MA MOHAU

She was a tiny, wizened woman when I met her many years ago. Sister Enid Barber. An Anglican nun and nurse in the African township near Bloemfontein. Aids had just made its scrofulous and leprous appearance and was claiming its first victims.

Sister Enid had started with a handcart when she was a young nursing and religious sister fresh from England at the end of the Great War to end all wars – yeah right! Apartheid had not been born yet, but poverty had – a long, long time before, as we all know. She had come for those who were its chief victims. She took her handcart into the townships, the Black Ghettoes, dispensing medical care and the true gospel of unconditional love.

She had soon moved on to a donkey drawn cart, then a horse ambulance and finally a motorised ambulance. Meanwhile the authorities had built a hospital to which she could ferry her lambs.

Her own work, however, never changed. She tended, nursed, fed and rescued the poorest of the poor.

One of her lambs was a little boy with rickets. We visited him in ‘her’ hospital. She’d found him abandoned on the streets, like Charlie, a little boy I met in Johannesburg. But he’s another story. The spidery-limbed little boy’s face lit up with joy as the gentle nun stroked his face and spoke lovingly to him. She lingered with him, her special lamb and then moved on to others who were dying of the mystery ailment. To each one she ministered love and tenderness.

When there was rioting and it was not safe for whites to be in the African townships, she was there, still dispensing love and medicines without a thought of retiring despite approaching 90 years of age. 

She was never harmed by even the most radical and angry of rioters. She was one of the people, you see.

The Sotho people, whom she so loved that she gave her life for them, called her, Ma Mohau, Mother of Mercy.  Even the angriest and most violent of the young people recognised someone who had heard and heeded the Great Shepherd’s injunction: “Feed My Lambs!”