Obituary: Jonty Driver – anti-apartheid campaigner, educationalist and writer

Among the heroes of the struggle to defeat apartheid, many stood tall but none perhaps physically taller than CJ Driver, known to many as Jonty. 

Born in Cape Town as the Second World War began, he emerged from a childhood in Kroonstad then Cradock and finally Grahamstown (now Makhanda) a giant at nearly 6 foot 4 inches. In three distinct yet interwoven spheres – political activism, education and writing – he towered above many of his contemporaries in terms of insight and achievement on any reading of his rich life. But though an imposing figure, who could be extremely direct and assertive in decision-making, he was the gentlest and kindest of souls. 

His father, an Anglican priest as had been his grandfather before him, nurtured in him a strong sense of justice, a passion for the development of young minds, hearts, and bodies. Even at sixty Jonty was still to be found “flailing”, as his distinct running style was called, around a school playing field. He also had deep literary interests which he shared with his sister Dorothy, professor of English successively at UCT and Adelaide University, and her husband, the Nobel Literature Laureate, JM Coetzee. 

Schooling at St Andrew’s College Grahamstown, with its traditional combination of muscular Anglicanism and Scottish-style military marching band, would one day find obvious fulfilment and echo in his leadership of Wellington College, where the sons and more recently daughters of the military continue to be shaped by the same vigorously Anglican spirit of self-sacrifice and service. 

In Jonty, one of the most reflective people one could meet, the first opportunity to deploy these in leadership terms came through his engagement at UCT with the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) of which he became President in 1963-64. 

It is easily forgotten, at this distance, quite how pivotal was the role of student leadership at this point in the anti-apartheid struggle. The ANC leadership was either in exile or in the process of being sentenced to long stints in prison. It was natural then that students should fill the gap in leadership opened up by this situation. Articulate, charming and handsome, as well as tall, Jonty was exactly the right man in the right place at the right time. He already had a shrewd sense of how institutions functioned. This was later to make him a revolutionary headmaster at three successive schools: Berkhamsted, The Island School, Hong Kong, and Wellington College. He exuded that combination of natural authority and a thoughtful ability to listen and engage which made people want to follow him. He needed all these emerging qualities since he found himself at the centre of a series of very tricky cross-currents.

uMkhonto we Sizwe – MK, the ANC’s armed wing – had been exiled or gone underground. The question of whether to advocate armed or passive resistance filled the late-night conversations of students. Driver found himself on the edge of a group of students who were certainly members of the African Resistance Movement (ARM). His predecessor as president, Adrian Leftwich, was one of these. He had recruited many students to the ARM and they had undertaken acts of sabotage, including the Johannesburg railway station bombing by John Harris about which Jonty would later write a short memoir. NUSAS had always been against violent resistance. But when Leftwich was arrested and broke under interrogation, out tumbled the names of many a NUSAS student, including that of Jonty, not a member of ARM, who was to spend a month in solitary confinement in the cells at Sea Point following his arrest. 

Though never charged, this most formative and traumatic of experiences was to send him into an exile in the United Kingdom where for some years. His South African passport having been withdrawn, he was to be a stateless person. In the cells of Sea Point, he was accompanied by the beauty of the King James Version of the Bible. The then Archbishop of Cape Town, Robert Selby-Taylor was prevented when he visited Jonty from leaving with him the concordance that Jonty opined “would have made the theology easier to grasp”. This terrifyingly isolating time for Jonty was nonetheless filled with a degree of creative possibility, the sheer beauty of language, on which the rest of his life was so richly to make good. 

Crucial mentors or supporters came at just the right time for Jonty, a role he was subsequently to play for so many himself. Once released from the cells he was swiftly to find himself in possession of an air ticket to England. Through the offices of Robert Birley, the former headmaster of Eton who had been a professor at Wits University and aware of Jonty’s situation, not least the fact that Jonty’s father had died just before his arrest and detainment, he was offered a job at Sevenoaks School. 

Schoolmastering, as it would then have been called, was an obvious choice for Driver. His father had been a much-loved chaplain at St Andrew‘s College. Jonty had all the qualities that would make for a great teacher. Initially Sevenoaks was but a springboard however to Trinity College, Oxford where Driver undertook the degree of Master of Philosophy. But if he thought of pursuing a career in academia, this thought soon gave way to a consistent call to the classroom and to the shaping of institutions that in turn make possible the shaping of citizens with a strong sense of service and social justice. 

