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3 (1905-1912)

THE MINISTER OF MONTAGU

The man who arrived home in the midst of the South African summer was now a learned doctor – in a country where the title inspired awe and respect, and where ministers of the church towered over their communities – and yet, somehow, he still felt uncertain about himself. He was thirty years old, but painfully aware of his inexperience. He felt certain that this was not lost on those around him, especially his father, who mock-sighed in jest: ‘Yes, Danie, you have studied for such a long time that you are almost old enough to retire.’[1] These words were not spoken with harmful intent, but to the recipient, they were painful.[2]

His family was changed. His father had retired from farming during his absence and had handed the farm over to Fanie, who had since married. Even though Malan knew that he would never have become a farmer, he felt as if a bond between him and his home had been severed forever. He was filled with a sense of sadness and loss upon realising that he would in future be a mere visitor in the house of his birth.[3]

He now had to take his own, independent steps into the world. The prospect of leading a congregation by himself was still too daunting – he preferred to become an assistant preacher in a parish where he would be able to learn from the senior minister.[4] In May 1905, after successfully completing the necessary admission exams to enter the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC),[5] Malan accepted the position of assistant preacher in the parish of Heidelberg, Transvaal, where he lived in the same house as the church’s minister, the Rev. Adriaan Louw.[6] Louw was well acquainted with Malan and his family: he had served as the minister of the Riebeek West congregation during the 1880s, during which time he had become close friends with Malan’s parents.[7] Louw had always taken an interest in the young Malan’s progress, and invited him to join him in his work shortly after his return to South Africa.[8]

Malan arrived in Heidelberg right in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the clerical year. It was Pentecost, and Malan was overjoyed at the success of the Pentecostal services, during the course of which a number of new souls dedicated themselves to the Lord for the first time.[9] On 29 July 1905, Malan’s own big day arrived: he was officially ordained into the DRC. None of his family members were able to attend, which saddened him, but his old schoolmaster Theunis Stoffberg and his wife were there. The event itself was deemed to be an exceptional one. Malan’s ordination coincided with a mission conference in Johannnesburg. The delegates all decided to attend the ceremony, and so it happened that, at the height of the proceedings, Malan knelt in front of the pulpit with an unheard-of number of seventeen ministers in attendance to give him their blessing.[10] They formed a crowded half-circle around him, each with his left arm stretched out in order to lay his hand upon Malan’s head.[11]

The community in which Malan now found himself had been ravaged by the devastation of war. A total of 867 of its members had died, whether in battle, in concentration camps, or in the field.[12] Malan worked with a battle-hardened church council: one of its members had lost an arm; another, both his eyes. The town also had a large orphanage that cared for the children who had been orphaned by the war.[13] Upon ‘Doctor’ Malan’s introduction to the Sunday school, the minister’s young daughter – under the impression that all ‘doctors’ were medics – exclaimed ecstatically: ‘But that means that he can treat the orphans free of charge!’[14]

The parish of Heidelberg’s flock was sparsely distributed along the Vaal River, which meant that Malan had to travel for up to fourteen hours in order to visit congregants who lived on the outskirts of the district. These travels would take him away from the town for up to three weeks at a time. On these far-flung farms he conducted services for people who had last attended the church in town before the outbreak of the war. In a crowded burnt-out wagon house – a remnant of the war – the searing heat literally took his voice away as he tried to minister to his deprived flock. Here, on the farms, he encountered desperate poverty, especially among the bywoners.[15]

And yet, in spite of all the hardship that he witnessed, Malan was inspired by the people he met. To Nettie he wrote:

Please do not hold it against me for saying it so bluntly – we have spoken about this many times. What is the difference between the Transvaal and the Colony? To be Afrikaans (not just to feel like it), and to speak and to write it (not least the ladies), is the most natural thing in the world. People do not even dream about doing it differently. Poor, watered-down, emasculated Colony – the limpness and wretchedness and inability to stand on its own feet, although there is more than enough lip patriotism. Men of character and great deeds can, at present, only be born in the Transvaal and the Free State. The Colonial spirit is too impoverished for that.[16]

In spite of its devastation, the Transvaal seemed to Malan like a nationalist’s paradise. These people were so different from those in the anglicised Cape Colony – they appeared to be the embodiment of his ideal. True to his nature, it was not long before Malan sniffed out kindred nationalist spirits. In the Transvaal, he was able to read Gustav Preller’s newspaper De Volkstem. Preller was to become famous for his work as an organiser of the Second Afrikaans Language Movement, as well as for his nationalist publications on Afrikaner history, which he managed to popularise to a phenomenal extent.[17] Like Theal before him, Preller portrayed the Afrikaners’ past as a battle between Afrikaner nationalism, British imperialism and black ‘barbarism’. Through the course of 1905 and 1906, which partially coincided with Malan’s stay in the Transvaal, Preller wrote a series of features on the Voortrekker leader Piet Retief that was published in De Volkstem. In 1906 these articles were published as a book, under the title Piet Retief, Lewensgeskiedenis van die grote Voortrekker. This book took a firm place as one of the first works of prose of the Second Afrikaans Language Movement.[18] It was filled with accounts of atrocities committed against the Voortrekkers, complete with ‘battered baby skulls, dead women, and drifting feathers from the ripped mattresses’.[19]

It was Preller’s work as a language activist that drew Malan to him in 1905. In March of that year, ‘Onze’ Jan Hofmeyr had given a seminal address in Stellenbosch entitled ‘Is’t ons Ernst?’ (Are we earnest about it?)[20] Taking up the issue of language rights, Hofmeyr questioned whether Afrikaners were really serious when they complained that Dutch was being pushed out of the public space by English, since they made no notable effort to exercise their right to language equality. He echoed Malan’s private complaints that much lip service was paid to the issue, but no action was taken.[21]

In response to Hofmeyr’s address, Preller published a series of articles in his newspaper, which were then collated into a booklet entitled Laat’t ons toch Ernst wezen! (Do let us be earnest about it!) While Hofmeyr’s address was concerned with the Afrikaners’ right to use Dutch, as opposed to English, in the public sphere – and especially in the education and religious instruction of their children[22] – the young Preller declared that for Afrikaners, Dutch was a dead language. There was certainly much to be gained from a study of Dutch, but Afrikaans was the language in which Afrikaners expressed their innermost feelings. Therefore, Afrikaans had to be elevated to a written language.[23]

In August 1905, Malan wrote to Preller and requested a copy of the booklet, as the matter was ‘of great importance in view of the future of our nation’.[24] After studying it, Malan wrote to Preller with enthusiasm:

For many years – I can say, since I first began to think about our language issue – I have been resolutely convinced that only the elevation of Afrikaans to our written language in South Africa will be able to safeguard the continued existence of the Dutch language, in whatever form. Your important, engaging and convincing plea about this issue in your pamphlet has filled me with an exceptional amount of interest. The movement, which you have inspired anew, has my full sympathy.[25]

Preller was indeed devoted to the revival of the Afrikaans Language Movement. In December 1905, he established the Afrikaanse Taalgenootskap (ATG) in Pretoria, with D.F. Malan as one of its members. Through this organisation, Malan became part of a new generation of Afrikaner intellectuals and nationalists. The Afrikaner students of the 1890s – who had already demonstrated their distinctness from their elders – had come of age, and now took a clear stance against the older generation that still clung to Dutch and dismissed Afrikaans as too underdeveloped to replace an established language.[26] The new generation recognised the potential nationalist power of the Afrikaans language, and it was they who would develop it into a viable replacement for Dutch through what became known as the Second Afrikaans Language Movement.

