Allan Boesak (born 1945), cofounder of the United Democratic Front (UDF), was a leading opponent of apartheid in South Africa and continues to be a spritual and political force.

Allan Aubrey Boesak was born on February 23, 1945, in Kakamas, N.W. Cape, South Africa. From an early age he developed his twin interests of religion and politics. Having always wanted to be a minister, Boesak at age 14 became a sexton in the Dutch Reformed Church's Sendingkerk (a "colored," or mixedrace, offshoot of the white Dutch Reformed Church). After graduating from Bellville Theological Seminary in 1967, Boesak was ordained at age 23. He married Dorothy Rose Martin in 1969 and they had four children (he eventually divorced and later married Elna Botha in 1991). By his late teens Boesak had expressed increasing dissatisfaction with South Africa's apartheid, a strict form of segregation, especially after the government cited racial reasons to force his family to relocate...