Historian

An Autobiography

Hermann Giliomee

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813940915
• eBook ISBN: 9780813940922
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

In this eloquent memoir, already widely read and praised in the author's native South Africa, Hermann Giliomee weaves together the story of his own life with that of his country--a nation that continues to absorb and inspire him, both despite and because of its tortuous history.

 

An internationally respected historian--his landmark The Afrikaners, writes J. M. Coetzee, "includes an account of the origins and demise of apartheid that must rank as the most sober, objective and comprehensive we have"-- Giliomee has devoted a lifetime to exploring the origins and perpetuation of the deep divisions in South African society. Although he grew up in the heart of the Afrikaner nationalist movement, he soon began to cut his own path in examining the rise and entrenchment of exclusive Afrikaner power and became one of the National Party's chief critics. As an "outside insider"--or, to his critics, a "snake in the grass"--Giliomee has an understanding of Afrikaner power that is informed and nuanced. He has engaged with members on all sides of South Africa's debates--many of whom appear in these pages through vivid and insightful portraits--and his outspokenness has hit nerves across the political spectrum. The personal journey of this original and courageous thinker will appeal to anyone interested in the complexities of South Africa's past and present.

Reconsiderations in Southern African History

Chapter One

Origins

It was religious persecution that forced the Guillaumé family to flee France. Between 1670 and 1700 around 300 000 Huguenots bade their motherland farewell after long-standing discrimination and deadly attacks. The refugees settled in the Netherlands, the German states, England, Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia, the American colonies and other predominantly Protestant countries. In 1688 some 200 Huguenots arrived at the Cape of the Good Hope from the Netherlands.

The flight of the Huguenots was one of the largest waves of migration Europe had seen up to that time. For France, it resulted in a massive loss of human capital. “La grande catastrophe” was President Charles de Gaulle’s reaction when the South African ambassador in Paris told him about his own Huguenot forefather’s flight.

The progenitor of the Guillaumé family in South Africa was François Guillaumé – in the primary sources the surname is also spelled Guilliaume and Guilliaumeth. He was born in 1680 in either Aimargues or the neighbouring village of Saint-Laurent-d’Aigouze, southwest of the city of Nîmes. The villages were part of Languedoc, a staunchly Protestant region between Nîmes and Montpellier, which was home to a flourishing silk industry.

François Guillaumé, who had left Languedoc as a child, married Claudine Cloy. By 1700 the couple were living in Berlin, where François most probably made silk clothing for a living. The Huguenot community, with their own church and congregation, numbered about 50 000 and constituted a quarter of the city’s population. The Guillaumé couple’s son Mathieu (later called Matthias) was born in 1711. Three other children were also born in Berlin.

In 1726 Guillaumé and his family travelled from Berlin to Amsterdam, and sailed from Texel to the Cape of Good Hope a few months later. François had two contracts in his pocket. One was a mandate that authorised him to negotiate on behalf of Jacob Labat, a Huguenot in London with a claim to the estate of a brother who had died at the Cape shortly before. It was likely, therefore, that Guillaumé was literate.¹

The second contract was one he had entered into with the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) to start a silk industry at the Cape. He undertook to establish silkworm breeding and silk spinning as a business. The venture formed part of the VOC’s efforts to set up an export industry that would make the Cape financially self-supporting. There had been unsuccessful attempts under two previous governors, Willem Adriaan van der Stel and Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, to establish a silk industry.

From silkworms to St Helena

In October 1726 Guillaumé and his family arrived in Table Bay aboard the Berbices. He had brought along some silkworms, but it appears that he might have spoken too highly of his own abilities. OF Mentzel, author of one of the best descriptions of the Cape in the first half of the eighteenth century, later wrote with a hint of schadenfreude that the so-called “expert” was not as competent as he had claimed to be.

Guillaumé soon discovered that he faced huge challenges. For one, his factory was situated at the top end of the Heerengracht in the small seaport town, while the mulberry trees were in Rondebosch. Slaves had to undertake daily trips to pick leaves for the silkworms. But there was a much graver problem: the worms Guillaumé had brought from Europe did not adapt well to the Cape climate.

