Читать книгу Hermann Giliomee: Historian - Hermann Giliomee - Страница 11

In 1956 I enrolled as a student at the University of Stellenbosch (US) with no expectations of becoming an academic. As my aptitude for maths was nothing to write home about, I did not do particularly well in the final matric examination. My brother Jan and my sister Hester would later enjoy reminding me that both of them had obtained a better symbol than I did in their matric exams. In his history classes my father told the story of the past well, and was respected by his friends for his political judgement. I decided to choose history as one of my major subjects.

My student years were largely carefree. I thoroughly enjoyed life in Simonsberg residence, especially the inter-residence sport. In 1958 I was a member of the team that won the Sauer Cup for the first league of residence rugby. I was on the editorial team of the student newspaper Die Matie, but preferred writing about sport rather than student politics. The ardent nationalists on the campus put me off.

To my surprise, I was elected to serve on the SRC in 1960 despite not having published my policy in Die Matie as all the other candidates had done voluntarily. When I was questioned about this at the pre-election mass meeting known as “the Circus”, I had a pat answer. I argued that experience had taught us that candidates’ promises were seldom carried out, and that all I would promise, therefore, was to do my best according to my lights. It sounded principled, but the real reason was that I decided to stand at such a late stage that the opportunity to publish my policy had passed by.

In 1960 I was also elected primarius (head student) of Simonsberg, a residence that accommodated 280 male students. This was at a time when students had started questioning the official ban on alcohol and female visitors in the rooms. To the annoyance of Prof. Chris Gunter, the residential head, I maintained that it was not the responsibility of the house committee to be moral guardians, but only to act against students who openly flouted the rules.

Towards the end of my term as primarius, I received my first lesson in how power operates. Late one evening, about twenty Simonsbergers invaded a female residence and overturned the beds of the sleeping residents. The university authorities considered this a serious offence, and immediately requested the names of the culprits from the house committee. Without the committee’s cooperation, however, they were powerless.

I contended that the house committee had no say with regard to offences committed by Simonsberg residents outside the residence, and that we were only prepared to comply with the request if the authorities undertook not to punish the culprits. The undertaking was given verbally. Accordingly, the house committee persuaded the culprits to provide their names, with the assurance that they would not be punished.

A few days later I heard to my dismay that the university authorities had written to the parents of the offenders, informing them that their sons were guilty of a serious offence in a female residence and that any further misdemeanours would be punished severely. Evidently the authorities felt that because no one had been punished, they had kept to their undertaking. I felt that the university’s action flew in the face of the promises that had been made, but it was too late to do anything about it.

On the other hand, there were also times when the university decided not to act. One day “Vloog” Theron, an obstreperous second-year student, asked me for permission to bring two elephants to graze on the lawn in front of the residence. I thought he was joking, and did nothing to stop him. Lo and behold, a day or two later he turned up at Simonsberg with two circus elephants in tow. The following day Die Burger published a photo in which I and a few other residents looked on laughingly as Vloog and the two giant animals made themselves at home on the lawn. There was no reaction from the administration. Clearly, elephants on the loose on Simonsberg’s lawn was much less dangerous than male students on the loose at 11 pm in the bedrooms of a female residence.

A symbiotic relationship

By the time I started my studies, the university had entered the “era of Thom”. Prof. HB Thom, who was rector from 1954 to 1969, was also the only person from the south of the country who ever served as chairman of the Afrikaner Broederbond’s Executive Council. He occupied this position from 1952 to 1960. This undoubtedly boosted the AB’s membership figures on the Matie campus.

The US was a university with attitude: all students and lecturers were supposed to be extremely grateful for the privilege of being part of the US’s proud legacy. Between 1919 and 1978, all the prime ministers were US alumni. There was a symbiotic relationship between the university and Afrikaans as an official language. It was the first institution with full university status in the country that used Afrikaans predominantly as the medium of instruction. The offices of the Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse taal, a comprehensive descriptive dictionary aimed at reflecting Afrikaans in its entirety, were situated on the campus. And, of course, Stellenbosch had Danie Craven, who was practically synonymous with South African rugby.

