‘I Saw People Killed’: Child of Apartheid Trades Hate for God’s Love

Racism, violence, poverty, abortion—Trevor Sampson was exposed to all of this and more as a black boy growing up under Apartheid in South Africa. But amid the turmoil and oppression, Trevor’s love for music led him down a path that would change his life forever.

He discovered God offering forgiveness, joy, and a way out of darkness. Listen as Trevor shares his experience on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories.

You can connect with us through email at gps@billygraham.org or on Billy Graham Radio on Facebook.

This episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. aired in its original form on October 21, 2015. 

Transcript

MUSIC STARTS

Trevor Sampson:
00:00:01 Housing in Cape Town at that time was very, very tight. There was very little housing for the, what we call, the so-called colored people. 

Jim Kirkland: Trevor Sampson is a Black man from South Africa. He grew up under apartheid—a form of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination. Trevor’s childhood home was in a poor neighborhood of Cape Town.

Trevor:
00:00:22 Gangster-riddled, drug-infested, alcohol problems, all kinds of stuff. So that was the order of the day. I saw people killed in front of my eyes.

Jim: Trevor’s story is a journey from poverty and abuse to reconciliation and salvation. And it’s the story you’re about to hear on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. I’m Jim Kirkland.

Trevor Sampson didn’t experience the love of a biological father, but his life would be changed by the love of his Heavenly Father. Billy Graham spoke about God’s love for all of us in his historic 1973 outreach in South Africa.

Billy Graham:
00:01:00 Christianity is not a white man’s religion. And don’t ever let anybody tell you that it’s white or black. Christ belongs to all people! He belongs to the whole world! His Gospel is for everyone.

Jim: Billy Graham insisted that Blacks and whites be allowed to sit together during his outreach in segregated South Africa—and that made headlines. You’ll hear more from that message a little later in this episode. If you’d like to learn more about God’s love right now, visit our website at FindPeaceWithGod.net, available to you anytime. FindPeaceWithGod.net. And, anytime you would rather speak with someone, call the 24/7 Billy Graham prayer line at 855-255-7729. That’s 855-255-PRAY.

Intro: GPS: God. People. Stories.

MUSIC TRANSITION

Jim: Trevor Sampson’s story doesn’t begin with his birth, but that’s where we’re going to start—a birth … that had some complications.

Trevor:
00:02:08 The battle to get me to shout or make a sound for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes of really slapping me [laughs] … I’ve been making that sound and I’m still making that sound: I’m alive! I’m here! [laughs] Planned or unplanned, thank You, Jesus, here I am!

Jim: He is here, but he was not planned. And that’s where Trevor’s story really begins. 

Trevor:
00:02:33 My mum was a young teenager who went through—I found her later—she went through a lot of rejection and a lot of challenges in her own family home. And there was a young man next door who obviously gave her the attention and got her to prove her love and you know the way things go; she had to give her virginity over to this guy and at the age of 15 she got pregnant with her first child, which is my brother. And at the age of 17, she fell pregnant again with another child from this same guy. When she came along with a second child, the older women in the family sort of tried to force her to abort this child. 

Jim: Abortion was not uncommon in the world Trevor’s mom had grown up in. It was illegal, but not uncommon.

Trevor:
00:03:19 And so my mother knew the gruesomeness and the challenges that some of the other young ladies went through and she didn’t want to go through that, so she ran away … and gave me an opportunity to be born on the 18th of November 1961.

Jim: After Trevor was born, he and his mom went back to live with her mom and her extended family. 

Trevor:
00:03:38 And housing in Cape Town at that time was very, very tight. There was very little housing for the, what we call, the so-called colored people. And so, my grandmother had a house and by the time I was 13, we were 24 people in a two-bedroom council house. Now you would call it the projects house. I mean, that house is the size of my double garage. [laughs] And we were there, packed in like sardines. So, my mother’s siblings would have children, their children would have children, and so people would be sleeping all over the place. But, here’s the deal: God had His hand on this young boy from a very, very early age. 

