Afrikaner nationalism captures the state
A Miracle Election
‘The outcome of the election has been a miracle. No one expected this to happen. It exceeded our most optimistic expectations. Afrikanerdom has lived under a dark cloud and the future has been black for many years. We feared for the future of our children. But the cloud has disappeared and the sun is shining once more.
In the past we felt like strangers in our own country, but today South Africa belongs to us once more. For the first time since Union, South Africa is our own. May God grant that it always remains our own.’
— Prime Minister Dr DF Malan, 1 June 1948.
ON 1 JUNE 1948 Dr and Mrs DF Malan embarked on a ‘victory ride’ by train from Cape Town to Pretoria. Throughout the night and day of that triumphant journey, at every little station and siding, people gathered to cheer the learned doctor and wish him success.
Crowds Welcome Prime Minister, Dr DF Malan,
at
Pretoria Station, 1 June 1948
In Pretoria, thousands of excited Afrikaners waited, waving vierkleur flags, to greet their new Prime Minister. As he arrived, a few wept, unashamed of their public emotion. To the strains of the hymn, Praise God from Whom All Blessings How’, young people brought forward an immense vierkleur banner. The republican flag was also hoisted over the Union Buildings. The atmosphere was one of heightened jubilation. The day of the long-awaited Afrikaner revolution had dawned.
The National Party’s shock victory in the 1948 elections surprised even its own members. The victory was a slim one — only a five-seat majority. Yet this tenuous hold on the political control of the country grew steadily, and the National Party remained the ruling party for many decades. What was the background to this historic victory?
BETWEEN THE END of the war and the 1948 election came a period of confusion and contradiction. Soldiers returned from war with high expectations. White soldiers hoped to be rewarded for protecting the Western world against fascism. Black soldiers returned, believing they had fought for a new world, for a democratic South Africa. Both groups were disappointed. They returned instead to unemployment, housing shortages, food rationing anc high prices.
Poverty, racism and persecution continued as before. The government seemed to be tightening its control over black townspeople. It had ruthlessly crushed the post-war mineworkers’ strike, and ignored the Passive Resistance Campaign. As the demand for black labour dropped after the war, city councils mounted stricter and more frequent pass raids A number of municipalities planned removal~ and segregated housing schemes.
There was also criticism from within the establishment itself. While the Johannesburg City Council, for example, continued with plans to demolish black suburbs like Sophiatown, Newclare and Western Township, the newspapers gave much publicity to the re forms recommended by various government commissions.
Both the 1942 Smit Committee and the 1947 Fagan Commission recommended this abolition of the pass laws. They urged that urban blacks be recognised as a permanent part of the urban community. The Both Commission of 1948 (published shortly before the election) recommended labour reforms and a limited recognition of black trade unions.
For certain sections of the white population, these suggestions pointed towards an alternative, more progressive road South Africa might take. Some movements, such as the Springbok Legion, led largely by ex servicemen, began to agitate for more democratic reforms.
A demand for change was in the air and it came from man quarters. The background to this widespread dissatisfaction — described in the first three sections of this document — was the economic and social development that took place during the fifteen years of economic growth before 1948.
Many whites became highly anxious as a result of these changes. The growing militancy of urban and working-class blacks (including the protest by Indians against the Ghetto Act) was deeply threatening. Many working whites also felt their economic position was very insecure. WAR, WORKERS AND WAGES tells of the marked change in the composition of labour in the factories, with more black men taking over jobs as machine operatives, where before production was dependent on white artisans. Farmers, who traditionally relied on overseas markets to sell their products, criticised the Smuts government for their ‘shortage’ of labour, and for not controlling the flow of labour away from the countryside and into the towns.
The National Party was able to offer an apartheid package, which appealed to an alliance of various Afrikaner classes, including white workers, farmers, businessmen, professionals and intellectuals. This section will show how Afrikaner nationalism developed out of the determined efforts of a few committed nationalists to mobilise Afrikaans-speaking whites behind their cause. Political, social and economic conditions were in their favour. In 1948, through long-term persistence, and through the weakness of their opponents, the nationalists won their day.
