This One Thing : Journeying with Tutu by Dan Vaughan

Content
 

This is a personal, behind-the-scenes account of a white South African who, during the time of apartheid, moved from indifference to become Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s right-hand man in the struggle for a non-racial democracy.

 

It begins with his missionary service in Zimbabwe, moving on to the author’s leadership of a para-church organisation in South Africa, and then into the time when he was invited to join the staff of the South African Council of Churches.

 

Here the narrative tells of Tutu’s iconic role in that organisation: his faith, courage, and passion for justice. It shares details of Tutu’s earlier life, why the SACC appointed him as its General Secretary, and of the early problems he faced as its first Black leader. Here also are the writer’s personal struggles in his now inverted world, where colleagues are supportive and friends hostile.

 

The SACC becomes increasingly prominent under Tutu’s leadership. His call for sanctions incenses the authorities, who are relentless in their efforts to silence his voice. The narrative details the build-up to their attempt to silence the SACC through the Eloff Commission, offering unique insights into Tutu’s strategy for confronting this attack.

 

Later, in the turbulent early eighties, Tutu leaves the SACC, and Beyers Naudé takes over. The author resigns soon after, a victim of the wave of Black Consciousness in the churches at that time.

 

The final chapters describe Tutu’s role in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Then, moving to the next phase, his international ministry of peace and reconciliation from his Cape Town office. Here are the stories of the author’s travels with Tutu, describing his efforts toward reconciliation in Colombia, Northern Ireland and the Sudan, up to his official retirement in 2012.

 

The Foreword is written by Nontombi Tutu, daughter of the late Archbishop.

 

The Epilogue, written after the death of Tutu on 26 December 2021, are the author’s reflections at the State Funeral service at St George’s Anglican Cathedral, Cape Town on 1 January 2022.

Reviews
 

John Allen, author of Tutu’s official biography, Rabble-Rouse for Peace: To my knowledge, this is quite unique in providing a vivid insider's account which conveys both the flavour and the detail of what it was like to work alongside the Arch. I know of no other work that does that. [It also] provides the first account I know of sketching some of his post-retirement ministry. Beautifully done.
 

Peter Storey, former President, South African Council of Churches: This book is an absorbing read … told with endearing intimacy and regard, offering a unique insight into the grace, gifts and courage of the spiritual leader who, as much as anyone, blazed our path to freedom. [It is] a unique peek into to the character and spirit of the diminutive Bishop with the wide-open heart.
 

Thomas O Scarborough, writer and philosopher: A masterpiece. How does one write a close-packed memoir which spans more than seventy years, covering a traumatic, sometimes joyous, and often contradictory chaos of events? Author Dan Vaughan shows that it can be done, and it can be done well. This book seems to glide effortlessly and smoothly through the often tumultuous history of a nation, seen by one who was at the heart of the action.
 

Seamus Cashman, Irish poet and publisher: Here is without doubt a most important memoir of resistance and reconciliation. It blossoms with truths shared in peace and kindness, and with powerful exemplars of the vital roles of thoughtful persistence and self-questioning in the pursuit of what is good in human nature, by a man at the heart of the mountain-trek of persuasion that South African resistance followed.
 

Einar Lunde, former Norwegian TV News anchor and Africa Correspondent: Dan Vaughan has had a unique and close relationship with Desmond Tutu. He offers an exciting and moving insight into the churches’ struggle against apartheid. We witness how a white, born to undeserved privilege, gradually becomes active in that struggle. It’s an important and amazing book.

Author
 

The author, Dan Vaughan, is a South African, born in Cape Town. Now retired, he lives with his wife Daphne in Sedgefield, a small resort village on the southern coast of South Africa.

 

His working life includes government service, a short spell in missionary work, and leadership roles in national interchurch and welfare organisations.

 

In the mid-1970s Vaughan was invited to join the staff of the South African Council of Churches, a leading organisation in the South African church struggle against apartheid under Archbishop Desmond Tutu. There he served for some eight years.

 

In 2003 the then Archbishop Emeritus Tutu called on Vaughan to join him as manager of his office and travel companion. He served him there until 2012, when Tutu himself withdrew from active public involvement.

