The Last Afrikaner Leaders

A Supreme Test of Power

Hermann Giliomee

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780813934952
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Finalist for the Alan Paton Award

In his latest book, renowned historian Hermann Giliomee challenges the conventional wisdom on the downfall of white rule and the end of apartheid. Instead of impersonal forces, or the resourcefulness of an indomitable resistance movement, he emphasizes the role of Nationalist leaders and of their outspoken critic Frederick van Zyl Slabbert. What motivated each of the last Afrikaner leaders, from Verwoerd to de Klerk? How did each try to reconcile economic growth, white privilege, and security with the demands of an increasingly assertive black leadership and unexpected population figures?

In exploring each leader's background, reasoning, and personal foibles, Giliomee takes issue with the assumption that South Africa was inexorably heading for an ANC victory in 1994. He argues that historical accidents radically affected the course of politics.

Drawing on primary sources and personal interviews, Giliomee offers a fresh and stimulating political history that attempts not to condemn but to understand why the last Afrikaner leaders did what they did, and why their own policies ultimately failed them.

A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Reconsiderations in Southern African History

Chapter 1

An Extraordinary Country

‘WHAT SPECIAL INTELLECTUAL OR SPIRITUAL TASK DO YOU SUGGEST TO THE Afrikaner nation, which as a young West European nation, is only now reaching its spiritual maturity?’¹ In 1951 this was a question the young and upcoming member of the Afrikaner nationalist intelligentsia Piet Meyer asked some leading Western intellectuals after the unexpected National Party victory in the 1948 election.

Arnold Toynbee, one of the Anglophone world’s most prominent historians, responded. A single-volume abridgement of his ten-volume A Study of History had appeared four years earlier. In 1949 Time magazine had featured Toynbee on its cover, with a cover story urging the government of the United States – the leading nation of Western civilisation – to learn the lessons of earlier civilisations in recorded history. Toynbee’s views had stimulated as much publicity and discussion as Samuel Huntington’s article ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ would do 40 years later.

Toynbee’s reply deserves to be quoted at length: ‘My personal feeling is that the Afrikaner nation is confronted with a most difficult, and at the same time most important, spiritual task, which it is bound to undertake, without having any choice of refusing. It seems to me that, in South Africa, you are faced already with a situation that is going very soon to be the common situation of the whole world as a result of the “annihilation of distance” through the progress of our Western technology … There will never be room in the world for the different fractions of mankind to retire into isolation from one another again.’

Toynbee continued: ‘Now, in South Africa, the accident of history has put the native, coloured and white people of the country into this difficult situation at an early date: History – or God – has given you the honourable mission of being the spiritual pioneers in trying to find the solution of a spiritual problem that is soon going to face the rest of the human race as well.’²

‘A unique combination’

Why did Toynbee assign to Afrikaners a major role in dealing with the problem of the annihilation of distance? The reason can best be found by looking at three features that make South Africa exceptional, according to economic historian Charles Feinstein. As he formulates it, South Africa represents a unique combination of the way in which the indigenous population, European settlers and mineral resources were brought together in a process of conquest, dispossession, discrimination and development to promote rapid economic growth.³

The country’s history was indeed extraordinary. First, virtually alone in the history of Western colonisation, substantial numbers of the indigenous population survived. The numbers of Khoisan and Africans by the beginning of the nineteenth century can be put at 1.5 million, rising to 4 million by 1904. Second, Europeans settled in much larger numbers than in other European colonies not founded as settlement colonies. At the time of the 1904 census they totalled over a million. There also was a third difference: while other colonies also had rich mineral resources, there was nothing that could be compared to the vast mineral wealth of the Witwatersrand. The discovery of gold in 1886, together with the earlier discovery of diamonds, transformed South Africa.⁴

The substantial rise of the gold price in the early 1930s sustained high growth for nearly 40 years, but many of the constraints on development remained. The historian CW de Kiewiet singled out three major factors that hampered the country’s growth: ‘its low-grade ore, its low-grade land, and also its low-grade human beings’.⁵ Much of South Africa’s low-grade gold ore sold at a low, fixed price and could only be mined by very cheap labour. Low-grade land, together with poor and uncertain rainfall, was responsible for many of agriculture’s problems. There also were ‘low-grade human beings’ – the product of low spending on education and the great distances many rural children had to travel to school. The education for coloured and black children, provided by church or missionary societies, was in most cases inferior to what white schools provided.

Between 1929 and 1933 the worldwide economic crisis changed the shape of white politics in South Africa. The ruling National Party (NP), under the leadership of General JBM Hertzog, and the South African Party (SAP), under the leadership of General Jan Smuts, merged in 1933–34 to form the United Party (UP) under Hertzog’s leadership. Nineteen members of the Cape NP, led by Dr DF Malan, rejected this Fusion and formed the Gesuiwerde National Party (NP), which became the official opposition in 1934.

Between 1910 and 1936 a system of rigorous segregation between whites and blacks was implemented. This culminated in the 1936 legislation that removed Cape Africans – about 3% of the total number of voters – from the voters’ roll. They would have to vote on a separate roll for three whites to represent them in the House of Assembly. Four white senators, elected by electoral colleges, would represent other blacks in South Africa. There would also be a Natives Representative Council to discuss issues affecting Africans in both the reserves and the common area. An additional 7.25 million morgen of land would be bought up for the reserves. Once that was completed, 13% of the country’s land would be in black hands.

