be done. It became soon clear that we could not hold on to Kokosnootstraat 58 as it had remained a  rented house, and had to be put on the market for another person. A few items went back to the social welfare service but the rest of the household could be collected by anybody who could make use of  them.

I left Holland  for Great Britain on 28^th of September, after a quick visit to Irene, one of my nieces, the eldest daughter of Wim and Elly, who had had a very dangerous pregnancy. Eventually she gave birth to a lovely boy, her second child, called Joris.

Before joining the hectic life in Lusaka, I gave myself a bit of a rest with Julie and David Woolgar in Corsley. There I met Justin and Elize on their way back to South Africa with their children John and Kadinka. He seemed to enjoy his important work as a vascular surgeon  but Elize had her doubts about the future of now independent  South Africa. Maxine wanted an official Anglican wedding with Charlie Russell, with whom she had come to Siavonga some time ago. She asked me if I could be present and assist at the ceremony in the nearby church. I agreed with joy as I felt that things were taking a right turn in her life.

I reached Lusaka  on the 10^th of October  and met Marja and Eric both busy and in good health. By then I had been surrounded by ‘Brother Death’ for most of the year and it was not the end of it.  I was told that  both Brother Jan Leenen and Joop Harding  had terminal cancer and that another classmate, Laus Doedens had come back from Uganda in a deep coma. Joop had been my classmate from the days of Sterksel. He had always been our popular and handsome sportsman. After years of priesthood he  had decided to leave, had married  and started a family. The fact that he always remained his good old self with a constant smile on his face, was proved by the packed church during his burial[23].  

Finally there was the email from The Hague. The long serving Antoon Groenendijk. Parish priest of the St Paul church from 1964 onwards had died on 11^th of October. To my utter surprise he left me 5000 Dutch guilder in his original will. I donated it to my confrere, Edgar Pillet, of Kabata parish in Lusaka who had started a huge development project in a very poor compound called Misisi[24].          

I continued the interviews and all the work for the different archives with gusto if only to overcome a sense of bereavement. Missionaries, in particular the men,  lack sensitivity, can be hard at times, under the cloak of not being too sentimental. The ‘apostolic work’ must go on and only too often do we not notice that a confrere is going thought a difficult patch in his life.

In Woodlands two new confreres had arrived from Canada and wanted to start their given task as quickly as possible.  Besides being appointed to be the ‘animator’ (the superior) of the community, I was asked to give conferences all over the place, even as far as in Nairobi, Kenya.

The year ended with a peaceful Christmas and a retreat in Chikungu, a mission station near Chipata in the East. It had been a long and rather doleful time.

 

This did not deter us to continue with the ‘History Project’ in the following year 2001. I write ‘us’ because by then Marja was fully involved. She travelled to Great Britain and to Dublin in Ireland in order to interview key persons who had been along time in Zambia but were now retired in, or appointed to the ‘home country’. She returned on the 26^th of January laden with excellent data. She managed to contact some friends, ex- confreres, of whom I had not heard  for ages. One of them was Brian Garvey, a classmate of mine since the beginning of the novitiate in 1953. After his ordination, some years of teaching in the minor seminary in England and missionary work in Zambia he had decided to give his life another direction. He had married Kamanzi, a young lady from Uganda by whom he had three children. After obtaining his doctorate he had come back to Lusaka during the seventies to lecture at UNZA, the University of Zambia. Another was Pat Menzies, also happily married and now living in Warrington with his wife and two daughters.

 

By then missionary recruitment from West Europe had almost come to a standstill in contrast with the ‘Third World’ from where  the flow of new candidates increased every year. This did not happen without the usual teething troubles. A good number of these young men had  seemingly no clue what a White Fathers missionary vocation was about except that it would take them to an exciting life in Europe. One of them had been had been dismissed and been told that ‘he had no vocation’. That happened only one year before his final oath. His family, of whom one if the members claimed to be an important lawyer in London, intended to start a case against the White Fathers for unlawful dismissal and demanded compensation for ‘lost time’, during the years he was being trained. It was the first time such a claim came upon us and at first the provincial in Zambia panicked. I suggested to ask for advice from a well known, catholic lawyer in Lusaka. He came at once to Woodlands and  after a short hearing he assured us that the claimants had no leg to stand upon[25].

Other young missionaries came with a clear view of their vocation. There were young men, who were soon sent for further studies in Rome and London. My dream of  more professionalism besides genuine missionary zeal, was finally coming to fruition.      

The first months of the year passed quickly with attending meetings and the giving of conferences on Inculturation. The Street Kids Project near Bauleni along the Leopards Hill Road was in full swing with Sr. Elizabeth Dawson wondering where the money would come from. The poor people were asked by the Government to pay school fees for their children. Many headmasters became subsequently rather ruthless and were not ashamed to dismiss pupils from school if they failed to come up with exorbitant contributions on the first day of the school year. I felt sad and remembered  the happy days in Mulilansolo some forty years ago when primary education was a free gift.

Many of us managed to find sponsors both in the country and abroad to pay the fees for the most poor. Sr. Elizabeth also received substantial financial support from the Caritas division in Breda. After his short but sweet visit to Zambia, my brother Stef and his wife Nel had done their homework and soon the money arrived at regular intervals[26].

Pastorally we were all very busy but things were not becoming any easier. The Vatican issued  an Instruction for Devine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments[27]. Translations had to be as literal as possible with no inclusive language.

It also seem to object against our method of Inculturation. All this made us wonder and laugh. How did the ecclesiastical authorities envisage the literal translation of their medieval  jargon?  Did they realise what was theologically going on in Africa since the moment that the Gospel and other sacred texts were being translated in hundreds of languages and well in such a way that the Good News  became understandable for everybody?[28]  Fortunately we were too busy with interviews, seminars, pastoral work, the setting up of archives and codifying books and papers  to be unduly bothered[29].

May came and with it another piece of news from abroad. Our Archbishop Milingo was reported  to be marrying a South Korean lady acupuncturist, called Maria Sung. It took indeed place on the 27^th of May . This was soon followed by an excommunication , instigated by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger . What had been a ray of remedial ritual  became a drama, gratefully welcomed by the paparazzi in Italy. Rome was concerned that Milingo would start ordaining married men to the priesthood, even women, and so create a schismatic church[30]. Archbishop Milingo replied on 4 August that he could not give up his wife and would act against compulsory celibacy[31].

More was to come: On 8 August Milingo had a personal meeting with Pope John Paul II and announced on 24 August that he would leave his wife.

‘My commitment in the life of the Church with celibacy does not allow me to be married. The call from my Church to my first commitment is just. I am aware of Maria Sung’s sufferings and I will pray for her every day[32].

 

It was all very disconcerting. Had the so pastorally-minded and hard-working young bishop, I had known since 1971, lost his bearings? Had the glare of a constant world attention become too much for him? What had they done to him while in Rome? Why did so many promising  leaders, who had started so well, end up as strange people after a few terms in office?

Knowing him so much  I had that feeling that it would not be the end of the affaire and that Archbishop would manage to remain hot news in the future.

I had left Zambia with a heavy heart but first passed through Great Britain, and arrived in Corsley on 29 June. There I found Maxine Woolgar and Charlie Russell waiting to be married by the Anglican vicar on the following day. I was asked to assist, to give the sermon and pronounce the blessings. I remember it as a lovely ceremony in that little village and I prayed that from then onwards the life of the couple would go from strength to strength.

But I had become tired of all these churchy surprises that were sprang upon me all the time. I was 68 and thought seriously of retiring and taking it easier. Once back in Holland I heard that  the White Fathers had acquired a sisters convent near a home for the elderly in a place near The Hague, called Leidschendam. It would be an excellent place to settle down. With the help of my sister Carla, and her husband Henk, we transferred my few belongings and archival material to the loft of that convent.

Again terminal sickness was all around me. Is that part of normal life when growing old? By then Henk was diagnosed to have cancer and had just undergone chemo treatment. He looked pale but was still full of cheer and of good hope for the future. Cor, the husband of another sister, Nelty, had been diagnosed to have the feared and incurable Huntington disease which he inherited from his mother. Soon afterwards I was told that Pim, one of her sons also suffered from it. How was my sister Nelty, born the day after  liberation on  the 5^th of May 1945, going to cope?

Back in Lusaka towards the end of August, I sat down and started the final writing of the History of the Catholic Church. I worked day after day, without any interruption and managed to complete the first draft at the beginning of 2002. We also re-started the seminars and kept going until March 2003[33]. Some of them were of a high standard, others less so. But they always drew a faithful audience, in particular from the Jesuit Fathers. However they let us pay for the use of the hall to the dismay of Marja, in particular when during the session a charismatic happy- clap church ceremony with a thunderous sermon took place next door. But it was all worthwhile[34].

Our optimism of the sixties however imploded with the crazy and vicious attacks on the twin towers of the Trade Centre in New York on 11^th of September. We were told about it during a birthday party of Eric, Marja’s husband. Everybody felt that from now onwards humankind had to deal with the darkness of an extreme terrorism wherever it would come from.

It must have been the final straw because in that same month I wrote a letter to the Powers-that-be in which I told them that I would like to leave the Region (now called province) of Zambia. According to wise advice I did not send it immediately, kept it in a drawer, where it remained for a long time and from where it was never sent.

But the shadow of the past caught up with me. The former Lumpa church, now properly registered and called New Jerusalem Church had  come back to Zambia, led by Lenshina’s son in law, called  Remy Mulenga. They claimed compensation from the State for all the harm Dr. Kaunda had caused them.

At the end of the month an AMA specialist, Mr Kees Ton, arrived in Lusaka from the Netherlands[35]. We travelled together to Chipata and  the Mansa. It gave us time to get to know each other. The old dream of  having a White Father Centre in Zambia was becoming a reality. It was not going  to be called N.S.I.M.A (National Service Information Missionaries of Africa) but would come about eventually under another name[36].

At the end of October I received the sad news that my brother-in-law Henk Krulllaars was dying. He died on All Saints day, the first of  November and was buried on the 6^th. He was one of the most social people I have known, always happy and ready for a good laugh. It was a great loss for my youngest sister Carla, only 51 years old. Together with her husband she had been looking forward to uninterrupted retirement, after the successful education of their three sons.

It was not the end of  the ‘faithful departed’ One of my confraters, Anton Buys came back from a long safari in the Luangwa valley and noticed that the fridge was not working properly. He did not noticed that a thick vapour of paraffin had permeated the small room. He lit a match, and the whole fridge exploded. His entire body was burnt to a third degree. It was decided to transport him to South Africa by a small chartered plane but  he died of shock on the small airport of Katete. He was  one of these inveterate missionaries, who always made people laugh and never gave up his good humour. I do not know why but after his burial many of our generation of missionaries had that feeling that we had somehow reached the end of  active life in Zambia.  

The remainder of the year 2001 passed  most of the time behind the computer. Marja and Eric completed their house, moved in and gave a lovely house warming party. I received the honour of becoming member of the  colonial Lusaka  club and addressed it a week before Christmas. It made me think of Geoffrey Boedeker  who long ago had to give a talk on how to increase one’s memory and just before the speech noticed that he had forgotten his notes!

