Background
Van Rensburg was born in Durban, South Africa.
Van Rensburg was born in Durban, South Africa.
Van Rensburg attended Saint Henry"s Marist Brothers" College and Glenwood High School.
He founded the Brigades Movement in, and the Foundation for Education with Production which is active in South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The family spoke English at home and were Roman Catholic: a big difference from the traditional Afrikaner upbringing. Van Rensburg was South African Vice-Consul in the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo) from February 1956 till May 1957, when he resigned as a protest against South Africa"s apartheid policies of racial discrimination.
In 1959 he moved to the United Kingdom, where he almost immediately began helping organise the 1960 campaign to boycott South African goods in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
Other organisers and supporters of the campaign included Julius Nyerere, Trevor Huddleston, Canon John Collins and Tennyson Makiwane. The Boycott Movement soon grew into the British Anti-Apartheid Movement.
Van Rensburg was vilified by Afrikaners for his part in the campaign, and when he returned to South Africa in 1960, his passport was confiscated and he fled over the border to Swaziland. In 1962 he moved to Bechuanaland (now ), where he undertook many educational and social initiatives.
In the 1980s he founded the Foundation for Education with Production.
He is now one of "s elder statesmen, having written a regular column for years for Mmegi, the independent daily newspaper.
He joined the Liberal Party of South Africa, becoming the party"s organising secretary for the Transvaal province in September 1958.