By Mary Garnett
Sovereign World International. 140 pages. £6.99
ISBN 978-1-85240-254-9
Available from http://www.sovereignworld.com
This book is most appropriately subtitled ‘The life story of William Duma, a man who lived in agreement with the Holy Spirit’. It has been edited, in the interests of a slightly more racy style, from a book originally published about July 1979 by the South African Baptist Missionary Society. After passing through many reprints in South Africa, it is now available from an organisation called Christian Booksellers in East London after the original publisher folded. The author’s real name is Joan Goddard, and she is the daughter of a Congregational minister in South Africa.
William Duma was the Zulu pastor of the Umgeni Road Baptist Church, a multi-ethnic congregation which met, during the days of apartheid, in a concrete and corrugated iron structure in a low-income district in Durban. He became renowned throughout many parts of the world for both his Christ-likeness and his healing ministry. He died in McCord’s Hospital on October 8 1977. It is evidently God’s plan that Duma’s life and work should become accessible to Christians of today; credit is due to Sovereign World International for this initiative.