Читать книгу Hermann Giliomee: Historian - Hermann Giliomee - Страница 7

It was religious persecution that forced the Guillaumé family to flee France. Between 1670 and 1700 around 300 000 Huguenots bade their motherland farewell after long-standing discrimination and deadly attacks. The refugees settled in the Netherlands, the German states, England, Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia, the American colonies and other predominantly Protestant countries. In 1688 some 200 Huguenots arrived at the Cape of the Good Hope from the Netherlands.

The flight of the Huguenots was one of the largest waves of migration Europe had seen up to that time. For France, it resulted in a massive loss of human capital. “La grande catastrophe” was President Charles de Gaulle’s reaction when the South African ambassador in Paris told him about his own Huguenot forefather’s flight.

The progenitor of the Guillaumé family in South Africa was François Guillaumé – in the primary sources the surname is also spelled Guilliaume and Guilliaumeth. He was born in 1680 in either Aimargues or the neighbouring village of Saint-Laurent-d’Aigouze, southwest of the city of Nîmes. The villages were part of Languedoc, a staunchly Protestant region between Nîmes and Montpellier, which was home to a flourishing silk industry.

François Guillaumé, who had left Languedoc as a child, married Claudine Cloy. By 1700 the couple were living in Berlin, where François most probably made silk clothing for a living. The Huguenot community, with their own church and congregation, numbered about 50 000 and constituted a quarter of the city’s population. The Guillaumé couple’s son Mathieu (later called Matthias) was born in 1711. Three other children were also born in Berlin.

In 1726 Guillaumé and his family travelled from Berlin to Amsterdam, and sailed from Texel to the Cape of Good Hope a few months later. François had two contracts in his pocket. One was a mandate that authorised him to negotiate on behalf of Jacob Labat, a Huguenot in London with a claim to the estate of a brother who had died at the Cape shortly before. It was likely, therefore, that Guillaumé was literate.2

The second contract was one he had entered into with the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) to start a silk industry at the Cape. He undertook to establish silkworm breeding and silk spinning as a business. The venture formed part of the VOC’s efforts to set up an export industry that would make the Cape financially self-supporting. There had been unsuccessful attempts under two previous governors, Willem Adriaan van der Stel and Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, to establish a silk industry.

From silkworms to St Helena

In October 1726 Guillaumé and his family arrived in Table Bay aboard the Berbices. He had brought along some silkworms, but it appears that he might have spoken too highly of his own abilities. OF Mentzel, author of one of the best descriptions of the Cape in the first half of the eighteenth century, later wrote with a hint of schadenfreude that the so-called “expert” was not as competent as he had claimed to be.

Guillaumé soon discovered that he faced huge challenges. For one, his factory was situated at the top end of the Heerengracht in the small seaport town, while the mulberry trees were in Rondebosch. Slaves had to undertake daily trips to pick leaves for the silkworms. But there was a much graver problem: the worms Guillaumé had brought from Europe did not adapt well to the Cape climate.

The Political Council, the body that governed the Cape, was undeterred by these hurdles. The Council erected a three-storey building at the top end of Heerengracht and gave it the grand name of De Oude Spinnerij (the old spinning factory). The building was later demolished, but the name Spin Street has lived on as a reminder of the enterprise.

Though the outlook had been bleak from the outset, the Political Council was determined to persevere. In December 1727, just more than a year after his arrival, Guillaumé sent a gloomy report to the government. In the entire preceding year he had managed to harvest only six pounds of silk. Its value was far less than that of his salary of 20 florins per month plus living costs. Every year the enterprise’s loss increased.

Towards the end of 1729, the members of the Political Council visited Guillaumé’s spinning factory and expressed their disappointment at the poor progress. What he told them worsened their mood. He predicted poor results for the coming years as well, as few of the silkworm eggs had hatched.

In 1732 Guillaumé threw in the towel, overwhelmed by the problems with labour, worms and the mulberry trees. He saw no hope of a profit, and asked for permission to transfer the business to his son Matthias. In 1735 he informed the government of his intention to remain at the Cape as a free burgher. In that year, the name François Guillaumé appeared on the list of burghers of the district of Stellenbosch for the first time.

