Obituary

Anti-apartheid cleric, dies in South Africa

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Beyers Naude, an Afrikaner cleric who became one of the anti-apartheid movement's most powerful voices after spending half his life using the Bible to justify the racist system, died early Tuesday (Sept. 7, 2004), a family spokesman said. He was 89.

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

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

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

Christiaan Frederick Beyers Naude was born in 1915 to an 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.

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

As a cleric in South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church, Mr. 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 created biblical justifications for South Africa's brutal racism and Mr. 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 him into an intense bout of soul searching and Bible study ending with his development of an alternative church theology that condemned racism.

He helped found the Christian Institute, an organization that worked to promote reconciliation through interfaith dialogue.

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

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