Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ flew in the face of the promises that had been made, but it was too late to do anything about it.

      On the other hand, there were also times when the university decided not to act. One day “Vloog” Theron, an obstreperous second-year student, asked me for permission to bring two elephants to graze on the lawn in front of the residence. I thought he was joking, and did nothing to stop him. Lo and behold, a day or two later he turned up at Simonsberg with two circus elephants in tow. The following day Die Burger published a photo in which I and a few other residents looked on laughingly as Vloog and the two giant animals made themselves at home on the lawn. There was no reaction from the administration. Clearly, elephants on the loose on Simonsberg’s lawn was much less dangerous than male students on the loose at 11 pm in the bedrooms of a female residence.

      A symbiotic relationship

      By the time I started my studies, the university had entered the “era of Thom”. Prof. HB Thom, who was rector from 1954 to 1969, was also the only person from the south of the country who ever served as chairman of the Afrikaner Broederbond’s Executive Council. He occupied this position from 1952 to 1960. This undoubtedly boosted the AB’s membership figures on the Matie campus.

      The US was a university with attitude: all students and lecturers were supposed to be extremely grateful for the privilege of being part of the US’s proud legacy. Between 1919 and 1978, all the prime ministers were US alumni. There was a symbiotic relationship between the university and Afrikaans as an official language. It was the first institution with full university status in the country that used Afrikaans predominantly as the medium of instruction. The offices of the Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse taal, a comprehensive descriptive dictionary aimed at reflecting Afrikaans in its entirety, were situated on the campus. And, of course, Stellenbosch had Danie Craven, who was practically synonymous with South African rugby.

      The US as an institution that was unmistakably Afrikaans was founded on the winged words “Stellenbosch stands for an idea”, expressed by Dr DF Malan in 1913. By that he meant that Stellenbosch was the place from which the Afrikaner nation could best realise its ideals. The US was established a few years later through a generous bequest of the philanthropist Jannie Marais, a Stellenbosch businessman and politician, which stipulated that Dutch or Afrikaans had to occupy no lesser place than English at the institution. Almost a hundred years later, no one seems to know any more what the famous Stellenbosch “idea” was. Without much compunction, the university has allowed English to elbow out Afrikaans relentlessly as medium of instruction.

      At the time of my enrolment at Stellenbosch, there were certain departments and lecturers that were justifiably rated highly. The Law Faculty was universally recognised as excellent, and the students had the greatest admiration for the dean, Prof. JC de Wet. Prof. PJ van der Merwe of the History Department was the most influential Afrikaans historian.

      Encountering Verwoerd

      I was a student at a time when it seemed as if white rule would remain inviolate for decades to come. Except for three or four months after the Sharpeville tragedy in 1960 – when the police shot dead 69 black people as a large crowd protested against the pass laws at the Sharpeville police station – we did not really have any fears about security. My generation was the last one which was not subject to military conscription, and we were also the generation that experienced the excitement of the final push towards a republic. I voted “yes” for the republic in the referendum of 1960. In the general election of 1961, I voted for the NP for the first and last time during the era of that party’s rule.

      In 1958, when I was in my third year, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd became NP leader and prime minister. I have two personal memories of Verwoerd that are unrelated to his political ideas. At the age of about 12 or 13, I collected signatures of celebrities as a hobby. Most of the cabinet ministers replied to my written request with a brief note from their private secretaries to which the signature had been added.

      Verwoerd was the only one who responded to my request with a personal handwritten note. He wrote that he had a child who was left-handed like me, and another who was the same age as me. I read later that a little girl once asked him for permission to call her pet rabbit Hendrik Verwoerd. He replied that he did not think it was a suitable name for a rabbit, but he was prepared to give his permission nonetheless. It says something about the man that he took this kind of trouble with children’s requests.

      My other instance of contact with him was in June 1960, when a few students and I spent the winter holidays with our fellow Simonsberg resident Siebert Wiid at his father’s farm Welgevonden, near Groblersdal. Verwoerd and his wife arrived at Welgevonden shortly after us. He was due to address a huge crowd at Groblersdal the following day, one of his first public appearances after the failed attempt on his life three months earlier. (David Pratt, a farmer from the Magaliesburg district, had shot Verwoerd in the face while he delivered a speech at the Rand Easter Show.) We students had our meals together with the VIP guests in the main house. I sat next to Verwoerd, and I remember how calmly and convincingly he formulated his standpoint in a way that made complete sense.

      On the Sunday morning of the Verwoerds’ weekend at Welgevonden, the local NP branch presented Verwoerd with a painting of him as a gift. He received it graciously, but remarked that it had a minor flaw: something was missing. There was a moment of consternation. “My beauty spots,” he explained smilingly, pointing to the bullet scars on his face. In my layperson’s view, it was clear that the assault on his life had caused no psychological damage. Thereafter I took scant notice of claims that Verwoerd regarded his survival as tangible proof of divine intervention and of the special blessing that supposedly now rested on him.

      Years later, in my book The Last Afrikaner Leaders (2012), I gave a more favourable assessment of Verwoerd than is the norm. I believe this had much to do with my first-hand exposure to the force of his personality and his powers of persuasion during that weekend in 1960.

      The publisher Koos Human had a similar experience. He and José Burman, the author of a book on mountain passes in the Boland, asked Verwoerd to write a foreword, as it was known that Verwoerd and his wife were keen mountaineers. Verwoerd invited Human and Burman to his office where, after informing them that he had read the entire manuscript and had written the foreword himself, he elaborated expertly on the subject in a ten-­minute monologue. Human made an observation that I can endorse wholeheartedly after the weekend at Welgevonden: “Never before (or since) have I been in the presence of such an almost unbelievably dominant personality. After this brief encounter, there was no doubt in my mind that he had his cabinet, caucus and party under his absolute control.”20

      The struggle against the English

      The political struggle of the 1950s had two facets: one was the overt competition for power between the National Party and the United Party (UP); the other was the veiled competition for status between the Afrikaans- and English-­speaking white communities. By 1955 English South Africans had started realising that the UP would in all likehood never regain political power. Like the Afrikaners after their loss of power in 1994, they were resentful of their diminished status and political marginalisation.

      The political activist and writer Patrick Duncan expressed their sense of disgruntlement as follows: “English South Africans are today in the power of their adversaries … They are beginning to know what the great majority of South Africans have always known – what it is to be second-class citizens in the land of one’s birth.”21

      After 1948, it was English commentators who “interpreted” the Afrikaners to foreign journalists and diplomats and, through them, to the entire world. Some commentators and historians declared that the Afrikaners were simply and solely driven by apartheid and other racial obsessions.

      English South Africans’ opposition to apartheid and their dissatisfaction about the fact that the Afrikaners СКАЧАТЬ