Читать книгу Hermann Giliomee: Historian - Hermann Giliomee - Страница 9

My parents were Gerhardus Adriaan Giliomee (1905–1986), born in Villiers in the Free State, and Catharina Gesa Giliomee (1903-2001), whose birthplace was the farm Grasberg, near Nieuwoudtville on the Bokveld Plateau. My paternal grandfather’s participation in both the Anglo-Boer War and the Rebellion of 1914-15 had shaped my father politically. Notable political influences in my mother’s case included her German father, Hermann Buhr, and the colonial patriotism that had developed among Cape Afrikaners in the nineteenth century.

At the time of my parents’ birth in the early twentieth century, Afrikaners lagged far behind the English-speaking community. At the root of this disparity were the poor educational and cultural foundations that the Dutch East India Company had laid down in the first 150 years of the settlement. When the British first occupied the Cape in 1795, there were no locally produced newspapers, magazines or books. The Dutch-speaking burgher community was isolated, poorly educated, and far behind developments in Europe.

The British rulers decided to make English the only official language and the language of instruction in schools. The isolated life on farms and a huge shortage of schools in the country districts made it difficult for Afrikaners to establish a culturally conscious middle class.

By 1930, when my parents left university, a commission found that a quarter of the Afrikaners could be classified as poor whites – so impoverished that they lived far below the level that was considered then appropriate for white people. In the bigger towns and the cities, many lived in wretched conditions. Here, English was the dominant language. The English-speaking community set the tone in the spheres of fashion, architecture, language, good manners and polite conversation.9

My parents studied at the University of Stellenbosch, where both of them trained for the teaching profession with the aim of devoting their lives to the building of the Afrikaner community. They married in 1933. In 1935 my father obtained his first permanent appointment, at a high school in the village of Ugie in Griqualand East.

Destitution was rife in Ugie. Those were the years of the Depression and prolonged drought. Many farmers had thrown in the towel and moved to town. In addition to all the poor farm children, the town had a large orphanage that could accommodate 400 youngsters. It had been established by the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape Province in the wake of the flu epidemic of 1918, which left many orphans. Over the next forty years, the institution would send more than 4 000 children into the world equipped with a good school education.

Ugie influenced my parents’ outlook on life in two ways in particular. They became aware of the vital importance of education in the upliftment of poor Afrikaners, and they reacted strongly against the tendency of some English speakers to look down on the orphans and other poor Afrikaners. My parents resolved to be unashamedly Afrikaans. Instead of calling our parents “Daddy” and “Mommy”, we were taught to say “Vader” and “Moeder”.

My parents moved from Ugie to Sterkstroom, where I was born in 1938. Six months after my birth, my father accepted the post of history teacher in the town of Porterville in the Western Cape. Porterville offered a much gentler and more pleasant environment than the Eastern Cape.

Porterville’s history dates back to 1863, when the first plots were laid out on the farm Pomona. The town was named after William Porter, a popular attorney-general of the Cape Colony. The first school was opened in 1870. In 1876 the Dutch Reformed church was consecrated, and in 1880 the first minister was called.10

When the little school opened its doors in 1870, it had 82 registered pupils and one English-speaking teacher. But the average attendance figure was only 43. There was a fundamental problem: the teacher had lost control over the children. A replacement had to be found, and the school only re-opened a year later.

The Cape Colony only introduced compulsory education for white children in 1905. The school in Porterville, which was initially just a primary school, became a secondary school as well in 1917, and it took another three years before a proper high school for white children was established in a separate building. This was fully two hundred years after the first burghers had settled here, and less than two generations before I went to high school in the early 1950s. Coloured children only gained access to a high school after 1994, when the white school was integrated.

The residents of Porterville had retained something of the independent spirit of their free burgher forebears. Many still kept their own cows so that they could be self-sufficient in terms of milk supply. In the mornings these cows would be taken to the pastures south of the town where they grazed, and in the evenings they were brought home to be milked. The municipality kept a bull in a kraal in the town to serve the cows. He was soon referred as “the Bull from Porterville”, which is how Portervillers are known to this day.

Culturally, the town and district formed one of the most homogeneous communities in the country. Virtually all the inhabitants were either white or coloured, followed the Christian faith, and spoke Afrikaans. With a few exceptions, the coloured Afrikaans speakers were much poorer than their white counterparts. There were only two black African people in the town.

The number of Porterville residents who spoke English as their first language could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. Most Afrikaans speakers’ grasp of English was nonexistent or poor. English was, for all practical purposes, a foreign language.

A Boland childhood

Porterville lies at the foot of the Olifants River Mountains, about 150 km north of Cape Town. It is a tranquil town, abounding in trees and water, with a moderate climate except for a quota of sweltering summer days. The Olifants River Mountains, which separate the coastal plain from the interior, stand sentinel over the town without dominating it.

For Jan Smuts, who had been born in nearby Riebeek West, the most beautiful spot in the world was the view from Riebeek Kasteel over the coastal plain to Cape Town. In my case, it was Porterville’s town dam, from where you could look up at the Olifants River Mountains across the water to the east and down on the town to the west. On balmy summer evenings, my mother would often pack a picnic supper which we enjoyed at the dam. Porterville was a town where children felt safe and secure. You knew who you were, and who your family were. Porterville was my place.

