seraphimsigrist recently posted a poll on spiritual heartlands,showing pictures of Radonezh in Russia which is more or less the home of Russian monasticism, and asked readers to think of similar places in their own countries.

In trying to think of such places in South Africa, one that came to mind was Marishane, the site of the martyrdom of Manche Masemola, which has become a place of pilgrimage. I've written about it in more detail and put pictures on my Khanya blog, where it is easier to post pictures than on LJ.

We've had a busy weekend, with a visiting bishop for St Thomas's patronal feast, which I've blogged about on my other blog. It's much easier to post pictures there than here.

If you go to Mamelodi, east of Pretoria, or any open space in the megacity of Tshwane, or indeed any other South African city, on a Sunday afternoon, chances are you would see a group of white-robed Zionists doing a wheel dance.

In fact they might look rather similar to this:



Except that these are not Zionists, but newly-baptised Orthodox Christians.

If you'd like to read more about the baptism, with more pictures, see the Baptism of Blackie Sibiya on my Khanya blog.

The Zionists have been around in South Africa for just over 100 years. The first missionaries of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion arrived from Zion City, Illinois in 1904. Since then, the Zionists have become the largest group of Christian denominations in South Africa, will millions of members in thousands of denominations.

Orthodox Christianity arrived in South Africa about the same time, the first decade of the 20th century. But Orthodoxy has not grown as fast as Zionism, mainly because of ethnic exclusivity. The first priest in Johannesburg, Fr Nikodemos Sarikas, who came from Turkey, left in disgust after a couple of years, because the congregation wanted him to confine his ministry to Greeks. Nevertheless, 100 years later, Orthodoxy is beginning to expand beyond the bounds of immigrant ethnic communities.

A historic picture -- three English-speaking South African deacons at the Nativity Liturgy in a Serbian Orthodox Church. Hierodeacon Seraphim (van Niekerk), Deacon Stephen (Hayes) and Deacon Irenaeus (MacDonald). Most of the service was in Serbian or Slavonic, but all the Litanies were in English. It was the first time I have served with two other deacons, and it went quite well.

But it also brings dangers. When I was ordained as a deacon it took me exactly half a day to get tired of everyone asking me when I was going to be ordained as a priest, so I said, publicly, that I would not even begin to consider such a thing until there were at least three deacons in every parish in the Archdiocese, and the Archbishop said, also in front of witnesses, "You can stay a deacon as long as you want." But suddenly things don't seem to seem so secure any more!

And though 21 December was the longest day, 7 January was certainly the hottest day.

Yesterday was Christmas Eve and we took Amanda Walker, a Canadian visitor from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to the Hours and Readers Service at Mamelodi, in the classroom at Zakhele School. The main gate of the school, was locked, so we had to park outside. Amanda belongs to the St Vincent of Lerins Antiochian Orthodox Church in Saskatoon, and had been at our youth conference earlier in the holidays, so was able to meet some of the friends she had made there.

Then in the evening Amanda came with us to the St Nicholas of Japan Orthodox Church in Brixton, Johannesburg for Compline and Matins for Christmas Eve. She was very curous about the differences in Christmas customs between Southern Africa and North America, and that is something I've noticed in blogs and journals.

She observed that Christmas is far less commercial here, and people generally make don't make a big fuss about it as they seem to do in North America. It is very unusual here for people to put Christmas decorations on the outside of their houses. There is one street in Pretoria where the residents do this, and people from all over town go to have a look at it.

And its only white people who seem to put up Christmas decorations inside their houses anyway. Our family custom is to put them up on Christmas eve, and take them down again on Theophany eve, a hangover from our Anglican days, when we tried to avoid celebrating Christmas in Advent. And for Orthodox the secular "festive season" is our "fastive season".

Another difference is that the words "holidays" and "vacation" seem to mean something different for us here than in North America, and there is a different series of events marking them. The Commercial Christmas begins in October, when shops begin their "Buy!" campaigns. In November the Christmas or summer vacation begins in the universities -- whenever students write their last exams of the academic year. Then they go home and relax, or look for vac jobs. This is also the season of office parties and school nativity plays.

Then comes the school holidays -- the Christmas holidays proper. This is usually in early December. The next event is the builders holidays, which begin about 12-13 December and last until about 7-8 January, and these two events mark the beginning of the grand exodus from Gauteng, to the country or the coast. Traffic jams in town magically vanish as the population heads north and south, and journey times within town are halved. The freeways are littered with broken-down trailers -- usually the wheels have come off because they are so heavily overloaded.