The US as an institution that was unmistakably Afrikaans was founded on the winged words “Stellenbosch stands for an idea”, expressed by Dr DF Malan in 1913. By that he meant that Stellenbosch was the place from which the Afrikaner nation could best realise its ideals. The US was established a few years later through a generous bequest of the philanthropist Jannie Marais, a Stellenbosch businessman and politician, which stipulated that Dutch or Afrikaans had to occupy no lesser place than English at the institution. Almost a hundred years later, no one seems to know any more what the famous Stellenbosch “idea” was. Without much compunction, the university has allowed English to elbow out Afrikaans relentlessly as medium of instruction.

At the time of my enrolment at Stellenbosch, there were certain departments and lecturers that were justifiably rated highly. The Law Faculty was universally recognised as excellent, and the students had the greatest admiration for the dean, Prof. JC de Wet. Prof. PJ van der Merwe of the History Department was the most influential Afrikaans historian.

Encountering Verwoerd

I was a student at a time when it seemed as if white rule would remain inviolate for decades to come. Except for three or four months after the Sharpeville tragedy in 1960 – when the police shot dead 69 black people as a large crowd protested against the pass laws at the Sharpeville police station – we did not really have any fears about security. My generation was the last one which was not subject to military conscription, and we were also the generation that experienced the excitement of the final push towards a republic. I voted “yes” for the republic in the referendum of 1960. In the general election of 1961, I voted for the NP for the first and last time during the era of that party’s rule.

In 1958, when I was in my third year, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd became NP leader and prime minister. I have two personal memories of Verwoerd that are unrelated to his political ideas. At the age of about 12 or 13, I collected signatures of celebrities as a hobby. Most of the cabinet ministers replied to my written request with a brief note from their private secretaries to which the signature had been added.

Verwoerd was the only one who responded to my request with a personal handwritten note. He wrote that he had a child who was left-handed like me, and another who was the same age as me. I read later that a little girl once asked him for permission to call her pet rabbit Hendrik Verwoerd. He replied that he did not think it was a suitable name for a rabbit, but he was prepared to give his permission nonetheless. It says something about the man that he took this kind of trouble with children’s requests.

My other instance of contact with him was in June 1960, when a few students and I spent the winter holidays with our fellow Simonsberg resident Siebert Wiid at his father’s farm Welgevonden, near Groblersdal. Verwoerd and his wife arrived at Welgevonden shortly after us. He was due to address a huge crowd at Groblersdal the following day, one of his first public appearances after the failed attempt on his life three months earlier. (David Pratt, a farmer from the Magaliesburg district, had shot Verwoerd in the face while he delivered a speech at the Rand Easter Show.) We students had our meals together with the VIP guests in the main house. I sat next to Verwoerd, and I remember how calmly and convincingly he formulated his standpoint in a way that made complete sense.

On the Sunday morning of the Verwoerds’ weekend at Welgevonden, the local NP branch presented Verwoerd with a painting of him as a gift. He received it graciously, but remarked that it had a minor flaw: something was missing. There was a moment of consternation. “My beauty spots,” he explained smilingly, pointing to the bullet scars on his face. In my layperson’s view, it was clear that the assault on his life had caused no psychological damage. Thereafter I took scant notice of claims that Verwoerd regarded his survival as tangible proof of divine intervention and of the special blessing that supposedly now rested on him.

Years later, in my book The Last Afrikaner Leaders (2012), I gave a more favourable assessment of Verwoerd than is the norm. I believe this had much to do with my first-hand exposure to the force of his personality and his powers of persuasion during that weekend in 1960.

The publisher Koos Human had a similar experience. He and José Burman, the author of a book on mountain passes in the Boland, asked Verwoerd to write a foreword, as it was known that Verwoerd and his wife were keen mountaineers. Verwoerd invited Human and Burman to his office where, after informing them that he had read the entire manuscript and had written the foreword himself, he elaborated expertly on the subject in a ten-­minute monologue. Human made an observation that I can endorse wholeheartedly after the weekend at Welgevonden: “Never before (or since) have I been in the presence of such an almost unbelievably dominant personality. After this brief encounter, there was no doubt in my mind that he had his cabinet, caucus and party under his absolute control.”20

The struggle against the English

The political struggle of the 1950s had two facets: one was the overt competition for power between the National Party and the United Party (UP); the other was the veiled competition for status between the Afrikaans- and English-­speaking white communities. By 1955 English South Africans had started realising that the UP would in all likehood never regain political power. Like the Afrikaners after their loss of power in 1994, they were resentful of their diminished status and political marginalisation.