We were three children in a happy family: Jan was born in 1936, I in 1938, and Hester in 1940. The three of us followed the same path through school and church in the town. As eldest child, Jan was the natural leader and he developed an interest in his environment, agriculture and the study of insects at an early age. He would later become a professor of entomology at the University of Stellenbosch, an eminent champion of environmental conversation, and an astute art collector.

I was named after my maternal grandfather, Hermann Buhr, an enterprising and innovative person, a great individualist and a strong family man, a German and an Afrikaner. I never really managed to connect with him. By the time I entered my teens he was already in his mid-seventies, and he had in any case never been disposed to small talk.

My sister Hester, a vivacious and energetic child, became a teacher. Many years later, when the television producer and director Herman Binge made the documentary programme Stroom-op, Hester revealed herself surprisingly as someone with a natural gift for appearing in front of the television cameras.

In our home in Porterville, I suffered from the typical “second-child syndrome” and routinely rebelled against Jan’s authority and some parental decisions. “Against the government”, my mother would remark about my protests.

My father was a well-informed, level-headed and positive person who dedicated his life to his family and to education. My mother was a strong woman, imbued with a great devotion to her family and a sense of duty towards the poor Afrikaners in the town.

My love for history came from my father. In his history classes at school, he tended to emphasise the “story” in history and the role of prominent figures such as Napoleon and the Boer Republic presidents Paul Kruger and MT Steyn. In his lesssons on the French Revolution, he would sometimes go as far as singing the rousing anthem “La Marseillaise”.

After his retirement, my father wrote this message to the school: “Keep in mind that all knowledge and all experiences are of value to one and make one a richer and better person.” He added that, despite temporary disappointments and setbacks, his teaching career had been “happy and fruitful years”.

One of the disappointments had been an unsuccessful application for the principalship. He never applied for a principalship elsewhere. He could see no sense in it, as he identified with the local community and was able to find fulfilment in the town. Financially, there was no need for him to pursue a senior post. He did well with his investments on the stock exchange, especially in gold shares, and could send his three children to the University of Stellenbosch without taking out a loan.

He expressed himself exceptionally well in writing, and assisted me with the Afrikaans translation of The Rise and Crisis of Afrikaner Power (Yale University Press, 1979), which I co-authored with Heribert Adam. Given the chance, he might have become an excellent historian.

War and its aftermath

Both my parents supported the National Party (NP) except for a period in the 1930s, when my father lined up behind General JBM Hertzog, leader of the United Party (UP). The declaration of war in 1939, after General Jan Smuts had gained the upper hand in the UP, caused him to return to the NP. My parents remained loyal to the NP government through thick and thin. They would have voted for the proverbial broomstick if it had stood as the NP candidate in their constituency.

During the war years I was vaguely aware that my parents, like the majority of Afrikaners, were opposed to South Africa’s participation as a member of the Allied Forces. The decision to join the war had been taken in Parliament in 1939 with a slim majority of thirteen votes, which mainly reflected the Afrikaans-English split in the country.

Afrikaner nationalists were not the only ones who felt that the country should not have entered the war on the basis of a split vote in Parliament. In her memoirs, the historian Phyllis Lewsen recounts that JS Marais, a respected liberal historian, told her: “No country should go to war except with multiparty support … The great majority of Afrikaners, and I include myself – though, as you know I am a liberal and hated the Nazis and the Nationalists – supported Hertzog’s neutrality policy.”11

The stories I heard from my parents about the victimisation of Afrikaners during the war would later prove to be true. The Smuts government suspended the policy of employing people on merit to a professional civil service during the war as, understandably, it did not want to run the risk of having anti-war Afrikaner nationalists in strategic positions. There were many stories of Afrikaners employed on the railways who were transferred against their will or forced to take early retirement. Another major grievance was that monolingual English officials were appointed in senior positions to replace officials who had joined the armed forces.

Rob Davies, in later years an ANC cabinet minister, wrote in his book Capital, State and White Labour in South Africa, 1900 to 1960 (1979) that the dissatisfaction among railway officials was so widespread that Paul Sauer, who had become minister of transport after the election of 1948, appointed a Grievances Commission. A total of 2 875 complaints were received from Afrikaans-speaking employees who felt they had been disadvantaged.

Following the 1948 election, in the case of two high-profile positions the NP government made appointment shifts that created a great stir: William Marshall Clark, who, during the war, had been appointed general manager of the SA Railways and Harbours over the heads of two Afrikaner civil servants, was ousted with a generous golden handshake, and Major-General Evered Poole, who had been first in line for promotion to chief of staff of the defence force, was sidelined. There are indications that the change of government disadvantaged another fifty officers who had been pro-war, including Afrikaans speakers, who were demoted or sidelined.

Leo Marquard, a respected liberal commentator, asserted in his book The Peoples and Policies of South Africa (1969) that the NP government reinstituted the policy of a professional civil service. The NP government did insist, however, on the strict application of the bilingualism requirement in the case of civil servants and on compensation for those who had been unfairly dismissed or denied promotion during the war. The predominance of English speakers in the higher ranks in the civil service still continued, and it was only by the early 1960s, more than fifty years after Unification, that people in those ranks reflected the white population composition.12

When I started writing about politics in the 1980s, I often had arguments with English-speaking commentators, notably Ken Owen, who claimed that the NP government had politicised the civil service by instituting a massive purge of English officials after the 1948 election. No evidence was supplied to substantiate these claims. It was more the case that, after the war, there was the perception among English speakers and pro-war Afrikaners that they would be discriminated against. The Civil Service Commission, however, would have acted against blatant injustice.