Two young confreres  arrived: Bill Russell who had a PhD in Ecumenism and Bernard Udelhoven, an aspirant anthropologist. Both of them would print their footsteps on the clay of history.

At the beginning of 2002, Zambia acquired a new leader. The outgoing president, Frederick Chibuba, tried to change the country’s constitution that would have allowed him a third term but the strong arm of the Churches, the civil society and the judiciary  quickly thwarted any attempt in this regards. It was the first time a non speaking Bemba person became in charge as Levy Mwanawasa originated from the small Lenje group that lived since time immemorial in and around Lusaka. Its people were known to be steady farmers.

In Europe a common currency, the Euro, came in vogue. The Zambians regarded this on the whole a good idea as it would lessen the chance of tribal wars among the Basungu (The White People)!! As big elephants they had twice flattened the grass in Africa during the past century.

In the Netherlands the crown prince Willem Alexander married an Argentinian lady called Maxima, a name that made the dear Zambians think of the imported condoms, called Maximum

After his visit to Zambia, Stef got violent headaches and was finally diagnosed to have an enlarged hypophyse that needed urgent treatment. Carla tried to overcome the loss of her husband, Henk, by accepting a demanding employment  as head financial administrator of a huge Secondary School.

My dear father had donated all his savings to ‘the mission of Hugo’.  Together with Yvon Feenstra, (one of my nieces, daughter of Marian and Wybe) the widowed Carla set up a special Foundation dedicated to our dad, Steef Hinfelaar. It became registered in March 2002.  On 26 April her last child, Freddie, married Saskia Vrolijk and with this her responsibility as a parent seemed to have ceased.

Life continued with new challenges.

What quickened my zest for life in Zambia was the fact that the idea of a White Fathers  Centre had finally caught on somehow, after having lobbied for it since 1996. Now the challenges were where to place it, where the finance would come from and what would be the academic contents of  something that shloud not  become a white elephant. It soon caused tensions between all of us in Lusaka. Everybody had his opinion and defended it with tenacity. We al looked forward  for a consensus during a general assembly of the White Fathers that would be held  in the Barn Hotel, along the road to Chipata, some 15 km east from Lusaka.

It  took place from 9 until 13 April. It did not solve our differences, on the contrary, it became more acute. I championed for keeping things small and beautiful and placing the Centre on the grounds of Bauleni. People thought that I recommended Bauleni as it was my ‘favourite child’ where I had spent so many happy years since 1973. However my main motivation was the fact that the grounds were owned by the Archdiocese, so that this local church community would be involved right from the beginning and would carry it forward into the future. A good number of my confreres had all kinds of big ideas, even of buying additional property that would pay for the day to day running of the Centre. This at a time when we had no penny saved as yet!!

In  retrospect this tug of war caused again a delay of several years  and discouraged any serious fundraising in spite of  things starting to look brighter when it was decided to invest a part of our state pensions in this project.

Even the Generalate joined the fray. In June the Zambian province received a letter from one of the councillors, Fr Benito Underraga, with the advice that as regards the Centre, the local church should be kept in the picture, that it should be a place of encounter, that only a small building should be constructed and a proper budget for running expenses should be foreseen.

Lots of advice but little financial encouragement. Not long afterwards Benito died suddenly of an heart attack and with that the realisation of the project was delayed again.

 

Fortunately I was too busy trying to complete the voluminous History of the Church  to be left twiddling my thumbs. The proof reading, the graphics and the selection of the photo’s proved to be a major undertaking. Fortunately the patient Mrs Fay Gadsdon of World Book Publishing had accepted  the publication of the book. She would not rest until it was ‘on the market’.

 

In the Netherlands the public mood changed drastically. The tolerant, lay back period of a ‘Purple’ political administration, consisting of a coalition of The Labour Party and the right wing Liberals, (of all people) collapsed after the assassination of a prominent demagogue, Pim Fortuyn, by some maverick with strange ideas[37]. The ‘man (and woman) in the street feared  of being overrun by an influx of immigrants who seemed to have little in common with the so called Dutch culture. Many original inhabitants, now called autochtones,  swayed from one extreme to an other and demanded a stop to any further arrival of strangers, dubbed allochtones. Later, in 2004, a prominent columnist and film director, Van Gogh was also assassinated by a Muslim extremist. To us, living outside the country, Theo Van Gogh seemed almost to have asked for such a reprisal because of his offensive language and writings but that was not the general opinion in the Netherlands.

All this would keep the, now so volatile, Dutch in its thrall for many years to come.

 

In Zambia people became slowly aware how much the former president Frederick Chiluba had stolen from the poor, from the nation. One spoke about millions deposited in banks of tax free havens, all over the world. People, in particular the national and international  donor agencies, became despondent. What was the use of Aid when so much money disappeared? Crime became more organised.  On 28 May  John Hudson, M.B.E, the  Commissioner who had guided the district of Isoka so well during the Lumpa troubles and was now living with his wife in Lusaka,  was attacked by a heavily armed gang and shot into his leg. He lost a great deal of blood, became unconscious but was revived by mouth to mouth resuscitation[38].

The Anglo-American Corporation who had been part and parcel of  the mining industry for such a long time with the liberal Oppenheimer family in charge, said abruptly farewell to the Copperbelt  and looked for greener pastures. Financially Zambia had become horribly corrupt and now seemed a bottomless pit.

However  some redemption came in sight with a more open way of governance under President Mwanawasa.

In Rome Archbishop Milingo, now 72, published a book entitled The Fish that was Retrieved from the Mud, in which he wrote that everything seemed like a bad dream and that he wanted to remain a member of the Catholic Church all his life. But we were told that despite his conversion he was still being ridiculed in Rome, and severely restricted in his healing apostolate[39].

During the month of September we finally moved the remainder of the archives from the Catholic Secretariat in Unity House on Freedom Way to Kapilinga house in the distinguished area of Kabulonga  where we occupied two rooms of the new premises. The former offices of Unity House came to be rented by an Insurance company. I left  the offices with a touch of nostalgia as it had served the national Church so well since 1965 during the euphoric days after the Second Vatican Council[40].

 

The move to the new offices had made us tired and both of us, Marja and me, needed a holiday. For me this came in the form of a visit from Julie Woolgar. She arrived all excited  from London on 28^th of September and after a few days of rest with Marja and Eric in Chilanga we went to Siavonga.  It was like the old days during the dreamy seventies with the  hippo’s passing in front of us on the patio, complete with a bout of diarrhoea because of eating so many mango’s and with a monitor lizard in the toilet. Later, in October, we returned to Lusaka and went on to the north, to the new White Fathers mission Kasamba, near the Kasanka game reserve. There we were well received by the community and accommodated in new roundavels. Later we visited a string of old missions, now taken over by the local clergy. Julie enjoyed every minute of it all, and, as a capable pharmacist, was at her best when dealing out medicine to the sick. The days passed too quickly, most of it ‘walking down memory lane’.

She left on the 19^th of October, both of us in silence as we somehow felt that this so successful holiday in peaceful Zambia might well be the last one.

I continued with the publication of the book, with the seminars on church history and with other services in the parishes. I remember that one of out vicious cats scratched an eye out of a small and beautiful  Border Collie, a present form Ginny Bond, the wife of Robin Miller. It was most probably too lively to be hemmed in between our concrete walls in Woodlands  and I had to pass it on to a farmer’s wife near Kabwe. It made me think of the war, when I had not been successful either in keeping a little dog, called Bobby.

Marja  was by then on top of the world  in and around Lusaka. She founded a kind of NGO, called Network of Historical Research in Zambia and soon assembled together a set of very capable academics, Zambians and expatriates alike. She also suggested to stage an exhibition, now that the Catholic Church had been part of Zambian history for hundred years.

 The White Fathers were still at loggerheads as regards the future place of the Centre. I was fully occupied selecting pictures for the church history book with the house in Woodlands almost all the time occupied by students from all parts of Africa. It made me feel ‘elderly’ something I did not like at all!!

 

Aids was rife by then. Some of its victims was a very capable secretary-manager at the Catholic Secretariat, called  Rachel Zulu. I was told that she caught it from her husband who already had died. She kept on working with a determined smile on her face. It made me terribly sad, to witness her slowly going down. One day she did not appear at work and I was told that she had gone home to die in her home country Zimbabwe. This epidemic took the most capable people away, in particular the women. But life took over and I was surprised how quickly she and her hard work was forgotten. I decided to try and become more involved in this ‘Dance macabre’, if only to keep in touch with reality. Another obviously sick person was the cleaning lady, whose husband had  had left her with 6 children to care for. “I have had a small stroke”, she said while carrying baskets outside to the waste bins. Like so many people she avoided pronouncing the dreaded word ‘Aids’ calling it by another name. One day she came to say goodbye. “I have to be strong now”, she said “because I will have to go back to the bush to grow food for my children” I never saw her again.

It became December, with the heat, the longing for fresh rain and the preparations for Christmas. A press release from the Nuncio announced the arrival of Archbishop Milingo. He would stay at ‘Mount Sion’, the headquarters of the Daughters of the Redeemer. We all met together in the Kabwata church during a solemn celebration of the Eucharist with as theme ‘Reconciliation’. There were even two representatives of the Islamic Faith, something unusual as Zambia had not many adherents of Islam. It was obvious that the nuncio and the bishops wanted the people to see Archbishop Milingo re-accepted by the ecclesiastical authorities after all that happened in the past. Later he was interviewed by Ben Kangwa of Z.B.B.C. during which the Archbishop revealed that he had been warmly received by the Moonies’ when in trouble’. But it all felt eerie and not true to life. Milingo was not any longer the happy-go-luck pastor as I had known him some thirty years ago. I met him personally on the 19^th of October but we could not really talk as he was always surrounded by one of his two ‘bodyguards’ (as people called them, one of them a priest from the Foculare movement.) As of old, I asked for his blessing. He in turn asked me for another copy of my first book, the doctoral thesis on the ‘Religious change among Bemba-speaking  women in Zambia’. He left the next day and I had that intuitive feeling that we would catch up with each other some day in the future.

  

The New year 3003 started with a loud bang. Around 2 a.m. a sleek BMW car drove into our wall fence and ended topsy-turvey in our vegetable garden An obviously intoxicated man crept  out from underneath, looked dazed at the gathering crowds and kept on shouting: “Please, do not touch my car, please, do not report me to the police!”. The police arrived after 10 minutes, and pulled the wreck  out of our garden. Next day a sober and humble man, employed by one of the well known Aid Organisations, came to apologize and posted a watchman at the gab in our wall. He promised to repair everything as long as we did not make a case or lodged an complaint. Within a couple of days the hole was repaired and we parted as friends.

 

During these first months of the year I started to realise that I was becoming a bit deaf and could not always follow the chattering conversation of the staff in the Catholic Secretariat. I realised that the day would come when I had to put a full stop behind my contribution to the local church, now mostly in hands of local personnel. Even the White Fathers’ house in Woodlands did not suit me any longer. It had become a transition house with an endless stream of new candidates passing through. Outside, on the sharp corner of Musi-o-Tunya and Mwapona Road roared the endless stream of old cars roared past day and night. I could not help being nostalgic and think of the 1960s when the house was in a quiet, residential area, without walls, and only an occasional car passing by.

