Verwoerd: My Journey through Family Betrayals. Wilhelm Verwoerd

and started to see their faces. After a lot of soul-searching and intense political discussions, he committed himself to addressing the human cost of his and others’ violent actions. When he was released, conditionally, after thirteen years in prison, he trained as a counsellor. His life mission increasingly became to facilitate storytelling and dialogue across apparently unbridgeable conflict divides.

      I have been deeply affected and encouraged by Alistair, by his relentless, often brutally honest, battle with the blood on his hands. My peace work has been decisively shaped by his personal experience of the transformative potential of the inclusive sharing of life experiences and risky, deep dialogue. He became a key mentor in my role as a co-ordinator of the Glencree Survivors and Former Combatants Programme. After a few years, Alistair and I worked increasingly closer together as co-facilitators and developers of a process we entitled Journey through Conflict.8

      Though my life path has been very different to Alistair’s, we share a strong, conservative Protestant family background. We are both, ultimately, on a faith journey, trying hard not to avoid responsibility for our pasts; committed to open-ended, humble attempts to help address the ongoing human consequences of violent conflict.

      Alistair described the challenging nature of this kind of inner and outer journeying, in the following statement in which he refers to Gerry Foster, a former enemy, who was an active member of the Irish National Liberation Army.9

      “My experience has been of two different journeys. It’s the journey of having contact with your enemy but having a relationship that’s practical, and maybe political, about change and getting things done. And then for me there is a journey that’s not better, but deeper, in terms of getting to know someone who was your enemy as a full human being – their hopes, their dreams, their aspirations. [This journey] has been more difficult and more painful because it allows me to see darkness in myself that’s not comfortable to sit with.

      “When I first met with Gerry, it was a superficial, practical sort of encounter. And quite easy, in some senses, because I didn’t really have to give too much of myself. But, for me, as that relationship has deepened – trying to understand why Gerry made the choices that he made, what he thinks about people like me and people from the loyalist [Protestant, British] community, why he thinks about them in the way that he does, why he gets angry, his relationship with his daughter – it has become more difficult.

      “The personal relationships that I have developed with a number of different republican combatants have allowed me to take more responsibility and to be more aware of what my actions actually did to other human beings, what it left families with. Everything about me wants to run away from that, because it’s much more emotionally and psychologically painful to do that.”

      Alistair and Gerry’s friendship, growing over a span of more than fifteen years despite unresolved political differences, continues to inspire me. I strongly resonate with Alistair’s articulation of his deeper journey: the unavoidable inner pain when one vulnerably opens oneself to the suffering of (former) enemies, begins to acknowledge their full, equal humanity. I identify with the darkness of facing one’s capacity to dehumanise, the heaviness of truly accepting personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. Everything about me also wants to run away from this kind of deep, dark journeying.

      In the Scottish Highlands with Alistair.

      I resisted the temptation to turn away. I continue to strive to not run away from following Alistair’s example in my South African context.

      I am also vitalised by many other people involved in the conflict in and about Northern Ireland, and in other bloody political conflicts, who are journeying through rather than away from their conflicts. These include, in particular, members of Combatants for Peace and The Parents’ Circle Family Forum.10 A personal and professional highlight has been to work with these truly remarkable people, who in the midst of a heated, escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are working together for a sustainable, just peace.

      Towards the end of my time in Ireland, Alistair, Brandon Hamber and I embarked on an international Beyond Dehumanisation project.11 From 2012 to 2014 we brought together small, diverse groups of experienced peacemakers from the conflict in and about Northern Ireland, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and from South Africa, to reflect on the challenging journeys of humanisation between (former) political enemies.

      Insights from this project, coupled with the embodied, practical wisdom of Alistair, helped me to stay on course during my current deep, dark trek to come more fully home in my skin and my kin. But to understand this present-day journeying through being a white, Afrikaner, Christian Verwoerd, it is important to go back to the mid-1980s. I need to revisit a watershed period in the country where Oupa Hendrik was born, a pivotal phase of disentanglement, of beginning the reformation of my Verwoerd identity.

      PART 1

      Reformation

      “Look to the rock from which you were hewn.”

      – Isaiah 51:1