H. W. van der Merwe

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Hendrik W. van der Merwe (1929–2001) was a South African academic, a Quaker, and a pioneer of conflict resolution. In 1968 he founded the Abe Bailey Institute for Inter-Racial Studies at the University of Cape Town, now called the Centre for Intergroup Studies. He was born on June 24, 1929, in rural South Africa about 210 km east of Cape Town. Raised as a Calvinist, he later became a Quaker. He earned a BA in 1956 and an MA in sociology in 1957 from Stellenbosch University, and a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1963. He taught sociology at Rhodes University in Grahamstown from 1963 to 1968. That year he became the founding director of the Centre for Intergroup Studies and led it as executive director until 1992. In 1992 he was named emeritus honorary professor at the University of Cape Town, and he served as a senior consultant for two more years before retiring in 1994. He died of cancer on March 5, 2001, at his farm near his birthplace. His memoir, Peacemaking in South Africa: A Life in Conflict Resolution, with a foreword by Nelson Mandela, recalls how in 1984 he first arranged talks between the banned African National Congress (then in exile) and South African newspaper editors.