During that same December of 1905, Malan was preparing for the next big move in his life – he had received a call from the parish of Montagu in the southwestern Cape to become its minister. This meant much soul-searching, as he had to face his doubts all over again: was he, as a young preacher, able to lead a congregation by himself?[27] Finally, Malan took the step and thereby crossed an important threshold in his life. He accepted the call to Montagu in much the same manner as he had accepted God’s call to the ministry as a young student in Stellenbosch: with intense uncertainty and fervent faith in God’s will. This was reflected in his acceptance letter:

Although I have no doubts that God Himself has called me to this work, yet, taking this decision was not an easy step. I am especially hesitant of accepting work of such importance and extent at this stage. I am clearly conscious of my own weaknesses and shortcomings. Therefore I want to state it here emphatically, that I am willing to take up this work, not because of who I am or can become, but trusting only in God’s grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, and leaning on the tolerance and love of the Church Council and the congregation.[28]

So it happened that Malan bade Heidelberg and the Transvaal farewell, and returned to the Cape Colony to visit friends and family before moving to his new home.[29]

It was in the midst of the sweltering February heat of 1906 that D.F. Malan arrived in Montagu to a welcome that one might have thought would be accorded to visiting royalty, but which was the normal practice when a Dutch Reformed congregation welcomed its new minister. A procession of about sixty or seventy horse-drawn carts accompanied Malan into the town. Addresses were given by nearly every constituency within the church. There was a reception, a dinner, and an inaugural service. At the inaugural service, the church building was packed, which necessitated the church council to insist that only those over the age of fifteen would be allowed inside. Nevertheless, about 1 100 bodies managed to squeeze themselves into seats that were only built to accommodate somewhere between 700 and 800.[30]

The first challenge that Malan faced as minister of his own flock was that the addresses he had been given on his arrival included a petition from the English-speaking community in Montagu requesting that an English service be conducted one Sunday evening per month, as had been the custom in the past. Malan and his new church council had to consider the petition – which also carried the signatures of persons who were either Afrikaners or who were known to be able to understand Dutch. At the meeting, Malan unequivocally stated his opposition – in principle – to English services for the church’s own Dutch-speaking members, and his support for English services for English speakers – in a separate building.[31] Following the deliberations, Malan drafted two letters: one intended for the English-speaking petitioners, the other for their Afrikaner sympathisers. The English letter cordially refused the request in the interests of the town’s poor white community who, on account of their poverty, attended the evening services rather than the morning services, and who did not understand English.[32] The second letter, written in Dutch, was also cordial, but ever so slightly harder, and carried the stamp of its author’s nationalism. It reiterated the argument that the rights and the interests of the poor white Afrikaners were of the highest importance. In addition, Malan asserted that the nation’s language was Dutch, and that its use in the practice of its religion was closely tied to its sense of self-worth and independence as a nation. For the members of Montagu’s Dutch Reformed congregation, there would be no services in English.[33] In the eyes of Montagu’s new minister, language, religion and nationalism were inseparable.

Malan took up residence in the church’s enormous parsonage, which engulfed his newly acquired furniture. His parents, who were present at the auspicious occasion, stayed with him for a while, but as they (and with them, his stepmother’s cooking) were preparing to leave, the young bachelor began to wonder where his meals were going to come from. Cooking was beyond his area of expertise. Thankfully, it was arranged that he could take his meals with a lady who lived close to the parsonage.[34]

The women of Montagu soon discovered that their young minister was a man who possessed phenomenal powers of concentration, accompanied by astonishing absent-mindedness. His meals were prepared for him and sometimes a young girl would be sent to deliver them, neatly packed in a basket. She would usually find him hard at work at his desk, oblivious to her knocks on the door. Eventually she would be forced to tiptoe closer, place the basket on the table next to him, and tiptoe out again, her presence having gone unnoticed.[35] During these years, Malan never ate much. He had simple tastes, and enjoyed nothing more than a hard-boiled egg and some moskonfyt,[36] which his mother used to give to him as a treat when he was a child. His congregants also noticed that he consumed large quantities of coffee when he visited them.[37]

These mandatory house calls nearly overwhelmed him. By August of 1906 he reported to Nettie that his head was spinning from meetings and people, people and meetings. There were always more people for him to be introduced to, and visiting the 230 families in the town consumed all of his time and energy. Once that was done, he had to begin visiting the families scattered across the district. For this purpose, he owned a horse cart and two fine horses – and fortunately the services of a stable attendant to take care of them and the five chickens, as he felt certain that they would all have become emaciated if left only in his care.[38]

To Malan, house calls entailed travelling with his horse cart through the deserted landscape for days on end, sometimes for up to ninety hours.[39] It took him to all corners of the district, where he came into close contact with his human flock as they went about their daily lives. As he described it to Nettie, the area was truly Karoo: if one ever had the inclination to hurl something at a dog, there would always be a stone within reach, and if one had the wish to prick someone, there was never a shortage of thorns.[40]

Malan took his visits to the people of this dry, yet abundant land very seriously. He preferred to invest time and energy in each visit, instead of rushing from house to house like many of his colleagues from the neighbouring parishes. In a small notebook, he recorded details about every member of his congregation. When the various parishes met to report on their work, Malan was the only minister who had not managed to visit all of his congregants during the period of a year – to which he remarked drily that he had done thorough work.[41] Years later, he would write a plea to his fellow ministers not to treat these visits as a routine that satisfied their official consciences, but rather as an opportunity to spend sufficient time with those in doubt in order to lead them to the light. Hurried visits gave the impression of an annual spiritual inspection, with the minister being the spiritual tax collector or policeman from whom his victims hid their sins. Malan felt a true need to bring enlightenment and grace to people who were spiritually ignorant – and the best way, in his view, was to spend time with each person. It gave him a deep sense of fulfilment to provide answers to someone’s difficult questions, or to explain a complicated Bible verse.[42]

His flock regarded him as an intellectual. His sermons were often too difficult and complicated for them to follow, but his listeners were nevertheless in awe of his abilities. Malan continued to buy books, and studied late into the night. He was particularly concerned with equipping himself for his task, and made a point of reading books on psychology. In later years, his insight into human affairs and his ability to handle flammable personalities in difficult situations became legendary, and possibly had much of its grounding in his late-night reading.[43] Yet Malan did not write or publish much during these years – he absorbed and he practised.

To outside observers, Malan was a young man of great potential. At the end of October and for the first half of November 1906, Malan attended his first Synod meeting, which was held in Cape Town. Here he drew attention to himself on account of his nationalist stance on matters of language and religion, which found approval with his audience. His first public appearance was as part of a debate on whether the DRC’s teachers’ training school ought to be moved from Cape Town to Stellenbosch. Malan asserted that a larger matter was at stake – that being nationalist principles – which ought to be the first concern when equipping Afrikaner children for their calling to their church and their state. For this reason, Malan argued, Stellenbosch provided a far more suitable environment for the nurturing of such principles than Cape Town. He also emphasised the importance of mother-tongue education for the sake of the Afrikaners’ national self-respect and continued existence.[44] Responding to Malan’s speech, the church’s actuary told his audience that he felt proud of the Dutch Reformed Church – especially since it had acquired the services of such a learned young man. He also observed that the young ministers who had recently returned from their European studies seemed to be of the opinion that, in the sphere of both education and politics, the Afrikaners had to separate themselves from the English. This, according to the actuary, was a new phenomenon, and deserved the serious consideration of both the church and the nation’s leaders.[45]

While the Dutch Reformed Church’s Synod was taking note of the language issue, the Second Afrikaans Language Movement – which Gustav Preller had established in the Transvaal – reached the Cape Colony. Its foremost campaigners were the young J.H.H. (Jannie) de Waal, who was destined to become an important Afrikaans novelist and playwright,[46] and D.F. Malherbe, who would become a prominent poet and academic.[47] On 3 November 1906, while Malan was in Cape Town for the Synod meeting, the Afrikaanse Taal Vereniging (ATV) was established in the same city, with D.F. Malherbe as its first president and Jannie de Waal as vice-president. Malan also attended the meeting, and was elected to the organisation’s management.[48]

Unlike their colleagues in the Transvaal, the young men who founded the ATV in the Cape had to contend with a powerful pro-Dutch establishment, which manifested itself in the Taalbond. The Taalbond was supported by the older generation, and included powerful Afrikaner leaders and intellectuals such as ‘Onze’ Jan Hofmeyr and Malan’s Stellenbosch professor P.J.G. de Vos.[49] Conscious of the opposition from the older generation, the fledgling organisation took pains to emphasise the advantages of a thorough knowledge of Dutch, and undertook to cooperate with pro-Dutch organisations – in particular the Taalbond. Nevertheless, the new movement’s aim was clear: Afrikaans had to be developed into a written language.[50] Its branches spread across the Cape, in spite of the disapproval of the older generation.[51]

Within this new generation, Malan stood out from the crowd. Just as the Synod took note of his presence, his peers also recognised his potential. For this reason, the ATV appointed him as its chairman at the end of 1907. As D.F. Malherbe later recalled, they ‘desired to have a man of the church who carried much weight among our ranks, in order to give status to our impoverished existence’.[52]

Malan’s yearlong leadership of the ATV was of a symbolic nature. He lived far away from Cape Town and Stellenbosch, where the heart of the organisation was situated, and could not make any noteworthy administrative contribution. He had no training as a linguist or a literary theorist, and could not participate in any of the ATV’s spelling commissions that battled to provide the new language with its own spelling and grammar rules[53] – it was not the reason for his election in the first place. Like many of the ATV’s members, Malan had joined because of his sympathy for the cause – he and others like him recognised the nationalist potential of the Afrikaans language. The ATV was the precursor to the more explicitly nationalist organisations that would enter the political scene less than ten years later: it was a breeding ground for a new generation of young Afrikaner nationalists. Malan therefore did not make any contributions to the development of the Afrikaans language itself but, in terms of adding moral substance to the movement, he was worth his weight in gold. In 1908, he gave one of the most famous speeches of the Second Afrikaans Language Movement to an audience in Stellenbosch. In response to ‘Onze’ Jan Hofmeyr’s address ‘Is’t ons Ernst?’ and Gustav Preller’s booklet Laat’t ons toch Ernst wezen!, Malan’s address was entitled: ‘Het is ons Ernst’ (We are earnest about it).