Constructing Afrikaner nationalism
Thousands great the trek wagons, Johanesburg, december 1938
IN RECENT YEARS, historians have commented that Afrikaners were far from being one people.1 It is misleading, they say, to speak of ‘the Afrikaner’ or the ‘yolk’ as if white, Afrikaans-speaking people were one, uniform mass. For at least 150 years, Dutch-speaking South Africans were divided, scattered and unaware of national unity. It was only when a systematic effort was made that national consciousness became widespread. In the nineteenth century, for example, settled Boers and townspeople in the Western Cape, differed greatly from the Voortrekkers (who themselves were not a united movement — many parties had split up to trek in different directions). Even in the Boer republics there were divisions between rich and poor, landowners and bywoners.
With industrialisation, class differences separated Afrikaners further. The success of Afrikaner nationalism must be seen against the historical background of the north, particularly the Transvaal. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many Boers trekked beyond the Cape Colony to look for land and also to remove themselves from British rule. In their struggles for land and independence, these trekkers fiercely resisted British rule. The Boers fought the British a number of times for control of land — in the Eastern Cape, in Natal, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, often making political alliances with black chiefdoms to protect their territories (but also, at other times, allying themselves with the British against black rivals for land).
Then, with the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and gold on the Rand, the struggle for South Africa’s mineral wealth began. Gold and Workers described the causes of the ‘Second War of Independence’, the Anglo-Boer War. Its outcome was that the British, and the English-speaking mine owners, were to control the growing capitalist economy on the Rand.
But not all Afrikaners shared the same history. In the Cape, many were urban professionals, while even the farmers had more in common with Cape English settlers than with the children and grandchildren of the trekkers who had left so many years earlier.
Afrikaner nationalism began to take off after two wars of independence against the British in the Transvaal. During the second war (the Anglo-Boer War) the British ‘scorched earth’ policy —burning down Boer farmhouses to prevent them from providing shelter for Hoer soldiers — and the herding of Hoer women and children into overcrowded and unhygienic concentration camps, where thousands of children died, left deep scars in Hoer consciousness for many years.
Language of Opposition
Smuts, who had been a Boer general during the war, wrote:‘Had it not been for Milner and his extreme measures, we Afrikaners would probably all quite happily have been speaking English by now. By his opposition to our language, he helped to create it.’
Thousands
of Boers grew increasingly angry at Lord Milner’s aggressively
English policy. The new governor of the defeated Hoer Republics tried
to impose ‘superior English civilisation’ on
Hoer children. In some schools, those caught speaking Dutch or Afrikaans were
made to carry placards saying ‘I am a donkey’.
Even before the Anglo-Hoer War, Afrikaans-speakers in the Transvaal lived in a society dominated by English mine owners. And after the war, thousands of public servants, teachers and clerks were obliged to use English at work or lose their jobs. There was a sharp backlash to this ‘Anglicisation’ policy. The humiliations of a people forced to speak ‘the conqueror’s language’ greatly strengthened Afrikaner nationalism.
One of the most important ways of mobilising people behind the movement for Afrikaner nationalism was the careful fostering of an Afrikaans culture, language and literature. This highly conscious promotion, started at first by a small number of journalists, preachers and teachers, became known as the taalbeweging.
Afrikaans was consciously fostered as a language. But there were many difficulties and a long road to travel before Afrikaans was recognised as an official language, on a par with English. In the process of this struggle, many Afrikaners became mobilised and politicised.
In the nineteenth century Boers officially spoke Dutch. Hut middle-class Boers in the Cape tended to favour English as the language more likely to advance their careers as farmers exporting to Britain, merchants or public servants. On the Rand too, English dominated the economy and the job market, as Hendrik Hoffman’s story shows.
Towards
the end of the nineteenth century, however, a political party known
as the Afrikaner Bond had been started in the Western Cape. Its publication
Die Afrikaner Patriot made a small and shaky beginning, read mainly
by the less well-to-do rural readers whose home language was not Dutch
but Afrikaans, sneeringly referred to as the patterjots by Dutch speakers.
Afrikaans was not a systematic language. Dialects differed widely — at
the beginning of the century, for example, six dialects existed in the Cape
province alone. Furthermore, Afrikaans had an unfavourable image for wealthy
Boers. It was associated with both colour and class; the middle class regarded
it as a kombuistaal — a ‘kitchen language’ to be used when
addressing servants or farm labourers. Generally, the poorer the community,
the more its Afrikaans differed from the ‘purer’ version spoken
in the Western Cape. For example, the language spoken by the poorer peasants
in Namaqualand caused concern:
In (this area) one finds the weakest Afrikaans. Ignored by Church and State, these people have been in constant contact with Griquas and Hottentots, who speak a low semi-barbaric form of Afrikaans. We must make a distinction between civilised Afrikaans and the language of the street, playground and servants.
