Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee
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also the dark side. After the NP came to power in 1948, Indians were forced to move from business centres to the outskirts of towns. My parents ordered us not to buy from Hassim, an Indian who had a shop in the main street. Few enterprises were owned by coloured people, and up to the last decade or two of NP rule the government or local authorities made virtually no attempt to help coloured entrepreneurs grow their own businesses.
By the time I reached the age of ten in 1948, there was still only a smattering of Afrikaner-owned businesses that were bigger than the town café or the town shop. It was only in 1945 that the first Afrikaner company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE): Anton Rupert’s Distillers Corporation. Bonuskor (in the Sanlam stable) followed a few years later.
Fortunately, there was no question of English companies having to lend the Afrikaners a hand in establishing themselves economically. The Afrikaners had to earn their respect by creating their own successful enterprises. I asked Anton Rupert in 1999 if he could think of any Afrikaans company that had been “empowered” by an English company. He reflected for a moment before answering: “Not one, and I’m very grateful for that.”
My father had joined the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) shortly after his arrival in Porterville. After the congress of 1939, the AB encouraged its members to invest in Afrikaner companies. My father had started buying shares on the JSE at an early stage. He bought gold shares in particular, but also invested in Rembrandt, Federale Volksbeleggings and Federale Mynbou.
Something that irked my father was the poor quality of Die Burger’s business page. In 1959 he asked in a letter to Die Burger’s managing director, Phil Weber, that the newspaper “should become just as authoritative in the economic field as it already is in other fields”. He described Die Burger’s financial reporting, justifiably, as “formal, technical, stiff and dull”. English-language papers, on the other hand, were chock-a-block with analyses of the value of particular shares.
To illustrate his point, my father referred to the shares of Federale Mynbou (later known as Fedmyn), a Sanlam subsidiary that was established in 1953 and that soon achieved success. In 1958 it went public with Bonuskor and Federale Volksbeleggings as the major shareholders.
My father was keen to buy shares in Fedmyn but could not find the necessary information in Die Burger. He complained to Weber about the difficulty investors had in trying to evaluate the transactions of the emerging Fedmyn. To do that, he wrote, “information and yet more information” was required. As matters stood, “we have to hunt around for it everywhere in the English magazines”.
Weber forwarded the letter to the paper’s editor Piet Cillié for answering, with the comment: “Apparently the man means well.” It would still take almost ten years before Die Burger’s business page improved.
The Broederbond “gang”
My father’s Broederbond membership gave him a sense of participation in the Afrikaner nationalists’ debates on policy issues. Along with other branches of the organisation across the country, the Porterville branch studied the working documents that the Johannesburg head office circulated among members for comment. I sometimes chanced upon some of these documents, for instance an analysis of the Tomlinson Commission’s report. As children, we enjoyed playing along to maintain secrecy when the local branch of the AB met at our home. Naturally, I never talked to my friends about the AB. Now and then I would tease my father light-heartedly about his “secret gang”, but I soon saw that I was on dangerous ground.
In the mid-1950s the Porterville branch lodged a complaint because a member from another branch had rejected a teacher they had recommended for membership. At that stage the rector of the University of Stellenbosch, Prof. HB Thom, was chair of the AB’s Executive Council, and the AB management referred the complaint to him. Thom and my father had been classmates at Stellenbosch.
It later transpired that the objection had come from someone who suspected the nominee of having cheated as a referee in a school rugby match. The person in question never became a member. Maybe the AB did not want to take a chance with someone who had a reputation as a crooked referee.
My father never derived any personal benefit from his AB membership. He was shocked when it was alleged in later years that the AB pulled strings to advantage its members, and that some people joined the organisation for their own advantage. “That was never what the Bond was intended for,” he often said.
However, my father did not have any first-hand experience of the modus operandi of the AB outside the confines of Porterville. The dissident Afrikaner theologian Nico Smith relates in his book Die Afrikaner-Broederbond: Belewinge van die binnekant (The Afrikaner Broederbond: Experiences from the inside) (2009) how he was appointed as Broederbonder at the Theological Faculty of Stellenbosch over the heads of two other candidates who were much better qualified. The historian Ernst Stals, who conducted an in-depth study of the AB, writes that from early on it had been the AB’s aim “not only to promote the interests of the Afrikaners in general, but also to help its members advance in their careers”. I would later have reason to wonder whether the AB had something to do with the apparent dead end my career at Stellenbosch reached towards the end of the 1970s.
“The man who refuses to participate”
“Be proud of your own” were words that I and other children of my generation heard repeatedly when language and culture came up for discussion. We took part in volkspele (Afrikaner folk dances) in the church hall and enjoyed them. Rev. Theron, who was our minister during my school years, was vehemently opposed to dancing. It was at university that I first discovered dancing was a harmless social activity and regretted the fact that I had not learnt to dance at school.
The volksbeweging placed great emphasis on the notion that every individual’s contribution counted. This applied in particular to the promotion of Afrikaans as a public language which, constitutionally, enjoyed equal status with English. At school I was struck by ID du Plessis’s poem “Soet is die stryd” (Sweet is the struggle) from his collection Land van die vaders (Land of the Fathers) (1945), which stressed that, despite the pessimism of those who considered the obstacles too daunting, what mattered was the effort one put into the collective struggle, regardless of the eventual outcome. The last two lines underlined the personal responsibility of the individual: Maar die man wat sy deelname weier, / Is die MAN wat sy Nasie VERMOOR!!! (But the man who refuses to participate / is the MAN who KILLS his nation!!!).
When I became involved in the language struggle at the University of Stellenbosch many years later, these words still inspired me.
The message of the volksbeweging in the 1950s was that one should never regard one’s people and one’s language as inferior. Our household at Porterville was well aware that Afrikaans literature, especially in the field of prose, still ranked far below the literatures of the major European languages. A momentous event for us was the appearance of Die Afrikaanse kinderensiklopedie, a children’s encyclopedia, the first volume of which was published in 1948. The editor noted in the introduction that the work had been written by “friends of children”. One of the writers was the poet and intellectual NP van Wyk Louw, whose notions of “lojale verset” (loyal resistance, or rebellious loyalty) and “liberale nasionalisme” (liberal nationalism) would later exert a great influence on me.
We were avid readers of the youth magazine Die Jongspan, which, like the encyclopedia, was edited by Dr CF Albertyn. On his retirement from the publishing company Nasionale Pers, he came to live on his farm in the Porterville district. Following his own retirement from teaching, my father assisted Albertyn on an almost full-time basis with his ambitious project of publishing an adapted version of the Dutch Winkler Prins ensiklopedie through his own company. It involved the translation of articles from Dutch into Afrikaans and the incorporation of additional entries on South African topics written by local experts. Sadly, the project was not a financial success.
During the first half of the 1950s, when I was a high-school pupil, it seemed as if the great ideal of a republic was close to being realised. It was a time of surging optimism. For me, the spirit of the times is represented by the first lines of “Die lied van jong Suid-Afrika” (The song of young South Africa), which we sometimes sang in