Wilhelm Verwoerd 
Verwoerd: My Journey through Family Betrayals 

When, in the 1990s, Wilhelm Verwoerd spoke out against his grandfather’s racist policies, his father called him a traitor. After many years of working in Northern Ireland, brokering peace between former enemies, he returns to his homeland to make his own peace. Back home, as he listens to his black neighbours’ and friends’ painful stories of the past, he struggles to reconcile the hated symbol of apartheid with the loving husband he encounters in Betsie Verwoerd’s intimate diaries. This moving memoir examines the complexities of having Verwoerd blood in your veins in the full knowledge that HF Verwoerd had blood on his hands. It is an unflinchingly honest look at loyalty, kinship and the demands of restitution in South Africa.

Over de auteur

Wilhelm Verwoerd was born in 1964, in the heyday of apartheid, which was infamously formalised by his grandfather Hendrik Verwoerd. Deeply disillusioned with the system he was raised in, Wilhelm joined the ANC in the early 1990s, and worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and for reconciliation in Northern Ireland and South Africa.