Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee
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was that the two-volume work, which ran to a thousand pages, would be accepted as the new orthodoxy. Instead, it became the target of a fiery assault by radical scholars, who were mostly people of my generation. They contended that the liberal approach, as displayed in the Oxford History, was outdated, despite the fact that it was sharply critical of white domination. According to them the emphasis had to be placed on structural analysis, and especially on capitalist exploitation, which, in their view, was the real driving force in history.
I agreed with neither the radicals nor the liberals. What I did not know, however, was that certain Afrikaner historians, particularly Floors van Jaarsveld, would react with disgruntlement to my decision to pursue postgraduate studies at Yale under Thompson. To Van Jaarsveld, this was confirmation of the suspicion that I had crossed over to the liberal side.
A special year
The year that I spent with Annette and our two young daughters, Francine and Adrienne, in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1973 was an enriching experience. For me as a historian, it was a great stimulus. Of all the top American universities, Yale was the one where the largest proportion of undergraduate students majored in history.
I had a spacious office in the department and also spent long hours in the magnificent library. For Annette and the children, though, it was hard at times. We stayed in a minuscule apartment in the Divinity School. Our funds were limited and there was little opportunity for sightseeing trips and tours. At best, we were part of the “Greyhound set”.
At Yale I soon discovered that Thompson harboured suspicion towards me as an Afrikaner. I think he had expected me to be far more openly critical of the NP government and NP supporters. But I had no intention of passing myself off as a “detribalised Afrikaner”. It was clear that Thompson, who identified with the cause of black liberation under a liberal order, was upset by the criticism levelled at the Oxford History and was in search of allies.
Thompson thought highly of Van der Merwe as a historian, but his assessment of the Afrikaners was negative. He wrote that from the time of the first free burghers to the Voortrekkers only one social order had obtained, namely one in which the Afrikaners and their ancestors regarded people of African, Asian or mixed origin as a subspecies of humanity, as “creatures” rather than “people”. This view was, according to him, engraved in the minds of the Voortrekkers, who cemented it in legislation. Hence Thompson concluded: “That was what custom prescribed, self-interest demanded, and God ordained. That was how it always has been and always must be in South Africa.”46
I found it surprising that a historian as sophisticated as Thompson could make such an unhistorical statement, almost as if he simply had to give vent to a sense of resentment against the Afrikaners. It was completely at variance with the positive comments he had expressed in a scholarly article fifteen years earlier about the Republic of the Orange Free State whose constitution was based on that of the United States.47 He ignored the history of the Afrikanerbond in the Cape Colony and that of the early National Party, between 1915 and 1929, which had been in favour of the political and economic integration of the coloured people and had competed zealously for their vote.
Once Thompson asked me directly what I thought of the two volumes. I replied that the Oxford History’s stress on the interaction between people of different races and cultures provided an important corrective to the orthodoxy that white people had always just insisted on segregation, but that I had problems with the book’s view that the Afrikaners and their forebears were inveterate racists. He listened to my explanation in silence.
Thompson was someone with a huge ego and a thin skin. But I would always be grateful to him for the doors he opened for me. In the end we did establish a relationship based on mutual respect. In 1975 he was one of my referees in my application for the vacant King George V Chair in History at UCT. (He had previously occupied the chair.) When Colin Webb, an English-speaking historian, was appointed, he expressed doubt in a letter as to whether Webb’s long residence in Natal would help him to understand the Afrikaners.
Influential people
In 1973, and again in the academic year of 1977/78, I got to know several of the other professors in the History Department at Yale. I always made a point of asking historians which book outside their particular field of research had influenced them the most. A name that cropped up frequently was that of Reinhold Niebuhr. His influential work Moral Man and Immoral Society had appeared in 1932 when the system of segregation in the southern states of the United States was at its worst.48
Niebuhr believed that an oppressive system such as segregation in the American South was not primarily the result of ignorance, erroneous doctrines or irrationality. People organised themselves in communities in order to protect their particular political identity, interests and social values. Contrary to what the liberal creed maintained, such groups did not dissolve easily. As members of a community, they tended to be much more unmerciful towards other groups than in their personal relationships with individuals from other communities. This struck me as an apt description of the Afrikaners.
Niebuhr did not believe that solutions lay in finding “reasonable leaders” who were prepared to talk to the leaders of competing parties or communities and come up with a clever solution. A nation, an ethnic community or a class believed in the justness of its cause. Appeals to people’s conscience and to “reasonableness” and “fairness” would fall on stony ground until the balance of power had shifted sufficiently to make a community change its course. A democracy only became possible once people’s fears about security and their sense of self-worth in a new dispensation were allayed.
Naturally, I also asked Thompson which historians I should study. He singled out De Kiewiet and WM Macmillan, and added that I did not have to take much notice of Lewis Gann’s recently published article on liberal interpretations of South African history. Needless to say, I immediately made a point of reading the relevant article in the Rhodes-Livingstone Journal of 1959.
Gann, a historian of German-Jewish descent, had received his university training in England and worked in the British colonial service before accepting a university position in Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe). He had written books on the history of Rhodesia and about the African continent.
Gann’s argument was that liberals sought to impose an inappropriate model on South Africa. The model was that of British society, which had first granted the franchise to its middle class before extending it to its working class. Unlike South Africa, British was a homogeneous society in terms of race and culture, and a rich and prosperous country to boot.
Gann rightly pointed out that if historians were looking for a model, they should rather study the history of ethnic conflicts in eastern Europe. In these societies ethnic and class differences coincided, as in South Africa; and in eastern Europe, too, ethnic groups had long been engaged in a fierce power struggle.
The dominant group made sure that it kept all the others subordinate. Gann emphasised that while the refusal of the NP government to give black people any representation in Parliament after 1948 could be described as selfish, from a short- to medium-term perspective it was not irrational.
Gann asserted that the fate of political minorities with no power was seldom pleasant, and that the loss of political power by the NP might well also mean the end of the Afrikaners as an ethnic minority.49
During the year at Yale I attended a memorable public lecture by the writer Alan Paton. In many respects a “Christian realist”, like Niebuhr, Paton was also one of the leading voices in South Africa in favour of a liberal alternative to apartheid. He firmly believed that if the international world were to force the Afrikaners to accept majority rule in a unitary state, they would rather “be destroyed than yield”.
But he did not exclude the possibility of a voluntary transfer of power. Paton posed the key question: “When total apartheid is seen to be impossible, what will the Afrikaner intellectuals and religious leaders do? Will they choose white domination or the common society?” In this speech and in various articles, he answered the question himself: “Surely, with their intellectual qualifications and moral views, they must choose the common society.” In Paton’s view, the Afrikaners would not be forced from power. The initiative,