I am Elizabeth Gordon, John's sister. Our parents were Eric and Margaret Osmers and there were three of us, John, David and Elizabeth. Ours was an Anglican family. Our father was an Anglican clergyman. When he married our mother she was the Travelling Secretary of the NZ Anglican Girls' Bible Class Union. Her uncle was an English Anglican clergyman called C. F. Andrews who worked all his life in India with Gandhi and whose work in Fiji stopped the terrible system of Indian indentured labour.

John grew up in Christchurch, went to school at Christchurch Boys High School and then to Canterbury University College where he did an MA in English literature. As a student he read a book published in 1956 called Naught for Your Comfort written by the English priest Trevor Huddleston. It was about his personal experience of the evil effects of apartheid in South Africa. John was very affected by this book. I reread it last week and it still makes me distressed and angry.

Like so many young New Zealanders at that time John then went to England by ship. He wanted to visit South Africa so he got off the boat in Durban and bought a motor bike. For the next 6 weeks he travelled around South Africa. If he saw an African walking along the road he would offer him a lift. For several weeks he travelled with an African student called Ernest Gallo. Ernest was a Marxist and highly intelligent, and John began to see South Africa through his eyes. John had to get special permission to go to with Ernest who had to be registered as his Boy or servant.

At the end of 6 weeks he left from Capetown to continue his journey to London.

The night before he left he was staying in a shantytown and he heard a woman weeping. She was weeping because the next day she was going to be transported to the Homelands, a place she had never been to before and her husband had to move to a single sex hostel in Cape town. The plight of that woman haunted John all his life.

On the boat to England he met some sisters from the Anglican order of the Society of the Precious Blood who had strong connections in Africa. When the sisters returned to England one of them told the sisters at Burnham Abbey where they were based that she had met a young man on the boat who one day would be ordained and work in Africa, 'but he doesn't know that yet.' They put John's name on their prayer list and three years later were delighted to find his name on an ordination list.

By this time John had decided he would return to South Africa so he went to the university of London School of Oriental and African Studies and asked if he could learn an African language. They said they had a professor and lecturer of the Bantu language Sesotho who had no students that year so John became their student. Some of his classes were held in coffee shops.

The following year he put himself forward for ordination in the Anglican church. He trained at Mirfield in Yorkshire and then spent three years working as a curate in the parish of Rawmarsh in Yorkshire.

Then in 1965 he went to Africa, not to South Africa as he had hoped but to Lesotho, a small kingdom in the Drakensburg mountains surrounded by South Africa. It used to be called Basutoland. It had about 2 million people and was very poor. The main language spoken there was Sesotho.

In every town in Lesotho there was an office recruiting men for the South African mines. The population of the country was made up of old people, women and children. The men were all working in South Africa. 

John had a rocky start in Lesotho. In the town of Mohales Hoek he filled in for an English priest, Fr Goodall, who was on leave. Fr Goodall had a strict rule never to allow Africans into his house. While he was there John broke his rule. Some African curates would come long distances at night in bad weather and John couldn't send them away. He thought that Fr Goodall would never find out. But unfortunately some of John's visitors had brought bedbugs with them and Fr Goodall was furious and complained to the bishop that John was an 'unfaithful priest'. The bishop didn't support John. He also was an Englishman who also forbade Africans from coming into his house.

So John was sent to a distant parish in the south of Lesotho called Qthing. Here he was a parish priest of the diocese and his conditions were the same as any African priest. His parish covered a large area and it was later joined to two more parishes so it had 80 congregations; and the church was also responsible for about 15 schools in the area. Most of the travel was done on horseback. I spent the summer of 1967 there with John and he borrowed the butcher's horse so that I could go with him on these mountain treks. 

Here in the mountains, the Save the Children Fund had set up an excellent feeding scheme for the school children. The local people put in vegetable gardens with help from the Save the Children Fund who then provided the food for a daily nutritious soup, also using the vegetables.