The political activist and writer Patrick Duncan expressed their sense of disgruntlement as follows: “English South Africans are today in the power of their adversaries … They are beginning to know what the great majority of South Africans have always known – what it is to be second-class citizens in the land of one’s birth.”21

After 1948, it was English commentators who “interpreted” the Afrikaners to foreign journalists and diplomats and, through them, to the entire world. Some commentators and historians declared that the Afrikaners were simply and solely driven by apartheid and other racial obsessions.

English South Africans’ opposition to apartheid and their dissatisfaction about the fact that the Afrikaners were in power were often indistinguishable. David Yudelman, an esteemed historian, criticised English-speaking opinion-makers for disseminating a distorted picture of Afrikaners to the world. South African anglophones, he wrote, were not significantly more liberal than the Afrikaners on race questions, yet they tended to present the Afrikaner as “the villain, the fanatic, who created or at least perfected institutionalised racial discrimination”. Whites of British extraction, on the other hand, supposedly accepted segregation and apartheid only passively.

The anglophones, Yudelman added, were quite prepared to “use apartheid as a pretext for indirectly expressing their culturally chauvinistic distaste for the Afrikaners while continuing to enjoy the benefits of white supremacy”.22

The person who had the greatest political influence on me up to the mid-1960s was Piet Cillié, who became editor of Die Burger in 1954. Long before Yudelman, he expressed a similar view. He was a razor-sharp political commentator and, along with NP van Wyk Louw, the best political essayist in Afrikaans. Cillié headed a brilliant team that included three outstanding journalists: Schalk Pienaar, JJJ Scholtz and Rykie van Reenen.

From my high-school days I read the daily editorial in Die Burger as well as the political column under the pseudonym “Dawie” that appeared on Wed­nes­days and Saturdays. The collection of articles from this column, Dawie, 1946 tot 1964 (Tafelberg, 1966), provides a better perspective on the surging Afrikaner nationalism of the 1950s than any other book. This was before the dogma of apartheid began to stifle Afrikaners’ cultural nationalism.

Cillié often drew attention to the far-reaching way in which the “first-past-the-post” electoral system influenced politics and racial policy in particular. In the first place, the system made it possible for a party that had won a minority of votes to form a government. This was indeed what happened in South Africa between 1948 and 1958. Secondly, in countries that used this electoral system, there was a strong tendency that power ended up in the hands of the biggest ethnic group among the electorate and that the leaders tightened their grip on the group through a form of ethnic mobilisation that radicalised the political system. Between 1948 and 1994, Afrikaners at all times constituted more than 50% of the voters.

There was also a third trend associated with the system. Vulnerable racial or ethnic groups that held the balance of power between two big parties were often shut out. An example of this is what happened in the southern states of the United States in the 1890s when the Democratic Party spearheaded the large-scale disenfranchisement of black people. During the 1960s, it would take all of President Lyndon Johnson’s legendary ingenuity to get black people back on the voters’ roll. He did this even though he knew his party would pay a high price in the South for a generation or two.

In the general elections of 1948 and 1953 the English voters voted solidly against the NP, while the UP captured about 20% of the Afrikaner votes. In the 1948 election there were only 130 000 more potential Afrikaner votes than potential English votes. Up to the mid-1950s, NP fears that the UP could win an election with the help of coloured votes were not unrealistic. These fears are sometimes dismissed with the statement that there were only eight constituencies in which coloured votes could tip the scales. This argument misses the point that in 1948 the NP had an effective majority of only five seats.

Piet Cillié was pre-eminently the person who took up the cudgels against the view that the English-speaking community was supposedly above racial discrimination and racism. During election campaigns he seldom defended apartheid on its own terms, but described the English-Afrikaner contest and the contest between white and non-white as struggles that were inextricably intertwined. He rejected the liberals’ insistence that they had no ulterior motives in promoting equal rights for all. To Afrikaner nationalists, he wrote, the English liberals had always seemed to be more English than liberal, and more interested in power for the white English speakers than in power for black or coloured people.

