Melanie Verwoerd (; ; born 18 April 1967) is a South African and Irish political analyst and former diplomat and politician. She was previously the director of UNICEF Ireland.
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. Between 2007 and 2011 she was the executive director of UNICEF Ireland.
Early life and education Melanie Verwoerd was born Melanie Van Niekerk on 18 April 1967 in Pretoria, but grew up in Strand, Western Cape, and Stellenbosch. She was later adopted by her mother’s second husband and changed her name to Melanie Fourie. The name “Melanie” is stressed on the second syllable (meh-LAH-nee), not on the first syllable as in English. 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.
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 neighbourhood". 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 honour 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 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 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. She met Verwoerd in 1985 in her theology class at the University of Stellenbosch.
Anti-apartheid activist Change of position
Verwoerd 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 fiancé, Wilhelm Verwoerd, 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 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".
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 1988, she studied for a Masters of Arts in Feminist Theology at Oxford, and returned to South Africa in 1990. On 11 February 1990, Nelson Mandela, the leader of the ANC was released from prison, and Verwoerd from her apartment in Oxford watched his release live on television while exchanging a toast of champagne with her husband. Verwoerd stated her Master's thesis at Oxford was: "It's all about the gender issues in religion. Like Roman Catholicism, the Dutch Reformed Church [one of the supporting blocks of apartheid] was vehemently opposed to women clergy. I wanted to buck that. I was the only girl in a class of 50 men when I was doing my Masters, which was a strange experience for me as I had no brothers, only sisters, and had gone to an all-girls' school".
Joining the ANC In 1990, after his release from prison, she met Mandela, the leader of the ANC who had imprisoned in 1964 under Prime Minister Verwoerd, which inspired her to join the ANC. Her husband had wanted to meet Mandela to apologize for his suffering in prison, leading to her meeting Mandela at a cocktail party. After meeting the ANC leader, Verwoerd told her husband "I'm sick and tired of that 'them and us' feeling", leading her to join the Stellenbosch chapter of the ANC. Verwoerd stated that the day after meeting Mandela she was driving home from work when she saw a group of black women line up to leave the all white town of Stellenbosch just before 5:00 pm when their work passes expired left her with the feeling that South Africa was too divided and something needed to be done to bridge the racial gap. Shortly afterwards, Verwoerd was promoted to the executive community of the Stellenbosh ANC chapter. Her decision to join the ANC made headlines in South African newspapers, which reported that "A Verwoerd is in the ANC". Her father-in-law and mother-in-law, both of whom were supporters of apartheid disowned her, expressing the shame that their son had married her, and as of 2004, she had not spoken to them for years. In a 2002 interview, Wilhelm Verwoerd Sr. called her "an upstart" and "violently feministic".
From late 1992 to April 1994, Verwoerd together with her husband spoke constantly at ANC rallies. Irish journalist Catherine Cleary wrote in 2005: "In the early 1990s the Verwoerds, whose story has a film-script flavour, were the poster boy and girl of South Africa's journey from apartheid to democracy." Her decision to seek election as an ANC candidate in the 1994 elections was controversial as she was a mother and as the expectation within the Afrikaner culture is that women, especially mothers, should stay at home, not work outside. Verwoerd described her decision to seek a political career as "weird in South Africa. People don't do that". During the 1994 election campaign, she received a number of death threats from right-wing Afrikaners for whom she was a "renegade"."
She stated that while campaigning in the 1994 election that she met a favorable reception from black South Africans as she recalled: "Not once did I get any resentment or anger or suspicion while campaigning. Sometimes people needed to ask questions in a very careful and polite way. People would tell you things like: 'I know it's horrible to say this, but the day Verwoerd was assassinated we danced in the streets.' It was like reclaiming a country that I didn't know existed."
Afrikaner reaction Verwoerd stated that she felt that Afrikaner culture was highly conformist with little room for dissent as she said: "As long as you stay in the laager [a defensive circle of wagons used by the Boers during their wars with the Zulu in the 19th century], you can face a few ways, you can be a little bit of step - they will bear with you...But then when you step out of the laager and actually do something which is not in line, then the laager closes and you are out of it. It's a well known thing with Afrikaners. It's been like that since the Boer War, with the people who sided with the English. Calling an Afrikaner a renegade is a vicious thing to say to someone". As such, her decision to campaign against apartheid made her into something of an outcast within the Afrikaner community. Verwoerd recalled in 2007: "It was a very difficult time. My grandparents were extremely upset by my joining the ANC because the area they lived in was very strongly peopled by the AWB [the extreme right-wing Afrikaner movement]. But when the press leaked the fact that there was a Verwoerd in the ANC camp, all hell broke loose...I lost every single friend I had. I remember being spat on as I walked along the streets in Stellenbosch."
With her husband, Verwoerd had two children.
Political and diplomatic career National Assembly