Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

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СКАЧАТЬ am afraid your Highness will find that all our most popular heroes are people who have either been in gaol for political crimes or in hospital for fractured bones. I must admit that the fact that your Highness has never been in gaol is a serious disqualification, which I sincerely trust your Highness will manage to get remedied before leaving the country. On the other hand, your Highness has fortunately, on several occasions, managed to get yourself into hospital and I can assure you that on that count alone your visit would give us great pleasure.

      As regards our lady students, I would very much have liked to interpret their feelings also, but I am afraid their sentiments on this occasion are far too delicate for masculine interpretation, and for further information on the subject, I shall have to refer your Highness to the way they are looking at you. I trust that the mere fact that they have put me here will abundantly show just how enthusiastic they can be over good-­looking young fellows with pleasant smiles.8

      Markus Viljoen, famed editor of Die Huisgenoot, wrote about the speech: “After all the formal, lacklustre, rather cloying expressions of loyalty, the young student’s speech was like a fresh spring breeze in a stuffy room, and it was a topic of discussion for weeks afterwards.”

      Oom Johann was not very impressed with the Prince, whom he described as follows:

      The Prince, between you and me, is a rather hopeless specimen of humanity. He is extremely nervous, looks quite dissipated, and doesn’t command respect in the least. He starts a sentence, and if you look him straight in the eye, he titters and starts a brand-new sentence.

      So I soon dropped the etiquette and from that point on he seemed more at ease and we had quite a good chat, about the university and about sport. He has one good trait, which is that he makes an effort to be pleasant … He evidently does his best in very trying circumstances, and the strongest emotion he inspires in me is one of profound sympathy. He is a nice boy through and through, with no trace of haughtiness; but lacks all the qualities of someone in his position.

      This assessment was not wide of the mark. Twelve years later, the Prince ascended the throne as Edward VIII. A few months later he abdicated after having committed the cardinal sin of refusing to give up his plan of marrying a divorced woman. Thereafter he took the title of Duke of Windsor. Winston Churchill dismissed him as “a little man, dressed up to the nines”.

      After obtaining a BA degree in 1925, Oom Johann worked in Pietermaritzburg for two years as editor of The Times of Natal. In 1928 he returned to Stellenbosch and completed his legal studies.

      When the university Senate decided to ask a student to address the audience on graduation day, the choice fell on Oom Johann. After speeches by the rector, the vice-chancellor and one or two other office-bearers, it was finally his turn. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “you have listened to words of wisdom. Now you can listen to words of common sense.” He continued:

      I have been at Stellenbosch for ten years now. In the course of these ten years, there have been many changes. New university buildings have been erected … And whether it’s true or not I can’t say, but there are students who claim that during these ten years there have even been changes in some professors’ notes.

      The students cheered him, but the vice-chancellor, Professor Adriaan Moorrees, was not amused.

      “Brilliant writer”

      Markus Viljoen considered Johann Buhr one of the most versatile and talented journalists he had ever encountered. “He was a born humorist who could be funny without even intending it.” Because the editorial team of Die Burger was so small in those early days, Johann had scant opportunity to give his humoristic bent free rein. The paper even offered him the position of sports editor.

      Among his best-known reports was his account of Malcolm Campbell’s attempt to break the world land speed record at Verneukpan in 1929. He also accompanied the first Afrikaans theatre companies on their tours as a reporter, and wrote about pioneering actors such as Paul de Groot and Wena Naudé in his series of articles “Agter die sterre” (Behind the stars). The actor and director André Huguenet described Johann Buhr as a “brainy and brilliant writer” who did much to stimulate the public’s interest in theatre.

      In 1930, at the age of 30, he resigned for health reasons after having contracted turberculosis. In his entire life, he had spent less than six years in a full-time position. He returned to Grasberg, and for some while stayed in a mat hut at a remote cattle post in Bushmanland in the hope that the dry air would cure him of the disease.

      Nevertheless, during the 1930s he still contributed several short stories and articles of exceptional quality to Die Burger and Die Huisgenoot.

      A year or two before his death in 1940 at the age of 40, some of his student friends visited him at his lonely hut at the cattle post to say their goodbyes. ID du Plessis, who would later receive the Hertzog Prize for poetry, delivered this touching tribute:

      Judged by outward appearances, Johann Buhr was unimpressive. But it was only poor health that prevented him from achieving much, both as journalist and as literary writer with a light satirical touch; for behind that exterior lay a remarkable mind: a scintillating intelligence, a fine sense of humour, a quicksilver wit that could have given a new dimension to Afrikaans journalism.

      If he could have devoted his talents to column writing from the outset, no doubt we would have been enriched today by a contribution of lasting value in his particular field.

      In the last years of his illness he had to spend the winter months at an isolated cattle post. Through the agency of his friend Recht Malan, he received reading matter from Cape Town: a gesture for which he was poignantly grateful; because for this endearing person it always came as a surprise that others could be so good to him.

      My last impression of him was at Nieuwoudtville, when a few of us visited him in the final year of the eclipse. That day he told me: “What a wonderful privilege it must be to be able to fulfil oneself in poems.”

      What would have passed through his mind as he stood watching us drive off: we who were headed for a life filled with all the possibilities that he, with his shining talent, was not destined to enjoy?

      On his death in 1940, Die Burger wrote: “As sincere and faithful as he always was towards friends, so he was towards the Afrikaner cause, which he promoted to the best of his ability.” The Cape Times commented that his friends had expected him to make a contribution to “the virile Afrikaans literature”, but, sadly, a very good brain had been housed in a weak body. In his memoirs Spykers met koppe (1946), Johannes Steinmeyer referred to Johann Buhr as one of his colleagues in journalism who were regarded as “men of great repute”.

      The tragedy of her brother’s early death left a deep impression on my mother. There must have been a strong bond between them, as he had nominated her as executrix of his estate. Whenever I underachieved, I felt that my mother was especially upset because she thought I was squandering my opportunities.

      In 1980, forty years after Oom Johann’s death, Anthony Heard, editor of the Cape Times, and Gerald Shaw, the deputy editor, invited me to write a column for the paper on the recommendation of the well-known journalist Anthony Delius, whose acquaintance I had made during the 1977-78 academic year at Yale University. I wondered what Oom Johann would have made of the opportunity to write his own column – a role for which he had been eminently equipped.

      Chapter 2

      “The song of a nation’s awakening”

      My parents were СКАЧАТЬ