Peter Everington gave this talk to the Faith in Leadership course at Lambeth Palace, London, on 5 Nov 2008.
As you will know, the main issue in Sudan has been the relationship between the Arab Muslim North and the African South which is part Christian, part African religions. In 52 years of Sudan’s independence there have been 30 years of warfare between North and South.
Among the Sudanese involved in statecraft whom I have known as close friends are:
- a Muslim from a famous family who, at the age of 26, prevented a massacre in the capital by heeding what he calls the guidance of God.
- a South Sudanese politician who overcame his hatred of the Arab North, out of a sense of his own need for forgiveness. His key thoughts helped frame the peace settlement that ended Sudan’s first civil war.
- a North Sudanese, Director of the Ministry of Labour, who wrote the national Five Year Plan after that peace, with a special chapter on the rights and role of the South, out of conviction that the North needed to atone for slavery.
- a South Sudanese guerrilla commander who fought the central Government for nine years, then turned to his Christian tradition and to peace. Later he became Vice-President of the country, then Ambassador to the UN in New York. Over a period of 14 years with Initiatives of Change he took his experience of post-conflict reconstruction to Cambodia, Pakistan, India, Zimbabwe, Kenya, South Africa, Cameroon, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and frequently to the international centre for reconciliation in Caux, Switzerland.
In the time for comment and question you are very welcome to ask about these people and the context of their statecraft. I have been asked to talk for a few minutes first about how I got into the Sudan picture. People sometimes ask how it is that I can still speak fairly fluent Arabic. I reply with a theory – that the thing we do with enthusiasm in our twenties stays with us for life. I believe many of you are in your twenties. So I shall be interested to know what you are enthusiastic about.
When I was 20 I was enthusiastic about cricket, travel, the church, my career, my country, the world situation, and finding the right girl to marry. But how all this could come together I couldn’t see. If you haven’t already found it, I wish for each of you a sense of purpose that brings together your faith, brains, energy, imagination, emotions and world view, in a clear vision of your life work.
I started to find that clear purpose at a little school in County Down, Northern Ireland, where I took a job for the summer term. I was filling in time between my National Service with the Army in Hong Kong and starting at Cambridge. Among other duties I was the Assistant Cricket Master, and I found myself sharing rooms with the Cricket Master, a cheerful Irishman from Tipperary.
I tried to impress him with my Christian record but he saw I was all mixed up and wasn’t fooled. He put it to me that if I wanted to change the world I could start with myself; I could pray to know God’s will, then listen in silence for thoughts that might come to me. I found this very embarrassing and it didn’t seem to work. So he suggested I do what he’d done: write absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love on separate pieces of paper, and check my record on each. This was even more embarrassing. A flood of thoughts came, showing I’d been a phony kind of Christian. I was particularly ashamed about my domineering attitude to a younger relation. God spoke to me clearly about this and other wrongs, how to say sorry, put them right and start a new life.
At Cambridge I fell in with other people committed to living this way. One of them gave me another useful thought: ‘As I am so is my nation’. It seemed to me (as it still does) that the UK has done some good things in the world and sent out some good people. But too often, like me with my relation, we have been domineering towards less advantaged peoples. I saw that we as a country could become a servant and a friend of countries where we had been a master. In expressing this, I developed close friendships with people of other races and religions for the first time. One of them was an Egyptian law student.
This was the 1950s, the great decade of struggle for African independence, also the decade of a poisonous relationship between Britain and Egypt. In November 1956, as you’ll know, Britain invaded Egypt – still the most shameful act in our history since World War Two, in my opinion, though there were wrongs on the other side too.
As a student I felt desperate about this situation. I couldn’t sleep. There was nothing I could say to my Egyptian friend. And what about my career? I’d done two years of Greek and Latin and was set to change to Theology for my final year, hoping to become a clergyman in the Church of England, but here I was, burning with anguish about the Middle East.
Someone then gave me a new angle on career. You can either say, “I have a plan for my career, and God has a part in helping me fulfil it”, or you can say, “God has a plan for the world, and I have a part in helping him fulfil it.”
Deciding to try the second option, I went away by myself with pen and paper and asked God to show me his plan and my part. We’ll all get different answers to that question. Mine was: “God wants a bridge of trust built between Britain and the Arab peoples. Your part is to study Arabic and go where British people are still wanted to serve in those countries.” As we go on in life, we may get a fuller picture of God’s plan and an expansion of our part. But for me that moment when I switched to Arabic was when faith, the world, and career first came together in an enthusiasm, a calling that through ups and downs has held me ever since.
Within a year I had completed the preliminary Arabic course at Cambridge and landed in Khartoum, with a contract to teach English in Government secondary schools for five years. I stayed a further three as a college lecturer, and since then I’ve made twenty return visits to Sudan. In my thirties a Scottish lady said yes to my proposal of marriage, and we share this calling. As well as Sudan we’ve been together in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, Iran and Malaysia with Initiatives of Change. In Egypt we always see the Egyptian lawyer I first knew at Cambridge fifty years ago.
Coming back to ‘Faith in Leadership’, when I started in Port Sudan Boys Secondary School at the age of 23, an inexperienced teacher, ignorant about the country, I didn’t feel I had anything to say about statecraft. But a strange thought came to me in a ‘quiet time’, the time of early morning prayer and listening to the inner voice: I was meant to be a statesman as well as a schoolmaster. I interpreted this as a duty to live into the joys and sorrows of the country, and to be open towards people in government as they might need encouragement like anyone else.
Meanwhile there was much to learn in those early years: how a Christian should relate to Muslims; the different ideologies at work in Sudan – Arab nationalism, South Sudanese nationalism, Communism, Islamism, and Sufism. Also how to live sensibly in that hot climate, and how to be a good teacher. Many blunders along the way, but that’s part of how we learn, isn’t it.
English