A recent biography by Jaap Steyn clarified for me why I felt such an affinity with Cillié. In 1952 Cillié wrote to the Rev. Ben Marais, whose aforementioned book Die kleur-krisis en die Weste had just been published: “I agree wholeheartedly with you that the efforts to find Scriptural supports for apartheid, in the naive form that this quest mostly assumes, are doomed to failure … I know only one old man who believes that coloured people are descendants of Ham and eternally cursed, and no coherent pseudoscientific myths about race are being propagated deliberately in South Africa.”

He expressed his doubts as to whether the statistics Marais had quoted to prove that, inherently, races and ethnic groups differed very little from each other, were of any practical value for the problem in South Africa – how would it help Jews and Arabs in Palestine, for instance, to know that there were more similarities than differences between people?23

According to Cillié, colour was only salient in South African politics to the extent that it represented the boundary between “peoples” or “nations”. He referred to the Afrikaners’ reaction to the superior number of black people as “national instincts”. He criticised Ben Marais for not addressing the issue of “political power that lies at the root of race relations”. For Cillié, apartheid had to ensure that the Afrikaners and the broader white community retained power over themselves while they were building the state and the economy in the ultimate interest of all.

Cillié had an element in him of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose thinking had interested me from an early age. The Florentine is often erroneously described as a thinker who was prepared to argue that power be gained through the most immoral methods. Machiavelli did believe that the state’s task was not in the first place to be fair to all, but to ensure its citizens’ safety. But that was not an end in itself. The ultimate goal was a strong, effective state from which all its citizens benefited. I believe that this is also what Cillié strove for.24

Arnold Toynbee’s warning

An important element in Afrikaner nationalists’ thinking was the notion that the NP government would only succeed in building an effective state and a well-ordered society on the basis of a united Afrikaner nation. Growing Afrikaner unity was a new phenomenon. Oral tradition has it that in the 1938 election in the seat of Stellenbosch, university lecturers were split right down the middle.

The Afrikaner unity that developed in the 1950s was based on the possession of state power and the ideal of a republic. Many historians have gone looking in the Afrikaners’ past for a unity that never existed. A question we often discussed as students was whether Afrikaner unity was necessarily a good thing, for the survival of the Afrikaners as well. Would an Afrikaner unity that attempted to incorporate all factions not lead to a political paralysis that could stymie urgently needed reforms?

My interest was piqued by an essay by Arnold Toynbee, a British historian who had studied the rise and decline of two dozen civilisations since the earliest times. Entitled “History’s warning to Africa”, it appeared in 1959 in the opinion magazine Optima which the Anglo American Corporation distributed to its shareholders, of whom my father was one.

I tore the essay from the magazine and kept it in a file in which I preserved the most stimulating articles I came across. By that time Toynbee was no longer the international star he had once been when he graced the cover of Time magazine in 1949, but in this essay he anticipated the Afrikaners’ failure to adapt timeously to South Africa’s political challenge.

In his essay, Toynbee considered the different roads open to dominant min­orities in empires. He first looked at the Spanish colonies in Latin America. The Spanish also exploited the native peoples, but here the division between first-class and second-class citizens did not follow racial lines and was therefore not impassable. The barriers to upward mobility were predominantly based on class, not race, and the colonial rulers allowed the elite from among the oppressed into the ranks of the dominant group. The result was continued Spanish predominance, even after their colonies became independent. The same applied to people of European (or mainly European) descent in the former Portuguese colony of Brazil, where they constituted just more than half of the population. After independence, they continued to call the tune at almost all levels of society.

The colonies the Dutch and the British founded in Africa provided a stark contrast. Upward mobility for coloured or black people was difficult, and intermarriage with white people was virtually ruled out. Toynbee noted that there was “no easy way of entry into the … dominant caste for an able and adaptable Bantu [sic]”, and continued: “The Graeco-Roman precedent shows that, even after a thousand years, the roots of domination may still be as shallow as they were in the first generation.”25

He stressed the aspect of demography. If the dominant minority was ahead in technology and culture, as was the case in South Africa, the struggle would be more drawn out and morally more complex than in a clear-cut military struggle. But, he emphasised, “the dénouement may be more tragic”.

