In the bitter aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war, a group of Afrikaner leaders, fearing that the sheer weight of British power and influence would engulf the Afrikaner people and lead to their decline and oblivion, organised new forms of resistance. Many Afrikaners never accepted the idea of being part of the British Empire. Everywhere they were reminded of the presence of British authority. ‘God Save the King’ became the official anthem. The national flag was a British Red Ensign, with the Union Coat of Arms in a lower corner. The Privy Council in London, rather than the Supreme Court, was the final arbiter in the administration of justice. Moreover, on questions of war and peace, South Africa, under the 1910 constitution, was not a sovereign independent state, but bound by decisions of the British government. Most civil servants were English-speaking, even on the platteland. During the interregnum of British rule in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in the postwar era, the whole education system was swept away. English teachers and English inspectors were appointed. English was designated as the sole medium of instruction, except for a few hours a week allowed for teaching in Dutch.
Rather than submit to the new school system, Afrikaner leaders founded their own private schools for what was called Christian National Education that used Dutch as well as English as a medium of instruction, adhered strictly to Calvinist traditions and promoted a sense of Afrikaner national consciousness among students. At the forefront of the schools campaign were the Dutch Reformed Churches, the most powerful Afrikaner institutions to survive the war, determined to preserve Afrikaner culture and religion as much for their own interests as for wider nationalist motives. In 1908, a predikant of the Dutch Reformed Church at Graaff-Reinet, Dr Daniel Malan, urged: ‘Raise the Afrikaans language to a written language, let it become the vehicle for our culture, our history, our national ideals, and you will also raise the people who speak it.’
Hopes that Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans might find a way of resolving their differences and merge into a single South African nation soon began to founder. An election in 1910 brought to power a new government led by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, two Boer-war generals both committed to reconciliation. But other Afrikaner leaders questioned British hegemony. Among them was Barry Hertzog, another general from the war who joined the government but remained a staunch republican. Hertzog was determined that South Africa should develop a separate and independent identity within the Empire, embracing both English and Afrikaners on a basis of complete equality. ‘I am not one of those who always have their mouths full of conciliation and loyalty,’ he said in 1912, ‘for those are vain words which deceive no one.’ And in a clear reference to a recent meeting of the Imperial Conference in London that General Botha had attended, he added: ‘I would rather live with my own people on a dunghill than stay at the palaces of the British Empire.’ Dropped from the cabinet in 1913, Hertzog travelled from village to village in the Orange Free State promoting the Afrikaner cause and leaving in his wake a host of Afrikaner vigilance committees. The following year, with a handful of parliamentary colleagues, he formed a new National Party, demanding that ‘the interests of the Union come before those of any country’.
When Botha and Smuts took South Africa into the First World War, at Britain’s behest, Hertzog stood against them. ‘This is a war between England and Germany,’ he said. ‘It is not a South African war.’ Several of his old colleagues from the Boer war thought the time was ripe for rebellion and issued a call to arms. In sporadic encounters lasting three months, Afrikaner rebels fought government troops. It was an episode that left yet more bitter memories. In the general election in 1915, the National Party won sixteen of the seventeen Free State seats, as well as seven seats in the Cape and four in the Transvaal.
Adding to the anguish of Afrikaner nationalists was an immense social upheaval afflicting the Afrikaner community. Economic change in rural areas, caused in part by the war, in part by the growth of modern agriculture, pitched hundreds of thousands of Afrikaners into an abyss of poverty, precipitating a mass exodus to the towns – die trek na die stad. In 1900, there were fewer than 10,000 Afrikaners living in towns, less than 2 per cent of the total Afrikaner population of 630,000; by 1914, the number had grown to one-third. Yet, as the Afrikaners found them, the towns were an alien and often hostile world. The language of industry, commerce and the civil service was overwhelmingly English; their own language, derided as a ‘kitchen language’, was treated with contempt. Lacking skills, education and capital, many were forced to seek work in competition with cheap black labour and to live cheek by jowl on the ragged edges of towns. Urban poverty became as common as rural poverty. ‘I have observed instances in which the children of Afrikaner families were running around naked as kaffirs in Congoland,’ Dr Daniel Malan told a conference on urban poverty in 1916. ‘We have knowledge today of Afrikaner girls so poor they work for coolies and Chinese. We know of white men and women who live married and unmarried with Coloureds.’
The degradation of poor Afrikaners in towns alarmed many Afrikaner leaders. The rough mining communities which had sprung up on the Witwatersrand were already notorious as places of drunkenness, immorality and crime. Johannesburg, in the words of a visiting Australian journalist in 1910, had become ‘a city of unbridled squander and unfathomable squalor’. Now it was feared that poor whites would sink to the level of African life, breaking barriers of blood and race, debasing the entire Afrikaner stock.
