Catching up with Michael Cassidy

I began to be really politicised when I was about twelve through the influence of Patrick Duncan, a British colonial servant who lived next door to us in old Basutoland (now Lesotho) and whose father was a former Governor General of South Africa. Pat was passionately anti-apartheid and when the Afrikaner Nationalists came to power in 1948 on the apartheid ticket, Pat drilled into me that this was a political tragedy of the first order to have a formal political policy based on racial segregation.

This was reinforced in my high school years at Michaelhouse, an Anglican church school, where we had politically enlightened speakers, such as Alan Paton visit the school regularly.

After my Damascus road conversion at Cambridge University in 1955, I struggled to see how the personal and social dimensions of the Gospel came together. In due time I saw that these were complementary dimensions of the gospel, being the obverse and reverse sides of One Coin. And it was this conviction and commitment that I took into our African Enterprise ministry when we launched it in early 1965. Trying to preach the gospel in a racially polarized and alienated country was exceedingly difficult. And it landed us endlessly in collision with the apartheid regime.

1985 it fell to me to visit then-President PW Botha as first step in a process of calling on him to release Nelson Mandela and unban the Liberation Movements. He was furious. He also said I must denounce a certain group of black theologians when I was on TV that night being interviewed about a national PRAY-AWAY we had called for the next day, asking the country to stay home & pray. "If you don't,” he said, "I will fix you personally." I refused, though I knew what that could mean for me. And I survived. And the country responded. A local newspaper next morning in the rush hour photographed the busiest road in South Africa, that between Soweto and Johannesburg. There was one lone cyclist!

Not long after that, several black and white colleagues and I were to go into a black township near Port Elizabeth to preach. Police detained us, questioned us for two hours and then forbade us to preach. I replied, "Officer, we got our mandate to preach from God, not from you. We will be preaching there tonight." And we did so in spite of being followed in by two Caspir armored vehicles loaded with soldiers carrying AK47s! Bringing Apartheid down happened through hundreds of acts of defiance like this from thousands of people of all races.

A Congress we mounted in 1973, we insisted be nonracial in attendance, in hotel accommodation, and in transportation. The government went ballistic. And all our overseas speakers, including Billy Graham, were banned & denied entry. My book tells of the miraculous and incredible workings of God, which led to the government reversing its banning of our speakers and the securing, for the first time, nonracial accommodation, bussing, and participation. A newspaper banner read: "Apartheid is doomed."

We were doing a city-wide mission in a West African capital. When our media team arrived, although they all had visas, the immigration officials said, "We'll let in the blacks. But the whites must leave on the next flight." At this, our senior black colleague replied, ‘We have fought this type of discrimination all our lives back in South Africa, so why would we tolerate it here? We blacks will leave with them." And they did. This was a nonracial witness both in that country and in South Africa.