Afrikaner intellectuals worked very hard to ‘clean up’ Afrikaans —they appropriated the language developed by the ‘coloured’ lower classes and claimed it as their own, ‘white’ language. They removed black and Malay as well as English influences; for example, many southern Nguni words, which had entered the dialect in the Eastern Cape, were replaced by Dutch words in the new dictionaries devised by teachers and academics, to reinforce the idea that Afrikaans was respectable and ‘white’.
On the Rand, where the dominant language of an industrial society was English, working-class Afrikaans was riddled with English-based words. For example, the Afrikaans Garment Workers Union magazine Klerewerker (which promoted the use of Afrikaans) adapted many words derived from English — they used words like ‘werkendeklas’, instead of ‘arbeidersklas’. They also included creative new uses of words, like brandsiek, which was used to describe a ‘scab’, a person who broke a strike by working.4 Hut these were lost as they arose out of working-class experiences, and were excluded from official recognition by the middle-class compilers of Afrikaans dictionaries, and magazine and book editors.
As Afrikaans became more widely used, it also became good business. Magazines written in Afrikaans grew in circulation. Novelists and non-fiction writers were able to publish their ideas regularly through the Afrikaans publishing house, Nasionale Pers, set up during the First World War. A new Afrikaans literature began to take shape and, with the production of cheap paperback books, found a ready market.
The spread of railway lines into the white farming areas enabled mass publications to reach the countryside, where Afrikaans, rather than Dutch was spoken. Women, especially, were responsive to Afrikaans literature and magazines.
The construction and appropriation of Afrikaans by professional and committed Afrikaner nationalists took many years of hard work. Then, with the Pact government in power, a ‘whitened ‘and ‘purified’ Afrikaans replaced Dutch as one of the two official languages of South Africa. And so the old language movement became part of a wider concern for Afrikaner mobilisation.
Trek celebrations
ON 5 JUNE 1918 14 men met in Danie du Plessis’ house at 32 Marathon Street in the modest suburb of Malvern in east Johannesburg. Hendrik Klopper delivered what was recorded as ‘a moving speech’ and the group formally pledged themselves to form an organisation called Jong Suid-Afrika.
The Johannesburg meeting described above was to develop into a powerful national organisation, the Broederbond, or ‘band of brothers’, consisting of a carefully chosen cadre of ‘Afrikaans speaking Protestants of good character. Members were mostly professional people — teachers, lawyers, journalists and ministers. They swore secrecy, and saw themselves as a vanguard group who undertook to promote the Afrikaner cause and work towards an Afrikaner republic in whatever field they found themselves — in politics, at work, in the schools, in church, in the press, or in any other sphere of public or working life. The aim was a fundamentally political one: to win power as Afrikaners in South Africa. As the Chairman put it in 1932:
The national culture and welfare of the nation will not be able to flourish to the fullest extent if the people of South Africa do not politically break all foreign bonds. After the cultural and economic needs, the Broederbond will have to dedicate its attention to the political needs of our yolk. And this aim must include a completely independent, truly Afrikaans government for South Africa — a government which by its embodiment of our own personal head of state, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, will inspire us and bind us together to irresistible unity and power.
They began systematically to recruit and introduce Broederbond members into every sphere of public, economic, political and social life, locally in every town and dorp in the country, as well as in the most powerful circles. The interests of Afrikaner nationalists were put forward wherever possible, in both high and low places. They also encouraged the formation of cultural clubs to foster the Afrikaner identity through language, literature, and religion, and the development of a network of Afrikaans organisations.
WOMEN, THE MAIN bearers of culture, were also mobilised in the service of uplifting the Afrikaner people. The printed word was one way of communicating the duties of the Afrikaner woman.
Women were particularly important as the transmitters of the mother-tongue, and as educators of children. In the early years, Afrikaans (or a form of Afrikaans) was spoken mostly in the home — English dominated the workplace. In women’s magazines and in Afrikaans literature, women were warned of the dire consequences of ‘intermarriage’ (see extract below).