I have vague memories of how the war affected our household. White flour and rice were in short supply. Contrary to the government’s orders, my father did not hand in his revolver at the police station but buried it in the garden instead. He probably obeyed the instruction that civil servants had to resign from the Broederbond. The fuel shortage meant that my parents sometimes had to cancel plans to visit Grasberg or other places.

In 1999 I asked the well-known South African business magnate and philanthropist Anton Rupert what had been the decisive factor in the NP’s victory of 1948. He was unequivocal: “It was the war that clinched the election for the NP in 1948, not apartheid.”

I can still recall the great joy with which my parents greeted the news of the NP’s victory. It was not apartheid in the first place that had motivated them, but their identification with the Afrikaner volksbeweging (national movement).

The NP fought the 1948 election with several planks in its platform. These included:

 a republican plank, which urged that the state should be as independent from Britain as possible;

 a cultural plank, which set great store by mother-tongue education and active involvement in the Afrikaans language and cultural movement;

 a nationalist plank, which maintained that the state as well as the white community should accept responsibility for the white poor;

 a populist plank, which was directed against the big English corporations, especially Anglo American, which towered over the economy. The aim was to establish an Afrikaner corporate sector (the first Afrikaner company had been listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1945);

 a racist plank, which advocated white domination and comprehensive discrimination against coloured and black people.

The Afrikaners of my early years were very colour-conscious, and some were openly racist. Yet, on an interpersonal level, there often existed a paternalistic relationship between the “baas” and his “volk” (workforce) and between the “miesies” (mistress) and her “bediende” (domestic worker) that included responsibilities and obligations on both sides. A farmer was respected if he was someone who looked after “his people”.

It was when the Afrikaners acted collectively as a group or party that they showed a much more inhumane face. The Immorality Act, the pass laws and Group Areas were harsh and merciless. Jan Smuts made a noteworthy observation late in his life: “I do not think people mean evil, but thoughtlessly do evil. In public life they do things of which they would be incapable in private life.”13

The urbanised Afrikaner of today is already a generation or two removed from the traditional life on farms or in the small platteland towns. Nevertheless, there are many things Afrikaners still have in common: farm life, an interest in nature, and a love of braaivleis (barbequed meat). The custom of open-air braais took root among town and city dwellers during the 1938 celebrations of the centenary of the Great Trek.

School and church

As schoolchildren, we soon heard that we had to prepare ourselves for a future that would not always be easy. Implicitly, the message was that uncontested white domination would not last for ever, and that a good education would become increasingly valuable.

As a state establishment, our school in Porterville encompassed the entire spectrum of the white community: from parents who were well off to those who struggled to get by, and from pupils who were gifted to those who found it difficult to keep up. The last-mentioned category included two of my classmates, Org and Gys. Once I tried to justify my poor marks in an exam by saying: “Org and Gys fared even worse.”

My mother made it abundantly clear that the poor performance of “Org and Gys” could not be my benchmark. She firmly believed that I was capable of greater things. “Org and Gys” became a saying in our home whenever one of us children offered a feeble excuse for a mediocre performance. On the other hand, we never got the idea that achievement was a precondition for parental love, which sometimes seems to be the case among the ambitious middle class of today.

The school in Porterville was relatively small, and in 1955, my matric year, we were only sixteen in the class. The teachers were generally committed to their work and to the welfare of the pupils. The one weakness was the quality of the English teaching. Combined with the monolingual nature of the town, this deficiency was certainly not a good preparation for university.

At university I would enrol for the subject English Special, the standard of which was considerably lower than that of English I. Even “Engels Spes” I had to abandon later on account of my low marks. I fell in the category of those whom our formidable lecturer Patricia McMagh used to call the “Kakamasians”, or “Members of the Kakamas club” – students whose grasp of English was alarmingly poor. When she congratulated me in 2003 on the appearance of my book The Afrikaners, I reminded her kindly that I had once been one of her “Kakamasians”.

Church and catechism were compulsory components of our education. Besides the great emphasis that was placed on the sermons and on the doctrine of predestination – which is still a mystery to me – I cannot remember much about my Christian instruction. Few churches had a task as daunting as that of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), which had to try to reconcile apartheid with Christianity’s emphasis on the equality of all people.

Ben Marais, whose comprehensive study Die kleur-krisis en die Weste (the English version was titled The Colour Crisis and the West) appeared in 1952, was one of the ministers who rejected attempts to prove that apartheid had a Scriptural basis. When I worked in Pretoria from 1963 to 1965, I had the good fortune of getting to know him. In 1965 he perfomed our marriage ceremony when my fiancée Annette van Coller and I tied the knot.

“Oom Ben” was a respected and beloved minister who never complained about the opposition he encountered as a result of his views. He liked to tell the story of a session of the synod that took place in the election year of 1953, shortly after he had spoken out in his book against the efforts to justify apartheid on Christian grounds. An elder berated him: “Oh, dominee, you have now completely spoilt this year’s wonderful election result for us.”

A sense of community

There was no neighbourhood in Porterville that was conspicuously rich or poor. In several streets, rich and poor lived side by side. While the homes of the more affluent were comfortable, there were no ostentatious houses. Plot size was the most noticeable difference. Some residents not only had a flower garden but also fruit trees, vegetable patches and even a vineyard. The big municipal dam was fed by water from a kloof in the mountain. The weekly turn to irrigate one’s garden was a major event for the townspeople. Though my father was not a keen gardener, he did not easily miss his irrigation opportunity.

