The secretary for The Christian Institute would have addressed the letter formally to Mr Randall. Beyers then added the “!” in order to personalise the letter.

Peter Ralph Randall (1935 – 5 June 2024) was an anti-apartheid publisher in South Africa, who was banned by the former South African government between 1977 and 1981. He later became a professor in charge of teacher education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

From July 1965 to mid-1969 Randall was Assistant Director of the South African Institute of Race Relations, based in Johannesburg. The Institute published several titles by him, including a series of talks he gave on human rights and the need for social justice. From mid-1969 to 1972 he was Director of Spro-cas (Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society), which was sponsored by the Christian Institute and South African Council of Churches (SACC). Randall worked closely with Beyers Naudé who was heading the Christian Institute, and with other leading anti-apartheid clerics like Denis Hurley and Desmond Tutu. Although Spro-cas was intended as a relatively short-term project, it put together a substantial body of publications. Under the directorship of Randall, it published some 25 titles with the view to contributing to the search for social justice in South Africa. One of those was Cry Rage!, an innovative collection of anti-poems by James Matthews and Gladys Thomas, which became one of the icons of the Black Consciousness Movement.

Christiaan Frederick Beyers Naudé (10 May 1915 – 7 September 2004) was a South African Afrikaner Calvinist Dominee, theologian and the leading Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist. He was known simply as Beyers Naudé, or more colloquially, Oom Bey (Afrikaans for "Uncle Bey").

In 1963 Naudé founded the Christian Institute of Southern Africa (CI), an ecumenical organization with the aim of fostering reconciliation through interracial dialogue, research, and publications. The DRC forced Naudé to choose between his status as minister and directorship of the CI. He then resigned his church post, left his Aasvoëlkop congregation in Northcliff, Johannesburg, and resigned from the Broederbond in 1963. As a result, he lost his status as minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. His last sermon to his congregation noted that "We must show greater loyalty to God than to man".[4] Stoically anticipating the enormous pressure by the Afrikaner political and church establishment that was to come, he told his wife: "We must prepare for ten years in the wilderness."[1] Former Archbishop Desmond Tutu later said "Beyers became a leper in the Afrikaner community."

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See Vote Peter Randall Poster here
See Peter Randall (1935 - 2024) on escaping from John Vorster Square Written By James Findlay 23 August 2024