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Chapter Six:  On the Periphery - The period of Archbishop Milingo

1972 to 1982

 

I do not remember much of what happened during the four months of my second leave in the Netherlands. My father was near his retirement. His employer asked him to continue as he needed skilled artisans but my mother refused to let him go. She wanted him near her, at home and also intended to go on holiday to as many places as possible.

My youngest brothers and sisters had married and the house was relatively empty. I went camping and sailing with them. We had a good time during which I somehow recovered from the hard work at the Catechist Training Centre.

At the beginning of October I received a couple of letters from the bishop of Mbala and from the assistant Regional Superior, letters that initially rather upset me.  They had received incriminating reports from different sources about my relation with Sr. Astrida Furlong. People had opened some of my letters to her and that a great deal was being said about me behind my back. For years we had worked together closely for the benefit and health of the women and the children in and around Mulilansolo. I knew jealousy pervaded all spheres of church life. Why should I remain scot-free? It was a pity that those in charge had not dared to approach me for an explanation, if not a defence[1].

After some reflection I came to the conclusion that this was a welcome occasion to say goodbye to the rather small world of the Diocese of Mbala and put myself at the disposal of the White Fathers in order to work in another part of Zambia. We, White Fathers missionaries, are not secular priests, incardinated in a specific diocese but can be moved from one place to another all over Africa. I wrote a short letter to the bishop in which I told him that I had decided to resign from his diocese and was at the disposal of our Regional. His answer was not without a measure of suppressed anger.

I subsequently replied to be surprised about his reaction. Had I not worked faithfully for him since 1958? Had I not a right to apply for a change of diocese like any other member of the society?

It took some time before I received an answer. This was much more considerate and understanding. He supported and blessed my decision and wished me all the best in the future. This was more like the Bishop Fürstenberg I had known since the end of the 1950s. He always gave his young missionaries a great amount of freedom.

Palma Levesques, the Regional Superior, wrote that he agreed wholeheartedly with my intentions. It had become a policy of the region to send more missionaries to the urban area, where there was plenty of work. Could I contact him as soon as I had returned to Zambia?

The date of my return was fixed for the 17^th of January 1972[2].

Meanwhile I had gone on an excellent refresher course for missionaries in an Institute called Kontakt der Kontinenten (Contact of the Continents)  near Soesterberg in the Netherlands.

Well known periti of the Dutch avant-garde in theology came to give us excellent lectures on liberation theology, the use and abuse of Marxist analysis and the position of the Catholic Church in The Netherlands. In their lectures the theologians stressed a devotion to the Jesus of the Scriptures and of salvation history rather than to the vague Christ of Scholastic Theology. The exciting atmosphere of renewal was still in the air and the future looked bright and liberating, despite some dark clouds on the horizon.

I was even  invited to give a series of talks on Catechesis in Zambia and, to my surprise, was handsomely remunerated by the director Fr. Ypma at the end of the course. Jan, my younger brother, who now lived with his wife and three sons and daughter near Amersfoort came to fetch me for another short holiday in their peaceful surroundings.

I also crossed the North Sea to the U.K. and visited some of my classmates, who had left. They were now married and engaged on carving out a new way of life after years of work in Africa. I left the country with a touch of sadness as I wondered why friends whom I had known so long and so well, had to be excluded from their original missionary profession because of the obligation of celibacy. 

My parents drove me to Schiphol airport to wave me goodbye. When my father went to order some cups of coffee in the restaurant, my mother took me aside and confided to me that they had guessed something of the dilemma I was in. She and my father would not be upset if I decided to leave and choose another future.

I was deeply touched by my parents’ concern and told her simply that my vocation as a missionary was ‘so deep and strong that nobody, not even the Pope, would ever be able to take that away from me’.

I boarded the KLM plane for Nairobi where I arrived on the next morning, 18th January 1972.

 Little did I foresee that the next decade of my life would be so turbulent.

Things already happened in Nairobi. I waited for a connecting flight to Lusaka that was scheduled for 10 p.m. but suddenly the entire airport became very quiet. Nobody seem to move and nothing was announced.

I got hold of a frightened looking lady at the information desk who told me in a whisper that a plane full of Israeli soldiers had landed in Kampala, Uganda in order to highjack a well-known Jewish lady from prison. The Nairobi airport had been earmarked to serve as a kind of stand-by and no planes were coming in or departing until the entire enterprise had been successfully completed.

I waited for hours, tried to reach our Raptim representative in Nairobi but discovered that even the phones were put out of order. Finally, in the late evening, things started to move again but it was announced that the connection to Lusaka was delayed until next morning, 20 January. I slept fitfully on one of the hard benches until next morning, and finally reached Lusaka via Dar Es Salaam.

It was a concerned Palma Levesques who was waiting for me when I finally managed to get through custom and immigration. From Woodlands he took me straight to a reception organised by the Papal Nuncio on the occasion of the World Day of Peace. Palma told me that he still lobbied for the establishment of a National Pastoral Centre in Lusaka and for a rational distribution of personnel in the country but that, in many respects, he found himself ‘fishing behind the nets’ as the bishops took their own private decisions[3]. Most of them preferred to  scout for so called Fidei Donum priests in order to supplement the dwindling number of  White Fathers, Jesuits and Franciscans, the missionaries who had worn the heat of the day[4]. Priests from Ireland, Poland and Italy were arriving in considerable numbers[5]. The idea of a married deaconate, let alone a married clergy had been shelved ad infinitum.

Palma offered me a choice between a position in Lusaka, in the Copperbelt or in the archdiocese of Kasama. After a few days of reflection I chose Lusaka. Later he told me that he was not surprised about this decision, and had expected it.

Lusaka with an annual growth of 10%  was a city fully alive. A very young local priest, called Emmanuel Milingo, originally from the diocese of Chipata, had been installed as Archbishop in 1969. As he was used to work with the White Fathers, he had applied for a secretary from our society, preferably one who knew Bemba, a language he did not know so well and which was spoken by people in and around Kabwe in the north of his archdiocese.

This was not the only opening for me. The main line Christian Churches had come together to try and cooperate ecumenically in matters of Social Development in a similar way as they collaborated in the field of the Media and Religious Education. The initiators of that project looked around for an executive secretary to kick start this endeavour

Finally there was also plenty of work in the parishes and a great shortage of priests. Fr Andreas Edele, a German White Father was almost alone in the so called ‘Regiment’ Parish of St Charles Lwangwa. He intended to leave the community in Woodlands and move to a small house near the church to be nearer the people[6].

In the next parish another White Father, Reginald Carriere had started a joyful and attractive group of young musicians, called The Rising Stars.  They were very popular and were even invited to official occasions, organised by  Dr Kaunda, the President of the country.

 

Mozambique, a neigbouring country to the south-east was at that time still ruled with the iron fist of Portugal’s colonial establishment.

The Superior General of the White Fathers, Theo Van Asten, had decided in May 1971, to withdraw all his 32 men from there in protest against the injustices and cruelty of the Portuguese troops against the local people. With this so prophetic action he had not only gained himself the ire of Portugal, but was also cold shouldered by members of the Curia in the Vatican who preferred to be more diplomatic[7]. Some of the WF missionaries were re-assigned to work in Zambia and of course received with open arms. Their presence and their happiness about being able to work in a free country rekindled our appreciation for our status in Zambia[8].

A few days after my arrival Fr Adrian Smith took me for a drive to the Kafue river in order to brief me on church matters in Lusaka. As secretary of Church Affairs he was the key-pin of many developments in the Catholic Secretariat. He had established contacts with the Christian denominations. Together with them they made representations to the government on such subjects as health, education, social services and matters of ethical concern. He encouraged co-operation in the translations of the Bible and religious education in Schools. From the beginning of the 1970s they had worked steadily at creating new syllabi, handbooks and teachers’ books.

This common, ecumenical approach was not always understood by those missionary groups  who used their schools as the first vehicles of their evangelising zeal . They could not imagine the work of conversion would continue without the aid of their ‘school chapels’

Some of these die-hards made it a point of being present at all the meetings in which matters of Religious Education was being dealt with. Colm O’Riordan, the Jesuit in charge of Education put things in their proper perspective by declaring that the entire educational system was the ultimate responsibility of the new government and that they had the final say in matters of Religious Education[9].

Adrian Smith’s aim was to bring the various religious groups together so as to work efficiently for the newly appointed Zambian Bishops. It was for this reason that the brand new secretariat along Freedom way, in the middle of Lusaka, was called Unity House.

Adrian also mentioned the idea of a ecumenical approach to Social Development. Plans were still rather vague but there was a great deal of good will, even among the more evangelical groups. He invited me to one of the meetings of the core group

Finally he also introduced me to some of his expatriate friends, like the kindly Geoffrey Boedecker and his wife who gave us free access to their swimming pool. A great deal of Great Britain’s assistance to Zambia  was channelled via their Overseas Assistance (OSAS), the recruitment of British professionals who with their  skills contributed to the initial development of young nations, like Zambia.

Some of these families, like architect David and pharmacist Julie Woolgar, the agriculturist Hubert and Ann Bond, and Dr John and Jane Jelles lived nearby in the same area. They were all catholic and came faithfully with their children to Sunday Mass in the convent chapel opposite our house. Its premises were called Teresianum, and had a printing press, run by the sisters of St. Peter Claver.

Later Adrian also introduced me to an Anglican clergyman, called Pierre Dill. Born in Holland in 1937 he had come to Zambia with his wife Wendy and his two sons from South Africa where he had become an undesired subject because of his connections with the forbidden African National Congress. After a stint at the Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Cross he had  acquired a plot in Makeni, near Lusaka  in view of opening a Nutrition Centre for the vulnerable and poor people in the compounds. The poor had come in the thousands from all over the country and now squatted in illegal shanty compounds all around the capital.

 

In Woodlands, the residence of the White Fathers in Lusaka, I met regularly all my confreres from the north and from the east of Zambia. They came for a few days of shopping, went on, or came back from, home leave or simply came for some rest.

All of them were hard working and devoted men who made up with their zeal what they might have lacked with their up to date knowledge.  Among one of the most striking was a Belgian White Father called  Karel Hannecart. He was an excellent teacher of Nyanja and had a great sense of humour. The first thing he did when he came to Woodlands was to prepare an enormous dish of patates frites (chips), buy a crate of beer and invite us for a meal. One of his friends was an Anglican missionary, John Kleiberg with whom he had worked in and around Chipata.  John became the dean of the Anglican Cathedral and when his contract had come to an end he was asked to become  the bishop of Fulham in London. Much later  he became a Catholic in protest  for the Anglican Church’s ordination of women[10].

Kaunda and his Government were trying to create a nation of an array of different tribes, religions, and cultural backgrounds. His slogan was One Zambia, One Nation, a rallying cry he uttered at the beginning and at the end of all his public speeches The common syllabus was one way to bring the schoolchildren together. The selection of secondary school children was another. It was done in such a manner that pupils of different tribes were put together. This may well have contributed to the fact that since the upheavals of the Lumpa uprising, the country remained peaceful and relatively tolerant for a very lont time.

However towards the end of the 1960s, Kaunda’s bosom friend Simon Kapwepwe, also from Chinsali, had started a new party the United Peoples Party (UPP), which greatly appealed to the Bemba speaking people of Zambia. Kaunda feared disruption and strife caused by tribalism. At the beginning of 1972 he banned the party and put 120 men in prison. 

It felt good to become part of all these developments. Not everything had gone smoothly and tolerantly. Since the end of the 1960s a number of doctors had lobbied for a more liberal legislation on abortion and the termination of pregnancies. They had argued that abortions were performed anyway, but under horrible circumstances and often resulting in the death of both mother and child. It would be better that a these terminations were done in a controlled and painless way after a number of pre-conditions were fulfilled.

The young and fiery Archbishop Milingo threw himself in the thick of it as one of the most outspoken adversaries of this new proposed Act. Unfortunately during one of the heated discussions he mixed the word ante-natal with anti-natal and so became the butt of ridicule of the professional, mostly expatriate classes.

At the end of 1972 this new, and rather liberal piece of legislation, called ‘Termination of Pregnancy Act’ was passed through Parliament after three rushed meetings and with hardly any sign of protest from the Christian Members of Parliament. Relations between Church and State had cooled down considerably.

        

Meanwhile people were waiting for the final conference that would launch the Christian Development Committee. They asked me to write my Curriculum Vitae. The other applicant was the Rev. Merflyn Temple of the United Church of Zambia, a consortium that grouped a number of Protestant denominations together.

Adrian Smith together with his Anglican friend John Hougton  and a Dominican sister called Simone Donolly were busy setting up Multimedia, an ecumenical enterprise in the field of broadcasting, Television, Film Production, Christian Publications and other Visual Aids. They occupied a few rooms at the back of the Teresianum building where also Archbishop Milingo had his archdiocesan office.

I became usefully occupied with packing the first issue of The National Mirror, a then monthly publication of the fledging Multimedia project. I said Mass and preached in Bemba in some of the churches, gave catechism classes to junior girls in Kabulonga secondary school and wrote a first article for the Mirror. I also started the first draft of a correspondence course on ‘the Catholic Church after the Vatican Council’ particulary meant for adults.

Towards the end of February, I met Wim VanBinsbergen, a young lecturer in sociology at the University of Zambia and Professor Van Velzen, the head of  African Studies at UNZA, the University of Zambia. As I now worked in town,  I exchanged my first car, the Toyota Corona, for a small Renault.

Archbishop Milingo was in great need of a secretary for Social Development and the Lay Apostolate and I decided to offer my services until this forthcoming conference on Development. Right from the word ‘go’, we got on very well together. It needed more adjustment and skill to rub shoulders with Fr Patrick O’Brien, SJ , the Archbishop’s secretary.

My first action was to organise a meeting to acquaint myself with all the lay leaders of Lusaka city itself. This took place in the new building of Kalundu Centre, a hostel and meeting place, run by the Zambia Association of Sisters for their students at the University of Zambia. The leaders welcomed me extremely well. It was obvious that they were ready to assist their Archbishop as much as possible.

My luggage and personal belongings were still in Mulilansolo.  I motored the 800 km to the north, managed to get everything into the small car and was back in Lusaka at the beginning of March. On my road back I met Fr. Henk Geerdes and his driver. He had bought a car in Ndola and was now on his way  to Mulilansolo. Unfortunately it was the last time I saw him. In April he was killed in an accident, near Isoka.

 

Life in and around the small office of Archbishop Milingo was pleasant enough. We were a bit crammed as the staff of Multimedia kept on extending its parameters while negotiating the purchase of the empty seminary of the Anglicans along Bishops Road. We all looked forward to a successful deal.

In April the long awaited meeting of the Christian Churches on Development took place. Representatives of a great number of denominations, small and great, known and unknown attended the meeting. Everybody was very enthusiastic and at the end of it I was asked to become the executive secretary of the Christian Commission of Development.  My task was to co-ordinate all development projects run by the churches in Zambia

The period that followed was not easy. Gradually it dawned on me that the entire idea was as a great bubble with little to show off. The money that had been acquired was already spent on meetings and research done by Mrs Chester Woodhall and David Summers of the Mindolo Ecumenical Centre near Kitwe.

