Beyers Naudé (1915–2004): Christianity,violence,and reconciliation in South Africa

Introduction

The year 2015 marks the centennial celebration of the birth of a South African church leader and activist, who might be considered a modern prophet, Christiaan Frederick Beyers Naudé. The son of a pastor, Naudé emerged from a prominent Afrikaner family to initially fulfil both parental and societal expectations by becoming a respectable pastor in the influential Dutch Reformed Church. Politically, he supported the apartheid policies of the ruling National Party, and he was also a member of an elite organization, the Afrikaner Broederbond (Afrikaner Fraternity). However, from the 1960s, Naudé increasingly radicalized to become one of the most vocal critics of the apartheid regime. His criticism was also considered to be particularly damaging, precisely because of his heritage and pedigree within the Afrikaner establishment. Naudé would eventually become a symbol of reconciliation in South Africa, belonging to that small group of high profile individuals in South Africa whose life journeys demonstrated a serious commitment, against much adversity, to reach out and affirm shared humanity across racial and ethnic lines. As such, this type of reconciliation might be described as a triumph against the systemic injustice of the apartheid state. Injustice is, of course, often tied to violence, as was also the case in this context.

Might violence, on the contrary, also be a means to justice? This question, one of the oldest Christian controversies, is not so easily glossed over if one is not already a committed pacifist. To make the point more concrete, if it is relatively easy to point to Beyers Naudé in retrospect as a symbol of reconciliation, his attitude towards violence, and the role that different types of violence might have played in his personal identity formation, require a certain amount of disentanglement. Considering the theme of violence within the lives and work of South African figures who have been typically revered for their moral leadership in recent times, such as Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and in this case Beyers Naudé, might be an uncomfortable endeavour to engage in, but it is a necessary one.

Among Afrikaner intellectuals, generally, there was not much principled vocal resistance against apartheid during the 1960s and 1970s. Beyers Naudé was one notable exception. Sometimes compared to the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ¹ who opposed the Nazi regime and eventually paid with his life for this rebellion, Naudé went against the stream of what has been somewhat controversially termed “Afrikaner Civil Religion.” ² However, whether one agrees with the term or not, popular Afrikaner religious discourse during the apartheid years might typically be described as characteristic of a cosy, rather undifferentiated interrelationship between Afrikaner nationalist politics and protestant reformed religiosity. ³ This context tended to provide a bulwark of uncritical acceptance for apartheid ideology.

Naudé was never martyred in the way that Bonhoeffer was, but he was heavily ostracized and eventually confined to virtual house arrest according to the regulations of the banning order that was placed on him for a period of seven years in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Naudé, for the most part, declined to consider violence as a legitimate means of achieving a changed social order in South Africa, but there are also indications that Naudé’s ideas about violence changed over time. It seems that he became more accepting of its legitimate use as the anti-apartheid struggle continued and intensified in the 1980s. ⁴ Moreover, the theme of violence, particularly the collective Afrikaner memory of war, played a significant role in his background and personal identity formation, as this article will illustrate.

At Stellenbosch University, a Beyers Naudé archive is in the process of realization. This is an extensive research project on all aspects of Naudé’s life and legacy. One part of this concerns an endeavour in oral history. Interviews were conducted with as many as possible of his living friends, colleagues, associates, and family members. Another aspect of the archive concerns his personal writings, as well as those of close associates that were published in the journal Pro Veritate. This journal, which the apartheid state eventually banned, was highly critical of the status quo. There is, furthermore, a collection of sermons as preached in various settings. Informed by these sources, but with a specific focus on Beyers Naudé’s autobiography and Pro Veritate, this article considers his developing thoughts on the question of violence, particularly its potential role in the face of oppression. What is the relationship between violence and reconciliation in the life of this individual? This question, among others, should be considered within a contextual background of a South Africa that has achieved a fragile reconciliation at the end of political apartheid, partly due to the lasting influence of Nelson Mandela, but which still displays the signs of a country that stirs with the underlying potential for violence, which does occasionally erupt into the open.