CHAPTER 1: THE BEGINNING

I was eighteen and caught up in the excitement of my first romance. She was a colleague from work. She was Afrikaans-speaking and I spoke English. That didn’t matter. We were both comfortably bilingual, as were most of us in that government office.

When Verona invited me to watch the results of the recent general election being posted outside the offices of the mouthpiece of the National Party, Die Burger newspaper, in Keerom Street, Cape Town, I was only too glad to be with her, holding her hand in young love.

It was May 27, 1948. Around me was a cheering crowd of Afrikaners. I knew little of their politics then, and cared even less that they might win the election.

The South African parliamentary election of 1948 was primarily a contest between South Africa’s white English- and Afrikaans-speakers. But it was more than that. The leader of the Nationalist Party, Dr. D. F. Malan, had also promised his supporters that if they won, they would “make South Africa a white man’s land.”

The politics and social privileges of colonial South Africa had always excluded the original inhabitants of our country. A segregation deep-rooted in custom (and, if necessary, the gun) had from the beginning of the colonial era preserved the privileges of those of us who were white.

Now in the post-war era had come suggestions that this was wrong. White colonial power was to be replaced by the power of the people. Thus said the responsible leaders of the world.

The Afrikaners heard them. But, with the reins of government now firmly in their hands, they were not a group to yield to any winds of change. “We will make sure this will never happen here in South Africa,” they said. “We will legalise segregation. Let no one interfere in our sovereign rights." So did apartheid come upon us, resting on a framework of laws that entrenched segregation and prohibited any protest.

Under that banner the Nationalist Party governed South Africa for nearly 50 years. In the process it implemented an increasingly draconian rule over the life and soul of the nation. It systematically removed every remaining political, social, and economic right from all whose skins were not white, or not white enough.

Bulldozer-like, the ruling party re-shaped the legislature, signing into law one apartheid bill after another. Virtually every legal loophole which permitted contact between the races was closed. The government forbade blacks to use restaurants, beaches, or even park benches in proclaimed white areas.

The hearts of the cities were declared “white,” as were the choicest residential and recreational areas in the country. Separation was enforced in schools, in transport, in sporting events, in housing, in public areas—indeed, in almost every arena of life. Apartheid restricted the movement of black people at the whim of white authorities.

There were some who protested, but they soon found themselves legally denied even this basic human right. Their attempts to bring about peaceful change incurred the penalties of the sweeping new security laws. Activists were incarcerated indefinitely without trial; anti-government newspapers were shut down; and information on the country’s prisons or military activities was tightly controlled. Others were served banning orders that prevented

them from speaking out or being quoted by anyone. Within this climate it was easy for the shadowy forces of the state to murder and torture with impunity. This was the South Africa of my early adulthood.

***

While the shame of this picture is clear to me now, it was not so at that time. I was young and comfortable in my office job. Life moved on in pleasant routine. Like most of my kind, I was unaware of the implications of the sweeping changes in our country. When at times the new laws did touch our lives, it was in a far-off awareness, as of the sound of distant guns.

When two of our friends in our church youth group quietly announced their plans to marry in England, we wondered why. Later, whispers emerged that she was actually a so-called Coloured., and not white as we had thought. Such was the awful racial terminology we used. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, making marriage between people of different races illegal, was promulgated in 1949. It defined a white person as one “who in appearance obviously is, and by general appearance is, a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is by general acceptance and repute a Coloured person.” The bride-to-be had been classified as” Coloured.” Any minister of religion or other licenced marriage-office in South Africa marrying them would have incurred the penalty of the law.

None of us were outraged at the anguish these good friends of ours must have suffered as they decided to leave the country so that they might marry each other. It was our way of life, we said. That was how it was.

***

I grew up in the 1930s in an English-speaking suburb of Cape Town. It was a time of solid values. Duty and responsibility were drummed into our young minds, and for that I will always be grateful. But sadly, we accepted as normal, as did our fathers before us, that which we decry today: the selfish racism and chauvinism, and homophobia of the colonial age.

Tolerance and compassion were there also, firmly embedded, but mainly towards our own kind, and selected others. We missed out then on that which we have discovered in our present post-modern era, that kindness, the source of these virtues, needs to be directed towards all.