Wheat farming was the district’s principal economic activity, but by the 1950s there was already considerable diversification. On the mountain farmers grew fruit, berries and disa plants, and on the farms below the mountain one found fruit, vineyards and mixed farming. Export grapes and wine grapes were produced in the Vier-en-Twintig-Riviere area, south of the town, while wheat farming predominated in the Rooi Karoo, northwest of the town.

Until about the year 2000 most of the farms were between 300 and 500 morgen in size, considerably smaller than those in the Swartland districts such as Malmesbury and Moorreesburg. This was the main reason why no significant class differences developed among the white community in the Porterville district. There was no question of poor Afrikaners belonging to a lower class. White people regarded each other as equals, irrespective of income differences.

Portervillers tended to look askance at anyone who paraded their wealth or education. People even hesitated to talk about an overseas trip for fear that they might be suspected of showing off. In the early 1960s, when my mother mentioned to an acquaintance, Oom Dais Toerien, that she and my father had just returned from a visit to London and Paris, he swiftly trumped her with an account of his recent trip to Oudtshoorn.

My recollection is that the Afrikaner community, whose lives revolved around the church and the school, were reasonably content with their lives, mainly on account of the lack of conspicuous class differences but also because there was no television that could broadcast images of the lifestyle of wealthy South Africans.

A scientific study carried out in the 1950s in more than a dozen countries around the world indicated that, on average, the citizens of poor countries were no less satisfied with their lives than those of rich countries. When a similar study was conducted in the mid-1980s, the results were dramatically different. According to their responses, citizens of richer countries were distinctly happier than those of poorer countries. The crucial difference was television. Almost everyone could see how the middle class lived in the world’s advanced democracies, and almost everyone now hankered after that lifestyle and at the same time detested the rich.14

White people’s strong sense of community had struck my parents from the outset. The church and the school occupied a central place in social life, and there was a spirit of mutual caring that went hand in hand with an engaging unpretentiousness. People showed respect towards the minister and the teachers, but did not shrink from criticism when they neglected their duties. The school achieved good academic results over the years.

In one of the school’s yearbooks, three school inspectors highlighted the great value of “platteland schools for platteland children”. My subjective impression at Stellenbosch, both as student and as lecturer, was that outstanding students who had matriculated at obscure platteland schools almost always performed better than good students who had attended the top schools.15 Malcolm Gladwell recently proved this theory statistically in the context of American schools and universities in his David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants (2013).

A national movement

Participation in the volksbeweging was a formative influence in my life. It instilled in me a sense of involvement with Afrikaners as a community that was numerically small and still at an early stage of its cultural development. As strange as it may sound today, the volksbeweging did not arise in reaction to any perceived threat from coloured or black people.

The volksbeweging was especially aimed at liberating Afrikaners from their sense of inferiority towards the wealthier and more confident English-speaking section of the white population. Besides the upliftment of the so-called poor whites, the national movement had other important objectives: the establishment of Afrikaner business enterprises which would, in turn, employ Afrikaners, and the development of the Afrikaans language and culture.

My mother played an active role in the upliftment of the town’s poor. She was a member and, later, chair of the Porterville branch of the Afrikaanse Christelike Vrouevereniging (ACVV). This Christian women’s organisation, which had branches across the Cape Province, had been founded in Cape Town in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War to relieve the distress of destitute Afrikaners.

My mother often visited the poor herself to distribute food, clothing or reading matter, and sometimes she would send Jan. Her greatest frustration was that the poor did not want to read. She wanted to help uplift them intellectually so that they could be full members of the Afrikaner community and not only candidates for charity. This was a message that went out particularly from Dr DF Malan, editor of Die Burger and the NP leader, and ministers of religion.

The Stellenbosch economist Professor Jan Sadie has pointed out that the project of middle-class Afrikaners to uplift their own poor was an unusual phenomenon. It had much to do with the fact that the English-speaking elite tended to look down on Afrikaners collectively as a lesser “race” or community. Some tried to substantiate this theory of inherent inferiority by noting that more than 80% of poor whites were Afrikaners.

As a young newspaper reporter, MER (ME Rothmann), the Afrikaans writer who worked full-time for the ACVV for much of her life, heard a speech by Sir Carruthers Beattie, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, that upset her greatly. He stated that poor whites were generally “intellectually backward” and that there was something “inherent” in the Afrikaners that resulted in the phenomenon of poor whiteism assuming such alarming proportions in their case. MER wrote: “His audience raised no objections to this statement.” As Sadie put it, Afrikaners of all classes resolved to form a united front against English speakers, who looked down on them, especially their poor.

Most of the coloured people were, of course, even poorer than the poor whites. I once asked my mother whether she should not try to help the coloured poor as well. Her reply was that one could undertake only one great social task in one’s life, and the upliftment of the Afrikaner poor was her great task.

Economically, the Afrikaners still lagged far behind their English-speaking counterparts. In 1938, the year of my birth, the Afrikaner share of the private sector stood at less than 10% (excluding agriculture). Referring to the accepted correlation between Protestantism and capitalism, a respected analyst observed recently that “the failure of the Calvinist Afrikaners to develop a thriving capitalist system until the last quarter of the [twentieth] century” is an anomaly.16

In 1939 Sanlam and the Afrikaner Broederbond organised an economic volkskongres (people’s congress) in Bloemfontein to promote the establishment of Afrikaner companies. From their side, Afrikaner companies had to undertake to employ Afrikaners and to place those who excelled in management positions. The central idea was to increase the Afrikaner share of the economy in a way that would command respect.