Beyers Naudé, and his break with mainstream Afrikaner Christianity

Beyers Naudé started his career as a conventional Afrikaner minister in the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), but the 1960s heralded a turning point for him. Instrumental was the 1960 ecumenical Cottesloe Consultation, when 80 delegates of member churches in the World Council of Churches (WCC) convened to take a stand on the national crisis that had recently been highlighted by the atrocious Sharpeville shootings near Johannesburg. ⁵ Sixty-nine protesters and innocent bystanders were shot dead, and another one hundred and eighty-six were wounded in the streets by the South African police. ⁶ The Cottesloe Consultation, in which Naudé participated as a DRC delegate, spoke out rather modestly against government policies, but its official declarations statement caused a great deal of opposition from the mainstream within the Dutch Reformed Church, and in the pages of its official publication, Die Kerkbode. Naudé and other DRC delegates who had voted in favour of all of the consultation’s declarations were publically repudiated by many in positions of power, including the sitting Prime Minister, H. F. Verwoerd. One result of all of this was that the Afrikaner Reformed churches resigned their membership of the WCC.

Although the DRC delegates were expected to recant their support for the Cottesloe statement after this was denounced by national and DRC leadership, Naudé refused to change his tune. ⁷ For him, the post-Cottesloe years saw a period of increased disaffection and radicalization, which would eventually lead to his resignation as minister of the Aasvoëlkop congregation of the DRC, and to his subsequent loss of clerical status. His defrocking came as a direct consequence of his full-time involvement with the newly founded anti-apartheid Christian Institute, of which he served as director, and the journal Pro Veritate, of which he became chief editor. In 1977, a banning order was imposed against him under the regulations of an apartheid security law, which meant, among other constricting measures, that he was not allowed to speak publically nor meet with more than one person at a time. ⁸

Naudé’s personal life also illustrates a countercultural, even rebellious streak. One case in point was his marriage to Ilse Hedwig Weber who was the daughter of German Moravian missionaries at South Africa’s oldest mission station, Genadendal. This might not seem particularly seditious to anyone unfamiliar with South Africa, but considering the fact that he was the son of a prominent DRC minister, and that this was during the rising tide of Afrikaner nationalism when everything foreign and non-Afrikaans was suspect, his parents’ adverse reaction to the marriage makes a certain amount of sense. Naudé’s biographer Colleen Ryan describes the troubles caused within his family by this union. Naudé’s conservative parents objected to his planned marriage and tried to dissuade him from going through with it. ⁹ Beyers himself recounted how his mother had sent his older sister, Hymne, to try and convince him to renege on his plans of becoming engaged to Ilse. ¹⁰

Later on in the autobiography he described how he had eventually become reconciled with all of his surviving siblings, who had not universally supported his anti-apartheid activities, with the exception of Hymne and her husband Detlev Weiss, who persisted in avoiding any contact with Beyers Naudé, even at times of family bereavement. ¹¹

My article is indirectly interested in the question of memory. ¹² I am especially interested in the question of how memories and remembrances might help reconciliation triumph over injustice (and violence). This story about a failure of reconciliation among members of the Naudé family, of course, also illustrates the opposite scenario, which is that memories of perceived betrayals and/or injustices might become too precarious a bridge to cross in some instances.

A question of violence: The sentiments of the father visited upon the son?

What were Beyers Naudé’s views on violence and how were they shaped? I do not wish to endorse a deterministic perspective that would have children more or less as carbon copies of the values of their parents. Common sense and everyday experience of people and their families tell a different story, as does most research on family systems. However, research has also convincingly illustrated the strong trans-generational effects of trauma. ¹³ In the case of Beyers Naudé, the life experiences of his father, Jozua Francois Naudé, were evidently of formative influence also in terms of the son’s decisions and life trajectory, particularly the wartime experiences of the father. This, is in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that J. F. Naudé never spoke much about these experiences to his son. ¹⁴ Silence and secrecy, however, often work in paradoxical ways. To put it anecdotally, if you want a skeleton to be found, all you have to do is to hide it very carefully in a closet.