When John came back to New Zealand at this time he went around the country speaking on behalf of the Save the Children Fund. He was careful not to be too critical of South Africa because he was worried that they might ban him and stop him from doing the work he loved. But his attitude later changed. He still supported the Save the Children Fund but he realised that the solution was not just a matter of handing out food and clothes. It must be political. What was needed was a revolution. And he was assisted by the South African Government in 1970 when they did actually ban him from South Africa. It meant he no longer need to compromise. Because he was banned he didn't have to be to be careful anymore and he could criticise the South African government as much as he liked.

In 1973 John became the vicar of St Barnabas, Masite, a town much nearer to the capital Maseru. Derry and I visited him there with our children John and Susannah who are here today. Susie was baptised there.

In 1976 thousands of African students in Soweto protested about a law that said that all Black students should be taught in Afrikaans. 576 students were killed. Hundreds of school students fled into Lesotho. John was chairman of the Christian Council Refugee committee and he was responsible for finding these students schooling and accommodation. Every week, on his day off, he stayed overnight with the Soweto students and he helped them to set up study groups, discussing Marxism, revolution, the history of the African National Congress, the meaning of liberation. He himself became a member of the African National Congress.

One of the people who escaped into Lesotho at this time was an Indian lawyer called Phyllis Naidoo. Later she told me about her hair-raising journey escaping from South Africa, leaving everything, including her children, behind. She arrived in Lesotho with nothing and was in a state of shock. She told me how a tall white man came to where she was staying and just sat down beside her. He sat there with her for much of the day without talking until she was ready to talk to him. They became life long friends. 

In 1979 my husband Derry and I were in London with our children on sabbatical leave. On 5th July, which was a Saturday, I received a message through Defence and Aid that John had been attacked by a parcel bomb and that he was in hospital. On Monday I was on a flight to Lesotho and I stayed there for 6 weeks. The parcel had contained the ANC magazine Sechaba, printed in East Germany. They had opened it in Phyllis Naidoo's house and 6 people were badly injured. Phyllis later told me that after his surgery she was in the same room as John. The surgeon came to him and said, 'Father I'm very sorry but you have lost your right hand.' John answered, 'It's all right. I'm left handed.' Then the surgeon said, " Father I'm very sorry but I have to tell you that you have lost a testicle,' and John answered, 'It's all right. I'm a celibate priest.'

We asked the New Zealand government for financial help for John but Brian Tallboys a senior National party cabinet minister turned us down flat. I think the government wanted to stay friends with white South Africa. Later a man came from Mozambique - Mac Maharaj who later became a cabinet minister - with tickets, a visa and the necessary papers for John to be treated in Russia.

I'm a bossy sister and I persuaded John to come with me to London where he had treatment at Queen Mary's hospital Roehampton. He stayed with us for some weeks and then went back to Lesotho. A year later he was banned from Lesotho. The South African government hadn't managed to kill him but they brought impossible pressure on to the Lesotho government to throw him out. He said that this was more painful to him than the parcel bomb.

This was 1981 and New Zealand was in a state of unrest over the prospect of a Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand. So we asked him to come back to new Zealand to help with the anti-tour campaign. He immediately joined HART - Halt All Racist Tours and went around the country talking about the evils of apartheid. A few years ago he met Andrew Little at a Labour party meeting in New Brighton and Andrew told him how he had been a 16 year old boy at New Plymouth Boys High School when John came and addressed the school about the Springbok tour. He said John's talk made a powerful impression on him and he never forgot it.

The next stage in John's story was his move to Botswana as a parish priest at St Paul's Molepolole. Derry and I visited him there. Near his house was a big sign 'Gateway to the Kalihari Desert'. He was openly a member of the African National Congress and his church supported him.

Sometimes men would come to his house secretly at night and leave early the next morning. They used his ANC code name Modesa meaning 'shepherd.' A few days later he would hear of some act of sabotage in South Africa knowing he had probably been part of the action. Some of those carrying out the sabotage were captured and handed over his name. Somehow the South Africans had difficultly believing that Africans could plan and carry out such acts and they believed that there must be a white man behind them as the mastermind. The finger was pointed at John. The Botswana security service always promised to protect him and in 1988 they warned him that a death squad had come into the country to kill him. So he immediately left everything, even his address book, and flew to Zambia. He lived there for over 30 years.

