A Prophet with Honor

by William C. Martin

  Early in 1960, Graham embarked on an eight-week, sixteen-city tour of eleven African countries, adding a fifth continent to his career itinerary. This tour, chronicled in Safari for Souls, a Graham-sanctioned book by a South Carolina newspaper reporter and captured on film in a World Wide Pictures documentary, was notable in that it aroused in Graham a keen awareness of the need and potential for an Evangelical witness in Africa. At the same time, he seems to have sensed that he was not ideally suited to be the point man for any such attempt. Over the next thirty years, he would return to most of the sites where he conducted large crusades during the early years of his ministry, but with the exception of a 1973 crusade in South Africa, which he had refused to visit until guaranteed that all racial groups would be admitted and seated on a nondiscriminatory basis, he never attempted another large-scale African tour. He accounted for this as largely a matter of circumstance: Other opportunities seemed more promising, other groups exerted greater pressure, Africa lacked adequate television coverage. Quite likely, however, at least part of the reason he limited his efforts in Africa is that despite sizable and enthusiastic crowds in some areas, he and his team faced vehement opposition in other locales and at times seemed so out of place culturally that they could as easily have come from Pluto as from North Carolina.

  The tour began in Liberia, whose Christian heritage dated back to 1822, when freed slaves from the United States, with the aid of American colonization societies, founded it to serve as a home for other freedmen in the hope of helping to solve the problem of American slavery. Graham’s black associate, Howard Jones, who spent several months of each year in Liberia and had a thriving radio ministry over that country’s powerful Christian station, ELWA, helped organize the meetings. Graham could not have asked for more enthusiastic official cooperation. He came with a state invitation tendered by President William V. S. Tubman, who was also a Methodist minister. Baptist pastor William R. Tolbert, who doubled as the nation’s vice-president, served as crusade chairman. As a further sign of state approval, Billy was made a Grand Commander of the Humane Order of African Redemption, Liberia’s second-highest civil honor.

  Despite support at the highest levels, the total attendance for five days of meetings in Liberia was less than 13,000. Graham preached to similarly unimpressive crowds in Ghana, where the Accra Evening News blasted him for his refusal to comment on plans by the French to conduct atomic bomb tests in the Sahara. Graham was warmly received when he called on President Kwame Nkrumah, whose own quasi-messianic aspirations had led him to erect a statue of himself emblazoned with the words “Seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto it,” a blatant lifting of Jesus’ classic directive in the Sermon on the Mount, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33). In a reciprocal gesture of courtesy, the World Wide Pictures documentary Africa on the Bridge offered a brief criticism of Nkrumah’s this-worldly (and decidedly leftist) orientation but was generally positive toward his achievements, noting especially the improved status of women in that country.

  From Ghana, Graham proceeded to Nigeria. He drew well in Lagos—128,600 in seven days—and enjoyed hospitable treatment there and in Ibadan and Euegu. But in Kaduna, Kano, and Jos, all in the Islam-dominated northern part of the country, he not only attracted modest crowds but stirred strident criticism and resistance from Muslims, who, by his estimate, were winning ten converts from tribal religions for every one converted to Christianity. Here and elsewhere, Muslims appreciated Graham’s emphatic insistence that he was an ordinary man with no supernatural powers, a stance that contrasted with the claims of tribal shamans and fit with Islamic teachings about the nondivine status of all of God’s spokesmen, including Muhammad himself. They disagreed, however, with his claims for the deity of Christ and resented the straightforward criticism of Islam in his sermons. They were also disappointed when he declined a challenge to debate one of their scholars on theological doctrine or even to meet privately with Muslim leaders. On a more secular level, the strong endorsement he received from Christian political leaders led some Muslims to fear that he was trying to help boost a Christian government into power, a charge for which there was little evidence, though he did subsequently urge President Eisenhower to visit Nigeria to build better relations between the two nations and perhaps even to use the occasion of Nigeria’s becoming independent of England later that year to identify himself and the United States with the interests of African nationalism.

  Muslims in Sudan managed to rescind Graham’s invitation to preach in that country, apparently because they feared he might disrupt proper observance of Ramadan, the sacred month during which Muslims severely restrict normal activities. The most explicit and memorable Muslim challenge, however, came in Kenya, where Maulana Sheikh Mubarak Ahmad, chief of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission in East Africa, hurled a challenge reminiscent of that proposed by the prophet Elijah in his famous contest on Mount Carmel with the priests of Baal (I Kings 18:20–40). In a letter to Graham, the Muslim leader proposed that thirty individuals—ten Europeans, ten Asians, and ten Africans, all certified by the director of medical services of Kenya to be incurable by scientific medicine—be assigned by lot into two groups and that he and Graham, together with a small band of associates, beseech God to heal the group assigned to them “to determine as to who is blessed with the Lord’s grace and mercy and upon whom His door remains closed.” If Graham declined, Ahmad argued, “[I]t will be proved to the world that Islam is the only religion which is capable of establishing man’s relationship with God.” A group of American Pentecostals cabled him to “accept the challenge; the God of Elijah still lives,” but Graham neither picked up the gauntlet nor offered any comment to the press.