Therefore, to state the facts regarding J. F. Naudé’s involvement in wars as succinctly as possible: he fought variously under Generals Kemp and Christiaan Frederick Beyers, to whom he served as second in command during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). He distinguished himself with all manner of wartime heroics and eventually became the youngest delegate to represent the Boer side at the Peace Treaty of Vereeniging. Pointedly, Naudé furthermore (dubiously) distinguished himself at this meeting when he and five other compatriots ultimately refused to sign the treaty, for the simple reason that doing so would imply a defeat for Afrikaner independence. And thus his name became indelibly inscribed in the volks mythology of the budding Afrikaner nationalism as one of “die ses wat nie wou teken nie” (the six who refused to sign). ¹⁵

With this sort of reputation and status it is understandable that some years later, J. F. Naudé, as a DRC minister in the town of Roodepoort, would become a close confidante of Boer conspirators, who during the early phase of the First World War staged a Rebellie (Rebellion) in 1915 against the South African Union’s participation on the side of the British Empire. The Rebellie was an utter failure and ended in much tragedy for anti-Empire Afrikaners, particularly emphasized by the bloody demise of another hallowed Anglo-Boer War veteran, General Koos de la Rey, who was shot dead while attempting to escape a police roadblock, to be soon followed by the death by drowning of Naudé’s friend, General Beyers. ¹⁶ If it is not already apparent, Beyers Naudé, who was born in 1915, was named after this secondly-mentioned Boer General.

Beyers Naudé himself acknowledged the influence of his father on his own life, even if such influence manifested itself in unexpected ways. His father was for example one of the founders of the highly influential Afrikaner Broederbond, ¹⁷ and was chosen as its first president on 2 July 1918. Beyers described how someone had said to him: “Your father was the great Brother, and you are the great anti-Brother.” Beyers rejected this supposed contrast between himself and his father:

I think both of us, my father and me, are and were people who believed strongly and who had strong convictions regarding what we believed in. Once we came to a conclusion regarding what had to be done, we proceeded with that in spite of the consequences. ¹⁸

In order to answer this question, I present two general perspectives, mostly drawn from his personal writings on the matter. The difference between the two accounts constructed here is that the first presents a developing perspective of his thought as it found expression, in direct, more-or-less raw reflection on events occurring in South Africa under the apartheid regime. These were recorded in the pages of the journal Pro Veritate. The second perspective is drawn from his autobiography, which was written in his twilight years after apartheid had been abolished. This is therefore a developed perspective, where the themes of memory and interpretation play more upfront roles in the account presented to the reader.

Commentary on violence in the pages of Pro Veritate ¹⁹

If one looks at his writings on the theme of violence in Pro Veritate (PV), it is important to bear in mind that these were penned in apartheid-era South Africa when censorship, presumably also a degree of self-censorship, increasingly resembled a sword in the sky over the necks of academics, journalists, and editors of various stripe. The reader should not expect to find anything openly seditious in Pro Veritate. One might even state that the picture emerging here is a guarded one.

In 1963, Naudé wrote in response to a bomb explosion at the Johannesburg train station. In this editorial piece he unconditionally rejected violence as a reasonable means for securing human rights, or rectifying disturbed inter-human relationships. ²⁰ Similarly, just over a year later his close associate at the Christian Institute, Albert Geyser came out in favour of passivism, when he wrote that military violence might certainly not be promoted by a church, or Christian authority. ²¹

The next year in an article on violence in Africa, Naudé decried such happenings in Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, and other African states. But he also ridiculed proponents of so-called “Christian Western Civilization,” who, in their eagerness to denounce African instances of violence, maintain an ignorant innocence regarding their culture’s own complicity in violent brutalities, including that which originally led to the formation of democratic systems. He, furthermore, gave a warning to his readers that Christians and churches should,

determine what the stumbling-blocks are which are preventing the fruitful permeation of the Gospel into the hearts of the people of Africa and to do everything in their power to remove these obstacles if we do not wish violence ultimately to be seized upon as the only alternative by the masses in their frustration. ²²

In 1974, the South African Council of Churches adopted a statement at its annual conference at Hammanskraal in favour of “conscientious objection,” tabled by Douglas Bax and seconded by Beyers Naudé, which, among other things, decried violence as a means of solving societal problems. This concerned both the “primary violence” that was built into the apartheid system, as well as violence as a method for change by “terrorists” and “freedom fighters.” ²⁴