Most of the leaders of the churches were unwilling to give much information on their development projects but rather saw the Commission as another way of acquiring finance.

“Where would I have my office?”, I asked myself

I approached Fr Colm O’Riordan at the Catholic Secretariat, who told me that this time it was the turn of the Christian Council to tender office space. The Reverend Kingsley Mwenda of the Christian Council agreed reluctantly. He gave, what appeared to me, a small store room with some extra space at the end of a corridor.

 I decided to travel around to get some feeling of what was feasible. Most of the missions, dioceses and presbyteries were so engaged with their individual projects on Development that they seemed to have little inclination to form one front vis-à-vis the government and international aid organisations.

At the end of August I realised that with my little urban, let alone international experience, I was not the person to start such a major exercise. I informed Mindolo, the Catholic Secretariat and the Christian Council and submitted my resignation[11].

 

The more pastoral and down to earth work for and with Archbishop Milingo seemed much more attractive and more within the scale of my talents.

The Archbishop welcomed me with joy as nothing had been done since he applied for my assistance. He told me that the City Council of Lusaka had extended its boundaries and that a 100 acres Church property along Leopards Hill Road now felt within the city’s limits. The Catholic town clerk Mr Pelekamoyo advised the Archbishop to develop it as quickly as possible to avoid re-possession, and the danger of squatters occupying the area. The Leopards Hill road was situated in a prestigious area and also rendered access to the President’s State Lodge.

“Could you help me to develop this plot in the not too distance future?” Archbishop Milingo asked me.

I was young and full of good will, and accepted the challenge without hesitation. Next day I went to the Town Planning offices. The Nigerian clerk was pessimistic.

 “After extensive testing no water had been found in and around that area”, he said and he added, “It would be better for the church to sell the plot to the Council so that the Leopards Hill cemetery could be extended”.

I reported this dutifully to the Archbishop.

 “Never ever in my life will I allow the people of Bauleni compound to live between two cemeteries”, he replied. “We can always encourage the youth to use the area as sports and playing fields”.

Father Reginald Carrière and his band of the Rising Stars were keen to give it a try. They planted the first row of tulip trees to show that the church was serious and that something would be done in the near future.

By September I was well settled in Lusaka.  It was a city lined with brilliant flowering trees of all shades and colours. Its houses were not yet surrounded by high wall fences that later would hide the beauty of so many gardens.

Brian Garvey, one of my classmates who had left, and had married Kamanzi, a lady from Uganda, asked me if I could assist him with research work for his doctoral thesis on the history of the White Fathers among the Bemba. We travelled all around the Northern Province and interviewed elderly people in the old and well established mission posts. Later he obtained a post as lecturer at the University of Zambia.

Together with a team of Young Christian Workers we travelled to Mindolo, near Kitwe, to attend their National Meeting. I came away, impressed by their enthusiasm and their expertise. The Bishop of Mansa, Elias Mutale, and also in charge of the Laity, made it a point to be present most of the three days. In the evening we had long conversations together about the political situation in the country.

He was not in favour of the tribal fragmentation of Simon Kapwepe’s United Peoples Party and supported Kaunda’s drive for national unity. The theory of the,  so called, ‘ín-built opposition’ was in fashion. Its main argument was based on the mode of traditional governance. People in the rural areas remained united but the chief or village headman could never become a dictator. His power was checked and kept in balance by the councillors around him who traditionally belonged to the original inhabitants and the traditional priests and shrine keepers of the country.

 

Back in Lusaka I happened to meet a young Anglican deaconess called Venice Guntley, who had come from Jamaica as a social worker. She wanted to assist a group of young men in her parish of Kabwata in order to give them some skill-training. The main  aim was to turn these young men from unemployable to employable.

The Anglican parish priest, Fr Beasley, was so kind as to make a couple of buildings available and after some teething troubles, the project went off to a good start. We taught the young lads all kinds of skills, from how to handle a phone call properly to the first rudiments of auto mechanics. David Woolgar, the architect, who, as been written above, lived with his wife Julie and their three children nearby on Mwapona Road, helped me by making a plastic model of a simple car.

By then I had become a friend of these “OSAS” families, in particular the Woolgars. Whenever there was a free day we went out with their three lively children, Maxine, Justin and Miles. Our most popular outing was sailing in a small ‘Mirror’ dinghy on the Kafue river.

Gradually the “Skills” course became a success. We had no shortage of volunteers who were ready to render their services. The course lasted one year and, with a recommendation of the Centre, most of the young men got employed. For some of them it was even the beginning of a successful career[12].   

Archbishop Milingo asked me to set up regional councils of the Laity  in Lusaka, Kafue, and in Kabwe, the main areas of his archdiocese. He wanted day-to-day contact with the laity so that they could assist him in his apostolic work. These councils became a great asset in the years to come.

By the end of the year things were going smoothly. Multimedia had moved away to Bishop’s Road. More rooms became available. I tried to make the headquarters of the Archbishop more attractive and accessible. I even managed to clean a small room for the diocesan archives.

1973 came, a year that would remain forever fixed in my memory. Disenchantment with the government had increased with the introduction of the ‘Termination of Pregnancies’ Act.  When finally the dust settled the Bishops wrote a letter, directed to the Catholic community.

 

‘The fact that abortion was now legalised under certain circumstances’, they wrote ‘did not mean that is was acceptable. Abortion remained a deliberate killing of an unborn child. The position of the Catholic Church might appear to be intransigent if not fanatical but the Church was perfectly willing and ready to have such epitaphs hurled at it’.

 

The Jesuit Fr Patrick Walsh who had been such a great friend of Dr Kaunda before and after Independence left the country in dismay and became the secretary of the Papal nuncio in Pretoria, South Africa. When he died in May 1974, Dr Kaunda shed tears. The initial feeling of goodwill in the country faded away. The price of oil doubled  while the price of copper and other metals plummeted. The economy of Zambia began to be in trouble and now the country had to borrow money to keep things going.

Fr Patrick O’Brien took the place of Fr Walsh at the Nunciature and I was officially asked by Archbishop Milingo to assist him as his secretary for the time being, while a layman, Mr Tandeo Mulenga, took the responsibility of the Lay office.

After the nationalisation of the mines, and other major enterprises many expatriates and even residents saw the writing on the wall and looked for greener pastures in other countries.

As secretary I became increasingly aware of the difficult task the relatively young Emmanuel  Milingo had in the proper administration of his archdiocese. Most of his priests were of European descent with only a handful of priests who belonged to the local clergy. The original and the main body consisted of the Jesuits who among themselves seemed divided in a central, mostly Polish, group and a group from Ireland. As a canonically exempt order of international standing they appeared to me as being more intent on establishing their own order than to build up a national church with its own local clergy.

The White Fathers had arrived in Woodlands in Lusaka from the north and the east at the beginning of the 1960s, mainly to occupy secretarial positions at the Catholic Secretariat. They accepted the charge of one, later two, parishes but kept regarding themselves as ‘bushmen’.  On the whole they had remained on the periphery of urban life[13].

As mentioned above, during the 1970s a number of other congregations and groups were invited and came to Zambia: Fidei Donum priests from Poland and Italy, the Kiltegan Irish missionaries of St Patrick, the Bethlehem father from Switzerland, and Salesian priests from Poland, etc. With the addition of numerous groups of sisters’ congregations each with its own charisma, things were not so easy for Archbishop Milingo to handle.

He became increasingly inclined to look for the company of his fellow, Zambian priests and Zambian laity. He travelled to Rome where he met a group of young Zambian priests studying for a Roman degree. They gathered in a small place called Fratuccia and later issued an official statement on the desired changes of Church Ministry in Zambia in which the signatories called for a gradual moratorium of expatriate priest and more reliance on the local laity. When some of the details of this statement became known, the European priests became uneasy. The ones who had signed this declaration were students, very idealistic and possible a bit naïve. But even the Church at large in Rome took it very seriously and kept their names on the files for ever.

 

After the rains in the beginning of  April 1973 my parents came to visit me. By then they had educated all their thirteen children, Carla, the youngest was 23 years old and was married. They had plenty of time to travel around when and wherever possible. Their visit became a great success. The Sisters of the Dominican Convent nearby gave them accommodation in a small guesthouse. From there we travelled to all the places where I had worked in the Northern province.

They were received extremely well by all the people I had worked with. My mother was treated like a queen something she enjoyed tremendously. All this took away any doubts about my life in Africa among a people I loved and was beloved by the people  and would never leave. At the end of their stay I took them to  the Kafue river, where I and my father sailed among the lazy hippo’s and finally to Lake Kariba where we stayed in the small holiday place of Geoffrey Bodecker.

 

When I returned to the office at the end of April, I noticed how relations between the expatriate priests and Milingo had hardened. Sometimes he could be his own worst enemy as his approach was not very diplomatic and antagonized  missionaries of good will. It was not an easy situation and I became concerned.

The archbishop relaxed when he was among his own people, especially in Mtendere compound. Each weekend he went to the parishes to administer confirmations to the young adults and talk and joke with the people. He came back from these visits refreshed and in an excellent mood.

The city council kept on insisting that the Archdiocese developed the 100 acres plot along Leopards Hill road near the compound of Bauleni. The council did not want a shanty settlement along the road to the President’s Lodge and feared that the illegal compound of Bauleni would spill over onto that unoccupied piece of land.

I suggested working together with the town planners, to have the area divided in small plots and initiate a, so called, site-and-service scheme, under the control of the city’s authorities. Each plot would have an area of two acres on which the legal owner was to grow vegetables and fruit for sale. Fr Theo Nielandt, who had suffered so much during the Lenshina troubles, and was now stationed in Chipata, promised to come and divide the area accordingly.

Despite all the work I had as acting secretary, I remained involved with work for the laity. Archbishop Milingo asked me to group the women together into a special Council for Women. This was not difficult as most of the women were already organised by Sr. Xavier of the Irish Sisters of Charity, who had their convent in Kabwata.

Since my studies in the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague I had become interested in church-related and applied research for the immediate benefit of the people, in particular the women. I made it a point to be present at their meetings as often as possible. As expected most of their deliberations were about relations with their husbands and about family planning. I did not say much, and tried to remain as unobtrusive as possible while I collected important data.

 Traditionally the women had always known about the spacing of children and various ways of birth control. A pregnancy during the first two years after birth was avoided as much as possible. The baby had to be given ample time to be breastfed, and grow up until it could walk properly. During that time the child was called ‘fresh and green’. The midwives would give the young mothers specific beads with medicine to wear around the waist, a magic power to prevent pregnancies They knew about coitus interruptus, but also the wearing of a string to count the weeks between the menstrual periods. They counted the weeks and tied knots, ‘jumped the fertile beads’ by going on a visit to their parents, or sending the husband fishing, hunting or working away. In some way this had encouraged labour migration. Another way was, of course, polygamy, something the Bemba and Chewa women refused in principle.

Milingo’s strongest pastoral talent was that he made people speak by giving them occasion to come together and talk about their difficulties. The expatriate priests worked hard and were highly esteemed for their devotion but they were not seen as persons one talked with about more complicated and such intimate matters.

 

The Woolgar family, who I had befriended after they were introduced to me by Adrian Smith decided not to return to Zambia after their contract expired in August but to move on to Botswana. Before their departure the parents asked me to celebrate the first communion of their youngest son, Miles, after having been duly prepared by the sisters. David Woolgar had designed and overseen the construction of a presidential lodge near Ncele in the Luangwa valley and invited me to come with the whole family and enjoy a few days of rest in this lodge. We went on the bank holidays at the beginning of July.  I played with the kids, told them lots of funny stories and so made the long journey enjoyable. After David sold his car in view of his departure in August, I took the children to school, and David to his work nearby.

During the first week of August, David, Julie and their children were preparing for their return to the UK. They spent the last days in the Ridgeway hotel as their house along Mwapona Road, near the White Fathers, had to be made ready for another family. While moving to the hotel Julie received a letter from her father with the sad news that her mother had terminal cancer of the lungs

 It was a sad farewell when they all waved goodbye on the airport’s escalator.

 

One day followed the other in the office of Archbishop Milingo. I noticed that a growing number of women came to the office of the Archbishop.

At the end of one cold day in August the archbishop came to my office for a chat, as we did regularly and told me that during a prayer meeting with two middle aged women one of them had gone in a trance, remained seemingly hypnotised for hours but had come by eventually, relieved and happy.  I knew that Archbishop Milingo radiated a measure of comfort when conversing with them. Something good went out of him.

I suggested that he might have the talent of hypnosis as he had made one of the women go to sleep. After a few days he told me that he had gone to his sister in the Mtendere compound and had spoken to her about this strange phenomenon. She had laughed and exclaimed

 “Here comes the son of my own mother and does not know about his own tradition”

According to her the Archbishop had dealt with the rather common phenomenon of ngulu in Bemba or mashave in Nyanja. Its theologically faulty translation into English was ‘spirit possession’.

During the months that followed more and more women were seen to arrive at the Teresianum, some of them very early in the morning.

 I never discouraged him when dealing with this phenomenon. Many of the women lived in circumstances of great stress, especially those who had migrated to the towns and lacked the normal support of elderly women and their traditional customs of the village. They had become more vulnerable now that the constraints on the sexual behaviour of their husbands, the ‘traditional taboos’, as it was called in English, had fallen away.

‘Something is always better than nothing’ had always been my motto. If the warm hearted and exuberant Milingo could help people, especially the women, so much the better. It was only a great pity that he happened to be an Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church where the day-to-day administration of a diocese, let alone an archdiocese, is regarded as very important.

‘It will give him a lot of trouble’ I mused. Soon Milingo found himself dealing with these spirit-possessions until 4 o’clock a.m, after which he took a few hours of sleep.

Sometimes he arrived late in the office and missed appointments with important people during that day.

One of them was with a journalist of the Dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant. Jac Vroemen, a nephew of the bishop of Dedza in Malawi. When he waited patiently for Milingo to arrive I chatted with him in my office. I mentioned  how difficult it was for a young Zambian bishop to run an important diocese manned by an array of elderly expatriate priests.

Milingo arrived an hour later and gave his interviews These were subsequently published in  the Netherlands. It was well written and I kept the cuttings for the archives.

Towards the end of the year I received my copy of the Dutch missionary magazine called Bijeen.   In it I found an article about, and a photo of myself with a good appraisal of the work I did in the office of Archbishop Milingo. But to my horror I noticed that the journalist also published my off-the-cuff remarks about the various groups of expatriate priests working his Archdiocese. I realised that, as a private secretary, I had talked too much but consoled myself that it was published in Dutch and that nobody in and around Lusaka would ever read it.  This proved to be wishful thinking.

 

That year Milingo also got involved with the legal implications of inheritance rights and the ritual cleansing of widows. He was very spiritual and at times I found him praying before the Blessed Sacrament until deep in the night.

At the end of August I attended a meeting of the All Council of Churches in Africa. Milingo asked me to give a lift to its facilitator and president, the Rev Burgess Car. From him I heard for the first time the word ‘Moratorium”, convinced as he was that all expatriate personnel and even financial support from overseas should be withdrawn from Africa in order to make the Christian Churches strong and self reliant.

