Attie van Niekerk’s book on four poets from Soweto and Alexandra in the seventies, Dominee, are you listening to the drums? was co-winner of the Sunday Times Literary Award for Political Writing in 1984. Other publications are Sáám in Afrika, 1992 (English translation: One Destiny. Our common future in Africa), and Anderkant die reënboog, 1996, all published by Tafelberg Publishers, Cape Town. Recently, he wrote Towards the sustainable well-being of communities. Africa, the modern empire and Christianity, an open online publication of OASIS. All these publications deal with the interfaces between different cultures.

In 1994 dr van Niekerk became a founding member and, for some years, was managing director of Nova Institute, a non-profit organization that aims to enable poverty-stricken communities to improve their quality of life. This is done through participatory research and development, in which researchers from a diversity of backgrounds, together with a number of low-income families, are engaged in a process to design, and evaluate in practice, household products and processes that are effective, sustainable, affordable for low-income households, desirable, replicable and socially beneficial.
From 1997 to 201 he worked on a part-time basis at the Faculty of Theology, University of Pretoria, as lecturer, researcher and since 2003 as Director of the Institute for Missiological and Ecumenical Research.