Matthias, too, decided that the silk industry was a blind alley, and became a blacksmith. Ten years later he abandoned this occupation as well, and in 1743 he started farming on the farm Vlottenburg (also called Vredenburg). He stayed there until 1756, when he sold the farm. In the last year he supplied the following information about his property for the Opgaafrol (the inventory of farming activities): 5 slaves, 13 horses, 10 head of cattle and 200 sheep. He also grew grain on a small scale.

A few years later Matthias moved to the farm Afdak which he had bought near present-day Onrus. His descendants would become pioneers of the Overberg, and specifically of the areas around Bredasdorp and Napier.3 In the last years of the VOC’s rule, the name Guillaumé was simplified to Giliomee in the Company’s Opgaafrol.

My grandfather, Johannes Human Giliomee, born in 1867, was the son of an impoverished bywoner (tenant farmer) who worked on various farms in the Bredasdorp district. He married his cousin, Elizabeth Catharina Giliomee, and around 1890 the couple moved to the Republic of the Orange Free State. They settled in the town of Villiers on the southern bank of the Vaal River. Family tradition has it that they were as poor as church mice when they arrived in Villiers. There was a ray of light, though: my grandmother came from an affluent family in the Bredasdorp district.

With financial help from his in-laws, my grandfather soon found his feet. Villiers was on the main road to the Johannesburg goldfields, and my grandfather obtained the contract for the pontoon over the Vaal River. Later he was also awarded the contract for the mail coach between Villiers and Johannesburg.

When the war between Britain and the Boer Republics broke out in 1899, he joined the Free State forces and became a member of the Wilge River field cornetcy. British forces captured him and his brother Jurie at Groenplaats on 21 October 1900. They were sent as prisoners of war to the Deadwood Camp on the island of St Helena. Here he made a beautiful little wooden chest, which he brought back to Villiers.

My grandmother was determined that British troops would not capture her and her two children, both younger than ten, and send them to a concentration camp. They wandered around in the veld and lay low whenever a Britsh patrol was in the vicinity. The fact that she had hidden a sum of £60 in her belt assisted her greatly in the battle for survival.4

It has been estimated that by the end of the war, there were 2 000 Boer women and children in the Free State and 10 000 in the Transvaal who had been surviving in the open veld to escape internment in the concentration camps.

After the conclusion of peace, my grandfather was detained on St Helena for a further three months. On 19 August 1902, when he was about to depart, he wrote a simple yet moving letter to my grandmother that shows the extent to which the Dutch spoken in South Africa had already evolved into Afrikaans.

In the aftermath of the war, my grandparents managed to get back on their feet financially. Twelve years after the Peace of Vereeniging my grandfather took part in the Rebellion of 1914-15 along with many other farmers from the northern Free State, and was captured after a skirmish at Mushroom Valley. After the government had suppressed the uprising, the rebels were faced with huge claims for damages. In the northern Free State alone, the claims amounted to more than £200 000 (about R240 million today). The Helpmekaar Vereniging (Mutual Aid Association), which had branches countrywide, was set up to raise funds for the purpose of assisting the rebels to pay their debt. The project was extremely successful, and by the end of 1917 all claims for damages had been settled from the fund.

The National Party, which had been founded by General JBM Hertzog in 1914, benefited greatly from this early form of nationalist mobilisation. Without the Helpmekaar movement, my grandfather and the other rebels would probably have been ruined financially. He and my grandmother were staunch Hertzog supporters for the rest of their lives. Their farming operations on their farms Wolwepoort and Prospect in the Villiers district prospered. They were able to send their eldest as well as their third-eldest son (my father) to Stellenbosch to further their education.

A “Blommebuhr” from the Bokveld

I was named after my maternal grandfather, Hermann Henry Buhr (1876–1966), the son of Johann Jacob Buhr and Catharina Gesa Riege. His parental home in Germany had been on a smallholding in the district of Ochsenwerder just outside Hamburg. Here, several generations of Buhrs had grown vegetables for the Hamburg market and transported their produce to the city along the Elbe River.

Johann Buhr was an affluent banker and a member of the Senate which governed the city-state of Hamburg. According to family tradition, he was a “hard, unreasonable and unaffectionate man who was abnormally obsessed with the notion that one should not spend a single moment doing nothing”.

