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Historians who focus on South African history do not normally write autobiographies. Even CW de Kiewiet, the only South African historian who to my mind has come close to the elusive category of genius, never wrote about his own life. WM Macmillan, who together with De Kiewiet carried the liberal flag in the 1930s and 1940s, did write about his South African years, but he was neither born in this country nor died here. Phyllis Lewsen’s autobiography, Reverberations: A Memoir, appeared in 1996. Arthur Keppel-Jones’s A Patriot in Search of a Country was published posthumously in 2003. The only autobiography by an Afrikaans-­speaking historian is AJ van Wyk’s The Birth of a New Afrikaner (1991).

The two pillars of apartheid were theology and history. The theologian Jaap Durand recounts in his memoir Protesstem: Oomblikke van herinnering (2016) (Voice of protest: moments of memory) how he had made it clear in his doctoral dissertation that a racially divided church could not stand the test of the Christian gospel. This standpoint would radically influence his entire life and career.

History played an equally important role. The key myths were those of an “unoccupied land” in 1652 (except for small numbers of “Bushmen” and “Hottentots”), and of the “Bantu aggression and rapacity” which white farmers suffered from since the first contact in the 1770s, supposedly creating the need for boundary lines.

As a doctoral student I did extensive work on the frontier conflicts. I came to the conclusion that the conflict was about scarce resources, with arbitrary power rather than generally accepted rules being decisive. White farmers’ first priority was not partition, but black labour.

From early on the white authorities proceeded under the delusion that they could enter into a treaty with a chief or a paramount chief that bound the whole “tribe”. This was also the basic fallacy of the Bantustan policy of the second half of the twentieth century.

The main point on which I differed with other historians and social scientists was that of the root causes of social conflict. For me, it was not in the first place about the individual and his or her interests – as the liberals believe – or about class conflict – as the radicals would have it – but rather about the intrinsic competition between what can be called nations because they are based on different cultures.

In South Africa, up to about 1990, it was conflict between black nations that identified with Africa and a collection of ethnic minorities that had Europe rather than Africa as their reference point. In the 2016 election for the first time a strategically important segment in the electorate emerged that put a high premium on corruption-free and efficient government, not on “group identity”.

While I had no illusions about the fact that the NP regime would do everything in their power to retain sole control for as long as possible, I did disagree with some of my English-speaking colleagues who were of the view that the regime would also do everything possible to oppress black people. I believe, for example, that Hendrik Verwoerd’s policy of Bantu education was a rational attempt to provide mass education to a rapidly growing indigenous population within a political framework in which there was no enthusiasm from either Afrikaans- or English-speaking white voters for government expenditure on black education.

What has made my background somewhat different from that of most academics is that I spent the first half of my career at an Afrikaans university (Stellenbosch) and the second half on an English campus (University of Cape Town). I wrote books, academic articles and newspaper columns in both Afrikaans and English.

As a historian, I was fortunate in that I wrote about several “revolutions” and even experienced some at first hand. The first “revolution” was the first British occupation of the Cape (1795-1803), the subject of my first book. My study of this period enabled me to see how virtually the entire social order underwent a radical change, with paternalism, mercantilism and inequality supplanted by liberal principles, a market economy, and equality before the law. Not unlike today, leadership positions were occupied by the “Anglo men” who sought to replace Dutch-Afrikaans culture with English culture.

The second “revolution” I experienced as a child and a student: the rise of the Afrikaner nationalist movement. In 1938, the year of my birth, this movement reached one of its climaxes with the symbolic oxwagon trek in commemoration of the centenary of the Great Trek, which sparked mass Afrikaner enthusiasm. It was followed by a cultural blossoming over the next 20 to 25 years of Afrikaans as a literary and scientific language, and ultimately a republic outside the Commonwealth. Many Afrikaners expressed jubilation at the severing of this last link with Britain with a cry of “free at last”.

The third “revolution” was apartheid, which still enjoyed a degree of respectability in my student years. Van Zyl Slabbert, my contemporary at Stellenbosch in the 1960s, would later describe “the excitement, even the thrill” experienced by academics and students in discussing this ideology. He added that apartheid 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”.1

And then there was the fourth “revolution” with the ANC at its forefront, an increasingly intense battle against the apartheid state. In the mid-1960s, as a young cadet in the diplomatic services, it became abundantly clear to me that there was hardly any chance of apartheid winning support in the West. By the early 70s apartheid was already widely discredited outside of white, especially Afrikaner circles. For the next twenty years, the debate centred on how South Africa could become a more inclusive society without sacrificing steady economic growth and political stability.

It became ever clearer to me that the NP leadership regarded retaining their grip on power and salvaging party unity as their main priorities. I became increasingly critical in my newspaper columns, swiftly drawing the ire of NP-aligned academics who, against the evidence, kept clinging to the belief that they were influential within government circles.

By the late 1980s, with the struggle in South Africa at its most intense, I realised that newspaper columns and even books on politics and history have a short shelf life. I wanted to write a book which, in terms of its subject matter as well as accessibility to a general readership, might have a more lasting impact. There was only one big topic that interested me: the full story of the Afrikaner people from its beginnings in the 1650s to the present. I started working on the English version of The Afrikaners: Biography of a People in 1992 and completed the book ten years later, in 2002. My Afrikaans adaptation was published in 2004.

My next book, Nog altyd hier gewees (2007) (Always been here), dealt with the history of a coloured community that had been forcibly removed from the town centre of Stellenbosch. The research for this study gave me a perspective on my own people that was considerably less favourable than the one in The Afrikaners. In The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power (2012) I attempted to understand the five Afrikaners who, politically speaking, dominated our lives between 1958 and 1994: Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster, PW Botha, Van Zyl Slabbert and FW de Klerk. I had conducted interviews with all of them except PW Botha. In the late 1980s he had reportedly warned members of the NP caucus against me and a co-author of mine, Lawrence Schlemmer, as snakes in the grass.

There was something special about the extraordinary times I lived through and that I researched and wrote about. In South Africa, unlike many other countries, history is central to our contemporary politics. The struggle around apartheid in the 1980s and 1990s was in many ways a propaganda struggle in which opposing interpretations of South African history played a crucial role. The convergence of my professional interests as a historian, my personal experience of dramatic social change, and my evolving understanding of South Africa have inspired me to write this book.

Hermann Giliomee

Stellenbosch

Winter 2016