Beyers Naudé

Christiaan Frederick Beyers Naudé (10 May 1915 – 7 September 2004) was a South African Afrikaner Calvinist Dominee, theologian and the leading Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist. He was known simply as Beyers Naudé, or more colloquially, ''Oom Bey'' (Afrikaans for "Uncle Bey").

Early life and education

One of eight children, Beyers Naudé was born to Jozua François Naudé and Adriana Johanna Naudé (née) van Huyssteen in Roodepoort, Transvaal (now Gauteng). The progenitor of the Naudé name was a French Huguenot refugee named Jacques Naudé who arrived in the Cape in 1718.. The Naudé surname is one of numerous French surnames that retained their original spelling in South Africa. Beyers Naudé was named after General Christiaan Frederick Beyers, under whom his father had served as a soldier and unofficial military chaplain during the second Anglo-Boer War."Beyers Naudé." African National Congress.

Jozua Naudé, an Afrikaner Calvinist minister,or "Dominee", "was convinced that the British would never leave." He helped to found the ''Broederbond'' (Afrikaans, "Brotherhood" or "League of Brothers"), the powerful Afrikaner Calvinist men's secret society that played a dominant role in South Africa under apartheid. The ''Broederbond'' became especially synonymous with the Afrikaner-dominated National Party that won power in 1948 and implemented the racial segregation policy of apartheid. The elder Naudé also helped produce the earliest translations of the Bible into the newly standardized language of Afrikaans.

In 1921, the Naudé family moved to the Cape Province town of Graaff-Reinet, in the Karoo region. Beyers Naudé attended Afrikaans Hoërskool frikaans High School matriculating in 1931. Naudé studied theology at the University of Stellenbosch and lived at Wilgenhof men's residence. He graduated in 1939 with an MA in languages and a theology degree. His sociology lecturer was the future prime minister and chief-architect of apartheid, H. F. Verwoerd. But Naudé credited Stellenbosch theologian Ben Keet with laying the groundwork for his own theological dissent.

Naudé was ordained in 1939 as a minister in the South African Dutch Reformed Church and joined the ''Broederbond'' as its youngest member. For 20 years he served various congregations,"Beyers Naudé." ''Encarta''. starting at Wellington in Western Cape Province (1940–1942), Loxton (1942–1945), Pretoria - South-Olifantsfontein (1945–1949), Pretoria East (1945–1954), Potchefstroom (1954–1959) and Aasvoëlkop (Johannesburg) (1959–1963) preaching a religious justification for apartheid. On 3 August 1940 Naudé married Ilse Weder, whose father had been a Moravian missionary. The couple had three sons and a daughter.

Anti-apartheid activities

The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 (during which the South African police killed 69 black demonstrators protesting against restrictions on their freedom of movement) ended his support for his church's political teachings. He began to question the biblical justification of apartheid by the Dutch Reformed Church: "I made an intensive study of the Bible to prove that those justifications were not valid. I concluded that the passages that were being used by the white DRC to justify apartheid were unfounded. In some cases, there was a deliberate distortion in order to prove the unprovable!" In the three decades after his resignation from the denomination, Naudé's vocal support for racial reconciliation and equal rights led to upheavals in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Cottesloe and the Christian Institute of Southern Africa

In response to Sharpeville, the World Council of Churches (WCC) sent a delegation to Johannesburg to meet with clerics. Naudé, by then the moderator of his church district (the Southern Transvaal Synod), helped to organize a consultation (the Cottesloe Consultation)
between the WCC and eighty South African church delegates in Cottesloe, a Johannesburg suburb. The Cottesloe Consultation's resolutions rejected race as the basis of exclusion from churches, and affirmed the right of all people to own land and have a say in how they are governed. Naudé alone among his church's delegates steadfastly continued to reject any theological basis for apartheid after Prime Minister Verwoerd forced the DRC delegation to repudiate the consultation. The Dutch Reformed Church later left the World Council of Churches.

In 1963 Naudé founded the Christian Institute of Southern Africa (CI), an ecumenical organization with the aim of fostering reconciliation through interracial dialogue, research, and publications. The DRC forced Naudé to choose between his status as minister and directorship of the CI. He then resigned his church post, left his Aasvoëlkop congregation in Northcliff, Johannesburg, and resigned from the ''Broederbond'' in 1963. As a result, he lost his status as minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. His last sermon to his congregation noted that "We must show greater loyalty to God than to man". Stoically anticipating the enormous pressure by the Afrikaner political and church establishment that was to come, he told his wife: "We must prepare for ten years in the wilderness." Former Archbishop Desmond Tutu later said "Beyers became a leper in the Afrikaner community."

During the same year Naudé was blamed for leaking secret, confidential and unauthorized documents about the Broederbond to the press. The University of the Witwatersrand New Testament scholar Professor Albert S. Geyser later admitted that he had leaked the documents. Naudé had given the documents to Geyser to evaluate the extent of the influence of the Broederbond on the church. Geyser then provided the information to a journalist at ''The Sunday Times''. The book " The Super-Afrikaners. Inside the Afrikaner Broederbond " written by Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom published in 1978 exposed a name list of possible members of the Broederbond. The source of these documents, that was taken without authorization, was blamed on Naudé. In 1967 Naudé and Geyser won a libel case against conservative Pretoria Professor Adriaan Pont, who had called them communists.

In 1970 Naudé was among few white South African Christian leaders "who openly called for understanding of the WCC decision" to provide financial support for liberation movements in southern Africa."Letter to Rev. Dr Molefe Tsele, General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, 7 September 2004." Georges Lemopoulos. World Council of Churches "If blood runs in the streets of South Africa it will not be because the World Council of Churches has done something but because the churches of South Africa have done nothing," Naudé said. In response, the state formed the Schlebusch Commission