After the congress TE Dönges, who later became a cabinet minister, defended the economic mobilisation of Afrikaners in a way that was also wholeheartedly endorsed by my parents. The Afrikaners, he said, were determined to act as a group to increase their share of the economy fairly and peacefully. They felt that they had no right to expect others to help them, and were too proud to ask for help from others to work out their economic salvation. Dönges emphasised that the Afrikaners had no intention of boycotting English firms. All that they asked was for the English-speaking community to maintain at least a “benign neutrality” to allow Afrikaners to find their “economic feet”.

This was the idealistic side, but there was certainly also the dark side. After the NP came to power in 1948, Indians were forced to move from business centres to the outskirts of towns. My parents ordered us not to buy from Hassim, an Indian who had a shop in the main street. Few enterprises were owned by coloured people, and up to the last decade or two of NP rule the government or local authorities made virtually no attempt to help coloured entrepreneurs grow their own businesses.

By the time I reached the age of ten in 1948, there was still only a smattering of Afrikaner-owned businesses that were bigger than the town café or the town shop. It was only in 1945 that the first Afrikaner company listed on the Johan­nesburg Stock Exchange (JSE): Anton Rupert’s Distillers Corporation. Bonuskor (in the Sanlam stable) followed a few years later.

Fortunately, there was no question of English companies having to lend the Afrikaners a hand in establishing themselves economically. The Afrikaners had to earn their respect by creating their own successful enterprises. I asked Anton Rupert in 1999 if he could think of any Afrikaans company that had been “empowered” by an English company. He reflected for a moment before answering: “Not one, and I’m very grateful for that.”

My father had joined the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) shortly after his arrival in Porterville. After the congress of 1939, the AB encouraged its members to invest in Afrikaner companies. My father had started buying shares on the JSE at an early stage. He bought gold shares in particular, but also invested in Rembrandt, Federale Volksbeleggings and Federale Mynbou.

Something that irked my father was the poor quality of Die Burger’s business page. In 1959 he asked in a letter to Die Burger’s managing director, Phil Weber, that the newspaper “should become just as authoritative in the economic field as it already is in other fields”. He described Die Burger’s financial reporting, justifiably, as “formal, technical, stiff and dull”. English-language papers, on the other hand, were chock-a-block with analyses of the value of particular shares.

To illustrate his point, my father referred to the shares of Federale Mynbou (later known as Fedmyn), a Sanlam subsidiary that was established in 1953 and that soon achieved success. In 1958 it went public with Bonuskor and Federale Volksbeleggings as the major shareholders.

My father was keen to buy shares in Fedmyn but could not find the necessary information in Die Burger. He complained to Weber about the difficulty investors had in trying to evaluate the transactions of the emerging Fedmyn. To do that, he wrote, “information and yet more information” was required. As matters stood, “we have to hunt around for it everywhere in the English magazines”.

Weber forwarded the letter to the paper’s editor Piet Cillié for answering, with the comment: “Apparently the man means well.” It would still take almost ten years before Die Burger’s business page improved.

The Broederbond “gang”

My father’s Broederbond membership gave him a sense of participation in the Afrikaner nationalists’ debates on policy issues. Along with other branches of the organisation across the country, the Porterville branch studied the working documents that the Johannesburg head office circulated among members for comment. I sometimes chanced upon some of these documents, for instance an analysis of the Tomlinson Commission’s report. As children, we enjoyed playing along to maintain secrecy when the local branch of the AB met at our home. Naturally, I never talked to my friends about the AB. Now and then I would tease my father light-heartedly about his “secret gang”, but I soon saw that I was on dangerous ground.

In the mid-1950s the Porterville branch lodged a complaint because a member from another branch had rejected a teacher they had recommended for membership. At that stage the rector of the University of Stellenbosch, Prof. HB Thom, was chair of the AB’s Executive Council, and the AB management referred the complaint to him. Thom and my father had been classmates at Stellenbosch.

It later transpired that the objection had come from someone who suspected the nominee of having cheated as a referee in a school rugby match. The person in question never became a member. Maybe the AB did not want to take a chance with someone who had a reputation as a crooked referee.

My father never derived any personal benefit from his AB membership. He was shocked when it was alleged in later years that the AB pulled strings to advantage its members, and that some people joined the organisation for their own advantage. “That was never what the Bond was intended for,” he often said.

However, my father did not have any first-hand experience of the modus operandi of the AB outside the confines of Porterville. The dissident Afrikaner theologian Nico Smith relates in his book Die Afrikaner-Broederbond: Belewinge van die binnekant (The Afrikaner Broederbond: Experiences from the inside) (2009) how he was appointed as Broederbonder at the Theological Faculty of Stellenbosch over the heads of two other candidates who were much better qualified. The historian Ernst Stals, who conducted an in-depth study of the AB, writes that from early on it had been the AB’s aim “not only to promote the interests of the Afrikaners in general, but also to help its members advance in their careers”. I would later have reason to wonder whether the AB had something to do with the apparent dead end my career at Stellenbosch reached towards the end of the 1970s.