Toynbee warned that it would be fatal for a dominant minority to hold on to its supremacy by sheer force against a rising tide of revolt. “Even if its belief in its own cultural superiority was justified, numbers would tell in the long run, considering that culture is contagious, and that an ascendancy based on cultural superiority is therefore a wasting asset.” He expressed some sympathy for the dilemma of minorities: “Voluntary abdication in favour of a majority whom one feels to be one’s inferior is a very hard alternative for human pride to accept.”26 As a prophet of what would happen in South Africa thirty years later when the Afrikaners relinquished power without having been defeated, Toynbee is without equal.

Afrikaner warnings

GD Scholtz, editor of the newspaper Die Transvaler, came to a similar conclusion in his book Het die Afrikaanse volk ’n toekoms? (Does the Afrikaner nation have a future?) I bought this book in my fourth year and, judging by all the underlined sentences, read it attentively. If the white people failed to impose what Scholtz called “total segregation” in good time, he warned, black people’s numerical superiority and the knowledge that they could revolt successfully would be decisive. Unfortunately, the book failed to explain what form “total segregation” should take.

By the end of the 1950s it was already evident that great tension existed in Afrikaner ranks between those who wished to cling to white power and those who were in favour of making radical adjustments in good time in order to avoid the fate Toynbee predicted. Among the Stellenbosch students of my time, a split between the ideologues and the pragmatists started to manifest itself.

For the ideologues, apartheid was an end in itself and racial segregation the answer to virtually any form of social interaction. Theological students, or tokke­lokke as they were popularly known, abounded in this camp. Manie van der Spuy, a contemporary of mine who studied psychology, has rightly observed recently that there were two gospels of salvation in our time at Stellenbosch: “Christianity as personal salvation”, and “apartheid as the Afrikaner gospel of salvation”. In both cases, one only had to believe and was not judged by one’s deeds but by one’s faith. Those who deviated in any way from the prescribed dogma ran the risk of being stigmatised as “heretics”.

I sided with the pragmatists, who came from “Nat” as well as “Sap” homes. We believed that especially between white and coloured there should be no sharp division, and that rigid apartheid had to change rapidly to a system where leaders of the various communities exchanged views and cooperated on projects. Universities were the very places where people should make contact across the colour line. The Extension of University Education Act of 1959, which provided for racially separate tertiary education, destroyed the possibility that future leaders could get to know each other and hone their views in debates. In my residence there was considerable sympathy for Bertie van der Merwe and a fellow Simonsberger on the SRC, who were forced to resign in 1959 because they opposed the Act.

Stellenbosch had a tradition of tolerating dissidents. In his student days my father was a supporter of Prof. Johannes du Plessis, a professor at the Theological Seminary, who had played a leading role in the 1920s in bringing leaders from white and black churches together and in mitigating segregation. He was expelled from his post for doctrinal reasons. My father used to refer jokingly to Du Plessis’s opponents by their nickname “oupajane”. (One of the leaders had written a book with the title Op die ou paaie (On the old roads).)

In my time, the only reminder of this church struggle was a statue of Du Plessis that had been erected by his admirers. Owing to the pink hue of the marble, the statue was commonly known as Pink Piet. It was frequently vandalised in late-night pranks by intoxicated students who used to daub it with various colours, especially pink. Our lecturers did not think of informing us of the ground-breaking role of Du Plessis in the fields of theology and race relations.

Another prominent dissident was Bennie Keet, also a professor of theology. In my third year I bought and read his book Suid-Afrika waarheen? ’n Bydrae tot die bespreking van die rasseprobleem (Whither South Africa? A contribution to the debate on the racial question) (Stellenbosch: Universiteitsuitgewers, 1956). He was unequivocal in his rejection of any biblical justification of apartheid. In his view, increased segregation was “a flight from reality”. The challenge for every Christian was: What does Scripture say?

The following year I purchased and read Henry Fagan’s booklet Ons verantwoordelikheid (Our responsibility) (1959), which shaped my thinking to a signifi­cant extent. A graduate of Stellenbosch, Judge Fagan was a former journalist of Die Burger and a former UP cabinet minister. As chair of a commission that had investigated the issue of black urbanisation in 1947 and concluded that it was irreversible, he had a much greater understanding than almost anyone else of the political implications of this process.