Although Hermann had rebelled against his father in his youth, in his mature years he himself had little patience with children or grandchildren who sat around idly. He once asked a son-in-law who used to spend a long time on his morning devotions whether he could not pray under a fig tree instead and chase away the mousebirds at the same time.

After a few years at school, my grandfather ran away from home. His father discovered later that he had been working in a shoe shop in Berlin. He disappeared for a second time, intent on starting a new life in German South West Africa. According to research by my second cousin Riëtte Ruthven, his name does not appear on the passenger lists of any of the few ships that sailed to Africa in those days. The possibility that he was a stowaway cannot be discounted.

In 1895 my grandfather, aged nineteen, arrived in Table Bay. The ship’s captain refused to let him disembark, possibly because he lacked the necessary travel documents or financial means. Fortunately, the merchant William Spilhaus arrived and gave him an advance. The first that Hermann Buhr’s family heard of his being in South Africa was when his sister Martha received a letter from him from Cape Town.5

He worked for a few months for Spilhaus to repay his debt. While his plan was still to seek his fortune in German South West Africa, he could not afford the trip to that territory. He applied successfully for the position of manager of the store on the farm Grasberg, fifteen kilometres outside the town of Nieuwoudtville on the Bokveld Plateau. This was how my German grandfather ended up on the farm where he would spend the rest of his life.

Grasberg belonged to Elias Albertus Nel, a well-off farmer who owned 40 000 morgen. He and his wife had two daughters, and at first they were dead set against the relationship that developed between their elder daughter, Hester Christina, and the young German. But my grandfather was resolute and enterprising.

When my grandmother left Grasberg in 1898 for a three-week visit to an unknown destination, he wrote her a poem that has been preserved. The fact that he had it printed shows that his financial affairs had greatly improved. The poem gives the impression of a witty and literate suitor.

As poetry, it did not have much merit, but perhaps it cut the knot. Hermann Buhr’s circumstances improved dramatically after Hester and her parents consented to the marriage. Their wedding took place in 1899. Hermann’s brother Henri Buhr arrived from Germany for the occasion and brought along Hermann’s inheritance from his father.

Farmers on the plateau of the Bokveld Mountains, with its erratic rainfall, poor soil and long distances from the market, struggled to make headway. My grandfather’s inheritance enabled him to buy the store on Grasberg. A few years later he acquired a second store, on the farm Brandkop, on the road between Nieuwoudtville and Loeriesfontein.

My grandfather’s stores attracted a considerable clientele from the surrounding farms. They would provide him and his family with a good income for the rest of his life. His brother Henri settled in South Africa in 1903, and bought a store in Loeriesfontein.

Despite not having completed his school career, my grandfather was an intelligent and well-read man. He later subscribed to both Die Burger and a Cape Town-based English newspaper, and to two influential American magazines, the Saturday Evening Post and Life. My cousin Constand Wahl, who had many conversations with him, wrote: “Oupa Buhr’s contribution to the touch of difference that distinguished the Buhr family from the run-of-the-mill Northern Bokveld families was enormous … His policy was to give his children a good education, regardless of the cost. That was certainly a novelty for the Northern Bokveld.”

My grandfather did not immediately become a South African citizen, which might have been cause enough to render him liable to internment during the First World War. Perhaps the real reason for his internment was the bitter animosity between him and his brother-in-law, who also lived on Graskop, and who had in all likelihood informed on him to the authorities. The fact that he had acquired South African citizenship as far back as 1909 did not protect him.

During the Second World War, the entire family was pro-German. Neighbours congregated at Grasberg to listen to the broadcasts of Zeesen, the pro-­German short-wave radio station. One of my first political memories is of my disappointment at reading in the paper in 1945 that Germany had surrendered. I cannot recall, however, that the Nazi ideology or even Adolf Hitler was ever discussed. When the horrors of the Holocaust became known later, it was a great shock to the family.

My grandfather identified strongly with the Afrikaner community and was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church. Every Sunday he and my grandmother would drive to Nieuwoudtville to attend the service. He was known for speaking his mind, and once took this habit to the extreme. Just as the service was about to start, he rose from his seat and walked up to the pulpit to inform the dominee that he disapproved of the church council’s decision to build a new parsonage.

