Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee
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were transferred against their will or forced to take early retirement. Another major grievance was that monolingual English officials were appointed in senior positions to replace officials who had joined the armed forces.
Rob Davies, in later years an ANC cabinet minister, wrote in his book Capital, State and White Labour in South Africa, 1900 to 1960 (1979) that the dissatisfaction among railway officials was so widespread that Paul Sauer, who had become minister of transport after the election of 1948, appointed a Grievances Commission. A total of 2 875 complaints were received from Afrikaans-speaking employees who felt they had been disadvantaged.
Following the 1948 election, in the case of two high-profile positions the NP government made appointment shifts that created a great stir: William Marshall Clark, who, during the war, had been appointed general manager of the SA Railways and Harbours over the heads of two Afrikaner civil servants, was ousted with a generous golden handshake, and Major-General Evered Poole, who had been first in line for promotion to chief of staff of the defence force, was sidelined. There are indications that the change of government disadvantaged another fifty officers who had been pro-war, including Afrikaans speakers, who were demoted or sidelined.
Leo Marquard, a respected liberal commentator, asserted in his book The Peoples and Policies of South Africa (1969) that the NP government reinstituted the policy of a professional civil service. The NP government did insist, however, on the strict application of the bilingualism requirement in the case of civil servants and on compensation for those who had been unfairly dismissed or denied promotion during the war. The predominance of English speakers in the higher ranks in the civil service still continued, and it was only by the early 1960s, more than fifty years after Unification, that people in those ranks reflected the white population composition.12
When I started writing about politics in the 1980s, I often had arguments with English-speaking commentators, notably Ken Owen, who claimed that the NP government had politicised the civil service by instituting a massive purge of English officials after the 1948 election. No evidence was supplied to substantiate these claims. It was more the case that, after the war, there was the perception among English speakers and pro-war Afrikaners that they would be discriminated against. The Civil Service Commission, however, would have acted against blatant injustice.
I have vague memories of how the war affected our household. White flour and rice were in short supply. Contrary to the government’s orders, my father did not hand in his revolver at the police station but buried it in the garden instead. He probably obeyed the instruction that civil servants had to resign from the Broederbond. The fuel shortage meant that my parents sometimes had to cancel plans to visit Grasberg or other places.
In 1999 I asked the well-known South African business magnate and philanthropist Anton Rupert what had been the decisive factor in the NP’s victory of 1948. He was unequivocal: “It was the war that clinched the election for the NP in 1948, not apartheid.”
I can still recall the great joy with which my parents greeted the news of the NP’s victory. It was not apartheid in the first place that had motivated them, but their identification with the Afrikaner volksbeweging (national movement).
The NP fought the 1948 election with several planks in its platform. These included:
a republican plank, which urged that the state should be as independent from Britain as possible;
a cultural plank, which set great store by mother-tongue education and active involvement in the Afrikaans language and cultural movement;
a nationalist plank, which maintained that the state as well as the white community should accept responsibility for the white poor;
a populist plank, which was directed against the big English corporations, especially Anglo American, which towered over the economy. The aim was to establish an Afrikaner corporate sector (the first Afrikaner company had been listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1945);
a racist plank, which advocated white domination and comprehensive discrimination against coloured and black people.
The Afrikaners of my early years were very colour-conscious, and some were openly racist. Yet, on an interpersonal level, there often existed a paternalistic relationship between the “baas” and his “volk” (workforce) and between the “miesies” (mistress) and her “bediende” (domestic worker) that included responsibilities and obligations on both sides. A farmer was respected if he was someone who looked after “his people”.
It was when the Afrikaners acted collectively as a group or party that they showed a much more inhumane face. The Immorality Act, the pass laws and Group Areas were harsh and merciless. Jan Smuts made a noteworthy observation late in his life: “I do not think people mean evil, but thoughtlessly do evil. In public life they do things of which they would be incapable in private life.”13
The urbanised Afrikaner of today is already a generation or two removed from the traditional life on farms or in the small platteland towns. Nevertheless, there are many things Afrikaners still have in common: farm life, an interest in nature, and a love of braaivleis (barbequed meat). The custom of open-air braais took root among town and city dwellers during the 1938 celebrations of the centenary of the Great Trek.
School and church
As schoolchildren, we soon heard that we had to prepare ourselves for a future that would not always be easy. Implicitly, the message was that uncontested white domination would not last for ever, and that a good education would become increasingly valuable.
As a state establishment, our school in Porterville encompassed the entire spectrum of the white community: from parents who were well off to those who struggled to get by, and from pupils who were gifted to those who found it difficult to keep up. The last-mentioned category included two of my classmates, Org and Gys. Once I tried to justify my poor marks in an exam by saying: “Org and Gys fared even worse.”
My mother made it abundantly clear that the poor performance of “Org and Gys” could not be my benchmark. She firmly believed that I was capable of greater things. “Org and Gys” became a saying in our home whenever one of us children offered a feeble excuse for a mediocre performance. On the other hand, we never got the idea that achievement was a precondition for parental love, which sometimes seems to be the case among the ambitious middle class of today.
The school in Porterville was relatively small, and in 1955, my matric year, we were only sixteen in the class. The teachers were generally committed to their work and to the welfare of the pupils. The one weakness was the quality of the English teaching. Combined with the monolingual nature of the town, this deficiency was certainly not a good preparation for university.
At university I would enrol for the subject English Special, the standard of which was considerably lower than that of English I. Even “Engels Spes” I had to abandon later on account of my low marks. I fell in the category of those whom our formidable lecturer Patricia McMagh used to call the “Kakamasians”, or “Members of the Kakamas club” – students whose grasp of English was alarmingly poor. When she congratulated me in 2003 on the appearance of my book The Afrikaners, I reminded her kindly that I had once been one of her “Kakamasians”.
Church and catechism were compulsory components of our education. Besides the great emphasis that was placed on the sermons and on the doctrine of predestination – which is still a mystery to me – I cannot remember much about my Christian instruction. Few churches had a task as daunting as that of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), which had to try to reconcile apartheid with Christianity’s emphasis on the equality of all people.
Ben Marais, whose comprehensive study Die kleur-krisis en die Weste (the English version was titled The Colour Crisis and the West) appeared in 1952, was one of the ministers who rejected attempts to prove that apartheid had a Scriptural basis. When I worked in Pretoria from 1963 to 1965, I had the good fortune of getting to know him. In 1965 he perfomed our marriage ceremony when my fiancée Annette van Coller and I tied the knot.
“Oom Ben” was a respected and beloved minister who never complained about the opposition