In his speech, Malan made it clear that his promotion of the Afrikaans language was not for linguistic reasons. His aims were of a purely nationalist nature, as he stated: ‘The Afrikaans Language Movement is nothing less than an awakening of our nation to a feeling of self-worth and to the call to take up a more dignified place in the world’s civilisation.’[54] This meant that the Afrikaans language had to become a vehicle for the Afrikaner nation’s upliftment:

If our nation’s language can never be the bearer of our own literature and our national culture, what else does it mean but that we will always be regarded by others, and that we will regard ourselves, as a dialect-speaking nation. Elevate the Afrikaans language to a written language, make her the bearer of our culture, our history, our national ideals, and in so doing you elevate the nation who speaks it. Keep the national language at the level of a barely civilised provincial dialect, however, and in so doing you will keep the entire nation at the level of a barely civilised, illiterate and lowly class of people.[55]

These words struck a deeper chord than the endless debates on spelling and grammar that characterised the language movement. Without offering a solution to the immediate problem of the linguistic merits of Afrikaans, Malan united his audience behind a broader ideal. In response to Malan’s speech, Gustav Preller wrote: ‘Nou is’t ons ernst!” (Now we are earnest about it!).[56]

By shifting the focus away from linguistics, Malan also managed to maintain a conciliatory tone towards the Taalbond, stating that they had different methods of achieving the same goal – and envisioning the day that the two organisations would become one.[57] This took place within a year of his speech when, in 1909, the tension between the two organisations was diffused in the establishment of the Akademie voor Taal, Letteren en Kunst,[58] of which Malan became a member.[59]

This passion for the nation and its language permeated every aspect of Malan’s life. As the Malan family gathered to celebrate what was to be D.F. Malan Sr’s last birthday, Malan observed the Babel that reigned among the new generation of Malans. His sister Cinie’s two youngest daughters could speak only Chicaranga, a Shona dialect. Koos, who had since married an Englishwoman, had just returned to South Africa, and his little son could speak only English. Fanie’s and Mimie’s children, as well as the daughters from D.F. Malan Sr’s second marriage, spoke only Afrikaans. Nevertheless, the children managed to play together. Malan, the eldest son, and still the only one who did not have his own family, watched their multilingual games and drily remarked to one of his young half-sisters: ‘You had better make a plan to teach this little Englishman and these two little Kaffirs [sic] some Dutch.’[60]

His half-sisters were soon to become a prominent part of his life. To them, he was simply ‘Boetie’ who had studied in Holland, and who came to visit them during holidays; Boetie who was serious and withdrawn, yet enjoyed teasing them; Boetie who would go hiking in the nearby mountains – wearing his tie and tight collar – and who would join the children in roaming around the veld in search of kukumakrankas.[61] Soon after the large family reunion, D.F. Malan Sr passed away. About a year after the funeral his widow, Esther Malan, announced to her daughters that she had finally decided to accept her stepson’s offer to move to Montagu, where the girls would be able to attend a larger school. He, in turn, was desperate for a pastoriemoeder (mother of the parsonage) who could assist him with his work in the church, especially among its women – and, of course, someone who could manage his household.[62] Malan had a particular knack for eliciting the support and involvement of the women in his congregation, who took the tasks normally accorded to the minister’s wife upon themselves.[63] In spite of this, Malan still felt the need for the more extensive support that could only come from a pastoriemoeder.

When Esther Malan and her daughters took up residence in Montagu’s large parsonage – which used to echo whenever its lone occupant dropped something[64] – Malan received the support system he had been longing for. His relief must have been immense. The size of his 1 500-member congregation had never ceased to overwhelm him, and his interests stretched beyond the borders of Montagu’s district. His church council recognised this and was constantly engaged in searching for an assistant minister to lighten his load – but such efforts were not always successful. Malan continued to crisscross the extensive district on his horse cart – alone on the solitary plains or among the rocky outcrops of the Karoo – in order to conduct services for the most far-flung members of his scattered flock.[65] He liked these services, as he could stand among the people instead of preaching from the dizzying heights of the pulpit. The informality of the setting meant that he could greet each person by hand, and he did not have to preach in the formal language that the church demanded. He could preach in a language that the simple people understood, the language of plain evangelical truths, such as sin and grace, repentance and faith, forgiveness and redemption. And, moreover, he could preach in the language of his heart, Afrikaans.[66]

Now he found that he did not return from his journeys to an empty house; there were people with whom he could share the anecdotes from his visits. It was from one of these visits that Malan returned with another new companion that was to be at his side for the next seventeen years: a Collie puppy named Comet – after Halley’s Comet which could be seen in the night sky at the time. Comet shared Malan’s bed (and sometimes even his pillow), as well as the milk and biscuits that his sisters left at his bedside to sustain him through his late nights. Comet followed Malan wherever he went – which could be rather problematic. On Sunday mornings he hid as soon as the first church bells began to ring. He would then sneak in during the service. Sometimes he would quietly lie down by Malan’s sisters’ feet, and on other occasions sit in front of the pulpit, staring up at Malan as he preached. ‘His master’s voice,’ the sisters would whisper to each other. Comet’s decision to climb into the pulpit one day ended this endearing display of canine devotion. Thereafter, he had to be locked away early on Sunday mornings, before the bells could give him any forewarning.[67]

Malan never presumed to be a father to his sisters, but it was inevitable that he would occupy an authoritative role. He took a great deal of interest in their education and, along with their mother, kept a watchful eye on what they read. He never prescribed or forbade, but every now and then he would ask, ‘Are you reading an English or a Dutch book?’ or ‘When was the last time you read a Dutch story?’[68]

Malan’s sisters, in turn, became familiar with their older brother’s extraordinary powers of concentration. Their play seldom disturbed him while he was at work, and he hardly noticed three-year-old Stinie as she roamed around his study and even rode on the back of his chair while he wrote his sermons. But this gift was accompanied by intense absent-mindedness. If Malan was late for dinner his food was kept warm, and one of his sisters would be appointed to sit with him in order to ensure that he remembered to eat. He could become lost in thought and forget about the presence of his meal.[69] Visitors noted his eating habits with fascination – especially the manner in which he perforated his beloved hard-boiled egg with the tip of his knife, instead of decapitating it, as was the custom.[70]

Malan regularly received illustrious visitors, such as the Stellenbosch seminary’s professors Marais, Moorrees and De Vos, as well as other prominent clergymen.[71] In 1911, his church council managed to find him an assistant preacher, the young Dr E.E. van Rooyen, who would later be appointed to the Stellenbosch seminary in 1920. Like Malan, Van Rooyen was quiet and studious and, like Malan, he had graduated from a Dutch university – the Free University of Amsterdam – with a philosophical topic: Hume’s scepticism. When Professor J.W. Pont, who had known both men during their respective times of study in the Netherlands, heard that they lived under the same roof, he wondered aloud: ‘What would they have been silent about!’[72] On Mondays, the family would picnic in the veld, and Malan himself found it comical that Van Rooyen would slip away in order to study.[73] Van Rooyen was also an advocate for the use of Afrikaans as opposed to English and Dutch, and would later participate in the translation of the Bible into Afrikaans.[74] In spite of this common interest, the two men were on opposite sides of the theological spectrum. In later years, Van Rooyen would be among those who persecuted Johannes du Plessis for practising Higher Criticism.[75]

Van Rooyen represented a leaning in the DRC’s theology towards Abraham Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism, while Malan was a liberal theologian – precisely the type that Van Rooyen and his allies wanted to exorcise. Malan, as one of the last South African theological students to have graduated from the University of Utrecht – which was considered a liberal institution – and the protégé of one of Kuyper’s main theological opponents, practised a theology that was similar to that of Du Plessis, who was a renowned theologian and who would later become a professor at the Stellenbosch seminary. Like Du Plessis, Malan practised Higher Criticism and was sympathetic towards the theory of evolution, believing that some biblical events, such as the story of Jonah, were symbolic and did not actually take place. These theological practices brought charges of heresy upon Du Plessis that were driven by graduates from Kuyper’s Free University of Amsterdam, as well as those from Princeton, which also taught a fundamentalist approach to the Scriptures and rejected the distinction between sanctifying knowledge and those passages that were purely historical.[76]

