c. 1998 Religion News Service

CAPE TOWN, South Africa _ Spotlights burn down on the platform in a gymnasium already swathed in the steamy heat seeping through windows and doors here. A sweat-drenched crowd waits in chairs and bleachers.

Missionaries with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fan themselves with their programs while choir members fidget in their seats and girls in sun dresses prance about.

Suddenly, the crowd is still.

LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley walks slowly to the front of the platform. As in every other venue he has visited, the crowd begins to sing “We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet,” the Mormon anthem for their leader.

Hinckley, looking exhausted, allows only one verse before signaling the crowd to be seated. In his chair, he takes off his glasses and wipes his brow.

The trip to Cape Town in southwestern South Africa at the end of February is Hinckley’s seventh church meeting in a week and his second speech of the day. In the morning, the 87-year-old president will begin his flight back to the United States.

The crowded itinerary conforms to a pattern Hinckley has followed since becoming president of the 10 million-member church. Though he acknowledges a general distaste for life on the road, Hinckley is the most traveled prophet the church has ever seen. He has visited nearly 50 locales on six continents in the past three years, including five African nations on this trip.

Hinckley feels an urgency “to get out among the members of the church everywhere,” he said in an interview. In addition to South Africa, he also went to Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Zimbabwe.

“As long as I have the strength to do it, I want to do it,” Hinckley said.

His pace was dramatically accelerated when LDS billionaire Jon Huntsman Sr. offered one of his private jets to Hinckley and donated the cost of pilots, fuel and maintenance. Hinckley can fly into a country, clear customs and immigration right on the plane, get to a speech and get out again with little hassle.

While in the air, Hinckley passes the time reading _ LDS scriptures, newspapers, history, church books, church reports _ or conversing with his traveling companions. On this trip, they include Apostle Jeffrey Holland; Elder James Mason, president of the Africa Area; Don Staley, Hinckley’s personal secretary; David Sayers, Hinckley’s personal assistant; and Dick Hinckley, Hinckley’s eldest son.

The travel, Hinckley said “is wearisome. I am an old man and I get tired.”

Tell that to the younger men staggering in his wake.

“I am exhausted trying to keep up,” Mason said as he described to the Cape Town audience a single day of the Africa trip.

Hinckley arose early on Feb. 16 to visit a proposed temple site in Accra, Ghana. He met with the country’s president, Jerry Rawlings, at noon; addressed 6,700 people at 5; gave a radio interview at 7 and a TV interview at 8.

“The rest of us would get to the hotel and go blank, but he was always analyzing where he’d been, thinking ahead,” said Dick Hinckley. “Whatever the issue happened to be, he was always working it in his mind.”

But if the travel is draining, meeting church members is exhilarating.

“Every place I go, I wish I could stay longer and sit down with them,” Hinckley said. “When you are with the people, you just love them. It’s the same everywhere.”

In Zimbabwe, Hinckley drove by the mission home to greet a score of eager missionaries, and in Johannesburg he stopped at the temple to encourage the temple workers. There is precious little time for sightseeing.

On the way to the airport in Kenya, Hinckley took a few minutes to stop at a game park.

“We saw some giraffes with long necks and cape buffalos with short necks,” he quipped.

Years ago, when a church president visited a region, local members often put together an evening of indigenous dance and song.

Church members in Johannesburg still cringe with embarrassment when they remember the 1978 visit of President Spencer W. Kimball and several apostles. Because there were no black Mormons in South Africa at the time, the church member in charge of cultural events invited a local dance troupe to perform. When the women appeared in their native costumes, they were topless.

Though the church leaders graciously said nothing, members were furious.

In recent years, regional gatherings have focused exclusively on religious services, carefully choreographed for maximum effect.

During a service in Zimbabwe, speaker after speaker praises the man and his mission. Holland, sounding a note he would hit again and again during the Africa trip, tells the crowd Hinckley “is everything you hope him to be and want him to be. And more.”

Now it is Hinckley’s turn.

No matter how tired he is, as soon as he begins to speak, it is as if someone has “given him a shot of adrenlin,” Dick Hinckley said.

The president speaks conversationally, personally, without notes, moving seamlessly among a variety of topics. He speaks in general of the great work of spreading the gospel in every land, quoting scriptures and drawing on personal experiences, closing with the hope his listeners will all have food on their tables, shelter over their heads and clothes on their backs.

In what seems an impulsive gesture, Hinckley throws a kiss to the crowd in Cape Town. It falls like a shower of snowflakes on their cheeks, cooling them with a permanent memory.

“When he threw that kiss, I felt it was especially for me,” said Linda Nabe Ntshoko, Relief Society president in the Guguletu LDS branch, organized in a township. “It was my birthday.”

Hinckley is grateful for the emotion and the devotion, but he insisted they are for the office of prophet, not the man.

“Adulation is a dangerous thing,” he said. “You can’t let it take possession of you, for it may injure you, could destroy you. Keep your feet on the ground and live your natural life, just try to continue an interest in people.”

When the people sing, “We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet,” Hinckley joins in. He said while they sing to him, the living prophet, he imagines Joseph Smith, the faith’s founding prophet.

Does he ever wish he could step down from the pedestal and be just a man?

“I don’t even speculate about that,” Hinckley said. “I am what I am not of my own choosing.”

DEA END STACK