I could see that Fagan’s argument was very similar to Toynbee’s: as the economy became more sophisticated, the need for communication between the groups would become more and more urgent. Fagan warned that whites, as the dominant group, had far more to lose than blacks from a lack of contact between their respective groups. The homelands offered only a limited solution, as they could accommodate only a small proportion of black people.

In 1956 a commission chaired by Prof. FR Tomlinson recommended that the state should spend £104 million (about R45 billion today) over the next ten years to develop the homelands. As Minister of Native Affairs, Dr Verwoerd rejected some of the key recommendations and budgeted for a much smaller amount. He also torpedoed a recommendation that white private capital be allowed to facilitate industrial development in these territories. This gave rise to the question that would haunt me later: Was the government really serious about its policy of viable homelands?

Verwoerd’s clever plans

And then, in 1958, Verwoerd became prime minister. Within the first year or two he transformed apartheid from unvarnished white supremacy into a coherent ideology of a “commonwealth” that would ultimately consist of a white state or two and a number of prosperous black states. NP followers started believing in this model with growing conviction.

Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, who arrived at Stellenbosch in 1960 to study theo­logy, would later describe “the excitement, even the thrill” of academics and students in discussing this ideology. The policy, Slabbert added, had “a coherence and systematic quality which cannot be dismissed as racism pure and simple”. It “made logical sense and addressed some very prickly issues”.27 The homelands were still just an abstraction at the time, and, like many of my contemporaries, I initially saw the policy as one that, under a dynamic leader, could open up new possibilities.

Verwoerd’s policy with regard to coloured people was a huge disappointment. In 1960 he sharply rejected Piet Cillié’s call in Die Burger that coloured MPs be permitted to represent the coloured community in Parliament. Cillié also wrote approvingly of the resolutions of church leaders at the Cottesloe conference which declared that certain aspects of apartheid were incompatible with the demands of the Gospel. Verwoerd reacted critically, however, and at his urging the synods of the various Reformed Churches quickly condemned the Cottesloe resolutions. Cillié later told me: “When Verwoerd cracked the whip, you just saw coat-tails flapping as the ministers took to their heels and disappeared round the corner.”

My sympathy lay with Cillié, but the majority of the students at Stellenbosch regarded Verwoerd as an infallible political giant. Verwoerd not only impressed NP supporters. Allister Sparks once told me how he had been riveted by Verwoerd when, as a young reporter at the Rand Daily Mail, he sat listening to him explaining his policy in a hotel room.

In 1964 CW de Kiewiet, the liberal historian whom I would later come to admire above all, wrote in the influential American journal Foreign Affairs that Verwoerd was confronting the country’s grave problems with “boldness, shrewdness and even imagination”, and that it was by no means absurd to suggest a comparison between him and Charles de Gaulle, “the stern, headstrong but deeply imaginative leader of France”. In August 1966 Time magazine featured an article that was highly critical of apartheid yet described Verwoerd as “one of the ablest white leaders Africa has ever produced”.28

Job hunting

My studies as a full-time student progressed reasonably successfully. In 1958 I obtained a BA degree with history and Afrikaans as majors. At the end of 1960 I was awarded the honours degree in history with distinction, and the following year I embarked on my master’s thesis. I was very conscious of my limitations, however, which included a poor mastery of English. Having remained a “Kakamasian” through all my years of study, I decided that only drastic measures could resolve the problem. When I heard that Graeme College, an English-medium state school in Grahamstown, was looking for a social studies teacher, I notified the principal of my availability.

In 1962 I spent a productive year in the major stronghold of the British settlers. My spoken English improved with the help of my colleagues, and that of a music teacher in particular. Socialising with colleagues and with teammates in the Albany rugby team helped me gain a much better understanding of the English community.

On completion of my MA thesis in mid-1963, I accepted a position as cadet in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Pretoria. At the time, apartheid was not yet as discredited as it would be a few years later. De Kiewiet’s article in Foreign Affairs offered the hope that at least in some countries there could be a meaningful debate on South Africa. It was in any case not expected of diplomats to defend apartheid in all its facets but rather the standpoint that peaceful change in the country was possible.

