Afrikaner cleric-turned-anti-apartheid 'hero' dies

Beyers Naude, an Afrikaner cleric who spent half his life using the Bible to justify apartheid before becoming one of the anti-apartheid movement’s most important moral voices, died early today.

Naude, 89, had grown increasingly frail over the past six months and was taken to hospital last week with circulation problems blamed on his advanced age. He died at a retirement village in Johannesburg, said family spokesman and long-time friend Carl Niehaus.

South Africa’s former white rulers denounced Naude as a traitor and tried to prevent him from spreading his message of racial tolerance. His church marginalised him and many whites ostracised him.

But with the fall of apartheid a decade ago, Naude went from outcast to hero, and then President Nelson Mandela praised the “Afrikaner prophet” as a living spring of hope for racial reconciliation.

“His life is a shining beacon to all South Africans – both black and white. It demonstrates what it means to rise above race, to be a true South African,” Mandela said in a speech in 1995, marking Naude’s 80th birthday.

Christiaan Frederick Beyers Naude was born in 1915 to a leading Afrikaner nationalist cleric who fought the British in the Boer War and helped found the Broederbond, or “Brotherhood”, a secret society of Afrikaner leaders that eventually became synonymous with the apartheid government.

Naude followed his father’s path, getting a degree in theology from the University of Stellenbosch, a centre of Afrikaner nationalism, and becoming the youngest member of the Broederbond.

As a cleric in South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church, Naude spent years as an unquestioning spiritual leader for Afrikaners – the descendants of Dutch and French settlers – and their deeply religious National Party.

The church, which created biblical justifications for South Africa’s brutal apartheid racism, was often called “the National Party at prayer”, and Naude was seen as a rising religious and political star.

But after attending mixed-race church services in the 1950s, he began to have doubts about his church’s doctrine.

The 1960 Sharpeville massacres, in which government troops killed 69 black demonstrators, sent Naude into an intense bout of soul-searching and Bible study ending with his development of an alternative church theology that condemned racism.

When, with Naude’s support, the World Council of Churches issued a statement rejecting apartheid, prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd led a protest that ended with the South African church withdrawing from the council. Naude refused to change his position.

“It was the beginning of loneliness and isolation, something that I would experience again and again in the years ahead,” Naude once said.

He later helped found the Christian Institute, an organisation that worked to promote reconciliation through inter-faith dialogue.

In punishment, the church stripped him of his status as a minister. The government harassed him, and security police raided his home.

In 1977, authorities “banned” Naude for five years, a punishment that severely restricted his movement and his ability to meet people.

Naude was later ordained in the African Reformed Church and succeeded Archbishop Desmond Tutu as head of the South African Council of Churches.

In 1987, Naude was part of an Afrikaner delegation which met Mandela’s then banned African National Congress in exile in Dakar, Senegal.

After Mandela’s government took power in 1994, Naude was hailed as a hero.

He was given a series of local and international awards and had streets, schools and a major square in Johannesburg named after him.

Naude said he was never bitter towards those in the apartheid government who harassed him. His only real regret was waiting so long to fight for his nation’s oppressed.

“I’m grateful I managed to help some people at least,” he said.

He is survived by his wife, Ilse, and four children.