Beyers Naudé

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Christiaan Frederick Beyers Naudé (more commonly known as Beyers Naudé or simply Oom Bey (Uncle Bey) in Afrikaans) (10 May 1915 - 7 September 2004) was an Afrikaner-South African cleric, theologian and anti-apartheid activist picture.

1 History
2 The Naudé Name
3 Notes
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] History

One of eight children, he was born in Roodepoort, Transvaal but grew up in Cape Town. He was named after a general his father had served under during the second Anglo-Boer War. Naudé studied theology at the University of Stellenbosch, where one of his teachers was the future prime minister (and driving force behind so-called grand apartheid, chief-architect of apartheid,) H.F. Verwoerd.

Beyers Naudé's father was an Afrikaner cleric and a founder of the Broederbond ("Brotherhood" or "League of Brothers" in Afrikaans), a powerful Afrikaner male secret society which played a dominant role in apartheid South Africa. The Broederbond became especially synonymous with the Afrikaner-dominated National Party that won power in 1948 and started to implement the racial segregation policy of apartheid.

Like his father, Naudé became a cleric in the South African Dutch Reformed Church and joined the Broederbond, preaching a religious justification for apartheid. However, he began to doubt the religious justification for apartheid after attending interracial church services in the 1950's. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 (during which the South African police killed 69 blacks protesting restrictions on their freedom of movement), his faith in his church's teachings was completely shattered; he was alone among his church's delegates in supporting a landmark proclamation in the same year by the World Council of Churches that rejected any theological basis for apartheid.

In 1963 Naudé founded the Christian Institute of Southern Africa (1963-77).

As a result of his actions, Naudé was put under enormous pressure by the Afrikaner political and church establishment and he thus subsequently quit both his church post and Johannesburg congregation as well as resigned from the Broederbond in 1963. The Dutch Reformed Church later left the World Council of Churches.

Naudé was banned along with other leaders of the Christian Institute, including Brian Brown, Cedric Mayson, and Peter Randall. When Naudé refused to testify in 1972 before the state’s Schlebusch commission, he was tried and briefly imprisoned.

In 1980, Naudé was admitted as a cleric to the Dutch Reformed church's black African affiliate.

During the three decades subsequent to his resignation, Naudé's vocal support for racial reconciliation and equal rights led to upheavals in the Dutch Reformed Church as well as police surveillance of his private life. He became an underground supporter of the anti-apartheid resistance and helped to move its members in and out of the country. From 1977 to 1984, the South African government declared him a "banned person" (which meant a de facto form of house arrest), that severely restricted his movements and interactions with others.

After his unbanning in 1985, he succeeded Archbishop Desmond Tutu as chairman of the South African Council of Churches. Naudé was also the only Afrikaner member of the African National Congress delegation during the negotiations in the early 1990's with the National Party government which led to the transition to democracy.

Despite his long association with the African National Congress, Naudé never actually joined the party. This fact, as well as the constant ill health he suffered from during the last few years of his life, caused him to be politically sidelined.

His official state funeral took place on Saturday 18 September 2004, with President Thabo Mbeki and other dignitaries and high-ranking ANC officials in attendance. Naudé's ashes were scattered in the township of Alexandra, just outside Johannesburg.

He was survived by his wife Ilse and four children.

In 2004 he was voted 36th in the Top 100 Great South Africans (Behind H.F. Verwoerd who was voted 19th). In 1993, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).^[1]

[edit] The Naudé Name

The progenitor of the Naudé name was a French Huguenot refugee named Jacques Naudé who arrived in the Cape in 1718.^[1] The Naudé surname is one of the numerous French names which have retained their original spelling.