Steve de Gruchy—In Memoriam

On the 21st of February, 2010, Steve de Gruchy, Professor and Head of the School of Religion and Theology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Pietermaritzburg campus, Editorial Board member of Practical Matters, Editor of the Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, and an ordained minister in the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa, took a much welcomed break with his wife, Marian, daughter, Kate, and son, David. They were to go tubing on the Mooi River from the home of a close colleague who knew they needed fun time together. Steve’s eldest daughter, Thea, had just moved into residence at the Durban campus and could not join them.

On a glorious Sunday before lunch, the four of them took off down the river. Eventually, at some rapids, Marian and Kate pulled out and walked home, nervous of the conditions. David ran the rapids and came back. Steve decided to go with him on a second run (“if you can do it, so can I”)—without a life jacket, a typically adventurous and risky South African spirit. And normally it would have been fine.

But it was not. Steve fell off, losing his tube. Briefly able to stand in the current, he saw David gather it and, intending to swim to the bank and climb out, waved to him and shouted: “I’ll be OK; keep going!” He was not seen alive again.

“Steve lost in a river,” wrote Paul Germond, his long-standing best friend, to me and others in the African Religious Health Assets Programme. For the last seven years Steve worked closely and pivotally with this highly creative group of friends and colleagues, a task into which I first drew him and Paul one hot December day sitting in a tin boat on the river at Vermaaklikheid, Steve’s family holiday home not too far from Cape Town. That work is now known at the highest levels of public health and in many parts of Africa and elsewhere, along with the major contributions from Steve, including the inspiration for a set of tools now known and used around the world, which, typically teasingly, he called “piranha.”

It began on a river and, for Steve, it ended in a river. A great pain, an enormous loss. Many words have since been said, but so few can be said. That, in itself, expresses the shock and the devastation, the limits of our language: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden…”[1]

My history with Steve goes back even further. I have known him since, as a mid-teenager, he became a member of an odd ecumenical youth group I set up as Youth Pastor at Rondebosch Congregational Church in 1976. That group already framed the kind of openness, sensitivity to diversity, and embrace of difference that marked Steve’s adult life: with him in the group were a budding artist, more Buddhist in thinking than agnostic, later collections manager and an exhibited artist at the National Gallery in Cape Town; a young Muslim man, since an acclaimed human rights journalist and writer; a young woman, now a leading television journalist, to whom he was briefly married and through whose Italian roots he was also able to meet grand old men and women of the resistance to Mussolini and Hitler.

However small, this was an important piece of history in Steve’s unfolding commitments and passions, and eventually he took creative leadership of the group, writing songs and liturgies that were used for years after and contributing more widely to the Congregational Church youth ministry in southern Africa. That too is typical of Steve. Connection. Belonging and Connection. And giving other people agency in the process. Making them, in a way, his heirs—blessing them and their gifts and life, helping them grow and know.

In the youth group, which also had some connection through me to the anti-Apartheid Christian Institute of South Africa (later banned by the state) led by Dominee Beyers Naudé and the Reverend Theo Kotze, as well as through the witness of his renowned father, John, Steve swam in the waters of the struggle for freedom, justice, and comprehensive well-being for all. Here, in a racially defined and deliberately and systematically fractured society, we talked of the irrevocable dignity of all (Biko), of Christ the Centre and Life Together (Bonhoeffer), and of the theological meaning of hope (Moltmann).

Words, so many words . . . But Steve tried to live them, with such energy, creativity, and innovation that he will, in this generation in South Africa, be impossible to replace—tragically, just when we need it most once more.

During his student years at the University of Cape Town, Steve was on the Student Representative Council, active in the student anti-apartheid movement, a signatory to the Kairos Document, and a Conscientious Objector to military service. Over time, he served as a chaplain at Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town, minister of Gleemoor Congregational Church in the suburb of Athlone (1987-94), and Director of the Moffat Mission Trust in Kuruman, Northern Cape (1994-2000), the historic mission station where Robert Moffat and David Livingstone were based and where the first Bible was printed in Africa.

One-time editor of the Congregational Chronicle, a member of the Kairos Task Force on Transformation, the Theological Commission, and the Training for Ministry Committee, he was deeply involved in his denominational life. So, too, in ecumenical life: with the World Council of Churches’ Justice, Peace, and Creation team; the World Alliance of Reformed Churches; the Council for World Mission; the International Congregational Fellowship; and the Church Unity Commission in South Africa. He wrote on the social history of Christianity in South Africa, theology and development, and religion and public health. There are too many contributions for which Steve was known to people in many parts of the world to cover here.

To give some sense of the impact of his work and person, let me mention his vital part in the African Religious Health Assets Programme, including its research in Zambia and Lesotho commissioned by and carried out for the World Health Organization. He was a key inventor of the set of participatory research tools for mapping and assessing religious health assets that are now being used on at least three continents. On hearing of his death, the Reverend Canon Ted Karpf, Partnerships Officer in the Office of the Secretary General of the WHO, wrote:

On behalf of friends and collaborators in Geneva at the World Health Organization, I can only say that the pioneering efforts of the ARHAP team, of which Steve was a crucial part, have moved the global health systems debate to a higher and more accountable level which can be shared by more people worldwide. The evidence presented by the WHO-ARHAP study has changed the way global health is viewed and understood by many, including health ministries around the world. Steve’s personal charisma and vision, which informed this work, has touched all of us in deeply personal ways over the years. There is no replacing his work and what he has meant to each of us and to the many institutions in which we serve.[2]

Or, as our Camerounian colleague, Prof Elias Bongmba of Rice University, Texas, put it: “The South African academy, the faith community, and Africa as a whole have lost one of their most articulate and erudite voices on justice.”[3]

Steve, of course, was also entirely human. Over time he had become increasingly exhausted by the responsibilities he kept taking on. He had little capacity to say “no” to anything that offered him another chance to act, to engage, to make an impact, to do something to make a difference. And life itself was like that for him. One often tried to rescue him from this, though I suspect no one ultimately could and, in part, it was living his life in this way—to the full, uninhibited, unafraid, ready to risk, to take on more—that cost him his life. What great irony. But Steve could not have done otherwise. Just as he thrust himself into the turbulence of that river, so he thrust himself into the turbulence of life; and he embraced it.

And he usually did so with a great sense of irony and humor. A practical joker, an imp, he regularly challenged the pretensions of others or just pulled a leg, and many people will remember Steve precisely because he brought humbling laughter and celebratory fun into their lives. He was a gift. The gift remains. And the seeds he helped sow will be nurtured by many.

In great sadness and grief, but in the spirit of Steve, seeking a way of bidding farewell for which there are so few adequate words, we might again turn to T. S. Eliot:

‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.[4]

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.[5]

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.[6]

Steve, having lived a full and rich life, is now our ancestor. As such, he makes a demand on us. As Tinyiko Maluleke, Professor and Director of Research at the University of South Africa, reminded us,we might take Steve’s gesture to his son David as our own: “I’ll be OK; you keep going!”[7]

Or, as I would put it to myself and to others: “Mourn as you must; but now live as you should!”

Photo by Adam Jones, “Sculpture of Woman Mourning,” CC BY-SA 2.0