Two Roseveare Incidents

Extract

A visitor from South Africa to England is naturally asked many questions, and is equally naturally interested in any comments or reports of African and South African matters in the British press. Two incidents connected with the name of Bishop Roseveare of Ghana last August appear to me very significant.

The first of these is that the Daily Mail front page comment, discussing the expulsion of Bishop Roseveare from Ghana, went on to suggest that it is a pity there were not Ghanaian clergy trained and in positions of sufficient responsibility to make the statement needed. In other words, while someone had to point out to the Ghanaians that some of them were giving quasi-religious cultus to a human being, Dr Nkrumah, it would be far easier for the Ghana administration to hear this from a Ghanaian Bishop. It might indeed be almost impossible for them to accept it from a white man, a member of the colonial power from whose unjust domination (as they see it), they have just been liberated. We ought to hear truth and justice from anybody, and to fail to do so is flatly wrong. But there is the more excuse for the sin or failure, or whatever one is to call it, if the person who tells us the truth appears in some way himself identified with injustice. Not so very long ago a Pan-African Congress in West Africa passed a resolution to the effect that the white-organized Churches had been identified with the powers of exploitation. To expect Africans wholly to dissociate an individual from his people, a truth from the man expressing it, is to expect much.