In an address to a Dutch audience in 1976, Naudé again discussed the conditions of mounting violence in South Africa, including the violence of the liberation movements as a response to the “war psychosis” that had become predominant among the white community, which increasingly found their sense of security in militarism. He pled that the Netherlands and other countries wishing to see peaceful change in South Africa “should now come to the aid of South Africa to achieve this goal by exercising full scale meaningful pressures to relinquish its present racial policies. I am deeply convinced that this is the last alternative for all those who desire liberation, justice and peace without violence.” ²⁵ The note of impending doom expressed here was very appropriate and prophetic in a way, because scarcely a month later the Soweto uprising of 16 June occurred, which was met by violent police retribution resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries.

In a 1977 article, Beyers directly addressed his own Afrikaner people, whom he held accountable for threatening their own future survival, because of their persistence in policies of racial discrimination. He stated that the primary cause of all the violence and disruption in the country was the “sin of racial discrimination.” ²⁶ He called, perhaps rather optimistically, on Afrikaners to change their ways completely. He advocated courageous action, which in the light of the article title, played on the Afrikaner historical memory of standing up against British might, and asked conscientious Afrikaners to become involved in organized peaceful resistance against injustice committed in the name of securing so-called white identity or Christian nationalism. ²⁷

Finally, from Pro Veritate, I mention an address that Beyers Naudé delivered to graduates of the Federal Theological Seminary, on 16 March 1977. In this address, Beyers argued, again optimistically and prematurely as things turned out, that the end of the apartheid system and the beginning of political liberation were imminent, and that “this transition is going to be a turbulent, painful one.” ²⁸ This line might seem to imply a tacit acceptance that violence was going to play a role in the transition. He also again discussed the theme of black liberation in relation to the way Afrikaners renounced the “yoke of British imperialist oppression.” He then cautioned his black audience to remember that “when this hour of political liberation dawns, that Christ and His message of transformation of human life and of liberation of mankind [sic] stands above all political policy, all social systems, all economic structures.” ²⁹

Violence in Beyers Naudé’s autobiographical self-reflection

Beyond the above-mentioned possible influence of memories of violence as transferred through trans-generational trauma, the life story of Beyers Naudé contains an element that was quite common for people of his generation and social class in South Africa, certainly among Afrikaner people. That is the issue of corporal punishment. Beyers described how this was meted out within his childhood family. His mother would typically decide when such punishment was required, but the executor of the hiding would be his father. Beyers’ commentary on this is revealing: he stated that theirs was a strict household with tight rules, which was,

good in a sense …  But when a child does not see the punishment as a reasonable reaction, then you find resistance. Already then there must have been a feeling of resistance in me of which I was not conscious at the time. ³⁰

Although Beyers himself did not directly make this connection, enough allusions are made that the reader could easily enough see how a pattern of perceived unfair punishment to the self might translate into indignation when far worse punishment is vested upon an innocent other, particularly if the punisher purportedly represents the same authoritative figure or group in both instances. The group with whose nationalist aspirations J. F. Naudé had identified so wholeheartedly, white Afrikanerdom, had achieved its victory in the 1948 elections, and from then on further maintained power by means of draconian measures in social engineering, as well as the occasional employment of the proverbial iron fist. The above-mentioned proceedings at Sharpeville, on 21 March 1960, represented a particularly vicious instance of unjustified violent reprisal executed by the white authorities on black civilians. For Beyers, this signalled a watershed not only for South Africa, but also in his own life:

I experienced this as the emergence of a serious crisis, which could become a turning point in the history of South Africa – and maybe also in my own life … Deep in my heart I realized that this was about a case of injustice against people who had protested peacefully, and that I, Beyers Naudé, could no longer remain silent. ³²

This endorsement of Black Consciousness then led to the question of support, or not, for the armed struggle of the anti-apartheid resistance movements, including the African National Congress in exile. This is evidently not a question that Beyers could easily resolve within his own mind. But it became an unavoidable question for the Christian Institute, of which he was director in the 1970s, especially when the World Council of Churches instituted its Program to Combat Racism with its mandate to give monetary support to resistance movements such as the African National Congress (ANC). How did Beyers think about this issue? After referring to some writings on just war theory in Christian theological history, he drew the question closer to the bone. This is important enough to quote him at some length:

