A Matter of Conscience

When the guns of South Africa's Nationalist police mowed down hundreds of black "rioters" at Sharpeville last March. Richard Ambrose Reeves. 61. Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, rushed to the scene. He talked to the wounded in their hospital beds. Later he announced his findings: none of the rioters had been armed: many had been shot in the back. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's Afrikaner government decided that Bishop Reeves was a threat to South Africa's security. Warned of his impending arrest. the bishop fled to England, started work on a book: Shooting at Sharpeville: The Agony of South Africa. Then Bishop Reeves returned to Johannesburg--but not for long. Forty-two hours after he landed, the bishop was handed a deportation order, and escorted aboard a plane headed for London.

Last week Bishop Reeves asked to be released from the congregation he can no longer serve. Cape Town's Archbishop Joost de Blank, who is as bitter a critic of apartheid as Reeves himself, accepted his resignation. "A sorry day indeed has dawned for a people that claims to be devout and God-fearing," said Archbishop de Blank. "Many will see it as a victory of anti-Christian forces in this country when a man is outlawed for obedience to the Christian Gospel as he sees it."

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