“The man who refuses to participate”

“Be proud of your own” were words that I and other children of my generation heard repeatedly when language and culture came up for discussion. We took part in volkspele (Afrikaner folk dances) in the church hall and enjoyed them. Rev. Theron, who was our minister during my school years, was vehemently opposed to dancing. It was at university that I first discovered dancing was a harmless social activity and regretted the fact that I had not learnt to dance at school.

The volksbeweging placed great emphasis on the notion that every individual’s contribution counted. This applied in particular to the promotion of Afrikaans as a public language which, constitutionally, enjoyed equal status with English. At school I was struck by ID du Plessis’s poem “Soet is die stryd” (Sweet is the struggle) from his collection Land van die vaders (Land of the Fathers) (1945), which stressed that, despite the pessimism of those who considered the obstacles too daunting, what mattered was the effort one put into the collective struggle, regardless of the eventual outcome. The last two lines underlined the personal responsibility of the individual: Maar die man wat sy deelname weier, / Is die MAN wat sy Nasie VERMOOR!!! (But the man who refuses to participate / is the MAN who KILLS his nation!!!).

When I became involved in the language struggle at the University of Stellenbosch many years later, these words still inspired me.

The message of the volksbeweging in the 1950s was that one should never regard one’s people and one’s language as inferior. Our household at Porterville was well aware that Afrikaans literature, especially in the field of prose, still ranked far below the literatures of the major European languages. A momentous event for us was the appearance of Die Afrikaanse kinderensiklopedie, a children’s encyclopedia, the first volume of which was published in 1948. The editor noted in the introduction that the work had been written by “friends of children”. One of the writers was the poet and intellectual NP van Wyk Louw, whose notions of “lojale verset” (loyal resistance, or rebellious loyalty) and “liberale nasionalisme” (liberal nationalism) would later exert a great influence on me.

We were avid readers of the youth magazine Die Jongspan, which, like the encyclopedia, was edited by Dr CF Albertyn. On his retirement from the publishing company Nasionale Pers, he came to live on his farm in the Porterville district. Following his own retirement from teaching, my father assisted Albertyn on an almost full-time basis with his ambitious project of publishing an adapted version of the Dutch Winkler Prins ensiklopedie through his own company. It involved the translation of articles from Dutch into Afrikaans and the incorporation of additional entries on South African topics written by local experts. Sadly, the project was not a financial success.

During the first half of the 1950s, when I was a high-school pupil, it seemed as if the great ideal of a republic was close to being realised. It was a time of surging optimism. For me, the spirit of the times is represented by the first lines of “Die lied van jong Suid-Afrika” (The song of young South Africa), which we sometimes sang in classes at school:

En hoor jy die magtige dreuning

Oor die veld kom dit wyd gesweef

Die lied van ’n volk se ontwaking

Wat harte laat sidder en beef…

With its stirring description of the “mighty roar” of “the song of a nation’s awakening”, the verse still says something to me about the optimism with which the Afrikaners of my generation faced the future. A “nation’s awakening” had little or nothing to do with apartheid. As children, we felt we were part of a movement that would place us on an equal footing with the English community, that would proclaim a republic, that would expand Afrikaans, and that would conquer economic and cultural worlds. Viewing the volksbeweging and apartheid as one and the same is simply false.

After the NP’s election victory in 1948, Afrikaans was for the first time treated on an equal basis with English in practice as an official language. Over the next forty years Afrikaans grew rapidly as a public language, especially because it was so firmly embedded in schools and universities. Afrikaans enabled me to master universal knowledge in my mother tongue and made it possible for me to express myself optimally. It has become an inextricable part of my social identity. After the appearance of my book The Afrikaners: Biography of a People in 2003, I was often asked what had been decisive factors in the Afrikaners’ rise in the twentieth century. My reply was always: mother-tongue education and committed teachers.

Jean Laponce, a French-Canadian expert on the survival of smaller languages, later informed me that Afrikaans is one of only four languages in the world – the others are Hebrew, Hindi and Indonesian-Malay – that in the course of the twentieth century were standardised and developed from a low-status, informal language to one used in all branches of life and learning, including postgraduate teaching, science and technology. Hebrew and Afrikaans were the only two languages spoken by a very small speech community that had achieved this feat.

How did Afrikaans manage to achieve the near unthinkable? An e-mail message I received after the appearance of The Afrikaners demonstrated the misconceptions about this issue that exist in some quarters. My correspondent posed the question: “How did Afrikaans reach such a level?” He provided his own reply: “It was forced on schools’ curricula and imposed on the civil service as a so-called official language.”

The facts, however, are quite different. The Constitution of the Union of South Africa (the South Africa Act), passed in 1909, established Dutch and English as the official languages of South Africa, with equal status under the law. Neither language was “imposed” or “privileged”; the bilingual character of the state was the primary symbol of reconciliation between the country’s two white groups.

In a contemporaneous article in The State, the writer and historian Gustav Preller described the Union’s promise to place the two official languages on a footing of “most perfect equality” as essential to Afrikaner support for the Union.17 Without recognition of the equal status of English and Dutch (which would be replaced by Afrikaans in 1925), it is most likely that a debilitating conflict would have developed between the two white communities, with grave consequences for the economy.

But misunderstandings about what had been decided at the National Convention, the body that drafted the Constitution of the Union, would bedevil relations between the two white communities for a long time. FV Engelenburg, Louis Botha’s biographer and a staunch supporter of the South African Party’s ideal of English-Afrikaner cooperation, later wrote that whereas the fathers of the Constitution had accepted the absolute equality of both languages in good faith, English-speaking South Africans never took the matter seriously. Bilingualism was regarded as nothing more than a polite gesture towards the other section. According to Engelenburg, the average English-speaking South African was inclined to regard every form of political recognition of the Dutch language as a threat to the interests of “his own race”.