My grandfather retained a quality of “otherness” throughout his life. Johan Steyn, a frequent visitor to Grasberg in his childhood days, described him as follows: “He was a refined, cultured person, aloof from the then less cultured farmers of his district – in my view, the brains of Johann [his son] and his brother and sisters came from that side.”

My grandmother, Hester, was renowned for her tact, empathy and talent for reconciling people with each other. But her almost endless patience with my grandfather had its limits. On one occasion she lashed out at him: “Now I can see why you’re at odds with everyone.” To which my grandfather’s retorted: “Well, at least the two of us have got on for more than fifty years.”

The couple had nine children. The eldest, Johann, was born in 1900 and my mother Rina, the third child, in 1903. Elias, the only other son, obtained a degree in agriculture and subsequently took over the farming operations on Brandkop and Grasberg.

Nowadays the tourism industry markets the Bokveld Plateau, with Nieuwoudtville as the commercial hub, as the “bulb capital of the world”. My grandfather was the first person to see the potential of bulbs as a product for the Cape market. He was, after all, a child of Ochsenwerder where his family had produced vegetables for the market for generations.

My grandfather gained some prominence on account of the Dutch tulips he cultivated and his keen interest in the wild flowers of the area. One of the bulbous plants was named after him: Hesperantha buhrii (today better known as Hesperantha cucullata).

He also planted fields of Sparaxis elegans and marketed the bulbs. An article in the magazine Sarie Marais referred to him as the “Blommebuhr van die Bokveld” (flower farmer of the Bokveld). His son Elias inherited his interest in wild plants. He was the first collector of an aloe species that is named after him, Aloe buhrii.6

For me and all the other Buhr grandchildren, Grasberg was a wonderland we could never get enough of. Oupa had created a paradise of flower and vegetable gardens and orchards which he maintained in spite of periodic droughts. Once or twice every year my family would visit Grasberg, where we were always warmly received.

A student prince

Johann Buhr, the eldest child in the Buhr family, was born in 1900.7 I grew up with memories of “Oom Johann”, as the Buhr grandchildren continued to refer to him. It was as if he were still alive, despite the fact that he had died as far back as 1940, two years after my birth. At Grasberg, nearly everyone had an anecdote to tell about him. As my cousin Hermann Spangenberg, later professor in psychology at the University of the Western Cape, put it: “His giftedness and modesty were so overwhelming that he was the favourite son of the area: he personified the innate intelligence and modesty of the people.”

Johann was sent to Stellenbosch to complete his high-school education and in 1918 he enrolled as a student at the University of Stellenbosch, which had acquired university status in that year. He soon became known as someone with a keen intellect and unique sense of humour. In her autobiography My beskeie deel, MER (the writer ME Rothmann) recalled that everyone expected him to have a brilliant career, as he was already considered a leader in his student days.

His studies, however, got off to a slow start. He first took up agriculture, but dropped out of the course after a year or two and enrolled for a BA and later for a law degree. His class attendance was so poor that he was not permitted to write the final examinations for the BA degree. He informed his parents with a laconic three-word telegram: “Exams a fiasco”.

To earn an income, Johann went to work for Die Burger for a few years. This was the beginning of what would become an association of almost twenty years with that newspaper and with the magazine Die Huisgenoot. Even after he had fallen ill with tuberculosis in 1930 and was no longer able to hold a full-time job, he still contributed newspaper reports, articles and short stories. In a preface to a collection of early Afrikaans short stories, Danie Hugo refers to “Johann Buhr’s playfully mischievous style” with which he depicted his world more mercilessly than his predecessors had done.

In 1923 he returned to Stellenbosch and soon gained a reputation as an excellent debater. He was the opener of the university’s team in a debate with the Oxford Union, the oldest debating society in the world. In 1925 he undertook a debating tour through the country together with the 23-year-old Hendrik Verwoerd and LC Steyn, a future chief justice of South Africa.

They debated with each other in front of audiences in thirteen towns in all four provinces. With the exception of Middelburg, Cape, and Springs, the halls were packed. At Kroonstad, 700 people turned up to listen.

In 1924 Johann was elected chairman of the students’ representative council (SRC). In that capacity, he was charged with the task of welcoming Edward, Prince of Wales, the heir to the British throne, on behalf of the students during the Prince’s visit to Stellenbosch on 4 May 1925. Before the SRC approved the students’ programme, there was heated debate about how the Prince should be received.

