New Era

WINDHOEK – Colin Winter became the Anglican Bishop in Namibia in exile until his death, a status bestowed upon him for his fearless rejection of the apartheid system.

Colin Winter was born in 1928 in Stoke-on-Trent, England, as the youngest of five children to working class parents.

His mother, a nurse albeit not well educated, was an Irish immigrant. His father worked as a hosier in Liverpool.

In his autobiography, Winter recalls his early childhood growing up during the Great Depression, playing in tough back streets of Potteries.

The formative influences of that time were his mother, a woman of great compassion and humour. The other influence was the Christian brothers in his Roman Catholic School. The third was his oldest brother who would become an Anglican priest, and who coaxed Winter into the church when, as he put it, he was “hovering on the brink of atheism”.

His brother’s influence led him to pacifism, and a strong belief in non-violence.

From 1946 to 1948, Winter trained in athletics and gymnastics at Loughborough College, and by the age of 19, he began to attend daily Mass.

After his first term at Loughborough, he had to register for conscription in one of the British armed forces. Instead, he registered as a conscientious objector.

In 1956, he was ordained as an Anglican priest. On arrival in Cape Town, South Africa, he served as a rector of a parish near Cape Town from 1959 to 1964. He then moved to Windhoek where he was a priest at the St George’s Cathedral until 1969.

During a time when even churches were segregated, Winter’s ministry soon widened through his daily contacts with black people.

On October 12, 1968, Winter was elected bishop of the Anglican church, with the vote for this position being swung by the congregation from northern Namibia. He was consecrated on November 17 that year in St Paul’s church in Durban, South Africa.

Also in 1968, Winter served in the former Damaraland, a job made difficult by racist sentiments from the South African head church.

“Damaraland faced crisis after crisis due to a lack of regular funding,” he wrote, and sardonically observed, “We had been quietly pushed into independence as a diocese by the rest of the church in South Africa and left virtually to go it alone.”

His predecessor, a Bishop Mize, was deported presumably because he had brought in American priests to the diocese, and had ordained “more Africans than ever before in our history”, opened schools and churches, and succeeded in affecting legislation giving the church its elected synod.

Winter saw his role as keeping the church united.

“If the church had a reconciling role in Namibian society, it would have been sheer foolhardiness to have split off the north from the rest and particularly at that time,” he wrote.

Another task he saw for the church was to, as he put it, “break out of the laager of silence and complicity in which it was hiding from a State which had forced it to retreat”.

These ideas put him under constant threat of the apartheid State, as well as putting a strain on the church’s activities.

Winter and his co-workers made a deliberate and conscious choice to work as part of a freedom struggle from which they could not retreat.

At the 1971 synod, people voiced more vociferously than ever the appeal for racial harmony.

“Here, in fact,” he wrote, “was the church talking about real living issues and, though facing the distinct prospect of persecution, being neither daunted nor cowed in her task.”

But, he said, the synod did more than that. It rejected policies of apartheid, and produced its own freedom charter, which outright condemned apartheid rule, and emerged with democratically elected representatives.

In December 1971, more than 13 000 Namibian workers, mostly contract labourers from the former Ovamboland, went on strike in mines, factories, farms, offices, and railway yards.

By December that year, wrote Winter, Katutura was “hemmed in with a cordon of police armed with guns, batons and riot vehicles”.

An array of churches came out in support of the strikers, liaised with international media, and arranged defences in court.

In 1972, Winter decided to go to the former Ovamboland, which de described as appearing like an occupied territory. He travelled to Oshandi for the first seminary, proceeded to Onamanama where one of the strongest Anglican churches was located.

Here, Winter gave a sermon and when he came out of the building, he witnessed South African trucks carrying troops on their way to Epinga, who he thought were responsible for Ovamboland’s own bloody Sunday in which six people were shot and killed on January 30, 1972.

Sickened by this event, Winter called for a full-scale investigation while the Pretoria regime imposed a blanket silence on the incident. In February 1972, Winter released a report to the world press in which he recounted the shootings.

That same year, Winter, alongside his assistants David de Beer and Reverent Stephen Hayes, were deported to England in terms of the Undesirables Removal Proclamation of 1920.

After he left, the Anglican Church made a decision that Winter remain as its bishop even while being exiled from Namibia.

During his years of banishment from Namibia, Winter travelled the world to petition on behalf of the people of the country at the United Nations and elsewhere.

He also set up two centres for southern African refugees in England, and wrote books about his experience in the region.

Winter died of a heart attack in England in November 1981.

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