Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

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СКАЧАТЬ in Villiers in the Free State, and Catharina Gesa Giliomee (1903-2001), whose birthplace was the farm Grasberg, near Nieuwoudtville on the Bokveld Plateau. My paternal grandfather’s participation in both the Anglo-Boer War and the Rebellion of 1914-15 had shaped my father politically. Notable political influences in my mother’s case included her German father, Hermann Buhr, and the colonial patriotism that had developed among Cape Afrikaners in the nineteenth century.

      At the time of my parents’ birth in the early twentieth century, Afrikaners lagged far behind the English-speaking community. At the root of this disparity were the poor educational and cultural foundations that the Dutch East India Company had laid down in the first 150 years of the settlement. When the British first occupied the Cape in 1795, there were no locally produced newspapers, magazines or books. The Dutch-speaking burgher community was isolated, poorly educated, and far behind developments in Europe.

      The British rulers decided to make English the only official language and the language of instruction in schools. The isolated life on farms and a huge shortage of schools in the country districts made it difficult for Afrikaners to establish a culturally conscious middle class.

      By 1930, when my parents left university, a commission found that a quarter of the Afrikaners could be classified as poor whites – so impoverished that they lived far below the level that was considered then appropriate for white people. In the bigger towns and the cities, many lived in wretched conditions. Here, English was the dominant language. The English-speaking community set the tone in the spheres of fashion, architecture, language, good manners and polite conversation.9

      My parents studied at the University of Stellenbosch, where both of them trained for the teaching profession with the aim of devoting their lives to the building of the Afrikaner community. They married in 1933. In 1935 my father obtained his first permanent appointment, at a high school in the village of Ugie in Griqualand East.

      Destitution was rife in Ugie. Those were the years of the Depression and prolonged drought. Many farmers had thrown in the towel and moved to town. In addition to all the poor farm children, the town had a large orphanage that could accommodate 400 youngsters. It had been established by the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape Province in the wake of the flu epidemic of 1918, which left many orphans. Over the next forty years, the institution would send more than 4 000 children into the world equipped with a good school education.

      Ugie influenced my parents’ outlook on life in two ways in particular. They became aware of the vital importance of education in the upliftment of poor Afrikaners, and they reacted strongly against the tendency of some English speakers to look down on the orphans and other poor Afrikaners. My parents resolved to be unashamedly Afrikaans. Instead of calling our parents “Daddy” and “Mommy”, we were taught to say “Vader” and “Moeder”.

      My parents moved from Ugie to Sterkstroom, where I was born in 1938. Six months after my birth, my father accepted the post of history teacher in the town of Porterville in the Western Cape. Porterville offered a much gentler and more pleasant environment than the Eastern Cape.

      Porterville’s history dates back to 1863, when the first plots were laid out on the farm Pomona. The town was named after William Porter, a popular attorney-general of the Cape Colony. The first school was opened in 1870. In 1876 the Dutch Reformed church was consecrated, and in 1880 the first minister was called.10

      When the little school opened its doors in 1870, it had 82 registered pupils and one English-speaking teacher. But the average attendance figure was only 43. There was a fundamental problem: the teacher had lost control over the children. A replacement had to be found, and the school only re-opened a year later.

      The Cape Colony only introduced compulsory education for white children in 1905. The school in Porterville, which was initially just a primary school, became a secondary school as well in 1917, and it took another three years before a proper high school for white children was established in a separate building. This was fully two hundred years after the first burghers had settled here, and less than two generations before I went to high school in the early 1950s. Coloured children only gained access to a high school after 1994, when the white school was integrated.

      The residents of Porterville had retained something of the independent spirit of their free burgher forebears. Many still kept their own cows so that they could be self-sufficient in terms of milk supply. In the mornings these cows would be taken to the pastures south of the town where they grazed, and in the evenings they were brought home to be milked. The municipality kept a bull in a kraal in the town to serve the cows. He was soon referred as “the Bull from Porterville”, which is how Portervillers are known to this day.

      Culturally, the town and district formed one of the most homogeneous communities in the country. Virtually all the inhabitants were either white or coloured, followed the Christian faith, and spoke Afrikaans. With a few exceptions, the coloured Afrikaans speakers were much poorer than their white counterparts. There were only two black African people in the town.

      The number of Porterville residents who spoke English as their first language could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. Most Afrikaans speakers’ grasp of English was nonexistent or poor. English was, for all practical purposes, a foreign language.

      A Boland childhood

      Porterville lies at the foot of the Olifants River Mountains, about 150 km north of Cape Town. It is a tranquil town, abounding in trees and water, with a moderate climate except for a quota of sweltering summer days. The Olifants River Mountains, which separate the coastal plain from the interior, stand sentinel over the town without dominating it.

      For Jan Smuts, who had been born in nearby Riebeek West, the most beautiful spot in the world was the view from Riebeek Kasteel over the coastal plain to Cape Town. In my case, it was Porterville’s town dam, from where you could look up at the Olifants River Mountains across the water to the east and down on the town to the west. On balmy summer evenings, my mother would often pack a picnic supper which we enjoyed at the dam. Porterville was a town where children felt safe and secure. You knew who you were, and who your family were. Porterville was my place.

      We were three children in a happy family: Jan was born in 1936, I in 1938, and Hester in 1940. The three of us followed the same path through school and church in the town. As eldest child, Jan was the natural leader and he developed an interest in his environment, agriculture and the study of insects at an early age. He would later become a professor of entomology at the University of Stellenbosch, an eminent champion of environmental conversation, and an astute art collector.

      I was named after my maternal grandfather, Hermann Buhr, an enterprising and innovative person, a great individualist and a strong family man, a German and an Afrikaner. I never really managed to connect with him. By the time I entered my teens he was already in his mid-seventies, and he had in any case never been disposed to small talk.

      My sister Hester, a vivacious and energetic child, became a teacher. Many years later, when the television producer and director Herman Binge made the documentary programme Stroom-op, Hester revealed herself surprisingly as someone with a natural gift for appearing in front of the television cameras.

      In our home in Porterville, I suffered from the typical “second-child syndrome” and routinely rebelled against Jan’s authority and some parental decisions. “Against the government”, my mother would remark about my protests.

      My father was a well-informed, level-headed and positive person who dedicated his life to his family and to education. My mother was a strong woman, imbued with a great devotion to her family and a sense of duty towards the poor Afrikaners in the town.

      My love for history came from my father. In his history classes СКАЧАТЬ