Each year, the ‘poor white problem’, as it was called, continued to grow. Periodic droughts (in 1919 and 1924–7) and depressions (in 1920–3) drove more and more whites off the land. In the depression years of 1928–32 the scale of misery affecting poor whites was immense. A Carnegie Commission report estimated that in 1930 about 300,000 whites, representing 17.5 per cent of white families, were ‘very poor’, so poor that they depended on charity for support, or subsisted in ‘dire poverty’ on farms. A further 31 per cent of whites were classified simply as ‘poor’, so poor that they could not adequately feed and clothe their children. At least nine out of ten of these families were said to be Afrikaans-speaking.
In rural areas, the Commission reported, many families were living in hovels woven from reeds or in mud huts with thatched roofs similar to those used by Africans. A third of these dwellings were said to be ‘unsuitable for civilized life’. Many white families lived a narrow and backward existence. More than half of the children did not complete primary education. ‘Education was largely looked upon, among the rural population, as something foreign, as a thing that had no bearing on their daily life and needs.’
Facing social upheaval across the land and finding themselves in the towns at the mercy of British commerce and culture, Afrikaners responded by establishing their own organisations to try to hold the volk together and to preserve their own traditions. A host of welfare and cultural associations sprang up. In Cape Town, a group of wealthy Cape farmers and professional men established a publishing house and the first nationalist newspaper, De Burger. Forsaking the pulpit for politics, Dr Malan became its first editor and subsequently leader of the National Party in the Cape Province. Among the organisations founded during this period was the Afrikaner Broederbond. It began in 1918 as a small select society, interested principally in the promotion of Afrikaner culture, but it grew into one of the most formidable organisations in South African history.
The black population, meanwhile, was subjected to a barrage of legislation designed to relegate it to a strictly subordinate role and to keep it segregated from whites. A major impetus towards segregation came as the result of an investigation by the South African Native Affairs Commission set up under British auspices in 1903 to work out a uniform ‘Native policy’ for the four South African territories, each of which maintained different laws and traditions affecting the African population. Most members of the commission were English-speakers and were regarded as representing ‘progressive’ opinion on native matters.
The main recommendation of the commission’s report, published in 1905, was that whites and blacks should be kept separate in politics and in land occupation and ownership on a permanent basis. In order to avoid the ‘intolerable situation’ in future whereby white voters might be outnumbered by black voters, a system of separate representation should be established, though political power, of course, would remain in white hands. Land should also be demarcated into white and black areas, as the report said, ‘with a view to finality’. In urban areas, separate ‘locations’ should be created for African townsmen. These ideas on the need for segregation between white and black were widely shared at the time, by friends of the black population as well as by adversaries.
The significance of the commission’s report was that it elevated practices of segregation commonly employed throughout South Africa during the nineteenth century to the level of a political doctrine. Segregation was used by every leading white politician as a respectable slogan and found its way in one law after another onto the statute book.
In 1913, the Natives’ Land Act laid down the principle of territorial segregation and shaped land policies for generations to come. Africans were prohibited from purchasing or leasing land in white areas; henceforth the only areas where Africans could lawfully acquire land were in Native reserves which then amounted to about 7 per cent of the country. The Cape was excluded from the legislation since African land rights there affected voting rights.
The effect of the Act was to uproot thousands of black tenants renting white-owned land – ‘squatters’, as they were commonly known. Some sought refuge in the reserves, though overcrowding there was already becoming a noticeable feature. Others were forced, after selling their livestock and implements, to work as labourers for white farmers. A whole class of prosperous peasant farmers was eventually destroyed. The impact was particularly severe in the Orange Free State where many white farmers lost no time in evicting squatters in compliance with the law. The plight of these destitute families driven off the land was described by the African writer Sol Plaatje, in his account of Native Life in South Africa. ‘Awakening on Friday morning, 20 June 1913,’ he wrote, ‘the South African Native found himself not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.’ Plaatje recorded how, travelling through the Orange Free State in 1913, he found bands of African peasants trudging from one place to the next in search of a farmer who might give them shelter, their women and children shivering with cold in the winter nights, their livestock emaciated and starving. ‘It looks as if these people were so many fugitives escaping from a war.’
Although the amount of land for Africans was increased in 1936 to 14 per cent of the total area of the country, overcrowding caused ruinous conditions. Official reports warned of land degradation, soil erosion, poor farming practices, disease and malnutrition on a massive scale. Unable to support their families in the reserves, needing money to pay for taxes, more and more men headed for towns in search of work.
