Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ urbanised Afrikaner of today is already a generation or two removed from the traditional life on farms or in the small platteland towns. Nevertheless, there are many things Afrikaners still have in common: farm life, an interest in nature, and a love of braaivleis (barbequed meat). The custom of open-air braais took root among town and city dwellers during the 1938 celebrations of the centenary of the Great Trek.

      School and church

      As schoolchildren, we soon heard that we had to prepare ourselves for a future that would not always be easy. Implicitly, the message was that uncontested white domination would not last for ever, and that a good education would become increasingly valuable.

      As a state establishment, our school in Porterville encompassed the entire spectrum of the white community: from parents who were well off to those who struggled to get by, and from pupils who were gifted to those who found it difficult to keep up. The last-mentioned category included two of my classmates, Org and Gys. Once I tried to justify my poor marks in an exam by saying: “Org and Gys fared even worse.”

      My mother made it abundantly clear that the poor performance of “Org and Gys” could not be my benchmark. She firmly believed that I was capable of greater things. “Org and Gys” became a saying in our home whenever one of us children offered a feeble excuse for a mediocre performance. On the other hand, we never got the idea that achievement was a precondition for parental love, which sometimes seems to be the case among the ambitious middle class of today.

      The school in Porterville was relatively small, and in 1955, my matric year, we were only sixteen in the class. The teachers were generally committed to their work and to the welfare of the pupils. The one weakness was the quality of the English teaching. Combined with the monolingual nature of the town, this deficiency was certainly not a good preparation for university.

      At university I would enrol for the subject English Special, the standard of which was considerably lower than that of English I. Even “Engels Spes” I had to abandon later on account of my low marks. I fell in the category of those whom our formidable lecturer Patricia McMagh used to call the “Kakamasians”, or “Members of the Kakamas club” – students whose grasp of English was alarmingly poor. When she congratulated me in 2003 on the appearance of my book The Afrikaners, I reminded her kindly that I had once been one of her “Kakamasians”.

      Church and catechism were compulsory components of our education. Besides the great emphasis that was placed on the sermons and on the doctrine of predestination – which is still a mystery to me – I cannot remember much about my Christian instruction. Few churches had a task as daunting as that of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), which had to try to reconcile apartheid with Christianity’s emphasis on the equality of all people.

      Ben Marais, whose comprehensive study Die kleur-krisis en die Weste (the English version was titled The Colour Crisis and the West) appeared in 1952, was one of the ministers who rejected attempts to prove that apartheid had a Scriptural basis. When I worked in Pretoria from 1963 to 1965, I had the good fortune of getting to know him. In 1965 he perfomed our marriage ceremony when my fiancée Annette van Coller and I tied the knot.

      “Oom Ben” was a respected and beloved minister who never complained about the opposition he encountered as a result of his views. He liked to tell the story of a session of the synod that took place in the election year of 1953, shortly after he had spoken out in his book against the efforts to justify apartheid on Christian grounds. An elder berated him: “Oh, dominee, you have now completely spoilt this year’s wonderful election result for us.”

      A sense of community

      There was no neighbourhood in Porterville that was conspicuously rich or poor. In several streets, rich and poor lived side by side. While the homes of the more affluent were comfortable, there were no ostentatious houses. Plot size was the most noticeable difference. Some residents not only had a flower garden but also fruit trees, vegetable patches and even a vineyard. The big municipal dam was fed by water from a kloof in the mountain. The weekly turn to irrigate one’s garden was a major event for the townspeople. Though my father was not a keen gardener, he did not easily miss his irrigation opportunity.

      Wheat farming was the district’s principal economic activity, but by the 1950s there was already considerable diversification. On the mountain farmers grew fruit, berries and disa plants, and on the farms below the mountain one found fruit, vineyards and mixed farming. Export grapes and wine grapes were produced in the Vier-en-Twintig-Riviere area, south of the town, while wheat farming predominated in the Rooi Karoo, northwest of the town.

      Until about the year 2000 most of the farms were between 300 and 500 morgen in size, considerably smaller than those in the Swartland districts such as Malmesbury and Moorreesburg. This was the main reason why no significant class differences developed among the white community in the Porterville district. There was no question of poor Afrikaners belonging to a lower class. White people regarded each other as equals, irrespective of income differences.

      Portervillers tended to look askance at anyone who paraded their wealth or education. People even hesitated to talk about an overseas trip for fear that they might be suspected of showing off. In the early 1960s, when my mother mentioned to an acquaintance, Oom Dais Toerien, that she and my father had just returned from a visit to London and Paris, he swiftly trumped her with an account of his recent trip to Oudtshoorn.

      My recollection is that the Afrikaner community, whose lives revolved around the church and the school, were reasonably content with their lives, mainly on account of the lack of conspicuous class differences but also because there was no television that could broadcast images of the lifestyle of wealthy South Africans.

      A scientific study carried out in the 1950s in more than a dozen countries around the world indicated that, on average, the citizens of poor countries were no less satisfied with their lives than those of rich countries. When a similar study was conducted in the mid-1980s, the results were dramatically different. According to their responses, citizens of richer countries were distinctly happier than those of poorer countries. The crucial difference was television. Almost everyone could see how the middle class lived in the world’s advanced democracies, and almost everyone now hankered after that lifestyle and at the same time detested the rich.14

      White people’s strong sense of community had struck my parents from the outset. The church and the school occupied a central place in social life, and there was a spirit of mutual caring that went hand in hand with an engaging unpretentiousness. People showed respect towards the minister and the teachers, but did not shrink from criticism when they neglected their duties. The school achieved good academic results over the years.

      In one of the school’s yearbooks, three school inspectors highlighted the great value of “platteland schools for platteland children”. My subjective impression at Stellenbosch, both as student and as lecturer, was that outstanding students who had matriculated at obscure platteland schools almost always performed better than good students who had attended the top schools.15 Malcolm Gladwell recently proved this theory statistically in the context of American schools and universities in his David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants (2013).

      A national movement

      Participation in the volksbeweging was a formative influence in my life. It instilled in me a sense of involvement with Afrikaners as a community that was numerically small and still at an early stage of its cultural development. As strange as it may sound today, the volksbeweging did not arise in reaction to any perceived threat from coloured or black people.

      The volksbeweging was especially aimed at liberating Afrikaners from their sense of inferiority towards the wealthier and more confident English-speaking section СКАЧАТЬ