Melanie Verwoerd

Fourie's ancestors took part in the Great Trek of 1835-1840 when a number of Boers as the Afrikaners called themselves at the time left the British Cape Colony to go inland to found the two Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (commonly known as the Transvaal Republic).

To be a descendant of the Boer Voortrekkers is considered to be a great honor in Afrikaner culture.

Like most Afrikaners, her family's rise to middle class status was only recent as she recalled: "My grandparents were farmers, working a subsistence farm about the size of a small Irish one; they had a few cows, pigs and vegetables. My grandmother was an enormously important part of my life. She was a typically strong, but tiny, Afrikaner woman -- absolutely fearless, very aware of her Trekker history in South Africa. I loved her to bits".

Fourie studied Calvinist theology at the University of Stellenbosch, being the only woman in the class of about 50 men as theology was traditionally considered to be a male subject in Afrikaner culture.

The NGK (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk-Dutch Reformed Church) had traditionally played an inordinate role in Afrikaner culture, being described by the American journalist David Goodman as playing "...a crucial role in providing the theological and moral underpinnings of Afrikaner nationalism" as the Reformed Church used the Calvinist doctrine of predestination (with "the elect" predestined for heaven) to argue apartheid was just because the Afrikaners were "God's chosen people".

Critics often dubbed the Dutch Reformed Church as "the National Party at prayer".

Fourie's ambition as an young woman was to be a minister in the church, but she came to be disillusioned with it because of what she called its systematic sexism and racism as she taught in her university courses that God had ordinated inequality for humanity with women to be subservient to men and blacks subservient to whites.

She admitted that her choice of a subject to major in at university was a quixotical one as the Dutch Reformed Church did not ordain women as ministers at the time, but stated she was gripped by a "deeply religious passion" at the time.

As a young woman, she dated and later married Wilhelm Verwoerd, the grandson of former South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the "architect of apartheid" who as the Native Affairs Minister brought in the laws that established apartheid after the National Party won the 1948 election and served as prime minister from 1958 until his assassination in 1966.

His grandfather Hendrik Verwoerd was one of South Africa's best known politicians, famous for declaring South Africa a republic on 31 May 1961 on the 49th anniversary of the Treaty of Vereeniging, which many Afrikaners took as a symbolic revenge for the Boer War.

Melanie Verwoerd stated about her surname: "If you speak to Afrikaans[-speaking] white people, as a rule, they would be very, very impressed that you're a Verwoerd. When you carry a surname like Verwoerd in South Africa, you always get a reaction".

Verwoerd described her father-in-law, Wilhelm Verwoerd Sr. as the typical Afrikaner takhaar (patriarch), a stern man with long white hair and an equally long white beard (symbols of wisdom in Afrikaner culture) who expected unconditional obedience from his family and for whom the ANC was a "terrorist organisation".

Melanie Verwoerd (Fourie; born 18 April 1967) is a South African and Irish political analyst and diplomat.

She was previously a politician, ambassador, and the director of UNICEF Ireland.

In particular, the 1978 book Biko by Donald Woods about the Black Consciousness Movement activist Stephen Biko - who died as a result of a beating given by the South African police - was described by her as having a major impact in giving her another perspective on apartheid.

Biko was banned in South Africa at the time.

Additionally, she was shown the trial transcripts of the Rivonia Trial, where Nelson Mandela and the other African National Congress (ANC) leaders were convicted of plotting to blow up the South African power grid.

Verwoerd stated that she had been brought up to believe that Mandela and the ANC leaders convicted at the Rivonia trial were "terrorists", but that reading his speeches at the trial changed her view of him.

At the trial, Mandela admitted that he was guilty as charged, but that he only decided to use violence because non-violence had failed.

Mandela stated that the ANC had pursued non-violent resistance fruitlessly for decades and all that the South African government had done was to take away more and more rights from black South Africans like himself, leading him to the conclusion that violence was the "only way out".

Verwoerd recalled about her debates with South African exiles: "They just hammered me for nights. And I tried every rational argument in the books about Buthelezi [a pro-apartheid Zulu chief], about everything. After a few nights, the arguments didn't work out very well. I came back and I was quite shattered. It was very hard. I felt that every authority figure I had ever known had been lying to me. I was angry, disillusioned. I must have been an extremely difficult student after that".

She met Verwoerd in 1985 in her theology class at the University of Stellenbosch.

Fourie started out as a supporter of apartheid, saying in her "Christian national education" she was brought up in to believe that apartheid was the natural system for South Africa.

Her fiancée was a Rhodes scholar and she credited her time living in the Netherlands for three months prior to moving to Oxford in 1986 as changing her views.

During this time she met several South African exiles who showed her books banned in South Africa, which she stated gave her a new perspective on her country.

In late 1986, she met a group of South African emigres in London who "...told us about a country that I did not know of and I will be forever thankful for that".

Fourie became involved with the National Union of South African Students and the Institute for Democratic Alternatives in South Africa.

At IDASA conferences held in secret, she met several "banned people" who would appear briefly to speak at the conferences before disappearing again.

Her turn against apartheid exposed her to some risk because she remembered: "...if you opened your mouth too much, the Security Police, who had people in every single class, in every single hostel - fellow students - would start taking notes. But they were so stupid, it was always easy to know which ones they were".

In December 1987, she married Wilhelm Verwoerd.

Verwoerd was elected as a Member of Parliament for the African National Congress (ANC) during the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, and re-elected in 1999.

In 2001, she was appointed as the South African Ambassador to Ireland, a position she held until 2005.

In 2005, she described her youth in Stellenbosch as growing in an almost all-white world, as the only black South Africans she saw were servants as under apartheid, Stellenbosch was reserved for whites.

She described her youth as: "Usual Afrikaner story, grew up in a very traditional Afrikaans household, white schools, white church-Dutch Reformed-white neighborhood".

Between 2007 and 2011 she was the executive director of UNICEF Ireland.

In 2007, Verwoerd was awarded with the Irish Tatler International Woman of the Year award.

Fourie was born in Pretoria, but grew up in Strand and Stellenbosch.

She was brought up in what she described as a middle-class, conservative and Calvinist Afrikaner household, with both her parents being academics.

She is of Dutch descent.

She described her parents as both being supporters of the ruling National Party.