 I could not help wondering who or what organisation paid for his travels all over the world but agreed that too much money and assistance would keep the Church in Zambia at the apron strings of the mother countries, especially of Mother the Church in Rome.

 Later that year Archbishop Milingo went to Ann Arbor, in the USA, to acquaint himself with the Catholic Charismatic Movement. I made use of the occasion to follow a course in Nyanja and to stay a few weeks in the Eastern province to practise what I had learned.

After his return from the USA Archbishop Milingo was still uncertain about his involvement with the Mashave, the spirit possessions. When he was made a member of the Cultural and Social Sub Committee of the Central Committee of the United Independence Party he wrote to Dr Kaunda himself asking his advice. The latter advised him to continue for the good of the people but never to ask for any remuneration. This condition was not difficult for the archbishop as he never bothered much about finance and left it all to Holy Providence.

I became so impressed by Milingo’s concern with the poor and weak in the compounds that I decided to stop my weekly sailings on the Kafue river. I wonder now if this was a wise decision as from then onwards there was no let-off any more, no time to take a distance.

However the people of Bauleni, a sub-parish still served from time to time by my confrere Hans Faulhaber of the Mtendere parish, had asked the Archbishop for a full time priest. I finally agreed to come as much as often as possible.

At Christmas 1973, I celebrated the first night Mass in the hall of the UNIP party. This became the date of the foundation of Bauleni parish, dedicated to Matthias Mulumba, one of the martyrs of Uganda.

I had received a letter from Julie Woolgar in Great Britain with the sad news that her mother had died on the 25^th of November. Her father was broken hearted and now depended on his only child for mental support. Just after Christmas he was taken to hospital during a heavy attack of bronchitis. On the 4th of January 1974, she was woken up by the hospital nurse with the terse information that her father had died of a pneumonia on the previous evening at 7 p.m.

I decided to continue writing to her and her family to be a support during these trying times.

 

The year 1974 might well be called one of the heaviest, but also one of the most creative years of my life. Archbishop Milingo became under great stress not only because of his work in the compounds but also because of his pastoral healing. The inhabitants of Lusaka still increased annually by 10%. All over his archdiocese new parishes were being founded by the missionaries. He made it a point to visit all of them during the weekends, one after the other.

It became painfully evident that most of his priests found it difficult to understand what his ministry of healing was all about and why, at times, it took place during the solemn celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday mornings.

He asked me to help him with the training of the small congregation of sisters, founded by him, the Daughters of the Redeemer, a group of four young women, who were the  founding members.  I did this work with joy and travelled regularly to their convent, called Mount Sion, situated in the Chelston area, just outside Lusaka on the way to the airport.

I was also elected the be the first urban representative on the Regional Council of the White Fathers. For this I had to travel regularly to the North in order to attend these regional meetings. Already I was taken aback by the fact that during these meetings the day-to-day matters were treated and reported, together with confidential reports on the behaviour of some of the missionaries, under the heading of ‘special cases’[14]. Missionaries were being judged without them having been given the opportunity to explain, let alone defend themselves.

The first Eucharist had been celebrated in Bauleni at Christmas but after Mass I had told the small congregation that I could not continue to make use of a public building of the UNIP party and that we needed a chapel as quickly as possible.

The church leaders, who had invited me to their compound, obtained a plot and encouraged all the worshippers to make the concrete blocks. We did this work together on Saturdays all through the year. Hans Faulhaber, my confrere in Mtendere parish, came to measure out the foundations and gave us a strong, steel mould for casting the concrete blocks. I promised to try and get money for the asbestos roof as soon as the walls were up.

The Dominican Sisters of the Convent School in Woodlands asked me if I could be their chaplain. It was a strange combination: building and looking after the spiritual well being of the convent girls. Sometimes I would rush from the building site in Bauleni back to the convent grounds in order to celebrate Mass. The congregation of sisters and girls would noticed traces of cement still on my hands.

 

After the successful visit of my parents my eldest sister Toos and her husband Chris also ventured to come out during the lovely month of April 1974. We went to the Copperbelt for a guided tour deep down in the Mufulira mine, visited the beautiful Musi-o-Tunya (Victoria) falls near Livingstone and travelled all through the north. They went back on the 26 April. When it was near boarding time on their way back to misty Holland my sister held me tight and sighed: “Hugo, I would love to stay here for ever”. I thought of  that happy girl of long ago, now a demure mother of five grown up children.          

Back in the office I was told there were plans to move the entire archdiocesan headquarters from the Teresianum annex in Woodlands to a more central place in town, along the railway, next to the old parish of St Francis in Northmead. A row of buildings, formerly occupied by the education secretaries had become vacant since the Archdiocese had handed over all the primary schools to the government. For me it meant weeks of sorting out files, handling furniture and finally overseeing the removal. The days that I could walk by foot from the White Fathers House in Woodlands to my office at Teresianum became a thing of the past.

Meanwhile life in Woodlands had become interesting with the arrival of some new confreres. Frank Carey had been appointed as National Inspector of Religious Education, while another light hearted and witty person, Alf Harrison, was appointed to work in the Regiment parish of St Charles Luangwa. Besides being able to learn languages very quickly, Alf had a great sense of humour He could imitate almost anybody extremely well. There was another confrere, Joe Brankin, put in charge of Multimedia and, of course, Adrian Smith. All in all a very British group, a rarity among the ‘French’ White Fathers of Cardinal Lavigerie.   

 

While on one of my visits to the parish of Chilanga, the south of Lusaka on the way to Kafue, and waiting for the Polish parish priest to arrive, I saw a piece of paper on the coffee table that attracted my attention.

To my horror I discovered that the article published in Bijeen by the Dutch journalist J. Vroemen had been translated into English by the wife of a Dutch doctor, and then copied and circulated  to many parishes in the Archdiocese.

I kept my fingers crossed but knew myself to be in trouble. And sure enough, a few days after this, I met my regional superior, Fr Palma Levesques, who informed me that that the Jesuits in particular had been most upset by what I had said, that a great deal of damage had been done and that it would be expedient for me to visit the Jesuit Provincial as quickly as possible and offer my apologies.

I never had or will have any difficulty in offering apologies to people who feel they need them. So I took my car then and there and without any previous appointment I visited the Jesuit Provincial Fr Counihan, offered my apologies but also told him that it was not written by me personally but by a free-lance journalist without my permission.

However I added that a great deal of it was true. There was a lack of understanding between Archbishop Milingo and some of the expatriate priests, and the blame should not be put to one party only. I was of the opinion that Milingo had been given a difficult time, since his appointment as Archbishop of Lusaka and that I admired his stamina.

 As a good Jesuit, the kind Fr. Counihan did not reply me directly but warned me, with a paternal smile, to be more careful in the future.

Later he and the Archbishop organised a meeting of all the priests in order to smooth out matters. It did help a bit, at least for the time being[15]. But, I must confess, since then, things were not the same any more.

     

The enthusiastic little group of Catholics in Bauleni had almost completed the walls of their chapel and came back to my promise to pay for the asbestos roof. I wrote an emergency letter to the parishioners of my home parish, St Paul’s in The Hague. They soon had the money together. The finishing of the inside of the chapel took longer than expected. An artist confrere of mine, the Canadian Fr. Claude Bouchard, who worked in Malawi, had to stay in Lusaka for some time and offered to decorate the walls together with the people. They made a wonderful job of it. I contributed to the artistic set up by buying a set of the Stations of the Cross from a local carver. On one of my visits to the local prison I met an artist who originally came from the Congo and whose only crime was that he was an illegal immigrant. He needed money to be extradited back to his native country. I offered him a coach ticket, on the condition that he would first carve a statue of Our Lady for the Bauleni Chapel. I collected a big chunk of mukwa hard wood from the bush and forgot about the affaire. But soon  I was told that he had finished and wanted to go home. When I entered the remand prison I could not believe my eyes. He had used the entire block to carve an almost life-sized statue of Our Lady, with a small baby in her hands whom she offered, as it were, to the world. I got the necessary papers from the probation officer, loaded the statue on my pick-up, and covered it with a white cloth[16]. I said farewell to the Congolese artist on the bus with a one-way ticket in his hand and drove back happily to Bauleni. On my way the traffic police stopped me. One of the constables asked me what I carried in the back. Without blinking an eye I told him that it was a corpse. They quickly waved me on in the direction of Leopards Hill cemetery.

 

Once the little church was completed we invited Archbishop Milingo to come and bless it.

It took some time for him to come as he had so many engagements and often travelled abroad, famous as he now was because of his healing ministry. But when he finally arrived all the poor people, not only the Catholics, of Bauleni compound, were beside themselves with joy. When he drove his car from Leopards Hill tar road onto the muddy track of Bauleni a big group of strong man stopped him and carried him high on their shoulders to the decorated chapel.

It became a huge feast that lasted until late in the evening. That was Milingo at his best, praying, preaching, laughing, joking and even dancing his Ngoni dances among his people.

The chapel was completed, a new parish was born but the 100 acres plot was still lying idle. Nobody had the money to develop it as yet, so as to show that the church occupied the area.

 

Once we were finally settled in the new premises near St Francis in Northmead, a sister was so kind as to take over a great deal of my secretarial work. I suppose, after the translation and circulation of ‘that article’, some of the parish priests and other church people found that I had too many fingers in the ecclesiastical pie and wanted me to be cut me down to normal size.

It might well have been necessary. Archbishop Milingo was so busy and trusted me so much that he would sign a number of blank and headed papers before his departure abroad for me to reply his letters according to my own discretion. The trouble was that sometimes he was shown letters signed by him of which he did not know its contents.

Fr Vincent Chicecki, SJ, became the diocesan treasurer, once his position as education secretary had been discontinued. Because of his expertise and his many contacts in the city the financial situation of the Archdiocese became favourable in a very short time

Financially Archbishop Milingo left all negotiations to his financial committee and never touched public money. He had his own ‘mini budget’ of monies he received from his personal benefactors.

 

One day, it must have been in the middle of the year, Kuno Ringenberger,  a young missionary, came to the office. He belonged to the order of the missionaries of Marienhill and had worked in Southern Rhodesia. He had been declared a prohibited immigrant  by Ian Smith as he publicly had said he was not in favour of his Unilateral Declaration of Independence.

Milingo has sent him to Kaparu, an area between Lusaka and Kabwe where there happened to be a great number of Shona farmers. Some had come there during the days of Federation, others had recently joined them as refugees.

“It will be easy for you,” Milingo had said “as you know the language and culture”.

Kuno had gone there and right in the middle of no-where he had established a mission post for the Shona Catholics, complete with a church and a training centre. But he had overtaxed his physical stamina and looked exhausted. I told him to take a good rest and to relax as much as possible.

“But where will I go”, he asked “in all the mission posts and new parishes people are working hard. We have no places for rest and relaxation”.

He went back to Kaparu  on a Thursday. The following Sunday he celebrated two Masses and after his dinner he told his cook to take a free afternoon. Next day, Monday morning, the cook returned and found Bruno had died all alone in his room of a massive heart attack.

 

Archbishop Milingo was upset. and shaken. Together with the wailing parishioners they buried him in front of his own house and put a caretaker in charge of the premises for the time being.

On the way back to Lusaka Milingo confided to me how concerned he was about his church personnel.. All of them, sisters, brothers and priests alike, worked so hard without a day of rest. Did I know of some place where they could go and relax from time to time?

At that time I went regularly to Geoffrey Boedecker’s holiday house along Lake Kariba in Siavonga. The Archbishop asked me to look around for some property that might be for sale in that resort.

Not  long after this conversation I  heard that a Mr Dean, a well-known commercial farmer near the Jesuits of Kasisi mission, intended to sell his plot in Siavonga. When I visited it, I knew immediately that it was exactly what we wanted. The buildings were simply structured and looked like a Greek holiday place along the Mediterranean. There was no water, the previous owner pumped it by hand from the lake, but the electricity was professionally installed. It had a small beach along the lake and was also near the parish church. The only snag was that one had to descend more than hundred steep steps to reach the property.

I eventually acquired the property from the kind owner for little money. Everything succeeded in that time. After a great deal of detective work, I also traced the owner of the small plot adjacent to it. He was a Mr. Hoets, who had left the country long ago for the U.K. and was surprised that it has not been re-possessed  by the government.

I dutifully reported all these negotiations to the financial council of the Archdiocese.  To my disappointment the members declined to set aside the little money needed for the purchase and the title deeds in the name of the Archdiocese. The members argued that the place and the road, leading to it, was not safe, due to the war with Rhodesia. And where would the money come from to bring the place up to scratch and pay a permanent caretaker?

I offered the property also to the White Fathers but the acting vice-regional refused it on the grounds that it was too far from Kasama, where most of  White Fathers missionaries worked.

I finally decided to put these attractive holiday plots in my name. As a permanent resident I had the right to own property in Zambia.

As expected this raised a number of eyebrows.

 

Meanwhile the Woolgars had left the U.K. to take up a new OSAS assignment in Botswana. They looked back to the lovely time they had spent in Zambia with nostalgia where the people had been so welcoming, always ready for a good laugh despite their poverty.

The children had to be taken to boarding schools in the UK. Could they combine the journey with a stay in Zambia and help with decorating the new holiday place in Siavonga?

 They came just before the beginning of school. I remember that the little Miles ran so fast down the 100 odd steps that he fell flat on his nose while Maxine, the eldest daughter, had a good look around, ran back up the stairs again where we were unpacking and cried out :  It is  brilliant, it is brilliant!” During the two weeks that followed we all worked hard to prepare the place for the first visitors and had a glorious time.

Once returned to Lusaka I was back again to the raw reality of that time. The euphoria of Vatican II had definitely become a thing of the past. In Germany two eminent theologians, Hans Küng and Joseph Ratzinger were quarrelling with each other and when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.

In mid-1974 the delegates of the White Fathers in the Region of Zambia left for Rome to attend their 21^st Chapter. Theo van Asten had become exhausted from his dealings with the Curia concerning the behaviour of the Portuguese in Mozambique and the subsequent withdrawal of all the White Fathers. He was happy to hand his responsibility as Superior General to his successor, the Frenchman Jean Marie Vasseur. The new Superior General took the reigns firmly in his hands.  When he came to visit Zambia and stayed in Woodlands his first remark was that we were not serious enough, that we took too many holidays and ‘had too many friend girls’ whatever that meant!

This did not encourage the hard working missionaries in the field. Some of them could not agree any longer with the hard and fast rules of the church regarding married life and decided to call it a day.

 “We put heavy burdens on people’s shoulders” they said  “without ever touching any of them. Religion is supposed to make people happy, not sad”.

The mood in the archdiocese itself did not improved either. On the contrary, relations between the Archbishop and some of his missionaries seemed to have hardened.

 “Milingo will have to go one day”, said an expatriate parish priest one day, almost prophetically[17].

A great deal of water would pass under the bridge before that happened.

 

On the positive side it was still a period during which many new parishes were founded. Everybody worked hard to gather the Catholics into thriving Christian communities. The parish priests were near the people, some of them wanted to live with them in the compounds. Archbishop Milingo continued visiting the parishes one after the other and always encouraged the lay people to form active parish councils. It was a privilege to be part of it all and so  make history

The months followed each other, one after the other. It became 1975.

