"I Won't Come Out Alive"

The judge took five hours to drone out his verdict, but it still had the impact of a thunderbolt. Women in the courtroom gasped and sobbed last week as the dean of Johannesburg's Anglican cathedral was sentenced to five years in prison under the catchall Terrorism Act for subversion against the South African government. As the pale, stocky defendant left Johannesburg's Old Synagogue, site of his three-month trial, blacks and whites outside began singing Onward, Christian Soldiers.

To the South African regime, Dean Gonville A. ffrench-Beytagh (pronounced french-Beta) had indeed veered too close to Christian soldiering during his insistent campaign against apartheid. ffrench-Beytagh freely admitted distributing $70,000 to political prisoners and their families but denied the money had come from the outlawed Defense and Aid Fund of London. The more complicated charges dealt with his political statements.

The government's star witness was Kenneth Jordaan, one of the dean's altar servers and confidants. Jordaan said that ffrench-Beytagh had egged him into joining the security police to keep tabs on government tactics. The prosecution maintained that the dean had incited Jordaan to violence and had told the Black Sash, a liberal women's group, that bloody revolution is justified under certain circumstances. Taking the stand in his own defense, ffrench-Beytagh said that, far from advocating violence, he had warned that the present racial system would result in violence if it were not changed. Apartheid, he insisted, is "heresy--and damnable heresy."

The verdict was plainly intended as a warning to leaders of South Africa's non-Dutch churches, who constitute a significant anti-apartheid force even though their laymen often favor the regime's policy. As the churches have stepped up their agitation, the regime has retaliated with sweeping raids on church offices and expulsion of 40 churchmen. Since ffrench-Beytagh's conviction hinged, in the words of one South African paper, "on what he had said rather than what he had done," the clergy fear they will be even more circumscribed.

ffrench-Beytagh, a Shanghai-born former hobo and odd jobber with a long-time reputation as a "fighting parson" in Rhodesia and South Africa, is free on $14,000 bail pending an appeal. Because, at 59, he is suffering from a weak heart and hypertension, he figures that if the appeal fails, "I won't come out alive, you know." Thus he is using his time to say farewell to friends.

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