Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

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СКАЧАТЬ had other important objectives: the establishment of Afrikaner business enterprises which would, in turn, employ Afrikaners, and the development of the Afrikaans language and culture.

      My mother played an active role in the upliftment of the town’s poor. She was a member and, later, chair of the Porterville branch of the Afrikaanse Christelike Vrouevereniging (ACVV). This Christian women’s organisation, which had branches across the Cape Province, had been founded in Cape Town in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War to relieve the distress of destitute Afrikaners.

      My mother often visited the poor herself to distribute food, clothing or reading matter, and sometimes she would send Jan. Her greatest frustration was that the poor did not want to read. She wanted to help uplift them intellectually so that they could be full members of the Afrikaner community and not only candidates for charity. This was a message that went out particularly from Dr DF Malan, editor of Die Burger and the NP leader, and ministers of religion.

      The Stellenbosch economist Professor Jan Sadie has pointed out that the project of middle-class Afrikaners to uplift their own poor was an unusual phenomenon. It had much to do with the fact that the English-speaking elite tended to look down on Afrikaners collectively as a lesser “race” or community. Some tried to substantiate this theory of inherent inferiority by noting that more than 80% of poor whites were Afrikaners.

      As a young newspaper reporter, MER (ME Rothmann), the Afrikaans writer who worked full-time for the ACVV for much of her life, heard a speech by Sir Carruthers Beattie, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, that upset her greatly. He stated that poor whites were generally “intellectually backward” and that there was something “inherent” in the Afrikaners that resulted in the phenomenon of poor whiteism assuming such alarming proportions in their case. MER wrote: “His audience raised no objections to this statement.” As Sadie put it, Afrikaners of all classes resolved to form a united front against English speakers, who looked down on them, especially their poor.

      Most of the coloured people were, of course, even poorer than the poor whites. I once asked my mother whether she should not try to help the coloured poor as well. Her reply was that one could undertake only one great social task in one’s life, and the upliftment of the Afrikaner poor was her great task.

      Economically, the Afrikaners still lagged far behind their English-speaking counterparts. In 1938, the year of my birth, the Afrikaner share of the private sector stood at less than 10% (excluding agriculture). Referring to the accepted correlation between Protestantism and capitalism, a respected analyst observed recently that “the failure of the Calvinist Afrikaners to develop a thriving capitalist system until the last quarter of the [twentieth] century” is an anomaly.16

      In 1939 Sanlam and the Afrikaner Broederbond organised an economic volkskongres (people’s congress) in Bloemfontein to promote the establishment of Afrikaner companies. From their side, Afrikaner companies had to undertake to employ Afrikaners and to place those who excelled in management positions. The central idea was to increase the Afrikaner share of the economy in a way that would command respect.

      After the congress TE Dönges, who later became a cabinet minister, defended the economic mobilisation of Afrikaners in a way that was also wholeheartedly endorsed by my parents. The Afrikaners, he said, were determined to act as a group to increase their share of the economy fairly and peacefully. They felt that they had no right to expect others to help them, and were too proud to ask for help from others to work out their economic salvation. Dönges emphasised that the Afrikaners had no intention of boycotting English firms. All that they asked was for the English-speaking community to maintain at least a “benign neutrality” to allow Afrikaners to find their “economic feet”.

      This was the idealistic side, but there was certainly also the dark side. After the NP came to power in 1948, Indians were forced to move from business centres to the outskirts of towns. My parents ordered us not to buy from Hassim, an Indian who had a shop in the main street. Few enterprises were owned by coloured people, and up to the last decade or two of NP rule the government or local authorities made virtually no attempt to help coloured entrepreneurs grow their own businesses.

      By the time I reached the age of ten in 1948, there was still only a smattering of Afrikaner-owned businesses that were bigger than the town café or the town shop. It was only in 1945 that the first Afrikaner company listed on the Johan­nesburg Stock Exchange (JSE): Anton Rupert’s Distillers Corporation. Bonuskor (in the Sanlam stable) followed a few years later.

      Fortunately, there was no question of English companies having to lend the Afrikaners a hand in establishing themselves economically. The Afrikaners had to earn their respect by creating their own successful enterprises. I asked Anton Rupert in 1999 if he could think of any Afrikaans company that had been “empowered” by an English company. He reflected for a moment before answering: “Not one, and I’m very grateful for that.”

      My father had joined the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) shortly after his arrival in Porterville. After the congress of 1939, the AB encouraged its members to invest in Afrikaner companies. My father had started buying shares on the JSE at an early stage. He bought gold shares in particular, but also invested in Rembrandt, Federale Volksbeleggings and Federale Mynbou.

      Something that irked my father was the poor quality of Die Burger’s business page. In 1959 he asked in a letter to Die Burger’s managing director, Phil Weber, that the newspaper “should become just as authoritative in the economic field as it already is in other fields”. He described Die Burger’s financial reporting, justifiably, as “formal, technical, stiff and dull”. English-language papers, on the other hand, were chock-a-block with analyses of the value of particular shares.

      To illustrate his point, my father referred to the shares of Federale Mynbou (later known as Fedmyn), a Sanlam subsidiary that was established in 1953 and that soon achieved success. In 1958 it went public with Bonuskor and Federale Volksbeleggings as the major shareholders.

      My father was keen to buy shares in Fedmyn but could not find the necessary information in Die Burger. He complained to Weber about the difficulty investors had in trying to evaluate the transactions of the emerging Fedmyn. To do that, he wrote, “information and yet more information” was required. As matters stood, “we have to hunt around for it everywhere in the English magazines”.

      Weber forwarded the letter to the paper’s editor Piet Cillié for answering, with the comment: “Apparently the man means well.” It would still take almost ten years before Die Burger’s business page improved.

      The Broederbond “gang”

      My father’s Broederbond membership gave him a sense of participation in the Afrikaner nationalists’ debates on policy issues. Along with other branches of the organisation across the country, the Porterville branch studied the working documents that the Johannesburg head office circulated among members for comment. I sometimes chanced upon some of these documents, for instance an analysis of the Tomlinson Commission’s report. As children, we enjoyed playing along to maintain secrecy when the local branch of the AB met at our home. Naturally, I never talked to my friends about the AB. Now and then I would tease my father light-heartedly about his “secret gang”, but I soon saw that I was on dangerous ground.

      In the mid-1950s the Porterville branch lodged a complaint because a member from another branch had rejected a teacher they had recommended for membership. At that stage the rector of the University of Stellenbosch, Prof. HB Thom, was chair of the AB’s Executive Council, and the AB management referred the complaint to him. Thom and my father had been classmates at Stellenbosch.

      It later transpired that the objection had come from someone who suspected the nominee of having cheated as a referee in a school rugby match. The person in question never became a member. Maybe the СКАЧАТЬ