  Throughout much of Africa, Graham had to confront a force more deeply rooted and, for that reason, less familiar and harder to combat than Islam: the indigenous tribal beliefs and practices of animism, augury, juju, shamanism, and idolatry. In Liberia, at a tribal dancing exhibition, a little man clad in a “country-devil” costume—a huge black mask attached to a kind of grass poncho that completely covered his body—repeatedly tapped Graham on the chest, muttering, “I’m the devil; I’m the devil; give me a dollar; give me two dollars.” Billy lifted his arm and pointed to the man, exclaiming, “I’ve come to cast out the devil.” Then, less dramatically, he knelt and grasped the man’s hand in an attempt to make contact with the universal human component hidden beneath the fantastic costume. At Ki-sumu, Kenya, three men in full witch-doctor regalia walked forward and took positions directly in front of the platform, standing stiffly and staring straight at Graham as if working a curse. Instead of calling for security personnel to remove them, Graham addressed them directly, announcing to them that “God loves you, and Jesus died on the cross for you.” They did not respond, then or at the invitation, and Graham suffered no ill effects from their imprecations—no surprise, since they had been hired by a news photographer to dress up and help him obtain a colorful photo.

  Not every encounter left the evangelist so untouched. During a preaching stint in Kaduna, Nigeria, a Southern Baptist missionary invited Graham and his team to visit a leprosarium near that city. The missionary told Graham that Christians at the leprosarium knew who he was and had built a brush arbor of limbs and straw in the hope that he might pay them a visit and hold a brief service. To a man with such a strong preference for cleanliness and propriety, the sight of a village filled with people whose toes and fingers and noses and ears had been eaten away by leprosy must have been a horrifying sight, but Billy preached a passionate sermon, assuring his audience that God loved them no matter what their physical condition and that Christ had died to make it possible for them to have a new and perfect spiritual body in heaven. When he gave the invitation, dozens raised deformed and scarred hands to signify their desire to accept the salvation he proclaimed. As the team prepared to leave, a small woman with nothing more than
stubs for hands approached him to say, with the missionary acting as interpreter, “Mr. Graham, before today we had never seen you. But since your London crusade in 1954, we Christians have been praying for you. Here in our little leprosarium we have been keeping up with your ministry.” Lifting an envelope toward him with her two nubbed arms, she said, “This is just a little love gift for you and your team for your worldwide ministry.” Deeply moved, Billy grasped her nubs in his hands and thanked her. As she walked away, the missionary translated a note she had included: “Wherever you go from now on, we want you to know we have invested in some small way in your ministry and given, in a sense, our widow’s mite. We send our love and prayers with you around the world.” Inside the envelope were two Nigerian pound notes worth approximately $5.60 in American money at the time. Graham turned away to look across the vast brushland. After a few moments, he turned to Grady and Cliff, tears trickling down his face. “Boys,” he said, “that’s the secret of our ministry.”

  To accommodate the low level of education in many quarters, as well as to try to overcome language barriers, Graham deliberately “put the cookies on a lower shelf,” using concrete sensory language and speaking in short repetitive sentences to facilitate translation, but he still worried that he was being misunderstood. On several occasions, the response to his invitation was so large and general that in an effort to winnow out those who were simply going along with the crowd or seeking to please the American visitor, he took pains to stress that becoming a Christian meant a complete repudiation of idols and other aspects of tribal religion. Even so, his efforts to bridge the chasm between cultures, though always transparently sincere, seemed at times more poignant than potent or prophetic. In one little village where some of the women squalled and fled when he appeared in the midst of their huts, he preached a simple sermon and returned to his car, optimistically observing that “just this little visit and somebody could be converted.” Another time, in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), he visited a Sekei village where a drunken dance was in progress. His white shirt, blond hair, and open grin offering anemic contrast to the half-naked painted and festooned bodies writhing about in inebriated ecstasy, he did the only thing he knew to do in such a situation: He took out his New Testament and tried to tell one of the men how he might be saved from the chaos swirling about him. He might as well have been trying to sell the Watchtower in the middle of the Super Bowl. The hapless tribesman, more baffled than angry at the incongruous apparition squatting beside him, kept saying, “I too drunk. I do not understand.” Finally conceding that his message was falling on rocky ground, Graham consoled himself in the knowledge that he had tried and politely stood back to watch as his camera crew documented the great gulf between depraved juju worshipers and the sober God-fearing folk who would see their film.