The next thing is the public holiday of the Day of Reconciliation on 16 December. For me, that has always been the signal that one should do one's Christmas shopping. The only traffic jams are in the vicinity of shopping centres.

Most of the businesses that have remained open since the start of the builders holidays close early on Christmas Eve, and some of them remain closed until after New Year. So from Christmas to New Year things are quieter still, except for the Old Year's Eve and New Year's Eve parties (Old Year's Eve parties seem to be peculiar to Pretoria -- I've never seen them anywhere else).

Christian churches in the Reformed tradition don't observe Christmas much. Some don't even have services on Christmas day unless it happens to fall on a Sunday. And as the Dutch Reformed Churches are among the biggest in the country, that tends to make Christmas more secular in South Africa. For the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK), the biggest of the Dutch Reformed Churches, Pentecost is far more important, and they often have special services between Ascension and Pentecost. They were very put out when Ascension Day ceased to be a public holiday.

For Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Anglicans, Theophany/Epiphany marks the end of the Christmas season, the "Twelve Days of Christmas", though in my Anglican days that was when we used to put the wise men in the crib, which was blessed on Christmas Eve and remained up until Candlemas on 2 February. For Orthodox, Theophany is primarily the celebration of the baptism of Christ.

For our family, we then get a second bite of the cherry, as we are also involved with Old Calendar parishes, and so Theophany is followed immediately by Old Christmas, and the blessing of Christmas trees, made of oak leaves, which people take home from church. In Serbia they are all brown, because it is winter there, but here they are fresh and green.

The schools begin the new year about 7-12 January, and that is the end of the Christmas holidays. The Christmas vacation lasts a little longer. When I was a student, it lasted until the end of February, but since then the academic year seems to have been made extended, and so the students often go back at the end of January to begin the new academic year.

But that is all in the future. Today is the first day of Christmas, and we will go to the Divine Liturgy at St Nicholas at 9:00, and come back to Christmas dinner -- gammon and salads.

But that's one other difference in Christmas since becoming Orthodox. Not only have Easter eggs become far more important, but so have Christmas eggs. Yes, we have traditional Christmas fare of the English-speaking world -- turkey, ham or gammon and so on. We haven't really got into the Romanian custom of slaughtering pigs in the garden yet. But for us the best food of the Christmas season is BEST -- Bacon, Eggs, Sausage and Tomatoes. That is the Christmas fare we most look forward to!

Today is Youth Day -- a public holiday on which we remember the young people who rebelled against apartheid education in 1976, and thereby helped to free the country.

There is a similar public holiday in Greece, called Polytechniou, which commemorates the students who two years earlier, in 1974, rebelled against the military junta that has seized power in 1967, and had also managed to bring down a government. The difference is that in Greece the government fell almost immediately, whereas in South Africa it took another 18 years, and interestingly enough, 1976 fell exactly halfway between the introduction of Bantu Education in 1954 and its official demise.

This year we had an Orthodox youth gathering to mark the occasion. I've described what went on there more fully at the gathering here in the orthodoxy Orthodox community for those who are interested.

Fr Athanasius, Fr Pantelejmon, George Bizos, Fr Athinos

Advocate George Bizos, the well-known human-rights lawyer, and Fr Pantelejmon Jovanovic were the main speakers. George Bizos spoke on the meaning of the day, and Fr Pantelejmon spoke on Orthodox monasticism.

As far as I know this was the first such Orthodox youth gathering in Southern Africa, made possible because the church had acquired a 25 hectare plot at Leeuwenkop, west of Pretoria, with the aim of eventually having a monastery (or two - one male and one female) on the site, as well as a conference centre and a place for holding youth camps, etc. An interesting thing is that this area, between Pretoria and Magaliesberg, is positively infested with church or parachurch youth camps, conference centres and the like. The picture shows Fr Spyridon and Fr Pantelejmon, and gives an idea of the setting, which is quite beautiful, though now, in mid-winter, the grass is brown and many trees are bare, and also there are lots of places blackened with veld fires.

It was quite a schlep to get people there from our congregation in Mamelodi, which is on the other side of the town, to the East, and it was quite a squash with ten of us in the car, but they all seem to have enjoyed themselves.

I've described the occasion in different places from different points of view, and so there is also a post on it in my other blog Notes from underground: Youth day - 2006

The following article used to be on the web page
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/liberal1.htm
but was arbitrarily removed by Yahoo! for reasons best known to themselves. Since there is very little accurate information on the Liberal Party of South Africa on the Web, I'm putting it here as a temporary measure, until it can find a more reliable home.