I received a letter from my old friend, Adrian Smith, who wrote happily about another of his books being published, but despaired of the structure and decreasing relevance of the Catholic Church in his home country, the U.K.. But how easy it was to position oneself on the margin, almost out of the community and criticise it without mercy.

My mood did not improve when another British confrere, Patrick Harrity, told me that he intended to leave Zambia after a stay of 42 years. He had been a wonderful missionary and worked mostly in the Luapula province of the diocese of Mansa. Later on in the month another  confrere, Patrick FitzGerald, left for New York, USA. For years on end he had given excellent courses on Personal Human Relationships, but had now accepted  to work in a parish on Long Island.

It was an era of saying goodbye and I wondered when my turn would come. The excellent volunteers of the Emmanuel group, Arnout and Priscilla David, and their two lively boys, left for Belgium after having put the Catholic Secretariat in a solid financial order.

My mood was not at its best and did certainly not improve when I was stopped for speeding near Chilanga. On a quiet Sunday morning police officers had positioned themselves behind a 50 km traffic sign to catch as many culprits as possible. When they noticed that I was a missionary on my way to celebrate the Eucharist I was given a reprimand and then asked if they could have a lift towards the church!! Gradually I was becoming tired of all this. 

At the beginning of February the then Regional, Fr Antoon Oostveen asked me if I was willing to chronicle the history of the White Fathers in Zambia, from 1964 until 4004 after completing the History of the Church in Zambia. I accepted it partly to put their slovenly archives in good order.

Brother John Meade, the director of the Education department at the Catholic Secretariat asked me to write the first draft of a pastoral letter on Catholic Schools, something  that the Bishops wanted to publish in the middle of the year.

We, that is Marja and I, were still fully engaged on conducting the seminars on the History of the Catholic Church in Zambia. On the 16^th of February Prof Gerrie ter Haar arrived, stayed until the beginning of March  and presented  a set of wonderful papers on Archbishop Milingo. All the theology students of  Justo Mwale, the college of the Zambia Reformed Church and of St Dominics of the Catholic Church  and a good number of local church workers were present and appreciated the positive way in which Prof Ter Haar positioned the role of the Archbishop. With these conferences of Gerrie the seminars, started in September 2001,  came to an end in March 2003. They were so successful because of the expert organisational help of Marja. A few week later she and her group launched officially at the University of Zambia, the Network of Historical Research in Zambia.

In my naivety I thought that these so welcome series of talks, discussions, seminars and exhibition would accelerate the building of the White Fathers centre in Lusaka, but the contrary happened. The general treasurer in Rome wrote us that the entire project had been put on the back burner for the time being. This did not deter us from renewing our lobbying. We argued that in the future such centres would be necessary for ‘the young ones’ to keep them not only firmly rooted in the reality of pastoral concern but also known and appreciated by the local church. We even planned to set up a comprehensive photo, slide and video library! To pacify the powers-that-be, I accepted to give talks to the ‘stagiares, to the theology students at St Dominic’s’ and to various groups in Lusaka. I also contributed to the building of a Marian Chapel in Bauleni, next to the church. The, mentioned above Polish parish priest, Fr Tandeo would eventually make a wonderful job of the shrine of Our Lady of Bauleni.

It became the third of April, my 70th birthday. I thought it would pass without anybody noticing it. But Jan and Jeanne, who happened to be in Zambia on a visit to their daughter, the members of my community in Woodlands and all other friends and acquaintances managed to make it an enjoyable time something I will not quickly forget.

 

Easter was late that year. The Sisters of Charity of Mother Theresa kept on begging  me to celebrate the Holy Week with their Aidspatients in Mtendere compound. On Good Friday some of them staged the stations of the Cross in such a beautiful way that the drama of Christ death and the misery of their own plight seemed to intermingle. When, according to the drama’ Christ died, one of the soldiers who surrounded the Cross toppled over and fell backwards. He was carried away to one of the wards. Later I was told that he had died and had been taken back to his family to be buried.

At the end of April on the 27^th we left Zambia. Jan and Jeanne for the Netherlands and I for a quick visit to the UK. I reached Amsterdam on the 6^th of May where my family was waiting for me. They all took me to Carla’s house in Zoetermeer to celebrate my birthday again.

The White Fathers had decided to sell the house in Leidschendam  and had no accommodation for us in the North of the country any longer. Fortunately Carla had prepared her second floor for me to stay during my leave. Once settled with my few belongings I went on the usual pilgrimage to various doctors in Weert and in The Hague. Everything seemed relatively in good order.

My eldest niece, Hanneke and her husband Frank came to fetch me for a visit to Sterksel. It had become a commuter’s place so different from the sleepy village I had known in the 1940’s. Some of the new inhabitants had organised a kind of an exhibition that was opened by the local bishop of den Bosch, Mgr Hurkmans. Used as I was to make contact with our bishops in Zambia I walked up to him for a good chat. But I was swept away by one of his ‘bodyguards’ and he passed on without giving me even a look.

 It was as if the church in the diocese of Den Bosch had stood still, frozen in a pre-Vatican corset. It was the first but certainly not the last time I would come upon such an attitude. 

The purple government of a coalition of the Labour and the Liberal parties had given way to a coalition of the Christian Democrats and the Liberals. The time of an easy going and tolerant governance seemed to have come to an end in the Netherlands and its place had been taken by a stricter administration that stressed the values and the norms of the Dutch way of life. It included  a set of high demands for the so called allochtones, people who had come and were still coming to the Netherlands for a better future. This sometimes harsh approach would last to 2006, when a collation of Christian democrats and Labour eased the reigns and pardoned thousands of illegal migrants on the condition that they would ‘integrate’ as quickly as possible.

Another feature that struck me at that time was the terrific pace of secularisation that was going on in my ‘homecountry’. It seemed that Holland had definitely said farewell to everything that reeked of religion.

Our house in Heythuysen was not regarded as suitable, as coming up, to the standards of a Home for the Elderly and was now in the process of being taken over by a Foundation that introduced a strict and more commercial management. It meant that rooms could be taken by ‘ordinary’ lay people as soon as they came free. Also the African artefacts, like an imposing drum given to a White Father by a chief,  had to be removed from the hall so as to give a more neutral impression!

To me it seemed as if the house had come into the firm grip of bureaucratic red tape, assisted by a professional consultant on a high salary. It might have been coincidental but during this process a whole generation of happy-go lucky elderly missionaries died  and took with them the days of a glorious rich Roman life. Some of them had ushered me into the White Fathers’way of life and I dearly missed them.

While in Zambia I had made an arrangement with my friend Benny Bohan to make a trip to Spain, especially to the South. I took the plane to Madrid on 26^th May where a Spanish White Father was waiting. He took me and Benny who came four hours later to Menorca road in the middle of the city.

We had a lovely time together. After a day or two in Madrid we left for Granada, then went on to Seville, Cordoba and other Spanish towns. The mixture of Christianity and Islam produced a so called Mudejar architecture, a style developed by Moors artisans under Christian rule. Walking around it was as if we had landed in the 15^th century. Somehow it seemed very relevant in a time when both Turks and Moors  had come to Western Europe as ‘guest labourers’ and had decided to stay in the Netherlands. The memories of that holiday in Spain remained with me for ever.

I flew back to Holland on the 5^th of June where I found a letter from the ex-superior general, Gotthard Rosner with the news that he had been appointed to be the provincial of the Zambian region. He encouraged me to hold on, not to give up and promised that the Centre would come about eventually.

Next day we, that is my two sisters Carla, Fiet and I travelled together to Helvoirt in Brabant to attend the annual family camp. Wybe, Marian’s husband, had borrowed a caravan especially for me for this great occasion. The gathering of the clan, of my whole family, a total number of 115 people, young and old, made again a great impression on me. We knew that this joy would be mingled with the tears of loss, pain and sickness but it was and would remain worth all this. The children loved to run free and happily after a long and stuffy winter at home. That time we even celebrated a short but moving ceremony on the day of Pentecost with Vivianne, the oldest grandchild of Jan and Jeanne in the lead. They also conducted a sponsored walk to collect money for the Steef Hinfelaar foundation. After three days the camp was broken up when one family after the other left. At the end there was only a heap of forgotten socks and some garments left, right in the middle of a trampled field.

I left the place hoping to be back in the future. Hanneke and Frank Balk were so kind to give me a lift back to Heythuysen. From there I travelled to my brother Stef and his wife Nel, with the intention to baptise Daan and Stefanie, two of their grandchildren. It became a lovely ceremony in a small chapel nearby with all the members of the family present. I had that feeling that one day the catholic religion would come back, especially in Brabant where the people had suffered so much after the Reformation. Just now people were not inclined to ‘come back’. The horrifying cases of  sexual child abuse, at that moment especially in the USA, did not help either.

We went to Dongen in the middle of the month of June. Since 2002 the headquarters of the White Fathers were now situated over there as by then the houses of the White Fathers in Boxtel, in Vaassen and in Tilburg had been sold or their rent terminated and their communites had been put together. It was an opulent building that had belonged to the Brothers of Dongen and  had long corridors and extensive grounds around it.

 

The remainder  of the month was spent in visiting old acquaintances, a day of sailing with my brother, Jan. Then there was that sermon in my parish church. It must have been the first time that I was confronted by a more ‘democratic’ approach of the lay people. A few days before I was called by the mission committee and told what to preach in order to get not only some attention but also plenty of money. Perhaps I had been spoiled by the kind people in Zambia, as I was not prepared for this at all. I left the presbytery stunned and angry. I did eventually re-write the sermon and was consequently told that it had been a great success. But it must have been the first time that I seriously thought of ‘winding off nicely and gently fading away’. Even the church has been commercialised, was my silent comment.

I spent the first half of July mainly by visits to the dentist  in Heythuysen. He removed the last few teeth out of my lower jaw, built two small corner teeth on a set of healthy roots and finally fitted a pair of new dentures. At first  it did not fit properly and this caused my mouth and tongue to be covered with blisters. But in the years that followed I came to realise what an excellent job the dentist  in Heythuysen had done. The dentures fitted wonderfully well and from then onwards I had no dental trouble any more.

Strange enough,  the nagging pain and days of misery made me determined to return to Zambia for a last flint at getting that Centre established  and winding off properly. Some of my classmates had come back from Africa and slipped quickly in the  warm womb of care, provided by the kind nurses in Heythuysen. I found them sitting passively among a group of elderly people, singing songs of long ago, intoned by a kind and motherly matron.

No, I was certainly not ready for that, if ever it would come. I had still a task to do. During my stay I also met Theo van Asten and his wife. He had been our Superior General  during the turbulent 1970’s  but after his mandate he had decided to ‘leave the priesthood’ and had chosen another way of life. The Vatican had not forgiven him and refused to lift his excommunication despite the excellent work he had done in particularly around  the independence of Mozambique. I asked both of them if they would be ready to be interviewed one day, if only to hear his side of this sad event. It was his wife in particular who agreed with eagerness[41]. 