Our part of South Africa had been a colony of England since 1806. Though British control of South Africa had essentially been abolished when I was two years old, we continued to carry the values of “the colonies.” Despite the beckoning power of Hollywood, and our growing allegiance to an American lifestyle, our orientation was at this time to all things British.

I lost myself in British schoolboy stories, and in the valour of the British heroes who would explore and conquer and build an Empire. There was little mention in those books, though, of those whom they destroyed in the process. We learned at school how we English had brought light to the black people of Africa, and rescued them from slavery. We were taught of the history of the first Europeans who “discovered” the Cape, and settled here as the founders of our country. We never learned much of the plight of the original people whose land they had appropriated. We learned of the governors of our “colony” who were the initiators of libraries and museums and all things civilized. We were taught about the Boers who had left the Cape to escape the long arm the English laws that demanded that they release their slaves to freedom.

That was our history. It was heavy with tales of enlightened white people conquering ignorant black people. Small wonder there developed in us the unconscious belief that we who were white were better than those who were black. For we knew nothing of the heritage

or the history of the first people of our land, save that which represented them as violent or treacherous. In my growing years, these were the people who swept our streets and served us in our homes.

***

I was about seventeen years old when a lady who had been the lodger in our family home for most of my childhood passed on to me three or four little books written by the renowned South African Christian leader, Andrew Murray. I liked what I read, and looked for more of his writings. His recipe for a full and worthwhile life called for a total surrender of self. It confirmed all I had learned of my faith. In the placid circumstances of my life—and in my teenage longing for adventure and significance—it was an easy and exciting call to answer. Here was the allure of self-giving, the possibility of a life far above and beyond the humdrum world of the ordinary. And here was also the promise of a future larger than anything I had hitherto experienced.

My answer was an easy “yes.” I had nothing to lose. Eager to discover the road I was to travel, I spoke with my minister. He suggested I consider a missionary vocation. This appealed to me. I had often heard missionaries share their stories, and had envied their adventurous lives in foreign lands and their sense of destiny. This would be mine also.

I quit my job in government service when I was twenty-one and enrolled at a missionary training college in Kalk Bay, a little fishing village on the False Bay coast. The students stayed on campus, in comfortable accommodation on the edge of the ocean. It was a good year of learning and the formation of enduring friendships.

More than that, I was in love again, this time more seriously. I had known Ursula since childhood, as her parents and mine were friends. Our courting progressed satisfactorily through my college days, even though Ursula and I could see each other only on weekends. We became engaged to be married, in December of that year.

By then I had applied to the mission board of the Dutch Reformed Church, to which I belonged, for a position in their mission in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Ursula and I were both interviewed and my application was approved. Because the vacancy on the staff—it was for a Superintendent of Schools—needed to be filled urgently, the mission authorities asked whether I could take up the appointment as soon as possible.

This put us in a dilemma. Ursula felt she was not yet ready to leave for Zimbabwe. On the other hand, there was the considerable pressure from the mission authorities for me to take up my position without delay. In the end we decided to marry as we had planned. After that I would travel on ahead to Zimbabwe. Ursula would follow soon after.

We were married on April 19, 1952. My wedding suit was a gift from a friend. The best man was Manny Vivieros, a friend from my school days. My sister Sheila was Ursula's bridesmaid. It was the young pastor’s first marriage ceremony and I think he was more nervous than I was. The reception was a tea in the home of my new parents-in-law; we used their wedding gift to pay for our honeymoon. We drove to Hermanus, a coastal town one and a half hours from Cape Town in my father’s Morris 10 motor car.

Ten days later I was on a train on my way to Zimbabwe. My destination was Morgenster, near present day Masvinga, in south-eastern Zimbabwe. It was a long and lonely journey. A missionary colleague-to-be met me at Bulawayo station three days later, and we travelled by car for the last stage of my journey.

Reviews
 

John Allen, author of Tutu’s official biography, Rabble-Rouse for Peace: To my knowledge, this is quite unique in providing a vivid insider's account which conveys both the flavour and the detail of what it was like to work alongside the Arch. I know of no other work that does that. [It also] provides the first account I know of sketching some of his post-retirement ministry. Beautifully done.
 

