D avid Jacobus Bosch was born into an Afrikaner home on December 13, 1929, near the town of Kuruman in the Cape Province of South Africa.' His parents were poor but proud farmers, "simple rural folk," and loyal members of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). From his earliest childhood, he re ceived a "Christian Nationalist" education. Bosch stated how "at a very early stage already our minds were influenced by teachers and other cultural and political leaders to see the English as perpetrators of all kinds of evil and as oppressors of the Afrikaner.We read poems of Totius and Jan Celliers, we read Een eeuwvan onrecht-a century of injustice-and we were convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that no people were a patch on the English when it comes to arrogance, self-righteousness and brutal op pression of others. After all, my own mother could tell stories about the concentration camp to which she was taken at the age of eight."?If the English were the enemy to the young Bosch, blacks were essentially nonpersons. Blacks were hewers of wood and drawers of water, "a part of the scenery but hardly a part of the human community.... They belonged to the category of 'farm implements' rather than to the category 'fellow-human beings."?In 1948, the same year that Bosch entered the University of Pretoria's Teacher's College, the pro-apartheid National Party was swept into power. For Afrikaners like Bosch, "it was to us like a dream come true when the Nationalist Party won that victory. We had no reservations whatsoever." At the university, Bosch became involved with the Student Christian Association (SCA). While participating in an SCA-sponsored evangelistic outreach at a lakeside camp, he became convinced that God was calling him into the Christian ministry.Upon returning to his parents' farm that summer, Bosch organized a Sunday service for the black laborers. A large crowd of black workers gathered. What happened there can only be described as a conversion of sorts.As I arrived, trembling, at the place of meeting, everybody came forward to shake hands with me! It was one of the most difficult moments in my life. When they saw my hesitation, they assured me that it was quite alright, that, in fact, it was normal for Christians to shake hands with one another! Only then did I discover that many of them were Christians: Methodists, Angli cans, members of the African Independent Churches, and so on. Previously I only thought of them as pagans and, at best, semi savages.Looking back now to that day, thirty years ago, I guess I can say that that was the beginning of a turning-point in my life. Not that, from then on, I accepted Blacks fully as human beings. Far from it. But something began to stir in me that day, and all I can say is that, by the grace of God, it has been growing ever since. Gradually, year by year, my horizons widened and I began to see people who were different from me with new eyes, always more and more clearly. I began to discover the simple, self-evident fact, that the things we have in common are more than the ...
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