After the little chapel in Bauleni had been built and blessed I directed my energy towards the 100 acres next to the compound. The proposed settlement project was approved when the scheme was gazetted and called ‘the Leopards Hill Cooperative’. I applied for financial support from Cebemo, a Dutch aid organisation in order to build the first phase, its centre. It consisted of a house for the manager, a hall for training the members and a row of workshops.

On paper things looked very attractive but in reality we had to start from scratch. Until then no water had been found while the Centre had to be protected with a long wall fence.

 I started the foundations with a group of young, unskilled, men. The aim was not only to build but also to teach them simple bricklaying and other skills. With my car I collected drums of water from the compound, given by a kind and relatively wealthy Nganga, a traditional healer in Bauleni. The White Fathers in Washington donated the first capital to drill for water, to get connected to the main electricity grid and install a pump and water tank.

At the same time I continued getting  the plot in Siavonga nice and tidy. A young man from Mambwe, George Simfukwe, appeared out of the blue and offered his services. He was a slow but steady and an all-round worker, who laid out the terraces, built a stone wall along the lake to protect the houses and constructed more steps along the steep slope.

He was of great help and I could not have managed things without him. At the beginning of 1975 we connected the existing building with the town’s water supply.

People started to make grateful use of the place and enjoy a good rest. I remember in particularly, Frans and Gerdien Verstraelen. Frans had arrived  some time before in order to make a survey on the Ministerial needs of the Catholic church in Zambia while his wife, Gerdien, did research for her doctorate on the Reformed Church of Zambia.          

Another visitor from The Netherlands was Marga Kerklaan of the Catholic Broadcasting Cooperation. KRO. She had arrived the previous year to see whether a film on the children of Zambia was feasible. She returned with her crew in 1975, made an excellent documentary, plus two short films on the Catholic hospital in Monze and on independent Zambia in general, all of them of high quality. It included a lovely interview with Dr Kaunda, his wife and young children, taken in the grounds of State House. The President agreed in order to thank Queen Juliana and the Dutch people for the kindness he had received from them during a previous visit.

It was a great success despite the fact that their filming took place while Rhodesia decided to bomb Lusaka and its surroundings. Most of the Zambian soldiers were Bemba speaking and I managed to usher the crew through the military lines and the numerous checkpoints without any trouble. The documentary on the children, beautifully compared with Dutch children, became part of the curriculum of Basic Education in the Netherlands.

Marga’s visit brought me more into contact with the embassies.

I  was invited by the Nuncio for a meal and a ‘ friendly chat’. After my experience with the Jesuits I had learned to be cautious and diplomatic. Detailed information on the Church in Zambia  was to be channelled through the Bishops Conference and not directly to the Papal  Nuncio. Unfortunately not everybody followed this procedure. During these years a good amount of adverse information on Archbishop Milingo must have come to the knowledge of the representative of the Vatican.

I remember vividly one of the nuncio’s secretaries, an amiable and kind young cleric of American-Italian descend, called Ambrose De Paulo.  We went swimming together in the  pool of the Dominican Convent.  He often said that he envied us, so deeply steeped as we were in the pastoral work for the common people. He sometimes wondered if he had taken the right choice as a priest by becoming part of the Vatican’s ambassadorial service.

I replied with kind neutrality but wondered what stopped people like him leaving everything and opting for the humble pastoral work in the parishes, any where in the world[18]. He smiled sadly and made me think of the biblical passage of the rich young man.

 

The Dutch ambassador was  Jonkheer Belaerts van Blockland. He was an elderly man of Dutch nobility and had a great admiration for the missionaries. He became very popular among us as he made it a point to visit the Dutch and always to arrive with a few bottles of Bols, Dutch gin.

On the Queen’s feastday, at the end of April, four missionaries, the White Fathers Vanden Acker, Willekens, and the identical twins, Jan and Theo Smelt were awarded the distinction of the Order of Oranje Nassau. It became a big feast during which I had to remain sober in order to usher them home,  safe and well.

Later, in the same period, we were visited by Prince Claus, the prince consort of Queen Beatrix. All the men  came to the reception, formal dress, tie and jacket. I arrived in my safari suit with a little cross on the lapel. When Claus was ushered into the reception hall by the ambassador, he was also dressed in a common safari suit. During drinks and snacks he slowly made his way towards me and whispered;

“Why has everybody to be in jackets and tie in a country with such lovely sunny weather?”.

We had something in common and chatted away. I commended him on his excellent Dutch but he said that despite doing his best, he was still reprimanded from time to time by his three little sons for making mistakes. As a child he had lived in Tanzania and he would love to spend a few days in the rural area. Could I arrange for him to stay in and around a mission stations for a short time?

There was no objection from our side at all but things were much more difficult as regards official protocol procedure with the Dutch and Zambian Government. However his wish was fulfilled and, for so far I remember, with the help of Bas de Gaay Fortman and Fr. Joseph Vander Klundert Prince Claus stayed anonymously in Katete mission near Chipata as an ordinary visitor without being recognised.

While we were working happily, church life was changing rapidly on the home front, especially in the Netherlands.

In June1975 it was announced that Fr. Theo VanAsten had taken on an assignment, offered to him by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation[19]. In July we were told that VanAsten’s appointment had resulted in the final decision of him leaving the White Fathers’ Society and to live as a layman[20]. He was not alone. During the 1970s the White Fathers lost 73 of their missionaries, men who decided to go back on their oath and change their vocation.

The historically well known and easily accessible procure of the White Fathers on the Burgakker in Boxtel had to be abandoned to make way for a new road. The headquarters were moved to a double house in one of Boxtel’s suburbs where the White Fathers became almost invisible[21].

The White Fathers lost their central position, not only in Africa but also in the Church at large. In Zambia the local church began to take over and  relations with the bishops became more business like. As the councillor, and representative of those who worked in the urban areas, I was asked to negotiate and insist on clearly written contracts, with all the bishops of Lusaka and Ndola[22]. Both Archbishop Milingo in Lusaka and Bishop Dennis De Jong in Ndola were severely put off by this business like and rather un-Zambian approach.

“How could the White Fathers, the founders of the Catholic Church in Zambia and regarded by everybody as grandfathers, insist on making a contract with their children?” they said to me.

 

1975 was the year of the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Well trained sisters were not prepared any longer to be at the beck and call of the bishop, let alone the local parish priests. As missionaries, on a par with their male counterparts, they became inclined to leave their ‘traditional occupations as nurses, teachers, or house keepers and launch themselves into their own projects, based on their specific charisma. The most articulated group were the Dominican Sisters of the Convent School in Woodlands. From the 1920’s onwards they had educated the daughters of the colonial administrators but had become multiracial long before Independence. The school had an excellent reputation[23].

But by 1975 the tide had turned. Not only was the number of recruits among local girls low, some of the more outspoken expatriate sisters wanted to stop ‘educating the rich and opt for the poor in the compounds’.

As chaplain and as a missionary  actually engaged with ‘work for the poor’ my opinion was valued during the heated discussions that took hold of the meetings of the Parents and Teachers Association. My opinion was that the biblical poor of the world can be found in all strata of humankind, that the sisters,  who were highly qualified teachers, were needed in Zambia  and that it would be difficult to change one’s profession in mid air and become pastoral workers in the new urban and rural parishes of  Zambia.

But ‘identifying oneself with the poorest of the poor and to live with them in the compounds’ was very ‘ín’ at that time and could not  be stopped despite the misgivings of the local Zambian bishops. Some of the White Fathers and the White Sisters moved out of Woodlands and lived in small houses of the huge compound Mandevu, in the north of Lusaka.

The Dominican Convent School was eventually closed and its premises donated to the Bishops. They divided the area in three lots. The most important part became destined for the National Seminary, until then in Kachebere, near Malawi, and Mpima, near Kabwe.

For me its closure was a mixed blessing. I lost my contact with the pupils and their parents but also was given by the nuns plenty of furniture, household goods for the new houses in Bauleni and the holiday place in Siavonga.

 

By then I had  moved away from the archdiocesan office of Development and the Laity and accepted full time pastoral work in Bauleni, combined with the setting up of the Leopards Hill Cooperative Scheme.

Later people  remarked that this move away from Archbishop Milingo was a great pity. I had always felt at ease with him and admired his involvement and creative thinking. It is possible that our conversations at the end of a long day had more influence on him than I personally realised.

Whatever the truth of this might have been, from the middle of the 1970  Milingo’s ministry  of healing became increasingly polarised. The Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Zur, expressed his misgivings to the powers-that-be in Rome. The Congregation of the Evangelisation of Peoples (the old Propagation of Faith) sent the Cardinal of Nairobi, Mgr Otunga and Archbishop Kirima of Mombasa to Zambia for an appraisal of ‘the affair’.

I never knew the outcome of this inquiry as I was not asked for my opinion and their findings remained confidential. I got the impression that those interviewed  mainly belonged to the opposing group and that the final judgement was a foregone conclusion.

I worked hard in Bauleni parish and in and around the Leopards Hill plot. By August most of the Catholics’names were written down properly in brand new parish books and the first wedding ceremonies took place. In line with the decision of my confrere, André Edele I decided to move from Woodlands to my new house along Leopards Hill Road and start with the construction of a hall and a row of workshops.

There was some money left to drill another borehole, meant for the people. Some of them were now settling nearby on the plots we had measured out. The new borehole was a great success. The drillers struck a ‘double’, that is, a stream of water at thirty and another one at 60 metres. This required the installation of a much bigger pump  powered by a three phase source of electricity. It was as if I had found a goldmine of water but had not the money to develop it. Fortunately  the person in charge of Zesco, the Zambia Electricity Supply Co-operation, was a devout orthodox Christian from Egypt. After a few calculations he installed  a three phase transformer with the money left from the grant of Cebemo.

The infrastructure for the hundred acres plot along Leopards Hill Road was complete.

My confrere, Frank Carey, now fully engaged as Inspector with the introduction of the New Syllabus of Religious Education, asked me if he could join me in the new house of Bauleni. This seemed a God-sent offer as I was again in trouble with my own White Fathers group that did not allow a missionary to live on his own, outside community.

We celebrated the Eve of New year with a bottle of whiskey. During our party my cat decided to give birth to a number of kittens under the blankets of my bed. When I finally went to sleep after midnight I almost lay down on top of a meowing litter and an angry looking mother.

 

The year 1976 became a time of stabilization, rest and evaluation. Together with a small number of Catholics we had built the church in the compound. After it had been completed and blessed, others came to be registered and to pray regularly. I went from house to house in order to visit the people and to get to know them. I was always very well received, even pampered with small gifts.

At that time Bauleni was still a bit rural. There was plenty of free land nearby for market gardening and some agriculture. Each morning women and small children walked to their gardens with their hoes and baskets to grow and harvest all kinds of crops. It was said that at that time 20% of the foodstuff of Lusaka came from those small holdings. Most of the men were employed in the service sector. Bauleni was not far from the residential suburbs of Kabulonga, and Woodlands, with all its embassies and other international agencies.

Zambian families who had become wealthy since Independence were engaged in building their mansions along Leopards Hill road, many of them Bemba from the North. Some people called it ‘the Gold Coast of Lusaka’, others ‘New Kasama’.

All by all it was a healthy situation with little unemployment and a steady income for most of the people. One could walk through the compound during the morning and find it relatively quiet, with hardly any ‘loafers’. The excitement came during the weekends. Then the numerous beer places were opened, where most of the men spent their time, drinking and enjoying life. Food, especially maize, was still heavily subsidized and prices of other commodities were low. Despite the fact that the economy of the country was slowly getting into trouble people still live in the relaxed atmosphere of post-Independence.

I enjoyed these house-to-house visits as I was always received extremely well. As soon as I entered the little yard around the house, its owner would offer me a bottle of beer or another beverage, call his wife and children and introduce them very proudly to me. It was easy to write down all their names and then to invite them to come for prayers regularly. The little church in the compound was full on Sunday mornings.

 “It will become too small” the members of the parish council said “We will have to build a much bigger church in the future”.

 I replied that I was always ready to say two, even three Masses on Sunday morning. We organised a special  celebration of the Eucharist  for the children, led by the members of the Legion of Mary. I loved these Masses for the children. They sang their hearts out and listened intently to the preacher who kept their full attention with attractive stories, occasional questions and  understandable examples.

The formation of the church leaders was my task.  We had to establish a church council and also divide the parish into small sections for the setting up of Small Christian Communities[24].

All over Zambia these TuBungwe, these small Christian communities were being successful. They gave the people a new identity, mutual assistance and a colourful way to come together, read the Bible and pray. Later, from the 1980s onwards these communities would become a welcome ‘home-based’ structure to cushion the ravages of Aids.

 

Progress in the further establishment of the Leopards Hill Cooperative went much slower. Some six families took the opportunity to acquire a plot of land and started to build their houses. But for some reason further development came to a halt and the rest of the area remained unoccupied. Most probably the people who were interested were not certain about property rights vis à vis the Archdiocese of Lusaka and preferred to develop their own plots in Bauleni itself. Later at the beginning of the new millennium, when land in and around Lusaka had become very scarce and expensive, people would express their regret of having missed that chance. Most probably the legalities of the scheme were not clear enough as I had little experience when dealing with the City Council.

I decided to concentrate on the central buildings: the hall was not yet completed, the workshops had still to be build and we had to construct new walls and lay pipes for irrigating the crops. We did not grow the traditional crops of maize, groundnuts and sweet potatoes but introduced new products, like sunflower, soy beans and wheat. Short courses on domestic science, carpentry, brick laying and other skills were well attended. As in the Waddington centre of Kabwata, young people had no trouble getting simple employment after such a course and a recommendation from the instructors.

 

There were always the regular outings to Siavonga. At the beginning of April the children of my adopted family, the Woolgars, arrived in Lusaka straight from boarding school in the U.K. I expected beautiful, sunny weather but to my chagrin, the skies remained grey and it rained from morning till evening. I was happy when their parents Julie and David arrived from Botwana to keep them busy.

The rainy season came to an end, and, after more than four years of hard work I was ready for home leave. The person in charge of the SNV, the Foundation of the Dutch Volunteers, was so kind as to second Edzo Tonkes, one of the volunteers to oversee the fledging Cooperative during my absence while the parish council took over in Bauleni itself.

My arrival at home was a bit unexpected. My parents had planned a journey to Rome and wondered what to do. I put them at ease, told them to go all the same while I took a good rest, in the house that had been so busy and full in the past.

I spent a great part of my leave visiting friends who were also benefactors, and aid organisations for financial support. I even met the first ambassador, Sir Beelaerts van Blokland, now retired, in front of the houses of parliament in The Hague. He took me for a meal in a fish restaurant in Scheveningen.

The well-known midwife, Zr Reini van Tholen had died in January at the age of 69 and been cremated. I missed her, as she had always been so interested in my life as a missionary.

My youngest brother, Sjon, a town planner, helped me with the making of a model of the entire Leopards Hill scheme and drew  a better design of  the central hall.