In discussing the rise of a harsher form of racial exclusion in the American South during the 1890s, which would last until the 1960s, C Vann Woodward, an outstanding historian of the region, made an important point. While economic and social changes paved the way for a more extreme form of segregation in the American South, the basic motives were political. The new system of segregation was instituted mainly to gain or perpetuate power. Far from being the work of ‘rednecks’, the policy of segregation ought to be considered as ‘the subtle, flexible, complex fabrication of sophisticated elites’.⁶

In South Africa, too, it was sophisticated elites in the Afrikaner community who placed South Africa on the road towards a more severe form of segregation and later of apartheid. They, too, were spurred on more by the drive to win power through the ballot box and use it for the advancement of their community than by deep-seated racist convictions. In the 1929 election, when Hertzog’s NP contested the election alone, the party message on racial policy was much harsher than in 1924, which had been fought in alliance with the Labour Party. While some Nationalist politicians enthusiastically wooed the coloured vote between 1910 and 1929, they switched to propagating a rigorous form of segregation in the early 1930s. This was because the UP occupied the middle ground in white politics, leaving the NP little hope of attracting coloured support. To win over the Afrikaner intelligentsia the NP tried to present its racial policy as something better than segregation, which it claimed was merely interested in ‘walling off’ the coloured and the black population in their ‘locations’.

Social segregation

In the 1930s and 1940s all the major parties strove to maintain social segregation. In 1931 leading liberal philosopher Alfred Hoernlé wrote that both whites and blacks properly valued ‘race purity’ and ‘racial pride’. It was part and parcel of ‘the best public opinion, the most enlightened racial self-consciousness, of natives no less than of whites’.⁷ In 1936 he remarked that a visitor from Mars would immediately be struck by the pervasiveness of racial exclusion and discrimination in South Africa. Such a visitor could come to only one conclusion: ‘[There] was a dominant urge towards segregation, which has moulded the structure of South African society and made it what it now is.’⁸ Forum, a journal founded to support Jan Hofmeyr’s liberalism, stated that it was ‘revolted’ by miscegenation.⁹

The UP retained the elements of liberalism that had characterised the Cape Colony since the 1850s. There was still no law that restricted coloured people or Africans from living where they wished or from buying property in the Cape Colony. From the early 1930s government policy was to build separate coloured townships, but by 1950 almost a third of coloured people in Cape Town still lived in mixed areas, often called the onderdorp. There was no ban on sexual intercourse between white and coloured people, though in 1927 a ban had been placed on marriages between whites and blacks. Coloured-white marriages were rare. Between 1943 and 1946 only 100 such marriages per year took place on average, compared to 30 000 intra-white marriages per year.

There also was no statutory population registration. During the 1930s a select committee of parliament found that a population register was impracticable. That was also Jan Smuts’s view. It was, he said, an attempt to classify what was unclassifiable. When the NP government introduced the Population Registration Act in 1950, he pleaded: ‘Don’t let us trifle with this thing, for we are touching on things which go pretty deep in this land.’¹⁰

Political segregation

Before 1910 political segregation was policy in the Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natal provinces, but the policy was more fluid in the Cape. Coloureds and Africans could vote along with whites since the introduction of the liberal Cape Constitution in 1853. Essentially, electoral politics involved the Afrikaner and English sections of the white population, but between 1910 and 1929 coloured voters held the balance of power in the rural seats of Stellenbosch and Paarl and several other constituencies in the rural western Cape.¹¹ In Paarl and Stellenbosch their share of the vote was estimated at between a quarter and a fifth of the total vote.

While some leading Cape NP members pressed for putting coloured voters on a separate roll from 1915, the alternative of a qualified vote was hardly ever proposed. Generals Hertzog and Smuts discussed it in 1928 at a time when the African National Congress (ANC) demanded ‘equal rights for all civilized men’. But the two white communities were at quite different levels of socio-economic development. English-speakers earned an income of at least half more than that of Afrikaners and nearly a quarter of Afrikaners were deemed to be ‘poor whites’ – people so destitute that they could not maintain what was called a white living standard. A qualified vote could well exclude large numbers of poor Afrikaners, threatening to relegate the NP to the fate of a permanent opposition. Increasingly, leaders of the Cape NP began arguing that coloured voters had to be put on a separate roll.

The first major weakening of the coloured vote occurred as a result of the electoral reforms of 1930–31. The franchise was extended to white women, but not to coloured women. Virtually all qualifications were removed in the case of whites, but not in the case of coloured people. The law allowed anyone to challenge the registration of a voter. The onus of proof rested on the voter in court – a humiliating and time-consuming procedure. Invariably, it was coloured voters who were challenged. General Hertzog denied that he had promised coloureds the vote on the same basis as whites; he had only promised they would ‘eventually be included with us politically’.¹²

Overall, coloured people lived in a grey area in which there was neither integration nor mandatory segregation. Municipal offices in the Western Cape did not have segregated counters. There was very little organised mixed sport, but coloured people were admitted to performances in the Cape Town City Hall. A few cinemas in the inner city of Cape Town sold tickets to coloureds and seated them at the back or on the balcony. The South African Library w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: A Tragic Dilemma
• 1 An Extraordinary Country
• 2 An Extraordinary Professor and the ‘Cape Nats’
• 3 “The Most Terrific Clash of Interests Imaginable’: Hendrik Verwoerd’s Response
• 4 Denying Black South Africans Citizenship: John Vorster’s Empire
• 5 Moving out into Africa: John Vorster’s Foreign Schemes
• 6 PW Botha and ‘Power Sharing without Losing Control’
• 7 A Crossing Suspended: PW Botha’s Rubicon
• 8 Van Zyl Slabbert: The Golden Boy and the Black Prince
• 9 ‘The Risk of Not Taking Risks’: Ending Empire
• 10 Time for a ‘Quantum Leap’: FW De Klerk’s Venture
• 11 ‘Paddling into Dangerous Rapids’: Drafting a New Constitution
• 12 A Record of Understanding
• 13 A Wary Military
• 14 Negotiating the NP Out of Power
• Concluding Remarks
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Index