I had asked myself: What had caused us Boers to take up arms against the British Empire? What made my father, who was a theological student, who was preparing himself for the ministry, to take up the weapon? I am sorry that I never spoke to him about this, because I can imagine that he, just like General Beyers, must have struggled over this issue. Why did General Beyers do what he did during the Rebellie? It must have been an intense inner struggle for him: May I take up the weapon? – and now it is brother against brother, Afrikaner against Afrikaner! ³⁴

Implicitly, one can therefore see a tacit acknowledgment of the legitimacy of, and the need for the armed struggle, even if Beyers Naudé did not feel himself able to physically take part in it.

Conclusion

Beyers and his wife and children suffered much under the apartheid regime, and against the cold shoulder that the Dutch Reformed Church and Afrikanerdom generally had turned to them, especially during the “seven lean years” of the banning order. Yet when the wheel turned and apartheid came to a rather abrupt and unexpected conclusion, Beyers did not hesitate to reconcile, when it was also evident that many in the white community were eager to reconcile with him. At the so-called “synod of reconciliation,” the 1994 general synod of the DRC, anti-apartheid struggle luminaries Nelson Mandela and Beyers Naudé were present, and the church body eventually extended a formal apology to Naudé for their erstwhile silencing of this prophetic voice within their own ranks. ³⁶

Although nowhere near as influential as Nelson Mandela within wider national and international communities, in this respect Naudé shared with Mandela what appeared to be an uncommon graciousness that made them both willing to cross the divide and take the hand of their former enemies, just as they in turn were easily embraced by their former adversaries in a post-apartheid South Africa. ³⁷ Both were perhaps simply good at reconciling.

In the case of Beyers Naudé, one could certainly make the point that reconciliation for him was something well practiced, because his whole public career since Cottesloe in 1960 was, in one way or another, the early, and largely successful, yet often lonely attempt of a white Afrikaner to seek and practice reconciliation with the ecumenical Christian community in the first instance, and with the black victims of apartheid in the second. In some instances this search for reconciliation coincided with a theme of violence, and sometimes memories and tales of violence even served as inspiration for the path Beyers Naudé understood he had to walk.

There is a particularly poignant story that Beyers tells of his friend, Reverend Tshenuwani Simon Farisani, the author of Diary from a South African Prison, who personally related the torture he had undergone at the hands of the Security Police as a political prisoner. After listening to this survivor’s tale of many horrors on the eve of Farisani’s release from prison, Beyers asked: “But Tshenuwani, in the light of everything you have told me this evening, is there not a terrible bitterness and desire for vengeance in your heart because of what the Security Police has done to you?” ³⁸ In response, Farisani described three reactions that he had experienced while in prison: first came a sense of extreme fear, because he realized he might not survive his imprisonment; second, there arose a sense of anger and bitterness at the injustice of it all; and third “a reaction of compassion” with the white agents of torture:

Suddenly I realized that I was a prisoner with chains on my arms and sometimes also on my legs, while these people were free – but that it was actually them who were the prisoners, in a prison of their own blind creation, full of fear and cruelty, while I was in my spirit a free person. ³⁹

For Beyers Naudé, even if his understanding of its use within the context of apartheid South Africa had developed over time, violence remained solely a possible means of recourse within situations of self-defence, as a last resort, when all other options have been depleted. In his estimation, such had become the situation for the anti-apartheid liberation movements in the 1980s. Ironically, it was the anti-imperialistic memories so deeply mired in the formation of an Afrikaner nationalist mythology, of his father and his compatriots and their armed rebellions against the British in the Anglo-Boer War, and then against the South African government in the Rebellie of 1915, that evidently convinced him that a similar shoe was now on the foot of the armed struggle of black liberation. He came to the conclusion that if violence had been justified back then for Afrikaners, so it was in the 1980s justified for black South Africans. Perhaps a strange logic, but it was, I think, understandably a plausible one for Beyers Naudé, this pious Christian pastor and public theologian of note.