Jim: Growing up in South Africa, Trevor survived the institutionalized racial discrimination that was apartheid. He also survived rampant violence in his hometown.

Trevor:
00:04:32 It was a gangster-riddled little township. It’s less than a mile over the road from one of Cape Town’s most prestigious shopping malls. And our township was called Factreton. It was locked in between two air force bases, but it was so hidden away behind the factories so you couldn’t really see it. You just saw a sign: Factreton Housing Estate, down past the factories and in there. Gangster-riddled, drug-infested, alcohol problems, all kinds of stuff. So, that was the order of the day. I saw people killed in front of my eyes. I saw … I mean talk about being abused as a child, that kind of abuse I saw. On the daily basis, I saw gangsters stabbing each other, killing each other. And there was this desire to not become like that and to join a gang, but there was a desire to become better.

Jim: Trevor found hope—in music. 

Trevor:
00:05:27 Through my singing. I was always singing. I was the child in the community that was … I call myself the music glutton. Wherever music, the sound of music was heard, I gravitated toward that. There was a lot of church meetings, and there was a lot of other little functions, so I would find myself there. There would be the concerts, you know, the local town concerts. And then over the weekends, lots of activities, lots of church services; so, we’d start with the Seventh Day Adventists. I would be in there. I loved their singing, so I’d be in their services the whole day, because they have church all day! 

Jim: Trevor was spending all this time in church meetings, but neither he nor anyone in his family was a follower of Jesus Christ.

Trevor:
00:06:11 No, no, no! They were far from Christian. They were members of the Anglican Church, but they were only found in church twice a year, or maybe three times a year, you know, Easter, Christmas, and when someone died. So, they were that kind … [laughs] 

Jim: And so was he, but that didn’t stop Trevor from joining a traveling gospel group. He didn’t know the Jesus he was singing about, but that was about to change.

Trevor:
00:06:35 It was in a Pentecostal church on a Sunday night, and the pastor was asked to close the service only in prayer. There’d already been an altar call by the Baptist minister who preached. And this Pentecostal pastor felt the urge to make another altar call and three times the amount of people responded. And I looked and I thought, OK, there’s something funny going on, but you know how the Pentecostals are—there are tongues and all kinds of stuff and people, and I looked and I started laughing at what was going on. Next thing he said, Everyone raise up your hand as a sign of total surrender to the Lord. And as I raised my hand, something came over me. There was tears for more than an hour I was there. God was helping me; He was saving me; He was helping me on my journey to being saved, and I will never forget that experience because it was a very real experience. I was 13 years old and I said ‘yes’ to Jesus.

Jim: Trevor’s heart was transformed, but his surroundings weren’t. And he was bound to those surroundings for a few more years still.

Trevor:
00:07:38 In this whole process, God preserved me. You got to understand the whole history of the lineage before me had messed up, you know, children before marriage, sleeping together, and shacking up together, and so on, and from an early age, I prayed this prayer: God, I want to rise out of this. I want to be a virgin when I get married. Help me, Lord.

Jim: In short, Trevor didn’t want to be like his father.

Trevor:
00:08:03 My father was our next-door neighbor, but he was seen as the drunk of the town, so a lot of people mocked him. He never supported his children. He never really lifted a finger to support me, or even send me a birthday card, even know when I was born. So, to cut a long story short, I knew what he looked like, but he was never my daddy.

Jim: Trevor grew up and went to Bible school, and within just a few months he got a big assignment from God. 

Trevor:
00:08:31 God impressed on my heart: You need to go and fix up those things. You think I’m black out here, you should’ve seen what was in my heart. My goodness, there was a lot of hurt, a lot of pain, a lot of rejection, a lot of … unforgiveness, and I had to uproot all of that. And the way to do it is not only to talk to God, and that’s the first step to take, which is what I did, but the second step I took was to go and reconcile and make restitution and make right and speak a release over them. So, I went to my father first. And, typical evangelist, I asked for forgiveness, and asked him, Now, the same Jesus that forgave me can forgive you of your sins. And right there, at age 21, I was able to lead my father to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jim: Next, Trevor had to talk to his mom.

