Beyers NaudeHis very name declared his origins. In 1915 Christiaan Frederick Beyers Naude was solemnly christened into the Dutch Reformed Church and named after a Boer general who had fought against the British in the South African War.
Forty-eight years later in October 1963, Rev Beyers Naude left the church that had nurtured him, because it was also the church that nurtured apartheid.
He chose as his final sermon the theme: "We must show greater loyalty to God than to man." He took off his robes, left his pulpit and told his wife: "We must now prepare for 10 years in the wilderness."
Those wilderness years were longer than predicted, but Beyers Naude did spend the last decade of his life in a South Africa in which the evil of apartheid had been removed and in which he had become known affectionately to the majority of his compatriots as "Oom Bey", their respected "Oom" or "Uncle" . One of the major roads in Johannesburg, formerly called after D. F. Malan who formed the country's first fully racist government, now bears Naude's name.
Naude was one of the small band of Afrikaners who had the courage to oppose apartheid when the system was at the height of its powers and faced the consequences of being branded traitors to their people.
His journey from membership of the secret Broederbond society, which spawned the policies of apartheid and which his father helped to found, was a painful one.
The Broederbond was the dominant force in Afrikaner life. It controlled the National Party which was entrenched in power and it controlled the Dutch Reformed Church which played a dominant role in Afrikaner life.
It was hardly surprising that Beyers Naude became a member. His entire youthful formation would have led him in that direction. He was born one of eight children in Roodeport to Jozua Francois, a minister of the church and his wife Ada Naude at a time when the wounds of defeat by the British in the Boer War were still sorely felt.
The family moved south to Graaf-Reinet in the Cape in 1921 and his secondary education was at the Afrikaans Hoer Volkskool from which he matriculated in 1931.
After that it was the traditional path to Stellenbosch University near Cape Town where he studied languages and graduated from the School of Theology in 1939. A year later he was admitted to the Broederbond as its youngest member, but he had already, if slowly and painfully, begun to question the beliefs of his father and the majority of his people.
At Stellenbosch he had come under the influence of Johan de Plessis whose views led him to be tried for heresy and dismissed from the Dutch Reformed Church seminary.
His professor of ethics Ben Keet also sowed the seeds of doubt and apartheid's architect Hendrik Verwoerd, who lectured in sociology at the time, produced a negative effect on the young Naude.
For two decades he ministered to deeply conservative pro-apartheid congregations in different parts of South Africa, but the real turning point in his life came in 1960 with the massacre of African demonstrators by South African police at Sharpeville.
Later that year when Verwoerd, as prime minister, ordered a delegation from the Dutch Reformed Church to the World Council of Churches to rescind a statement that rejected all biblical and theological bases for apartheid, all but Naude obliged.
He was now out in the cold. The Broederbond and the Afrikaner establishment disowned him. He was made a leper by his people. One of those who sat through Naude's farewell sermon in 1963 was the Broederbond's leader, Piet Meyer, who could barely conceal his disdain for the man he regarded as a traitor.
But Naude believed he was following the true Afrikaner tradition, "the willingness to cross frontiers" that had been demonstrated so frequently by his ancestors. His black compatriots were, he believed, undergoing the same sufferings and humiliations that Afrikaners had undergone in their own history.
The authorities reacted predictably. His passport was confiscated. From 1977 to 1984 he was declared a "banned person", the South African equivalent of being put under house arrest. While never a member of the ANC, he became involved in the underground movement against apartheid, using his hobby as a talented mechanic to provide cars to those escaping the attentions of the secret police.
After the ANC's unbanning he was invited to join the organisation's negotiating teams for talks with the National Party which led to the end of apartheid even though he still did not become a member.
His commitment to racial harmony was witnessed in 1980 when he and three other theologians joined the black sister church of the Dutch Reformed Church. He later succeeded Archbishop Desmond Tutu as chairman of the South African Council of Churches.
His courage in opposing the majority of his people while remaining proud to be an Afrikaner, singled him out as an anti-apartheid icon, a "true African patriot and prophet" in the words of Nelson Mandela.
Beyers Naude born 1915; died September, 2004