Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee
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outlook on life in two ways in particular. They became aware of the vital importance of education in the upliftment of poor Afrikaners, and they reacted strongly against the tendency of some English speakers to look down on the orphans and other poor Afrikaners. My parents resolved to be unashamedly Afrikaans. Instead of calling our parents “Daddy” and “Mommy”, we were taught to say “Vader” and “Moeder”.
My parents moved from Ugie to Sterkstroom, where I was born in 1938. Six months after my birth, my father accepted the post of history teacher in the town of Porterville in the Western Cape. Porterville offered a much gentler and more pleasant environment than the Eastern Cape.
Porterville’s history dates back to 1863, when the first plots were laid out on the farm Pomona. The town was named after William Porter, a popular attorney-general of the Cape Colony. The first school was opened in 1870. In 1876 the Dutch Reformed church was consecrated, and in 1880 the first minister was called.10
When the little school opened its doors in 1870, it had 82 registered pupils and one English-speaking teacher. But the average attendance figure was only 43. There was a fundamental problem: the teacher had lost control over the children. A replacement had to be found, and the school only re-opened a year later.
The Cape Colony only introduced compulsory education for white children in 1905. The school in Porterville, which was initially just a primary school, became a secondary school as well in 1917, and it took another three years before a proper high school for white children was established in a separate building. This was fully two hundred years after the first burghers had settled here, and less than two generations before I went to high school in the early 1950s. Coloured children only gained access to a high school after 1994, when the white school was integrated.
The residents of Porterville had retained something of the independent spirit of their free burgher forebears. Many still kept their own cows so that they could be self-sufficient in terms of milk supply. In the mornings these cows would be taken to the pastures south of the town where they grazed, and in the evenings they were brought home to be milked. The municipality kept a bull in a kraal in the town to serve the cows. He was soon referred as “the Bull from Porterville”, which is how Portervillers are known to this day.
Culturally, the town and district formed one of the most homogeneous communities in the country. Virtually all the inhabitants were either white or coloured, followed the Christian faith, and spoke Afrikaans. With a few exceptions, the coloured Afrikaans speakers were much poorer than their white counterparts. There were only two black African people in the town.
The number of Porterville residents who spoke English as their first language could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. Most Afrikaans speakers’ grasp of English was nonexistent or poor. English was, for all practical purposes, a foreign language.
A Boland childhood
Porterville lies at the foot of the Olifants River Mountains, about 150 km north of Cape Town. It is a tranquil town, abounding in trees and water, with a moderate climate except for a quota of sweltering summer days. The Olifants River Mountains, which separate the coastal plain from the interior, stand sentinel over the town without dominating it.
For Jan Smuts, who had been born in nearby Riebeek West, the most beautiful spot in the world was the view from Riebeek Kasteel over the coastal plain to Cape Town. In my case, it was Porterville’s town dam, from where you could look up at the Olifants River Mountains across the water to the east and down on the town to the west. On balmy summer evenings, my mother would often pack a picnic supper which we enjoyed at the dam. Porterville was a town where children felt safe and secure. You knew who you were, and who your family were. Porterville was my place.
We were three children in a happy family: Jan was born in 1936, I in 1938, and Hester in 1940. The three of us followed the same path through school and church in the town. As eldest child, Jan was the natural leader and he developed an interest in his environment, agriculture and the study of insects at an early age. He would later become a professor of entomology at the University of Stellenbosch, an eminent champion of environmental conversation, and an astute art collector.
I was named after my maternal grandfather, Hermann Buhr, an enterprising and innovative person, a great individualist and a strong family man, a German and an Afrikaner. I never really managed to connect with him. By the time I entered my teens he was already in his mid-seventies, and he had in any case never been disposed to small talk.
My sister Hester, a vivacious and energetic child, became a teacher. Many years later, when the television producer and director Herman Binge made the documentary programme Stroom-op, Hester revealed herself surprisingly as someone with a natural gift for appearing in front of the television cameras.
In our home in Porterville, I suffered from the typical “second-child syndrome” and routinely rebelled against Jan’s authority and some parental decisions. “Against the government”, my mother would remark about my protests.
My father was a well-informed, level-headed and positive person who dedicated his life to his family and to education. My mother was a strong woman, imbued with a great devotion to her family and a sense of duty towards the poor Afrikaners in the town.
My love for history came from my father. In his history classes at school, he tended to emphasise the “story” in history and the role of prominent figures such as Napoleon and the Boer Republic presidents Paul Kruger and MT Steyn. In his lesssons on the French Revolution, he would sometimes go as far as singing the rousing anthem “La Marseillaise”.
After his retirement, my father wrote this message to the school: “Keep in mind that all knowledge and all experiences are of value to one and make one a richer and better person.” He added that, despite temporary disappointments and setbacks, his teaching career had been “happy and fruitful years”.
One of the disappointments had been an unsuccessful application for the principalship. He never applied for a principalship elsewhere. He could see no sense in it, as he identified with the local community and was able to find fulfilment in the town. Financially, there was no need for him to pursue a senior post. He did well with his investments on the stock exchange, especially in gold shares, and could send his three children to the University of Stellenbosch without taking out a loan.
He expressed himself exceptionally well in writing, and assisted me with the Afrikaans translation of The Rise and Crisis of Afrikaner Power (Yale University Press, 1979), which I co-authored with Heribert Adam. Given the chance, he might have become an excellent historian.
War and its aftermath
Both my parents supported the National Party (NP) except for a period in the 1930s, when my father lined up behind General JBM Hertzog, leader of the United Party (UP). The declaration of war in 1939, after General Jan Smuts had gained the upper hand in the UP, caused him to return to the NP. My parents remained loyal to the NP government through thick and thin. They would have voted for the proverbial broomstick if it had stood as the NP candidate in their constituency.
During the war years I was vaguely aware that my parents, like the majority of Afrikaners, were opposed to South Africa’s participation as a member of the Allied Forces. The decision to join the war had been taken in Parliament in 1939 with a slim majority of thirteen votes, which mainly reflected the Afrikaans-English split in the country.
Afrikaner nationalists were not the only ones who felt that the country should not have entered the war on the basis of a split vote in Parliament. In her memoirs, the historian Phyllis Lewsen recounts that JS Marais, a respected liberal historian, told her: “No country should go to war except with multiparty support … The great majority of Afrikaners, and I include myself – though, as you know I am a liberal and hated the Nazis and the Nationalists – supported Hertzog’s neutrality policy.”11
The stories I heard from my parents about the victimisation of Afrikaners during the war would later prove to be true. The Smuts government suspended the policy of employing people on merit to a professional civil service during the war as, understandably, it did not want to run the risk of having anti-war Afrikaner nationalists in strategic