I left Holland on the 15^th of July and stayed the remainder of that month in Great Britain. Of the people I met I remember two in particular because of the conversation we had together. In Burford it was Mary Hannah who almost pleaded with me to think of a return to Europe in order to give myself some ‘quality time’ as she called it. Then, in Warrington, I met my classmate Pat Menzies and his wife, Pauline. We travelled around seeing places and also talked more than usual. Their two daughters had married and they now enjoyed a generous  pension. It gave him also more time to ruminate about the past, about his relatively short period in Africa and about the reasons he had left.

Later on during so many interviews I discovered that most of those who ‘had left’ came up with the same reason. During the idealistic years of their youth they had expressed a desire to ‘to go out and do something for the world’. For a simple catholic boy or girl of that time the only way to go for it was to become either a priest, a sister or a brother missionary. Being young and eager they did not always envisage the conditions of celibacy, poverty and strict obedience that was wrapped as it were in the package of ‘doing something for a better world’.  Only once back ‘into the world of the apostolate’ would they realise that they were not really cut out for these vows.  Later on, in particular after the liberating constitutions and decrees of Vatican II, so many ‘windows were opened’ that provided many more alternatives to young people who wanted to contribute something ‘to the world.’

Walking between the Anglican and Catholic cathedrals of Liverpool we both felt that just talking about it  caused a feeling of well being and freedom. But we also realised that change might well have come too late and that, some 150 years of emancipation and the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy, the young generation had found their own way, outside the Catholic Church. The missionary era of  ‘consecrated’ sisters, brothers and priests’ was gradually becoming something of the past.

After a few days in Oak Lodge, near St Edwards along Totteridge Common in the North of London, I stepped on the third of August into the plane that took me back to sunny Zambia.  By that time my youngest sister Carla had already arrived for a visit and stayed in the house of Marja and Eric. After a few days in Lusaka itself we both left for the North where I had worked so happily in years that now laid far behind me.

Carla was born when I was 18 years old and already wearing a clerical Roman collar. Her memories of me were mainly those of important occasions, of feasts, and of celebrations. Now, as a widow and grandmother at the age of 53, with all her children happily married, she was given the first opportunity to get to know me as her brother, a human being with all my warts  and wrinkles.  

 We got on very well with each other and enjoyed each other company. I soon noticed that she had a sharp, at times critical, vision that enabled her to prick quickly through appearances and show. Via Chilonga we reached Kasama where the White Fathers English speaking Novitiate was being  extended to accommodate scores of novices. Already at that time it was clear that the high command in Rome was intent to direct the entire focus of formation towards the South, in particular to Africa itself, leaving Western Europe and America to the glory of the past.

From there we took the dirt Road to my first mission, Mulilansolo, via Malole, and the pontoon over the Chambesi  near Mbesuma. It was like coming home. Everywhere people recognised me with big smiles, happy to see me and my sister. It was the visit to a village near the mission itself that I would remember in particularly. There I met the old Barton Kusensela, who told me with a twinkle in his eyes that, now that having only one of his four wives wasleft, he was allowed to receive Holy Communion. His many sons and daughters had done well in the fyalo (various countries) and he was ready to die and see Lesa mukulu, the high God[42]. One of my former pupils of Mpima major seminary, was now in charge of the mission. Next day we walked to the village  near the mission  Carla took some lovely digital pictures of the people[43]. On our long drive way back to Lusaka I wondered if I ever would see all these wonderful people again.

 

There it did not take long before the Sisters of Charity of Mother Teresa had traced me and begged me for Eucharistic services, especially on Sundays. When I  arrived one of the young sisters put a piece of paper in my hand  on which was written :

‘RIP. Please, father, pray for these people who died this week here in the Mtendere Hospice’  It had twenty names written on it  and I wondered if they would ever be remembered in the future. Carla came with me and noticed with apprehension that some of the dying people would pull me very near to themselves while receiving H. Communion.

She left for home on the 17^th of August and within a few hours I was deeply involved in the work as if I had not been away. Sr. Monica Orange had started to first preparations for the Exhibition on 100 years of the Catholic Church in Zambia. It was to be staged in the Show grounds and needed strict supervision, a simple brochure and advertisement to attract people during three days.

The editor of Bookworld, Mrs Fay Gadsden, had finally started putting the final touches to the book after the White Fathers had signed the contract. But she wanted some guidance on where to put the pictures and what to write underneath them. I had finally come to the end of  getting the book published.

On Saturday, the last day of August, the exhibition was opened by Archbishop Medardo Mazombwe and by Fr Jude McKenna, the provincial of the Capuchin Friars. The Nuncio came late but was dutifully pleased. During that week over a thousand people came for a visit.

Once the exhibition became an event of the past and the artefacts were carefully stored away in the convent of Sr. Monica, a reaction set in that lasted almost until the end of the year. People engaged with the publication of the History became unnecessarily finicky and more interested in other assignments. Meanwhile the house in Woodlands was almost all the time chock-a- block with visitors from in and outside Zambia. I could hardly cope as there was never any restful moment. Were the years catching on and was I getting too old to be stationed at the headquarters of the White Fathers in Zambia? Had I to get used to the fact that contemporaries of mine, whom I had known for years, would suddenly pass away, change the temporal for the eternal? One of them was Denis de Jong, the bishop of Ndola who had exerted such a steady influence on the church in general and on the Bishops conference in particular. We buried him on the 20^th of September during a moving ceremony that lasted almost all day. Others came to say goodbye and leave for their ‘home country’. Had the last act of letting go and leaving space for the next generation arrived for me?

In mid September we had our last meeting of the History Committee and sent our thanks to AMA in The Netherlands. It was mainly due tothe hard work of Sister Monica (with her postulants) and my niece Marja that the exhibition had been a veritable success in spite of the very little means that had been at their disposal.

After the event  I continued trying to get things properly preserved and focused myself on the completion of the archives in the Catholic Secretariat, and in the office of the White Fathers. A major part had been stored in the (by now) two containers, outside in the courtyard at Woodlands. It meant  an almost constant fight against the ‘white ants’( the termites) who had penetrated the container from below and were set on destroying important documents.

 

Some sisters who had been in charge of Aids patients for a long time became burnt-out  and sick. Sr Hildegard Nagel, whom I had known since the 1950s had to be repatriated, bitter and frustrated as she was as regards the apparent lack of interest from ‘the bishops’ and angry with the donor agencies who regarded the use of condoms as the only answer to the huge problems. Did the outside world realise what it meant for the carers to live among a population where a 20% was infected with Aids and the whole country seemed to have become one big hospital. When you greeted people and asked how they were , the usual grim answer was “Surviving, just surviving”.

 

It became October when I seemed to be back to the ‘drawing board’ as regards the publication of the book, I buried myself in the routine of writing, writing the history of the White Fathers in Zambia. I often felt dizzy and became short tempered during this hottest time of the year.

This dizziness accompanied with an everlasting dry cough did not go away in November. I realised that I might have caught something contagious from the many victims of Aids in the hospice of the Sisters of Charity in Mtendere. It could not be T.B. was the opinion of a local doctor.

Things brightened up a bit when at the beginning of November I was told that the Provincial Council had finally decided on the place where the Centre would be built. After all these useless discussions it was going to be on ‘my’ plot, next to Bauleni compound along the Leopards Hill Road. I had proposed it at the very beginning of the project and the various odd ideas of others had only caused it to be delayed for months on end. At that time we were also told of a horrific accident in Malawi in which one of our best White Fathers, Toon van Kessel and a sister were involved. On their way from Lundazi to Chipata via the shorter and safer way through Malawi their car suddenly overturned  and ended up with a loud bang against a tree. Help from a nearby mission came slowly and both of them ended up almost paralysed in the small hospital of Chipata. From there they were flown to South Africa in a small private plane,  and that saved them. It would take more than a year for both to be rehabilitated and to be back ‘on the job’. 

Then, in the middle of November I said  goodbye to my age-mate Leo Venhuizen, whom I had known in the minor seminary! The doctors here diagnosed a minor stroke and told him that he needed thorough check-up. In the Netherlands the internists were at a loss about the diagnosis of his illness. During one of their consultancies Leo went to the toilet where he suffered an inner rupture of the intestines and died on the spot, to the consternation of the physicians.

It became December and the rains were late that year. I was asked to enumerate all the services that the future centre could offer. I suggested regular conferences and meetings, publications, the setting up of a well stocked library, the White Fathers archives plus those of other church communities, the giving of language courses and the provision of a think tank for deeper research. The paper was accepted and duly filed for the future. Later on, in the minutes of the Provincial Council I read : “We will have Fr Hugo Hinfelaar for the Centre, one of our best experts on Zambian culture and church history. He will be with us for a few years”.

 I must admit that this stroke my vanity!!. At the same time I had come to realise that life in Zambia on an altitude of some 1400 meters above sea level, was not any longer the best place for me to be. My heart beat had become very irregular and at times I felt exhausted and dizzy.

Towards the end of the year I was summoned to the office of the Provincial, Gotthard Rosner. The told me that his Council had read a few pages on what I had written on the W.F. History but that they wanted a more objective chronicle, not a critical analysis.

 I asked him for an exact reference from the minutes concerning this  judgement by the members of the Council. He rummaged some time through the papers in vain  and had to confess that nothing had been officially recorded about this matter. This made me wonder whether the members had really dealt with this  or that it was merely the unwritten opinion of some of the members.

 

Despite my feeling dizzy and exhausted most of the time I continued trying to be of service.. On the first day of the year 2004  I was asked again to celebrate the Eucharist for the poor people in the Mtendere Hospice and for the students and their families at the other side of the city, in Matero Secondary School. My friend, Dr Jellis advised me to see a private doctor as by then I almost looked like a warmed-up corpse. I went dutifully to the Coptic Medical centre and, after a cardio-gram, an echo and a scan I came out with a couple of tablets and a few aspirins in my hands. I was told to come back after one week. When I presented myself  after one week a locum doctor from Nairobi had taken the place of the one I had consulted before. He took me immediately off those pills as he did not believe in taking too much medicine. This would later on prove to have been a major mistake.

On the 7^th of January the White Fathers started their so called Pre-Capitular Meeting in ‘Assisi house’ situated  in grounds of St. Bonaventure Franciscan Seminary. It was the first time in my life that I felt excluded from their deliberations, like an old dog left outside in the snow. Later on I read in the report that ‘the older confreres had to be challenged to hand over their responsibilities’.

Was the writing on the wall?

Work at the archives in the Catholic Secretariat had as yet not come to an end. It also meant an occasional celebration of the Eucharist for the staff on Wednesday morning. I wondered at times whether the Secretariat was the best place for such a beautiful ritual. Followed by coffee or tea afterwards it also meant  a loss of more than an hour each Wednesday morning, was my opinion.  Had I become an old grumpy man? During my early years I had always promised myself to avoid this at all cost! However my services were not only required for the setting up of the Archives but also for the writing of  the Bishops’ pastoral letter on Catholic Education in Zambia. I got the first draft  on paper at the end of March.

Meanwhile one of the young Zambian Missionaries of Africa came to consult me on the writing of his Ph.D on Islam in Zambia. His name was Felix Phiri  and originated from Chipata province in the East.. It felt good to send him into the Bauleni compound and supervise his findings. In my imagination I already saw him as part of the future White Fathers Centre.  Later that year in the month of April I also met Phelim Malumo. He was on his way to Mongu to be ordained a White Father missionary priest by Bishop Duffy O.M.I. on the first of May . He had his first appointment to South Africa already in his wallet and also gave me that reassuring feeling that the future would be in good hands, even if these hands were not so many as had been in the past. Later I met another new missionary priest in Ndola, called Evaristo Mwewa. He was on his way to Ethiopia but had to wait for a visa. 

