13-year-old admired Oom Bey’s courage
ALEXANDRA - Professor Klippies Kritzinger of the Department of Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology at the University of South Africa remembered his encounter as a 10-year-old boy with Beyers Naude while cycling to school over the Northcliff Koppie.
“I then saw him again as a 13-year-old when he married my sister-in-law. He was not about politics, but he was about humanity, giving back the dignity to many people that had been denied that dignity under apartheid,” Kritzinger said during his address to the congregation of the Uniting Reformed Church of Southern Africa in Alexandra during the remembrance service for the late Oom Bey’s 100th birthday anniversary and book launch.
“I was saddened a few years down the line when the same humble man I had come to adore was demonised and ostracised by his own people for standing for what was right. He fearlessly used to urge us all to stand up and fight apartheid as it was an evil system that vilified other human beings simply because of the colour of their skin.
“He was called a traitor of the Afrikaaner folk and in 1980 he became a member of this congregation. I thank you for welcoming him and allowing him to make this church his spiritual home,” Kritzinger said.
Kritzinger described Oom Bey as a liberated man who could move from across bounds unhindered and meet with Black Consciousness activists to Jews on one front, to those in the law so he could win them to his side, to those outside the law that he was part of them, including the weak and the poor.
He said Oom Bey’s ideas of winning people was not converting them to his side, but to him it was being able and free to share ideas and knowledge in the hope that a new South Africa was possible.
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