Minister turned from evil
By TOM RAGAN- THE GAZETTE
Gerrit Wolfaardt used to roam the streets of Cape Town, South
Africa, with his thug friends.
They'd look for blacks to beat up. They'd pick them at random.
Bust beer bottles over their heads. Hit them with baseball bats.
Kick them. Leave some of them for dead.
That was in the mid-1960s when Wolfaardt got swept up in South
Africa's apartheid -- an institutionalized form of segregation
between the country's blacks and whites.
He once worshipped the Ku Klux Klan from afar. He called on the
South African government to exterminate all blacks and even talked
to elected officials about the possibilities.
These days, Wolfaardt, 57, is an ordained minister in Colorado
Springs. He preaches about "Jesus Christ, the Savior." He teaches
about love and racial reconciliation.
To say he is far removed from the hatred of his youth in heavily
segregated South Africa is an understatement.
Colorado Springs is full of people similar to Wolfaardt --
born-again Christians who've turned their lives around and are
earning a living spreading the Gospel.
But few have had movies made about them.
"Final Solution," based on Wolfaardt's life, will air at 10 p.m.
Saturday on PBS (Channel 8). The title comes from Adolf Hitler's
plan to exterminate the Jews, but it has religious connotations.
The movie has won several awards for revealing the grim realities
of apartheid, which Wolfaardt once embraced with the same enthusiasm
as he now does Christianity.
But today he's a repentant man who has lived in Colorado Springs
for five years.
The former associate rector of Christ the King Church in
Monument, the Rockrimmon resident is the national director for the
London-based Veritas College, which teaches ministers how to teach
the Scriptures.
"I think I came to the realization that we're all the same when I
looked down one day and saw blood on my hands and it was red -- not
black," he said, recounting one of the beatings he inflicted on a
black man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time in Cape Town.
"But you have to understand where I'm coming from or, rather,
where I came from," he said. "We were all raised to believe that we
were the chosen ones because we were white. Because we were
Afrikaners. Even in church, we were taught that blacks were
different -- that they had no rights, no feelings, that they weren't
equal.
"It's South Africa we're talking about. There was no such thing
as separation of church and state. The church was used as a
political instrument to advance the government's ideology, which was
do away with the blacks."
During his college years, however, Wolfaardt began to question
his beliefs. His racist attitude toward blacks slowly changed.
The credit goes to Alan Paton, a white South African who wrote
"Cry, the Beloved Country," a book that sympathized with the plight
of the country's blacks.
But the greater change came in June 1984.
"I was a lawyer at the time," Wolfaardt said. "I wasn't really
seeking God, but somehow he came to me and pulled me out of the fast
lane. I was making good money, defending drug lords, essentially.
"Then one day I walked out of the office after I got this
overpowering urge to go to church."
He found himself in front of the huge double doors of the Church
of England in Cape Town. He walked in. He listened to the Gospel.
Then he emerged -- a more confused man for it.
A few days passed.
Wolfaardt struggled to come to grips with who he was.
Then one night, he said, Jesus appeared to him as a bright light
and told him he had to make a choice between him or his friends.
"I chose Jesus," he said.
And that's pretty much what the movie is based on: Wolfaardt's
choice.
Although it has only appeared on PBS in select cities -- such as
Los Angeles; Tampa, Fla.; Minneapolis and Boston -- the movie's
director, Cristobol Krusen, said he's happy with the final product.
The idea for it, he said, initially came in the 1970s when Krusen
was attending film school at New York University. The racial
divisions in South Africa had long fascinated him.
But it wasn't until the late 1980s that Krusen was reminded of
his idea after he read a story about a controversial Afrikaner
minister who wanted to live among his black congregation --
something that was unheard of and illegal at the time.
Inspired anew, Krusen started searching for somebody -- anybody
-- who had a similar story in South Africa.
"I needed to find somebody who had an extreme change, a
180-degree kind of change, a real dramatic change," he said. "And I
found all that in Gerrit."
But not by chance.
Krusen mailed out hundreds of letters to churches and
organizations across South Africa. He received nearly 50 responses.
Some said they could help. Others said they couldn't. He ended up
following up on the more positive leads. He went to Cape Town.
There, after asking around, Krusen learned about Wolfaardt, who,
just a few years earlier, had been asking for forgiveness in several
black townships, going so far as to wash people's feet, perform all
sorts of good deeds for the downtrodden -- a former lawyer, they
said, who once held a lucrative job.
"It was nothing more than good detective work," Krusen said.
Wolfaardt had left the country and was working in Richmond, Va.,
as a minister -- no more than 100 miles from Norfolk, where Krusen
lived and worked.
From there, the movie was born -- again.
"I had South Africa in my back yard," he said. "All that was left
was putting together the pieces."
The movie is an hour and 46 minutes long.
Clarence Shuler -- who is black, a good friend of Wolfaardt's and
an ordained minister in Colorado Springs -- got a chance to see a
preview.
As graphic as it was, it hasn't changed anything between the two.
"We're still best friends," he said.
When Wolfaardt was abusing blacks and calling for their
extermination, Shuler was sitting in the back of buses, avoiding
"Whites Only" water fountains and ordering food at restaurants out
back, not inside.
What some people have a hard time understanding, Shuler said, "is
the power of the Lord."
"It just goes to show you that if you accept Jesus Christ into
your life, he will change it. He will make it better. There will be
love all around."
But as much as he is a new man, Wolfaardt readily admits he's not
sure what's in store for him when the time comes to meet his maker.
"Any person of a fallen nature, which includes all of humanity,
well, I'll have to deal with it when the time comes," he said.
"I get upset with all the stuff going on in the Middle East, the
human shields. It's not right, but at the same time I have to look
into my own heart. It will always be a struggle, knowing what I did.
..."
CONTACT THE WRITER: 476-1661 or tragan@gazette.com
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