  Africans and others seeking to discredit Graham could easily seize upon his open and clearly stated opposition to communism, Islam, and tribal religion. They had less success in painting him as a white supremacist. Wherever he went, he emphasized, as he had in India, that Jesus was not a white man. “People stumble,” he observed on returning to America, “because Christ is often presented as a European” and thus associated with colonialism and imperialism. “All over Africa, faces lit up as we told how Christ belongs to all races. . . . that he was born near Africa, that he was taken to Africa for refuge, and that an African helped carry his cross.” In Kenya and elsewhere, white and black Christians underwent counselor-training sessions together and sat intermingled at the services. In Northern and Southern Rhodesia, (known today as the independent nations Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively) Graham insisted that blacks be admitted to services, making them the first integrated public meetings ever conducted in either country, and that his sermons be translated into the native tongues, not given only in English as some of the Europeans on the sponsoring committees desired, hoping to discourage African attendance. He repeatedly reminded the mostly white crowds that the ground beneath the cross of Christ is level and that all who stand there are equals. “God doesn’t look to see the color of your skin or how much money you have,” he insisted. “An impartial God looks on the heart. He does not look on the outside.” It pleased him that many newspapers, including South African publications, duly reported that “smartly dressed White women stood shoulder to shoulder with African servants.” Further, the filmed account of the tour, shown to American audiences during the controversial sit-ins that were forcing drastic changes in southern society, showed black workers in Rhodesian copper mines and observed that “while African laborers appear content with wages and working conditions, there are increasing evidences of unrest, and many Africans include in their vision of tomorrow a dream of equal opportunity and an equal wage.”

  Despite their officially integrated status, Graham’s crowds in Rhodesia were overwhelmingly white, and most Rhodesians would never learn of his oblique criticisms of their society. Morever, black African nationalists objected to his repeated insistence that only by sitting down together in a spirit of Christian love could any nation hope to solve its racial problems. In Kitwe, Northern Rhodesia, they swept through housing projects urging blacks not to attend his meetings, then followed up by heckling and tossing stones at the few who did show up. In nearby Chingola, where Grady Wilson was preaching, a more determined effort led to a clash between boycotters and police, breaking up the service and sending several people to the hospital for treatment of their wounds. His opposition to racial discrimination took sharper form in his explicit and well-publicized refusal to preach in South Africa after being told blacks would not be permitted to attend his meetings. To underline his position, he chose to follow a circuitous and time-consuming flight schedule rather than a much easier route that would have included a stop in South Africa, specifically because he feared that country’s racial practices might embarrass Howard Jones. When sixty-four South African ministers chartered a plane to attend his crusade in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, he told reporters he was tempted to reconsider his boycott of South Africa but pressed for what he regarded as inevitable changes in racial attitudes and policies. “I don’t see how the South African approach can possibly work,” he said. “Race barriers will ultimately have to end. I cannot presume to suggest a solution in the Rhodesias or for the Union [of South Africa] problem, because we have our own problem in the States. Before I can preach about colour in Africa we must apply Christ in the United States.” He continued to insist, however, that the key to any change in policy would have to be a change of heart of the sort that only true conversion to Christ was likely to bring. On his return to the United States later in the spring, he declined to comment on the lunch-counter sit-ins in progress in the South on the grounds that he knew too little about them, but he said of the South African situation that “to keep the races in total separation is a policy that won’t work and is immoral and unchristian,” adding pointedly that “I would say the same of our past treatment of the Indians, as we look back on it.” The reference to Indians was a sign of still-widening social conscience, not an attempt to finesse the current racial unrest among blacks; Graham explicitly warned that American failure to solve its own racial problems was a key factor in the appeal of communism to many Africans. “They doubt the United States will be a true friend,” he explained. “Somehow, Americans of both races are going to have to find an amicable solution or we may lose the friendship of this richest continent on earth.” The alternative to a peaceful solution, he feared, was too dreadful to contemplate. “Seventy percent of the world’s population is colored,” he pointed out. “They will exterminate the white race if we don’t end discrimination.” Once again he asserted the only way either America or South Africa could summon the insight and moral courage to institute these changes was through sweeping religious revival. Only religion, he said, can create “an atmosphere [in which] all racial differences can be settled.”