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

At a time when the South African government believed it had silenced opposition to its apartheid policies, a voice rose from the Cape. Not unlike the Baptist minister and American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., that voice belonged to Allan Aubrey Boesak.

From the moment he made his first political speech at the University of the Western Cape in 1976, Boesak became a defiant, controversial, fearless and angry Black voice, insisting on liberty and the vote for all South Africans.

Because of this, he became an enemy of the government. State-sanctioned operations to bring him down and destroy his legitimacy and credibility were planned and executed against him. He survived the first leak of an affair to the news media, but he did not escape the second. By then, the quest for freedom was almost complete.

Freedom from apartheid in 1994 brought with it the beginning of Boesak’s political undoing. He was charged with fraud and, ignominiously, became one of the highest-profile internal anti-apartheid activists to be jailed.

This book tells his story, and the story of an unfulfilled dream.