Nico Smith

Nicolaas Johannes Smith (1929 – 19 June 2010) was a South African Afrikaner minister and prominent opponent of apartheid. Smith was a professor of theology at the University of Stellenbosch, a member of the Afrikaner Broederbond (Afrikaner Brotherhood) organization, and a minister of the apartheid-supporting Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). However, he abandoned his upper-class lifestyle to live with the impoverished and segregated blacks of Mamelodi, a township in the east of Pretoria. From Mamelodi, he worked to support the black community and oppose apartheid. Smith joined the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa (DRCA), the separate branch of the Dutch Reformed Church for non-whites, due to the DRC's refusal to oppose apartheid.

Early life and professional career Smith grew up in the rural reaches of the Orange Free State, and was raised by his father with conventional Afrikaner views on the inferiority of coloureds and blacks at the time. At the time, few whites knew how blacks lived due to strict segregation rules. Black neighborhoods were avoided and perceived as dangerous. Smith explained that he ran the swap because "White fear is one of the great barriers to understanding and progress in this country... But over the past two years there has been an increasing realization by whites of the depth and the degree of black anger." The swap was attacked as "designed to promote Marxist doctrine", as nearly any opposition to apartheid was called a communist plot to destabilize the country. Smith also demanded an investigation into suspicious murders of anti-apartheid activists.

In 1989, he moved back to a white suburb of Pretoria. and inspired the sustained Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue Group in the United States.

Later years After the fall of apartheid, Smith helped build a multiracial congregation in Pretoria. He wrote Die Afrikaner Broederbond: Belewinge van die Binnekant, a book critical of the Afrikaner Broederbond, in 2009.

Smith died of a heart attack on 19 June 2010. He was 81 years old. African National Congress spokesman Jackson Mthembu paid tribute to him as a "gallant fighter, and [we] will forever treasure the contribution he made in the struggle for liberation and the building of our democracy."