DARKMARK

Lenasia, three miles south of Soweto, during
the transition from apartheid to multi-party rule.

It was a challenging move for anybody, as
these were testing times for his new home. The
joy that greeted the end of the racist regime
was tempered by the knowledge of how deep
the resentments ran that had accumulated over
the previous 200 years. Outsiders like the
Reverend John required sophisticated political
and social skills to understand the meaning of
those tensions and how he might help to reduce
them.

His successful work in South Africa was
noticed further up the Anglican Church's
hierarchy and, after eight years, the Bishop of
Bradford in the English county of West
Yorkshire urged him to consider an equally
challenging post in Manningham, a residential
district on the edge of Bradford city centre.
The Reverend John was reluctant – England
had always struck him as a rather gloomy
place, with its miserable weather and urban
sprawl.

Equally, he knew that Manningham was no
bed of roses. Many Britons regarded Bradford,
and Manningham in particular, as a symbol of
their country's failing attempts to integrate its
many ethnic and confessional groups. More
malignant types saw in Manningham an
opportunity to ratchet up the mistrust between
those communities.

In July 2001 this district exploded into brief
but violent riots that reflected a deepening
division between the city's large Asian
constituency and its white population. Even
earlier, Manningham had experienced the
phenomenon of white flight and, by the time
the Reverend John arrived, three years after the
riots, 75 per cent of the population were
Muslims whose origins lay largely in the rural
districts of north-eastern Pakistan. 'The
remaining twenty-five per cent are Christians,
although only about five per cent of those are
church-going. The white community here
looks and feels like the minority it is,' said
the Reverend John. Although its climate,
architecture and culture bore no resemblance
to the townships of Jo'burg, in other ways
Manningham felt uncannily like South Africa.

This was a hardship posting. When the clouds
gathered or the snow fell, there was little that
appealed in streets lined by sombre neo-Gothic
buildings. Yet a little more than a century ago
Manningham had been a most desirable area
in which to live. This was during the period,
now forgotten to the outside world, when
Bradford was hailed as 'the wool