CLIVE DERBY-LEWIS

CLIVE DERBY-LEWIS is a fifth generation South African who was born in Cape Town in 1936. He spent nineteen years in voluntary service in the South African Army’s Citizen Force, attaining the rank of Commandant. At the age of 32, he became commanding officer of the Witwatersrand Rifles Regiment, the youngest CO in the regiment’s history. He still retains that record. He took the regiment to the SWA border during the war there where the regiment served with distinction.

After his military career, he entered politics and is one of the few politicians in South Africa to have served in the four arms of the previous government: local government, the Provincial Council, Parliament and the President’s Council.

He was a founder member of the South African Conservative Party in 1982 and served as that party’s official opposition spokesman on Economic Affairs. He established a parliamentary record by putting more than 800 questions to the ruling National Party during his term as a member of Parliament from 1987 to 1989.

He has been active in numerous organizations – many started by himself – to inform the South African public in general about South Africa’s political direction. (His predictions of course became a reality). He served on the boards of two hospitals, a school for children with learning disabilities, and a high school. He was a Zone Commander in SA’s Civil Defence Corps and was involved in many ex-servicemen’s organizations. He was elected Vice President of the London-based Western Goals, an organization devoted to the preservation of Western civilization, and was a member of various anti-communist groups. He attended the World Anti-Communist League Congress in Brussels in 1990.

A committed Christian, Derby-Lewis was involved in many groups opposed to the politicization of South Africa’s churches, their support for liberation theology and their active assistance to revolutionary forces in South Africa. He was born a Catholic and fought against the Catholic Church’s support for these revolutionary forces. He left the Catholic Church some years ago and is a member of Afrikaanse Protestante Kerk. (APK).

In 1993 Clive was given the death sentence for his involvement in the assassination by Janus Walus of Chris Hani, a communist revolutionary who wanted to see South Africa as a “wasteland”. In 1990, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

The law of South Africa says that a life prisoner over the age of 65 may apply for parole, and this he did. In July 2008, the Department of Correctional Services (DCS) Parole Board recommended he be given parole, to be released on 15 October 2008. DCS did nothing about this and the family was forced to take DCS to court, where the case was lost after a full bench (the first time in history) ruled that his application was faulty.

Again in 2010, the Parole Board recommended Clive’s release on parole, and he is waiting to see what transpires this time. Clive has been in prison for more than seventeen years.