‘Ons glimlag tussen ons trane deur [We smile amid our tears]”. These were the words of Johann Naudé, eldest son of Beyers and Ilse Naudé, who announced the death of his father early on Tuesday morning. ”Oom Bey” made a huge contribution to the birth of democracy.
He paid a high price for his uncompromising courage, responding to his harshest critics with kindness and grace. He refused to seek revenge. He believed that people could change.
Naudé, a graduate of Stellenbosch University, was a member of the Afrikaner Broederbond, minister of the NGK Aasvoëlkop congregation and moderator of the NG Kerk in the Transvaal. Driven out of his church, he formed the Christian Institute in 1963.
”I discovered that one’s quest for life and liberation is an enduring journey,” he observed a while ago.
For Naudé, it was the killing of at least 69 black people by the police in Sharpeville that convinced him of the need to take a new direction in life. The World Council of Churches called its South African member churches together in the Cottesloe Consultation. The Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk rejected the statement that emerged from that event out of hand, while the majority of the NG Kerk delegates supported it — at least initially. Hendrik Verwoerd, prime minister at the time, called the church to order. Most predikante recanted. Naudé refused. ”I had to decide. Would I submit to the political pressures I was experiencing or would I stand by my convictions?” Naudé asked. The rest, as they say, is history.
In early 1990, when the then-recently unbanned African National Congress put together a team of people for talks with the government in the historic Groote Schuur event, Naudé was included. Veteran ANC politician Walter Sisulu insisted: ”He has always been part of us.”
On the day it was announced in the media that the Johannesburg City Council had decided to rename DF Malan Drive in his honour and that he would have the Freedom of the City conferred on him, I found Naudé reading the Beeld. I congratulated him, pointing to the news report on the front page. He had seen the report, but had not yet had time to read it. He had decided to first read reports on the threatening Congress of South African Trade Unions strike and the latest developments in Zimbabwe.
Naudé seemed a bit perplexed about the honour. ”Why would anyone want to name anything after me?” he asked. ”These things should wait until people die, if it is done at all.”
A man of deep compassion, he made peace with the white NG Kerk, whose ministry he left after preaching his final sermon, appropriately entitled, Obey God Rather Than Man, to his Aasvoëlkop congregation in 1963. In 1994 he proposed to the South African Council of Churches annual conference that the NG Kerk be received back into full membership of the council. That same year, Naudé was invited to preach to the Aasvoëlkop congregation and his sermon was on reconciliation. He was also received by the 1994 General Synod of the NG Kerk as a ”prophet outside the walls of the church”.
”Oom Bey” was confined largely to his bed and wheelchair for the past three years, his mind sharp and focused until shortly before his death. ”We have an obligation to make our democracy a success,” he insisted a few weeks ago.
”Those of us who continue to enjoy the privileges that apartheid gave every white person need to understand that it is in our own interest to ensure that those who continue to experience the ravages of apartheid are given space in which to develop.” — Dr Charles Villa-Vicencio
Christiaan Frederick Beyers Naudé, born 1915; died September 7 2004