Stints at several schools, including at a comprehensive school on Humberside, saw Driver honing his craft as a teacher but also, as he married and became a father, seeking to make sense of the complex feelings of exile which were never quite to leave him, and which were woven into the fabric of his emerging writing. Initially, there was a volume of poetry shared with the distinguished South African poet and novelist, Jack Cope. This was followed by four novels, developing themes that came directly from his South African context and were well received by the critics (they remain in print as Faber Finds). This must have proved somewhat cathartic for him. They established a distinctive, formalist voice in their use of language and structures, a formalism that was to be a hallmark. Time at the University of York made possible the development of this voice and also his excellent biography of Patrick Duncan, the famous opponent of apartheid. 

If these works helped to establish a distinctive and nuanced voice, the obvious preoccupation with the context he had been forced to leave and from which he felt so strongly an exile was only to give way to a less obvious yearning for home. The preoccupations of headmasterly office, to which he brought a combination of brisk decisiveness, immense compassion, old fashioned straight forwardness, and strategic insightfulness together with a complete change of context to Hong Kong, produced a set of Hong Kong portraits that rooted him compellingly in the place and with the people he was then most immediately experiencing. It was as if only now could he find an identity in a holistic sense beyond that which he had forsaken. 

Novels had already given way to poetry. No doubt the pressures of time were too great amidst the strains of the headmaster’s study with its relentlessly quick-fire decisions. As the 1990s dawned and he made his final move in head-mastering terms to Wellington, he did so at a time when the South Africa he had so painfully left was changing rapidly, and at a point when he had mastered all the poetic forms that he was to deploy so memorably for the rest of his life. 

The advent of democracy made possible a return to the nation that had retained his name on a list of banned persons until the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC and other anti-apartheid organisations made return possible. In response to this completion of what was almost a biblical trajectory of departure and return for so many, he wrote voraciously, not simply evoking but immersing himself anew in the landscape that had been such a crucial part of his hinterland from his earliest years and which was now singing a song of freedom for him and his contemporaries not one of persistent misery and injustice. This all elicited his very best poetry. Whether in freer form iambic pentameter or sonnet or haiku, he achieved an ebullience on the one hand and a poignancy on the other that made his one of the most compelling voices writing in English in the period since the end of apartheid. 

So-called retirement from Wellington at sixty saw a veritable Indian summer in writing. A fifth and final novel, a memoir about the schools he had served and shaped memoirs of an historical kind, one for Granta prompted by a photograph of his friends in the 1960s or, most recently, by the obvious debt he felt to Robert Birley. 

To the last years at Wellington belonged perhaps one of his finest works, Requiem, a beautiful sequence of poems in which some of his most consistent themes, memory and exile, the power of family and the landscape among them, found consummate expression. 

It was really through this sequence of poems that I came to know Jonty well. We had met through a shared love of haiku. He had been perhaps over-generous in writing about my own attempts at the genre. He never of course lost the teacher’s desire to encourage nor the ability to do so. But when I read Requiem for the first time I saw the chance to do something creative with it. Jonty had explained that Brahms’ German Requiem, a much more “secular” requiem than the liturgical texts usually set, had been the inspiration for him. It seemed obvious to me to wrap music around the poetry. So I asked the cellist Guy Johnston, then a recent winner of BBC Young Musician of the Year, to weave a Bach cello suite “around” Jonty’s poetry. It was one of those happenstances in response to which you could hear a pin drop, as an entranced congregation of hundreds in Westminster Abbey one Sunday evening paid rapt attention to both music and text, and found in them a depth of spiritual encounter that was as moving for them as for the author and Ann, his wife of almost fifty years to whom he was so devoted. When, later, I suggested that Jonty himself be asked to read lines of Shakespeare at the conclusion of the Thanksgiving Service for the life of Nelson Mandela in the Abbey, he was both thrilled, honoured, and humbled. 

These experiences bound us together. We repeated the Bach-Driver combination several times, Jonty reading Requiem himself one Good Friday when it represented an imaginative reworking of the middle hour of a traditional Three Hours’ Devotion.

In one of those inexplicable coincidences that life throws up, I had reached for my copy of Requiem and was halfway through reading it when I learned of Jonty’s death. The stanza I had just read could not have been more apposite:

One shouldn’t feel sad for this kind of end,
But I mourn his passing, and miss his friendship,
The funny letters on ballet and books,
And the straight talking. Amen, old friend. Amen. 

CJ Driver will be missed by so many for a rare combination of straight talking, deep learning, and transforming friendship. Through it all, he offered a distinctive and rare example of the very best sort of leadership, the kind you cannot learn from books but is engraved in flesh. His passing surely prompts us to give great thanks for this and to hope for political and educational leaders who also possess such courage, insight, and grace. Amen, old friend. 

Chris Chivers was formerly precentor of St George’s Cathedral, Cape Town and Westminster Abbey. He now teaches religion and philosophy at UCL Academy, London.