From 1910 to 1948 the government of the day postponed consistent enforcement of Section 137 of the Union Constitution several times. The lack of suitable candidates in the civil service who were proficient in both languages was one of the reasons that were advanced for the lack of progress. By 1948, however, this was no longer a valid excuse. After its election victory in that year, the NP decided to systematically enforce the use of both Afrikaans and English as official languages in the civil service.

Economic mobilisation and the development of Afrikaans as a public language went hand in hand with acknowledgement of the Afrikaners’ history and their contribution to the establishment of the South African state. In 1952 I attended the Van Riebeeck Festival in Cape Town, which celebrated three centuries of white settlement, as an adolescent member of the Voortrekker youth movement. There was one memory that lingered in my mind. As part of a torchlight procession of thousands of Voortrekkers who marched from Signal Hill to the stadium in the Foreshore area, I met with disaster. My torch died while we were still on the mountain, and I was mortified at having to complete the march with an unlit torch. In subsequent years, I would often wonder whether my extinguished torch had any symbolic meaning.

It would be wrong to equate the volksbeweging with the National Party, or to regard the NP as an institution that dictated to the volksbeweging. In the first decade of NP rule there were still between 10% to 20% of Afrikaners who supported the United Party (UP), which had been formed out of a merger between General JBM Hertzog’s then National Party and General JC Smuts’s South African Party (SAP) in 1934. UP supporters were still commonly known as “Sappe” because of the link with the erstwhile SAP. Many Afrikaner “Sappe” felt equally strongly about the Afrikaans language and the upliftment of the white poor. The big difference between them and fellow Afrikaners who were NP supporters (“Natte”) lay in their support for South Africa’s participation in the Second World War and their veneration for the towering figure of Jan Smuts. I once asked Christo Wiese, who grew up in a “Sap” family in Upington and later became an outstanding entrepreneur, what had been the distinguishing factor between the “Natte” and the “Sappe” in our youth. His answer was simple but spot-on: Jan Smuts.

Coloured Portervillers

Porterville’s coloured residents spoke Afrikaans, but they were not regarded as part of the volksbeweging. The law determined the fate of white and coloured from the cradle to the grave. Everyone adhered to the same faith, but white and coloured worshipped separately; everyone spoke the same language, but white and coloured did not attend school, church or concerts together. Everyone played the same sports, but white and coloured never participated together in organised sports. There were undoubtedly secret relationships across the colour line. The many light-skinned children with reddish hair in the coloured neighbourhoods of Pella Park and Monte Bertha attested to that.

The coloured community of Porterville consisted of people who were no longer able to live on the farms, or had chosen to leave of their own accord. While a few managed to make a living as artisans such as builders or carpenters, the majority worked as “servants” or gardeners for white people. In my childhood days, every white home seemed to have its servant.

For a while our household also employed Japie, a coloured boy of my own age, who did odd jobs in the garden. He was exceptionally well built and self-­confident. Japie used to play cricket and rugby with me and my white friends in the backyard or in the street in front of the house. We were unable to get the better of him either physically or figuratively, which boosted his confidence even more.

One day there was a confrontation between the two of us, and I spat in his face. As the enraged Japie made a rush for me, I fled into the house. It was only indoctrination that prevented him from pursuing me into the house and getting even. I was bitterly ashamed of the incident, and spoke to no one about it until Athol Fugard told me years later that he had been involved in a similar incident in his youth. It provided the inspiration for his play Master Harold and the Boys (1982).

Farmworkers were worse off than most of the coloured people in town. In my schooldays, I sometimes stayed over with friends who lived on farms. The tot system of providing workers with wine throughout the working day was still in common use, and there was no pressure on farmers to abandon the practice. Still, there were also farmers who realised that it was wrong and who promoted abstinence from alcohol. They were also very critical of the heartless practice of some farmers to let their workers go after the harvesting season.

On Saturday mornings, many farmers would bring their “volk” to town, and by twelve o’clock intoxicated farmworkers were a common sight on the pavements in the vicinity of the two bottlestores in the main street.

Although coloured men who met the requirements of the Cape’s qualified franchise could vote up to the 1950s, I never heard of a single one in the town who was eligible to vote. Die Burger did not write about the fierce competition for the coloured vote during the 1920s in which the National Party had also participated. The paper frequently alleged that coloured voters were “open to bribery” and, by implication, did not really deserve the vote.

My parents supported the policy of apartheid. Their standpoint was that the policy was not only intended to bring about separation between white and coloured, but also helped to develop and uplift the coloured people by providing them with better mass education and social services. No doubt they endorsed the statement PW Botha made to his biographers: “The coloureds must first be uplifted and the consequences of that accepted.”18

The government’s spending on coloured education in the Cape Province had started increasing rapidly from 1935. In 1953 it was almost ten times what it had been in 1935. Between 1948 and 1951 it increased by 41%, and it did not slow down thereafter. In 1953 a study asked whether the “financial burdens” in this regard were not perhaps “disproportionate to the province’s carrying capacity”.19 Of course, the spending on white children was much higher, but no one asked whether this was disproportionate to the country’s “carrying capacity”.

