Melanie Verwoerd: Hamba kahle (walk well), dearest Arch

“Spring op [jump on],” chuckled the Arch. “Let’s give these guys something to talk about.”

I was South Africa’s ambassador to Ireland and the Arch was in Dublin for a reconciliation event. During a photoshoot he spotted the photographer Mark Doyle’s motorbike and asked if he could get on it. Then he encouraged me to get on as well and of course I said yes. How could I not?

I loved the Arch and even though I have known for some time that he was getting very frail, my heart is simply broken today. He once told me how “incredibly angry” he would get with God and remonstrate with Him/Her during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process.

For a while now, I have been remonstrating with God, but for a different reason. I have tried to explain to God that I feel strongly that there are a few people in the world who should never die, because they are just too needed in our broken world. That we need their guiding light to remind us to do better, to love and to fearlessly fight injustice. So, I wish I could have convinced God to have left the Arch with us . . . forever.

Fintan O’Toole: It’s the first birthday of the Brexit hole and they have to keep digging

---

Dear Frankie – Brian Maye on agony aunt and pioneering businesswoman Frankie Byrne

---

Desmond Tutu obituary: a spellbinding preacher who helped end apartheid

---

Ukraine, Russia and Nato

---

Even though I would never be so arrogant as to describe myself as a friend of the Arch, my path crossed the Arch’s at some of the most important milestones in my personal and political life.

The first time I met the Arch was during the late 1980s at Stellenbosch University. It was his first visit to the university and, most probably, the first visit of any black speaker. For days, there were protests on campus by the white Afrikaans students against his appearance, and pamphlets were distributed using selective quotes to “prove” that he was “the Antichrist” and “a communist”.

On the evening of his appearance, tempers were fraying. The security police were everywhere, as were the bomb squad, military and campus police. It was not long before the handful of left-wing students got into physical fights inside the venue with the more mainstream students. The Arch, however, came into the hall calmly and faced the angry crowd. “Goeie naand [good evening],” he said in Afrikaans. You could hear a pin drop and the discomfort among the majority of students was tangible. He then went on to tell a very funny joke about how he and Brigitte Bardot ended up together in heaven. His well-known high-pitch laughter disarmed even the most conservative in the audience and by the end of the evening he had the whole audience eating out of the palm of his hand. He even got a standing ovation.

Political path

Even though I had already started to question the political ideology that I had been taught since infancy, I knew that night for sure that my political path would lead me closer to Tutu and away from the Bothas and De Klerks of our time.

A few years later it was he who hugged me tightly on the day I was inaugurated as an MP for the ANC and reminded me to continue to be brave.

Two years after that, he was the one who showed us again what true courage was when he cried with us as our shameful past was exposed at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

When people so bravely exposed their almost unbearable pain and grief he comforted them and held them – both physically and emotionally. And when the apartheid leaders failed to apologise he, the one who had nothing to apologise for, apologised to victims, because someone had to.

Then when, I am sure, he would have liked to take a rest after the decades of struggle and the gruelling TRC process, he had to become our voice of conscience yet again. As the morally corrupt decisions, abuse of power and human rights abuses confronted us at a pace no one could have thought possible pre-1994, it was the Arch who fearlessly continued to speak out.

By this time I was already in Ireland as ambassador and he came to stay a few times with me and my family (ironically in the former residence of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid). To this day, I try (rather unsuccessfully) to emulate his routine of early morning prayer and quiet time, which I observed him doing without fail every day.

Although a man of the cloth, part of the Arch’s greatness was that he never took himself too seriously and although deeply spiritual, he was not pious.

Bono and Ali

Once, when he was staying with me, Bono and his wife Ali came over to see the Arch. The Arch offered to say a prayer and to do a blessing for the about-to-be-released How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb album. We stood in a circle as the Arch prayed in Xhosa first, and, when it sounded like he was winding down, Bono, in a real rock’n’roll gesture, lifted up his fist into the air and said “Amen!” The Arch opened one eye and said: “I am not finished, man!” He then closed his eyes and continued in Afrikaans. Once more, it sounded like he was winding down, but before Bono could do anything, the Arch, again with one eye closed, said: “Not yet!” He continued in English and then gave Bono a little nudge – “Now” – and Bono threw his fist into the air with an “Amen!”

A few years later Gerry Ryan and I hosted an informal dinner for the Arch and a few friends in a private room of a restaurant in Dublin. We had a lovely evening. However, in the middle of a very intense and heated discussion about the peace process in Northern Island, the door to the private room suddenly swung open and two scantily dressed burlesque dancers came in.

A silence fell in the room and, conscious that we were in the presence of a holy man, we stared over at them in horror. “Hello,” the two women purred. Luckily, before any more could happen, a frazzled manager ran in. “Wrong room, wrong room,” he said, “Your function is upstairs.” There was a slightly uncomfortable pause after they left, but then the Arch said, with exaggerated disappointment: “That was not very Christian to chase them out like that. We should invite them back for something to eat. They looked hungry.”

We have lost one of the greatest moral compasses the world has ever known.

For almost seven decades, when so many often felt unheard and unseen because of the colour of their skin or because of their economic status, the Arch was always there.

Now he has left us.

Hamba kahle (walk well), dearest Arch.*

Melanie Verwoerd is an independent political analyst and former South African ambassador to Ireland

*This article was amended on December 28th, 2021