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Notes on the Dedicated Life Patrick Maekane mbk:  A Sign of Contradiction by Ralph Martin ssm

Patrick Maekane was an African (Mosotho), a religious, perhaps the first in the Church of the Province [of Southern Africa] to be professed into the religious life, to which he had felt God calling him from the age of ten, and in which he died at the age of 83 in 1985.

Motsemolo Solomon Maekane was born in the Teyateyaneng [TY] district of Lesotho in 1902, and when he was ten he was sent to St Agnes School at TY, which was then under the care of SSM. It is said that this small schoolboy applied to our Brother Edwin for work, and with the pennies he saved he hoped to start a religious community one day like SSM.

In 1917 he was confirmed and given the new name of Patrick, because Fr Wrenford did not like the name Solomon which his parents had given him. He was greatly encouraged in his vocation by meeting Fr Woodward, one of the founders of SSM, and later he sent his teachers to ask his parents for permission to marry the bride of his choice, which was the Religious Life. 

His parents gave their consent with the proverb "the heart only eats what it really likes," their only concern being who would provide for him in his old age, a childless man. To this he replied that he would die in harness, for he intended to persevere through all difficulties by the help of the Blessed Virgin Mary - which thing he did.

On Michaelmas Day, 1929, at Modderpoort [the Society's Orange Free State priory] he was made the first novice of the Mothaka oa Bahlanka ba Kreste (mbk) (Company of the Servants of Christ), the "native" community which Fr Joseph White was hoping to foster.

In 1940 the small Community was sent to Masite which, with fourteen outstations, was one of the largest parishes in the diocese [of Lesotho]. Patrick made his profession in St Barnabas Church, Masite, on February 12, 1942.

The numbers of the Community rose and fell, the support of the SSM waxed and waned, thorns of scandal sprang up, Patrick was declared unsatisfactory, and in 1944 the SSM Provincial, with the Bishop [of Bloemfontein, under which the Diocese of Lesotho then fell], disbanded the Community.

However, Patrick was allowed to persevere in his vocation as a member of mbk, still wearing his habit - the [black] SSM habit in the colour brown.

Almost at the same time he gathered round him a band of women who were called the Handmaids of Mary, Mother of Mercy. By the 1950s there were between 12 and 40 Handmaids at Masite, with numbers rising.

At first he sent them to live with the Community of St Michael and All Angels of Bloemfontein, who at that time had a house in Hlotse, but this broke down when two of the Handmaids were sent home because they were physically disabled, and when the Black sisters were put to live in separate quarters in the garden, even though this was Lesotho [and not South Africa].

The Handmaids clamoured to be a community of their own around Fr Patrick, and the Bishop gave his consent to this, but then reversed his decision at the very last minute when the White European communities declared Patrick was not fit to be a superior.

Patrick had been in correspondence with the Society of the Precious Blood at Burnham Abbey, England, since 1949, asking them to come to the help of the Handmaids. They came in 1957, but part of the arrangement was that Patrick should be posted to a distant parish.

But still he persevered in his vocation.

In 1965 he told the Bishop that he wished to retire so as to dedicate the remainder of his life to caring for unwanted and neglected children.  When the Bishop declared that no funds were available at that time for any such project, Patrick, undeterred, replied that there was no problem: he would turn to his most faithful friend and helper, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, lover of the poor and forsaken.

When they told him that he did not have the financial backing to put up a rondawel [a round, thatched hut], he said he had a heavenly Father who was very, very rich. Largely with his own hands, he built a home for homeless boys at Masite [near the capital city, Maseru] called Tholoana oa Lerato ["Harvest of Love"].

And when this was taken over in 1977 by the Save the Children Fund, this freed Patrick, at the age of 75, to build a home for unwanted girls on a barren stretch of land at Mantsase, and there he stayed amongst "these my last-born children," as he called them, until his death in 1985, the last member of mbk. 

Such zeal, such faithfulness, and so little left behind!

We may feel that Patrick Maekane is one of those seeds which fell among the thorns; certainly his relations with the SSM were always thorny, to say the least. About him the [SSM] brothers could never agree.

In a report on "The Religious Life for Africans" made to the Great Chapter of the Society in 1952, we read, "Fr Patrick Maekane, in spite of tribal pressure that he should marry and succeed his father as local chief, has persevered in his vocation. He is a very active and successful mission priest with a developed prayer life. He is an isolated religious with no special desire for an European way of living."

