Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

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СКАЧАТЬ father never derived any personal benefit from his AB membership. He was shocked when it was alleged in later years that the AB pulled strings to advantage its members, and that some people joined the organisation for their own advantage. “That was never what the Bond was intended for,” he often said.

      However, my father did not have any first-hand experience of the modus operandi of the AB outside the confines of Porterville. The dissident Afrikaner theologian Nico Smith relates in his book Die Afrikaner-Broederbond: Belewinge van die binnekant (The Afrikaner Broederbond: Experiences from the inside) (2009) how he was appointed as Broederbonder at the Theological Faculty of Stellenbosch over the heads of two other candidates who were much better qualified. The historian Ernst Stals, who conducted an in-depth study of the AB, writes that from early on it had been the AB’s aim “not only to promote the interests of the Afrikaners in general, but also to help its members advance in their careers”. I would later have reason to wonder whether the AB had something to do with the apparent dead end my career at Stellenbosch reached towards the end of the 1970s.

      “The man who refuses to participate”

      “Be proud of your own” were words that I and other children of my generation heard repeatedly when language and culture came up for discussion. We took part in volkspele (Afrikaner folk dances) in the church hall and enjoyed them. Rev. Theron, who was our minister during my school years, was vehemently opposed to dancing. It was at university that I first discovered dancing was a harmless social activity and regretted the fact that I had not learnt to dance at school.

      The volksbeweging placed great emphasis on the notion that every individual’s contribution counted. This applied in particular to the promotion of Afrikaans as a public language which, constitutionally, enjoyed equal status with English. At school I was struck by ID du Plessis’s poem “Soet is die stryd” (Sweet is the struggle) from his collection Land van die vaders (Land of the Fathers) (1945), which stressed that, despite the pessimism of those who considered the obstacles too daunting, what mattered was the effort one put into the collective struggle, regardless of the eventual outcome. The last two lines underlined the personal responsibility of the individual: Maar die man wat sy deelname weier, / Is die MAN wat sy Nasie VERMOOR!!! (But the man who refuses to participate / is the MAN who KILLS his nation!!!).

      When I became involved in the language struggle at the University of Stellenbosch many years later, these words still inspired me.

      The message of the volksbeweging in the 1950s was that one should never regard one’s people and one’s language as inferior. Our household at Porterville was well aware that Afrikaans literature, especially in the field of prose, still ranked far below the literatures of the major European languages. A momentous event for us was the appearance of Die Afrikaanse kinderensiklopedie, a children’s encyclopedia, the first volume of which was published in 1948. The editor noted in the introduction that the work had been written by “friends of children”. One of the writers was the poet and intellectual NP van Wyk Louw, whose notions of “lojale verset” (loyal resistance, or rebellious loyalty) and “liberale nasionalisme” (liberal nationalism) would later exert a great influence on me.

      We were avid readers of the youth magazine Die Jongspan, which, like the encyclopedia, was edited by Dr CF Albertyn. On his retirement from the publishing company Nasionale Pers, he came to live on his farm in the Porterville district. Following his own retirement from teaching, my father assisted Albertyn on an almost full-time basis with his ambitious project of publishing an adapted version of the Dutch Winkler Prins ensiklopedie through his own company. It involved the translation of articles from Dutch into Afrikaans and the incorporation of additional entries on South African topics written by local experts. Sadly, the project was not a financial success.

      During the first half of the 1950s, when I was a high-school pupil, it seemed as if the great ideal of a republic was close to being realised. It was a time of surging optimism. For me, the spirit of the times is represented by the first lines of “Die lied van jong Suid-Afrika” (The song of young South Africa), which we sometimes sang in classes at school:

      En hoor jy die magtige dreuning

      Oor die veld kom dit wyd gesweef

      Die lied van ’n volk se ontwaking

      Wat harte laat sidder en beef…

      With its stirring description of the “mighty roar” of “the song of a nation’s awakening”, the verse still says something to me about the optimism with which the Afrikaners of my generation faced the future. A “nation’s awakening” had little or nothing to do with apartheid. As children, we felt we were part of a movement that would place us on an equal footing with the English community, that would proclaim a republic, that would expand Afrikaans, and that would conquer economic and cultural worlds. Viewing the volksbeweging and apartheid as one and the same is simply false.

      After the NP’s election victory in 1948, Afrikaans was for the first time treated on an equal basis with English in practice as an official language. Over the next forty years Afrikaans grew rapidly as a public language, especially because it was so firmly embedded in schools and universities. Afrikaans enabled me to master universal knowledge in my mother tongue and made it possible for me to express myself optimally. It has become an inextricable part of my social identity. After the appearance of my book The Afrikaners: Biography of a People in 2003, I was often asked what had been decisive factors in the Afrikaners’ rise in the twentieth century. My reply was always: mother-tongue education and committed teachers.

      Jean Laponce, a French-Canadian expert on the survival of smaller languages, later informed me that Afrikaans is one of only four languages in the world – the others are Hebrew, Hindi and Indonesian-Malay – that in the course of the twentieth century were standardised and developed from a low-status, informal language to one used in all branches of life and learning, including postgraduate teaching, science and technology. Hebrew and Afrikaans were the only two languages spoken by a very small speech community that had achieved this feat.

      How did Afrikaans manage to achieve the near unthinkable? An e-mail message I received after the appearance of The Afrikaners demonstrated the misconceptions about this issue that exist in some quarters. My correspondent posed the question: “How did Afrikaans reach such a level?” He provided his own reply: “It was forced on schools’ curricula and imposed on the civil service as a so-called official language.”

      The facts, however, are quite different. The Constitution of the Union of South Africa (the South Africa Act), passed in 1909, established Dutch and English as the official languages of South Africa, with equal status under the law. Neither language was “imposed” or “privileged”; the bilingual character of the state was the primary symbol of reconciliation between the country’s two white groups.

      In a contemporaneous article in The State, the writer and historian Gustav Preller described the Union’s promise to place the two official languages on a footing of “most perfect equality” as essential to Afrikaner support for the Union.17 Without recognition of the equal status of English and Dutch (which would be replaced by Afrikaans in 1925), it is most likely that a debilitating conflict would have developed between the two white communities, with grave consequences for the economy.

      But misunderstandings about what had been decided at the National Convention, the body that drafted the Constitution of the Union, would bedevil relations between the two white communities for a long time. FV Engelenburg, Louis Botha’s biographer and a staunch supporter of the South African Party’s ideal of English-Afrikaner cooperation, later wrote that whereas the fathers of the Constitution had accepted the absolute equality of both languages in good faith, English-speaking South Africans never took the matter seriously. Bilingualism was regarded as nothing more than a polite gesture towards СКАЧАТЬ