Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee
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in the open veld to escape internment in the concentration camps.
After the conclusion of peace, my grandfather was detained on St Helena for a further three months. On 19 August 1902, when he was about to depart, he wrote a simple yet moving letter to my grandmother that shows the extent to which the Dutch spoken in South Africa had already evolved into Afrikaans.
In the aftermath of the war, my grandparents managed to get back on their feet financially. Twelve years after the Peace of Vereeniging my grandfather took part in the Rebellion of 1914-15 along with many other farmers from the northern Free State, and was captured after a skirmish at Mushroom Valley. After the government had suppressed the uprising, the rebels were faced with huge claims for damages. In the northern Free State alone, the claims amounted to more than £200 000 (about R240 million today). The Helpmekaar Vereniging (Mutual Aid Association), which had branches countrywide, was set up to raise funds for the purpose of assisting the rebels to pay their debt. The project was extremely successful, and by the end of 1917 all claims for damages had been settled from the fund.
The National Party, which had been founded by General JBM Hertzog in 1914, benefited greatly from this early form of nationalist mobilisation. Without the Helpmekaar movement, my grandfather and the other rebels would probably have been ruined financially. He and my grandmother were staunch Hertzog supporters for the rest of their lives. Their farming operations on their farms Wolwepoort and Prospect in the Villiers district prospered. They were able to send their eldest as well as their third-eldest son (my father) to Stellenbosch to further their education.
A “Blommebuhr” from the Bokveld
I was named after my maternal grandfather, Hermann Henry Buhr (1876–1966), the son of Johann Jacob Buhr and Catharina Gesa Riege. His parental home in Germany had been on a smallholding in the district of Ochsenwerder just outside Hamburg. Here, several generations of Buhrs had grown vegetables for the Hamburg market and transported their produce to the city along the Elbe River.
Johann Buhr was an affluent banker and a member of the Senate which governed the city-state of Hamburg. According to family tradition, he was a “hard, unreasonable and unaffectionate man who was abnormally obsessed with the notion that one should not spend a single moment doing nothing”.
Although Hermann had rebelled against his father in his youth, in his mature years he himself had little patience with children or grandchildren who sat around idly. He once asked a son-in-law who used to spend a long time on his morning devotions whether he could not pray under a fig tree instead and chase away the mousebirds at the same time.
After a few years at school, my grandfather ran away from home. His father discovered later that he had been working in a shoe shop in Berlin. He disappeared for a second time, intent on starting a new life in German South West Africa. According to research by my second cousin Riëtte Ruthven, his name does not appear on the passenger lists of any of the few ships that sailed to Africa in those days. The possibility that he was a stowaway cannot be discounted.
In 1895 my grandfather, aged nineteen, arrived in Table Bay. The ship’s captain refused to let him disembark, possibly because he lacked the necessary travel documents or financial means. Fortunately, the merchant William Spilhaus arrived and gave him an advance. The first that Hermann Buhr’s family heard of his being in South Africa was when his sister Martha received a letter from him from Cape Town.5
He worked for a few months for Spilhaus to repay his debt. While his plan was still to seek his fortune in German South West Africa, he could not afford the trip to that territory. He applied successfully for the position of manager of the store on the farm Grasberg, fifteen kilometres outside the town of Nieuwoudtville on the Bokveld Plateau. This was how my German grandfather ended up on the farm where he would spend the rest of his life.
Grasberg belonged to Elias Albertus Nel, a well-off farmer who owned 40 000 morgen. He and his wife had two daughters, and at first they were dead set against the relationship that developed between their elder daughter, Hester Christina, and the young German. But my grandfather was resolute and enterprising.
When my grandmother left Grasberg in 1898 for a three-week visit to an unknown destination, he wrote her a poem that has been preserved. The fact that he had it printed shows that his financial affairs had greatly improved. The poem gives the impression of a witty and literate suitor.
As poetry, it did not have much merit, but perhaps it cut the knot. Hermann Buhr’s circumstances improved dramatically after Hester and her parents consented to the marriage. Their wedding took place in 1899. Hermann’s brother Henri Buhr arrived from Germany for the occasion and brought along Hermann’s inheritance from his father.
Farmers on the plateau of the Bokveld Mountains, with its erratic rainfall, poor soil and long distances from the market, struggled to make headway. My grandfather’s inheritance enabled him to buy the store on Grasberg. A few years later he acquired a second store, on the farm Brandkop, on the road between Nieuwoudtville and Loeriesfontein.
My grandfather’s stores attracted a considerable clientele from the surrounding farms. They would provide him and his family with a good income for the rest of his life. His brother Henri settled in South Africa in 1903, and bought a store in Loeriesfontein.
Despite not having completed his school career, my grandfather was an intelligent and well-read man. He later subscribed to both Die Burger and a Cape Town-based English newspaper, and to two influential American magazines, the Saturday Evening Post and Life. My cousin Constand Wahl, who had many conversations with him, wrote: “Oupa Buhr’s contribution to the touch of difference that distinguished the Buhr family from the run-of-the-mill Northern Bokveld families was enormous … His policy was to give his children a good education, regardless of the cost. That was certainly a novelty for the Northern Bokveld.”
My grandfather did not immediately become a South African citizen, which might have been cause enough to render him liable to internment during the First World War. Perhaps the real reason for his internment was the bitter animosity between him and his brother-in-law, who also lived on Graskop, and who had in all likelihood informed on him to the authorities. The fact that he had acquired South African citizenship as far back as 1909 did not protect him.
During the Second World War, the entire family was pro-German. Neighbours congregated at Grasberg to listen to the broadcasts of Zeesen, the pro-German short-wave radio station. One of my first political memories is of my disappointment at reading in the paper in 1945 that Germany had surrendered. I cannot recall, however, that the Nazi ideology or even Adolf Hitler was ever discussed. When the horrors of the Holocaust became known later, it was a great shock to the family.
My grandfather identified strongly with the Afrikaner community and was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church. Every Sunday he and my grandmother would drive to Nieuwoudtville to attend the service. He was known for speaking his mind, and once took this habit to the extreme. Just as the service was about to start, he rose from his seat and walked up to the pulpit to inform the dominee that he disapproved of the church council’s decision to build a new parsonage.
My grandfather retained a quality of “otherness” throughout his life. Johan Steyn, a frequent visitor to Grasberg in his childhood days, described him as follows: “He was a refined, cultured person, aloof from the then less cultured farmers of his district – in my view, the brains of Johann [his son] and his brother and sisters came from that side.”
My grandmother, Hester, was renowned for her tact, empathy and talent for reconciling people with each other. But her almost endless patience with my grandfather had its limits. On one occasion she lashed out at him: “Now I can see why you’re at odds with everyone.” To which my grandfather’s retorted: “Well, at least the two of us have got on for more than fifty years.”
The couple had nine children. The eldest, Johann, was born in 1900 and my mother Rina, the third child, in 1903. Elias, the only other son, obtained a degree in agriculture and subsequently took over the farming operations on Brandkop and Grasberg.
Nowadays the tourism industry markets the Bokveld Plateau, with Nieuwoudtville as the commercial hub, as the “bulb capital