Anti-apartheid activist Dr Beyers Naudé
Dr Beyers Naudé - a man of courage.
GRAAFF-REINET — On August 3, 2016, the Baviaans Local Municipality, the Ikwezi Local Municipality and the Camdeboo Local Municipality was merged into one municipality and renamed the Dr Beyers Naudé Local Municipality.
Beyers Naudé was a child of Graaff-reinet, but essentially, of white Afrikanerdom.
He was named after Boer War General Beyers and was born in Roodepoort where his dominee father, Ds Jozua Naude was serving refugees from the war-ravaged
As a in the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK) Ds Jozua was engaged in a fight with the post-war British government for the rights of Afrikaners, especially the right to mothertongue education.
He chaired a committee promoting Afrikaner interests, known later as the Broederbond - this would become a major force in Afrikaner politics by the 1950’s.
Beyers and his siblings had learned from their father about the brutality of the British campaign to crush the independent Boer republics. They also knew about the terrible suffering and death of more than 26000 Boer women and children in British concentration camps.
As a 6-year-old Beyers Naudé witnessed cartloads of Boer refugees passing through Graaffreinet in search of work on the mines. Many received food and shelter from his parents at the Pastorie.
Compassion for these unfairly disadvantaged people remained in his memory.
It would cause him to question injustice for the rest of his life.
On arrival in Graaff-reinet, the Naudé children experienced the furore that erupted on their first Sunday in the NG Grootkerk when their father, newly appointed as senior delivered his sermon in Afrikaans, instead of the accepted colonial Dutch or English.
Over 300 members of the congregation would eventually leave the Grootkerk and build the NG Nuwekerk.
The Naudé children became foundation members of a newly established Volkskool, the first Afrikaans-medium school in the area. Volkskool was provided by the Department of Education after Ds Jozua Naudé formed a parent committee to demand mother-tongue education for the children of Afrikaners.
The Pastorie in Murray Street where Beyers Naudé and his family lived from 1921, had a large back garden for growing vegetables. The children could swim in the Sundays River, explore the koppies and visit farms surrounding the town with their dominee father.
As a young man, Beyers Naudé began questioning the unfairness of racial discrimination.
His parents had taught him that, like the Hebrews of the Old Testament, Afrikaners had a duty to spread knowledge about God to people of colour and to maintain themselves a separate and superior race in order to fulfil the role.
His questioning would gradually develop into a passionate commitment to prove that racial discrimination and the policy of Apartheid were not based on Biblical teaching.
His convictions would put Dr Beyers Naudé on a collision course with the NGK and his own people.
As a result, although he had become a respected young Afrikaner leader in the church, he was condemned as a traitor. He would have to leave the Dutch Reformed church that he loved in order to work with other dissidents in the struggle against Apartheid.
The Christian Institute (CI) and its newspaper, Pro Veritate became his new platform. These were banned by the government with other dissident organisations and newspapers in 1977, and Beyers was sentenced to 5 (later 7) years house-arrest. Being ostracized by their own people caused the Naudé family deep pain and humiliation. But in spite of this, once they were free to travel, their continued work with the world Reformed churches, would, in the end, help bring about radically changed attitudes and policies in South Africa.
It would play a part in enabling the emergence of previously unacknowledged African leadership, and plans for economic and social transformation in a post-apartheid country.
Beyers Naudé was invited by Nelson Mandela to take part in forming a new Constitution - despite the fact that he had never joined the ANC.
He died on 7 September 2004 and was honoured with a State funeral. The Pastorie - now part of the Eastern Cape Department of Education district offices.