Jan van Eck

Jan van Eck (18 December 1943 – 27 January 2009) was a Dutch–South African politician who served in opposition in the South African House of Assembly from 1986 to 1994. He represented the Progressive Federal Party from 1986 to 1987 and the Democratic Party from 1989 to 1992; at other times, he sat as an independent. An opponent of apartheid, he left the Democratic Party to join the African National Congress (ANC) in 1992. After South Africa's democratic transition, he briefly represented the ANC in the National Assembly in 1994, but he left to become involved in peacemaking in Burundi, where he worked for over a decade as an independent mediator in the Burundian civil war. Early life and education Van Eck was born on 18 December 1943 in Holland, the eldest of five siblings. His mother was a housewife and his father was a classical piano teacher, and they moved to South Africa when van Eck was five years old. He matriculated at Bonnievale High School in the Cape Province in 1961 and enrolled at Stellenbosch University, where he completed a bachelor's in geography and history in 1964, a teaching diploma in 1965, and an honours degree in geography in 1965. While at university, van Eck joined the opposition Progressive Party, and Colin Eglin recruited him to campaign among Afrikaans students in the Cape, initially as founding editor of the party's Afrikaans-language journal, Deurbraak ("breakthrough"). Over the next two decades he held a variety of positions in the public relations unit of the party and its successors, the Progressive Reform Party and the Progressive Federal Party (PFP). He stood unsuccessfully for election to Parliament in 1974 and to the provincial council in 1977, before he was elected to the provincial council in 1981, representing the PFP in Groote Schuur, Cape Town.