 

Upsetting news came again from my family in the Netherlands. After a successful treatment for her heart my sister Riet, only 68 years old, had suffered an haemorrhage that left her physically handicapped. She had enjoyed a few months of good health,even ready to take up playing tennis again and now this. It left her depressed and a bit passive with seemingly nothing to live for.

‘It never rains but always pours!’, I thought.  This time it was the life long companion of Frank Carey, Sr. Vincent (Mary Alic MacDonald) who had was diagnosed to have leukemia, a terminal cancer. She was on her way to Zambia in order to say goodbye for ever. I remember the days in Siavonga in the 1970s  when she had spoken so wisely and had given sound advice to many of us. Now she had done her task and was on her way out.

I remember also having a long talk with Gotthard Rosner one day. He enjoyed excellent relations with the new generation and trained them as a good ‘formator’ This he had been most of his life and he was  good at it.

During the conversation he asked me whether I would be healthy enough  to be in charge of the Centre from 2005 onwards as  Fr. Francois Richard, who had succeeded him as the Superior General in Rome, was interested to become its Director. Would I be in agreement with this appointment? I readily gave him my blessing, only too happy to stay away from the ensuing  administration and financial management that went with it. Gotthard also told me that a first grant from the Generalate had been allocated for the building of the centre and that he had applied for another grant from Mission Aachen in Germany. Things we finally moving into the right direction.

March came and with it Ash Wednesday with the long Lenten preparation for Easter Sunday, a good period to launch my book :

                                       The History of the Catholic Church in Zambia.

 Spread out on the tables around the swimming pool of the new Catholic Secretariat the copies looked very attractive and solid.  Gotthard  delivered the opening speech  and Fay Gadsdon and her husband took the orders.  Within one hour 260 copies were sold, more than a quarter of the total print of one thousand. Fay was on top of the world. She had never experienced this before  in her life as a book publisher. The Jesuit Fathers, with Fr Vincent Cichecki in front, were the first to read the contents, approved of it and nodded their approval  with  relief.. I had written the History  as a chronicler, rather  than as a critical  analyst. Later on some people regretted this and would have preferred more background information of some of the events, in particular of  the so called Milingo affaire. But this era was still too near and ‘raw’ to be able to write sensitively about it. That would be the privilege of a future generation when most of us were gone.

I had come at the end of a long road and enjoyed a welcome period of recognition  by all and sundry. Father Vincent asked me if I could now update the Directory of the Catholic Church as the last one had been made in 1999. But I was of the opinion that this task should be done by the local Catholic Secretariat and not by ‘expatriates’ any longer.

I remember the services of the Holy Week in and around the hospice of the Sisters of Charity in Mtendere again as extremely beautiful, especially the Exultet on the Eve of Easter. Two young women sung this Hymn of Gratitude in CiNyanja  so movingly that I would have liked them to go on for ever. As  victims of  Aids they looked forward to the hope and brightness of Christ’s resurrection. Afterwards we sang and danced around the Easter fire until the early morning. It became an Easter day hat remained fixed in my memory for ever.

 

On my 71^st birthday my niece Marja and a couple of my friends encouraged me to start and write my autobiography. I must admit that at that moment  I felt very old and almost  ‘on the shelf’ This did not improve when I noticed that I was not getting rid of that dry and exhausting cough. It lasted all through May and June. I suffered from palpitations of the heart, my lungs became blocked and I had difficulty in breathing, especially during the night. Was the end near ……………….?

I left Lusaka for London  on the 29^th of May. There I found Miles, the youngest son of David and Julie, waiting for me to take me to Corsley, Lyes Green. In the car he told me that he was engaged to be married with a young lady from the Philippines, called Faith. She worked as a stewardess for the Saudi Arabian Airlines. The wedding would take place in a little church near Manilla. Would I be willing to conduct the service ? I was very glad to hear that his life was going into the right direction after all the ups-and-downs  since early youth and agreed with joy.

In London I met  Esther Gordon, the lady of the Grail with whom I had followed the course on Catechetics at Corpus Christi College in 1966. I admired her clear analysis she made of the Catholic Church in the Netherlands after she had been there for some weeks. In the years after the Vatican II Council, remarkable developments had taken place, instigated by well known Dutch theologians. This occurred before ‘ Rome’ had clamped down on the ‘excesses’(as some regard them) of the seventies For the young it was useful to have some record  of this early springtime of theological progress.

Esther had written very objectively, and calm about it without any aggression or direct confrontation. Perhaps that would be the right approach when facing up to the necessity of on-going change despite objections from  more conservative theologians. It would never to be too late to do this.

Somehow I felt that my stay in Zambia was coming to an end  and decided I made a concerted effort to  refurbish the room on the second floor of Carla’s house in Zoetermeer. Frank, the husband of my oldest niece, Hanneke, was so kind as to transport a few belongings from Oak Lodge in London to my new ‘penthouse’. We bought IKEA furniture and installed a computer with a small printer., It was not easy as I was not accustomed any longer to commercial and fast moving Europe.

 

Religion had lost its status in the Netherlands and the Catholic Church had finally accepted not to be a folk church any longer with full churches on Sundays. The bishops were as it were rearing the troops after heavy losses and had become inward-looking, a situation so different from the Churches in Zambia. The parliamentary deliberations of  the nations seemed  increasingly limited to internal problems such as care for the elderly, the handicapped  and the fear of terrorists  People kept to themselves, seemingly content with life as it came. But many seemed depressed and suffered from a lack of intimacy. To me it seemed that the demise of the established churches had caused a gaping wound with no healing medicine from other sources available.

After the collapse of the ‘purple’ period  the Netherlands seemed now to be carried forward by a stricter, more Calvinistic atmosphere with the stress on ‘norms and values’ Could the upsurge of Islam be one of the causes?  According to me it  made the country dull and  monotone.

Our home for the elderly  in Heythuysen, now called St Charles, had become the object of an endless set of rules and regulations about the danger of  fire, the purchase of vegetables and fruit, the kind of soaps to use and doors to shut. The missionaries took it a passively with a sense of humour and disappeared in their rooms for a bit of peace and quiet. I was told that many convents, monasteries and presbyteries had to be broken down as they did not come up to modern state legislation.

I left for the UK towards the end of August and enjoyed the friendship of the many people I had met during my ‘colonial?’ past.  In on of the Underground stations in London I remember reading an Voluntary Service Overseas advertisement that said :

V.S.O.  offers the chance to do something for the world…you want more than ‘life as usual’ And not for you alone either. You have professional experience and unique talents  and you volunteer to share this with people in the world  poorest countries, to go and work with them ..to change your life and theirs  and may be the world.

Was this not very similar to the motivation I possessed when leaving for Africa in 1958?

I had booked a cheap ticket by coach something I really regretted on my way back in the middle of September. The driver was new, we lost our way in various French, Belgian and Dutch towns and arrived more than three hours late. Once back in Zoetermeer I was told that Fiet, my sister, had waited for me in the droughty railway station for more than an hour and that Danny, the younger son of Nelty and Cor , had also been diagnosed to have the Hutington disease. The transmission via her mother-in-law had been 100%

 

Without really planning it, I started to prepare a probable future in the Netherlands by taking up the loose ends that I had left behind in years past. I wrote an article for  ‘Inside Zambia’ 1964-2004. published and edited by werkgroep Zambia, attended a series of conferences organised by various aid organisations, like Cordaid, Icco,  and  Visited universities, like the Institute of Social Studies, the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. I  attended reunions, met old classmates like Oscar Holleman and Lucy, his Indonesian wife, and paid visits to old friends, like Tony van Diessen and his wife with whom we had worked in the diocese of Mbala, Zambia. I was invited for a meal in the Teniersstraat, in The Hague, where the White Fathers had started a multicultural project a decade before.

One of the sisters of Charity of Mother Teresa, the Belgian Lieve Heyrick whom I had met  working  in the Mtendere compound of Lusaka, had been transferred to the Egelantierstraat  in the Jordaan quarters of Amsterdam. I found my way rather easily by asking for direction from the loafing and drinking men on the street corners. She was doling out big cups of soup when I arrived.

I combined my visit with looking up Thera Rasing, the anthropologist who had written so well about the modern initiation ceremonial that was being conducted in the compounds of Zambia. At that moment she was employed as a psychiatric nurse but would soon ‘ burn all her ships’ in Holland and settle down in Zambia as an UNZA  professor of Gender Relations. There was another quick trip to the G.P. in Heythuysen who gave me the green light for a return to Africa, as the unruly heartbeats  had quietened down considerably        

The chilly days of October passed quickly. On the 29^th I boarded the plane from Amsterdam to London and was on my way back to Zambia. While waiting for the plane to depart for Lusaka, I met  Edwin Flynn and some of his Capuchin confreres who told me the latest news. Some ministers had been sacked. The Konkola Copper Mine, Zambia’s largest copper producers were sold for a song to Indian investors through a London listed company, called Vedanta. The ex president, Frederick Chiluba had refused to sell the national Z.C.C.M to a Kafue Consortium at a much higher price. There was a Chinese company called Quantum Consortium that had invested  in Mopani Copper Mines and reactivated Bwana Mkubwa and (later) Kansanshi  mines. All this had taken place at a time when copper prices were rising at an all-time high. Something, somewhere was very wrong and one wondered what the use could be of development aid when such deals could be made while the simple people remained the victim of it all. I also heard that Sr. Vincent had died and remembered her soft but firm voice during a visit to Siavonga, some 15 years ago. How many young ladies had she educated since Independence in 1964 and where were they now?

Gotthard Rosner and Bernhard Udelhoven had come to the airport to collect me. They told me that the Kalundu Study Centre in Roma township and the Brothers Training centre in Chelston expected me to give a course on the history of the Church in Zambia to their junior aspirants. After a few days in Woodlands I noticed how little had changed during the time I had been away. Nothing had been done to give the construction of the Centre a kick start. I was duly left out of all concerns as regards finance, management, future governance or even overall policy.

November came and with it the horrifying news from Holland that the popular film producer Theo van Gogh had been assassinated. Extremists combined this  with the death of the politician Pim Fortuyn on the 6^th of May 2002, the troubles with Ayan Hirshi Ali and, of course the cruel attack on the twin towers of the huge Trade Centre in New York. The usually so tolerant Dutch populace slipped into a deep aversion of Islam.

Our generation had deeply enjoyed the euphoria of the sixties and the seventies but  now after a period of disenchantment  the world had not changed and another outbreak of war deemed imminent. In spite of all this most of the missionaries remained faithful to their vocation. How could they give up in a time when Africa was smitten with Aids and other related diseases, like malaria and tuberculoses ? In particular the hard-working nunsand  their lay-carers, most of them women,  continued quietly their work..