Trevor:
00:09:18 I managed to get the word out to her and say, You know what? All this giving of money and all this stuff and bringing good gifts and dropping it there and running off, you thought I was your best son. I was not. In fact, I had a hatred in my heart towards you that I need to get released and I need your forgiveness.

Jim: Within a year of that conversation, Trevor’s mom and the rest of his family gave their lives to Jesus. Even as God was bringing about so much change in his life and the lives of his loved ones, change was slow to come in South African society. Apartheid remained in place until Trevor was in his early 30s.

Trevor:
00:09:55 So, there was a lot of anger that I had to deal with. You know, you can’t get on this bus; you can’t get on this train or into that carriage of the train; you can’t go in that side of the station; you can’t go in that side of the restaurant; you can’t go on this beach; you had to go to the one that was dangerous and people always drowned; you can’t go into these movies. So, I was a very angry young man. So, apart from the rejection that I went through, God had to do a whole lot of deliverance from the other stuff that was added to by the system, you know. But in it all I think I found my voice; I found my place, you know? So, with all that negativity, there was still reason for me to sing, make my sound. And in retrospect, I think I’m glad that I actually experienced the apartheid thing, that I know now never to do the same to others, whoever it is I may be in contact with—to treat them with the utmost of respect and to love my neighbor as myself. 

MUSIC TRANSITION

Jim: Trevor Sampson has learned a lot about loving people the way God loves them—unconditionally. Because God loves you, He wants to save you from your sins and give you peace and joy in your daily living. We can tell you more about this at our website, FindPeaceWithGod.net. That’s FindPeaceWithGod.net. 

In just a moment, a parting word from Trevor Sampson about another person who impacted his life and ministry.

MUSIC STARTS

Voice-over: You’re listening to GPS: God. People. Stories. A podcast production of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. 


Billy Graham:
00:11:46 What a great privilege and delight it is to be in South Africa and here in this great stadium is gathered a remarkable crowd, made up of various races and various language groups. 

Voice-over: Billy Graham …

Billy Graham:
00:12:00 Christianity is not a white man’s religion. And don’t ever let anybody tell you that it’s white or black. Christ belongs to all people! He belongs to the whole world! His Gospel is for everyone. For God so loved the world—the Black world, the white world, the rich world, the poor world, the uneducated world, the educated world, and He loves us all the same. God loves you. And God loved us so much that He gave His Son. What do you have to do? By faith, you must receive Christ as your Lord and Savior.

Jim: That excerpt you just heard is from Billy Graham’s 1973 outreach in South Africa. At the time, the nation’s apartheid political system dictated that Blacks and whites be fully segregated in just about every part of society. Mr. Graham refused to hold any events there until the country’s leadership would allow fully integrated gatherings for his outreaches. That finally happened in 1973 and it drew international attention. 

Our guest on this episode of GPS: God. People. Stories. is Trevor Sampson, a Black man who was living in South Africa when Mr. Graham visited. Trevor didn’t attend the outreaches, but as he says …

Trevor:
00:13:27 I was affected by the aftereffects of that particular Crusade—people who came with a fire and started evangelizing and telling others, you know, and so, you know, the music ministries that came from it, the street ministries, the tent Crusades, all of that. I saw a lot of that happening in the ’70s. And suddenly you saw all these things springing up all over the place and I thought, Wow! What’s happening? It impacted me in a big way. It put in me a desire to want to spend myself. 

Jim: “A desire to want to spend myself.” That’s what Trevor Sampson has done. He has ‘spent’ his life in full-time music ministry, as well as other types of service to Jesus. We’d like to thank Trevor for sharing his story with us on this episode of GPS. 

If you would like to hear some more great stories, we have over 300 episodes available wherever you listen to podcasts, and also available on YouTube. New episodes come every other Wednesday, so make plans to join us to hear from our next guest in two weeks.

MUSIC STARTS

I’m Jim Kirkland. This is GPS: God. People. Stories., it’s an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—Always Good News.

CLOSING MUSIC

# # #