Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

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СКАЧАТЬ way back, but fortunately ran into a policeman. He informed me that they had been looking for me everywhere, and that I had wandered into the heart of District Six. I wrote the story as if my straying into District Six had put my life in danger.

      For coloured people, the forced removals and the break-up of established communities were a source of immense grief and heartache. I would only grasp this fully many years later, when I wrote about the forced removal of the coloured community from the centre of Stellenbosch in the late 1960s. This same story repeated itself in numerous towns without any protest from Afrikaners.

      The only serious conversation I had with a well-educated coloured person at the time took place in 1966 aboard a ship on the way to Europe. He was a teacher headed for Canada to start a new life there, and I was travelling to the Netherlands to study at the University of Amsterdam. The sadness in his voice as he spoke of his humiliation made a lasting impression on me.

      As I have mentioned, there were virtually no black people in Porterville. When the homeland policy was discussed, it was as if one were talking about some exotic experiment in a far-off land. In our student days at Stellenbosch, the only black people we interacted with were the waiters in the residence. Black residents of the town were subject to a curfew; every night at ten o’clock a siren would go off, which meant that no black person was permitted to be outside the township of Kayamandi. We did not think of the flagrant denial of a person’s citizenship it represented.

      “The open conversation”

      Our household subscribed to Die Huisgenoot in which the column “Die oop gesprek” (the open conversation) of NP van Wyk Louw, one of the leading Afrikaner intellectuals, appeared. On 8 August 1952 Louw’s column took the form of a letter adressed to “My dear young friend”. Van Wyk Louw’s article was prompted by the NP government’s efforts to remove coloured voters from the voters’ roll.

      Louw was at that stage a professor in Amsterdam, and he wrote in general terms instead of criticising the decision to put coloured voters on a separate roll. In a letter to a friend at the University of Cape Town, he wrote that legislation “was not necessary for our preservation as a people”. It would be better to make the coloured people “nationalists again than to put them on separate rolls”.

      Louw was referring to the 1920s when coloured voters constituted about a quarter of the electorate in constituencies such as Stellenbosch and Paarl. Along with the other parties, the NP competed fiercely for their vote. In 1929 Bruckner de Villiers, the victorious NP candidate in Stellenbosch, was carried shoulder-high into Parliament by coloured voters. After the 1938 election, in which De Villiers lost the Stellenbosch seat to the UP’s Henry Fagan by 30 votes, he commented scathingly on the “bright young men” in Parliament whose “clever plans” had cost the party several Cape seats, while they managed to win only one seat in the Transvaal.

      In the battle to remove the coloured voters from the voters’ roll in the 1950s, the NP leaders and Die Burger kept silent about this history, or, when it did crop up, shrugged it off with the comment that coloured voters were bribable.

      In his article of 1952 Van Wyk Louw wrote that a people could be faced with various crises of national survival: one was military conquest, and another would be if a critical mass of its members no longer considered it important to continue existing as a separate people. And then there was the third case: when a people, after it had done all in its power to survive, was faced with the last temptation: “to believe that mere survival is preferable to survival in justice” (Louw’s emphasis).

      Louw realised that people would ask why an ethical crisis like this could threaten the survival of an entire people. He replied with a counter-question: “How can a small people continue to survive if it is something hateful and evil for the best within – or without – it?” He added: “I believe that in a strange way this is the crisis from which a people emerge reborn, young, creative, this ‘dark night of the soul’ in which it says: I would rather perish than survive through injustice.”

      I have no memory of having read the article at the time, and Jaap Steyn writes in his biography of Louw that Die Huisgenoot received no letters from readers in response to the particular column. The article was republished in 1958 in Louw’s collection of essays Liberale nasionalisme when I was in my third year at university as a student of Afrikaans-Nederlands. There was no mention of this work in our classes.

      But Piet Cillié, editor of Die Burger, wrote in an exceptionally positive review that Louw excercised his influence as an intellectual midwife. “He was more skilful and subtle than many other thinkers, but without the pretensions of absolute certainty.” During my student years, such thinkers were extremely rare at the Afrikaans universities.

      Chapter 3

      A university with attitude

      In 1956 I enrolled as a student at the University of Stellenbosch (US) with no expectations of becoming an academic. As my aptitude for maths was nothing to write home about, I did not do particularly well in the final matric examination. My brother Jan and my sister Hester would later enjoy reminding me that both of them had obtained a better symbol than I did in their matric exams. In his history classes my father told the story of the past well, and was respected by his friends for his political judgement. I decided to choose history as one of my major subjects.

      My student years were largely carefree. I thoroughly enjoyed life in Simonsberg residence, especially the inter-residence sport. In 1958 I was a member of the team that won the Sauer Cup for the first league of residence rugby. I was on the editorial team of the student newspaper Die Matie, but preferred writing about sport rather than student politics. The ardent nationalists on the campus put me off.

      To my surprise, I was elected to serve on the SRC in 1960 despite not having published my policy in Die Matie as all the other candidates had done voluntarily. When I was questioned about this at the pre-election mass meeting known as “the Circus”, I had a pat answer. I argued that experience had taught us that candidates’ promises were seldom carried out, and that all I would promise, therefore, was to do my best according to my lights. It sounded principled, but the real reason was that I decided to stand at such a late stage that the opportunity to publish my policy had passed by.

      In 1960 I was also elected primarius (head student) of Simonsberg, a residence that accommodated 280 male students. This was at a time when students had started questioning the official ban on alcohol and female visitors in the rooms. To the annoyance of Prof. Chris Gunter, the residential head, I maintained that it was not the responsibility of the house committee to be moral guardians, but only to act against students who openly flouted the rules.

      Towards the end of my term as primarius, I received my first lesson in how power operates. Late one evening, about twenty Simonsbergers invaded a female residence and overturned the beds of the sleeping residents. The university authorities considered this a serious offence, and immediately requested the names of the culprits from the house committee. Without the committee’s cooperation, however, they were powerless.

      I contended that the house committee had no say with regard to offences committed by Simonsberg residents outside the residence, and that we were only prepared to comply with the request if the authorities undertook not to punish the culprits. The undertaking was given verbally. Accordingly, the house committee persuaded the culprits to provide their names, with the assurance that they would not be punished.

      A few days later I heard to my dismay that the university authorities had written to the parents of the offenders, informing them that their sons were guilty of a serious offence in a female residence and that any further misdemeanours would be punished severely. Evidently the authorities felt that because no one had been punished, СКАЧАТЬ