Their dedication did not reach international attention  but one visitor who ended up in St Luke’s Mission Hospital in Mphanshya  along the Great East Road, wrote later  in the national newspaper:

 

In the morning a beatific Polish missionary nun brought us boiled eggs, tea and toast on her way back from early morning Mass. She told us that one of her patients had died in the night While we ate breakfast she listened to our lungs and told us to quit smoking. We felt better after a couple of days and she was so kind as to take us around in the Aids Ward., humid with the sour-sweet smell that is the end of life. Eyes followed her every move as she touched blistered skin, stroked heads, held hands and moistened feverish lips. I though if my body were eating itself alive  I would count on her by my bedside. She is afraid of nothing , not even death  but would prefer that mating geckoes did not fall on her in the middle of the night…        

 

We held another provincial assembly at the beginning of December that took place in St Andrews motel, near Lusaka, along the road to Kafue and the South. Most of the deliberations were now  focused on ‘formation’ in the houses of the postulancy, the novitiate and the possibility of  starting a house of philosophy. The construction of my dream project, the White Fathers Centre seem to come like an afterthought during  the last item of ‘Any Other Business’

 

After the completion of the History of the Catholic Church in Zambia and  of the History of the White Fathers in Zambia since Independence, my reputation as a  historian seemed to have been established.  Ivan Page, the general archivist of the WF Generalate in Rome asked me if I was willing to write a small biography of Bishop Jan van Sambeek. I collected the data from the diaries in Lusaka, from the main archives in Rome in August  and from information from the Netherlands.  It became a fascinating story. At first I was promised a small grant by Ivan but later on he confessed that he had not been able to get any financial support. This made it impossible for me to travel to Tanzania, via Mpulungu. Fr Gotthard  Rosner took the manuscript with him to Rome where it was well received. Later on Ivan complained about the lack of clear references, indeed a weakness of mine, and found the editing difficult.  It took ages to get it translated into French that  was finally published in 2007.

The gravel dust combined with the growing pollution from the ‘minibuses’ from outside made me almost asthmatic. Gradually I acquired a dislike for the uncongenial WF headquarters in Woodlands. Writing does make a person lonely. I had hardly any pastoral work to do during these months and also little contact with the people. To assuage things we, (Maurice Gruffat and me) made it a point of coming together in his room each evening for a talk and a glass of wine. It was a good idea but it also separated us, two old men, from the community at large. Both of us had serious misgivings about the behaviour and the ways of the young candidates and in our rooms criticised those in charge to our hearts content. Maurice was good company . He had also plenty of personal money, accredited to him via a bank in Switzerland by the friend of his youth, now one of the owners of the Carrefour chain of  supermarkets. The money was given for Maurice’s personal use: he could decide how to dispose of it.

As regards the Çentre’ things were finally moving into the right direction. The foundations of the wall fence were being dug. It gave me the necessary impulse to arrange the library, the archives and the documents as well as possible. To my dismay I noticed that the termites, the white ants, had again gnawed themselves through the container and attacked a couple of shelves..

The book on the History of the Catholic Church was widely read in Lusaka. The German Ambassador, 

Mr Christoph,  was enthusiastic and praised it highly.  He invited me for lunch in February. When I entered his well kept garden I noticed that outside, along the veranda, a long table had been prepared by his wife for all the Ambassadors of the European Union. It proved to be a working lunch, with me as an invited guest. I explained a few chapters of the book, answered questions while trying to enjoy the food. After the meal the Ambassador closed the working lunch  with a few words of thanks and told the gathering that he would recommend  the book for  each new ambassador to read  as ‘it gave a good view on Church and State relations in Zambia’

I drove home on a cloud of praise and told my confreres about it. But, after so many years, I knew that  they were not easily given to praise. Celibate bachelors seem to keep an adolescent  sense of competition all their lives

In March I heard that the Reverend Pierre Dil, a Dutchman who became an Anglican priest, had died in South Africa. He had  always attracted a great deal of attention, was often at loggerheads with the Powers-that-be, had started an  Ecumenical  Centre in Makeni in the seventies and made a success of it He was never afraid to ‘stick his neck out’ when it concerned the poor and the sick of Lusaka. He was buried next to his chapel in Makeni. His South African wife, Wendy and his two sons were present, intent on upholding Pierre’s ideals and fervour.

Lent came and with it the ceremonies of the Holy Week and of Easter. The White Father parish in Kitwe, called Kawama, was without a priest as my friend, Piet Verkley, had to stay in the Netherlands for more medical care. I promised to take his place  if only to show myself that I was still strong enough to go through the demanding routine of the ceremonies. The Eucharist of Maunday Thursday was not too bad; I enjoyed the beautiful singing of  the people who were so grateful that I had come all the way from Lusaka. But during the protracted ritual of the stations of the cross on Good Friday, which was held along the dusty lanes of the Compound, I felt dizzy and almost collapsed. The Easter Wake lasted until deep into the night, followed by the solemn High Mass at Easter itself. Later on that day we all danced, feasted and had a meal together. Towards the evening a group of happy women and children accompanied me singing around my car and waived branches.

I was in an pensive mood when I drove back to Lusaka. Had there been progress since my arrival in 1958?  Would Zambia become one day a country  where everybody received his or her share of God’s gifts on earth?  At times one was inclined to loose heart and despair . Recently my friend Dr Jellis had told me that mortality of women at childbirth had not diminished  at all and was now one of the highest of the world. But people never lost courage and with their laughs and happy faces always insisted on never giving up. I felt sure that one day they would manage and live a life that was worthy of God’s children.

But I doubted whether I would ever see this.

After Easter my community was so kind as to celebrate my 72^nd birthday in style. We went for a meal and a walk in a park near Nghombe compound. It was then that I heard that a working committee had been formed for the final stages of the new Centre and that I, ‘because of my age’ was no member of it. I felt relieved. I had lobbied for years on end and managed to make a dream reality. Now  a younger generation, was ready to take over the baton and with that a burden fell off my shoulders.

I was still prepared to assist at the beginning by giving some courses.

Pope John Paul II finally died at the beginning of April. He had been a favourite for the Media and managed to keep them entranced until a few hours before his death. For us, missionaries of the first hours, who had been so enthusiastic when Pope John XXIII called for a Second Ecumenical Vatican Council, the long reign of the so Polish John Paul had been tough- going all the way. We looked forward to a ‘let-off,’ hopefully an Italian again  with a wider view.

I must to admit that when I heard that our German friend Joseph Ratzinger became Pope and called himself  Benedict XVI  I was horrified. He was known as the great Excommunicator with as recent victim the humble Tissa Balasuriya from Shri Lanka. It seems that the leaders of our Catholic Church could not move away from a model that was  based on the old Roman Empire.   

And with this in mind I took Kenya Airways towards London towards the end of April. It was a cheap flight via Lilongwe and Nairobi with tedious hours of waiting for a connection and I arrived in Londen, exhausted, a bleeding nose and the beginning of a backache. This did not become less on my way to the West Country, the home of David and Julie in Lyes Green, near Corsley (Warminster). I hoped to get rid of it by plenty of sleep before another long flight to Manila in the Philippines. As I wrote before  Miles Woolgar and Faith Broas, a stewardess had asked me to conduct their wedding ceremony in the Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in Tagaytay City near Manila..

The marriage ceremony took place on the 5^th of May and was a pleasant and a joyful occasion. With the help of a few pain killers I forgot the misery of the previous days. I got to know the people of the Philippines: with their respect for the elderly, their love of children, their deep religious feelings and their natural hospitality I met Faith’s brothers and sisters and had a long conversation with her parents especially her father. He seemed in perfect health, full of joie de vivre, had a canny sense of humour and was a devout church-goer. Less than a year later, back in Zambia, I heard that he had died quite suddenly. I will never forget his joyful face.

After the wedding we took a small plane to one of the islands, called Bohole. It was a relaxed place and most of the coast was geared to tourism of all sorts. We made a special trip by boat to a much smaller island, called Balicasac, where I went snorkelling for the first time in my life. We went for interesting trips, visited opulent churches and saw the so called chocolate hills.  I enjoyed every minute of these days but at the same time I could not get rid of  that nagging feeling of ‘déja vu’ , of being at the end of an era, of being cut off because of a growing deafness,  in short of becoming old.

I needed medical attention of such calibre that was unavailable in Lusaka and for which I was insured in the Netherlands.

We, David, Julie and me, left the couple and other visitors in the Philippines on the 14^th of May and flew in the direction of Singapore. There life seemed to be the exact opposite of what we had seen in Manila.. Everything was highly organised and the traffic flowed gently on the broad  boulevards. But, in contrast with the lively Philippines, the place seemed dull, too tidy and the people too correct, almost cold..

On the 15^th of May it was  Pentecost, the day of the Coming of the Holy Spirit. David and Julie had gone to see a colourful bird sanctuary while I slipped into the majestic  Catholic Cathedral of the Good Shepherd  along Queen Street in Singapore. The service was a mixture of prayers and hymns in English  and Gregorian Chant in Latin. The whole congregation was able to participate under the excellent direction of a choirmaster with a well- trained and beautifully turned out  choir of more than 100 members. I do not exactly know why but it all seemed to be as if I was coming home, home to my youth as a member of the Loosduinen parish choir, home to the years at the St. Paul’s college in Sterksel, and home to the African hymns in Zambia. I looked around and saw that the church was packed with people, mostly Asians of all shades and colours. ‘Yes’, I thought, ‘the future of the whole church is in the hands 0f the young people of the South. Was it the first inkling of the near future, this multicultural gathering of worshippers?

We were on our long way back to London on 14^th of May  and, after a couple of days in Lyes Green, Corsley, I returned quickly to Holland where  my sister Carla was waiting for me.

The Dutch were then  on the eve of an important decision. They were being asked about a ‘yes’or ‘no’to the European Constitution. I saw it as another step to closer collaboration, to the fulfilment of my dreams of my youth in 1945, especially the period just after the war. To my utter surprise and bewilderment however they opted for a clear ‘No’.

 What had happened among the people ? Were they still in shock since the assassinations of  Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh? Had they been wrongly informed? Had they given themselves time to read through the new Constitution itself?

Summer came and went with the usual visits to the physician and the dentist,  in Heythuysen, to the cardiologist  and the urologist in Weert and the ear, throat and nose specialist in Roermond. Medically everything seemed in reasonable order. Back in Zoetermeer I installed myself definitely in my new dwelling with the help of Carla and Marcel, one of her sons. In order to render me used to Dutch life,  another nephew, Chris Lampe Jr., the son of a my late sister Toos,  gave me a bicycle. One day I came home rather late and forgot to lock the shed at the back of Carla’s garden. Next morning the bike had gone without a trace. I looked for it all over the town, found scores of abandoned bikes  but no trace of mine.  One of the neighbours laughed and said “ You are definitely becoming part of Holland again because there are not many Dutchmen whose bike has been stolen!”.

Autumn was fascinating, with the leaves of the trees changing all the time from deep green to dry brown. I visited friends , baptised little grand nephews and nieces, in sort I was getting accustomed to the Dutch way of life. One cold day I found myself  pushing a pram onto the dyke along the drainage canal. In it sat   little Djavan, one of my grandnephews,  with his red nose in the wind, chattering his baby talk. Was I becoming a Dutch grandfer!!

