Anton Lovink - my adult journey 1972 to 2024

My baptism in Bawku, Ghana during my intensely lived, three year experience in this very religious and spiritual small town in Black West Africa, transformed my sense of reality and of humanity, totally altering my life perspectives and goals.

Via a few months in South Africa and then living on the upper side of Manhattan, bordering Harlem, I focused my M.A. studies on the Black church, African religions, the ecumenical movement and understandings of the Bible. In 1975, now 28, I graduated from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary with an A- average. I was offered a job at the National Council of Churches administering programs and fund raising for development and urgent needs across Africa. In some ways, as a white man, I was good at raising money among very white communities wanting to help Africa. But it soon became impossible as my white boss and I got sidelined by the increasing black power movement.

After losing that job I spent a little more time advocating for change in South Africa via the corporate responsibility movements. But ultimately, I felt moved to come back to Canada where I got a contract job at external affairs researching the origins of Canadian foreign policy. This involved primarily carefully reading Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s diary which had first become available for scrutiny in the 1960s. https://www.amazon.ca/Diplomacy-fear-Canada-Cold-1941-1948/dp/0802066844

My next job, again with the Africa theme, was as general assistant to the executive vice president of the International Development Research Centre [IDRC/CRDI) while doing early research work on the network information system for Sahelian/Saharan French speaking West Africa. The IDRC was a wonderful organization to work for, with a lot of flexibility in my work. I eventually became first the information officer for the organization and then the national conference coordinator. My role was to try to link Canadian research capacity to the research needs of the world. It was a massive challenge trying to bring about significant international research collaboration. I learned a lot and was able to travel extensively across Canada, which to some extent enabled me to discover myself as a gay man.

In the meantime, while still in New York I had got married, but then brought my wife to Canada where we wonderfully produced two children. I struggled with coming out as a gay man and at the same time living spiritually very deeply, or as much as possible for the sexually tortured man I was then. Gradually that man found roots in local churches in Ottawa, where I also found deep community. While recovering from my divorce I started learning how to sing and took piano lessons as well.

Around the same time, after intensive psychotherapy paid for by the IDRC, I became much better mentally and I also discovered the joys of tennis and then swimming which I began to do three times a week, often at 6:00 AM in the morning. This physical discipline eventually led to triathlons, working out just before dinner or in the summer evening hours, or running with colleagues along the Rideau Canal from my downtown office. I became much more mentally and emotionally relaxed, able to walk into university presidents’ offices for IDRC, and later to teach with ease.

When the IDRC found its budget cut very significantly by the Conservative incoming government, many middle management jobs were cut. So in 1986 I found myself unemployed. Though I received a full year’s income separation pay, I still had child support payments to be made. Over the next two and a half years, I had 10 different sources of income from selling Britannica encyclopedias to contracts with the Secretary of State on immigrant adaptation processes to teaching French in the evening to adults. It was a tough few years, but by then I was somewhat supported by my loving husband Alain Lanoix, who allowed me to survive financially as well as in many other ways, including enabling my volunteer work.

Through my church life, I became involved in sponsoring and settling refugees from South Sudan, an area of the world that I knew quite well from my work with the national church offices in New York. The three-year volunteer work in welcoming and then settling two families of South Sudanese was very difficult but informative, allowing me, post-hoc, to prepare my eventual doctoral work. When these family groups and later a Djiboutian family of 5, variously African Christian or Muslim, discovered that I was gay, it became impossible for us to communicate. This was one of the factors driving me to complete my dissertation.

However, I needed to make money and I knew that there were available teaching jobs, especially in French immersion, through the then Ottawa School Board. Based on my work at Columbia University in religion and education, I was offered a scholarship at the University of Ottawa, where I completed my Bachelor of Education in history and French. Almost immediately, in1989, I was offered a job in French immersion at one of the schools in Ottawa, where after two years probation, a unionized job with great salary and benefits was next. But at 42, at the bottom of the pay scale, I was too old to learn the subtleties of managing and teaching large classes of adolescents.

I moved from French immersion, which I had found meaningless, teaching only rich white adolescents, to English second language teaching, working with new immigrants to Canada, becoming a specialist in second language teaching and linguistics. For 9 years, I taught English as at least the second language to adolescent refugee and immigrants, at one point having only Somalis in my class, 14 to 19 year olds, some totally illiterate, mostly male, homophobic and sexist, but wonderful to teach.

Continuing my grasshopper life I transferred to another high school, working with another refugee wave, now from Eastern Europe. This time I had the challenge of controlling male Serbs and Croatians fighting in my classes. As coordinator of ESL at Glebe Collegiate in Ottawa, ethnic-based disputes among students were not unusual, but supporting their integration into school and community life was very meaningful.