But there was also another problem, which NP supporters only realised later. Improving a community’s education levels without giving them meaningful rights is a recipe for political alienation and revolt.

The Group Areas Act was the central aspect of the political debate in the early 1950s, at the time I started becoming politically aware. By law, coloured people had to be moved from the “white town” to separate coloured “towns” on the outskirts of, or a short distance from, the main town. It was said that the resettled people would get their own houses and shops there.

In Porterville, a relatively small proportion of the coloured community was moved during the period of NP rule to Monte Bertha, a coloured suburb that had been established as far back as 1937. But there were several towns in the Boland, notably Stellenbosch, Paarl and Wellington, which had large coloured or racially mixed neighbourhoods that were situated in the central business district. In the first two decades of NP rule, these neighbourhoods were all proclaimed white areas and the coloured residents were forced to move. The most prominent mixed area in the Cape was District Six in Cape Town, which had about 65 000 residents. While the majority was coloured, there were also black, Indian and white residents, including Afrikaners. NP propaganda portrayed District Six as “a den of iniquity”.

As an avid newspaper reader from an early age, I was certainly exposed to this propaganda that was peddled in Die Burger. This is apparent from my first article that ever appeared in print. It was written in 1951, when I was in standard 6 (now grade 8), and appeared in the school’s yearbook three years later.

In the article I gave an account of my first visit to Cape Town, and related how I had lost my way in the city centre and later found myself in a slum quarter where I saw only hovels around me. I wrote that I had no idea of how to find my way back, but fortunately ran into a policeman. He informed me that they had been looking for me everywhere, and that I had wandered into the heart of District Six. I wrote the story as if my straying into District Six had put my life in danger.

For coloured people, the forced removals and the break-up of established communities were a source of immense grief and heartache. I would only grasp this fully many years later, when I wrote about the forced removal of the coloured community from the centre of Stellenbosch in the late 1960s. This same story repeated itself in numerous towns without any protest from Afrikaners.

The only serious conversation I had with a well-educated coloured person at the time took place in 1966 aboard a ship on the way to Europe. He was a teacher headed for Canada to start a new life there, and I was travelling to the Netherlands to study at the University of Amsterdam. The sadness in his voice as he spoke of his humiliation made a lasting impression on me.

As I have mentioned, there were virtually no black people in Porterville. When the homeland policy was discussed, it was as if one were talking about some exotic experiment in a far-off land. In our student days at Stellenbosch, the only black people we interacted with were the waiters in the residence. Black residents of the town were subject to a curfew; every night at ten o’clock a siren would go off, which meant that no black person was permitted to be outside the township of Kayamandi. We did not think of the flagrant denial of a person’s citizenship it represented.

“The open conversation”

Our household subscribed to Die Huisgenoot in which the column “Die oop gesprek” (the open conversation) of NP van Wyk Louw, one of the leading Afrikaner intellectuals, appeared. On 8 August 1952 Louw’s column took the form of a letter adressed to “My dear young friend”. Van Wyk Louw’s article was prompted by the NP government’s efforts to remove coloured voters from the voters’ roll.

Louw was at that stage a professor in Amsterdam, and he wrote in general terms instead of criticising the decision to put coloured voters on a separate roll. In a letter to a friend at the University of Cape Town, he wrote that legislation “was not necessary for our preservation as a people”. It would be better to make the coloured people “nationalists again than to put them on separate rolls”.

Louw was referring to the 1920s when coloured voters constituted about a quarter of the electorate in constituencies such as Stellenbosch and Paarl. Along with the other parties, the NP competed fiercely for their vote. In 1929 Bruckner de Villiers, the victorious NP candidate in Stellenbosch, was carried shoulder-high into Parliament by coloured voters. After the 1938 election, in which De Villiers lost the Stellenbosch seat to the UP’s Henry Fagan by 30 votes, he commented scathingly on the “bright young men” in Parliament whose “clever plans” had cost the party several Cape seats, while they managed to win only one seat in the Transvaal.

In the battle to remove the coloured voters from the voters’ roll in the 1950s, the NP leaders and Die Burger kept silent about this history, or, when it did crop up, shrugged it off with the comment that coloured voters were bribable.

In his article of 1952 Van Wyk Louw wrote that a people could be faced with various crises of national survival: one was military conquest, and another would be if a critical mass of its members no longer considered it important to continue existing as a separate people. And then there was the third case: when a people, after it had done all in its power to survive, was faced with the last temptation: “to believe that mere survival is preferable to survival in justice” (Louw’s emphasis).

Louw realised that people would ask why an ethical crisis like this could threaten the survival of an entire people. He replied with a counter-question: “How can a small people continue to survive if it is something hateful and evil for the best within – or without – it?” He added: “I believe that in a strange way this is the crisis from which a people emerge reborn, young, creative, this ‘dark night of the soul’ in which it says: I would rather perish than survive through injustice.”

I have no memory of having read the article at the time, and Jaap Steyn writes in his biography of Louw that Die Huisgenoot received no letters from readers in response to the particular column. The article was republished in 1958 in Louw’s collection of essays Liberale nasionalisme when I was in my third year at university as a student of Afrikaans-Nederlands. There was no mention of this work in our classes.

But Piet Cillié, editor of Die Burger, wrote in an exceptionally positive review that Louw excercised his influence as an intellectual midwife. “He was more skilful and subtle than many other thinkers, but without the pretensions of absolute certainty.” During my student years, such thinkers were extremely rare at the Afrikaans universities.