One dark evening we received a phone from my sister Nelty, weeping. The first signs of the dreaded Huntingtom disease had also become apparent in the behaviour of Danny, her second son.  “I cannot cope any longer and need help”. We met her on the promenade along the beach of Kijkduin and convinced her to apply for professional assistance, provided by the State.

 I left the Netherlands for the U.K keeping my fingers crossed.

The end of an era had also the Missionary Institute of London (MIL)  and the White fathers School of Theology in its iron grip. The consortium of the participating orders, congregation and lay organisation were either thinking of a fusion with the nearby university of Middlesex or of moving their institutes of learning towards the South, to Africa. I went there to rescue a few of my personal belongings and to see where the well-stocked library would go.[44]

Together with Adrian. B. Smith (‘Sir Adrian’) we went on a delightful day trip to a safaripark, called Whipshade. We had been close friends since the ‘Mulanga’ period, at the beginning of the sixties. Was it meant as a kind of saying goodbye ? He told me that he planned to retire to a home run by the Methodists, somewhere in Nuneaton, near Coventry in the Midlands.

At the beginning of November I took the coach to Warrington to visit my classmate Pat Menzies and his wife Pauline. The British were then celebrating the 200 anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar and the final defeat of Napoleon. For the Netherlands it would inaugurate a century of  poverty and want, but it was far from me to be a spoilsport. We went to visit Patrick Harrity, now appointed to a White Fathers house in Preston. When we turned into the drive, we saw him peacefully hanging laundry on the line. His main task was to put the house on the market for sale and , as a kind of locum, to assist the parish priests of the town with supplies during the weekend.  When I asked him if he missed Zambia after having been there for some forty years, he replied with a relaxed laugh : Ach, Zambia is only a vague memory by now”…

I took the night coach back to Holland, via Canterbury, Dover, though France and Belgium and reached The Hague at 7 in the morning .

There Nelty and Cor were preparing their 40^th wedding anniversary. We managed to make it a  happy occasion, with prayers, a beautiful talk by Nelty and a blessing.

After having been fitted with hearing aids, I left by plane to Rome via Eindhoven for a deep dive into the extensive and well kept White Fathers Archives. The principal archivist,  the Australian Ian Page was on holiday but Jon Tapesser gave me full access to all the Roman documents..

When two of my sisters, Marian and Carla, heard that I was in Rome, they decided to pay me a visit, so that ‘I would not work too hard and give myself a few days of respite!’  Within a couple of days both had been robbed by pickpockets and lost their wallets with money and credit cards. Fortunately they were insured but their  esteem for the Holy City plunged to a very low. I had also to get used to this combination of being in a holy place and at the same time in a city that seemed to be drenched in criminality.

Towards the end of that year I made another trip to the U.K, this time to Wales  via a cheap flight to Bristol. Justin and Elize Woolgar invited me to celebrate Christmas with them and the whole family in their picturesque cottage in the hills near Swansea. On Boxing day I went for a long walk and chatted with all the people I met. They were so warm hearted, kind and ready for a chat . An elderly couple even invited me for a warm cup of tea in their cosy kitchen.

‘That is what Christmas is all about’, I thought, when walking back in a pensive mood.

 

I was back in ‘my room’ in  the home of my sister Carla  in Zoetermeer at the beginning of the new year 2006 with only a few days before my departure back to Lusaka on the 10^th of January.

 Little did I foresee at my arrival that soon my 48 years presence in Zambia would come to an end. In the car on the way to Woodlands Gotthard Rosner told me  that building permission for the Centre had been applied for,  that a working committee  had been established to carry the project forward but that  during my absence not much had been achieved.  

 There was also strange  news. Due to the upsurge of the copper price and the investments made by  Chinese and Indian mining consortiums , the local currency, the kwacha, had been ‘upgraded’ by 30 %! Was there ever any other country in the world where such things happen. Even for a lay person it was clear that financially a great deal of manipulation took place.

I attended a meeting of this ‘Centre Working Committee’ and  noticed that I was seen as an observer rather than as an active participant. My suspicion that I was slowly being sidelined  became even stronger when I found a letter from Piet Kramer, the then Dutch Provincial,  in my mail congratulating me with my appointment to the Dutch province. I replied l that so far I knew nothing of the sort had been decided upon, and that I would take a decision in due time whatever it would be.

Soon I was taken up by the tasks I had before and agreed to acting as a resource person n to a couple of church persons who were new to the country.

 However, when putting things in order in the library and the archives I noticed that a few items had been mislaid, even disappeared.  Francois Richard had been in charge and asked him about it. He told me that he had given the keys to a certain Gordon who had spent a few days freely roaming about, and even taken pictures of important documents. This did not improve my good humour . The  Dr.David  he had mentioned had some time ago given a talk during a successful Conference on the Post-Independent History of Zambia and had given a rather unprofessional slant to the way we had dealt with the Lumpa troublesway back  in 1964.  He argued that  the then  missionaries, the new national government of Dr Kaunda and the local colonial administration had brutally repressed poorly unarmed  adherents of the prophetess Lenshina Mulenga. To obtain this information he had taken evidence from some members of  the Lumpa church, now duly registered in Lusaka as the New Jerusalem Church. I  smelled a rat. Was I, after more than 40 years, going to be accused of  manslaughter ?  Was someone trying to make a scoop of this sad period for his own career?  Was he a victim of the book the ‘Da Vinci Code’ whose author was making thousands of dollars by writing false history only to make a good read ?

 It was not the first time in the turbulent continent of Africa that well meaning people ended up in prison  after very flimsy trials. Had I not decided in 1964 to enter the academic world,  and obtain a major degree in  African history in order to be able to reply to such kind of accusations and get the facts straight and dealt with within their proper context?

I decided to nip Gordon’s accusations in the bud. He had presented his paper to the Conference for further discussion. Marja told me that his paper  had been criticised  by some of participants as based on very flimsy evidence  and had been told  to do his homework. I asked her to pursue the matter, not so much as to defend me, but in order to create proper history  for the benefit of future generations.

I also wondered why he had avoided  interviews with those in charge during the upheavals, men such as Dr Kaunda himself, or the then district Commissioner of Isoka, Mr John Hudson who still lived in Lusaka or/and  John Hannah, the then District of Chinsali, who could have been could be traced easily in Burford near Oxford, U.K.  There was also Peter de Vere Moss who was a District Officer in Mpika at that time and others still alive, and writing their memoirs.

I wrote to some of them, received  their evidence and deposited their testimony in the White Fathers Archives. Later, I received a letter from David Gordon. His paper had only be an essay,  a first try and, indeed, needed more substance. But had I not taken sides by becoming a member of UNIP and allowing party members to visit our mission, to hold meetings on our grounds and encourage people to vote for this party?

I replied that everybody, whatever their colour or creed,  had always been welcome in our house as was the custom of the White Fathers. Rallies were indeed conducted nearby by both parties: ANC guided by the local budding politician Mr Barrister Lombe and UNIP  by people like Mrs Kapwepwe. I had encourage the people to vote, something that was new to them. I had indeed expressed my opinion that it was better to vote ‘en block’ for one national party and not fall in the trap of ‘Divide and Rule’ I had indeed become member of the UNIP party later on and well  in 1967,  when posted in  Mulilansolo. UNIP had by then become a national movement and we all worked for unity rather than partisan discord under Dr Kaunda’s slogan : One Zambia, one Nation. In fact this policy had worked rather well and might well have been one of the reasons that Zambia remained a peaceful country until now, and was not crippled by tribal wars. However, after I had been appointed to Lusaka in 1971 as the secretary of Archbishop Emanuel Milingo I had not renewed my membership .

And there the matter rested, at least for the time being but my relation with both Gotthard and Francois, both of them having been superior generals in our headquarters  in Rome, did not improve.

I wondered whether it was not high time for me to call it a day and let things  go into their hands, urged me to leave it to the next generation. “It is even in your name”  some people  laughed, “Yougo means you must go”.

There were, indeed, many , more modern, and young people, eager to take over. First of all there was my niece Marja. Another was Ms Thera Rasing. She had been in Zambia before and as an anthropologist had made an extensive study of the initiation rites as hey were practised in the modern, more urban setting of the Copperbelt. After work in the Netherlands, she had decided to accept a local contract at the University of Zambia as a lecturer on Gender. When I asked her why she had made such a drastic decision  she said something I would be reminded of in the near future.

In the Netherlands, one is not any longer interested in the pursuit of knowledge but rather set on making a career by hook or crook. When you get invited to give a lecture, the organiser will make sure to pose a very articulate person  next to you who will argue the exact opposite of what you want to say. It is like a sensational game. Everybody wants to score points. The one who shouts harder and comes with lots of easy platitudes, is the winner.

She was not the only one. There was the humble, but very thorough Tony Simpson from Manchester University. “The universities have become commercial. They become renowned when they know how to attracted famous speakers to their expensive conferences and have little attention or money for the struggling young student”.

All of them wanted to stay away from Europe and from America and remain in the field as long as possible. The outcome of it all was that the so hospitable country of Zambia had a  fine group of academics  in its capital.

Another event that made me laugh with derision was the appointment of an treasurer in the North where the Archdiocese of Kasama was financially in great trouble. It was said that some of the grants given by the Congregation of the Evangelisation of Peoples, the Old Propagation of Faith, had disappeared. Via the local Nuncio this Congregation imposed  Jules Roy, a White Father Treasurer ,  created him a Monsignor  and gave him financial authority over and above the local Archbishop, James Spaita. This must have been a great humiliation for him and his  clergy. What really surprised me (and others) that Gotthard Rosner glorified in this appointment , he who claimed to be so ‘anti Vatican’ and who had insisted that our responsibilities for the local church were something of the past. 

But was I gradually becoming an old and bitter man?

It did not hinder my  merriment and laughs from time to time. Medardo Mazombwe, the archbishop of  Lusaka had finally completed a worthy cathedral on the so called Pope’s Square, the place where Pope John Paul had come for a visit in May 1989. The Catholic Church had finally a central cathedral, something Archbishop Milingo had already fought for in the 1970s. The artist Gabriel Ellison was kindly asked to decorate the wall of the building with a series of paintings on  large panels. She accepted to do it without any payment. But, as alleged ‘atheist’ she had almost daily squabbles with the Italian procurator, Fr Olinto. He wanted by all means a painting of ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’. When I visited her one day she asked me in desperation: “How does one paint  the Kingdom of Heaven? How does it look like?

Yes, how did it look like I wondered ? I had worked for it so long but could not give an answer.

She had also painted an array of little ‘Rubens’ angels  on one of the panels all in Adam and Eve costume.  The father  insisted she dressed them with small nappies.

On the 16^th of March  Father Vincent Cichecki died. A few weeks before I had been told that he would not have long to live. I went there on a sunny afternoon and met him sitting peacefully in the veranda, playing with a couple of kittens. His mind seemed to be going from time to time  but he did recognise me. “What have you come for” he asked several times.

Perhaps he thought that I had come to get a copy of that article translated into English, written by a Dutch journalist in the missionary magazine ‘Bijeen’, some thirty years ago and which had given me such trouble.