 

Much more difficult were my relations with the White Fathers. Letters had been written to the Netherlands, again behind my back. I was called for a serious appointment with the Provincial and his assistant.

The church, and our White Fathers’ Society in particular, experienced a general malaise. I was accused of living my own individual life, mostly outside the community, with too many contacts with expatriates. I tried to explain my position and also my opinion that in this day and age the missionaries had to acquire new ways of assisting Africa, for example to work together with the groups of volunteers, sent by their government and with the  more secular groups, called N.G.O.’s According to me, they were the modern missionaries. This did not mean that I was leaving the society, or even the priesthood. But it did mean that missionaries might be called to live on the margin of traditional life while trying out new ways of apostolate.

I think that my approach was understood in more modern Holland but back in Zambia in August, relations with my superiors became increasingly strained. There were great differences of opinion concerning the nature of the missionary church.

As has been seen, alternative ministries had been wiped off the table by the Bishops of Central and East Africa (AMECEA) At the same time the number of missionary priests dwindled down all the time with no strong body of local Zambian priests in sight.

Moreover nobody mentioned the thorny question of the problem of artificial contraceptives. It had become a taboo about which one did not dare to speak publicly. Many of us kept our fingers crossed and buried our heads in matters material, i.e. building, working for social economic development and the structural establishment of new parishes.

 

All commercial dealings with South Africa and with Rhodesia had been  stopped by the Government. We had to import our material from Botswana where a ban on trade with South Africa did not exist. Via the Woolgars in Gaborone in Botswana I was asked by the treasurer of the Episcopal Conference to go there by plane and drive a convoy of new cars from Gaborone to Lusaka. This was great fun but, again, it raised eyebrows among my confreres.

 

In Bauleni I was received with joy after my leave. I came with a lovely portable sewing machine, an Elna of Swiss precision, a gift of my family. It was used by the instructress of the Domestic Science group, who made curtains etc for the new houses in Siavonga and Leopards Hill. The church council had run the parish very well, and even collected money and introduced pews in the church.

In Siavonga one of the buildings had been literally undermined by a  huge storm. A wall had collapsed and the water of the lake undermined the foundations. Again, it took some time to get things protected. George built a huge, much stronger wall and a kind of pier to break the rolling waves. The level of the lake was kept as high as possible at that time  as the engineers  saved water for filling up the Caborra Bass dam, downstream near Malawi and Mozambique.

 

My confrere, Frank Carey, left Zambia for a sabbatical and a period of study and I was again, all alone, in the small house on Leopards Hill Road to the dismay of the White Fathers. Especially the house in Siavonga remained a bone of contention. During a meeting of the Regional council it was re-stated that this holiday house was not the responsibility of the Region and that in the future proper dialogue  should be carried out with the authorities before individual confreres commit themselves to such projects.

The Council was not in favour either of me residing in the manager’s house along Leopards’ Hill Road, even when the place was only three km away from Woodlands[25].

Tensions were high. One of my confreres, who stood by my side, became so excited that he thumped the table and shouted that the White Fathers had to adapt themselves to new circumstances.

 

While the White Fathers distrusted my ‘projects’ others became enthusiastic. There was even a sudden inspection from an agent of State House. Dr Kaunda had passed high over our project in his helicopter on the way to his State Lodge and wondered what it was all about. I explained everything and got words of encouragement from the President himself. Mr John Hannah, now employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Whitehall, London, as a Queens messenger’ approved highly of the Cooperative Scheme and applied for a plot for one of his former workers.     

Visitors to the Siavonga holiday resort became more frequent. Some of them even said that the purchase of the two properties was one of the best things I had done in my life!

I continued working until the end of the year, hoping that the appreciation of the White Fathers themselves would improve. The signs were not propitious. In one of their meetings it was said that they would keep to the two traditional parishes in Lusaka: Kabwata and Regiment parish but try to hand over other parishes, like Mandevu, Mtendere, and Bauleni as quickly as possible. The atmosphere became inward looking with the major  stress put  on ‘the maintenance of viable communities, personal development and on-going formation’.

The Bishops rejected the Fratucci resolutions and called for a spirit of utter dedication, renunciation and obedience. Seminaries were not to prepare the candidates for humanistic, social or political matters but render a deep spiritual formation. A priest was not a social worker or a politician. He had to be trained to see what good could be derived from a celibate life for his vocation in the parish[26].

I decided to dig in and concentrate on the pastoral life of the parish and the development of the Cooperative. The six families who had joined in the previous year were now building their houses. I assisted them as much as possible, especially by connecting them to the mains of electricity and water. The children of the Lower Primary school in Woodlands, planted hundred of small trees and shrubs as part of their project on ecology[27].

After a visit from Washington, DC in USA by my confrere Anthony Coninx and his assistant, a series of articles and beautiful photo’s were published in various church magazines, among others in The Southern Cross of South Africa. This brought the needed financial support to equip both my house and the hall. I bought tools for the carpentry and bricklaying section, a small concrete mixer, plenty of material for the domestic science group, steel furniture, a filing cabinet for the office and also roofing material, corrugated iron sheets for a row of workshops. A French company that had built the fertiliser factory in Kafue, was leaving and offered a great amount of second hand material for sale.

My policy was to spend the money as soon as it arrived in order to avoid any loss by the staggering devaluation of the Kwacha. I discovered that constructing a building with roof and all was only half of the work. Finishing properly inside and making it attractive took much longer than I expected.

I was not the only person building and equipping. Alf Harrison, by then the parish priest of Regiment Church, took down the old parish church built in the 1930 and got money to construct a beautiful parish hall. From the old church I collected the wooden window frames for the house of George, my faithful builder and keeper in Siavonga.

Everywhere in the archdiocese of Lusaka, young missionaries were building and setting up new parishes. Archbishop Milingo gave them all freedom, did not interfere as long as they did not come to the Diocesan Treasurer for financial assistance but managed to get it from the people themselves and from monies from abroad. Thanks to this approach the thousands of Catholics, who migrated from the rural areas to the towns in search of employment, were not left on their own but were gathered together in emerging parish communities.

 I remember these years of the second half of the 1970 as very creative, despite the troubles the Archbishop himself experienced because of his ministry of healing.

The Regional of the White Fathers agreed to come all the way from Kasama and “to have a look at it all in Bauleni”. He seemed impressed by what was achieved and I hoped that he had a better understanding of the situation  and that a more positive approach to work in the urban areas would be the result of it.

 I argued that in the towns, where we lived so near each other, the strict ‘rule of three’ of our Founder could be relaxed as long as we came together at regular intervals for relaxation, common prayer and mutual support[28].

It was not to be. I was ordered to leave the new house along Leopards Hill Road and return to my room in Woodlands. Gerry Weffers, the brother in charge of the day-to-day running of the house had to go on leave for an urgent operation on the prostate. I was asked to take his place for at least three months. I agreed without any hesitation, primarily for the sake of brother Gerry himself who was an example of joyous and dedicated service, despite his horrendous past as a soldier in Hitler’s army[29].

 

Next to all the parish work, the Leopards Hill Cooperative and the care for Siavonga.  I was now put in charge of the kitchen, the visitors and the ordering of plane tickets for those who went on leave. Gerry ‘s sick leave took longer than planned. I was finally relieved of this extra work when he finally came back at the beginning of September 1977.

Progress at the Leopards’ Hill Cooperative halted. The place itself looked well kept, with trees, flowering shrubs, vegetable gardens and healthy crops. David Woolgar came to Lusaka to inspect a building for the Botswana embassy. He pointed out some of the mistakes I had made but gave it his blessing.  The City Council was also content as we had occupied the hundred acres, carved out roads and plots. The danger of people occupying and squatting on it had passed.

Once the infrastructure of the plot was in place and everything looked spic and span the treasury of the Archdiocese of Lusaka had second thoughts. The 100 acres had become very valuable. The two huge boreholes were now in operation powered by a three-phase electricity net. The new and attractive buildings, the wall fences and the gardens looked pleasant and attractive.

To my distress the Archdiocesan Finance Committee went back on their promise to donate the plots to the people. I argued that justice demanded that we follow the original intention of the donors and continue with the Cooperative Scheme. But the  members of the Committee kept the title deeds firmly in their possession and were not inclined to initiate any legal changes for the benefit of the Cooperative and its members.

There were other disappointments. A big amount of Swedish development money was destined for the building of a Cooperative College, almost opposite our little project. Mine stone, a construction company moved in with all its heavy equipment. No assistance was required from the local population. This took away the initial enthusiasm of the Bauleni people for any self- help. They discovered that when they waited long enough most of the development work would be done for them.

In Siavonga my faithful servant George Simfukwe suddenly, and without warning  decided to return to his village, a thousand km to the North. He had been angry with his wife, who, according to him, did not know how to produce male children, only girls. We had tried to convince him that it was surely not her mistake but he replied that in his tribe women like her were at fault and should be divorced.

I took her and her children to Lusaka and gave her three months of his salary and some holiday money.  The irony of it all was that she attached herself to some man in Mandevu compound and consequently produced a boy. Such is life[30].

Lusaka itself came under fire from sudden attacks from the Rhodesian army planes. Zambia had not the money or the means to defend itself but retaliated by staging numerous road- blocks and a growing distrust of any unknown white person.

One day a plane arrived from Botswana on a regular flight. Its pilot saw someone walking on the landing strip, informed the airport authorities and decided to circle round Lusaka until the person was removed. When he finally landed, it appeared that some madman from nearby Chainama mental hospital had been walking on the runway.  However, the pilot, a Dutchman was accused of being a spy as he had been flying over the  camps  of the ANC and of Joshua Nkomo’s freedom fighters. He was put straight into one of the awful prisons in Lusaka. The first secretary of the Netherlands Embassy asked me to put in a good word and try to get him released. I visited him and came away deeply impressed by his religious stamina. He was a devoted Protestant and kept himself mentally and spiritually alive by reading the Bible al day. After a month or so he was suddenly set free and escorted to the airport.

 

In 1978 work continued on the Leopards Hill plot. Even when people were slow in joining the Cooperative and the entire Cooperative project might become a failure, I knew that one day the place would be developed and serve the church in one way or another. Together with a group of young men of the training centre, we made more roads and paths, levelled the area by hand, and planted trees. I was surprised about the number of spitting cobra’s we met during work. 

There were also hosts of field mice, plenty of them and, to the joy of the workers, most of them of the edible kind. At the end of the day a whole row of them was pinned on the wall fence to dry in the sun. Soko, the watchman had somehow overcome his addiction to hemp smoking and became a real asset as he was an extremely strong man. He loved to uproot whole trunks of trees with his bare hands.  I decided to build a proper house for him, and for two other workers together with two outside lavatories for the centre. We combined it with putting slabs of concrete on areas that were muddy in the rainy season, especially within the courtyard in front of the school and the house.

The parish itself grew by leaps and bounds. The small number of families had grown  to a big congregation. Young and old were written down for the catechumenate and looked forward to being baptised. Even some of the members of the extended family of the nganga, the healer who had been so kind as to give me access to his water supply at the beginning, approached me and asked to be admitted to the Catholic Church.

 

I also made a point of being present at the meetings of Bauleni’s local development committee.’ The greatest desire of the people was to have their own local clinic. I became the treasurer of the fund raising committee and bought material, like window and doorframes as soon as there was some money. For the foundations we followed the now well-known lay out of the rural health centres, as I knew them from the one in Mulilansolo.

During my house-to-house visits I discovered how many mentally and physically handicapped children there were, some of them a bit hidden away in the darkness of the houses or in the kitchens as if their parents were ashamed of them. I kept the data collected at that time with the hope that one day a special school for the handicapped would be established[31].

Life in and around Bauleni was not always smooth and pleasant. During a heavy rainstorm   a tremendous clap of thunder destroyed the cables and some of the pylons, plus even our transformer.  The  shocks waves travelled along  the arrestors and damaged the fuses and some electric appliances in the manager’s house and the hall. Fortunately the installation outside was now owned by the Zambia Electricity Service Company while the appliances were insured. Within a very short time everything had been restored, even renewed.

Worse was the increase of theft in and around the Centre. My Peugeot pick-up was one of the most desired objects of Lusaka’s thiefs. It was said that they even possessed the master keys of that car. They made several attempts and finally succeeded.

I had gone to the library in town to return some books and had to pay a small fee. Unfortunately the lady had no change and it took time before she came with it. When I returned into the sharp sunlight,  I saw my precious pick-up disappear around the corner. Nobody helped me to retrieve it. The police took ages to draw up a statement.

 “There are so many car thefts each day”, they said.

The vehicle was comprehensively insured by the compulsory State Insurance. It took ages to get some compensation and when it came it was so little that I vowed never to insure my car comprehensively any more.

 

Without a car I could not do much in the way of building. I still had my little motorcycle with which I travelled up and down from Woodlands to Bauleni. It was May-June the beginning of the cold season and sometimes quite chilly in the early morning.

One day, when we were harvesting various crops and picking tomatoes for the market in town, Archbishop Milingo came on an unexpected visit. I invited him inside for a cup of tea and we talked together for some time.

The archbishop had become a worried man and was convinced that the country with all its promiscuity and immorality was heading for disaster. He saw it all as a tremendous struggle against evil, against demons, against the powers of darkness.

I had always admired his love for the people and his total lack of fear. He was always very near God and ready to be ‘demoted’ or even to die for his faith and his convictions.

He advised me to go in for more Church-related research.

 “Pastorally we try so many experiments”, he said “but there is little reflection or evaluation”.

He gave me a  blessing  and said some very comforting prayers. I was proud to have been his secretary. We gave him a bag of tomatoes and some soy beans. It was the last time I saw him before his recall to the Vatican in1982.

He was not the only person who encouraged me to go for more study. During a visit to the Jesuits in Louwisha house, opposite the University of Zambia, I met Fr Michael. J. Kelly , then vice chancellor and head of the Department of Education at the university. He remarked that the first centenary of the Catholic Church was not so far away and that we should be thinking of writing its history. He asked me if I had a degree in history. Had I ever thought of obtaining it in mid life? It sounded very much like a pipe dream to me, but I did not forget his observation.

“If one of us will not write our history”, he said “someone else will do it in the future in a not so kind a way”.

However, without a car I could not do very much. I had written an S.O.S to Miva Holland and together with my savings I had enough to buy another smaller, car, a Datsun Pick-up.

It was ordered together with another couple of cars for the Catholic Secretariat. When we arrived in Gabarone by plane, everything was ready for us to collect and drive back to Lusaka. It was a long journey on a dirt road via Francistown and from there to the pontoon at Kazungula. We reached the long embankment towards the evening when it was getting dark. Suddenly we were caught in the middle of a cross fire of bullets, coming from all directions. Our convoy was in great danger and we all jumped out of the brand new cars and took shelter in a trench along the embankment.

After some time things became quite, eerie still on that darkening evening. We rushed back to the cars, turned them as fast as possible and drove them back to a small rest house near Chobe. There its owner told us that  army units  from Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) tried to cross the Zambezi into enemy country but were driven back by the soldiers in Zambia and Botswana. The border would be closed for some days.

