Allan Boesak

In June 2013, Christian Theological Seminary and Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana appointed Boesak as the Desmond Tutu Professor for Peace, Global Justice, and Reconciliation Studies, a new four-year position held jointly with both institutions.

Boesak has written a book on his 30 years as an activist – Running with Horses: Reflections of an Accidental Politician – which was published in late March 2009. Boesak said that in his book he will explain why the banning of UDF affiliates meant the money could not be accounted for. Boesak declined to testify in his trial in 1999. He maintains that keeping this silence was one of the main reasons for his conviction.

In 2008, Boesak publicly challenged the South African leadership to remember why the country had set out to join all races and create a non-racial South Africa. In the annual Ashley Kriel Memorial Youth Lecture, he suggested that the ANC was well down the slippery slope of ethnic preferences and "had brought back the hated system of racial categorization." In December 2008 he left the ANC to join the Congress of the People Party. In reaction, the ANC leaked a memorandum written by Boesak, detailing how he had discussed different roles he could play to help the organisation and stating that his preferred choice was the post of South African ambassador to the United Nations.

Boesak joined the new Congress of the People party in December 2008, and was selected in February 2009 as the party's premier candidate for the Western Cape in the 2009 Provincial and National Elections. In November 2009, Boesak resigned from Congress of the People.

Although Boesak applied for a presidential pardon from Thabo Mbeki after his release, it was not granted, as the government felt that he had not admitted that he had committed an offence. However, on 15 January 2005, it was announced that he had received a presidential pardon and that his criminal record would be expunged.

In 2004, Boesak came out in favour of same-sex marriage in South Africa, a year before the country's Constitutional Court ruled that the denial of marriage to gay people was discriminatory and violated the country's constitution. In 2008, while serving as the Moderator of the Cape Synod of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, to the shock of many senior church leaders, Boesak announced that he was going to resign all of his positions within the church because of its discriminatory position on homosexuality and gay and lesbian people. He invoked the anti-apartheid 1986 Belhar Confession, which lambasts all forms of discrimination, to say that the church should welcome gays and lesbians, begin to perform gay marriage ceremonies, and appoint gay clergy.

Boesak was charged and found guilty of fraud on 24 March 1999. He was jailed in 2000 and released in 2001, having served just over one year of his three-year sentence.

Boesak resigned from the Dutch Reformed Church in 1990 after details of an extramarital affair with television presenter Elna Botha emerged; they later married.

Along with Beyers Naudé and Winnie Mandela, Boesak won the 1985 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award given annually by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights to an individual or group whose courageous activism is at the heart of the human rights movement and in the spirit of Robert F. Kennedy's vision and legacy.

The allegation were into the use of foreign aid given to the Foundation for Peace and Justice charity setup by Boesak. The DanChurchAid (Danish Church Aid) approached Johannesburg law firm Bell Dewar to investigate the use of a $1 million donation made in 1985 (c.a. R3 million at the time) . For six weeks Boesak held out while the scandal was aired in the press. Only when the Office for Serious Economic Offences began its own investigation was he finally persuaded to resign from the foreign ministry.

Boesak was elected as president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1982, a position he held until 1991.

He rose to prominence during the 1980s as an outspoken critic and opponent of the National Party's policies and played a major anti-apartheid activist role as a patron of the United Democratic Front (UDF) from 1983 to 1991. In 1991, Boesak was elected chairman of the Western Cape region of the African National Congress (ANC).

Originally from Kakamas, Boesak became active in the separate Coloured branch of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk and began to work as a pastor in Paarl. He became known then as a liberation theologian, starting with the publication of his doctoral work (Farewell to Innocence, 1976). For the next decade or so, he continued to write well-received books and collections of essays, sermons, and so on. One of Boesak's anti-apartheid speeches was sampled by British electronica group The Shamen on their album En Tact.

Allan Aubrey Boesak (born 23 February 1946) is a South African Dutch Reformed Church cleric and politician and anti-apartheid activist. He was sentenced to prison for fraud in 1999 but was subsequently granted an official pardon and reinstated as a cleric in late 2004.