Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee
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on Race and Class (1988), Christopher Saunders states categorically that Afrikaner historians made no contribution to the liberal-radical debate. He writes that this “may be explained at least in part” by their “more unquestioning acceptance of white supremacy”.53
Saunders’s view is wide of the mark. It is a myth that English speakers as a community were significantly more liberal than the Afrikaners. In 1988, when the Progressive Federal Party for the first time resolutely propagated a non-racial form of majority government, their policy was supported by nearly all the English newspapers. There was, however, a huge gulf between the editors and their readers. In an opinion poll conducted in the same year, only 10% of English speakers supported majority government, compared with 3% of Afrikaners.54
Afrikaner historians were generally not interested in participating in a debate whose basic terms had been formulated by academics outside the group. Pieter Kapp makes the valid point that the Afrikaner historians attempted to answer the questions put to them by their Afrikaans readers.55 Until about 1960 the most important questions on the part of Afrikaans readers related to the establishment of white control and to what was called the “struggle between Boer and Briton”, which only started to fade away after the advent of a republic in 1960.
The aftermath of humiliation
Instead of the old nationalist historiography, what I identified with was the approach known as pluralism. It seeks to understand deeply divided societies, where a common social will and shared values are lacking, in a particular way. It emphasises the cultural as well as material influences that have shaped the Afrikaners. In this approach, culture represents a force in its own right and is not merely a component of the ideological superstructure that serves to legitimate particular interests, as the radical historians would have it.
Pluralists also grasp the great extent to which politics are driven by national or cultural humiliation.56 My study of Cape society during the first decades of British rule made it clear to me that what had united the burghers as a community was their culture and the disdain with which they were often treated by British officialdom, rather than their material interests.
After the British conquest of the Cape, a small group of burghers, the so-called “Cape Dutch”, offered their services to the new government, adopted English customs, swore unconditional allegiance to the new government – and soon became anglicised. But they were an unrepresentative elite. The majority of the burghers continued to identify with the culture and institutions to which they were accustomed, namely the system of landdrost and heemraden, and their church and congregation. They were well aware of the contempt with which leading figures in the English community regarded “the Dutch” and their culture.
In British eyes, most of the burghers remained nothing more than Hollanders – with the implication that this was an inferior status. Thirty years after the second British conquest of the Cape, Christoffel Brand, a leading Afrikaner in Cape Town, wrote that “their conquerors had continually worked to remind them that they were Hollanders”.57
History studies written in English tend to assess the Great Trek largely in terms of material interests, such as the emanicipation of slaves and the hankering after land beyond the colonial borders. What they overlook, however, is the scornfulness on the part of many government officials and the grave lack of representative institutions through which burghers could air their views.
The writer Olive Schreiner, who had worked as the governess of Afrikaner children in Cradock and other eastern Cape districts a few decades after the Great Trek, commented on the trek as follows:
[What] most embittered the hearts of the colonists was the cold indifference with which they were treated, and the consciousness that they were regarded as a subject and inferior race by their rulers ... [The] feeling of bitterness became so intense that about the year 1836 large numbers of individuals determined for ever to leave the colony and the homes they created and raise an independent state.58
After 1994, two hundred years after the regime change of 1795, it was again the humiliation that had been imposed on black people during the previous two centuries that determined the new government’s politics.
The central question
The big question I asked myself at the start of my career was the following: From what perspective would I tell my story? Tony Judt, one of the most respected historians of our time, was born of Jewish parents in London and grew up there. He never felt himself to be specifically Jewish or English, but identified with both identities at different times. He was neither a radical nor a conventional liberal.
Judt has pointed out that in everyday life, the person we tend to trust the most is the one who is upfront about the perspective from which he comes and from which he tells his story, rather than the one who tries to pass himself off as totally objective.59 Of course, one does not reject the need to avoid partisanship, but in the final analysis one gives one’s personal interpretation.
I also learnt that one can derive great benefit from seeking information from a historian with an ideological perspective that differs from one’s own. My collaboration with Rick Elphick on the analysis we did of early Cape society in the final chapter of The Shaping of South African Society taught me more about historiography than all the classes at Stellenbosch had done.
A focus on both the overall picture and the detail is important. Without the detailed study I had done of Cape society between 1780 and 1812, I would never have grasped the bigger picture of the shaping of a particular society. The same holds true for the transition from white to black control in the years between 1960 and 1994. Perhaps Piet van der Merwe was right in insisting that every aspiring historian first has to undergo an apprenticeship by writing a conventional dissertation on a demarcated period from the past before tackling a topic from contemporary history.
During the year at Yale, I often asked myself the following question: How can the study of history serve to make people, and notably the Afrikaners, aware of the way in which they were liberated from English political, economic and cultural domination, and, on the other hand, inspire them to fight for freedom for all in South Africa?
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