Our stay became a mini holiday as we enjoyed viewing the animals in the game park nearby. The owner told us proudly that the filmstar Elizabeth Taylor had stayed in his rest house. Whether did was true or not, we could not verify but his reputation had certainly not been improved by his very monotonous menu that consisted mostly of oxtail soup, followed by oxtail meat!

Finally the border opened again and we drove quickly back to Lusaka, via Livingstone. I paid little import tax on my Datsun as it had been scratched by the bullets and custom and excise regarded it as second hand vehicle.

There I was told that since the departure of the caretaker George Simfukwe  a thief had  broken into the holiday house in Siavonga and stolen a great deal of items. It was not easy to reach the place as part of the road and also a small bridge had been washed away during the rainy season and soldiers were all over the place. When I finally reached Siavonga I was told that a man had been arrested to await trial. He was known to be a professional petty thief and the local police wanted him behind bars at all cost. They asked me to bring a case , and press the matter in court.

Little did I realise how difficult that would be and how much time I would lose. I had to come back several times as the local magistrate did not turn up and also be very exact in my accusation, that is to remember all the things that had been taken away. At the end of it all, the judge declared that the culprit had a case to answer and was imprisoned for 9 months. When I finally left the local court I had the premonition that this man would come back one day.

 

In Rome Pope Paul VI died, was succeeded by Pope John Paul I, who suddenly died after a very short time under strange circumstances. He was succeeded by a Polish Pope, John Paul II, who soon after his election asked us ‘to pray for the conversion of Russia’.

Among the White Fathers, an important change had come  almost unobtrusively. We would  feel the gradual impact in the decades to come.

 Until now the Society had followed the firm directives of our Founder and those of previous Popes, like Benedict XV, by working for the establishment of a local church with its own clergy and not to go out for missionary vocations for our own society. Many of us were of the opinion that our society, founded during the colonial times, would be slowly phased out once the church had been firmly ‘planted ‘. In June however the congregation of Religious and the one for the Evangelisation of Peoples issued a joint document that said:

 

‘Up till recently religious vocations in Africa  were restricted to those of Brothers and Sisters. Now it is desirable that young Africans  should serve as priests within a religious and missionary order. We are in favour of reaching not only institutions whose members are all African but also those, which are international in nature. In this way they will give a universal dimension to the religious life and open out to genuine pluralism’.

 

By 1980 the White Fathers had accepted this recommendation wholeheartedly and reached out for missionary vocations, not only in Africa but also in other ‘Third World Countries’. I did not realise the importance of this document at that moment, neither did I foresee that it was to become a cause of major disenchantment for me and a great number of my confreres. 

 

In and around Bauleni things improved all the time. The leaders of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) became interested in the Leopards Hill Cooperative scheme and the Hospital project. The construction of the local clinic came into their hands. The staff of the new Cooperative College nearby offered its support and students from different schools came to visit us and admired the spirit of our self-reliance.

A delegate from Cebemo, Mr Karel Lokhorn, arrived from Holland to see how things were going. At first he seemed impressed by what had been achieved but on the second day he insisted that the project should aim at a higher income and be self-sufficient, entirely paying for itself. I took him to the big borehole in the middle of the property and introduced him to a long queue of chattering women waiting patiently with an array of buckets, tins and pots next to them.

“Do you think I will be able to get money from them”, I asked him in Dutch “According to them water is a free gift from Lesa, the good Lord. They do not think of the fact that I spent so much money for a borehole, bought the entire installation and now pay for the electricity to get the clean water from out of the deep hole high into the water tank”.

Due partly to all the development that was taking place along Leopards Hill Road the settlement of Bauleni became gazetted by the City Council as a legal compound. After all the years of hard work the place was on the map and would develop in the future.

 

But financially the state of the young nation itself seemed  to go from bad to worse. The intermittent skirmishes with the army of Ian Smith in Rhodesia did not help either. As a staunch supporter of the non-aligned, front-line nations Zambia was called upon to make the greatest offers, economically speaking[32]. Experts in the Ministry of Finance, men like Luke Mwanashiku and John Mwanakatwe urged economic liberalisation but the Central Committee of UNIP refused this.

As has been seen, since 1973 the country was a one-party state with the opposition supposed to be in-built within its structures. Both Archbishop Mutale and the catholic vice president Mainza Chona had agreed to the one-party state on the condition that this would be reviewed within a decade[33]. Since then Dr Kaunda and his UNIP party had given themselves almost dictatorial powers. The Central Committee had the right to challenge any locally selected candidate of whom it did not approve. This was called ‘vetting’[34].

All forms of opposition, let alone on-going parliamentary control was wiped aside when the UNIP Party was installed over and above Parliament. The only group that remained neutral, independent, and came to act as a kind of watchdog was the one of the established Churches. The three denominations, the Catholics represented by the Zambia Episcopal Conference, the mainline Protestants, led by the Christian Council of Zambia and the Evangelical Fellowship constituted one block vis-à-vis the ‘Party and its Government’. This was done by regular ‘pastoral letters’ and via the remaining independent newspapers: the ecumenical National Mirror and the Bemba publication, Chengelo, published by the Franciscans in the Copperbelt. 

 

With the coming of the local elections for the Party and its Government  a candidate of the Constituency to which Bauleni belonged  approached me and asked me to recommend him after Mass on Sunday in the Church.

 “I will think of it” I replied “when I see you regularly in the compound itself, working for the poor people”.

He never came back and lost the election.

 

In retrospect I came to call 1979 an annus horribilis as so many tragic events happened in that year and so many issues came to a head.

After the’ winter of discontent’ in Britain, with one strike after the other, the Labour Party, had to make place for Margaret Thatcher of the Conservatives. The country’s economy,  proud of its industrial and imperialist past, was in deep trouble and had to approach the I.M.F. for financial help[35].

Under her iron fisted rule Labour would spend the following  18 years in the wilderness while the rest of Western Europe remain in her dark and icy shadow well into the next millennium. I remember meeting a member and candidate of the Labour Party in Bristol, a Mr. Ambrose Holman, who came to visit his old friend and classmate Geoffrey Boedecker He predicted that “her rise to power would become the greatest disaster of the remaining years of the century”.

In Eastern Europe the Soviet Union of Russia seemed near disintegration after Poland managed to escape its consuming grip. Did the healthy and strongly willed Karl Wotlya, now the Polish Pope John-Paul II,  trigger off this process after his first and so successful visit to his native country? Only history will tell.

During his youth he and his people had been persecuted first by the atheistic Nazis and then by the Communists. To survive the Polish Nation had clung to every symbol and traditional practice of the Roman Catholic Church. Its church leaders were inclined to treat those who did not agree with this stance as those who harmed the truth.

For the men and women of the 1960s, whose inclinations were ‘to the left’, things seemed to go terribly out of balance. Socialism became a dirty word and liberation theology became suspected. Hard working missionaries, men of the first hour and always so near the people, were sidelined by a backlash from Rome. They had dug the foundations, established the structures, but were now steadily moved to the margin. The new, much smaller, group of young men and women seemed more conservative, wanted security and a bit of peace and quiet. The elders decided to stay on for the sake of the people themselves who were so taken by the demands of daily survival that they  had no clue or time to understand what was going on among their priests.

“Indeed we are not working for some ideal, or vision but for the people who need help”

concluded Karel Hannecart during a meeting in February[36].

He was the chaplain of the maximum security prisons in Kabwe where he performed an excellent task for the inmates, especially for those who had been condemned as spies or betrayers by the Party and its Government.

During that same February I received a letter from my youngest brother Sjon, married to Anneke with a picture of his three children. He wrote sadly that the youngest of them, called Jillis was diagnosed to be very severely mentally handicapped and would remain so all his life.

“You might call it God’s will”, he added “but I call it bad luck”.

I realised that he was depressed but could do very little, so far away.

 

After Fr Palma Levesques had completed his task as Regional Superior, he joined our community in Woodlands and moved into a room next to me. The Bishops Conference had appointed him as Pastoral Co-ordinator in view of starting a National Pastoral Office. It was not an easy assignment as it overlapped with other departments, of which its secretaries were prone to hold on to their little kingdom.

But he remained kind and patient, content to start in a small way. He was overweight and smoked, but played tennis and tried to ‘kick the habit’. In the middle of March I woke up in the early hours of the day and heard him groaning in agony. He had a heart attack and needed a doctor. We drove him quickly to the University Hospital where the nurses put in him intensive care. He seemed to recover, even joked with those who visited him but died suddenly on the 17^th of March. After a memorial service in the Regiment Church of St Charles Lwangwa, I was asked to transport his remains all the way to Chilubula mission in the North, for the burial,  a journey of 860 km. I drove on all night without sleeping and arrived next day half an hour before the beginning of the funeral service.

I will never forget his last words to me in the intensive care unit of the hospital. He suddenly  opened his eyes, looked at me intensely and said : “Hugo, keep up the good work”.

His death at a young age (he was just 50 years old) came as a big blow to all of us. He had been an excellent leader, had a sense of humour, and always a listening ear. With his departure it was as if for us a lively period had definitely passed away.

 

My parents had enjoyed their first visit to Zambia so much that they asked if they could come for a second time, and see the Leopards’ Hill project and the new parish of Bauleni.

A few days before their arrival I noticed that a foul smell was coming from the new bathroom of my house at Leopards Hill, where they were to stay. Whatever we did, it persisted, in fact it became worse. At the end we discovered that a cat, chasing a mouse into the inspection hole, had both become stuck and died and were now in a last state of decomposition. My faithful Soko was so kind as to remove the remains and the air became fresh again. But he himself vomited and felt sick for a few days. Soko had by then overcome his addiction to hemp smoking, and the police came to regard the place as a kind of rehabilitation centre. One day they arrived with an old, and poor white man called John White, whom they had found in one of the compounds, covered with wounds.

We healed his wounds but his rehabilitation was not a success. He slept in a corner of the property , prepared his own meals in some blackened tins but did very little work. It was clear that he was used to roaming around as a real ‘tinker’. When he became better, I managed to get his papers up to date and took him to the airport on his way to some family in South Africa.

“Will you survive John?”, I asked a bit anxiously.

 “Father”, he replied, “I will keep fighting  and die struggling”.

 More people came to visit my little house on the project. I remember especially the young couple Fred and Els Roos, with their two children, Marieke and Michel who remained friends throughout the years. Fred was an economist and worked for the Dutch embassy. Els’ parents came to visit Zambia. Her father was a ‘Dominee’ a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church near my home parish. He took some beautiful pictures of the little church in Bauleni.         

 

When finally my parents arrived I noticed that they were becoming elderly. My father was a bit deaf and my mother spoke very softly and hesitatingly. They deeply enjoyed the ceremonies of  Easter night. It is only in Africa where one can really celebrate Easter properly. The people had started a roaring fire outside the chapel and sung their hearts out when the candle was lit. During the celebration of the Eucharist an impressive and serious group of adults was baptized and received their first Communion.

We decided not to travel too much but to stay put in the cosy house and enjoy the presence of the happy people. My mother taught a group of women to make a small dress for their children in a very cheap way and from very little material. It was a very charming and unforgettable sight: my mother behind the little Elna sewing machine on the small teaching the eager women, while the petals of the flowers of the creeper above her fell into her grey hair. Outside in one of the workshops my father supervised the some young men, who instinctively knew that they had to do with a craftsman. Later he told me that some of them were very good and could become excellent carpenters.

We went once to the mighty Musi-oTunya waterfalls in Livingstone and to the Kariba lake at Siavonga but they loved to return to the sunny life in and around the parish and the project.  The parishioners organised a big feast at the end of their stay. My father ended up being very popular because despite his age, he managed to dance and frolic with most of the leading women of the parish!

 “He was always like that” my mother remarked while we both looked on. The whole scene will always remain in my mind as later so many of these happy women would die early due to Aids.

On their way back to Amsterdam via London, a kind stewardess put them first class, something my mother  had always wanted in her life. She took it like a queen.

A week after her return she suddenly got a stroke and the left side of her body became paralysed. She could hardly say an audible word, let alone write a letter to me, something she had done faithfully since I left home in 1945. The attack came suddenly and at first my father could hardly cope. But soon he picked up the pieces, and assisted her in the long and protracted rehabilitation process. But things were not the same any longer. After fourteen children and a couple of miscarriages in between, my strong willed mother entered the last phase of her life on earth.

 

The war between Zambia and Rhodesia became more intense and cruel. These were the kicks of a dying horse. The juvenile ‘Rhodies’ enjoyed making in-roads into the country, and show how powerful they were militarily speaking. They ambushed a row of cars in the escarpment near Kafue, and killed every body, innocent women and children included. Later that year, in October, they went as far as the hydro-electric power station on the Lushiwashi, in the Luangwa valley between Chipata and Serenje, and shot down its workers. One of them was our ex-brother Roan Musonda with whom I had worked so well in the Catechist Training Centre towards the end of the 1960s. In 1977 he had been released from his oath as a White Father missionary and had married in September 1978.

It must have been in July when I got into trouble with the C.I.D., the plain clothed detectives of the government. Archbishop Milingo asked me to give a lift to two Shona-speaking refugees from Rhodesia who wanted to return to their home country and cross the border illegally. One of them was poorly dressed and shivered in the cold when I said goodbye on the junction of the road to Chirundu and Siavonga. I gave him my jacket and forgot the affair. A few weeks later I was called by one of the officers who belonged to the Office of the President. The two men had been caught, and returned to their asylum camp near Lusaka. They had found my blue Registration card in one of the pockets of the jacket

. “What were your dealings with these men?”, they asked.

 I told him the story after which I was told never to deal with such men any longer. My crumpled registration card was returned a year later, via the immigration department of the Catholic Secretariat.

It must have been during that same month of July or in the beginning of August that Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by her son Prince Andrew and also Margaret Thatcher came to Lusaka to prepare an agreement on the final Independence of Rhodesia, to be called Zimbabwe. As a “Member of the British Empire” I was graciously allowed to shake the Queen’s hand during a reception at the British Embassy. I remember being surprised about her small stature but at the same time admired her pluck as she went around standing straight in an open car without any fear of being shot or attacked.

 

Until then it had been a very eventful, if not distressful year. More was to come.

After a quick visit to Gabarone to visit the Woolgars, I took a taxi from the airport to Woodlands. On my way, in Kabulonga, Brother Gerry Weffers stopped me and shouted:

“I received a phone call from your father. Your brother John has died. They want you to go home as quickly as possible”.

 I did not believe my ears. I knew that he found it difficult to cope with the disease of his youngest son but not that he was ill. I phoned as soon as possible and was told my tearful father that Sjon had fallen very ill during a holiday in Yugoslavia. He had somehow managed to drive home to Rotterdam where he was put immediately under close observation. The doctors could not agree on a diagnosis while both his kidneys stopped functioning. He had asked for me to come home and talk but it had been difficult to reach me and he had died a few hours later.

It was also very difficult to get a ticket on the plane; I had to wait several days and when I finally reach home, he had been buried already in the cemetery near the dunes, where he always loved to play and roam around as a little boy.

He left Anneke a widow at 25 years and their three children, one of them severely mentally handicapped.

My mother was terribly upset. “What have we done to deserve this?” she asked herself, “and what about the celebration of our golden jubilee, the 50^th anniversary of our marriage?”