The same process of segregation was applied to towns. The Native Urban Areas Act of 1925 established the principle that the towns were white areas in which Africans were permitted to reside in segregated ‘locations’ only as long as they served white needs. The Act provided for ‘influx controls’ regulating the entry of Africans into urban areas through greater use of the pass system. Pass laws, commonly employed since the nineteenth century for a variety of purposes, became an integral part of Native policy. African men were required to carry passes recording permission to work and live in a particular white area. They needed passes for travel, for taxes, for curfews, always liable for inspection by police. Africans deemed to be ‘surplus’ to labour requirements were liable to be deported to the reserves.
African workers also faced discrimination in the labour market. In 1911, the government introduced an industrial colour bar giving white mineworkers a monopoly of skilled occupations. In 1924, it attempted to tackle the problem of white unemployment by devising what was called a ‘civilized labour’ policy, giving preference to white workers and restricting black employment opportunities. An official circular defined ‘civilized’ labour as ‘the labour rendered by persons whose standard of living conforms to the standard of living generally recognized as tolerable from the European standpoint’. It went on: ‘Uncivilized labour is to be regarded as the labour rendered by persons whose aim is restricted to the bare requirements of the necessities of life as understood among barbarous and undeveloped people.’ In practice, the policy meant that wherever feasible whites replaced blacks in the public service. The greatest effect occurred on state-owned railways: between 1924 and 1933, the number of white employees increased by 13,000; some 15,000 Africans and Coloureds lost their jobs. Other government agencies and departments were similarly affected. By the 1920s, South Africa had developed an economic system allocating skills and high wages to whites and heavy labour and menial tasks to blacks on meagre pay.
In 1936, African voters were struck from the common roll in the Cape Province, losing a right they had held for more than eighty years. The practical effect of the legislation – the Representation of Natives Act – was limited. African voters at the time numbered only some 10,000, amounting to no more than 2.5 per cent of the provincial electorate and 1 per cent of the Union’s electorate. But the political significance was crucial. As the historian Cornelius de Kiewiet noted: ‘To destroy the Cape native franchise was to destroy the most important bridge between the world of two races.’
Facing the juggernaut of white power, the small black elite – teachers, church ministers, clerks, interpreters, journalists – made strenuous efforts to mobilise political action to protect their interests. In January 1912, at a gathering in Bloemfontein, several hundred prominent Africans formed the South African Native National Congress – later renamed the African National Congress – to oppose discriminatory legislation. The early African nationalists were mostly conservative men, the product of missionary schools, influenced by Christian tradition and concerned largely with their own position in society. For more than thirty years, they organised deputations, petitions and protest meetings. But their attempts to withstand the onslaught of segregation had little effect.
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By the 1930s, the Broederbond had developed into a tightly disciplined, highly secretive group with an elite membership bound together by oath. It had helped launch a range of Afrikaner cultural institutions and was keen to move into new spheres, into politics and business. Its guiding force had become a bevy of Afrikaner academics in the Transvaal, able to provide a new coherence to the aims of Afrikaner nationalism. Those aims were no longer confined merely to defending Afrikaner traditions. Their essential theme was to establish Afrikaner domination. In a private circular issued in 1934, Professor J. C. van Rooy, the chairman of the Broederbond, wrote: ‘Let us keep constantly in view the fact that our chief concern is whether Afrikanerdom will reach its eventual goal of mastery [baasskap] in South Africa. Brothers, our solution for South Africa’s troubles is . . . that the Afrikaner Broederbond shall rule South Africa.’
Yet Afrikanerdom itself was torn by new divisions. In 1932, as South Africa struggled to cope with the consequences of the Great Depression, Hertzog agreed to take his ruling National Party into a coalition with Smuts’s opposition South Africa Party in what became known as Fusion government. The following year, the two leaders went a stage further, deciding to merge their two parties as the United Party.
The split that occurred over fusion represented a fundamental turning point for the Afrikaner people. Hertzog’s purpose was to forge a new kind of unity in South Africa. He no longer feared the menace of British imperialism and sought to establish Suid Afrikaanse volkseenheid – a unity between all South Africa’s whites. His new ally, Smuts, was fully in agreement with this objective. But to Afrikaner nationalists, fusion threatened both their republican aspirations and their hopes for eventual Afrikaner control. Instead of Hertzog’s Suid Afrikaanse volkseenheid, they wanted Afrikaner volkseenheid. Hertzog, they insisted, no longer stood for their interests and thereby had forfeited any claim to leadership of Afrikanerdom.
