Alex Boraine

Working for Peace and Reconciliation

Mansfield is sad to report that the Reverend Dr Alex Boraine, one of Mansfield’s earliest Honorary Fellows and an alumnus, has died in Cape Town on December 5th, 2018.

Alex Boraine became the youngest ever President of the Methodist Church of South Africa in 1970 and was a prominent white opposition politician in the later years of apartheid, as a Progressive Party MP between 1974 and 1986 and subsequently as the founder of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa. He joined Desmond Tutu on the ground-breaking South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as Deputy Chairman and later founded the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). Alex was kind, decent and insightful; a remarkable combination of idealism and pragmatism, he envisioned a better society and was able to work from day to day on the steps that might eventually bring it about.