The Liberal Party of South Africa

The Liberal Party of South Africa was formed in 1953, and fifteen years later was forced to close when the National Party governnment passed the Prohibition of Improper Interference Act, which made non-racial political parties illegal. Another 26 years were to pass before South Africa became, at least on paper, the kind of society the Liberal Party had struggled for, with non-racial free elections, a democratic constitution that entrenched the rule of law, and a bill of rights.

The definitive history of the role of the Liberal Party in the struggle against apartheid is probably Randolph Vigne's Liberals against apartheid (London, MacMillan, 1997, ISBN 0-333-71355-9), but there doesn't seem to be any web page dealing with this topic, so I hope this helps to fill the gap. What follows is something of a personal memoir. I was a member of the Liberal Party towards the end of its life, in Natal, and I write from that point of view. I hope that eventually others will contribute to this story.

Introduction

On 9 May 1953 the Liberal Party of South Africa was formed at a meeting in Cape Town. The meeting was of the South African Liberal Association, which had been formed earlier from diverse groups that had gathered in different centres in South Africa (Vigne 1997:20-21). The National Party had just won its second term of office with an increased majority, which it took as a mandate to press ahead with its policy of apartheid. It set about removing coloured voters from the comon roll, and abolishing the separate representation that the few African voters had had since they had been removed from the common voters' roll in 1936. The Communist Party of South Africa had been banned, and civil liberties had been eroded as the National Party sought to suppress opposition to its policies.

The main centres of the Liberal Party - Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg and Durban - in many ways represented different philosophies, outlooks, views of what was wrong in South Africa, and what needed to be done about it. Vigne (1997) concentrates mainly on the Liberal Party at the national level, and in the old Cape Province. Natal liberalism, however, was somewhat different. The bulk of the party membership was among Zulu-speaking people in the rural areas.
The history of the Liberal Party is divided into two almost equal periods -- 1953-1960, and 1960-1968. Nineteen-sixty was a watershed year for South Africa. The Sharpeville massacre in March 1960 was followed by the banning of the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan-African Congress (PAC), and several other political organisations, a State of Emergency (during which several members of the Liberal Party, as well as those of other organisations, were detained), and a referendum among white voters on whether South Africa should become a republic. The formation of the Progressive Party of South Africa in 1959, with its policy of a qualified franchise, siphoned off the more right-wing white supporters of the Liberal Party, and thereafter the Liberal Party was unequivocal in its electoral policy of "one man, one vote."

What is liberalism? What are liberals?

"Liberal" was, and to some extent still is, something of a dirty word in South Africa. It most frequently appears with the epithet "white", and the stereotype of the "white liberal" is often propagated in the news media. See, for example:

• Article: Triumph of the unwilling liberals
• Article: Are liberals racists?

Such articles are misleading, however. Though most of those at the founding meeting were white, within a few years of its founding most of the members of the Liberal Party were black. For the first few years white members were the dominant influence in the party, mainly because the proceedings at national congresses were in English. But when simultaneous translation equipment began to be used, and conference delegates could speak their minds in whatever language they were most fluent in, this changed.

The main aim of the Liberal Party was to establish a free and democratic non-racial society in South Africa. A free society is one in which people are free from excessive government control. The Liberal Party was explicitly opposed to "all forms of totalitarianism, such as fascism and communism". It was therefore strongly opposed to the oppressive aspects of Nationalist rule, such as detention and banning without trial, and people being deprived of their property of ideological reasons, as when people were deprived of land and houses in the name of apartheid. Pass laws, influx control and similar laws were oppressive and unjust, and represented undesirable government interference in the lives of ordinary citizens.
In a peculiar twist of the meanings of words, many people nowadays, especially in the USA, seem to associate liberalism with "big government". This, however, is the reverse of the truth, and was certainly the opposite of the truth in South Africa. In South Africa the National Party arrogated more and more power to the government and its officials, and systematically removed the legal rights that protected ordinary citizens from the arbitrary abuse of power by officials. It has been rightly said that one of the principles of liberalism is that "the government governs best that governs least". But the Nationalist government in South Africa wanted to govern more and more. New laws kept appearing to remove from the courts the power to question the validity of laws, or to pronounce on the validity of actions that government officials took when using the growing powers that the laws granted them.

Peter Brown, one of the founders of the Liberal Party, and for many years its national chairman, died in June 2004 at the age of 79. The following obituaries have more information:

• Peter Brown - obituary from the Natal Witness
• Obituary from the Mail & Guardian

The archives of the Liberal Party are kept at the Alan Paton Centre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg http://www.library.unp.ac.za/paton

A couple of weeks ago a book turned up that we had put away a few years back for house alterations, "Soldiers, surveyors and selectors", written by Bob Cowley, one of my wife's Australian cousins, on family history. That started me following up some minor family mysteries.