Building a Nation with Words
‘If a woman runs her home with skill and knowledge — knowledge of hygiene and domestic science.., and if she leaves nothing to chance, then her children will go far and achieve greater things for country and yolk. If Afrikaans women read and pick up ideas from this magazine, and then apply this knowledge to the household, then a better future awaits her children. — Die Boerevrou, March 1919.
In a short story, ‘Elke hond krij sij dag’ —‘Every dog has its day’ — an Afrikaans woman develops pretentious ideas. She begins to call herself Mary and to speak English. She marries a faithless British man, who deserts her. In another story Helen, who comes from a wealthy lam4’, also develops ‘fancy’ English notions. But she comes right when she marries Hennie from a lowly but honest family of ‘unaffected Afrikaners — hospitable, homely, pleasant and patriotic.
The figure of the Afrikaner woman had a special place in nationalist culture. While the Afrikaner man was the active agent fighting for the yolk, the woman played a supportive role. She was praised for her courage and moral strength in the face of suffering. It was she who, at the time of the Great Trek, left her home to accompany her man into the unknown wilderness so that the purity of the yolk would be preserved. It was she who, with her children, suffered at the hands of Zulu and British alike. After the wanderings and struggles of over fifty years, women and children had had their homes burned down and died in their thousands in British concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War. But suffering merely strengthened them, and they set a shining example to their men folk to struggle on. A leading Afrikaner figure said in 1929:
If we take note of all that the woman has meant in our people history, then we cannot but recognise that supporting it all lay a great moral principle. Her influence was consoling and up4fting. The sheer power of the life of our people had its roots in the pure life of the woman. Her influence kept the man from despair
Thousands of women were inspired by this image of themselves, and by the role held up to them as faithful and loving supporters of a noble cause. After the Anglo-Boer War more and more middle-class women became involved in charity work, and were exposed to the destitution of families in the platteland and the traumas of unemployment in the towns. In a letter of appeal for donations, one of the founders of the Suid-Afrikaanse VroueFederasie (Women’s Federation), Georgina M Solomon, described
some of the heroic women who spanned their own bodies into the ploughs, in yokes of nine women to draw each plough! And thus they prepared the soil; then sowed the grain, or planted the produce wherever they expected to feed their precious children in the enforced absence of their men.
It was a way of life not unlike the day-to-day duties of black women on the land, particularly as migrant labour removed more and more men from the homestead. But such comparisons were of no comfort. The same appeal went on to point out with horror that white Afrikaner women were working with blacks in the cities. The writer related how ‘Boer Girls were serving under the coolies in the coolie laundries’, and called for donations to ‘prevent the fatal step from being taken; or upon us lies the eternal shame and disgrace.’ The preservation of the family was seen as central: ‘...the family is the cell of the community.’
Women’s charity work exposed them to poor and working-class Afrikaners, and they became active in promoting the Afrikaans language, religion and culture among these people. They also alerted their communities and churches to the major social issues.
The women’s organisations concerned themselves with social work, which promoted Afrikaner interests. They organised house visits to the poor, helped to set up Afrikaans nursery schools, and granted bursaries to Christian National Schools. They also supported certain strikes (for example the white miners’ strike in 1946), and helped with building hostels for working Afrikaner girls and low-paid youths, to guide them to an Afrikaans environment in the city. By their 50th anniversary in 1954, a major women’s organisation was able to proclaim:
The SAVF urged the state to establish factories so that needy people could find work and be saved and become independent; asked many times for [an Afrikaans] technical college in Pretoria; called for higher standards and wages for the police force; separate and better housing for [white] railway workers and, where possible, black workers in subsidised work to be replaced by disabled whites.
As wives and mothers, and through their organisations, white Afrikaans-speaking women supported white Afrikaner nationalism and contributed to its success.
FOR HISTORICAL REASONS, most of the Rand’s less skilled white workers were Afrikaners. They came from rural areas with out much industrial training or experience. As a result, Afrikaner tended to get the lower-paid or more dangerous jobs, while English-speaking workers dominated the well-paid and well-organised craft industries. By 1939, almost 40% of Afrikaner workers were employed in four areas — as unskilled labourers, railway workers, bricklayers and mine workers. In all these occupations, the jobs could be undercut by the lower-paid labour of black workers.
