2: How do I react? What should I do?
It was 1960 and I was in my second year at medical school. I joined the weekly early morning prayer meeting organised by former ENT surgeon from Kenya, now an anatomy lecturer at the University of Cape Town. Even in silence I was crying out to God: 'Oh Lord, our country!' One of the small group was physiotherapy student, Stephanie Kemp. From an Afrikaner background, she became 'radicalised' and spent time in prison. She later worked underground in London for the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.
When you pray you're asking God to lend a hand, but then you discover there's more to do, so you get on and do it, but you still ask him to lend a hand!
Our friends were people of different racial backgrounds, though socialising together was more difficult. William van Graan was one - a much-respected fellow-member of the Salvation Army Students Fellowship. Years later he became one of my trusted advisers in leadership.
In the 1950s the Siebrits family had gone to court, pleading for reclassification of some of their friends. Half of the family had been classified white, the other coloured.
'Okay, then.'
I had to say it again. This time it was to Margaret when she asked me not to get involved in the protest movement in the 1960s. 'I don't want to be married to a man in jail,' she told me.
She herself had trudged the sands of the Cape Flats, following up the families of malnourished children. And she was the one to challenge my mother when she thought a young boy was being exploited by asking him to polish the floors. Cedric Adamson adored her. He never forgot what she had said.
Eva Krotoa was interpreter for the Dutch commander at the Cape in 1652. Of Koi origin, she had learned Dutch and Portuguese. She married the surgeon, Peter van Meerhof. Margaret's second cousin, Attie Siebrits was at Cape Archives when he made the shock discovery. The curator noticed his distress and came to reassure him: 'Many South Africans have a similar ancestry,' he explained. In later years, Margaret was always proud to claim her mixed race origin as a descendent of Eva Krotoa.
We may think we are racially pure, but some of us may be in for a big surprise!
'Apartheid means separate development.' The South African government had tried to publicise the idea.
'Perhaps that will work,' I had thought. It is what I told Phil Needham when we met at The Salvation Army's college at Denmark Hill in 1967. He told me they had said the same in the United States and especially in his native Georgia. Separate did not mean equal there. I had to agree the same was true in South Africa.
I had grown up in a white suburb, attended a white school, went to a white church, joined a white scout troop, had white friends, and later attended a mainly white university. I was immensely privileged.
My mother's brother, Alf Erikson ,was South African born, but spent most of his life working as a Salvation Army missionary in the Rhodesias. He and the family would spend a few weeks holiday with us every few years. I listened to his account of what they did. He taught me to play chess.
Years later I discovered David Bosch's definition of a missionary:
'A Christian who crosses a boundary in the spirit of a servant.'
That's what I saw in Uncle Alf. It says what I have tried to be - across all kinds of boundaries; any kind of boundary.