It sounds good, but on the next page we read, "It seems that no community can be built by Fr Maekane. He has just not got the gifts needed in a superior, and with no indigenous religious tradition to guide them, the principles of the Religious Life cannot be understood and practised. Another effort of this kind would fail."  Even as these words were being spoken, Patrick was gathering some thirty women around him at Masite as the Handmaids of Mary, hoping to begin a new community.

The SSM brothers said he was too imitative, too autocratic, and not easily assimilated. "In general," they said, "the criticism may be made that [mbk] tended to be an unintelligent imitation of SSM." From his childhood, the only form of the religious life which Patrick had seen was SSM and probably, in his zeal, his reproduction of it may have looked to the brothers more like a caricature, but it also should be remembered that the life he had observed at Modderpoort was itself a close imitation (whether intelligent or unintelligent) of the life the brothers had left behind in England at Kelham.

Their time-table, organisation, customs, chapel, all duplicated minutely what was done at that mother-house on the banks of the Trent, Newark, Nottinghamshire. The house [work] lists, the jokes, the plainsong, the order of services, all were as they had been there, even to the extent of sending loud protests back to the mother-house when the English brothers dared to make changes in Psalm tones I:5 and V:2, and to sing with a flattened b, without notifying Modderpoort so the brothers there could keep in step.

No one had yet begun to think that the religious life might perhaps need to be adjusted somewhat for a different country, a different age, and a different culture.

The brothers said that he was too autocratic. They found him, and Whites in general found him, often arrogant and rude. Amongst the reasons given for the failure of the mbk at the 1952 chapter in England, it was said that "neither superior nor members understood what was involved in religious obedience". How could they? Fr Maekane seemed to act as an autocrat and to expect explicit obedience to arbitrary orders."

But here again it needs to be remembered that the SSM role-model Patrick first met was Fr Wrenford, and that the Director of the Society through most of these years was Fr Stephen Bedale, two autocrats who would make the Russian Czar look wimpish!

Even at Kelham in those same years, the brothers were busy preparing resolutions which they hoped would deliver them from "ad hoc and arbitrary rulings" from on high. In those days the will of the Prior was God's will for the House [at Kelham]. Amen.

Yet notwithstanding this "arrogance" of his, on two occasions at least, Patrick asked for an SSM brother to be sent to lead  mbk. He knew how little he knew about Religious Life, as it was then understood, but, sadly, no brother was ever available through all those years.

They said he was not easily assimilated. For most of the brothers serving in Southern Africa at that time, Africans fell into two distinct groups; those who were westernised, and those of the "peasant" type. Again, from the 1952 discussion on the Religious Life for Africans, we read, "Some Africans have become so completely westernised that they might fit quite happily into a community which is predominantly European."

Although even these men were not without problems. Some men, once westernised, then refused to return to live amongst their own people and, even with the westernised, "natural racial characteristics [unspecified!] may tend to militate against intimate community life, and some brethren may find the difficulty insuperable ... whereas no peasant type ever could be assimilated into SSM." One brother in the course of the discussion expressed the opinion that whatever might do for the "peasant types" would of necessity be short-lived, since the whole of African society would inevitably and soon be totally absorbed into western culture.

Such was the tangled web woven between the missionaries and the "natives" in these colonialist days.

But all this is particularly ironic in the case of SSM brothers. Fr Kelly founded the Society on the principle that there was no such thing as a peasant class, that any person from any background whatsoever, who was capable of being educated, was capable of taking on leadership in the church. The brothers who made up the Southern African Province at the time had themselves for the most part largely been recruited from the working class of England, the peasants of an industrialised society, and no doubt some of their peers at Kelham had used their theological training, or their novitiate, as a springboard into the middle classes rather than returning to work in the slums from which they arose.

A report on the Religious Life for Africans prepared for the Great Chapter of the Society in 1962 says, "In view of the virtual failure of the Society's attempt in South Africa [to foster an indigenous community] it may be asked whether the male African is yet ready for the Religious Life, at least in its SSM form."

Thirty-six years later [in 1998], we perhaps should rephrase the question, to ask whether the SSM in its present form, is yet ready for the male African who wishes to try his vocation to this category of gospel ministry.

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