Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

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      From 1910 to 1948 the government of the day postponed consistent enforcement of Section 137 of the Union Constitution several times. The lack of suitable candidates in the civil service who were proficient in both languages was one of the reasons that were advanced for the lack of progress. By 1948, however, this was no longer a valid excuse. After its election victory in that year, the NP decided to systematically enforce the use of both Afrikaans and English as official languages in the civil service.

      Economic mobilisation and the development of Afrikaans as a public language went hand in hand with acknowledgement of the Afrikaners’ history and their contribution to the establishment of the South African state. In 1952 I attended the Van Riebeeck Festival in Cape Town, which celebrated three centuries of white settlement, as an adolescent member of the Voortrekker youth movement. There was one memory that lingered in my mind. As part of a torchlight procession of thousands of Voortrekkers who marched from Signal Hill to the stadium in the Foreshore area, I met with disaster. My torch died while we were still on the mountain, and I was mortified at having to complete the march with an unlit torch. In subsequent years, I would often wonder whether my extinguished torch had any symbolic meaning.

      It would be wrong to equate the volksbeweging with the National Party, or to regard the NP as an institution that dictated to the volksbeweging. In the first decade of NP rule there were still between 10% to 20% of Afrikaners who supported the United Party (UP), which had been formed out of a merger between General JBM Hertzog’s then National Party and General JC Smuts’s South African Party (SAP) in 1934. UP supporters were still commonly known as “Sappe” because of the link with the erstwhile SAP. Many Afrikaner “Sappe” felt equally strongly about the Afrikaans language and the upliftment of the white poor. The big difference between them and fellow Afrikaners who were NP supporters (“Natte”) lay in their support for South Africa’s participation in the Second World War and their veneration for the towering figure of Jan Smuts. I once asked Christo Wiese, who grew up in a “Sap” family in Upington and later became an outstanding entrepreneur, what had been the distinguishing factor between the “Natte” and the “Sappe” in our youth. His answer was simple but spot-on: Jan Smuts.

      Coloured Portervillers

      Porterville’s coloured residents spoke Afrikaans, but they were not regarded as part of the volksbeweging. The law determined the fate of white and coloured from the cradle to the grave. Everyone adhered to the same faith, but white and coloured worshipped separately; everyone spoke the same language, but white and coloured did not attend school, church or concerts together. Everyone played the same sports, but white and coloured never participated together in organised sports. There were undoubtedly secret relationships across the colour line. The many light-skinned children with reddish hair in the coloured neighbourhoods of Pella Park and Monte Bertha attested to that.

      The coloured community of Porterville consisted of people who were no longer able to live on the farms, or had chosen to leave of their own accord. While a few managed to make a living as artisans such as builders or carpenters, the majority worked as “servants” or gardeners for white people. In my childhood days, every white home seemed to have its servant.

      For a while our household also employed Japie, a coloured boy of my own age, who did odd jobs in the garden. He was exceptionally well built and self-­confident. Japie used to play cricket and rugby with me and my white friends in the backyard or in the street in front of the house. We were unable to get the better of him either physically or figuratively, which boosted his confidence even more.

      One day there was a confrontation between the two of us, and I spat in his face. As the enraged Japie made a rush for me, I fled into the house. It was only indoctrination that prevented him from pursuing me into the house and getting even. I was bitterly ashamed of the incident, and spoke to no one about it until Athol Fugard told me years later that he had been involved in a similar incident in his youth. It provided the inspiration for his play Master Harold and the Boys (1982).

      Farmworkers were worse off than most of the coloured people in town. In my schooldays, I sometimes stayed over with friends who lived on farms. The tot system of providing workers with wine throughout the working day was still in common use, and there was no pressure on farmers to abandon the practice. Still, there were also farmers who realised that it was wrong and who promoted abstinence from alcohol. They were also very critical of the heartless practice of some farmers to let their workers go after the harvesting season.

      On Saturday mornings, many farmers would bring their “volk” to town, and by twelve o’clock intoxicated farmworkers were a common sight on the pavements in the vicinity of the two bottlestores in the main street.

      Although coloured men who met the requirements of the Cape’s qualified franchise could vote up to the 1950s, I never heard of a single one in the town who was eligible to vote. Die Burger did not write about the fierce competition for the coloured vote during the 1920s in which the National Party had also participated. The paper frequently alleged that coloured voters were “open to bribery” and, by implication, did not really deserve the vote.

      My parents supported the policy of apartheid. Their standpoint was that the policy was not only intended to bring about separation between white and coloured, but also helped to develop and uplift the coloured people by providing them with better mass education and social services. No doubt they endorsed the statement PW Botha made to his biographers: “The coloureds must first be uplifted and the consequences of that accepted.”18

      The government’s spending on coloured education in the Cape Province had started increasing rapidly from 1935. In 1953 it was almost ten times what it had been in 1935. Between 1948 and 1951 it increased by 41%, and it did not slow down thereafter. In 1953 a study asked whether the “financial burdens” in this regard were not perhaps “disproportionate to the province’s carrying capacity”.19 Of course, the spending on white children was much higher, but no one asked whether this was disproportionate to the country’s “carrying capacity”.

      But there was also another problem, which NP supporters only realised later. Improving a community’s education levels without giving them meaningful rights is a recipe for political alienation and revolt.

      The Group Areas Act was the central aspect of the political debate in the early 1950s, at the time I started becoming politically aware. By law, coloured people had to be moved from the “white town” to separate coloured “towns” on the outskirts of, or a short distance from, the main town. It was said that the resettled people would get their own houses and shops there.

      In Porterville, a relatively small proportion of the coloured community was moved during the period of NP rule to Monte Bertha, a coloured suburb that had been established as far back as 1937. But there were several towns in the Boland, notably Stellenbosch, Paarl and Wellington, which had large coloured or racially mixed neighbourhoods that were situated in the central business district. In the first two decades of NP rule, these neighbourhoods were all proclaimed white areas and the coloured residents were forced to move. The most prominent mixed area in the Cape was District Six in Cape Town, which had about 65 000 residents. While the majority was coloured, there were also black, Indian and white residents, including Afrikaners. NP propaganda portrayed District Six as “a den of iniquity”.

      As an avid newspaper reader from an early age, I was certainly exposed to this propaganda that was peddled in Die Burger. This is apparent from my first article that ever appeared in print. It was written in 1951, when I was in standard 6 (now grade 8), and appeared in the school’s yearbook three years later.

      In the article I gave an account of my first visit to Cape Town, and related how I had lost my way in the city centre and later found myself in a slum quarter СКАЧАТЬ