The Political Council, the body that governed the Cape, was undeterred by these hurdles. The Council erected a three-storey building at the top end of Heerengracht and gave it the grand name of De Oude Spinnerij (the old spinning factory). The building was later demolished, but the name Spin Street has lived on as a reminder of the enterprise.

Though the outlook had been bleak from the outset, the Political Council was determined to persevere. In December 1727, just more than a year after his arrival, Guillaumé sent a gloomy report to the government. In the entire preceding year he had managed to harvest only six pounds of silk. Its value was far less than that of his salary of 20 florins per month plus living costs. Every year the enterprise’s loss increased.

Towards the end of 1729, the members of the Political Council visited Guillaumé’s spinning factory and expressed their disappointment at the poor progress. What he told them worsened their mood. He predicted poor results for the coming years as well, as few of the silkworm eggs had hatched.

In 1732 Guillaumé threw in the towel, overwhelmed by the problems with labour, worms and the mulberry trees. He saw no hope of a profit, and asked for permission to transfer the business to his son Matthias. In 1735 he informed the government of his intention to remain at the Cape as a free burgher. In that year, the name François Guillaumé appeared on the list of burghers of the district of Stellenbosch for the first time.

Matthias, too, decided that the silk industry was a blind alley, and became a blacksmith. Ten years later he abandoned this occupation as well, and in 1743 he started farming on the farm Vlottenburg (also called Vredenburg). He stayed there until 1756, when he sold the farm. In the last year he supplied the following information about his property for the Opgaafrol (the inventory of farming activities): 5 slaves, 13 horses, 10 head of cattle and 200 sheep. He also grew grain on a small scale.

A few years later Matthias moved to the farm Afdak which he had bought near present-day Onrus. His descendants would become pioneers of the Overberg, and specifically of the areas around Bredasdorp and Napier.² In the last years of the VOC’s rule, the name Guillaumé was simplified to Giliomee in the Company’s Opgaafrol.

My grandfather, Johannes Human Giliomee, born in 1867, was the son of an impoverished bywoner (tenant farmer) who worked on various farms in the Bredasdorp district. He married his cousin, Elizabeth Catharina Giliomee, and around 1890 the couple moved to the Republic of the Orange Free State. They settled in the town of Villiers on the southern bank of the Vaal River. Family tradition has it that they were as poor as church mice when they arrived in Villiers. There was a ray of light, though: my grandmother came from an affluent family in the Bredasdorp district.

With financial help from his in-laws, my grandfather soon found his feet. Villiers was on the main road to the Johannesburg goldfields, and my grandfather obtained the contract for the pontoon over the Vaal River. Later he was also awarded the contract for the mail coach between Villiers and Johannesburg.

When the war between Britain and the Boer Republics broke out in 1899, he joined the Free State forces and became a member of the Wilge River field cornetcy. British forces captured him and his brother Jurie at Groenplaats on 21 October 1900. They were sent as prisoners of war to the Deadwood Camp on the island of St Helena. Here he made a beautiful little wooden chest, which he brought back to Villiers.

My grandmother was determined that British troops would not capture her and her two children, both younger than ten, and send them to a concentration camp. They wandered around in the veld and lay low whenever a Britsh patrol was in the vicinity. The fact that she had hidden a sum of £60 in her belt assisted her greatly in the battle for survival.³

It has been estimated that by the end of the war, there were 2 000 Boer women and children in the Free State and 10 000 in the Transvaal who had been surviving in the open veld to escape internment in the concentration camps.

After the conclusion of peace, my grandfather was detained on St Helena for a further three months. On 19 August 1902, when he was about to depart, he wrote a simple yet moving letter to my grandmother that shows the extent to which the Dutch spoken in South Africa had already evolved into Afrikaans.

In the aftermath of the war, my grandparents managed to get back on their feet financially. Twelve years after the Peace of Vereeniging my grandfather took part in the Rebellion of 1914-15 along with many other farmers from the northern Free State, and was captured after a skirmish at Mushroom Valley. After the government had suppressed the uprising, the rebels were faced with huge claims for damages. In the northern Free State alone, the claims amounted to more than £200 000 (about R240 million today). The Helpmekaar Vereniging (Mutual Aid Association), which had branches countrywide, was set up to raise funds for the purpose of assisting the rebels to pay their debt. The project was extremely successful, and by the end of 1917 all claims for damages had been settled from the fund.

