There took place in May the canonization of Martin de Porres, the mulatto, seventeenth-century, Dominican laybrother of Lima. We do not know for certain whether he was, by his coloured mother, of African or of Indian blood; the fact that he was usually called a mulatto, not a mestizo, rather suggests the former, and one may think there is something African about his laughter and gentleness. We do not even know for certain whether he was, technically, a laybrother, or simply a familiaris in the priory; he certainly took vows, but he seems always to have been referred to as a donatus, and the legislation of the Order at the time (for instance at the Chapters of 1580, 1642, and 1647) seems officially to have excluded half-castes from receiving the habit. But these details are of little significance by comparison with what he was in himself. The important thing is that he belonged to the class of the despised and the underprivileged. He was illegitimate, brought up in poverty, a coloured man; he spent his life doing chores. But he overcame all this by the sheer breadth of his charity. The Acts of the General Chapter of 1642, three years after his death set it on record that at his death ‘clergy and people came in great crowds, and kissed his feet and hands with tender devotion’. We know that he died at the moment that the words of the Creed were being sung: Et homo factus est, He became man. That is perhaps the great significance for our time of his long-awaited canonization. He had penetrated to the ultimate humanity of men, past the barriers of pride and cruelty, of oppression and resentment.

A death struggle can also be a struggle for life, a new birth. Perhaps the present crisis is the birth agony of a new world. Let us hope that it is. No one can dare to predict what is about to be born of our confusion, our frenzy, our apocalyptic madness. Certainly the old order is changing, but we do not know what is to come. All we know is that we see the many-crowned and many-headed monsters rising on all sides out of the deep, from the ocean of our own hidden and collective self. We do not understand them, and wecannot. We panic at the very sight of their iridescent scales, their jaws that flame with nuclear fire. But they pursue us relentlessly, even into absurd little caves fitted out with battery radios and hand-operated blowers. We find no security even in the spiritual cave of forgetfulness, the anaesthesia of the human mind that finally shuts out an unbearable truth, and goes about the business of life in torpor and stoical indifference.

And yet the monsters do not have to come to life. They are not yet fully objective like the world around us. They do not have the substance which is given to things by the creative power of God: they are the spiritual emanations of our own sick and sinful being. They exist in and by us. They are from us. They cannot exist without us. They are our illusions. They are nightmares which our incredible technological skill can all too easily actualize. But they are also dreams from which we can awaken before it is too late. They are dreams which we can still, perhaps, choose not to dream.

In this article I want to examine some of the obstacles which stand in the way of mutual understanding between white priests and black people in Southern Africa today. Initially I had intended to discuss the African and the Gospel preached to him in a more impersonal way, in terms of contrasted cultural backgrounds. As will appear, this has not proved possible, for, at least in the Republic of South Africa, the giving and receiving of Christian truth is complicated at every turn less by the cultural inheritance of the giver or the receiver than by the colour of his skin.

Perhaps the chief obstacle to the missionary’s fulfilling his task is his own ignorance. This ignorance may be of the customs and languages of his people: a deficiency which missionaries throughout the world learn to contend with by imaginative hard work. At the same time Southern Africa does present particular difficulties in this matter because the African people themselves, unlike, say, the Chinese in the time of Fr Ricci, do not have a clear cut idea of what their culture is. Under the influence of European civilization the old tribal customs are dissolving or else mixing uneasily with what Europe has brought to Africa, some of it good, some of it very bad. With the best will in the world the missionary will often be perplexed.

The recent publication of his Collected Essays has renewed interest in Orwell’s position as a writer, and especially in his attitude to the artist’s commitments in the world. The writer’s problem, in a time of conflict, according to Orwell, was that ‘one half of him, which in a sense is the whole of him, can act as resolutely, even as violently if need be, as anyone else. But his writings, in so far as they have any value, will always be the product of the saner self that stands aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as to their true nature’. For Raymond Williams (e.g. in The Observer, May 21 1961) this separation, while understandable, is not necessary: ‘it is part of the dissociation between the individual and society which is our deepest crisis’. Elsewhere he points out that any defence of liberty by an exile, as Orwell chose to be, standing apart from society, is bound to be ambiguous because ‘while the rights in question may be called individual, the condition of their guarantee is inevitably social... to belong to a community is to be part of a whole, and, necessarily, to accept, while helping to define its disciplines’. While I agree with this view, I want to argue in this article that the source of Orwell’s dilemma, and indeed of the dissociation in general, has an important but hitherto undiscussed, philosophical aspect—to put it crudely, Cartesian dualism—which manifests itself in Orwell’s treatment of two related problems: the problem of language and the problem of orthodoxy.