Rev. Dr. Christaan Frederik Beyers Naude is an Afrikaner, a Reformed pastor, preacher and theologian, an ecumenist and a social prophet. He is a white Afrikaner of white Afrikaners having studied at the Afrikaner patriotic academic institution Stellenbosch University and having also been a member of the elitist Afrikaner Broederbond. He epitomozed at one the white supremcist certitudes and ideology of Afrikaner nationalism. Even before the landmark date of March 1960, the Sharpeville Massacre, Beyers Naude began a self-transformation that led to his rejection of apartheid, Afrikaner nationalism and some supposedly sacred tenets of the Dutch Reformed Church. In this rejection and transcendence of particularism, he situated himself at the center of the transforming process in South Africa. As an agent of change, Beyers Naude founded and led the Christian Institute as well as having been in the 1980s the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches. Explaining how one could easily be wedded to a wrong concept through a false patriotism, Beyers Naude observed: “I think the first reason, from my side, is that in the Afrikaaner society there is such a deep sense of loyalty to a wrong concept. Loyalty to your people, loyalty to your country. Loyalty and patriotism, have in a certain sense become deeply religious values; they have ben converted into deeply religious values. So that anybody who is seen to be disloyal to his nation, to his people, isd not only deemed to be a traitor, but in the deeper sense of the word, he is seen as betraying God. He is betraying  the deepest values of the understanding of faith as it was potrayed. So again the basic problem is not economic one or a cultural one or a social one, although all these factors play a role, in the deep sense of unity of the Afrikaaner people” (Beyers Naude and Dorothee Solle, Hope for Faith: A Conversation, 1986). These compelling reflections are an indication of the profound changes that one of South Africa’s premier theologians underwent. Beyers Naude attributes in the aforementioned text his ‘conversion’ from nationalism and particularism to democracy and universal to three interrelated factors and processes associated with the political events and tragedies associated with the decade of the 1960s. The first causative factor was the decolonization process of African countries from European domination which began with Ghana attaining independence in 1957 and culminating in 1960 when approximately thirteen African countries became politically independent. Frantz Fanon characterized this decolonization process in uncharacteristically metaphysical terms: “National liberartion, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent process. . . Decocolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatual power; the “thing” which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself” (The Wretched of the Earth, 1963). The second causative factor in Beyers Naude’s change in historical consciousness and ideological beliefs was the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. This horrendous act was a futile attempt to the prevented the making of a new woman and a new man who would create a New South Africa. It was an action that would postpone the inevitable, the making of a democratic South Africa, for about three decades. The historical crisis of this particular moment enabled Beyers Naude to question and challenge the Dutch Reformed Church’s ideological justification of apartheid on biblical grounds. In a 1990 “Introduction” to the Penguin Book’s edition of Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me On History, an autobiography which originally appeared in 1963, Lewis Nkosi recalled the epochal nature of this political event: “The Sharpeville massacre, which occurred in March 1960, less than a year after Modisane’s departure, was foolowed by the declaration of the first national state of emergency the country had ever known and by the subsequent banning of the ANC and the PAC, the two main liberation organisations, obliging them to go underground. Collectively, these events represent a decisive moment in our political history and in our culture, and Blame Me On History is vertiginously poised at the tip-end of that political precipice” (Lewis Nkosi, “Introduction”). Given the historic importance of this political crisis, it can only be a mark of a profound mind and unexampled intelligence that Beyers Naude was immediately able to draw a proper political conclusion that a re-orientation of his historical positioning was required and demanded. The third causative factor in Beyers Naude transforming himself from an Afrikaaner nationalist into a New African was  the information relayed to him as a Regional Supervisor of the Transvaal Synod by young white missionaries about the effects of apartheid of apartheid on the poor African, Indian and Coloured communities they were serving. All of these three factors were to make of Christaan Frederik Beyers Naude a New Man committed to the construction of a New Africa through the Word of God. His banning for seven years by the white apartheid regime was not to divert him from his fundamental goal: bringing a New South Africa into being.