In the two weeks that preceded the visit, the university authorities, the municipality, and even the prime minister were anxious about the programme and what Johann might say in his speech. In a letter to his father, Johann wrote that the municipal and university authorities insisted on knowing to the last detail “what we are going to do and exactly how we are going to do it”. Just before the visit, the prime minister finally approved the SRC’s programme.

Great excitement prevailed on the day of the royal visit, but one person was absent when the reception started: Johann Buhr. His friends found him fast asleep in his room in Wilgenhof university residence, and rushed him to the venue of the reception. The following day, the Cape Times reported:

The brilliant little speech in which the young student who had been elected to speak on their behalf addressed the Prince was such as to warrant the prediction that South Africa will hear a great deal in future years of Mr. J. Buhr, to whom the task was allotted.

The speech should be read against the backdrop of the near-hysterical way in which the press reported on the Prince’s tour. One sensational event had involved a steeplechase in which the Prince, a keen horseman, took part. He had fallen from his horse and injured his collarbone. (On a press photo, he appears with a bandaged arm next to Oom Johann.) After the Prince’s accident, the govern­ment had ordered him to stop participating in “such a dangerous sport”.

In Ralph Deakin’s book Southward Ho!, which was published officially after the tour, this account was given of the reception in Stellenbosch:

A splendid rendering of Die Stem van Zuid Afrika, with words adapted to the occasion, led up to the jocular oration of Mr. Johan [sic] Buhr, the president of the Students’ Council, whose quips made the Prince, his entourage and the grand-stand full of students rock with mirth.

The Prince cabled the speech to his father, and it was included verbatim in the book. The speech, as it was delivered, read as follows:

We have come here to-day because we like to see a man and we cheered because we know a man when we see one. Our presence here is intended as a tribute to your manliness, which the most persistent attempts of the whole world have not been able to spoil. This is, however, not the only reason for our enthusiasm over your visit. Next to a real man there is nothing we love better than a real sportsman, no matter for what side he happens to be playing, and it is a special pleasure to us to welcome here, to-day, one of the finest and most daring sportsmen of the British Isles.

I am afraid your Highness will find that all our most popular heroes are people who have either been in gaol for political crimes or in hospital for fractured bones. I must admit that the fact that your Highness has never been in gaol is a serious disqualification, which I sincerely trust your Highness will manage to get remedied before leaving the country. On the other hand, your Highness has fortunately, on several occasions, managed to get yourself into hospital and I can assure you that on that count alone your visit would give us great pleasure.

As regards our lady students, I would very much have liked to interpret their feelings also, but I am afraid their sentiments on this occasion are far too delicate for masculine interpretation, and for further information on the subject, I shall have to refer your Highness to the way they are looking at you. I trust that the mere fact that they have put me here will abundantly show just how enthusiastic they can be over good-­looking young fellows with pleasant smiles.8

Markus Viljoen, famed editor of Die Huisgenoot, wrote about the speech: “After all the formal, lacklustre, rather cloying expressions of loyalty, the young student’s speech was like a fresh spring breeze in a stuffy room, and it was a topic of discussion for weeks afterwards.”

Oom Johann was not very impressed with the Prince, whom he described as follows:

The Prince, between you and me, is a rather hopeless specimen of humanity. He is extremely nervous, looks quite dissipated, and doesn’t command respect in the least. He starts a sentence, and if you look him straight in the eye, he titters and starts a brand-new sentence.

So I soon dropped the etiquette and from that point on he seemed more at ease and we had quite a good chat, about the university and about sport. He has one good trait, which is that he makes an effort to be pleasant … He evidently does his best in very trying circumstances, and the strongest emotion he inspires in me is one of profound sympathy. He is a nice boy through and through, with no trace of haughtiness; but lacks all the qualities of someone in his position.

This assessment was not wide of the mark. Twelve years later, the Prince ascended the throne as Edward VIII. A few months later he abdicated after having committed the cardinal sin of refusing to give up his plan of marrying a divorced woman. Thereafter he took the title of Duke of Windsor. Winston Churchill dismissed him as “a little man, dressed up to the nines”.