Vincent had not been an easy person to work with and , again, I would never know what the Jesuits said about me, during those heady Milingo days. But seeing him there so alone with his kittens I had pity. He and his brother had become orphans as little boys and both had found support and structure among the Jesuits and among the Salesians in Poland. One day their country, they were so proud of, would join the European nations and hopefully not being buffeted any more between Germany and Russia. The Union of Europe  had always remain the ideal of my youth, and it had been one of the reasons I had become a missionary.

“I have come to get your blessing” I said, kneeling down. He seemed relieved, said a few words and gave me his last blessing. We parted with a smile and with that an important period of my life settled down  into history.

But back at Woodlands a feeling of unease remained. The house remained constantly occupied with young recruits who were either on the way to the homes of formation or came back from holidays or from other assignments. The servants could hardly cope and the rooms and  the corridors became dirty and smelly due to a lack of hygiene. Was this the reason that I and my collaborator Maurice Gruffat constantly coughed and remained  feverish ? Or were my regular church services at the hospice of the Sisters of Mother Theresa in a nearby compound the reason  of this lack of well being? As has been written above they cared for a great number of  fatal Aids patients with admirable devotion and kindness but their chapel had no air conditioning what so ever. Whatever the cause might have been I  ended up suffering from sleepless nights and an again an irregular heartbeat that was not very congenial to a leaking valve .          

 

It became mid April and Gotthard arranged a meeting with me on the 18^th. At three p.m. I walked in innocently, ready for a pleasant talk on how to be of academic service to the future Centre. Seated on a high chair he told me to prepare myself for leaving Zambia and to ‘go home and not to come back’! He took me utterly unawares and shouted “Where is home? If I go, I intend to return from time to time to give lectures, just as others like Pat Fitzgerald had done previously!”. But he remained adamant and forbade me to come back when not  invited.

I could not believe my ears, was never spoken to in such a way. What was this manner of approach about? Modern and kind for themselves and old fashioned  for others?  I knew to be at the end of my missionary life in Zambia , if only because of my failing health but disliked the way it was done. How could one tell a person who had been so involved in a country for almost half a century ‘to go home and never to come back?’

I left his office and said: “This is the worse appointment I ever had with one of my superiors”

I went back to my room and looked around stunned. I could as yet not imagine life without being in Zambia. It seemed to me a breach against human rights somehow. And then again these nagging questions. ‘What had been said behind my back in one of these awful Provincial meetings? Why had I not been called in to explain and  defend myself if there was anything against me? What was I going to do with the rest of my life, in grey Holland, called ‘Home’. Yes, I had a home, kindly provided by my youngest sister in Zoetermeer, not by the Powers-that-be in Zambia. I walked around like a Zombie and started to tell everybody that I had been told to leave. Nobody really believed me. “You will be back one day” was the usual comment. It was again my friend Frank Carey, who consoled me, and said “Do not fight against the system, but relax and always follow your own conscience”.  

From then onwards everything flowed like an icy avalanche. Farewell parties,  a few cheap gifts, financial matters, packing and storing my few possessions. I was not going to take much back to Holland as I had come to Zambia to give and never to take away.

I went to say farewell to Doctor John Jelles and his wife Jane. He told me with obvious glee that with help of the Dutch government he had been able to buy a new second hand plane for his foundation that aimed at reducing maternal and child mortality. During the ensuing conversation he confided again  to me that the number of  deaths had hardly decreased in Zambia since the turn of the century. It made me think of my anguished experiences  I had  in the Chinsali district of the 1960’s with Sr Astrida Furlong as a midwife. I then resolved to take this up as an special issue once back in the Netherlands.    

I left my car to Marja and Eric as I by now had come to the conclusion that they were the modern missionaries who had managed everything by themselves all the time. I also gave them my old computer, printer and scanner as these were paid for by Maurice Gruffat.

He was also  on the way out, back to France at the age of 80 years and left  on the 24th of   May.

I drove around to see as many people as possible but knew that many would not hear, not believe that I was gone. I remember vividly taking a last stop on a quiet and sandy road. The cold season  was coming but the sky was still clear and warm. This was the country I had come to in December 1958, this road looked very much like the road to Kayambi where we had stopped also and where happy, laughing young people had appeared from out the bush. I could at that time  as yet not understand them but felt right from the beginning that I was going to feel home with them.

 

The plane left on the 30^th May. I sat in the lounge waiting for it to depart. It was, of all people, the Jesuit Klaus Cieszynski, the former airport chaplain who came to sit with me . “All good things come to an end” he said , “even our sins”!

Then, when I walked to the plane out came Marcia, the lady in charge of  Air Zimbabwe. She came daily to Mass in Woodlands before going to her office at the airport. “She gave me a card on with was written: Thank you, father Hugo, for all that you did for Africa. May God bless you”. I shuddered with a surpressed sob. 

                    

 

 

[1]              He died in Scotland, December 1999.

[2]              He died in Tilburg, Netherlands, July 1999

[3]              It was most probably in his home where we, my brother Jan and I, were so well received during our cycle-tour through Belgium and Luxemburg in the 1950s. Se Chapter  2.

[4]              The demise of Mbala’s Headquarters and its top heavy administration became even more thorough when  at the beginning of the new millennium Mbala, Mambwe and Kayambi was accredited to the Archdiocese of Kasama and became a forgotten area.

[5]              He went to Tilburg, where he died on 21-07-1999

[6]              The results were excellent but after their training the Sisters did not receive a similar remuneration as the fathers. The course itself  petered out, due to lack of support by the bishops.

[7]              Hinfelaar. H, 2004, History of the Catholic Church in Zambia. 1895-95, Bookworld, Lusaka. P. 276.

[8]              In June 1980 Dr Kaunda was released fom detention after charges against him were withdrawn.

[9]              In fact, he died of  a sudden heart attack  in 2002.

[10]            It is remarkable that so many well-intentioned African freedom fighters ended as dictators. See: Hall, R. 1997,  ‘From doctor to dictator’ in the Guardian Weekly December 7, p.5 The Obituary of Hastings Banda.

[11]            This never happened. After a term in the Kabanana parish, he was appointed as spiritual formator in West Africa!

[12]            Moomba, in chief Mungule, of the Lenje, was an outstation almost right from the foundation of Kasisi Mission in 1905. It had a ‘schoolchapel’, a conbination of a lower pirmary school and a chapel. It had been visited regularly during the 1970s but after Archbishop Milingo’s withdrawal this stopped. It became an outstation of St Francis Parish in Lusaka. In 1990 a house for the priest and a chapel was constructed and a good catechist appointed, Makrina Mwale, in view of making it an independent parish, dedicated to the Good Shepherd.

[13]            After a try in West Africa Bro Paul settled down in Den Bosch, Netherlands. With his knowledge of  both French and English, he was able to help many refugees.

[14]         A few years later I heard that some of these ideas had been accepted and that a couple of the young missionaries had been sent for further studies at SOAS, in London.

 [15]            The Cathedral was consecrated on 30 April 2006.

[16]            Her Thesis was on the women movements in the Churches of Zimbabwe. Title ?

[17]            The injustice of it all became even more apparent later, in 2007, when it was internationally proved how much  had been stolen from the national coffers by some of the government ministers.

[18]            The Cathedral was consecrated on 30 April 2006.

[19]            The money that was presented to me on the occasion of  the 40th anniversary of my ordination paid for the building and the material.

[20]            Subsequently published by Gerrie Ter Haar (Ed.) in 2007 Hugo. F. Hinfelaar. ‘Witch-hunting in Zambia  and International Illegal Trade in Imagining Evil, Africa World Press, Trenton. USA. Pp.229-247. Also informal information by a member of the Public Office  against money laundering via Kabwe, Zambia. Salisbury, U.K. 12 August 2007.

[21]            See small articles ‘Terminally ill inmates fill prisons Times of Zambia’, 05-07-2000.

[22]            The Good Semaritan was established in 1992 by another Kiltegan missionary, Fr Frank McCaullife as an rehabilitation Centre. It aimed at giving the released prisoners some life skills and not to fall back into crime as a means of livelihood. The building was made possible through a grant of  the German Aid Organisation Misereor.

[23]            Laus Doedens never recovered from his coma. He finally died in May 2007, deeply mourned by the nurses who looked after him. Jan Leenen died in his native town Weert. He had been in charge of the garage in Chilubula, Archdiocese of Kasama. Before his death he asked us forgiveness for the rough time he had often given us when he noticed we did not look after our cars properly!

[24]            It was said that the compound  Misisi originally consisted of the small houses of the mistresses of  the Lusaka ministers and bureaucrats, who wanted to hide them from the prying eyes of their lawful wives.

[25]            04-01-2001, case of Joseph Kanema. Letter of the author to Superior General.

[26]            The total contribution received was fl.  12000. via Caritas, Breda East. Mgr Leytenstraat 15, 4817 JA Breda.

[27]            Liturgicam Authenticam.

[28]            At that time I was preparing people for the sacraments: Mark FitzGerald and Nuala Wixted  for their wedding on 21 April, Baptims of  Tobias, a child of Jason Matus and Catherine Bond plus Harry, a child of Robin Miller and Ginny Bond. On 23-03-200 the ex Brother Patrick Hayes died in Ireland. We had worked together in Mulilansolo during the sixties when he built the small hospital and the domestic science building. Sad news came also from the Netherlands where  the ex Bishop Joseph van der Biesen died on 04-03-2001. He had been bishop of  Mbala, (Abercorn) from just after the war until 1958 but since his departure never wanted to have any contact with the White Fathers.

[29]            21 May: Marja and Giocomom Macola start  arranging the White Fathers Archives in Woodlands.

[30]            The Daily Telegraph, U.K. 14 June.

[31]            The Tablet, p. 1127.

[32]            B.B.C. Times reporter, 24 August.

[33]            The official date of the beginning of the Seminars is 15 September. And was held at the Christian Centre at the Campus of UNZA. The steering Committee consisted of Sr Monica Orange, FMDM, Dr Marja Hinfelaar, Mr Pat Filter, Fr Edwin Flynn, Dr B. Siamwiza and  the author.

[34]              Important Africanists like John Mbiti, Gerrie Ter Haar,  Michael Kelly, SJ, and Umberto Davoli OFMConv,  

[35]            AMA is the  Advisory Board that helps the missionaries in the application for grants from a fund, set up by the  Religious in the Netherlands.

[36]            NSIMA is the name for the National Staple Food of Zambia, made mostly of maize meal.

[37]            The so called Purple Period lasted from 1996 to 2002.

[38]            John, born 13 September 1930, in Bulovale in the west of Zambia, had been the D.C. of Isoka in the North of Zambia during the Lumpa disturbances. (Autobiographical Notes, written for his grandchildren).

[39]            See also Tablet,  21 September 2002, p 27.

[40]            The new Catholic Secretariat was officially opened and blessed on 7^th of November 2002.

[41]            He was consequently interviewed by Fr Aylward Shorter. Much later, in September 2007 the Vatican lifted his being excommunicated by allowing him to ‘be reduced to the lay status’!

[42]            Barton Kusensela died in July 2007.

[43]            We promised to send them back. That took longer than expected and reached them only October 2007. By then one of the old grandmothers had died. The picture, taken of me with her,  became treasured as a relic.

[44]            The books were eventually packed and dispatched to the Catholic University of Zambia  by Fr Frank Carey in 2007.

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