Boesak Speaks at Chapman, Urges Divestment

An influential leader in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa detailed his plans for reconciliation with the white minority government and urged U.S. corporations to divest their interests there.

The Rev. Allan Boesak, listed in the current Biography Yearbook as ranking “with Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu as one of the most influential spokesmen (against apartheid) for non-white South Africans,” told a packed house at the Waltmar Theater at Chapman College on Friday that black South Africans would prefer to suffer the possible consequences of divestiture than continue to live under apartheid.

Economic sanctions will cause suffering in the black community, but apartheid, which is happening there now, causes death, Boesak said to an audience of about 400, according to the college’s chaplain, the Rev. Dennis Short.

Boesak, president of the 70-million-member World Alliance of Reformed Churches, also said that whites must reconcile their differences with South Africa’s black majority.

“He said reconciliation demands restitution, and that reconciliation is never cheap,” Short said, recounting Boesak’s speech. “He said religiously, the way to salvation is overcoming revenge and hatred.”

Short, who attended Boesak’s hourlong lecture, also said Boesak called on South African President F.W. deKlerk to make “a simple choice----to join us (anti-apartheid activists), or we have to go on without him.”

Boesak, founder of the multiracial United Democratic Front, the force behind many nonviolent demonstrations against apartheid, appeared at Chapman as part of the college’s annual Griset Lecture in Religion and the Paul Delp Peace Studies Lecture, Short said.

Boesak is scheduled to participate with Tutu in an unprecedented ceremony in Johannesburg honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Jan. 20. About 10,000 people are expected to participate.

Staff writer Rose Ellen O’Connor contributed to this report.