Boesak+was+iced+out,+Max+du+Preez,+The+Star



=Boesak's fire and charisma got him iced out=


 * //In the dark days of repression, this electric orator gave his people hope//**

The Star, Johannesburg, March 2, 2006

 * By Max du Preez**

Is it just possible that if the ANC had not unceremoniously dumped Allan Boesak and manoeuvred him out of politics, that he would have been the obvious choice to succeed Thabo Mbeki as president of South Africa?

Boesak turned 60 last week. At the ideal age for senior political leadership, the man the apartheid government once feared more than any figure in exile or the whole of Umkhonto we Sizwe is now a local pastor and a writer of theological books. What a waste of human potential (although I am sure his congregation would not agree). What a loss to South Africa.

I wonder if Thabo Mbeki and other former exiled leaders, even Nelson Mandela himself, ever had any idea what Allan Boesak really did in the 1980s, what he meant to millions of people, what role he played in the crumbling of Fortress Apartheid.

I remember the first time I saw him on a political stage. It was early 1984, one of the United Democratic Front's first big rallies on the campus of the University of the Western Cape. Those were dark days of severe repression and conflict. Boesak set the audience on fire. He inspired them, he gave them hope, he made them brave. He was electric. I have never seen anything like that, before or since.

In that hall I saw black, coloured and white activists act together like never before. To them Boesak had no colour or ethnicity. That evening gave me my first sense of true belonging to a nation in revolt against apartheid, racism and minority rule. That evening, and many times after that during the campaigns of the UDF, proved to me that non-racialism could work. I felt connected to my black fellow-citizens like never before or after. Not only did it not matter that I was a white Afrikaner, they wanted me with them because that was what I was. Our enemy was not a race, it was an ideology and a system.

It was Allan Boesak more than anyone else who brought God back into the movement resisting apartheid. Under his leadership all major faith communities inside the country were united against injustice for the first time.

The apartheid masters hated and feared Boesak - especially because he knew them, understood their lies and their insecurities, and because he was not scared of them. They had answers for the external ANC: they were violent and they were communists, threatening South Africa's future with their intimate relationships with Moscow, they said. But to the millions of ordinary South African citizens who followed Boesak's leadership they had no answers but vicious smear tactics, dirty tricks, bullets and incarceration.

Allan Boesak was South Africa's de facto president-in-inzile. He played a major role in pushing the apartheid government to a position where they knew they had to start talking to the majority. But here is the peculiar thing: when they wanted to talk, they did not talk to the UDF. They talked to Nelson Mandela and they talked to the ANC in exile. Other agents of change at the time made the same mistake by organising symbolically powerful safaris to the ANC in Dakar, Lusaka and Paris. And when the ANC came back after FW de Klerk unbanned them, they swallowed the UDF whole with almost no recognition of the role it had played.

Perhaps Nelson Mandela should accept part of the blame for the complete side- lining of the UDF. When the government of PW Botha started negotiating with him, he steered them towards Lusaka. I suppose it was because he was cut off from the political reality for so many years and the only organisation he ever knew was the ANC itself.

The exiles, and who can blame them, returned triumphantly as the liberators of the nation. The UDF, which had always been loyal to the ANC as its mother organisation, played good comrade by standing back and cheering the returnees. And then most of the UDF leadership slowly started seeping into the sand.

Some of Boesak's friends believe a newspaper report during these times, that Boesak was going to be Mandela's successor, was what sank him.

Boesak's political space was quickly made smaller and smaller. He was iced out, pure and simple. The ANC was afraid of Boesak's charisma and popularity.

I have said and written this many times before and after Boesak's trial for theft and fraud, and I have no hesitation stating it again with conviction: Allan Boesak should never have been sent to jail. It was a grave injustice. It was also a golden opportunity for the ANC leadership to abandon him completely.

Boesak could have pulled a Jacob Zuma, he could have mobilised his old constituency, split the ANC and threatened the stability of the country. He has much more charisma and is a much greater orator than Zuma. He didn't.

In a country short on dynamic leadership, it is a shame that we allowed someone with the calibre of Allan Boesak to be shunted into the political wilderness.


 * From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3135289**

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