After obtaining a BA degree in 1925, Oom Johann worked in Pietermaritzburg for two years as editor of The Times of Natal. In 1928 he returned to Stellenbosch and completed his legal studies.

When the university Senate decided to ask a student to address the audience on graduation day, the choice fell on Oom Johann. After speeches by the rector, the vice-chancellor and one or two other office-bearers, it was finally his turn. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “you have listened to words of wisdom. Now you can listen to words of common sense.” He continued:

I have been at Stellenbosch for ten years now. In the course of these ten years, there have been many changes. New university buildings have been erected … And whether it’s true or not I can’t say, but there are students who claim that during these ten years there have even been changes in some professors’ notes.

The students cheered him, but the vice-chancellor, Professor Adriaan Moorrees, was not amused.

“Brilliant writer”

Markus Viljoen considered Johann Buhr one of the most versatile and talented journalists he had ever encountered. “He was a born humorist who could be funny without even intending it.” Because the editorial team of Die Burger was so small in those early days, Johann had scant opportunity to give his humoristic bent free rein. The paper even offered him the position of sports editor.

Among his best-known reports was his account of Malcolm Campbell’s attempt to break the world land speed record at Verneukpan in 1929. He also accompanied the first Afrikaans theatre companies on their tours as a reporter, and wrote about pioneering actors such as Paul de Groot and Wena Naudé in his series of articles “Agter die sterre” (Behind the stars). The actor and director André Huguenet described Johann Buhr as a “brainy and brilliant writer” who did much to stimulate the public’s interest in theatre.

In 1930, at the age of 30, he resigned for health reasons after having contracted turberculosis. In his entire life, he had spent less than six years in a full-time position. He returned to Grasberg, and for some while stayed in a mat hut at a remote cattle post in Bushmanland in the hope that the dry air would cure him of the disease.

Nevertheless, during the 1930s he still contributed several short stories and articles of exceptional quality to Die Burger and Die Huisgenoot.

A year or two before his death in 1940 at the age of 40, some of his student friends visited him at his lonely hut at the cattle post to say their goodbyes. ID du Plessis, who would later receive the Hertzog Prize for poetry, delivered this touching tribute:

Judged by outward appearances, Johann Buhr was unimpressive. But it was only poor health that prevented him from achieving much, both as journalist and as literary writer with a light satirical touch; for behind that exterior lay a remarkable mind: a scintillating intelligence, a fine sense of humour, a quicksilver wit that could have given a new dimension to Afrikaans journalism.

If he could have devoted his talents to column writing from the outset, no doubt we would have been enriched today by a contribution of lasting value in his particular field.

In the last years of his illness he had to spend the winter months at an isolated cattle post. Through the agency of his friend Recht Malan, he received reading matter from Cape Town: a gesture for which he was poignantly grateful; because for this endearing person it always came as a surprise that others could be so good to him.

My last impression of him was at Nieuwoudtville, when a few of us visited him in the final year of the eclipse. That day he told me: “What a wonderful privilege it must be to be able to fulfil oneself in poems.”

What would have passed through his mind as he stood watching us drive off: we who were headed for a life filled with all the possibilities that he, with his shining talent, was not destined to enjoy?

On his death in 1940, Die Burger wrote: “As sincere and faithful as he always was towards friends, so he was towards the Afrikaner cause, which he promoted to the best of his ability.” The Cape Times commented that his friends had expected him to make a contribution to “the virile Afrikaans literature”, but, sadly, a very good brain had been housed in a weak body. In his memoirs Spykers met koppe (1946), Johannes Steinmeyer referred to Johann Buhr as one of his colleagues in journalism who were regarded as “men of great repute”.

The tragedy of her brother’s early death left a deep impression on my mother. There must have been a strong bond between them, as he had nominated her as executrix of his estate. Whenever I underachieved, I felt that my mother was especially upset because she thought I was squandering my opportunities.

In 1980, forty years after Oom Johann’s death, Anthony Heard, editor of the Cape Times, and Gerald Shaw, the deputy editor, invited me to write a column for the paper on the recommendation of the well-known journalist Anthony Delius, whose acquaintance I had made during the 1977-78 academic year at Yale University. I wondered what Oom Johann would have made of the opportunity to write his own column – a role for which he had been eminently equipped.