The nationalist mantle now passed to Malan. Repudiating Hertzog’s ‘betrayal’ over fusion, he launched the Gesuiwerde National Party (GNP) – a ‘purified’ National Party claiming to stand for the aims and objectives of ‘true’ Afrikaners. Gesuiwerde nationalism differed markedly from any of its predecessors. It was not simply a return to the ‘pure’ nationalism of the past, of the kind once espoused by Hertzog. It was a new nationalism brought forth from the depths of deprivation, hardened by new ideology and driven by a ruthless determination to dominate.
The GNP made little impact when it was launched in 1933. When the split occurred, only eighteen members of parliament followed Malan into the GNP, a small minority. For the next few years, Malan’s Nationalists remained in the wilderness. Hertzog dismissed them as a group of fanatics intent merely on stirring up hatred and discord. Yet during that time the foundations were laid for a dramatic revival of Nationalist fortunes.
At the centre of this revival lay the Broederbond. By the mid-1930s its influence extended to every level of Afrikaner society and to every area of the country. Its elite membership had risen to 1,400 in eighty separate cells, mostly professional men, teachers, academics, clergymen and civil servants. Its efforts now were directed to infiltrating members into ‘key positions’ in all leading institutions. With the formation of the GNP, it had also gained what was in effect a political wing. Malan and other Nationalist MPs joined in 1933.
It was under the Broederbond’s auspices that Afrikaner academics and intellectuals began to shape the new nationalist ideology. Christian-Nationalism, as it was called, was essentially a blend of the Old Testament and modern politics, influenced in part by the rise of European fascism. At its core was the notion once expounded by Paul Kruger that Afrikaners were members of an exclusive volk created by the hand of God to fulfil a special mission in South Africa. Their history, their language, their culture, being divinely ordained, were unique. They were an organic unity from which ‘foreign elements’ like English-speakers were excluded.
Afrikaner history was portrayed as an epic struggle against two powerful enemies, the British and the blacks, both intent on their annihilation and only prevented from succeeding by divine intervention. ‘The last hundred years,’ asserted Malan, ‘have witnessed a miracle behind which must lie a divine plan.’ In the context of the 1930s, the greatest threat to Afrikanerdom was seen to come not from the blacks, as it was at a later stage, but from British imperialism and its allies in the English-speaking population. Every effort was made to explain the present plight of the Afrikaner people by attributing it to the evil designs of British policy.
In a bid to gain popular support for the nationalist cause, members of the Broederbond conceived the idea of re-enacting the Great Trek of the nineteenth century at centenary celebrations in 1938. The Ossewatrek, as it was called, soon caught the public imagination and enabled Malan and the GNP to spread the message that Afrikaners as a people could rely only on themselves to fight their battles for survival.
In August, two wagons, named Piet Retief and Andries Pretorius after two famous voortrekkers, started out on the long journey from Cape Town for two destinations: one, a high ridge outside Pretoria; the other, the banks of the Ncome River in Natal, where a Boer commando had defeated a Zulu army at the battle of Blood River in 1838. Other similar treks were organised.
In every town and village through which they passed, ever larger crowds turned out to greet them. Men grew beards and wore broad hats, women donned long voortrekker dresses and traditional bonnets; babies were brought to the side of the wagons to be baptised, and couples stood there to be married; old men and women wept at the touch of the wooden frames and wheels; countless streets were named after voortrekker heroes. In speech after speech, Afrikaners were exhorted to remember their heroic past and their chosen destiny. Together they sang ‘Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’ – The Voice of South Africa – an Afrikaans anthem based on a poem by C.J. Langenhoven, which now became familiar to thousands of Afrikaners. At every meeting the theme was volkseenheid, the need for unity, for a new national effort.
The Ossewatrek generated a torrent of nationalist fervour. At the climax of the celebrations in Pretoria in December, a crowd of 100,000 Afrikaners – perhaps a tenth of the entire Afrikaner community – gathered to witness the arrival of the wagons and to attend the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone of a monument to the voortrekkers.
Less than a year later, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Afrikanerdom was rent apart. The Fusion government led by Hertzog and Smuts split over whether South Africa should join in. Hertzog wanted South Africa to remain neutral; Smuts argued for an immediate declaration of war against Germany. By a vote of eighty to sixty-seven in parliament, Smuts took South Africa into the war. A large majority of Afrikaners were outraged that South Africa had been dragged into another of ‘England’s wars’. Overnight, Afrikaner republicanism became a potent political force.