Val's great-great grandfather was Frederick Thomas Green (1829-1876), explorer, trader, elephant hunter, and general in the Herero army. He was one of 15 children of William and Margaret Green, born in Canada, came to the Cape Colony about 1846. But this story concerns his sister, Margaret Agnes Anne Green, known as Agnes.

Agnes was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was 11 when the family moved to the Cape Colony. She married young, to William Wilson, and they went to Australia (New South Wales) about 1853, where their first child, Caroline Wilson, was born in Sydney. They moved south to Kiora, where William was a storekeeper, and drowned in the Tuross River in 1856.

Agnes then married Alfred John Dawson Francis, and had four more children -- the last born about 8 months after he committed suicide in a Sydney boarding house, so it may not have been his. She went off inland to Queanbeyan (now part of Canberra) where she opened a school to earn a living, leaving her youngest child with the McLeod family at Moruya. When she set off she was pregnant with the youngest, and when the school did not provide enough to live on, she left that child with another family, and went to Sydney, where she married William Thwaites, and had four more children by him. She kept all those, but packed off her eldest, Caroline, to her brother Edward in New Zealand. After the birth of her children she married Thwaites again, in Adelaide. Turned out his first wife had been alive at the time of their first "marriage".

The mysteries, however, relate to her first two husbands. No trace has been found of the marriage to William Wilson, or why they went to Australia. Perhaps it was the gold rush, which was going on in that part of NSW at the time (the Moruya or Eurobodalla district, about 300 km south of Sydney).

Her second husband, Alfred John Dawson Francis, is more interesting, because just before this time an Alfred Francis Dawson appeared in Natal with a young wife, and two children too old to have been hers. When the young wife had children, the church register at their baptism had the name Dawson crossed out, and a note to the effect that the real name was Francis. This "Dawson" apparently got into the swing of the social life of the colony, becoming a church warden, being named as the co-resppondent in at least one divorce case, and being quite popular and prominent. Then his wife died in a boating accident, and he disappearted as mysteriously as he had arrived. A Mr Francis left on a ship with two children.

Could he have made is way to Australia and married Agnes Wilson, born Green? Well, perhaps, but the Alfred Dawson Francis in New South Wales appeared to have thought his wife's maiden name was Glasgow, and so did some others who ought to have known better -- Captain E.M. Battye, of the Braidwood Police, who adopted her (then) youngest daughter. But he had known her from childhood in Nova Scotia, and must have known the family name was Green, not Glasgow. And when the daughter grew up and married, he gave her mother's name on the marriage certificate as "Agnes Elliot". So it looks like a cover-up, but a cover up of what?

So the last couple of days I've been playing with this historical puzzle, trying to match dates and places and seeing who was where when.

Today I went to a meeting in a rather posh hotel on the outskirts of Johannesburg.

Gift Moerane, the general secretary of the Gauteng Council of Churches, phoned me the other day, and asked if I could go to a "peer review" meeting. I said I needed to have my bishop's blessing, so asked him to fax the details to the bishop.

The vicar general phoned me and said "Go, and give us a report".

I phoned Gift to tell him I could go, and ask about the meeting, but the people in his office said he'd gone to Namibia and wouldn't be back till next month, but they gave me the time and place of the meeting.

So I arrived at the meeting this morning with very little idea of what was about.

The provincial big wheel for Community Safety and Security, Firoz Cachalia, was there to enlighten us (me and about 12 others). We were a very small cog in a very big wheel of the African Peer Review Mechanism. We represented "the religious sector" in Gauteng, and by next Wednesday we were to produce a draft report evaluating South Africa in the areas of:

1. Democracy and good political governance
   
2. Economic governance and management
   
3. Corporate governance
   
4. Socio-economic development
   

Our draft report will be presented to a meeting of all the "sectors" on 8 Novermber, and after several reviews and revisions and collation with others will be sent off to the National report.

And then he pushed off and left us to it.

Well everyone at the meeting thought they should consult their constiuencies before committing themselves to any statements (by next Wednesday!) So they appointed a small drafting committee, one from each religion represented at the meeting. That meant a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu and a Christian. And the Christian was me.

So that was how I went to a meeting not knowing what it was about, and ended up representing all the Christians in Gauteng in telling the African Union how cool South Africa is (or isn't, as the case may be).

Please pray for me!