Peter Storey, former President, South African Council of Churches: This book is an absorbing read … told with endearing intimacy and regard, offering a unique insight into the grace, gifts and courage of the spiritual leader who, as much as anyone, blazed our path to freedom. [It is] a unique peek into to the character and spirit of the diminutive Bishop with the wide-open heart.
 

Thomas O Scarborough, writer and philosopher: A masterpiece. How does one write a close-packed memoir which spans more than seventy years, covering a traumatic, sometimes joyous, and often contradictory chaos of events? Author Dan Vaughan shows that it can be done, and it can be done well. This book seems to glide effortlessly and smoothly through the often tumultuous history of a nation, seen by one who was at the heart of the action. I consider this book a masterpiece, given the challenge.

It all seems like a dream now, reading this book. But all this madness really happened. I myself am familiar with much of the story. I felt an affinity with the author, too. Although I was brought up in a “noble” (pre-modern) society, with noble friends as my only friends, the issues of South Africa were equally muted for me when I entered the situation. Later, I was to marry a woman of Xhosa descent, across (post) apartheid tracks, which was possible through the very events of this book.

There is a parallel development in the book. On the one hand, Dan Vaughan describes his own awakening and transformation, from a young man who cared little about political developments (“it was in a far-off awareness”), to one who passionately cared about, and opposed apartheid. On the other hand, there is his growing relationship and partnership with the Anglican priest with a fast-moving career, Desmond Tutu, who in time became Archbishop and Nobel prize winner.

Vaughan’s picture of Tutu is interesting and informative. Tutu was a disciplined man. He had the ability to create harmonious and happy workplaces. He did not care to harbour suspicions of people (“we happily accepted each other at face value”), even where this seemed contrary to good sense. He consulted broadly, and thought in the broadest of terms. He had an irrepressible optimism, and managed to weave his way through a hair-raising history without being “removed”.

Given the seventy-plus years which are covered in the book, the author had to choose strategically the key events of the story, and the key developmental markers in his life and the life of Desmond Tutu. I consider these well chosen. They cohere, and they flow. What I found particularly attractive about the book is the way that the author not only describes the facts of the situation, but the dynamics of personal change and development. South Africans tend to write in an unfiltered style. While European and American books tend to be smooth and finely tuned, South Africans allow for rough edges. There does not seem to be the same drive to resolve things, or harmonize them. This book, while it is sophisticated, is similarly unfiltered, so that one is given the opportunity to look into the real struggles and contradictions that came people's way. This means, too, that it gives one permission to form one's own opinions about the story.

A weakness of the book, if one can call it that, is that it treats political, theological, and philosophical issues (the last being the focus of my own writing) with a very broad brush. But perhaps one should not expect more. The author was an intuitive organiser, and a skilled 
administrator, and while his beliefs and convictions were clear, and are clearly portrayed, perhaps one should not expect him to produce abstract ideas.

As is my custom, I put several pages of the book through computer analysis. It has a strong style. It will be understood by those of about 15 years and up – thus it is written for competent readers without becoming difficult. I read it on Kindle Cloud Reader, which was, unfortunately, wanting. As usual, Cloud Reader kept cutting out, the searches were slow and sometimes ineffective, and in this case the Contents were unmarked.

At the heart of Tutu's spirituality was “the recognition of our common humanity, and a God who cared for each of us”. “THIS ONE THING” (the title of the book) is love, which sums it all up in a word. In the new challenges which face the nation today, the author asks the question, apparently without answer, “Who is there to tell us, as persuasively as Tutu did?”
 

Seamus Cashman, Irish poet and publisher: I have read this (This One Thing: Journeying with Tutu) through with growing interest and discovery. It is without doubt a most important memoir of resistance and reconciliation. It blossoms with truths shared in peace and kindness, and with powerful exemplars of the vital roles of thoughtful persistence and self-questioning in the pursuit of what is good in human nature, by a man at the heart of the mountain-trek of persuasion that South African resistance followed, especially Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others, in order to eliminate the core inhumanity of apartheid. It is too a valuable insider’s portrait of Tutu in action.

