It’s sometime before Easter 1972. The weather’s beautiful, this is no time for jackets, although last week’s rain reminded us all of the floods a couple of years ago, so we tend to make sure we’re dressed for being marooned somewhere.
I’m enjoying being “grown up” which is what everybody calls me since I had a double figure birthday recently, although they add that it’s tough being an adult.
There’s a slight trepidation about entering church this morning. For weeks, we’ve been reminded of the visit by this priest from Cape Town; some political fellow who’s coming to talk about some campaign he’s been running.
There’s a car with two men in it parked outside the church. Strange that they’re just sitting there and don’t come into church. But not strange when we reach the door and somebody whispers: Did you see the branch outside? They’re here to watch the visiting priest.
“The branch” – dreaded, dreadful words that send a chill through your body. It doesn’t ease the tension that we think one of the plain-clothed security branch policemen sitting outside is an Anglican himself, who has apparently forsaken attending his own parish to keep watch this morning, although nobody’s sure because there’s no way someone will go up to the car to check.
Keeping watch, but not as Jesus admonished his disciples to keep watch in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The visiting priest is white; I wonder what he’s done to have brought the branch to Christ the King. White people are safe from the branch, aren’t they? Maybe he should have got a permit from the police station to be in Gelvandale. But, he’s a priest, they don’t need permits, do they? What will he preach about?
Bernard Wrankmore appears older than he actually is. Even in the vestments of a priest, he has a wiry frame, and moves slowly, carefully.
As he talks to us that Sunday morning, his physical demeanour takes on a special significance, adding meaning to his sermon.
He tells us, he is slowly recovering from an almost complete shutdown of his body, after a hunger strike of 67 days to protest at the death in detention of a Cape Town moslem cleric, Imam Abdullah Haron.
Haron had been the youngest Imam appointed in South Africa at the age of 32 to the Claremont Mosque. He was, by all accounts, a charismatic leader, selfless, engaged in assisting individuals and communities ravaged by apartheid. He was arrested by “the branch” in May 1969 under the Terrorism Act and kept in detention without trial for 123 days until his death on September 27 at the hands of his security branch torturers who claimed that he had fallen down the stairs.
Despite blood clots from trauma, 24 bruises and a broken rib, the inquest magistrate accepted the police version of his death.
Wrankmore, a reasonably unassuming priest who ran the Missions to Seamen in downtown Cape Town, was appalled by what had happened to the imam and believed that a commission of enquiry should have been held into the circumstances of his death.
On the second anniversary of the imam’s death, Wrankmore endeavoured to fast until the government of then prime minister John Vorster agreed to initiate a commission. Secluded in the Muslim kramat on Signal Hill, a burial place used for prayer, he fasted beyond a deadline of 40 days he had set himself. It seemed that he, or God, or a recalcitrant government, had decided that only a fast to the death would be enough.
He ended his protest at the very last, after 67 days, despite the government’s refusal to initiate the probe or even to meet with him when Wrankmore, by now a sack of bones, travelled to Pretoria to see Vorster.
The inhumanity of what was happening in our country, and fear for our future, were starkly reflected in the story of the Imam as we listened to Wrankmore while “the branch” sat outside our church in Gelvandale.
While the primary objective of his fast was not achieved, Wrankmore succeeded in bringing international attention to detention without trial and, especially, the deaths of detainees at the hands of South African police. It focused squarely on the brutality which the National Party autocrats brought to running the country.
Wrankmore had nothing to invest in the struggle against apartheid except his sense of justice and his faith that the God who had called him to take this stand on behalf of a murdered muslim cleric whom he had never met, would also sustain him.
For young boys, food intake is all about volume. To some of us listening to him, Wrankmore’s account of his self-deprivation was an act of madness. But his action, in pursuit of principle and against abominable behaviour by the then-Government’s police, had a profound influence on my life.
This was a moment of growing up, being empowered by the courage of Haron, Wrankmore and others prepared to take a stand against iniquity despite the personal consequences, willing to forsake sect and creed, race, class and gender, for the sake of our common humanity.
It’s what continues to empower me 40 years later.
• Bernie Wrankmore died in Cape Town at the age of 86 on June 10, 2011.
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