I had a lot of fun teaching ESL there. My then wonderful principal, Bob Dagenais, allowed me to raise money in the community for a camping program, in cooperation with the YM/YWCA which had an outdoor education centre in Dunrobin near the city. In two different late spring excursions, supervised by ESL teachers, I was able to offer an overnight camping experience to my new Canadians, including teaching them to canoe, to orienteer with a compass, to put up tents, as well as a high ropes experience and nature orienteering. Such an experience was an essential for these new arrivals in Ottawa, but expensive and somewhat dangerous, when lacking English understanding and with little swimming capacity.

However, sometimes our life plans get diverted by other factors. After my mother's death in 1999, I felt called to take a teaching job in the Netherlands, looking for my roots, teaching in English, but working with parents and colleagues in Dutch. I just felt a real need to find roots, to stop feeling that I did not belong, but I was a grasshopper.

In that full year in the Netherlands, I explored relationships with family members, some of whom I had never met, and made new friends every weekend. It was a glorious year of really becoming fluent in my birth language, beginning to understand the culture, except the humor, swimming competitively in many swim meets across that small piece of land with 16 million people. I felt at home… but not really.

In reality, the ‘grass is not greener on the other side’. Pensions are important and I discovered that I was, in fact, a Canadian, having first come to this gorgeous country at the age of 3 years old. My job and my pensions were guaranteed in Canada. My life partner was there as well as my children. I also discovered that I was not really Dutch, belonging defined partly by knowing the evolving language as well as appreciating the humor. The only friendships which remain from that time in the Netherlands, are four cousins and two good friendships I made then.

Alain came to visit twice, once in the spring to travel all over France, training in white water and canoeing in the Pyrenees, and then again in December when we spent two incredible weeks in Morocco, driving all over the country, forced to adapt our itinerary to the rigours of Ramadan, the month of Muslim fasting.

Hopping back to Canada, the homophobic new principal would not allow me to keep my job in ESL but told me to teach grade 9 core French. This was a very tough course for kids that have been learning basic French for eight years and whose language skills varied incredibly. However, I was allowed to start a very new French second language course for English second language learners, since a French credit is required for high school graduation in Ontario, even for immigrant students.

Since many of these students already spoke one or more languages, as I had discovered in teaching ESL, the challenge of teaching French was not that great, especially since I had a lot of experience in audio and visual language teaching. Many of these students went on to successfully complete the four French language courses for graduation.

But I was tiring from already having kidney failure and because teaching 14 year-olds is an exhausting experience. I continued to teach as a supply high school teacher, mostly in French immersion, but I took a full scholarship from the University of Ottawa to complete a PhD in the sociology of religion. It was a fun five years of taking a range of courses related to immigrant adaptation processes.

By 2007 I needed a kidney transplant. The whole process interrupted my studies for year. My wonderful husband, Alain Lanoix, generously gave me a kidney. Amazingly he has the same blood type as I do, as well as more than 50% of the same tissues. He was a better fit medically than likely even my brother.

I completed my dissertation on the adaptation of Christian South Sudanese to Canada in 2010. Interestingly, later in a post-doctorate offered to me at the University of Victoria, I was in part able to compare the Christian-mediated East African adaptation processes to that of ethnic Ghanaians, the country where I had been baptised. Unfortunately, I did not succeed in this effort.

My dissertation is available on line here . For those interested, the introduction to my PhD thesis has personal information and in chapter 5 readers will read how I struggled to complete this dissertation as an openly gay married man.

I could undertake the major task of writing this thesis because Africa and Christianity are deeply engrained in me, part of my senses, even as a white man. African rooted Christianity has never left me. I have struggled with racism since my years in Africa, even chairing the education committee for the national capital alliance on race relations in Ottawa. But being gay and white makes advocacy and worshiping in the black church a real challenge, even in the Ashanti (Ghanian) Church in Ottawa, a reality that is sadly practically impossible to overcome.

As recently as 2020, I worked with the local leadership in United Church of Canada and with its black-led national offices, focusing on the church’s efforts to work together with the increasing number of African and Caribbean rooted churches in our major cities. In Ottawa, there are at least 60 such churches. This type of outreach may be possible through the ministry of openly gay Christian black leaders.

Although this brief description of my life does not cover all the 14 different paid jobs I had between the age of 25 and 70, I do feel that my life was a lot like the grasshopper who always hops around looking for different food but continues to smile as my identity. My Christian faith, rooted in Ghana, enabled me to know the power of the Holy Spirit even in times of deep trouble and oppression. I am always helped, even with my impending death, by knowing that I am eternally loved, through Jesus, and that with hard work and discipline, mental, physical, emotional and spiritual, I can always nearly achieve what I intended. Thanks be to the Eternal.

August 10, 2024

Anton R. Lovink