White African American
From South Africa to Kansas
I am a white African American. I was born in 1959 into a small white tribe that first settled on the southern tip of Africa in 1652. In 1977, my father pulled up our family’s African roots and we immigrated to Los Angeles where he would study for his PhD in Christian Missions. He was a pioneer church planter in South Africa and helped establish the Pentecostal Assembly of God denomination among what is still called the “colored” or mixed races on the tip of Africa.
Our Christianity was fervent, aggressively evangelistic, and very sectarian. Every Sunday afternoon we canvassed the streets of Cape Town for our weekly revival service that night. When the Jesus Movement hit Cape Town in the early 70s, my father was out in the Indian Ocean baptizing hundreds of long-haired hippies and planting a new church in a dying Presbyterian cathedral downtown.
At the age of thirteen, I was sent off to boarding school where I encountered persecution for being a Christian for the first time in my life. Surrounded by hundreds of white boys from all over the country, I tried my best to hide my Pentecostal exuberance: refusing to pray in tongues or lay hands on my fellow borders for their healing; I just tried my best not to appear too weird.
But my attempt at hiding my faith came to a sudden end one night when a wild-eyed ship’s captain told us boys the story of Eric Liddell: the Scottish athlete who refused to run his 100-meter heat at the 1924 Paris Olympic Games — because it was held on a Sunday; and he refused to miss church. However, when he was given the opportunity to run in the 400 meters — a distance he had not fully trained for — he still broke the world record at 47.6 seconds. And then he disappeared into obscurity as a missionary in China, dying, unknown, in a Japanese World War II prison camp in 1945.
While still training for the Olympics, his sister once rebuked him for delaying his mission trip to China in order to run in the Olympics: “You are putting Glory ahead of China,” she said. And his response to her is memorably captured in this scene from Chariots of Fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd5LCN53q9Y
“God made me for China, but he also made me fast!” he told his sister. “And when I run, I feel his pleasure!”
I was inspired and committed myself from then on to a radical sold-out brand of Christianity that very naturally invited a fresh onslaught of persecution from my peers. As a new Christian, I was ready to make crazy commitments; but not yet ready to love and respect my fellow boarders as myself — the central command of Christ.
But since those early heady days, God has gently guided me all the way around to the very opposite end of the Christian “amphitheater,” and helped me to see his redemptive drama from the high Anglo-Catholic balcony — -a view of Christianity I always saw as petrified, rote, and fleshless. But what I found instead, was a re-connection to almost two thousand years of lost family history; an experience of Christianity awaited me which was rooted in an orthodoxy distilled from hundreds of generations of saints and martyrs over 2000 years — my huge cloud of missing family members described in the book of Hebrews.
Yet I still look fondly back at my defiantly sectarian Pentecostal days — -it instilled within me a Christianity that was activist, boldly counter-cultural, and passionately evangelistic (much of which I still retain). But rejoining the ancient mother church has given me a strange joy and humility I have never experienced in my faith before: like Frodo Baggins, I find myself caught up in a salvation drama far bigger, stranger, puzzling, and more beautiful than I ever imagined it to be. Christianity is now out of my control; it tosses me around; I am a far smaller part of a far larger Drama than I ever imagined before. Here then, is a short history of my Spiritual Roots, and how I eventually found myself in the middle of Kansas.
I. The Mother Branch: Passion!
In 1891, Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher of England, commissioned my great-grandfather to go to Cape Town as an early pioneer of the Baptist Denomination on the southern tip of Africa. “Keep the oven hot, Baker!” he apparently roared to him over the waves, as his ship pulled out from the Liverpool docks and chugged out across the Atlantic and then down to the southern tip of Africa. And so, Ernest Baker became the first settler in South Africa on my mother’s side of the family, pastoring churches across Cape Town and Johannesburg.
His eldest son, Cedric, did not follow his father into the ministry, and became a solid 9-to-5 banker all his life, marching to work every day in a black suit, bowler hat, and umbrella. But after he retired from the bank, he spent his happiest days teaching the Old Testament in my father’s Bible College for Cape Coloreds out in the far-flung shanty towns surrounding Cape Town. (All was strictly segregated back in the dark ages of Apartheid, and we all had to work around it).
