The United Nations and Africa: Redefining the UN’s role in Africa for the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

My relatively wide experience of sub-Saharan Africa has essentially been as a practitioner rather than an academic. I first sailed from Southampton to Africa in October 1961 in order to work for thirteen months as a lay personal assistant to Archbishop Joost de Blank of Cape Town. During that period I was able to witness, study and live under the horrendous system of apartheid but I also made many enduring friendships with people of all races who, in their different ways, were either living within the system or actively opposing it. The Archbishop was very much a leading mouthpiece of opposition, who did a great deal to make the Anglican Church in South Africa (of which he was the leader), other denominations and the Church overseas face the realities of what was, in essence, a neo-Nazi philosophy of racial domination by a minority who adopted over 200 Acts of Parliament in the essentially Whites-only legislature which were of a directly discriminatory nature.