I do hope this work will somehow find its way to people (especially its intellectuals and thinkers) in the Palestinian cause today. There is so much needed by them in their one-sided conflict with Israeli-Zionist apartheid’s militaristic, ruthlessly inhumane approach.

Its market is bigger than just local South Africa. So it may well be taken on by one of the larger international publishers with an interest in conflict literature, Africa, memoir, political and social lists, etc. And indeed in church literature too.

I wish Dan Vaughan every success with publication of this memoir.
 

Einar Lunde, former Norwegian TV News anchor and Africa Correspondent: Dan Vaughan has had a unique and close relationship with Desmond Tutu. He offers an exciting and moving insight into the churches’ struggle against apartheid. We witness how a white, born to undeserved privilege, gradually becomes active in that struggle. It’s an important and amazing book.

John de Gruchy, Theologian and academic, author of over 30 books. Currently Chairperson of the Volmoed Trust

I was not sure what to expect when I picked up Dan Vaughan’s book This One Thing: Journeying with Tutu and started to read. I had first met both him and Desmond Tutu (separately of course) sometime during the 1960’s, and it would never have occurred to me that their lives would one day intersect in the remarkable way that they eventually did. After all, back then, Dan was a white Baptist layman, a director of the South African National Sunday School Association, and someone highly respected in conservative white evangelical circles, which were by and large comfortable with apartheid. By contrast, Desmond Tutu, born and bred in a black township outside Johannesburg, was a recently ordained Anglican priest, a protégé of Trevor Huddleston, the “troublesome missionary”, soon to become the Francophone Africa Director of the World Council of Churches’ Theological Education Fund, based in London.

By the time Tutu returned to South Africa after a time in the UK, Dan was no longer on my radar screen, but Tutu loomed large, first as Dean of Johannesburg, then as Bishop of Lesotho, and especially in 1978 when he became General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and a large thorn in the side of the apartheid regime. By that time I had long since left the staff of the SACC (1968-1973) and migrated back to Cape Town. But as providence designed, by then, when Tutu became General Secretary, Dan had already been on the staff for a year. And I must confess to some surprise, delighted I must add, when I discovered that Dan was now an integral part of Tutu’s general staff.

Dan’s “journeying with Tutu” tells the story of how this happened, and more significantly, what this meant for him as he moved beyond being a member of staff to becoming a trusted confidant and colleague. Equally significant it tells the story of Dan’s own journey as it was shaped and honed by the influence of the Arch on his life. Of course, that journey in faith had begun long before his encounter with Tutu. Significant in its genesis was the influence of Andrew Murray, Jnr., the well-known Dutch Reformed pastor, educationalist, and social reformer. This led Dan to serve as a missionary educator in Zimbabwe before returning to Cape Town to work for the Sunday School Association. But he returned more mindful of the unjust consequences of colonialism, the horrors of apartheid and of church complicity in both, but also of the church struggle against apartheid.

So, soon after the Soweto Uprising in 1976, Dan joined the staff of the SACC to the consternation of his evangelical peers for whom the SACC was both theologically and politically suspect. So he was there that wonderful day when his “boss”, affectionally know to him now as “father”, received the Nobel Peace Prize. Dan soon became an important member of Tutu’s inner circle, joining him on many of his journeys, including to Oslo when he received the Nobel Prize.

In a sense the rest is history, but while its outlines are well-known, its details, as vividly told by Dan, are not. And, in Tutu’s case, it is not the devil that is in the details, but the Spirit of Christ which day by day prompted the Arch in his ministry of embracing the enemy and challenging both the church and the state to obey the prophetic call to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.”

Journeying with Tutu is not simply about myriads of visits to places across the globe; more significantly, it is about a journey of spiritual discernment, prayerful reflection on the events of the day, and sharing the daily Eucharist, even on board a Boeing jet! Yes, This One Thing is about the shared journey of an Anglican Archbishop and his trusted Baptist companion. And, like many others who travelled with Tutu, Dan’s life was transformed in the process. This story needs to be remembered and told, for we are all in danger of forgetting what Tutu’s legacy was all about.