This interview with 'Ampie' Muller, a colleague for many years of Hendrik Willem 'H.W.' van der Merwe, who is about the most widely recognized South African 'peacemaker' during the history of apartheid (racial segregation in South Africa). In 2014, Professor Ampie Muller and his wife, Dr. Beverley Roos-Muller, nominated H.W. van der Merwe for the South African Order of Luthuli. In this, they describe him as "the pioneer of conflict resolution in South Africa" and continued to describe him as someone who, earlier than any other white South African, "began the process of meeting with and facilitating meetings between individuals and organizations of opposing perspectives for the purposes of ending conflict and the violation of human rights he believed apartheid was."
In 2000, Nelson Mandela wrote the forward to H.W. van der Merve's autobiography in which he said "It is because South Africa had people like H.W. van der Merwe that we were able to enjoy a dramatic and peaceful transition to democracy, which serves as an inspiration to the world." In spite of this, in 2014, the ANC government bureaucracy failed to respond to the request for an order of Luthuli for H.W. van der Merwe.
The African Journal of Conflict Resolution, a publication of The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) in Durban, South Africa, honored H.W. in 2013 with a special issue on the theme, "Then and now: Perspectives on conflict resolution in South Africa," in which a number of his former colleagues paid tribute to his peacemaking work in a number of articles. The Journal notes that it is also quite ironic that H.W. came from racist Afrikaner beginnings to become "an Afrikaner who was far ahead of his time in enticing and cajoling his fellow Afrikaners into accepting that apartheid was racial discrimination, and eventually into processes of social and political change." In his 2000 book, Peacemaking in South Africa: A life in conflict resolution, H.W. writes that his racial intolerance with which he grew up transformed into 'intellectual dissent' as a student at the University of Stellenbosch.
He went on to undertake doctoral studies in sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles, where he received his degree in 1963. After five years as a sociology professor at the University of Rhodes in South Africa, from 1963 to 1968, he became the founding director of the Center for Intergroup Studies (now known as the Center for Conflict Resolution) at the University of Cape Town, where he stayed until 1992. It was from this institution that H.W. did most of his peacemaking work.
During the 1980s he and his wife, Marietjie, befriended Mrs. Winnie Mandela, who was then banished to Brandfort, in the South African province of Free State. She visited her husband in jail in Cape Town while staying with the van der Merwe's, and H.W. also acted in loco parentis for the Mandela's daughters while they were being educated. He also befriended Nelson Mandela, who was then imprisoned, and later became South Africa's first president after the ending of apartheid.
In the nomination for the Order of Luthuli for H.W., Muller and Roos-Muller note that H.W. was an active member of The Society of Friends (Quakers) and that H.W. put into his lifelong practice a belief that you make peace "by talking to enemies, not your friends." H.W. van der Merwe died of cancer in 2001.
Ampie Muller was the Senior Consultant at the Centre for Intergroup Studies for 21 years. He was therefore part and parcel of the peacemaking work that H.W. van der Merwe did and gives an outstanding account of their time together in this interview. Ampie was professor and dean at a number of South African universities for more than 30 years, and was the founding Chair of the South African Association for Conflict Intervention, in 1986. He was also a member of the National Peace Committee after Nelson Mandela was released.
JB/CRM