During Malan’s years in the church, Du Plessis organised theological symposiums that were considered controversial by the DRC’s rank and file. Malan took part in at least two of these symposiums – one of which was held in Montagu.[77] In a paper that he delivered on Higher Criticism, Valeton’s influence was indisputable. Malan was also an Ethical theologian who believed that the history of Israel’s religion was God’s means of revealing truth to his followers. Malan asserted that not all tales in the Bible were historically true – the tale of Jonah was an allegory, for instance, in which the fish symbolised the Assyrian mother and Jonah represented Israel, swallowed by the larger power because it had been unfaithful to its calling. As far as Malan was concerned, there was an important distinction between fact and truth: the story of Jonah, like Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, might not have been factual, but it was spiritually true. Malan could see no reason why the Holy Spirit would not have made use of tools such as allegories, legends and myths to convey religious and moral truths – and why the fact that such tales were not literally true diminished their value as part of God’s revelation. He believed that they formed an important part of the study of theology, which had to change along with the times – especially as new methods and new truths were presented by contemporary scholarship. If not, theology was at risk of becoming a field that was merely of antiquarian interest. Therefore, according to Malan, Higher Criticism – which was a product of the field of literary criticism – made an important contribution to the study of the Old Testament.[78]

In spite of these assertions, the sermons that Malan presented to his congregation did not contain such exposés, even though his congregants initially complained that his sermons went over their heads.[79] His surviving sermons were more of a moral nature, although they certainly did not lack clarity and argument. One, in particular, drew much attention and approval. In September 1910, Malan delivered a sermon entitled ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ The title of the sermon was taken from God’s question to Cain, who had just murdered his younger brother Abel, to which Cain had famously replied, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Malan, himself the son of a wine farmer, was deeply concerned about the exceptionally high levels of alcoholism he observed in the wine-producing district of Montagu – especially among its coloured community. The Swartland, where he had grown up, was also known for its wines, but he believed that the farmers there took care to ensure that excesses did not take place. He soon identified the culprit when he noted – with growing alarm – that as the number of local canteens serving alcohol increased, so too did the number of incidents reported to the local police. He saw a correlation between the availability of alcohol and its adverse effects. He placed the blame for the situation squarely on those who signed the necessary petitions that lobbied the municipality to open new canteens, rather than on the individuals who were addicted to alcohol. Since these petitioners were necessarily white, and those who suffered from alcoholism were mostly coloured, Malan also recognised a racial dimension to the problem:

If God has placed the body and soul of another in our hands, then He also has the right – and He also will demand – that body and soul from our hands … our own salvation depends for a large part on the manner in which we deal with the salvation of another. Let us not forget that God places a high, priceless value on every human soul … He has imprinted upon it His own image, His mark of ownership … He was ready to pay for it, yes, for the soul of the poor drunken coloured lying next to the street, a high price, the highest price ever to be uttered by human lips, the blood of the eternal Son. Can He be anything other than filled with a holy solemnity about the salvation of such a soul? Can He demand anything other than a strict account from everyone who had it in his power to save or ruin a soul?[80]

Through the Cain and Abel metaphor, Malan made it clear that the white community in Montagu was indeed its coloured brothers’ keeper. White petitioners had to take responsibility for their position of power. They had it within their power to provide already weakened alcoholics with even more temptation – or to limit the temptation and thereby aid a struggling soul.[81] There was another important component to Malan’s thinking: social ills had to be fought by authoritative measures from the top – it could not be left to the individual to fight them on his own. In this one recognises a mind-set that believed that most problems could be solved by the appropriate regulations, and it was to characterise his solutions to many difficult questions.

Malan’s appeal, which linked his congregation’s Christian conscience to their racial status, struck a deep chord. His views were received enthusiastically. A direct result of the sermon was a draft petition by his congregation to close a number of the town’s canteens. The petition was successful and elicited added measures, such as a limitation on the hours during which alcohol could be sold.[82] Malan, who had expected an angry rebuttal from his wine-producing flock, was astonished by the overwhelmingly positive response.[83] The experience must have diminished his initial fear of tackling sensitive issues – a valuable lesson indeed for a future politician.

At this stage, Malan did not realise that his sermons were paving his way to the political platform. The less educated among his flock might have struggled to follow him at first, but to a discerning listener, Malan’s sermons were an oratory feast, for which they were willing to travel a good distance. M.E. Rothmann (M.E.R.), who would become a well-known Afrikaans author, heard Malan’s sermons in Montagu. She recalled Malan’s sermons as befitting Matthew Arnold’s description of style: ‘Have something to say, and say it as clearly as possible.’ He had the ability to keep his audience spellbound for longer than an hour, and his oration would neither weaken nor waver for a moment. This was due to the incalculable amount of time Malan spent in formulating his arguments. He even refused to address a simple prayer meeting unless he had had the time to prepare. The notes to his sermons became collector’s items among his many admirers.[84] One of these was Andrew Hofmeyr, the nephew of Malan’s Stellenbosch professor N.J. Hofmeyr, who practised law in Montagu. He made copies of Malan’s sermons and sent these to his brother, Willie Hofmeyr. Willie Hofmeyr was a partner in a Cape Town law firm and knew Malan as a fellow founding member of the ATV.[85] It was Willie Hofmeyr who would later persuade Malan to enter politics.

In the meantime, Malan busied himself with the matters of the church – which inevitably reflected the matters of state. The four colonies moved closer together and in 1910 became the four provinces of the Union of South Africa. By the end of 1911 and in the course of 1912, the political parties that represented the Afrikaners in the Cape, the Transvaal and the Free State – the Afrikaner Bond, Het Volk and Orangia Unie respectively – dissolved themselves in order to form the South African Party (SAP). The SAP represented a new ideal: the unification of Afrikanerdom into a single party – although its membership included a few moderate English speakers.[86] The unification of the colonies prompted the DRC to consider its own unification across the new provincial borders. The debate concentrated most of its energy on the position of coloured congregants in the Cape Province. Although the Mission Church had been established in 1881 to provide for segregated worship,[87] coloured members still had the right to belong to the DRC. This right, however, did not extend beyond the borders of the Cape Province, and the northern provinces baulked at the idea of even one or two coloured members from the Cape participating in the national Synod. On this point, church unification broke down,[88] and it would only be achieved after Malan’s death.

Malan himself was in favour of the unification of the church, which he regarded as part of the broader unification of the Afrikaner nation itself. The political unification of South Africa was a dream come true and, initially, it filled Malan with cautious hope. In the light of this victory for Afrikaner unity, the failure of church unification was a genuine disappointment. Malan felt that coloured representatives in the Synod were in such a minority that their presence was negligible and could not constitute a threat to the northern provinces.

In a letter written in May 1912, he lamented the outcome, which he believed was due to poor timing – ‘[n]otwithstanding the new Union, the nation is far from realising that it is now truly one’.[89] The reality was that, among Afrikaners, provincial loyalties ran much deeper than the new loyalty to a united South Africa in which English and Afrikaans speakers formed a single nation. This provincial loyalty was manifested in a near hero worship of prominent personalities who were seen to represent a particular area. Especially in the northern provinces, the heroes of the South African War enjoyed an unrivalled amount of respect. The Transvaal was a Louis Botha-Jan Smuts stronghold, while the Free State adored ex-President Steyn and General J.B.M. Hertzog. In the Cape, admiration for its former prime minister, John X. Merriman, still ran very deep.

A new generation of Afrikaners was on the rise, however. They had not experienced the South African War, and did not have as strong a loyalty to its icons. They began to challenge Prime Minister Louis Botha’s attempts at conciliation between Afrikaners and English speakers. Botha recognised this, and it worried him. What worried him even more was the fact that the younger generation seemed to form an alliance with the most powerful of all Afrikaner institutions, the Dutch Reformed Church. He saw fit to warn Smuts against this impending threat:

Jannie, you and I will now make a stand somewhere – that is certain, for it seems clear that there is underhand collusion against our principles and moderate policy … The young Afrikaners, and especially our Church, are now going too far; we must turn them back before it is too late, for it cannot go on like this.[90]

Unfortunately for Botha, the wave of Afrikaner nationalism within the church, and among the younger generation, continued to swell, with Malan headed towards its crest. In 1911, the students of Stellenbosch organised a language conference to celebrate the Union constitution’s entrenchment of equal language rights for both Dutch and English, which marked a departure from the hegemony of English in the pre-Union colonies. At this conference, Malan gave a moving speech entitled ‘Taal en Nationaliteit’ (Language and Nationality).[91]

In his address, Malan distanced himself from the convoluted problems of linguistics once again and, instead, tied language to a broader nationalist ideal. He was convinced that all of the problems experienced by the Afrikaner community were the result of their national identity and language not being acknowledged, and because they were made to feel that theirs was an inferior culture. The situation was especially acute in schools, where the Afrikaners’ language and history were hushed into a corner. This had a detrimental effect on the Afrikaners’ character, Malan argued, since a nation that had lost its national self-respect could not hope to have a strong character.[92]

