Boesak Unauthorised

“Dr Allan Boesak is as urgent and necessary a voice today as he was during the struggle.”
Ntsiki Mazwai

“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 is 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

SYNOPSIS

If the government thought that by killing Biko it would create a leadership lacuna, it was wrong. Seriously wrong, because into this void stepped a priest who shared Biko’s passion for freedom from oppression. That man was Allan Aubrey Boesak, a “coloured” reverend, or “dominee”, in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church. Boesak’s church was one of the three daughter churches spawned by the white Dutch Reformed Church to serve “coloureds, Indians and Africans”. They were separate from the mother church and not equal to it.

The timing in South Africa was right for the emergence of a preacher/priest/politician like Allan Boesak. With his gifted voice and evocative speeches, Dr Boesak was our Martin Luther King. His speech at the launch of the United Democratic Front in 1983 is on the same agenda-setting, galvanising, defining-the-future level as Dr King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. He inspired with evocative words and visions of a non-racial, democratic country. As was the case with the American civil rights leader, Dr King, the state wanted to discredit him and thereby seriously damage the march to freedom in South Africa. There was an opportunity to damage and sully his reputation in 1985. The security police leaked information and recordings of his affair with South African Council of Churches worker Di Scott.

He survived that attempt and emerged more resolute to see the defeat of apartheid. He did not survive the next one: the exposure of his affair with television personality Elna Botha. The affair was the beginning of the fall of Allan Boesak, the end of his marriage and a journey to prison. It was an ignominious end.

The story of Allan Boesak is intriguing. The history of South Africa is incomplete without the narrative of Allan Boesak’s role.

I should add that no such book about Dr Boesak has been written, and the absence of such a book leaves a gap in the narrative of the period between 1976 and 1990, when the charismatic, suave and articulate Allan Boesak was at the forefront of the struggle for a new South Africa.