Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee
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burghers had not been particularly devout.
Other historians again traced the origins of racism back to the conflict on the eastern frontier where the burghers and the Xhosa clashed in six frontier wars between 1780 and 1836. What was never explained was how the poorly educated frontier farmers managed to influence the much more cultivated inhabitants of Cape Town and its surrounding areas.
After numerous conversations on the stoep of the Lanzerac Hotel in Stellenbosch and many letters, Rick and I formulated an argument with five legs. The first leg was the administrative framework that the VOC initially imposed on the Cape, which distinguished between three legal status groups: Company officials, free burghers and slaves. The government imported slaves (who were exclusively black or Asian) from Africa and the East Indies as labourers. The free burghers were almost exclusively people who hailed from Europe.
Over the first 150 years of the settlement, the legal status group and race/colour started to correlate more and more closely. The burghers were white people and the slaves black people; those who owned land were white, and the landless people were black or coloured. There were many white people who did not own land, but they had the status of burghers. Among other things, they helped defend the landowners’ farms and livestock.
Burgher status went hand in hand with certain rights, obligations (such as commando service) and social status. For example, the VOC appointed only burghers as heemraden and field cornets. Until well into the nineteenth century members of the burgher community did not regard themselves as a race, but referred to themselves as burghers or “ingesetenes” (inhabitants).
The second element was demography. By 1725 the initial imbalance between men and women in the European community, which had given rise to several mixed marriages, had largely disappeared. The European men who managed to find a European wife got married, and a large majority of the others took a black or coloured concubine. As a general rule, children born from such extra-marital interracial liaisons were not absorbed into the European community.
Thirdly, there was the role of the church in the promotion of a racially exclusive white community. The Dutch Reformed ministers were officials of a trading company, the VOC, which saw no profit in christianising black or coloured people. With regard to baptism, some ministers distinguished between born Christians (infants whose parents were Christians and who were baptised immediately) and baptised Christians (whose parents were not Christians). Those in the latter category often had to first prove that they understood the basic teachings of Christianity before they could receive baptism.
After Shaping had already been published, I came across the words of the Stellenbosch minister PB Borcherds. He had to explain to the British governor why, in a district as large as that of Stellenbosch, so few slaves had been baptised. Borcherds replied that he could not baptise slaves before they answered his questions about Christian doctrine to his satisfaction. He expected them to know the answers by heart. According to him, while they did have the “fear of God” in their hearts, they were too “stomp” (obtuse) to answer the questions.51
A fourth element was the system of Roman-Dutch law, which gave women in the Netherlands and in Dutch colonies more rights than those enjoyed by women in any other European legal system. In the event of adultery, a woman could divorce her husband and she then received half of the estate. During the eighteenth century, a pattern was established where women took the lead in becoming confirmed members of the church, and where they insisted that men who courted their daughters first had to be confirmed.52
Finally, the economy was so basic that no need arose to free a limited number of slaves to fill positions (such as those of merchants and soldiers) for which there were not enough Europeans and for which slaves were unsuitable. By contrast, in certain parts of Brazil an intermediate category of mulattoes emerged because of this need. An order without sharp racial distinctions developed in that country, which was completely different from that of the Cape.
During the time Rick and I were working on our final chapter, Cillié de Bruyn carried out genealogical research in the Archives which we would cite. He found that in a sample from the year 1807, only 5% of more than a thousand children had a grandparent that genealogists designated as non-European. Our conclusion was that by 1800 a community had emerged which intermarried and which had developed a high rate of endogamy. Thus a white “nation” emerged in South Africa without there initially having been any plan to “found” one. The VOC was succeeded by a British regime which, in a different way but equally purposefully, entrenched white power and white status.
My collaboration with Elphick provided me with the best possible exposure to the complexity of history and the unintended consequences of historical processes. It was a lesson that stayed with me and that I would find very useful in the last quarter of the twentieth century when the political order again changed fundamentally.
A sometimes venomous debate
In the last three decades of the twentieth century a heated debate raged at academic level between so-called radicals and liberals. It had been sparked in large part by the publication of the two volumes of the Oxford History of South Africa in 1969 and 1971.
The debate was about the question whether race (white versus black) or class (the “haves” who owned land and other fixed assets versus the “have-nots”) had been the key factor in the evolution of human relations in South Africa. Liberal historians tended to argue that certain myths and superstitions about descent or race (such as the idea of “Ham’s descendants”, the Calvinist notion of predestination, and beliefs about white “genetic” superiority) were responsible for white people’s subjugation and exploitation of black people. Radical historians (also called Marxists), on the other hand, proceeded from the assumption that the dominant class exploited other people, for example through slavery in the eighteenth century or through cheap labour in the twentieth century. The capitalist exploiters tried to justify this by means of a racist ideology.
A variant of this question was the following: Were the Afrikaners, with particular ideas that had been shaped by Calvinism, slavery, frontier conflicts and apartheid, the real culprits in the political crisis that started mounting in the country in the 1970s? Or were the real culprits the capitalists, with their exploitation particularly of the black working class?
From the outset I had reservations about the manner in which the race-class debate was conducted. There was a tendency among some liberal historians to serenely blame the Afrikaners for racial conflict in the country’s history while appropriating all the credit for economic growth for the English community and ignoring the massive disruption and exploitation of the capitalist system. Radical historians such as Martin Legassick saw through this and forced the liberal historians to engage in introspection. The Marxists, in turn, regarded nationalist movements as the work of a “petty bourgeoisie” who mobilised people through culture-mongering in order to derive the most benefit from the movement for themselves.
What surprised me was the arrogance and venom with which some radicals in particular fought against the liberals. The reason, of course, was that this was not merely an academic debate but a civil war in the ranks of the English-speaking intelligentsia. If someone considered class the determining factor, it followed almost automatically that he or she also believed that capitalism was the root cause of the South African problem, and that the solution lay in sanctions, boycotts and, for some, revolution. Those who adhered to race (or ideas) as the key element believed instead that capitalism was the solution. If capitalism were to be given free rein, apartheid would be swept away by economic growth, like a sandcastle by the incoming tide. Hence sanctions had to be opposed with might and main.
What the radicals did successfully was to draw attention to the illusions of sections of the English-speaking community and to the ideology of liberalism in South Africa. It was hard to believe that this community, which dominated the economy, had played only a minor role in the development of racism as dominant ideology. The much lower wages that English employers paid their black workers were most likely backed up by a view of black people that hardly differed from racism. By the beginning of the 1970s the white-black ratio for earnings in the private sector was a shocking 21:1 in the mining sector and 6:1 in the manufacturing sector. The vast majority of these employers were English speakers