From the start Afrikaner workers responded readily to workers organisation. In the 1922 strike most of the workers charged an imprisoned were Afrikaners. In the 1924 elections, white workers used their vote to bring to power Afrikaner nationalists in alliance with the Labour Party. The new government was called the Pac Government, and it promised to protect white worker interests.
The nationalists were aware of the vital importance of building a mass base of support. Afrikaner nationalism ‘stared death in the face’ wrote a nationalist historian, unless the nationalist movement organised the working class.
It was not long before nationalists and radical trade unionists clashed. The trade unionists emphasised class solidarity and class struggle, which cut across the nationalist programme. The non-racial aim of the trade unions was also unacceptable to the nationalists. Alarmed by the many thousands of Afrikaner workers who, like Katerina le Roux, belonged to militant trade unions, the Broederbond and the Church together developed a ‘Christian National’ approach to labour. Support groups such as the hankewerkers Beskermings Bond (the White Workers’ Protection League), the Reddingsdaadbond (Rescue Action Fund) and the Ossewa Brandwag Arbeidsfront (Labour Front) emerged.
Led by Dr Albert Hertzog (the Prime Minister’s son), Christian Nationalists toured the country, speaking to Afrikaner workers about nationalism and warning them against the dangers of communism, which they equated with non-racialism. Railway worker Hendrik Hoffman remembered these ‘nationalist missionaries’ who rode ‘up and down the country, talking to the teams between the stations’. Regardless of class differences, volkseenheid (national unity) was their aim. Christian National activists challenged unions wherever Afrikaners predominated in the workforce — in the garment, leather, laundry and tobacco industries, among shop workers, builders, miners and railway workers.
They bitterly attacked the ‘foreign values’, which, they said, radical trade unionists were using to corrupt honest Afrikaners. One article appearing in Die Vaderland singled out the secretary of the GWU:
People... like Mr Sachs. . .freely spread their poisonous teaching among our workers, destroy our spiritual values and uproot the Afrikaner worker from his association with relation and nation... to live only for his stomach, like himself It is quite immaterial to him among whom he spreads his poisonous communist teachings. Today it is white South Africa... but for Mr Sachs it will make no difference if tomorrow he does the same among the natives or Chinese.’
Christian Nationalists did not succeed in capturing the more democratically-run unions. Until the banning of many trade unionists in 1953, Afrikaner members, many of them nationalist supporters, elected radical trade union leaders again and again.
Wille Kalk
(It was) a working-class area and there were lots of laundry depots... Not one of these girls would vote for me... Every year I stood for the election in my trade unions. And I said to them ‘Why the hell do you vote for me as secretary of your trade union?’ ‘Oh, Miss du Toit, that’s different — that’s quite different! We wouldn’t have anyone else as secretary of our trade union because you don’t stand as a communist there.., you simply stand as trade union secretary, bent on organising and improving our conditions.’
Dannie du Plessis, another member of the CPSA, remained secretary of the Building Workers Industrial Union until his banning. Ii the Cape, Ray Alexander organised a number of unorganised white and black workers into new ‘mixed’ unions — notably the Food Canning and Allied Workers Union. Both the GWU and the Sweet Workers Union began to admit African women (as workers who were not at that stage ‘pass bearers’). Members of these unions had been taught to distinguish between class struggles and nationalist attitudes — they kept them separate, and were often supporter of both their union and the Afrikaner nationalist movement.
It was in the more bureaucratic unions — the National Union o. Railway and Harbour Servants (NURAHS) and the South African Mineworkers Union (MWU) — that the nationalists made headway The NURAHS leadership was weak and ineffectual, and tended to exclude the new, unskilled Afrikaners who entered the railways ii the 1930s. Hendrik’s story showed how the Spoor bond built up significant support from loyal Afrikaner nationalists As in the MWU, Christian Nationalists made headway by pointing to the bureaucracy and lack of activity of the NURAHS.
During the war, Afrikaner nationalists concentrated on areas where, they said, Afrikaner workers were losing ground. Many of the more experienced workers, like Katerina le Roux, were reclassified as supervisors of black workers. But there were thousands of semi-skilled white workers who remained threatened by the growing numbers of black operatives in the workplace. Even in the railways, the Spoorbond pointed to the increasing employment of blacks. A commission reported that, by 1946, 3 111 blacks were employed in jobs previously occupied by whites.
