From South Africa-
A memorial service for the former politician and businesman, who died at home with his family after an illness, will be held in Diepsloot , a family spokesperson said. “It took the pioneering and indomitable spirit of many different South Africans to overcome apartheid.
Dr Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert was one of those pioneers,” said Tutu of the former politician who died in Johannesburg last Friday. “He went against his upbringing, his culture, his peers to offer an alternative, progressive Afrikaner voice to the Afrikaner Nationalist government of the time.” He said that Slabbert had started challenging the status quo when he was a student at Stellenbosch University, where he openly rejected apartheid, and went on to do so as leader of the opposition in the then Progressive Federal Party, and in Parliament.
He resigned from Parliament saying he did not want to be in the slipstream of government’s incompetence and moved on to arrange a meeting between the exiled ANC and a group of about 60 influential white South Africans, most of them Afrikaners, in Senegal.
More here-
http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article453630.ece/Tutu--Van-Zyl-Slabbert-defied-own-people
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