But his only son, Richard, decided to pick up his grandfather’s church-planting mantle, and begin preaching and planting new churches throughout the Cape — but not Baptist churches. No. My Uncle Richard had discovered the Holy Ghost! –much to the shock of his grandfather’s staid and respectable Baptist elders — and began traveling across the country with a tent and a band of charismatic revivalists, casting out demons, healing the sick, and speaking in tongues. With a shock of red hair, blazing eyes, and often accompanied by both a Zulu and Sotho translator, he would set up tent outside black townships — far beyond the tony-white suburbs, and preach long sermons, dramatically translated into two or more African languages.
But once his preaching ministry had become a little more established, he would simply set out with his dog, and panniers strapped to either side of his 750cc motorbike, and roar off into the scrubby deserts surrounding Johannesburg, to the African “nations” of Venda, Lebowa, and Bophuthatswana. He was, of course, pastoring a white Pentecostal church in Johannesburg at the same time. But whenever his elders gave him permission, he would roar off into an African tribal homeland — -with dog and tent — and preach till he was happy and hoarse. And through as many translators as he could find!
In one of his more memorable sermons, while describing the believer’s spiritual authority to throw out demons, Richard spontaneously picked up his Sotho translator, hoisted him over his back, opened a window behind the pulpit, and began thrusting his body through the window opening — all while shouting at the top of his voice:
Then throw Satan out the window like this,
in the name of Jesus!
And while throwing out Satan in the name of Jesus, his Sotho translator, utterly unflustered, was simultaneously crying out at the top of his voice over Richard’s shoulder:
Ebe o lahlela Satane ka fensetere —
ka lebitso la Jesu!
And I’m sure if there was another set of windows, a Zulu translator would likewise have jumped up, grabbed another innocent bystander, and thrust him out a window too. There is power in repetition!
Richard had two daughters. Both are very respectable. And neither of them are preachers. His eldest daughter, Gaylen, bought property in Greece and France and became a millionaire and real estate agent. She was also the first in the family to abandon her faith. And I once asked Richard if he ever grieved over this — as many fathers would. But his answer rather surprised me:
Grieve over her! No, not at all. I’m very proud of her and love her deeply. But her relationship with God is not my responsibility. That is now God’s concern. My only job now is to love her as she is. It is too late to do anything else.
Richard also had two sisters, and the eldest, Rosemary, was my mother. From her, I learned passion and a sensitivity to beauty — clearly a strong Baker trait. She lured me into classical music — just as her big brother, Richard, had lured her — by playing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto every night during the family dinner. She trained me to understand and enjoy opera and classical symphonies as a 10-year-old by taking me to the Cape Town Opera House at Nico Milan and the symphony orchestra in the old city hall. But she also taught me to be a cultural snob by despising the Beatles and Rolling Stones revered by my peers, as well as anything found in white-Afrikaner culture.
My mother’s faith was, likewise, channeled through the sluices of Beauty — more than that of Truth. Growing up in a rather fundamentalist Baptist household, she always felt a deep need to liberate herself of legalistic constraints. Her relationship with God was always very personal and vivacious, but not always rooted in sound theology. For her, feelings often trumped theology. And her personal relationship with Jesus was more important than what she considered to be a morbid focus on sin and sanctification and repentance. (And this, I believe, later led to the demise of her marriage vows).
My maternal great-grandfather, Percy Dargin, immigrated to South Africa from Australia aboard a freight ship. When Percy died at 103, I was one of his pallbearers. I had visited him in his small flat in Cape Town every week for tea and cake while in boarding school, and he always met me at his door with a hearty chuckle and proceeded to tell me his dreams of the previous week — many of which seemed to include him meeting the Queen of England (When he turned 100, he received a hand-written birthday card from Queen Elizabeth — -a sweet gesture she extended to all her colonial centenarians). He was a wonderful old man, who always laughed, went to bed with a Scrooge-looking nightcap, and endured the rantings of his three Dargin daughters (only one of whom ever married) with amused detachment.