Not that black railway workers were ever allowed to work side-by-side with whites — as Hendrik said, ‘You still had teams of whites working with pick and shovel, but they were all-white teams. There were no blacks (in those teams).’Black unions’ success in raising wages narrowed the wage gap. In 1939, whites earned five times as much as blacks. By 1945, this gap had narrowed, with white workers earning ‘only’ four times as much as black workers. Many white workers resented this trend, white workforce.
The slight narrowing of the wage gap between black and white workers became a weapon in Christian Nationalist propaganda. The war years had brought little improvement in white workers’ wages, and Nationalist MPs attacked the United Party for its failure to raise real wages in government departments. During the war, workers worked longer hours without overtime pay. Strikes were suppressed, sometimes brutally, as in the case of the women workers’ tobacco strike in 1942. Ben Schoeman, a Nationalist member of parliament and future minister of labour, accused the Labour Party, which supported the ‘war effort’, of ‘sitting... among the capitalists and imperialists’. The nationalist movement was the only true representative of the Afrikaner worker, he said.
The time has arrived that in the interests of employers and employees self-government in industry and collective bargaining should be eliminated from our economic life.
‘We are Doubly Armed!’
‘One of the reasons we won is that we know what is going on in the platteland. Our opponents have not known. All they know is what they read in the Star and the Rand Daily Mail. They have not read the opposition press. But we are doubly armed; we know how we feel, and how others feel. — Deputy Prime Minister The Star, 1 June 1948
Farmers, financiers and traders
IN THE 1948 ELECTION farmers swung over to support the National Party. Yet five years earlier, 15 of the 23 farming constituencies in the Transvaal voted for the United Party. What caused the change?
The
l940s was a period of prosperity for most farmers. Those who survived
the Depression and its aftermath were beginning at last to make money.
With the help of the United Party government— through subsidies,
loans and protected food prices — the farmers were able to make
good profits.
The government also encouraged farmers to form co-operatives. Co-operatives
undertook to buy the farmers’ produce, market it and distribute it to
the cities. Through co-operatives they were better able to get credit and loans.
The amount of money deposited by co-operative members grew rapidly: from R4,4-million
in 1936, co-operative bank deposits grew to reach a total of R24,4-million
in 1949. By 1950, more than 90% of white farmers belonged to co-operatives.
In spite of their rapid economic progress, farmers had two major problems. Both came to a head during the war, partly as a result of the growth of the farming industry. One concern, as Martha Masina’s story in Section 1 has shown, was the farmers’ increasing shortage of labour as more and more young people deserted the farms for the cities in search of better pay and independence.
The other grievance was that, during the war, the government acted to keep down the price of food, even though world prices were soaring. The government rationed food and controlled prices through the Marketing Act in order to counter inflation, which not only affected working people but also increased the wage costs of the manufacturing and mining industries. The fixed price of maize also helped the gold mines to keep down their expenses in feeding compound workers.
For both these problems — labour shortages and price controls —farmers blamed the United Party. After General Hertzog resigned from the United Party, the war effort seemed to take precedence over many other interests. The farmers blamed the government for not enforcing the pass laws strictly enough: they felt the government was promoting the interests of mine and factory owners and city employers at the expense of farmers.
The Afrikaner nationalist movement was well aware of the farmers’ importance. Outside of the Natal sugar plantations, most white farmers were Afrikaans speaking. Furthermore, although the trek to the towns continued ii the 1940s, nearly half of Afrikaans-speaking whites still live in rural areas. Their votes ANC support were crucial, and the nationalist movement worked hard to reflect their interests, especially in the economic field.
In 1939 an important economic Volkskongres resolved to build up Afrikaner capital. The Reddingsdaadbond (‘Rescue Action Society’), a Broederbond organisation, initiated finance and insurance companies in the Cape, the OFS and the Transvaal to centralise Afrikaner savings and deposits and thus secure the material welfare of the yolk.
Some of the companies, especially SANLAM and the Federale Volksbeleggings (Federal People’s Investments), grew rapidly during the 1940s.
A large part of their capital came from farmers. Indeed, these finance houses began to invest successfully in industries related to agriculture. Farming implements, in short supply during the war, fertilisers and the food and canning industry were developed during this time.