The speech revealed Malan’s interwoven world-view, as he intertwined all that was dear to him: language, nationalism and religion. Language was more than just a means of communication:

The language is the membrane that binds everything that belongs to a nation together and makes it one. It is the peel around the fruit, the skin around the body, the bark around the tree; it is not only there to bind together and to include, but also to fence off the outside and simultaneously to make all healthy growth and expansion possible.[93]

To Malan, nationalism was a living, growing organism. It was holy, since the nation only existed because God had willed it so. Malan believed that God revealed himself in history, which proved time and again that disintegration, rather than integration, was the natural order. The tale of the Tower of Babel was an expression of this deep psychological and historical truth. Humanity was diverse, and imperialism, which sought to wipe out this diversity by imposing the hegemony of a single culture, was directly opposed to God’s will. Christianity brought unity, but not at the expense of cultural diversity. Instead, Christianity honoured and elevated it. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit enabled the apostles to speak various languages – and the translation of the Bible into the local German vernacular was an integral part of Luther’s Reformation. Based on this evidence, Malan declared to his audience: ‘My nationalism rests, in the last instance, on a religious foundation.’[94]

Malan believed that, to realise these ideals, forceful personalities and men of character were needed. To Malan, manhood was synonymous with adulthood and a steadfast character. This was an ideal that he strove to achieve in his life, and that he used to inspire others. Years before, when he was a student at Stellenbosch, one of his professors, J.I. Marais, had lamented the dearth of true men. His words had set Malan thinking, and it was in answer to this that he formulated his description of a true man, which he included in the speech:

What is a man? A man is someone with inner strength, someone who is not like the tide, moved and swayed by every wind, but who can assert himself in any environment. A man is someone who can leave his mark on others, because he has his own character. He is someone who has convictions, who knows what he wants, who is aware that he stands for something. A man is someone who knows that there are principles he must hold on to no matter what the cost, and who would, if necessary, willingly give his life for these principles. That is a man.[95]

In reaction to the speech the chairman of the conference, Professor A. Moorrees, rose and pointed to Malan, exclaiming, ‘There is a man!’ To which the audience responded with thunderous applause.[96]

Malan appreciated the force of personality as a vehicle for historical change. He believed that the world was a better place because a Luther had brought about the Reformation[97] – or because an Elijah had defied an Ahab. Even though he did not maintain any contact with his acquaintances in the Netherlands, Professor Valeton’s voice was still echoing in Malan’s ears, and the image of the prophet Elijah was still in his mind’s eye. A mere two months after his moving description of a true man, he was back in Stellenbosch to expand on the ideal in an address entitled ‘De Profeet Elia en zyne beteekenis voor den tegenwoordigen tyd’ (The Prophet Elijah and his relevance to the present day).[98] The address bore a striking resemblance to Valeton’s ‘De strijd tusschen Achab en Elia’ (The battle between Ahab and Elijah).[99] Malan, like Valeton, recounted the power struggle between Ahab – the clever statesman who saved Israel through his shrewd alliances, but at a terrible cost – and Elijah, who would rather perish than compromise the truth as determined by God.[100]

The manner in which Malan recounted the tale resonated with his audience. Utilising the political catchphrases of the day, he transformed his address into a barely veiled criticism of the Botha government. Ahab’s political alliance with the nations around him was ‘conciliation politics’, and ‘racial hatred’ had to be dissolved by ‘forgiving and forgetting about the past’, glossing over cultural peculiarities and fundamental differences and instead focusing on commonalities. In Israel’s case, the cost of ‘conciliation’ was the destruction of its national religion and the loss of the nation’s moral compass, since conciliation necessarily encompassed the importation of foreign gods. This, according to Malan, was an extremely serious matter, as a nation’s god dictated the nature of its morals and ideals – and therefore its future. Malan believed that the future was determined by ideals – ideals ruled the world and shaped the history of both nations and individuals.[101] His emphasis on the importance of ideals was a powerful reminder of the idealist philosophy he had studied as a student – his words echoed those of Berkeley, Hegel and Fichte. It was to form an essential component of his political career: he would become a powerful transmitter of ideals – ideals that were never to be compromised. In Malan’s opinion, the Israelites under Ahab were a nation who had achieved political independence at the cost of their unique national character and personality, their God, and therefore their conscience. To Malan, such compromise was symptomatic of a weak character. In contrast to the spinelessness of the Israelites and their leader stood the prophet Elijah, whom Malan called the ‘man of steel’.[102] Alone and unarmed, he did not flinch in the face of Ahab’s power and Jezebel’s fury.[103]

To Malan, Elijah was a man who possessed greatness as only a child of the desert could. Malan believed that history preferred men of solitude, men who were taught by the desert’s empty plains and eternal sky to be silent and listen to God’s word, who were filled with a sense of eternity.[104] Thus said the minister of Montagu – who himself had spent countless hours traversing the Karoo, who as a child had spent endless hours in the veld, and who had longed for the ruggedness of this world while the cities of Europe bustled around him. It was inevitable that he identified with Elijah and admired the prophet’s fearlessness. He felt that his world was dominated by the spirit of Ahab: politicians were more concerned about public opinion and grabbing votes than they were about principles; his nation paid lip service to their principles and refused to assert their rights. What was needed was the reawakening of the spirit of Elijah – and, as he addressed his audience, he expressed the hope that it contained young men who were willing to pick up the prophet’s mantle.[105] Malan was not yet ready to take the mantle upon himself, and still clung to Valeton’s idea that politics – especially the politics of his own country – was devoid of principles.

Through these public appearances Malan’s prominence within the Afrikaner community was growing, and there were whispers that, in time, he would become a professor at the Stellenbosch seminary.[106] He was already proving himself to be an ardent patron of Stellenbosch and the ideals that the town represented.

During these years there was considerable restlessness within the ranks of the Victoria College. The Union government had received a considerable sum of money from two Randlords, Julius Wernher and Otto Beit, for the establishment of a teaching university in Cape Town, to be located at Groote Schuur, Cecil John Rhodes’s former estate. This was in keeping with a vision that Rhodes had expressed in the 1890s, but which had to be shelved as a result of his complicity in the Jameson Raid. The possibility of a university being established at Rhodes’s former estate was perceived as a direct threat to the Victoria College, which would be forced to close and hand all its students to the new institution. In order to prevent this, a vigilance committee was established in 1911 to keep an eye on any developments affecting the college, and to voice concern and opposition if these developments threatened the college’s existence.[107] Malan became a member of this committee and participated in deputations that visited the Minister of Education F.S. Malan – whose newspaper, Ons Land, Malan had devoured as a student – as well as the entire Botha cabinet. In 1913, the committee drafted a memorandum concerning the issue that drew a lot of press attention.[108] The memorandum carried Malan’s stamp: it asserted that there was much more than just an educational institution at stake. The true issue was the interests of the Afrikaner nation and the ideals that Stellenbosch represented:

Stellenbosch … has been intimately bound to the spiritual, moral and national life of the Dutch-speaking section of the nation for years. It is the place where the Afrikaner nation can best realise her ideals, and from whence she can exert the greatest influence over South Africa. She is the best fulfilment of a deep-seated need that the nation has found thus far. She represents an idea. Therefore, she has become not merely an educational institution, among other things, to the nation, but the symbol and the guarantee of its own powerful, growing national life, which seeks expression.[109]

This idealisation of Stellenbosch as a breeding ground for the Afrikaners’ nationalist ideals contained another dimension: the separation, even insulation of the Afrikaner youth in order to protect them from English influences. The same memorandum dwelt on the negative implications of forcing the Afrikaner youth to study in Cape Town where, at such a fragile stage in their lives, they would lack the supportive and nurturing environment provided by Stellenbosch and the Dutch Reformed Church, and be left to fend for themselves in an environment dominated by English speakers. This would disturb the balance between the two sections of the population, as the one would inevitably achieve an unfair advantage over the other.[110]

The definition of the broader South African nation, and the position of English and Afrikaans speakers within it, formed an important component of Malan’s thinking. In the context of the Botha government’s conciliation politics, the language movement, and the university issue, he identified two clashing ideals. Both ideals acknowledged that the South African nation consisted of two nationalities (black people were not regarded as members of the nation). One of these ideals advocated the amalgamation of the two nations into one – which would inevitably be English. The other, which Malan regarded as the only true ideal, held that

in South Africa there are two nationalities and so it always ought to be; that both will be entirely free and that each will have an equal opportunity to maintain and develop that which is its own. This is the best manner for the greater South African nation to become one, a moral union, founded on a common love for a common fatherland, but it will be a unity that consists of a duality – a dual-unity. [111]

