Anthony Egan
MY WINDS OF CHANGE by Wilhelm Verwoerd (Ravan, R59,95)
If ever a country deserved a “paradox” theory of history, it is South Africa. Where else would one find a situation where today the grandson of HF Verwoerd, the grand architect of modern apartheid, is a member of the African National Congress, the movement that was the antithesis of everything his grandfather stood for, and where today another Verwoerd – Wilhelm Verwoerd’s wife Melanie – is in Parliament, as an ANC MP? Wilhelm Verwoerd’s autobiography goes a long way to explain such an anomaly.
Wilhelm Verwoerd grew up in a strongly Calvinist environment and went to Stellenbosch University with the view to becoming a Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) minister. Like many DRC scholars, Verwoerd visited the Netherlands to pursue further studies, which was where his life started to change radically.
In Holland, and later at Oxford, his perception of South Africa and apartheid was substantially altered by what he read about his country -and by encounters with people who were dramatically different from him. Writing to his fiance, Melanie Fourie, he expressed his growing doubts about the world he’d lived in. Eventually, back in Stellenbosch and a lecturer in philosophy, these experiences led them both – in the face of censure and rejection from family – to join the ANC.
The strength of this book lies in Wilhelm Verwoerd’s uncompromising honesty about himself. He openly admits his political confusion and what apparently amounted to a crisis of faith in his society and church. His self-perception, illustrated by his extensive use of his diaries and letters to Melanie, shifts from a rather self-satisfied, confident and patronising “soldier of Christ” to what he describes as a “sapling in the wind”, uncertain but open to new understandings of the political, the spiritual, and his relationship with others.
What makes this autobiography significant, apart from who Verwoerd is, is the way in which it illustrates how people change, not usually in some dramatic “road to Damascus” experience but over time, often with residual uncertainties, and always with effort.