The National Party, which had been founded by General JBM Hertzog in 1914, benefited greatly from this early form of nationalist mobilisation. Without the Helpmekaar movement, my grandfather and the other rebels would probably have been ruined financially. He and my grandmother were staunch Hertzog supporters for the rest of their lives. Their farming operations on their farms Wolwepoort and Prospect in the Villiers district prospered. They were able to send their eldest as well as their third-eldest son (my father) to Stellenbosch to further their education.

A “Blommebuhr” from the Bokveld

I was named after my maternal grandfather, Hermann Henry Buhr (1876–1966), the son of Johann Jacob Buhr and Catharina Gesa Riege. His parental home in Germany had been on a smallholding in the district of Ochsenwerder just outside Hamburg. Here, several generations of Buhrs had grown vegetables for the Hamburg market and transported their produce to the city along the Elbe River.

Johann Buhr was an affluent banker and a member of the Senate which governed the city-state of Hamburg. According to family tradition, he was a “hard, unreasonable and unaffectionate man who was abnormally obsessed with the notion that one should not spend a single moment doing nothing”.

Although Hermann had rebelled against his father in his youth, in his mature years he himself had little patience with children or grandchildren who sat around idly. He once asked a son-in-law who used to spend a long time on his morning devotions whether he could not pray under a fig tree instead and chase away the mousebirds at the same time.

After a few years at school, my grandfather ran away from home. His father discovered later that he had been working in a shoe shop in Berlin. He disappeared for a second time, intent on starting a new life in German South West Africa. According to research by my second cousin Riëtte Ruthven, his name does not appear on the passenger lists of any of the few ships that sailed to Africa in those days. The possibility that he was a stowaway cannot be discounted.

In 1895 my grandfather, aged nineteen, arrived in Table Bay. The ship’s captain refused to let him disembark, possibly because he lacked the necessary travel documents or financial means. Fortunately, the merchant William Spilhaus arrived and gave him an advance. The first that Hermann Buhr’s family heard of his being in South Africa was when his sister Martha received a letter from him from Cape Town.⁴

He worked for a few months for Spilhaus to repay his debt. While his plan was still to seek his fortune in German South West Africa, he could not afford the trip to that territory. He applied successfully for the position of manager of the store on the farm Grasberg, fifteen kilometres outside the town of Nieuwoudtville on the Bokveld Plateau. This was how my German grandfather ended up on the farm where he would spend the rest of his life.

Grasberg belonged to Elias Albertus Nel, a well-off farmer who owned 40 000 morgen. He and his wife had two daughters, and at first they were dead set against the relationship that developed between their elder daughter, Hester Christina, and the young German. But my grandfather was resolute and enterprising.

When my grandmother left Grasberg in 1898 for a three-week visit to an unknown destination, he wrote her a poem that has been preserved. The fact that he had it printed shows that his financial affairs had greatly improved. The poem gives the impression of a witty and literate suitor.

As poetry, it did not have much merit, but perhaps it cut the knot. Hermann Buhr’s circumstances improved dramatically after Hester and her parents consented to the marriage. Their wedding took place in 1899. Hermann’s brother Henri Buhr arrived from Germany for the occasion and brought along He...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Origins
• Chapter 2 “The song of a nation’s awakening”
• Chapter 3 A university with attitude
• Chapter 4 Apprentice
• Chapter 5 “A snake in our midst”
• Chapter 6 Civil war in “The John”
• Chapter 7 Among the English
• Chapter 8 “All the voices of this land”
• Chapter 9 “Witness to momentous times”
• Chapter 10 End of the party
• Chapter 11 An uncommon biography
• Chapter 12 Almost neighbours
• Chapter 13 New history
• Chapter 14 Surrender without defeat?
• Chapter 15 To know who you are
• Chapter 16 Proud and ashamed
• Acknowledgements
• Books by Herman Giliomee
• Index