These words were very different from those uttered by Jan Smuts four years earlier: ‘The great task was to build up a South African nation … In a South African nation alone was the solution … Two such peoples as the Boers and the English must either unite or they must exterminate each other.’[112] Malan’s solution, an order in which the two language groups would be ‘separate but equal’, was based on an assumption that cultural equality did not exist as yet. As far as he was concerned, English was still dominant and was hostile towards the Afrikaners and their language. These years were marked by deep divisions and a general animosity between English and Afrikaans speakers, with the language issue presenting an exceptionally explosive dilemma.[113]

The situation also manifested itself in the press. In the immediate aftermath of the South African War, two distinct interest groups were engaged in buying up press organs in order to propagate their political views. On the one hand the British high commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, used state funds to buy the loyalty of a number of newspapers that would propagate the imperial idea – and exploited martial law and censorship to stunt the growth of an opposition Afrikaner press – while on the other hand, Botha and Smuts were able to utilise funds from the Netherlands to counter Milner’s attempts to silence the Afrikaner press. In spite of these machinations, the press appeared to unite briefly – in the midst of the euphoria brought about by Union and the prospect of conciliation between the two camps – but its partisan nature soon re-emerged as the division within the country manifested itself within the Botha cabinet.[114]

Botha, in an attempt to counter the deep rifts in the country, chose individuals from all four provinces to serve in his cabinet. His and Smuts’s sympathies, however, were closer to the ideals of the English-speaking Unionist Party, which formed the official opposition,[115] than to those of the other extreme end of the cabinet, General J.B.M. Hertzog.[116] As early as 1907, Botha and Smuts had begun to move to the centre and reached out to English speakers. This was based on their growing awareness of the wider world of international power politics. The British Empire offered both security and beneficial trading links, and they realised that they could only achieve rapid economic growth if they gained the trust of English speakers of both British and Jewish descent, who controlled most of South Africa’s capital.[117]

For this reason, there was hardly any difference between the policies of Botha’s SAP and those of the Unionist Party, whose supporters were mainly English, and which took it upon itself to protect South Africa’s ties to the British Empire. The Unionists counted men like Leander Starr Jameson (of the Jameson Raid), the mining magnates George Farrar and Lionel Phillips, as well as Percy Fitzpatrick, who had been a prominent Uitlander leader in Kruger’s republic, among its leaders.[118] Both parties advocated the concept of a single South African nation, a non-doctrinaire native policy, white – but not Asian – immigration, economic development, and imperial preference. Neither party advocated special protection for the Afrikaners, a stance that aggravated Hertzog. It was through Hertzog’s intervention that the National Convention – where the terms of the Union were negotiated – accorded equal status to both Dutch and English in all public business, and provided for a bilingual civil service. Hertzog insisted that language equality could only be achieved when both languages were used as a medium of instruction in schools. As a cabinet minister in the former Orange River Colony, he had established parity in that colony, despite being labelled a ‘racialist’ by English speakers who saw no reason for their children to learn Dutch. Hertzog’s educational policy had brought about a clash between two conflicting principles: the right of parents to choose the language in which their children were educated versus the right of society to expect its children to be bilingual. Botha, for his part, felt frustrated with Hertzog for stirring up the language issue,[119] but managed to outmanoeuvre Hertzog when the new Union’s education policy was formulated. Hertzog’s system of absolute parity was abandoned in favour of one that made mother-tongue instruction for the first six school years compulsory in three of the four provinces, and gave parents the right to choose the medium of instruction thereafter. In Natal, the choice was left entirely to parents.[120]

Back in Montagu, Malan – as chairperson of the local high school’s school committee – made a point of asserting the rights of Afrikaans children to be educated in Dutch. As far as he was concerned, mother-tongue education existed only on paper in a system that was dominated by English. In response to a government questionnaire, Malan made it clear that school inspectors had to be bilingual, and requested that the Department of Education conduct all correspondence with the Montagu school committee in Dutch, since it was the language most spoken and understood by the committee, and because, ‘according to Section 137 of the South Africa Act, Dutch is one of the official languages of the country’.[121] The department replied that the practical application of the law was rather difficult, as not all civil servants could write in Dutch, to which the school committee replied that the situation had to be addressed as soon as possible.[122]

When it came to education, Malan’s concerns went beyond the language issue. At a time when poverty among Afrikaners was becoming more and more acute, his pastoral visits to his flock revealed the extent to which parents still ignored the 1905 law that made education compulsory and, to make matters worse, the limited extent to which the authorities enforced the legislation. Making compulsory education a reality in his district – and especially to the children of the town’s poor – became one of his main concerns.[123] The poor white problem was one of Malan’s most pressing priorities. During his studies in the Netherlands he had displayed sensitivity to the issue of poverty,[124] and his work as a minister made the poverty of his flock a daily reality which he witnessed at first hand as he entered the houses of his congregants. It made a deep and lasting impression on him, an impression inscribed even deeper when he later encountered some of the most deprived Afrikaners: those who lived beyond the borders of the Union.

These were also the years when mission work gained increasing prominence within the Dutch Reformed Church. Malan himself came from a family that held mission work in high regard – his sister Cinie worked as a missionary in Southern Rhodesia, and the family still treasured the memory of his deceased brother who, at the age of ten, had wanted to become a missionary. Malan displayed a formidable ability to inspire his congregation’s fundraising efforts, and motivated them to give generously to mission work. The parish of Montagu paid the salary of Rev. George Murray, a missionary in Mashonaland, and later also supported Rev. J.G. Strijdom, a missionary in the Sudan. By 1911, the Montagu parish was making the highest per capita contribution to mission work in the entire Cape Province. Malan linked these fundraising efforts to fundraising for the community’s own poor and thus, as the amount of money donated for mission work rose, so too did donations for poverty relief.[125]

When Malan took part in a large mission conference in Stellenbosch in April 1912, he was approached and interviewed by one of the Synod’s committees about the possibility of visiting Dutch Reformed congregations that were scattered throughout the two Rhodesias. Malan declared that he was able and willing to undertake the journey.[126] He would also write letters on his progress to De Kerkbode, the DRC’s periodical in the Cape Province. These letters took the form of a travel diary, and became popular reading – to the extent that they were also published by Ons Land and Onze Courant, Graaff-Reinet’s local newspaper. The letters were exceptionally well written, and made for such gripping reading that they were collated into a book that went through two prints.[127]

Malan left Montagu on 18 July 1912 in order to wander further north than he had ever been. He was accompanied by David Burger, one of the deacons from his church.[128] Together the two men would undertake what was to become a great adventure. It was to be filled with bad coffee, endless hours on trains, bumpy roads, carts drawn by donkeys that determined their own pace and working hours, a horse that was kind enough to bring variety to a hundred-mile journey by practising every trot known to his kind, mosquitoes that devoured them in the open veld and, above all, the beauty of the African bush.[129] But as he left the town in the full darkness of the night, still glowing from the hearty and spontaneous farewell in the local hall, Malan wondered whether he was to return to Montagu in order to continue his work there, or to bid it farewell.[130] A mere three days before his departure, the church council of the parish of Graaff-Reinet had addressed a letter to him in which it called on him to join their minister, Rev. P.K. Albertyn, in his work.[131] The letter was accompanied by a personal letter from Albertyn in which he implored Malan to accept the offer, as one of their main reasons for calling him to the position was because

we in these parts need a strong man on the terrain of language and nationality … our nation desperately needs you in these parts! Dear brother come, COME and help us! If you want to be the preacher and the student, I would willingly do the greater part of the pastoral visits.[132]

Albertyn foresaw that Malan was headed for great things – he assumed that Malan would become a professor in the not too distant future, and was happy to make whatever sacrifices were necessary in order to acquire the services of a man with Malan’s talents.[133] To Malan, always overwhelmed by the pastoral burden he carried by himself while his heartfelt passions and interests stretched far wider than the borders of his district, this offer must have sounded like manna from heaven. True to his nature, however, it was not an offer at which he jumped. He would mull it over while he journeyed beyond the borders of his country. As he travelled to Bulawayo, he was followed by a letter from the Montagu church council, imploring him to remain with them – unless it was God’s will that he left for Graaff-Reinet.[134] Malan did not come to a speedy decision, but he did not keep his church council in suspense for too long. By mid-August, he sent them a telegram to inform them that he had decided to accept the call to Graaff-Reinet.[135]

God’s will was also foremost in Malan’s mind as he contemplated his own future and that of the continent he was traversing. While on the train to Bulawayo, he spread a newly updated map of Africa open in front of him. It was so different from the one he had studied as a schoolboy. Earlier cartographers had filled the blank spaces on the continent with meticulous drawings of lions, elephants, crocodiles and snakes. Now these fearsome creatures had been replaced by the names of mountains, rivers, lakes and towns that could only intimidate the schoolboy who had to memorise them. Nevertheless, Malan felt that he was heading into a dark continent where uncivilised millions could not tell their right hand from their left – and these people were now the responsibility of the European nations who had painted their colours on the map. To Malan, the map resembled a cake from which the various colonial powers had each taken a bite. They carried the salvation of Africa’s inhabitants on their shoulders, and would have to account to God on Judgment Day about what they had done for the land and the people for whom Christ had given his blood.[136]

