While there he saw the coming of the National Party government, and the implementation of its policy of apartheid, which led to the ethnic cleansing of blacks from Sophiatown, which Huddleston opposed. For 12 years, from 1944-1956, he served as the parish priest of Sophiatown, a black suburb in western Johannesburg. Trevor Huddleston was an Anglican priest, and a member of the Anglican monastic order, the Community of the Resurrection (CR). It is also an affectionate portrait of Sophiatown, an anomalous black suburb of Johannesburg where Huddleston worked and where – much to the chagrin of the authorities – the black population had freehold rights. This book is a sombre meditation on the nature of apartheid, in which Huddleston deconstructs the political ideology of Hendrik Verwoerd (ironally addressed throughout as “Dr Verwoerd”) and exposes the “sub-Christian” theology of the Dutch Reformed Church of the 1950s.
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