II. The Father Branch: Duty!
My paternal grandmother, Elaine Florence, left England after the Great War as a teenager, to serve as a maid for some white farmers in South Africa. She was 18 years old, and like many others of her generation, yearned for adventure in the colonies. (So many men her age had died in the trenches of World War I that there was a serious shortage of eligible bachelors back then).
Soon after her arrival, an English farmer named Blankenberg Watney began dating her. He was a 3rd generation South African and, at 15 years her senior, was becoming a rather successful tomato and granadilla farmer. After they married, I am told that they both went to the dentist to have their teeth removed, so as not to be worried about toothache out on their farm in the Northern Transvaal province. They were clearly committed to life on a farm which was a 3-day drive to the nearest dentist in the small town of Tzaneen, near the border of Zimbabwe.
My father was born on a farm in 1933, where he and his older brother, John, spent their childhood. When he was 5 and John was 7, they were put on a cross-country train and sent to boarding school in Bloemfontein (the birthplace of JRR Tolkien). My father was so young, he didn’t even know how to make his bed and spent many a night weeping from homesickness, knowing it would be 6 months before he could see his parents again. But such was the expectation for British-raised children of farmers, merchants, and missionaries in this period.
Paul Watney, my father, became a Christian at the age of 12 after his best friend presented to him a list of strict “do’s and don’ts” for followers of Christ. Duty, not passion, convinced him of Truth. From him, I learned the way of duty, without which a meaningful life would be impossible. It is a good thing a Christian, and not a Communist, had triggered his yearning for commitment at that formative age. Nothing could be achieved, he believed, without the making of vows: whether to marriage or celibacy. And to this end he lived his life, throwing all he had into planting churches, baptizing hippies, earning two doctorate degrees in missiology, mobilizing students for missions as a professor, and finally, underlining 10 Bibles word for word during the final dark decade of his life as Alzheimer’s ravaged his brain.
As a Pentecostal minister, my dad was relocated to a new church every two or three years, until eventually, we settled near Cape Town where he was commissioned to start a Bible College for the Colored People who lived in the vast and bleak segregated “locations” on the wind-swept outskirts of this beautiful city, poised between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Every day my father would drive his Peugeot station wagon from our beautiful Spanish-styled house with its swimming pool and half-acre lawn in the beautiful whites-only suburb of Durbanville to the Colored shantytown of Elsies River 20 miles away where he had built the small one-roomed Western Cape Bible College with its corrugated tin roof and sandy fields of ugly Port Jackson scrub. As a child, I was always shocked by the jarring disparity between our affluent white suburb with its green lawns and leafy trees and the depressing dirt roads and tin-shanties. And only 20 miles between the two.
I spent the first 17 years of my life growing up under the Apartheid regime in South Africa and have spent much of my adulthood since, “recovering” and “reflecting” back upon the experience. It has been “the grit in the oyster” for me. My five years of boyhood misery in a Cape Town boarding school continue to exert a strange subterranean pressure on my identity far beyond the mere 10% slice of life it took from me. Those five years seemed to build in me an entrenched distrust of authority I have never been able to shake.
I still remember waiting for our white boarding school to be attacked in the aftermath of the Soweto Riots of 1976. We slept with buckets of sand next to each bed, and patrolled the white and manicured Rondebosch Boys High School campus in twos and threes night after night. But they never came. And in 1977 I immigrated to America with my family, exulting in the fact that I had just missed my military conscription to pursue the “terrorists” on the white empire’s remote Angolan borders. So how I ended up in Kansas is really a whole other story.
III. The Dargin/Watney Blend: Passion and Duty
This stock I come from — -the Dargins and the Watneys — -planted the seeds of who I was eventually to become: a man filled with both passion and duty — though perhaps more passion than I really needed! These families were as opposite in temperament as could be. My father’s side, The Watneys, lived by the creed of Duty — in which feelings were frivolous and never to be trusted. And their faith, as a result, was solid and unmovable — even if it sometimes lacked passion. Whereas my mother’s side, the Dargins, held onto their emotions with great conviction. And their faith, as a result, was both passionate and at times, unstable.
Hopefully, I inherited more of the best, rather than the worst, of both sides: a passionate faith riveted by duty. And if I fail to achieve this wonderful hybrid — I still have three sons who can hopefully pull it off where I fail.