These musings revealed Malan as a child of his time – a product of a Social Darwinist mind-set – who saw the world in terms of a hierarchy of civilisations. To Malan, racial differences were God’s creation, they were inherent, the natural order – and they were unquestioned. Racial conflict was the result of the natural order being disturbed, and could be avoided by maintaining the status quo. By virtue of their skin colour and European heritage, white Afrikaners belonged to Western civilisation and were therefore inherently superior to black Africans, whom Malan regarded as primitive. To him, Africans belonged to the heathen nations, who were only now fortunate enough to hear Christ’s message for the first time. But Malan also believed that Africans had a natural and deep-rooted respect for the bearers of civilisation, which was why they addressed white men as ‘baas’ or even ‘Inkosi’ – the same name they used to refer to God. Malan was convinced that Africans had even more reverence for the Afrikaners than for the English; for example, they recognised that Paul Kruger was a greater man than Cecil John Rhodes.[137] Within this context, the Afrikaners had a special, God-given calling. ‘The Afrikaner has power over the Kaffir [sic]. But truly, we would not have possessed this power if it had not been given to us from above. Has God not embedded it with a high and holy calling for our nation?’ Malan asked.[138]

Malan’s idealism about racial relations revealed a deep naïveté about the nature and dynamics of interracial relations. Up to that point in his life, the demographics of the era dictated that his interaction with people of other races was limited to the coloured community of the western Cape. It was a paternalistic relationship in which he was always in a position of power – first as a farmer’s son who knew coloureds only as servants, and later as the man who addressed alcoholism in the coloured community by appealing to his white congregation’s position of power. His knowledge of African people, in contrast, had to come from books and the tales told by his sister and friends who lived in the north. In a world far removed from the racial conflict of the interior Malan had been able to build his ideal. This ideal was confirmed as he travelled through the north, as the traveller is always insulated from the realities of Utopia’s everyday life.

So it happened that he became enamoured with the places he visited and the people he met. Everything and everyone was so unlike the city with its uniform people, who held uniform opinions and had uniform habits, who practised uniform occupations, wore uniform clothes and lived in uniform houses. Here, in the wilderness, there were diverse and unique personalities and unspoilt character. He was overwhelmed by the hospitality and generosity of the people who stood ready to welcome this man of the church with open arms. On his first night in Rhodesia, he slept in an old Voortrekker house, complete with antelope horns mounted on the walls and animal skins on the floor. He held a service outside under the trees and as the hymns rose into the African heaven, he felt as if he had been transported back to the days of the Voortrekker leaders Piet Retief and Andries Pretorius – a time when simplicity, hospitality and sincerity were still the foundation of the Afrikaners’ national character, or so he believed.[139]

As he travelled further into Rhodesia, Malan discovered some more worldly challenges to his elevated ideal of the Afrikaners. The communities in Rhodesia were thinly scattered and well out of reach of the church and its sanctifying community. Many had fallen prey to the ‘worldliness’ around them and stopped attending church altogether, while others attended the services of other denominations simply because it was too difficult to reach the nearest Dutch Reformed congregation, thereby becoming estranged from their own denomination. Malan was disconcerted by the amount of ‘mixed marriages’ between Afrikaans-speaking members of the Dutch Reformed Church and members of the English-speaking churches. He believed that this weakened the bond between congregant and church, and that children born to such a marriage had no bond to the church at all.[140]

It was the first time that Malan used the term ‘mixed marriages’ – and in a religious context. Interracial marriages, which later were to become known as ‘mixed marriages’ in apartheid jargon, between whites and coloureds also took place in Rhodesia – and Malan found it abhorrent. He was convinced that Afrikaners were not party to such unions – only English speakers ‘debased’ themselves in this way. Malan ascribed this to the Afrikaners’ inherent aversion to such a shameful lifestyle, but the few exceptions to the rule concerned him deeply, and constituted an omen that the Afrikaners were also threatened by the spectre of racial mixing which, up to that point, had been kept at bay by the church.[141]

Upon his arrival in Bulawayo, Malan was astonished by the city’s intricate racial hierarchy. It had a large Afrikaans-speaking coloured community who refused to mix with the Africans or to share a church with them. To this end, a separate coloured church was being constructed – which meant that their joining the ‘white’ church was not considered either. Coloured employers insisted that their African servants address them as ‘baas’ and ‘nooi’, or Mr and Mrs. ‘What an indescribably complicated social state of affairs we have!’[142] Malan exclaimed. To this was added the problem of white poverty, which also had an impact on interracial relations. Malan was shocked to discover that the DRC’s orphanage in Bulawayo was filled beyond capacity, and had got to the point where it had to refuse entry to about twenty children. As a result, three of these children were taken in by a coloured family. When the news of this situation reached the Dutch Reformed minister, ‘compassion moved the good minister’s heart to take them into his own cramped dwelling. They are now accommodated in the parsonage’s bathroom, which is a small corrugated-iron structure in the backyard.’[143] These words were written without any reflection – the undesirability of white children living with a coloured family was so overwhelmingly self-evident as to blur the squalor of their new living conditions. To Malan, raising funds to alleviate such a desperate situation was the most important issue at hand, and the image of the three orphans cramped into a corrugated-iron bathroom in the heat of the African sun was sure to move the more privileged Dutch Reformed congregants in the Cape to action.

The appeal for funds was to become a prominent part of his letters to the Cape Province, as Malan found the Dutch Reformed congregations in a desperate situation. Not only were they widely dispersed, they were also too poor to maintain full-time ministers of their own and received only the most sporadic of spiritual nourishment. Malan saw another threat looming over their heads. Their environment not only posed the danger of these people being lost to their church, it also posed the danger of their children being lost to their nation. In Southern Rhodesian schools, Dutch was barely tolerated, while in Northern Rhodesia no state funding was given to a school that taught any Dutch. Afrikaans-speaking children had to attend English schools where, according to Malan, they never heard the gospel in their own language and, to make matters worse, were taught to despise the language of their church and by implication their church itself.[144] For Malan, language, church and nation were so indistinguishable that disregard for one was disregard for all. Even worse, many of these schools were Catholic, which meant that Afrikaner children were falling prey to the menace of the ever-encroaching ‘Roomsche Gevaar’ (Roman Catholic Peril) as it made its way southwards from the Catholic colonial powers in Central Africa. Malan was convinced that the only way to withstand this threat was by establishing a buffer in the form of a strong, Protestant Afrikaner community in Rhodesia – and only the concerted efforts of a well-funded Dutch Reformed Church in Rhodesia could bring this about.[145] Malan’s appeals to his readers’ purses not only spoke to their spiritual conscience, but to their nationalist conscience as well.

Malan travelled further north and deeper into the Catholic heartland. He visited congregations in Northern Rhodesia and finally crossed the border into the Belgian Congo. He was headed for the train’s final terminus, the newly built city of Elizabethville,[146] where a few Afrikaner families had settled. The jungles of the Congo made him feel claustrophobic – the trees were so dense that he could see no further than a few metres at a time and in the thick growth he had no hope of determining his direction. Here, in this wilderness, the possibility of getting lost was a real threat. To Malan, such a place, infested with tropical diseases and tsetse flies, was no place for an Afrikaner. He was hardly impressed with the Afrikaners who had wandered so far to the north.[147]

These Afrikaners were a different breed. They were always trekking, not for any particular reason, but because it had become a religion to them. To Malan, it was a perversion of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination – the belief that whatever happens is God’s will. They justified their nomadic lifestyle by claiming that they were following the Spirit’s call into the interior. Malan was sceptical as to whether this ‘Spirit’ originated from God. The Afrikaners of the Congo did not fill him with any romantic notions harking back to the times of the original Voortrekkers. Trekking taken to such an extreme was nothing but detrimental, Malan wrote:

Here it is certainly not always easy to distinguish between the spirit and the flesh. This at least is certain, that the trekker often suffers great, almost irreparable damage to his most elevated interests. They live completely beyond the influence of the Gospel for months and years, the children grow up uneducated, and the people gradually become averse to regular or hard work. People even run the risk of losing the Bible and family devotions completely. Because, as someone told us, if one has to trek before daybreak in order to escape the heat, and if in the evening the wind blows out the candles in the wagon tent, soon there is no question of Bible study.[148]

Malan’s disapproval dripped from every letter. It is clear that he regarded any spiritual labour among these people as an attempt to plug a leaking dyke. He believed that they ought not to be there in the first place, and already belonged to the class of poor whites. Malan was gravely concerned about poor whiteism, which he believed had a direct impact on the Afrikaners’ God-given calling – as well as their continued existence. It had the potential to disturb the precariously balanced racial hierarchy.