 It was, indeed the year that my parents had been married for 50 years, since the 14^th August 1929. That evening the family came together and decided to go on with the feast despite the awful blow of the death of Sjon. And so it happened that, when one of the White Fathers arrived from Rotterdam to offer his condolences he found the house decorated for a big feast.

 

My arrival in the Netherlands became also my fourth home leave. I tried to console Anneke,  Sjon’s wife who still lived in Rotterdam. Jillis was soon  accommodated in a home for the handicapped. Auke, the little girl seemed too young to be aware of her father’s death. But Martin, the eldest, just five years old kept on saying to me and to everybody who came to offer his or her condolences: “My father has died, my father has died”.

Everything was so distressful and seemingly without hope.

Working as an agent for RAPTIM, via  KLM during the absence of Br GerrieWeffers, I had earned a free return ticket from Schiphol to Lusaka. I invited Anneke to come for a holiday to Zambia.

 

The Netherlands had entered a phase of drastic change, and became increasingly more secular. The ‘period of the ‘pillars’ by which its population was strictly divided in Catholics, Protestants, and Socialists/humanists seemed to have come to an end. My own catholic school in Loosduinen, the St Peter school, had to give way for a bigger road, a tramway and a block of expensive flats. Before it was demolished, I paid a last visit to the classrooms, and wondered where all the teachers and  the pupils of my years during the war had gone  Some of them had emigrated to Canada, America, the UK and Australia in order to start a new life.

The building would disappear but my youthful ideals had remained.

Because of all these distressing events I had hoped that my dear confreres, who happened to be in charge of the White Fathers in Zambia, would have left off a bit, and be a bit more understanding.

But  towards the end of October I received a letter from the Regional telling me that he and his council were still very concerned about my spiritual life! I was too emotionally attached to friends in Botswana, refused to work in community and had gone on home leave on my own despite several warnings. They advised me to apply for an extended leave, even a sabbatical in the Netherlands in order to sort myself out.

Away from the increasingly small life of a dwindling group far away in Kasama, things sounded very unreal and exaggerated to me. I knew that my actions had not always been according ‘to the book’ but because of an oath taken long ago, and still very dear to me, could people have so much power that, in this moment of evolution of the Church, they could force a person not to move ahead in a creative way?

I decided not to stay in the Netherlands but to travel back to Zambia in November and have a a bit of rest in Siavonga. I enjoyed these very quiet days, the beauty of the place and the gentle roll of the waves against the wall of the house.

But once again, something happened that would upset a lot of people. During that stay the Rhodesian army decided to give a last show of their superiority. They landed with helicopters in the escarpment, and blew up all the bridges of the main road to the South. Because of the blowing up of these bridges I became cut off from the world for weeks on end and tried to support the Finnish engineers and their families who lived near the Kariba Hydro-electric Power Station.

At the end of the year, in December, 1979 a cease fire was signed. After the deaths of thousands of young men and poor civilians, the Rhodies had lost the war and seemed ready to live and work under a national government. Rhodesia became independent and was from then onwards called Zimbabwe with President Mugabe in charge.

The unruly but also creative 1970’s had come to an end.

 

It was evident that eventually I would have to abandon Bauleni parish and the project of the Leopards Hill Cooperative. The archdiocese of Lusaka had other intentions with the now precious piece of land and the White Fathers were not ready to take on Bauleni parish as one of their responsibilities. They again  advised me to leave Zambia and go for a sabbatical.

Also the  refugee Andrew Mooyo wanted to go back to his country, now called Zimbabwe as quickly as possible, together with his family and possessions. He had been a stanch member of the Cooperative right from the beginning and built a  house on the plot, which he sold it to the treasurer of the archdiocese. I decided to spend all the remaining money on the project before my possible departure, installed a  hammer mill for the people and built a small house for the person in charge of the milling. The first step towards liquidation of the Cooperative was the return of all the shares to the members. They received them without much comment. There were now five houses built around the centre and 4 families had become permanent residents.

The parish of Bauleni was by then  well established and had flourished. Something had been created and would remain forever, even when not everything had gone according to my plan.

 

The person in charge of the Dutch volunteers asked me if I would like to teach new arrivals the rudiments of both Bemba and Nyanja and give lessons on the country’s culture and customs. I enjoyed doing this and travelled regularly to the so called Dutch farm, some five km to the west of Lusaka.

Els, the wife of Fred Roos,  invited me to assist her with the formation of  an Orange committee at the Dutch Embassy for the organisation of festivities, especially on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday, 30 April.

In April Anneke, the young widow of my deceased brother John, arrived accompanied by a friend of hers. We went to Livingstone and to Lake Kariba. There she sat in a corner of the wall and gazed for hours over the water. Later this place became to be called ‘Anneke’s corner’ For the remainder of the time they stayed mostly at Leopards Hill and helped me with the work. I do not remember so much of that time except that she cried a great deal. Later she told me that her visit to Zambia had done her a lot of good and was very thankful for it.

 

In May 1980 I received a visit from the Regional himself. He did not come in for a cup of tea but remained standing in the yard in front of the hall. He told me that he had visited he Archbishop and informed him that Bauleni parish and the Leopards Hill Cooperative would be handed over to the Archdiocese on the 31 July. There was no other alternative for me than to go back to Holland since I had rejected any other possible appointment.

“This had been decided during the Regional meeting of 29 April”, he said[37].

After he had left I looked around a bit dazed. Was this going to be the end of my stay in Zambia?

That same month a ‘pre-capitular’ meeting of the White Fathers took place in St Dominic’s, the new national seminary. The members decided again to concentrate more on established commitments, i.e. the parishes in the rural areas. The importance of new ventures had not to be exaggerated. Most of the delegates were of the opinion that extending the field of the apostolate to urban areas was not necessary as priests from other groups could easily be found.

Most of them agreed to accept Zambian and other candidates from the Third World and to free a vocation promoter for this purpose[38].

Meanwhile the Zambian Bishops asked if I could be made available for the preparation of the centenary of 1991 but the White Fathers Council replied that they had reservations about me.

 

There was, however, one glimmer of light.

Father Oger , the director of the Language Study Centre in Ilondola was of the opinion that in the near future the Centre would need qualified  lecturers with a degree. Was I ready to go for a period of study in the U.K? Frank Carey, with whom I had lived in community at Leopards Hill and was now studying at the department of education in the University of London, invited me to join him there.

In July I headed  a last convoy of cars for the Catholic Secretariat from Gabarone to Lusaka. This time we drove through independent Zimbabwe, via Plumtree and Harare. Despite the war the country had remained very orderly. Everything seemed very peaceful after the offer of reconciliation by the new president Robert Mugabe.

“Let us hope that nobody will make a mess of that country in the future”, we said to one another.

At the end of the month I handed all papers and monies back to the Archdiocesan Treasurer, who signed everything in front of me.  I wrote a final report to Cebemo and other benefactors  and ordered a cheap return ticket with Alitalia/Zambia Airways for  the middle of August. A few days before my departure I was told that Alitalia had decided to discontinue its flights, Lusaka-Rome. The last Alitalia plane would fly via Luanda and stay put in Rome. 

The journey to Rome took ages as the plane was held up in Luanda airport for hours as the flight was mainly used for the transport of Angolan soldiers and their weapons. We finally landed late in the evening in Rome but by then there was no immediate Alitalia connection to Amsterdam. I was given cheap accommodation in a nearby hotel, called Satalito and waited a whole day. I finally arrived in Schiphol a day later. My family had become very anxious and wondered what had happened.

I flew on to London on 26 August and was well received by the local superior Fr Tom McKenna, Marcel Neels, and Frank Carey. All of them were men with their two feet firmly on the ground and in favour of ‘moving on as missionaries’, rather than getting settled in one or two areas of the apostolate.

Marcel Neels took me to the University, to the School of Oriental and African Studies, but the registrar told us that I was too late for the academic year of October. I had to wait and apply in March 1981.

I visited Esther Gordon of the Grail, in Pinner. The group seemed a bit down after the National Pastoral Congress of the Catholic Church of England and Wales, held that summer in Liverpool. It had not produced the expected results By now this sounded familiar to me. All of them encouraged me not to lose heart but to continue despite all the disappointments.

But what was I going to do in rainy London during the coming winter? And would I be accepted as an MA student by the University?

 

I became depressed, even passive. During the first week of September I happened to sit high in a double deck bus a bit forlorn and down  when suddenly I saw the illuminated letters and logo of Zambia Airways beneath me in a shop.

I alighted at the next stop, entered the Travel Agency and asked the young lady not only if there were any flights back to Lusaka from London available but also whether I could make use of my Alitalia return ticket. She smiled, spoke with the manager and told me that this could be arranged. We ended chatting  happily together in ci-Bemba.

“Father” she said “there is a place free on the next plane. You do not belong to rainy and dark London. If you like, I reserve it for you”.

 I never felt better, phoned my parents from a public box, informed the community and started packing. I left on the 11^th of  September and arrived next morning in Zambia, at the beginning of the hot season. I felt like waking up from an haunting nightmare.

At Woodlands in Lusaka Brother Gerry Weffers did not believe his eyes but, as usual, welcomed me with a smile.

“Give me the keys of my car”, I said, “I plan to spend my sabbatical in the sun in Siavonga. I will stay there until I get myself sorted out before taking any decision about the rest of my life”.

And so the most colourful and free period of my life started. I promised the local parish priest Fr Joseph, a so called Fidei Donum missionary from Milan, to celebrate, alternatively in Nyanja and Bemba the Masses on Sundays. Bishop James Corboy, in whose diocese I now lived, came down to visit and to talk with me. He was very understanding and re-assuring. He told me that canonically speaking, I could spend my sabbatical in any place I wanted and was very pleased that I was ready to assist the hard-working Fr Joseph on Sundays.

Some sisters came down the steps from their convent, built on the high hill, just above me and asked if I needed anything. They came from Kerala, in India and seemed to place my stay all alone in that small house near lake Kariba  extremely well, when they said: “In India, spiritual men go often away and live  in a lonely place for a year or two to pray, meditate and reflect on the things of life”.

One of them was called Sr Annalisa, a lively person who was always in a good mood. We remained friends until she suddenly died of a combination of diabetes and cerebral malaria in 2002.

 

The war with the Rhodies  had come to an end  Lake Kariba became free and secure for fishing. A very lucrative enterprise was the Kapenta fishing during the night. These were very small fish, which looked like sardines but were of the herring family, introduced by Zambia National Fisheries with the help of the World Health Organisation. Experts had caught these fish in Lake Tanganyika, where they were indigenous, and transported them in planes to Kariba. From there they were dumped into the artificial lake[39].

Tadze Wixted, now working as an civil engineer in Lusaka asked me if I was ready to help him with the setting up of a small fishing company together with a Londoner, called Ron Storer and Bob Stansted. They constructed a fishing rig, a kind of a float with a small diesel generator, and a wide net  along one of the sides.  It was towed out just before dusk into the wide open lake and the huge net was lowered into the water. Then the little engine was started  and lit a number of  sharp neon lights. The rig looked like a big Christmas tree. After one hour the lights were suddenly switched off, except the one in the net. Thousands of small kapenta who had been attracted by the lights, would dive frantically towards that one lamp and at that moment we hoisted the net upwards as quickly as possible to catch as many kapenta as we could.

 My task was not only to hold the rudder and make sure the anchor remained fixed but also to wake up the workers each hour. They were inclined to fall into a deep sleep all through the night, forget about hoisting the net and so catch hardly anything.

The first night was not a success as we did not know the best fishing grounds and had to learn the tricks of the trade. But after a few nights we formed a team and started catching the little fish. I kept awake and spent the night reading  and even meditating. Each hour I rang a bell for the fishermen to wake up and quickly hoist the net up after I had turned off the lights.

The most interesting were the huge tiger fish also caught in the nets as they had been engaged upon chasing the small kapenta. They jumped angrily up, metres high, to get out of the net and often succeeded to do so. According to an unwritten law, the tiger fish caught like that belonged to the fishermen and their families.

The best nights were those without the moon and the best period was the hot season. During the rainy season the waves were too wild and the water too murky for the fish to see the light. During the cold season the fish hibernated and stayed deep down in warmer regions.

One beautiful night in October we caught so much that, very biblically, the boat was near sinking. We had to return to the shore very quickly to spread the fish on racks and let them dry in the sun. Later, when I met the other fishermen in the local restaurant, they argued jokingly that ‘as a padre ,  I possessed a special blessing and wanted me to join them on other rigs.

The first rains came, fishing stopped and I decided to dig the foundations of two extra hosing units further up the hill. My aim was to build four self-contained units and equip them as well as possible for the visitors, in particular church personnel as Archbishop Milingo had wanted it.

I yearned to be left alone but soon all kinds of visitors started to arrive. In the beginning it was  a small trickle, but soon it became a steady stream. The place had became very popular. In Botswana, David the architect, drew a couple of plans for the new houses. “It is a beautiful site”, he said, “that deserved an beautiful building”.

But when these drawings arrived I realised that their construction would be too complicated for me and that I would not have the money to build them. I opted for a simple and very cheap structure, something we are used to in Zambia, to the dismay of David.

My Jesuit friends, Louis Haven and John O’Leary, both American from Oregon, came to visit me and stayed for weeks. O’Leary had been elected the Provincial of the Jesuits in Zambia.  I will never forget their kind understanding, their sense of humour and their ability to see things in the right proportion. They brought me dozens of the modern recent books on theology and philosophy.

Then there were the Danish volunteers who assisted the people with setting up the fishing industry in a more commercial manner. They also invited me to teach the newcomers a bit of the language and Zambian culture. We had long conversations until deep in the night with the glistening lake in front and the starry, velvet darkness above us.

Zambia brings people together. ‘Is it a gift we receive from the people’, we wondered.

Despite having little income in the beginning I never starved, or was even short of food. In fact, I never felt so healthy and was never ill, all during my stay. I learned to buy and prepare the cheap food from the people in the market. Most of the visitors were very generous and left not only their remaining food but also some of the kitchen utensils with me.

The airfare to and from Gaberone in Botswana was still very cheap. I went to celebrate Christmas with the Woolgars. David took the whole family camping along the Limpopo river. Long ago someone had slung a steel wire and a pulley over the river into South Africa. We enjoyed  swaying up and down the wire like monkeys and then let ourselves fall in the brown, murky water. It was all great fun.

But my dear White Fathers were at a loss about my intentions. They warned that if things continued like that, I would have to apply for exclaustration. I had never heard of this word and replied again that there was nothing against me spending a sabbatical in Zambia.

They visited me to talk and try to understand my situation. I explained patiently to them that there was no need for an ‘exclaustration’, that is: to start the process of leaving the Society. but that I needed a time for study, prayer and reflection. I was ready to any dialogue in view of a future assignment in the Region.

Later it was told that a precondition to any fruitful dialogue would be my readiness to speak openly about the ownership of and future plans for the plot in Siavonga[40]. This remained the bone of contention.

 

I do not remember so many details of that whole year 1981, during which  I spent in Siavonga, except that it was very beautiful, refreshing and invigorating and that the visitors, Zambians and expatriates alike, were, on the whole comforting and supportive[41].

