happy, but I guess different, with Bill. Until a few years ago, he would still
cycle from Coton to Chesterton to collect his Waldensian calendar, generally
in December. We’ll miss him!
Erica Scroppo
Randolph Vigne (1928–2016)
We got to know each other in Torre
Pellice in 1989 when, during the cel-
ebrations of the 300th Anniversary
of the Glorious Return, Randolph
Vigne had brought the greetings from
London of the Huguenot Society, of
which he was President, and also the
official greetings from President Mit-
terand and of the entire then French
Government.
Randolph Vigne.
We became friends, and as a result,
I invited him to speak to the Annual
Meeting of the Waldensian Church Missions, of which I had become the
Executive Secretary in September 1988. We on our part established contacts
with the Huguenot Society, of which we became members.
I knew that he had been politically active at an important level in the South
Africa of the Apartheid era and I knew that all our South African friends of
his gene ration knew him, but I had no idea of his importance, which sadly I
only became aware of when I read his obituaries and the long articles – real
mini biographies – that the important English newspapers dedicated to this
extremely significant figure in the creation of a post-Apartheid South Africa
and Namibia.
Randolph Vigne was born in Port Elizabeth in 1928 into a distinguished
family of Huguenot refugee origins, and from boyhood he had felt driven to
combat racism, injustice and suffering. After taking his law degree at Oxford
– where he also distinguished himself as an athlete – he returned to South
Africa, where the Nationalist Party had introduced Apartheid. Joining the
opposition to this government, in 1954 he joined the newly formed Liberal
Party, which kept itself distinct from the African National Congress because
this was Marxist. Randolph worked for a publisher in Cape Town while also
being elected Vice-President of the Liberal Party, which however suffered a
major electoral setback in the 1958 Polls.
This led Randolph to the conclusion that the idea of defeating the
Apartheid regime through democratic means was pure folly. After the 1960
Sharpsfield Massacre, he became convinced that non-violent opposition was
no longer sufficient, and he took part in the foundation in the same year of
the NCL [Committee of National Liberation] and in 1962 of the magazine New
11