Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee
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Toynbee’s warning
An important element in Afrikaner nationalists’ thinking was the notion that the NP government would only succeed in building an effective state and a well-ordered society on the basis of a united Afrikaner nation. Growing Afrikaner unity was a new phenomenon. Oral tradition has it that in the 1938 election in the seat of Stellenbosch, university lecturers were split right down the middle.
The Afrikaner unity that developed in the 1950s was based on the possession of state power and the ideal of a republic. Many historians have gone looking in the Afrikaners’ past for a unity that never existed. A question we often discussed as students was whether Afrikaner unity was necessarily a good thing, for the survival of the Afrikaners as well. Would an Afrikaner unity that attempted to incorporate all factions not lead to a political paralysis that could stymie urgently needed reforms?
My interest was piqued by an essay by Arnold Toynbee, a British historian who had studied the rise and decline of two dozen civilisations since the earliest times. Entitled “History’s warning to Africa”, it appeared in 1959 in the opinion magazine Optima which the Anglo American Corporation distributed to its shareholders, of whom my father was one.
I tore the essay from the magazine and kept it in a file in which I preserved the most stimulating articles I came across. By that time Toynbee was no longer the international star he had once been when he graced the cover of Time magazine in 1949, but in this essay he anticipated the Afrikaners’ failure to adapt timeously to South Africa’s political challenge.
In his essay, Toynbee considered the different roads open to dominant minorities in empires. He first looked at the Spanish colonies in Latin America. The Spanish also exploited the native peoples, but here the division between first-class and second-class citizens did not follow racial lines and was therefore not impassable. The barriers to upward mobility were predominantly based on class, not race, and the colonial rulers allowed the elite from among the oppressed into the ranks of the dominant group. The result was continued Spanish predominance, even after their colonies became independent. The same applied to people of European (or mainly European) descent in the former Portuguese colony of Brazil, where they constituted just more than half of the population. After independence, they continued to call the tune at almost all levels of society.
The colonies the Dutch and the British founded in Africa provided a stark contrast. Upward mobility for coloured or black people was difficult, and intermarriage with white people was virtually ruled out. Toynbee noted that there was “no easy way of entry into the … dominant caste for an able and adaptable Bantu [sic]”, and continued: “The Graeco-Roman precedent shows that, even after a thousand years, the roots of domination may still be as shallow as they were in the first generation.”25
He stressed the aspect of demography. If the dominant minority was ahead in technology and culture, as was the case in South Africa, the struggle would be more drawn out and morally more complex than in a clear-cut military struggle. But, he emphasised, “the dénouement may be more tragic”.
Toynbee warned that it would be fatal for a dominant minority to hold on to its supremacy by sheer force against a rising tide of revolt. “Even if its belief in its own cultural superiority was justified, numbers would tell in the long run, considering that culture is contagious, and that an ascendancy based on cultural superiority is therefore a wasting asset.” He expressed some sympathy for the dilemma of minorities: “Voluntary abdication in favour of a majority whom one feels to be one’s inferior is a very hard alternative for human pride to accept.”26 As a prophet of what would happen in South Africa thirty years later when the Afrikaners relinquished power without having been defeated, Toynbee is without equal.
Afrikaner warnings
GD Scholtz, editor of the newspaper Die Transvaler, came to a similar conclusion in his book Het die Afrikaanse volk ’n toekoms? (Does the Afrikaner nation have a future?) I bought this book in my fourth year and, judging by all the underlined sentences, read it attentively. If the white people failed to impose what Scholtz called “total segregation” in good time, he warned, black people’s numerical superiority and the knowledge that they could revolt successfully would be decisive. Unfortunately, the book failed to explain what form “total segregation” should take.
By the end of the 1950s it was already evident that great tension existed in Afrikaner ranks between those who wished to cling to white power and those who were in favour of making radical adjustments in good time in order to avoid the fate Toynbee predicted. Among the Stellenbosch students of my time, a split between the ideologues and the pragmatists started to manifest itself.
For the ideologues, apartheid was an end in itself and racial segregation the answer to virtually any form of social interaction. Theological students, or tokkelokke as they were popularly known, abounded in this camp. Manie van der Spuy, a contemporary of mine who studied psychology, has rightly observed recently that there were two gospels of salvation in our time at Stellenbosch: “Christianity as personal salvation”, and “apartheid as the Afrikaner gospel of salvation”. In both cases, one only had to believe and was not judged by one’s deeds but by one’s faith. Those who deviated in any way from the prescribed dogma ran the risk of being stigmatised as “heretics”.
I sided with the pragmatists, who came from “Nat” as well as “Sap” homes. We believed that especially between white and coloured there should be no sharp division, and that rigid apartheid had to change rapidly to a system where leaders of the various communities exchanged views and cooperated on projects. Universities were the very places where people should make contact across the colour line. The Extension of University Education Act of 1959, which provided for racially separate tertiary education, destroyed the possibility that future leaders could get to know each other and hone their views in debates. In my residence there was considerable sympathy for Bertie van der Merwe and a fellow Simonsberger on the SRC, who were forced to resign in 1959 because they opposed the Act.
Stellenbosch had a tradition of tolerating dissidents. In his student days my father was a supporter of Prof. Johannes du Plessis, a professor at the Theological Seminary, who had played a leading role in the 1920s in bringing leaders from white and black churches together and in mitigating segregation. He was expelled from his post for doctrinal reasons. My father used to refer jokingly to Du Plessis’s opponents by their nickname “oupajane”. (One of the leaders had written a book with the title Op die ou paaie (On the old roads).)
In my time, the only reminder of this church struggle was a statue of Du Plessis that had been erected by his admirers. Owing to the pink hue of the marble, the statue was commonly known as Pink Piet. It was frequently vandalised in late-night pranks by intoxicated students who used to daub it with various colours, especially pink. Our lecturers did not think of informing us of the ground-breaking role of Du Plessis in the fields of theology and race relations.
Another prominent dissident was Bennie Keet, also a professor of theology. In my third year I bought and read his book Suid-Afrika waarheen? ’n Bydrae tot die bespreking van die rasseprobleem (Whither South Africa? A contribution to the debate on the racial question) (Stellenbosch: Universiteitsuitgewers, 1956). He was unequivocal in his rejection of any biblical justification of apartheid. In his view, increased segregation was “a flight from reality”. The challenge for every Christian was: What does Scripture say?
The following year I purchased and read Henry Fagan’s booklet Ons verantwoordelikheid (Our responsibility) (1959), which shaped my thinking to a significant extent. A graduate of Stellenbosch, Judge Fagan was a former journalist of Die Burger and a former UP cabinet minister. As chair of a commission that had investigated the issue of black urbanisation in 1947 and concluded that it was irreversible, he had a much greater understanding than almost anyone else of the political implications of this process.
I could see that Fagan’s argument was very similar to Toynbee’s: as the economy became more sophisticated, the need for communication between the groups would become more and more urgent. Fagan warned that whites, as the dominant group, had far more to lose than blacks from a lack of contact between their respective groups. The homelands offered only a limited solution, as they could accommodate