Bishop Ambrose Reeves: Secretly Deported for Opposing Apartheid

Richard Ambrose Reeves became Bishop of Johannesburg in 1949, a year after the National Party formalized apartheid as state policy, and spent the following decade turning the pulpit into a platform against it. English-born and consecrated in 1949 as the diocese’s third bishop, Reeves used sermons, pastoral letters, and public statements to attack pass laws, forced removals, and the broader machinery of racial segregation at a time when few white clergy in South Africa were willing to do so publicly. That record put him on a collision course with the state well before the event that finally forced his exit.

On March 21, 1960, police opened fire on a crowd protesting the pass laws in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 people and wounding over 180 more, most shot in the back as they fled. Reeves was among the first public figures to travel to Sharpeville in the massacre’s immediate aftermath, gathering testimony and viewing the dead and wounded firsthand, and he became one of the government’s most persistent domestic critics over what followed: a declared state of emergency, mass detentions, and the banning of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress. He set his account and analysis of events down in a book published later that year, “Shooting at Sharpeville: The Agony of South Africa,” which argued the massacre was the predictable outcome of a system built on institutionalized racial violence rather than an isolated failure of policing.

South Africa’s government treated Reeves as enough of a threat that it moved against him directly. He briefly left the country following Sharpeville, but returned to resume his duties, only to be secretly deported on September 12, 1960. Accounts of the deportation describe an operation designed to avoid public attention: Reeves was reportedly brought aboard a London-bound flight from Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport while it was still in a hangar, with his seat on the passenger manifest marked occupied but left blank of any name, before the aircraft was moved to the terminal for ordinary boarding. The deportation effectively ended his tenure as bishop; he formally resigned the post the following March, having governed his diocese in absentia for the intervening months.

Reeves’s public opposition to apartheid is often remembered in South Africa alongside a stark contemporary counterpoint: Adriaan Burger, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, the denomination whose theologians supplied apartheid’s principal religious justification, teaching that racial separation reflected God’s ordained order. The pairing of the two clergymen, one an Anglican bishop expelled for his opposition, the other a Reformed minister defending the system from the same pulpit tradition that had once produced South Africa’s abolitionist missionaries, captured how thoroughly organized Christianity in South Africa split along the apartheid divide. Reeves spent his remaining two decades in exile continuing the fight, serving as president of the London-based Anti-Apartheid Movement from 1970 until his death in 1980, a role that kept him engaged in the international campaign against the system that had forced him out of the country he had made his home.