The finance houses also helped to develop Afrikaner-owned trading store companies such as Sonop, Uniewinkels and an Afrikaner wholesale company. Volkskas, the first Afrikaner bank, also set up by the Reddingsdaadbond, increased its capital from R3-million in 1935 to R248-million in 1948, with 59 branches throughout the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
In
all sectors of economic life, Afrikaner finance houses stood ready
to gather together small savings, commercial profits and loose money
to consolidate capital in the name of nationalism. They were firmly
convinced that what was good for Afrikaner capital was also good for
the yolk.
The National Party’s black labour policies and the economic development
stimulated by Afrikaner finance houses convinced farmers that their interests
would be represented best by Afrikaner nationalism.
In 1948 farmers voted massively for the two Afrikaner nationalist parties — the Herenigde Nasionale Party (National Party) won 56 of the 66 farming constituencies outside Natal, with the Afrikaner Party winning a further five seats. As a final humiliation for the United Party, its leader Jan Smuts suffered a devastating defeat in his own constituency, the farming district of Standerton in the Transvaal. DURING THE I940s, with rapid industrial development, the economic situation of most Afrikaners was greatly improved. In only ten years, for example, the number of Afrikaner traders increased fourfold. By 1948 there were 9 585 Afrikaner-owned businesses.
With a very few important exceptions, though, most were small businesses — mostly country trading stores such as general dealers, dairies and garages. Throughout the 1940s, these traders struggled to expand because of stiff competition. Large chain stores, such as OK Bazaars, were beginning to set up branches in platteland towns, and were able to offer cheaper prices and a greater variety of goods for sale. In the smaller dorps, many Indian trading stores had been established for years.
Afrikaner
storekeepers began to organise themselves into local sakekamers (Chambers
of Commerce). They began to agitate against the big commercial monopolies,
and also against Indian traders.
During the 1940s a nasty anti-Indian campaign gained momentum. In 1947, after
the start of the Passive Resistance Campaign, a boycott of Indian stores was
launched. It seems to be orchestrated by groups within the nationalist movement
such as the Reddingdaadbond. Nationalist journals such as Inspan and the business
magazine Volkshandel heartily encouraged the boycott, praising it as the action
of a ‘Volk rescuing itself’ by ‘supporting its own business
undertakings’. ‘The Indian’, they argued, was
an unwelcome alien in our portals, not only from a moral and religious point of view — he has enriched himself at the expense of his white clients, he has attempted to squeeze his European competitor out of the business world through illegitimate trading methods — but has moreover challenged and defamed the country in which he trades as a guest, in an insolent manner.
The boycott did not succeed. Many platteland Afrikaners had very good relations with Indian storekeepers, who tended to give credit more easily than other traders. The Reddingsdaadbond failed to mobilise the buying power of Afrikaners.
Afrikaner trading interests increasingly turned to racial incitement, arguing that Indians posed a political threat. One editor, for example, urged readers to ‘drive all alien exploiters out of our business life... The continued existence of the white race is at stake.!
The Afrikaner nationalist parties associated themselves with these sentiments. During the 1948 election campaign, candidates promised to restrict the rights of Indians, both economically and in their communities, until such time as they would be ‘repatriated’ to India.
In 1950, soon after coming to power, the National Party passed the Group Areas Act preventing Indians, as well as other blacks, from living, owning property or trading in white areas. It was a step in the direction of the apartheid ideal, which Afrikaner traders supported with particular enthusiasm.
THE OSSEWA BRANDWAG, or OB as it was known, was an ultra-rightwing movement founded in October 1938. Vivid memories of the imprisonment of Boer men, women and children by the British during the Boer War meant OB views found strong support among many Afrikaners. OB members supported Nazi Germany and were strongly opposed to South African support for the Allied forces. The organisation was led by Hans van Rensburg, a former Administrator of the Orange Free State.
Robey Leibbrandt, a young firebrand right-winger and OB member, made contact with the Nazi movement while boxing at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. Fanatically devoted to Hitler and his politics, Leibbrandt agreed to undergo espionage training in Germany. Leibbrandt was then sent by Hitler to overthrow the Smuts government, then install himself as ruler of South Africa and set up a Nazi-style racial and political government. Leibbrandt was smuggled back into South Africa and was on his way to assassinate Jan Smuts when he was turned in by a government agent, Jan Taillard, within the Ossewa Brandwag. Leibbrandt was tried and sentenced to death.