By this time John was coming back to New Zealand every three years, paid for by the NZ Anglican Board of Missions. He travelled around New Zealand and did deputation work.

In Zambia he once more became a parish priest of the church in Lusaka, he was the diocesan treasurer, and chaplain to the ANC. Zambia had given refuge to the ANC, which it saw as the South African government in waiting. As chaplain he got to know the ANC members well, he took their funerals and their marriages and baptised their children. 

In 1994 the church in Zambia created a new diocese called the Eastern province. The area had been greatly neglected. The bishop of Zambia hadn't visited it for years. So John was asked if he would be the first bishop there. It went against his principles to be a white bishop in Africa. But the need was great and there were no other candidates. Derry and I went to his consecration and it was a a joyous affair. The diocese had nothing - no priests, no houses no vehicles. We raised money here in Christchurch for a van for him. In seven years he really built up the diocese and today it is flourishing. 

John loved this part of Zambia and it is his wish that his ashes will be interrred at Msoro, in the Eastern Diocese.

In the last period in John's life he became very much connected again with New Zealand much to our delight. On one of his visits we were able to get him into the New Zealand superannuation scheme and so he had a regular income. Sadly in 2015 he had become blind which meant that he was no longer able to do deputation work for the NZ Anglican Board of Missions. Now help from the family and the NZ government meant that he could still come back here. But it also meant that his primary place of residence was now New Zealand and he could not be away for more than 26 weeks. So for some years he made the long journey between Zambia and New Zealand several times a year.

His concern at this time was for refugees in Zambia and in particular those from Rwanda. After the genocide, Rwanda has been held up as an example of the great African success story. It has many women in parliament, excellent education opportunities, and a ban on plastic bags. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair love Rwanda and Western aid pours in. But the situation is actually far more complex and for those in opposition to the government it is a very dangerous place to live, with overseas assassinations and the imprisonment of anyone who criticises the government. They are put on trial for 'genocide denial.' Because of Rwanda's excellent public reputation UNHCR removed the refugee status of the Rwandans living in Zambia. This meant that for young people all their education funding was removed and their only future prospect was to be peasant farmers in a refugee camp.

So this became John's mission: to assist students with education. It meant using his own money, or any any other money he could get, to pay the university fees of these students. Those with no support came to live in his house. His second aim was to get Zambian citizenship for the Rwandans. This was his mission and he worked tirelessly at it. I know this. Because he was blind I had to write all his letters. Some days I was spending one or two hours writing emails, nagging and pestering people about these matters.

John was due to come back to New Zealand in April this year but we couldn't get him a place in MIQ until 30th June. He was very much looking forward to coming back. He loved going to St Lukes in South Brighton, and to the eucharist at St Faiths on Wednesdays followed by the community lunch. He loved the friends he made at Te Waka Aroha, the lounge at St Faiths. He made friends with men who had been in prison or suffered from addictions. They called him Matua. He loved going to the Catholic Workers service in Addington on Wednesday evenings and the meal that followed.

In April John planned to return to his old diocese in the Eastern province to celebrate 25 years since it was founded. And they were going to open a new building called the Bishop John Osmers House. It had 24 offices in it. The house was debt free and it was built to raise funds for the diocese. But another reason for going was because the President of Zambia would be there and John wanted to give him a letter and talk to him about the needs of the Rwandans. But not long before he was due to go John got pneumonia and had to go to hospital. He was hardly out of hospital when he went on the 8 hour journey. He did see the president and he did give him the letter. And he told me that he managed to get quite a bit about the refugees in his sermon.

A few weeks later he was back in hospital, this time with pneumonia and Covid-19 and sadly he died on June 16th. His student Philibert who stayed with him in the hospital told me that one of the last things he said was 'Tell my sister not to worry.'

Well I've done a lot of worrying about John over the years but I've also always thought that he was being taken care of. When I was getting anxious about the future he would say, "Remember that God is faithful."

May his work continue now through other people and may he rest in peace.