ABSTRACT
The Passlaw campaign in 1960 led to a watershed in South African white-black relations, with the killing of sixty-nine Africans by the police at Sharpeville. The race policy of white South Africa was highlighted at home and abroad in a very dramatic fashion. Violence as a very real factor in the struggle for liberation could no longer be ignored. Black political parties were banned (ANC and PAC), the leadership thrust into goals or forced into exile. In 1964, at the Rivonia trial, the most important ANC leaders (in casu, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu) were sentenced to life imprisonment. A year previously, in 1963, an Afrikaner ‘dominee’ with excellent antecedents in the tradition of the ‘ V o l k ’ , made a dramatic entry on the South African political scene. His name was Beyers Naudé. Like many Afrikaners with his genealogical background and upbringing, Beyers Naudé was also invited to become a member of that secret Afrikaner society, the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) founded in 1918. Serfontein, quoting from a report which appeared in the Sunday Times, records in his expose of the Broederbond (1979):
The most remarkable characteristic of the Afrikaner Broederbond was the tight discipline and total secrecy it has been able to enforce on members from the early twenties . . 1
Beyers Naudé was a part of this when during the Verwoerd era, he became disenchanted with the increasing racial discrimination in the country. The oath of secrecy was binding on all members and Beyers Naudé was no exception. He then committed the unpardonable sin in the eyes of the Volk when he passed on Broederbond documents and information to Professor Geyser, a minister of the Nederduits Hervormde Church, who rejected his Church’s stand on separate development. Geyser in turn passed it on to the journalist Bloomberg. Geyser was charged with heresy by his Church: supported by Professor van Selms he had namely challenged his Church’s principle that membership was only confined to whites. Geyser was stripped of his position as minister, then resigned his post as professor of New Testament theology at Pretoria University.