In January the rains were very heavy and like it had happened in Lusaka, along Leopards Hill Road, thunder and lightening hit the pylons, which came down with a loud crash and destroyed some of the electric wires. High waves exploded against the walls of the lake front and splashed all over the roofs of the small houses. The visitors got drenched during their sleep.

In February the leader of the Danish volunteers asked me to travel with him to Arusha in Tanzania in order to give a course on African Culture. It went well. I learned a few greetings in Kiswahili, and met the SVD missionaries nearby. One teacher, who belonged to the permanent staff of the Danish Centre had been a priest himself. He had married a Tanzanian lady and had a small child by her, a girl called Malaika (Angel). We talked together until late in the night.

These introductory courses, given to volunteers and other people who came to Africa, proved to be very useful and popular. Back in Lusaka the Dutch, Norwegian and Danish groups of volunteers even thought of establishing a centre for this purpose and asked me for advice. But, so far as I could gather, their authorities at home had other plans.

In March I took my elderly friend Geoffrey Boedecker to Harare in Zimbabwe for psychiatric treatment and to ask for a place for him in the Nazareth Home, run by sisters. They were very kind, managed to make a room free for Geoffrey and arranged treatment. He seemed to recover so well that he could go back to Lusaka after a few months. In Harare I again met Fr Kevin O’Donnell whom I had met a few years ago in Lusaka, when he founded the first Cheshire Home for the handicapped children. He was busy doing this, now in free and independent Zimbabwe.  I admired his pluck and steadiness.

Once the rainy season was over,  building on the new site ‘upstairs’,  became serious. I wanted to show people that one could build a permanent house of cement blocks rather cheaply. The only imported material was cement but for the rest one could use the stones, gravel and quarry dust from the hill itself. After we had poured the slab, we used it for making the blocks. I enjoyed the regular flow of daily toil with a couple of workers. Cement was now available in the little town of Kariba in Zimbabwe so I did not need to travel all the way to Lusaka. Relations with the White Fathers slowly improved. They sent me a mini budget to cover my expenses. I used the money for the roof and the further equipment of the two little houses.

The international world woke up with an act of terror when on the 13 May a young man, called Mehmet Ali Agza  pumped a bullet into the stomach of  Pope John Paul II on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima[42].  One of the results was that the Catholic Church apparently grew more ‘fundamental’. Next year, on the same day, John Paul II travelled to Fatima to place the bullet at the foot of the statue. Bishop, later Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was appointed as the head of the Congregation of Doctrine, declared that Lucia’s prophecy was indeed about the present Pope and that he had been saved for a divine purpose.  The third secret of the surviving seer, Sr. Lucia dos Santos, said that a  white bishop  would be a victim of assassination.  In fact the secret said that he would be killed by a group of soldiers but Lucia, then 94, was not asked to interpret the text, that also said that many bishops, priests, religious men and women and lay people would die[43]. To us all this seemed to blur the margins between private and public revelations. And  what had all this to do  with the growing poverty and misery of the peoples in Africa?

I received a positive  letter from  Fr Louis Oger. He asked me again to go for studies  and then assist him at his Language Study Centre in Ilondola.

The days, weeks and months passed peacefully.

The Woolgars came again in August, this time with lots of fishing tackle. One early morning, Justin, the eldest son, threw his fishing line and spinner into the small bay, next to the house, and suddenly he was almost pulled into the water. It was clear that he had something big on his hook. His father came to his rescue and together, after more than an hour wrestling with the monster, a huge exhausted fish appeared and landed ashore. The fish was almost bigger than himself. We took a picture of him holding the monster so as to keep this for posterity. When they returned, Julie did not travel with the family back to Botswana but accepted pharmacy work in Kariba and later in Bindura, both places in Zimbabwe, ‘to contribute to the family income’.

It must have been at the beginning of October when suddenly my friend Frank Carey appeared down the steps, followed by  Sr. John Vincent of the ‘Chigwell’ Sacred Hearts Sisters of Jesus and Mary. He had come back from the UK a few days before and gone almost straight to Siavonga.

“I have good news for you”, he said with a cheeky  smile “The Senate of the School of Oriental and African Studies has accepted you for an M.A. course in African Area Studies. You will have to come to London before March in order to get registered”.

He made me laugh ‘Typical Frank’, I thought ‘to put people for a fait accompli’. He had come with a prospectus for me to decide what subjects to take.

After they had left for Lusaka  a stillness came over me. I had to make a decision for the next period of my life. I wanted advice, advice of friends who had always given so much support. I talked with another confrere, Frits Pehle, who spent his holiday with me. I also mentioned the subject to Fred and Els Roos of the Dutch Embassy. They all seemed to be in favour of future studies[44].  A few days later, Ron Storer, told me that he was planning to go to Harare to try and get two of his three children in school. I asked him if he was ready to make a small detour and visit Julie Woolgar, who was now working as a pharmacist in Bindura.

We left a few days later and reached Bindura after a visit to the Jesuit Boarding School in Harare. We talked together in the garden of her Greek employer.

“Ÿes, by all means, go for it”, Julie said quietly. “It will give you an opportunity to see things from another angle”.

We turned the land rover and motored back to Kariba  the same day. We slept in and under the car and crossed the border into Zambia early morning. The decision was taken and the end of a sunny sabbatical was in sight.

My sister Toos and her husband Chris, came again for a visit and enjoyed a quiet and peaceful stay along the lakeside. She sewed the curtains and made cushions for the new housing units while Chris fabricated traps to catch the mice and rats in and around the house. One day he caught such a big rat that it ran away with the trap on its nose.

Toos had obtained her Diploma in Social Work and worked in a home for the elderly. She told me that she enjoyed her status, her work and especially the people with whom she could talk for hours. Her five children were adults, which gave her finally the time to do what she always had wanted to do in life.

When they left, we knew that we would see each other very soon as I had told them about my decision. By then I was near the completion of the buildings.

Back in Lusaka Fr Mike Kelly SJ. encouraged me again to take History as one of the subjects of my future M.A, in African Studies. “The history of the Catholic Church in Zambia has to be written before it is too late”, he said.

In Woodlands I had a long conversation with Jean Jacques Corbeil, who was now old and a bit down. The Bishop of Mbala, Mgr Furstenberg had decided to donate Corbeil’s Moto Moto  museum with all the precious items, collected by him all his life, to the Government. Later Archbishop Mutale wondered why the collection was not given to the local church in order to start a church museum as was done in so many countries.

I left my car and my motor cycle in the hands of the Catholic Secretariat for them to dispose of. The secretary of the Zambia Association of Sisters (ZAS), the Canadian White Sister Madeleine, was keen to take over the management of the Siavonga hostels, as they were now called. I gave her the keys and necessary documents and vowed not to touch a bag of cement for a long time to come.

I ended this turbulent but creative decade with a kind of a reflective retreat.The 1970s had been ttense. I had moved to town but this did not mean that the group of White Fathers in Zambia had become urban-minded. Way back from the 1930s onwards they had dug themselves into the rural trenches of the North and the East and stayed put, perhaps justifiably convinced that they were doing a good job as simple but hard working parish priests.

Some of them realised that a drastic move was called for. But the bishops, expatriate and local alike were inclined to hold on to these experienced men. On the whole the leadership of the White Fathers themselves were inclined to accommodate them.

The White Fathers became inward looking and allowed young inexperienced expatriate priests to go straight into urban parish work with little preparation. All this slowly undermined the momentum of the more creative minds among the White Fathers[45]. During the 1970 many of them left, in one way or another in order to find new channels for their active minds and bodies. Those who stayed on were few and far between. Some became ‘special cases’.

That in Rome, Theo VanAsten, left in the mid 17s, did not help either. It had never happened that even a (former) Superior General left the society and then married. Was there a panic among the members of the Society? The general opinion was that he missionary troops had to be rallied and  brought back  to order. Those who disagreed with the military discipline of the past had better go.

Finally it must be said that those of us  who did look for new ways, for new fields of the apostolate, had not the experience as yet to brave any opposition. Vatican II had come, its documents were written and promulgated and we thought that from then onwards everything would be plain-sailing. Little did we expect the reaction of the bureaucrats of the Curia, some of whom kept quiet during the Council’s proceedings but waited patiently for the bishops and the periti, the experts to go back to their dioceses and universaities.

Were the Council’s documents geared to pastoral life in Africa?  Or were they more attractive to an articulate group of expatriate missionaries than to the young, local church who struggled to gets its feet firmly on the ground?

Positively it may be said that a little group of both expatriate and local church workers kept standing and allowed the waves of  reactionary redress to wash over their heads. They waited for better times, even if these were long in coming.

Because, whatever may be said, they knew and were convinced to have taken the right way. Missionaries were not monks.

All of them, priests, brothers and sisters alike were missionaries who went on into the wilds, ended up at times on the periphery or in the margin. Yes, conservative theologians might put questions and exclamation marks behind our manner of proclamation and our apostolic methods but missionaries were always a step ahead.

We knew that the secularisation of the world combined with the rise of other world religions would not stop. A constant dialogue ‘with the world’ as Pope Jon XXIII had said, meant to get involved, to get one’s hands dirty just as Jesus Christ, the son of God, had become involved and had ended on the Cross, condemned to death.

The person who does not touch the world will never reach heaven’’ I thought, when I flew over the North Sea in the direction of London Heathrow.

 

 

[1]              Letter Bishop Fuerstenberg, 1-10-71; letter Fr Raymond Fortin 8-10-71. 

[2]              Letters Hinfelaar, 28 October, Fuerstenberg 14 November and Levesques 17 November and Fuerstenberg 18 December.

 [3]              At that time roughly  210 priests in White Fathers dioceses looked after one million people while 193 Jesuits and Franciscans looked after almost 3 million people.

[4]              Fidei Donum priests were secular clerics. In an encyclical entitled Fidei Donum written in the 1950s Pope Pius XII appealed to the traditional churches in the West  to send surplus priests to the missions in the Third World.

[5]              Later it was said that from then onwards the missionaries were challenged to give up their overall control, that the Church lost at least 25 years as regards supplementary ministry and that the missionary drive lost its impetus.

[6]              This was agreed upon by the Regional Council meeting at the beginning of 1972. Minutes 17/72.

[7]                Interview of Van Asten with Cardinal Villot, Secretary of State. The Burgess Missionaries Alfonso Valverde and Martino Hernandez  reported  in November about the cruelty of the Portuguese soldiers. This had reached the international press via Fr. Adrian Hastings.

[8]              Interview Cesaire Capannel, 6 Nov. 1996. The Portuguese colonial administration objected against the Eucharist being celebrated in the vernacular, as it was the language of dogs.

[9]              A Mr Potter, consultant to the Ministry of Education, pressed this point by saying that when the Churches failed to come up with a Common Syllabus, the Government would do it but then with a more secular approach.

[10]            Karel Hannecart, born in 1936, died after a heart replacement  in 1993.

[11]            The fact that after my resignation the entire idea of a common approach to Development was mooted and  never   attempted again  proved that the project was not feasible.  

[12]            The Centre was called the ‘Waddington Centre’ after a former Governor of Northern Rhodesia. Among the successful students was Dennis Banda, whom I met later on in the plane on his way to the UK for further studies.

[13]            Until the end of 1973 there was no one  on the White Fathers’ regional council who represented the urban areas, Ndola/Mufulira and Lusaka.

[14]            See e.g. Regional Council meeting Chilonga,  27 July 73 and 18/74.

[15]            Much later, in the year 2000 Fr Stef Wellens, the secretary of Bishop Mazombwe in Chipata told me that the wife of that Dutch doctor had regretted ever having translated this article. 

[16]            By then I had traded in the small Renault for a sturdy 202 Peugeot pick up.

[17]            Fr Kokalj, then parish priest of Matero.

[18]            Much later, I was told that he had become the nuncio for South Africa in Pretoria.

[19]            Petot Echo,June 1975. Cf Hinfelaar, H.F. 2005, An History of the White fathers in Zambia, 1964-2004. Manuscript, WFA.Z and WFA.R.

[20]            Idem, p. 45.

[21]              In 2002  the headquarters were again moved, now  to Dongen.

[22]            See Regional Council Meeting Minute No 18/75.

[23]            Their schools are formed by the ideals of St Ignatius. These consist of a need for a sense of duty, a concept of service to others and above all the belief that each individual is born for God’s purpose. Intellectually rigorous and totally committed to the faith, the convent school is concerned with education in every sphere. No one educated in that system can see life in secular terms.’ wrote a civil servant later on Gardner p. 132.

[24]            The members of the Legion of Mary were, in fact, the founders of the Bauleni Parish Community as they had gathered the people together long before I arrived at Chhrstomas 1973.

[25]            Meeting Regional Council 42/76.

[26]            Bishops circulars, August 1976.

[27]            This was done by Ena Wixted, the wife of Tadze, the young civil engineer who had come to Zambia to construct part of the Great Northern Road and whom I had known in Mulilansolo. He had married Ena, a schoolteacher at Roma’s secondary School in Lusaka and  founded his own company of Civil Engineering in Zambia. 

[28]            Cardinal Lavigerie insisted that the missionaries were not to live alone but support each other in a community of at least three members. This was indeed an excellent rule at the beginning when the mission posts were far from one another.

[29]            As a German soldier  he had been made prisoner of war in Kiev and worked in the mines for years under terrible circumstances.   

[30]            George returned to Siavonga at the beginning of the 1980s with a young second wife who, after two girls, finally  gave him a boy.

[31]            In January 2006, Sr. Elizabeth Dawson opened a special wing  for severly mentally and physically handicapped children.

[32]            Besides a polite ‘thank you’ the country would get little in return once the neighbouring countries and South Africa itself obtained their independence.

[33]            Interviews with Archbishop Elias Mutale, Mindolo, Kitwe, 1973 and Dr Mainza Chona, Lusaka, 1998. WFA.Z.

[34]            See Larmer, 2003, History of Zambia. The second Republic.’ In Murphy,E. 2003, A History of the Jesuits in Zambia, Paulines Publications, Nairobi, Kenya.

[35]              D.McKie,  March 2005, Obituary óf J.G. Gallaghan in the Weekly Guardian,April 1-7, p 31.

[36]            Urban Area Meeting, Ndola, February 1979.

[37]            Archives WFZ, May 47/80.

[38]            Archives WFZ May  and interview Fr P. Fitzgerald, the facilitator of this meeting.

[39]            This was done just after U.D.I. was introduced. It was said that the people in Rhodesia were not told of this exercise but that they discovered the presence of  these Kapenta in the stomach of the big tiger fish.

[40]            See also M.R.C in Ndola ,  11 February, 5/81.

[41]            I remember in particular the Bantubonse and the Chibesakunda family from Mulanga, now all living  in and around Lusaka.

[42]                   ………………………………………...

[43]            Tablet, 13 November, 2004, p 10-11.

[44]            During that visit Els gave me the ‘The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943. Ed. Klass A.D. Smelik- Alban Books , published in Dutch in 1981.

[45]            Evidence taken from my research when writing The History of the White Fathers, 1964-2004, Manuscript WFA, Zambia. 2004.

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