Malan regarded poor whiteism not so much as a poverty of flesh than as a poverty of spirit and mind, when all sense of adulthood and even self-respect had been lost. The only remedy, as far as he was concerned, was to rebuild the character of poor whites.[149] It formed a crucial driving force behind his preoccupation with language rights, as he constantly made it clear that language was directly related to national self-respect, and self-respect, in turn, was directly responsible for character.

The white poverty that he encountered in the two Rhodesias was different. Malan dubbed it ‘pioneer’s poverty’. It was a temporary situation, caused by disasters such as the rinderpest or East Coast Fever, which depleted cattle stocks, or the trial and error that accompanies the establishment of a new settlement. Pioneer’s poverty did, however, pose the danger of converting to poor whiteism, as the above-mentioned disasters prompted people to take up the nomadic lifestyle of transport riding or, even worse, hunting, as a temporary remedy to their difficult situation. If the temporary remedy became a permanent one, family life – with its tender and elevating influence – became lost, one’s sense of responsibility was weakened, children received no education – or if they did, merely a smattering – and moreover, people lost the habit of working hard and regularly on a daily basis. When transport riding no longer offered a living, or when all the game had been shot, they found themselves unfit for anything else. ‘There is no doubt that the poor white problem was born in the back tent of the transport wagon, and mostly behind the butt end of a Mauser,’ Malan declared.[150]

It was essential to solve the poor white problem in order to fend off the ‘Swart Gevaar’ (Black Peril). Malan believed that those whites who tried to ward off the advancement of Africans by denying them the right to vote, or by denying them access to education, failed to grasp the essence of the problem. The racial balance was based on Europeans’ inherent superiority and Africans’ inherent respect for them. As long as Europeans acted in a manner that was worthy of that respect, African advancement, which was a natural process, did not have to be feared, as whites’ inherent superiority would always assure them an elevated position. But if this respect was destroyed by the appalling behaviour of poor whites, withholding education and political and social rights could not save the white race from what was to come:

The violent exclusion of civil rights, which even the most unworthy white may enjoy, will in this case make the eventual revolution only more inevitable and bring it about more rapidly, with the outcome even more ill-fated. If, through his behaviour, the white loses the respect of the native, it means, in any case for South Africa – the Deluge. For this reason alone, if for no other, the South African nation ought to have the highest spiritual and moral standing and be the most civilised nation in the world. From this point of view, the solution of the poor white issue is also the solution to the native issue.[151]

Malan implored his readers to shift their focus. Instead of feeling threatened by Africans, they had to feel threatened by the degradation of their fellow whites:

The Black Peril would not exist if it were not for a White Peril that is a hundred times greater, which undermines and destroys the black’s respect for the white race. That the Kaffir [sic] is wicked, is in the first instance not the Kaffirs’ [sic] fault, it is not in the least the fault of mission work, it is the fault of the many whites who live worse than Kaffirs [sic].[152]

In his travel diary, Malan pleaded incessantly for the Dutch Reformed Church to expand its work in Rhodesia and to build Dutch-language schools. There was, however, also a new, and crucial, turn in his thoughts. He had grown up in a political home, devoured newspapers since his student years, written reams and reams of political opinions to his family and friends, and made rousing speeches on the most politicised issue of his day – the language movement. Politics was like oxygen to him and yet, under Valeton’s influence, he had pushed it away and dismissed it as impure. While he was in Rhodesia, however, it became more apparent to him than ever that policy decisions made at government level determined the nature of society. National upliftment could only be truly successful if the government supported the issues that were close to the nation’s heart, such as the education of its children in the language and faith of its national church. The church could only be successful in its task if the very highest echelons of the state were infused with its ideals. For the first time, Malan began to envision a place for religion in politics:

With reference to the increasing secularisation of our nation … the time might come when there will be an independent Christian-national party in our Parliament that can give a guarantee to the nation that its holiest principles will under no circumstances be turned into tradable commodities.[153]

This vision was closer than he realised. It was still a few months before Hertzog’s dismissal from the Botha cabinet, and more than a year before the National Party would be founded – but deep in the back of Malan’s mind, a door that had been shut for many years began to open.

The last stop on Malan’s journey was a visit to Morgenster, the mission station where his sister had lived and worked since her marriage. One of the missionaries, Maria van Coller, recorded her impression of Malan in her diary: ‘Despite outward appearances, Dr Malan is cheerful, sympathetic (very). Can laugh heartily, reason heartily, especially with women.’[154]

Here, Malan also met mission-educated Africans. The experience strengthened his views on the racial hierarchy and his arguments about white poverty. There were many whites who complained that missionaries who educated Africans stirred up racial tensions, as educated Africans had no respect for whites. For this reason, they were opposed to Africans receiving any education whatsoever. Malan tried to make it clear to them that it was impossible to halt African education – it was inevitable that Africans would strive to elevate themselves:

But even if, for the sake of the majority of the white race, a hostile attitude towards the education of the Kaffir [sic] could be justified, with the natives undeniably striving higher, such opposition would in any case be powerless. You cannot hold the waters of the Zambezi back with your hand. You cannot place a damper on Mount Etna. The only remedy is more, and especially better, education for the white so that he can, also without violence, maintain his superiority. Knowledge is power.[155]

Malan did not feel threatened by, or hostile towards, African education – as always, he shifted the focus back to the Afrikaners. He took pains to assure his readers that the worrisome ‘cheekiness’ of which they complained was nowhere to be found at Morgenster. Instead, he was overwhelmed by the Africans’ courtesy. He tried to explain to his audience, in the best possible terms, that there was nothing negative about Africans learning English. Black missionaries who worked among their own people in their own language also needed spiritual nourishment – and since there were no such books in their own language, they had to be able to read English in order to fulfil such an important need. Speaking English enlarged an African’s earning potential, and improved the manner in which he was treated:

The English are, as a rule, no experts in learning foreign languages and therefore, if he knows English, he can earn more. And besides, if he can understand his master he can do what is expected of him, and then he does not have to be cursed or beaten or kicked, as so often happens.[156]

Like his comments on the children who lived in the minister’s bathroom, these words were written without any reflection – but they were written to an audience who could empathise with the situation. However, Malan made it clear that mere knowledge of the English language did not constitute an education, and was openly hostile to American and British missionaries who laced the gospel with a good dose of cultural imperialism. As far as he was concerned, the education that they provided was designed to tear the African away from his nature and his nation. It would destroy his self-respect and thereby also his character and, ultimately, his future. Self-respect was of crucial importance, as it was the only way to elevate a human being, regardless of colour. This was Malan’s true motivation behind his language activism:

The struggle for the language is a struggle for self-respect and character, and therefore also for the spiritual and material independence of the nation. The satisfactory solution to the language issue is … also the solution to the poor white and poor coloured issue.[157]

He was adamant that black and coloured children, like white children, should receive mother-tongue education during their first six years of schooling. Thereafter, the parents could choose the medium of further education. Such education, however, should not be aimed at producing African or coloured imitations of Englishmen,[158] but had to be tailored to each nation’s particular character and calling:

What has to be done is that the governments of Southern Africa should not, as has been the case up to this point, leave the education of the coloureds to the whims of the Mission societies, even less should they force a wrong and disastrous system on the Mission societies but, taking account of the coloured’s destiny as a labourer, determine a particular native-education policy and embody it in law.[159]

Malan’s views on Africans reflected the conventional wisdom of the time, but these conventions would become the staple of apartheid mythology and discourse more than thirty years later – almost as if they had passed from common knowledge to law of nature.

Malan was overwhelmed by the beauty of the region that he visited. He had seen the capitals of Europe, but remained unimpressed. Here in the African bush, however, he was enchanted. Its beauty was a revelation of God’s greatness. Every place was more beautiful than the next, from the Matopos Mountains to the fertile valleys and the majesty of the Victoria Falls. The Zambezi River overwhelmed him; it was a ‘regal river’, the ‘pride of Africa’. Its clear and living waters, with its ‘dark-green, bushy banks and shady islands present a scene so picturesque and so romantic as to rival any other in the world’.[160] The Zambezi stayed with Malan long after he left. He would return one day, with his bride.

Malan finally returned to Montagu at the beginning of November 1912. In his absence, his travel descriptions to De Kerkbode had evoked a stream of letters and articles. Malan and the Afrikaners of Rhodesia were at the forefront of public interest.[161]

He now had to take the next big step in his life: from Montagu to Graaff-Reinet. There were long discussions between him and his stepmother – her following him was not a foregone conclusion. Finally, however, she decided to accompany him to his new congregation, and so the entire Malan family joined in the preparations.[162]