By Mary Garnett
Sovereign World International. 140 pages. £6.99
ISBN 978-1-85240-254-9
Available from http://www.sovereignworld.com
This book is most appropriately subtitled ‘The life story of William Duma, a man who lived in agreement with the Holy Spirit’. It has been edited, in the interests of a slightly more racy style, from a book originally published about July 1979 by the South African Baptist Missionary Society. After passing through many reprints in South Africa, it is now available from an organisation called Christian Booksellers in East London after the original publisher folded. The author’s real name is Joan Goddard, and she is the daughter of a Congregational minister in South Africa.
William Duma was the Zulu pastor of the Umgeni Road Baptist Church, a multi-ethnic congregation which met, during the days of apartheid, in a concrete and corrugated iron structure in a low-income district in Durban. He became renowned throughout many parts of the world for both his Christ-likeness and his healing ministry. He died in McCord’s Hospital on October 8 1977. It is evidently God’s plan that Duma’s life and work should become accessible to Christians of today; credit is due to Sovereign World International for this initiative.
Just recently, one Sunday, I was invited to share lunch at a friend’s house and found myself sitting next to a South African lady. I asked her which part of the Republic she came from and she said Durban. ‘Have you heard of William Duma?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘People still talk about him. In fact, he died in my husband’s hospital’. It turned out that her husband actually ran McCord’s. ‘The book refers to two instances of people being raised from the dead’, I ventured. ‘Yes’, she said. ‘Remarkable healings took place under his ministry.’
Back at work on Tuesday, I showed a copy of the book to a clinical psychologist, who had been a well-known anti-apartheid activist in South Africa. Mentioning that Duma died in a hospital which had been for Zulus, she immediately said: ‘Ah, yes! McCord’s.’ ‘It’s an interesting book’, I commented somewhat weakly. Her reply was enthusiastic: ‘I’ll bet it is!’ She was so gripped by it that she found it difficult to concentrate on something one of her colleagues was trying to tell her. Not surprisingly, I gave her the book.
It is difficult to know where to begin in reviewing such a book. I found it difficult to keep tears from my eyes. I kept wanting to put it down so that I could pray, yet I found it equally hard actually to put it down. As soon as I could, I ordered 20 copies from the publisher to distribute to friends - believers and unbelievers alike.
I suppose what stands out for me especially was Duma’s close attention to the Holy Spirit’s guidance as to how to handle each difficult, often humanly impossible, situation in his ministry. Essentially, the book is a manifesto of normal Christianity. The documented supernatural manifestations are many and have a ring of authenticity which was attested at the time by people from a wide variety of church backgrounds. By contrast, most of what happens today seems sub-standard.
There is much in this account that runs counter to the over-cerebral approach to Christianity so prevalent in today’s British evangelicalism. Yet Duma was neither Pentecostal nor charismatic and there is also a great deal to challenge much of the superficiality in the present-day charismatic movement. As ever, the people best placed to mount this challenge are always those, like Duma, who have experienced the genuine article.
