Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee
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HERMANN GILIOMEE
Maverick
Africans
The shaping of the Afrikaners
Tafelberg
Small nations. The concept is not quantitative; it points to a condition; a fate; small nations lack that felicitous sense of an eternal past and future; at a given moment in their history, they all passed through the antechambers of death. In constant confrontation with the arrogance and ignorance of the mighty, they see their existence as perpetually threatened or with a question mark hovering over it; for their very existence is the question.
– Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed (1993)
PREFACE
This book is a companion volume to The Rise and Demise of the Afrikaners, published early in 2019 by Tafelberg. The collection of essays in that book focused on the apartheid era and the transition to a negotiated settlement. The first part of this volume deals with the long-term historical forces that shaped the Afrikaner people: the powerful position that Afrikaner women enjoyed in their marital relationships under Roman-Dutch law, the expanding frontier which gave rise to individualism and later to republicanism, the struggle of the Dutch Reformed Church to remain racially exclusive while spreading the gospel to black people, and the rise of the nationalist movement that carried the Afrikaners to power in 1948.
The second part of this book covers key aspects of the political history of the past quarter of a century, some of which are still controversial. Chapter 5 examines the real and alleged politicisation of the civil service subsequent to regime change in 1948. Rumours of improper political interference abound, but the fact is that until 1994 a stable and professional service supervised by the Public Service Commission was one of the country’s strengths. Although Afrikaners dominated the political system, it was only in the mid-1960s that the upper levels of the civil service reflected the division between Afrikaans- and English-speakers in the composition of the white population. Expertise was retained despite political divisions. Within thirteen years after 1994, however, the civil service reflected the county’s racial composition but at the cost of an enormous loss of experience and expertise.
As I argue in chapter 6, the struggle between African and Afrikaner nationalism was not, as the leadership of the ANC has portrayed it, between the ANC’s non-racialism and the National Party’s apartheid policy but between two different communities. The one, led by Afrikaners, stressed a form of self-determination over issues like education, culture, language, the market and property rights. On the other hand, while proclaiming itself to be a non-racial movement, the ANC was in fact a typical populist movement that wanted to gain full control of the state and the land.
Chapter 7 deals with corruption perpetrated by or condoned by the state. This has been a key issue from the start of ANC rule. In a counter-attack, some ANC leaders have charged that the NP government either initiated or condoned corruption on a substantial scale under its watch. The chapter examines the famous ‘lifeboat’ issue involving state aid to Bankorp during a serious financial crisis in the 1980s.
The subject of chapter 8 is Piet Cillié, long-time editor of Die Burger. He was regarded by several of his peers as the most formidable opponent of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in Afrikaner nationalist ranks. Surprisingly, his critical voice became quiet when John Vorster became leader. Chapter 9 discusses the leadership qualities of people at the helm of the apartheid state. Finally there is a chapter on the current fractured state of the Afrikaner community.
I wish to thank Annette for giving me the mental space to write, Erika for her unwavering support, Albert for exchanging ideas on history and university life, and my children and grandchildren who have not yet read any of my books but whose energy and lewenslus are a source of great pleasure. It is to them that I dedicate this book in the hope that they will one day read it.
HERMANN GILIOMEE
Stellenbosch, 21 November 2019
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Some of chapters in this book have been published before as articles or have appeared on a blog. They are published here with permission of the publishers and are substantially unchanged.
Chapter 1: New Contree, vol. 59, 2010
Chapter 2: From Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson (eds), The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)
Chapter 3: South African Historical Journal, vol. 19, 1987
Chapters 5 and 7 were posted on the blog www.politicsweb.co.za
Chapter 6: From Hermann Giliomee and Lawrence Schlemmer (eds), Negotiating South Africa’s Future (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989)
Chapter 9: From Robert Schrire (ed.), Leadership in the Apartheid State (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1994)
PART ONE
An exceptional history and the growth of a maverick community
The emotional debate about South Africa’s past of colonialism and apartheid draws heavily on the assumption that our history differs little from that of other Western colonies. Where, similarly to South Africa, the land was forcibly taken from an indigenous population that was decimated or completely marginalised. Any comparative study of colonialism would, however, reveal features that have made South Africa exceptional.1
South Africa’s uniqueness starts with the position of women of European descent, which is discussed in chapter 1. It is a topic that has received scant attention in the historiography despite its fundamental importance. In most other halfway or refreshment stations, like the Dutch trading posts in the Far East, European men cohabited with or married slave women or women from the indigenous population. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention and the father of the Eurasian. This was the pattern at the Cape in the first four or five decades after the establishment of a settlement in 1652.
But in the ranks of the parties of French Huguenots who arrived in the late 1680s were many fecund girls. Increasingly a pattern of racial endogamy developed at the Cape among the burghers. Under Roman-Dutch law women enjoyed an exceptional position. The universal community of property was the basis of matrimonial property rights, with each party’s portion merging into the common property. A surviving partner inherited half the estate and each child regardless of sex inherited an equal portion of the rest. Further strengthening the position of women was the fact that the Dutch Reformed Church allowed divorce, including on grounds of adultery.
It was not the Calvinist conception of an exclusive calling that was decisive in shaping the racial character of the Dutch Reformed Church at the Cape but rather the determination of European women to live as Europeans and as Christians in a slave society. A case study of the Stellenbosch district in the eighteenth century shows that women became confirmed members of the church in great numbers well before the men. They would insist that a suitor of any of their daughters become a member of the church too. As a church of slave owners, the DRC made no special effort to challenge slavery or to promote racial equality within its congregations.
The relatively strong position of women had profound consequences. It was one of the major reasons for the development of an endogamous white community, for the decision of many frontier farmers to leave the colony on what came to be called the Great Trek, and for the heroic struggle of the bittereinders during the Anglo-Boer War. In the 1890s the novelist Olive Schreiner painted a remarkable picture of the ‘Boer woman’. She noted that the Boer woman on the farm had already attained what the ‘women’s movement’ in Britain was then striving towards, namely to stand beside her man as his full co-labourer, and hence as his equal. Referring to Roman-Dutch law, she stated: ‘The fiction of common possession of all material goods … is not a fiction but a reality among the Boers, and justly so, seeing that the female as often as the male contributes to the original household stock.’2
Schreiner argued that the Boer woman had no intention of becoming a ‘drone of society’ like upper-class women in Europe, leading a parasitic life in which