Tutu addressed his remarks directly to them. Bishop Tutu was one of the last people to speak as he was preparing to do so, the leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church were uneasy, visibly stiffening. The conversation was “very tense, very raw,” Haugen told me in an interview earlier this year. Read: How Apartheid haunts a new generation of South Africans And on the evening of September 11, about 15 church leaders, Black and white, from different denominations, gathered. The situation was desperate enough that even leaders of the powerful Dutch Reformed Church, which was allied with the white-supremacist government and usually avoided such gatherings, attended. Their hope was that the Church would help South Africa through the crisis. In September, hundreds of church leaders gathered in Pietermaritzburg. Together with Desmond Tutu, the new Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, Cassidy launched the National Initiative for Reconciliation. He was working for Michael Cassidy, the founder of African Enterprise, an organization focused on evangelizing and racial reconciliation. Botha’s apartheid government declared a partial state of emergency. He had arrived in South Africa that summer, fresh out of Harvard, just a few days before P. G ary Haugen was just 22 years old in the fall of 1985, when he attended a meeting that would change the course of his life.
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