• BOESAK UNAUTHORISED

BOESAK UNAUTHORISED

: Cruywagen (D.)

R 345.00
Quantity
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243pp., paperback, African Perspectives, Johannesburg, 2026

ISBN: 9781037095337

 

A biography of South African cleric, liberation theologian, anti-apartheid activist and politician Reverend Dr Allan Aubrey Boesak, known for his evocative speeches, which Dennis Cruywagen likens to those of Dr Martin Luther King

“The Reverend Dr Allan Boesak is a great figure in the history of liberation theology, a visionary leader of the anti-apartheid struggle who became a figure of planetary significance. This compelling account of his life should be widely read and discussed.” Dr Oscar van Heerden

“In Boesak Unauthorised, we find the echoes of the words of the playwright Terence: ‘I am human; nothing human is foreign to me.’ Here birthing and praying, rising and descending, freedom and incarceration are all bundled up into a life of daring perseverance.” Fr. Lawrence Mduduzi Ndlovu

Born in 1946 to parents who were classified as Coloured by the South African government, Boesak served as a minister in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, the Coloured branch of the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1982, he persuaded members of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to declare apartheid a heresy and to suspend membership of the white South African churches, and served as president of the alliance from 1982 to 1991. He helped organise the United Democratic Front and in 1991 was elected chairman of the African National Congress (ANC) in the Western Cape.

Boesak resigned from the Dutch Reformed Church in 1990 after details of an extramarital affair with television presenter Elna Botha emerged. In 1999 he was convicted of theft and fraud, and served one year of a three-year sentence before being released in 2001. He was pardoned in 2005.

Dennis Cruywagen is the author of Brothers in War and Peace and The Spiritual Mandela. The recipient of a Nieman Fellowship and a Mason Fellowship, he holds an MA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is a former Deputy Editor of the Pretoria News, and has worked as a spokesperson for the ANC.