And Tim died. And the Church in Carlisle Street, called Bethesda Temple, was packed with mourners attending the funeral service. Black and White, off-white and brown, Indian, African, Coloured and European; Hindu and Jew, Christian and Muslim, believer and unbeliever. The large FOSA Family was grieving over the loss of one of its most loved members, and when members of FOSA gather together, they are persons, people, not members of this race or of that group; they are individuals working together for the common good, each having his own religious convictions, the members often differing widely in their political affiliations.
FOSA—the Friends of the Sick Association—is more than an anti-TB organisation; more than just a welfare agency, although it has for thirty-three years, been both these with a vigour and a steadfastness that earned it the support and the affection of the community. As I say, FOSA is these things but it is also so much more. In a sense, banded together though they were in a desire to do welfare work, the Fosa-ites began, thirteen years before the Liberal Party was formed, to live a life together which completely ignored the barriers of race and which made of differing religious beliefs not barriers but bonds.
The Friends of the Sick Association was itself first constituted as a sub-committee of the Society of Servants in South Africa which in turn had been founded here by Harold Satchell on the lines of Srinivasa Sastri’s famous Servants of India Society. Harold Satchell was the English-born, India-trained Anglican priest about whom more anon, but first something about the Servants. Into this essentially atavistic, self-satisfied though searching and not self-seeking group , a medical doctor named Arthur Copley dropped a hand-grenade. The year was 1941, when South Africa, led by that great democrat Jan Christiaan Smuts, had thrown in his lot to save democracy and to fight the purveyor of the Aryan herrenvolk racism. The fact that like South Africa’s choicest fruit, Smuts was mainly for export was however well known to the people of South Africa, to those who actually practised herrenvolk racism here as well as those who suffered from it. For that was the time of the great anti-Indian agitation in Natal, led by that great adherent of British fair play and justice, Colonel C. F. Stallard, leader of the Dominion Party who was ably helped along by that exquisitely fair minded journalist, Mervyn Ellis, Editor of ”The Natal Mercury”.
•That was the time when Durban’s Town Clerk, one John Mclntyre would have liked to see “all the bloody coolies lined up on their damned Indian ocean and shot down like the rats they are”. • •This was a semi-religious organisation much impressed by the Early Christians and the scholarship of the Hindu philosophers and by Reverend C. M. Doke and by Mahatma Gandhi. • •They regularly gave discourses to each other, and spent many hours in contemplation and in meditation over similarities in the ancient Jewish and the ancient Hindu religious writings. • •Sometimes they would giggle over something one or other would say, over the exhibitionist self-flagellation of Hindu sadhus, and at the next session they would spend hours on anguish-sharing searchings with St. Augustine in his spiritual fire-walking. • •Their library, for their Society boasted a well-stocked one, had among its several hundreds of books, well-thumbed copies of the Rig-Veda, and the Artharva Veda as well as the Upanisads in addition to the usual works found in the libraries of such men. • •Anti-Indian agitation was so rife, that valiant attempts by Edgar Brookes and by Maurice Webb and by Dennis Shepstone, to reason with the Whites proved of little use.
And brave forays by Paul Sykes often into the heart of the hostile tribes of the English, exposed him, who never learned to like curry, to the label of “curry-lover”, said with all the sexual overtones as when “nigger lover” is spat out. To all this, General Smuts, being the great democrat that he was, naturally responded with the Pegging Act, which was the forerunner of the Group Areas Act. Into this miasma of racial prejudice Dr Arthur Copley threw his little bomb. So great was the death-rate from Tuberculosis among Durban Indians, he said, that in 15 years, the Indian Menace would have been taken care of, for unless something was done urgently to halt the spread of TB, there would be no Indians left. The Servants were shocked into action, for as Harold Satchell, the Anglican priest was wont to say, quoting Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita, ” in the right cause, there must be action”. The action taken was to form a sub-committee of the Society of Servants, the task of which was to take steps to bring about Community Action to prevent the spread of TB. The sub-committee consisted of five people, and it was called “Friends of the Sick.” And notwithstanding the five of Cleisthene’s Ebors or the penchant for paanch or panchayat among the Hindus, there was no magical or other significance in the number five; this was pure coincidence. But what was of the greatest interest is that these five were in a way representative (if not wholly then largely) of South Africa.