On 1 July 1964 I started my employment at Foreign Affairs at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. I had the good fortune to work directly under Donald Sole, with whom I had had my job interview in Cape Town. He was one of the most respected persons in the department.

Eric Louw was still the responsible minister till the end of 1963, and GP Jooste the secretary of the department. Pik Botha, however, roamed the corridors with a furrowed brow in a way that could suggest to the uninformed that all of South Africa’s diplomatic burdens rested on his shoulders, which in due course would indeed be the case. At that stage he was chief law adviser charged with the coordination of South Africa’s defence at the International Court of Justice against the claim that the country had violated its mandate over South West Africa (now Namibia).

After just over a year in the Department of Foreign Affairs, I abandoned the idea of a career in the diplomatic service and became a history lecturer at the University of South Africa (Unisa). There were certainly people such as Neil van Heerden, a colleague in the department, who would continue to serve the country and the cause of reform with great distinction, but my heart was not in a career of that nature.

Instead of trying to influence international opinion-makers, I wanted to lecture and to participate in the debate in Afrikaner ranks about apartheid and an alternative form of survival. I was itching to delve much deeper into issues than I had been able to do in the short pieces I wrote as part of my responsibilities as a cadet. I also resolved to embark on a doctorate in history as soon as possible.

The Pretoria of the mid-1960s was an ideal city for young graduates, who lived in large numbers in Arcadia and Sunnyside and worked for the state, for parastatals or for professional firms. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the rugby world and played for a season for the Pretoria Rugby Club’s first team in the formidable Carlton league.

In Pretoria I met Annette van Coller. She would qualify as an architect at the University of the Free State shortly after our marriage, and had started working at an architectural firm in Pretoria in 1963. Our family backgrounds were very similar: our paternal grandfathers had both fought in the Anglo-­Boer War, our parents were all teachers at Afrikaans schools, and she and I both identified with the Afrikaner volksbeweging. For me, she was the ideal partner from the outset. Today, fifty years later, she is still my greatest source of inspiration, strength and encouragement.

We were married on 3 April 1965 in the Pretoria East Dutch Reformed church, which is adjacent to the Loftus Versfeld Stadium. The date coincided with the start of the rugby season. I knew that if I failed to take the field for the Pretoria Club team at Loftus at 15h00 on that day, I would lose my place in the first team. The marriage service was due to start at 17h30, and I contemplated combining a rugby match and a marriage ceremony in one afternoon. My mother considered it highly irresponsible, and I had to drop the plan. This was also the end of my rugby career, which would in any case not have reached great heights.

In 1966 I took a year’s leave from Unisa to pursue postgraduate studies in history in the Netherlands. Annette and I spent an unforgettable year in Amsterdam. At the University of Amsterdam I completed a course that focused on Hitler’s assumption of power, but the other courses dealt with themes such as “The Medieval Diary”, which held no appeal for me. There was a lively group of South African students in Amsterdam who met once a month for a sociable “koffietafel”.

One day, out of the blue, I received a letter from Prof. Dirk Kotzé, professor in general history at the University of Stellenbosch, asking me to apply for a vacant post in the department. My application was successful, and I started at the beginning of the 1967 academic year. I was back at the “university with attitude” and in the town of Stellenbosch. Francine, our elder daughter, was born in that year, and Adrienne about three years later. They have continued to give us great joy in our lives.

In the general election of 1970 Annette and I decided to support the Progressive Party with its policy of a qualified franchise. Though my parents were dyed-in-the-wool Nationalists, I was not worried that our decision would result in a family squabble. Nonetheless, I decided to inform my parents of our decision by way of an ambiguous letter that read more or less like this:

For the sake of the children we have decided that our ways should part, and that we should sever a relationship that was once beautiful and precious, regardless of how hard it may be. We know that you will be shocked, but it is better that we part ways now instead of later.

I elaborated further in the same vein, and wrote right at the end: “What we would actually like to tell you is that we have decided to vote Progressive.” My mother told my father: “They’re not getting divorced, they’re going to vote Prog,” and then added in relief: “The bloomin’ fools.”