Allan Boesak

Allan Aubrey Boesak (born 23 February 1946) is a South African Dutch Reformed Church cleric, politician and anti-apartheid activist.

He became known then as a liberation theologian, starting with the publication of his doctoral work (Farewell to Innocence, 1976).

For the next decade or so, he continued to write well-received books and collections of essays, sermons, and so on.

One of Boesak's anti-apartheid speeches was sampled by British electronica group The Shamen on their album En Tact.

He rose to prominence during the 1980s as an outspoken critic and opponent of the National Party's policies and played a major anti-apartheid activist role as a patron of the United Democratic Front (UDF) from 1983 to 1991.

Boesak was elected as president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1982, a position he held until 1991.

Along with Beyers Naudé and Winnie Mandela, Boesak won the 1985 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award given annually by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights to an individual or group whose courageous activism is at the heart of the human rights movement and in the spirit of Robert F. Kennedy's vision and legacy.

Originally from Kakamas, Boesak became active in the separate Coloured branch of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk and began to work as a pastor in Paarl.

The DanChurchAid (Danish Church Aid) approached Johannesburg law firm Bell Dewar to investigate the use of a $1 million donation made in 1985 (c.a. R3 million at the time).

For six weeks Boesak held out while the scandal was aired in the press.

Only when the Office for Serious Economic Offences began its own investigation was he finally persuaded to resign from the foreign ministry.

A further complaint was made by Archbishop Tutu, who called in police to investigate what had happened to a donation of 423,000 Rands made by the American singer Paul Simon, which Tutu had passed on to Boesak's foundation.

'We are distressed and angry', he said in a statement, 'that money ... set aside for child victims of apartheid cannot be accounted for immediately'.

After a three-month investigation, the Johannesburg law firm issued a 600-page report damning of Boesak's conduct.

Boesak, the report said, had 'enriched himself substantially' by diverting funds to buy a luxury house and to pay for an inflated salary, vacations, his second wedding and his new wife's business debts.

Only a quarter of the foundation's income had gone to projects intended by Scandinavian donors to help apartheid victims.

Boesak's response was to deny all responsibility, to blame his staff and to claim that he was a victim of racism.

It was at the start of this trial that the phrase "struggle bookkeeping" was coined.

The term was used to justify struggle icons' use and abuse of international donor funding for private purposes.

Meanwhile, the government had asked one of its own legal advisers to investigate.

The adviser produced a three-page report which attempted to pick holes in the law firm's report and went on to clear Boesak of misconduct.

The response of the Johannesburg law firm was to describe the government report as 'preposterous' and 'absurd' and to issue an eighteen-page rebuttal, rejecting it point by point.

But without waiting for the work in progress by the Office for Serious Economic Offences to conclude, Mandela duly proclaimed Boesak innocent.

He invoked the anti-apartheid 1986 Belhar Confession, which lambasts all forms of discrimination, to say that the church should welcome gays and lesbians, begin to perform gay marriage ceremonies, and appoint gay clergy.

Boesak resigned from the Dutch Reformed Church in 1990 after details of an extramarital affair with television presenter Elna Botha emerged; they later married.

In 1991, Boesak was elected chairman of the Western Cape region of the African National Congress (ANC).

He was sentenced to prison for fraud in 1999 but was subsequently granted an official pardon and reinstated as a cleric in late 2004.

In 2004, Boesak came out in favour of same-sex marriage in South Africa, a year before the country's Constitutional Court ruled that the denial of marriage to gay people was discriminatory and violated the country's constitution.

In 2008, while serving as the Moderator of the Cape Synod of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, to the shock of many senior church leaders, Boesak announced that he was going to resign all of his positions within the church because of its discriminatory position on homosexuality and gay and lesbian people.

In 2008, Boesak publicly challenged the South African leadership to remember why the country had set out to join all races and create a non-racial South Africa.

In the annual Ashley Kriel Memorial Youth Lecture, he suggested that the ANC was well down the slippery slope of ethnic preferences and "had brought back the hated system of racial categorization."

In December 2008 he left the ANC to join the Congress of the People Party.

In reaction, the ANC leaked a memorandum written by Boesak, detailing how he had discussed different roles he could play to help the organisation and stating that his preferred choice was the post of South African ambassador to the United Nations.

The same month saw Boesak voicing his views on the Zimbabwe crisis, calling on citizens of the stricken country to rise up in opposition to President Robert Mugabe and his authoritarian ZANU-PF ruling party.

He also censured Thabo Mbeki for failing in his role as the Southern African Development Community's official mediator to heed the churches' call for a peace-keeping force.

He also called for a revaluation of affirmative action, describing the way it was used in the Western Cape as "totally inexcusable".

In June 2013, Christian Theological Seminary and Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana appointed Boesak as the Desmond Tutu Professor for Peace, Global Justice, and Reconciliation Studies, a new four-year position held jointly with both institutions.

After being replaced as the ANC party leader for Western Cape province, Boesak was compensated by Mandela with an appointment as ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.

A few weeks prior to commencing duties in this post, the first hint of corruption surfaced.

The allegation were into the use of foreign aid given to the Foundation for Peace and Justice charity setup by Boesak.