On coming to power, the Nationalist government pardoned and freed Leibbrandt. Taillard, on the other hand, was eventually refused a military pension and died in an old age home for the poor in 1988.
The OB had an additional military wing of specially trained Stormjaers, or Stormtroopers, allegedly to protect OB leaders and OB meetings from attack. At the height of its support during the war, the OB claimed a broad membership of over 300 000 from all walks of life, including the youth, students, railway gangers, miners, bywoners and bankers. Secret government documents later revealed widespread OB membership among the South African Police and within the Security Forces.
The
OB leadership did not support change through the vote, or the ‘British
parliamentary system’, and the organisation made an undertaking
to the National Party not to organise as a political party. Instead,
it aimed to unite all Afrikaner nationalists under the banner of culture
and heritage.
Like the Nazis, OB leaders believed that the state should take all responsibility
for political activity. In the early stages of the war, when the chance of
Nazi victory looked good, OB leader van Rensburg offered all his organisations’ resources
to Hitler should he wish to invade South Africa. After the Nazis were defeated,
it became clear that the possibility of insurrection was over, and that Afrikaners
would have to come to power through the vote. Many former OB members then took
up political careers. Two of them, CR Swart and JB Vorster, eventually reached
the highest office of the land, to become state presidents of apartheid South
Africa.
Naboth Mokgatle responds to Nazi-inspired Anti-Semitism
‘What I read happening to the Jewish people in Germany was my own story, the story of African people in South Africa. When I read that they were deprived of freedom of movement in the land of their birth, that they were segregated, denied education, dismissed from their lobs, forced into concentration camps, some of them dying without their relatives; knowledge, hunted, persecuted, their intellectuals despised, barred from practising medicine, carrying cards to identify them as Jews, their dignity destroyed, their homes raided at any time of the day or night — that was a description of the African’s life in the country of their birth.’
HISTORIANS HAVE OBSERVED that nationalist activity it many countries seems to follow a pattern. It usually begins with intellectuals, and then moves to the wider population in response ‘to some complex combination’ of economic and social development. This includes
a strong sense of cultural identity, the development of communications, improved literacy and the spread of new levels of... organisation to previously isolated rural communities.
These are features we have noted in this section. Afrikaner nationalism was fostered, from the 19th century onwards, in particular by an organisation called the Afrikaner Bond, and by intellectuals such as SJ du Toit and DF du Toit. In more recent times it was also promoted by Afrikaner politicians like JBM Hertzog, DF Malan and HF Verwoerd. Their organisation and hard work (both secretly and openly) eventually involved and mobilised the masses.
This section has shown how Afrikaner nationalists cut across class differences to mobilise white Afrikaans-speaking men and women. The Afrikaner nationalist movement was embodied in the Dutch Reformed Church, the Broederbond and other Afrikaner organisations, as well as in Afrikaans newspapers and popular magazines. These bodies helped to construct a vision of an Afrikaner yolk with its own special history, language and culture.
But
a nationalist movement is never simply a result of common inheritance.
It is also the outcome of material conditions. Afrikaner nationalism
was no exception. Against the background of sudden urbanisation, rapid
industrialisation and the growing demands of black people in the city,
the National Party exploited white racial fears, and offered its supporters
protection and prosperity based on racial exploitation. In its electoral
promises, the National Party undertook to provide labour and capital
for the commercial farmers. It promised to reserve jobs and housing
for white labourers and white-collar workers. It secured more business,
with less competition, for Afrikaner traders.
Aspiring capitalists, farmers, workers and the middle classes all stood to
gain from a National Party victory. It was thus a class alliance of all Afrikaners,
and it drew in the key constituencies of dissatisfied commercial farmers and
working-class Afrikaners, that produced the electoral breakthrough in 1948.
At
the same time, the National Party’s apartheid programme was a
response to the crisis of capitalist industrialisation. The growing
shortages of housing, transport, rural labour and a stable black labour
force in the cities had to be addressed. They were convinced that these
problems could only be handled through a programme of apartheid. How
that policy was developed and changed is discussed in the next volume
of A People’s History of South Africa.