Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee

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СКАЧАТЬ and sisters’ to assemble in Church Square in Pretoria. Some 4 000 women marched to the Union Buildings, where they presented a petition to Lord Buxton, the governor-general.88 After the rebellion Hertzog declared: ‘Perhaps they were the greatest rebels.’ He concluded with a warning: ‘If one ignores the voice of Afrikaner women, one would land this country in a political hell.’89

      Women and modernisation

      South Africa entered its period of industrialisation with the discovery of minerals in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. There was a rapid growth of towns and cities, an expansion of trade and industry, and the modernisation of the education system. By the early 1870s three distinct categories of Afrikaner women could be discerned. The first were girls and women in affluent families who were educated in English and were increasingly using English in their correspondence. The second category included poorly educated women in towns who were unable to read or write properly in either English or Dutch. Thirdly, there were the large majority of women, living mainly on subsistence farms, who had little schooling and spoke only Afrikaans.

      Afrikaner women were all profoundly affected by developments between the 1870s, when modernisation began to accelerate, and 1930, when white women received the vote. The most important was a change in the law of inheritance in order to promote the stability of landownership and capital accumulation. In 1874 the Cape government abolished partible inheritance, based on the rule of equal shares, and replaced it with primogeniture. Alfred Milner introduced primogeniture in the ex-republics after the Anglo-Boer War, despite considerable opposition.90 Although the convention of equal shares persisted for some time, it was no longer obligatory to have children equally share half the estate. Invariably the result was that the daughters received a smaller share than had been the case under Roman-Dutch law. Increasingly they had to move to the towns and cities in search of a livelihood.

      Another development was the modernisation of education. Until the early 1870s the level of education provided to Afrikaner girls was very low, while that of boys, with the exception of two or three schools, was not much better. The leading figures in the Dutch Reformed Church interested in educational reform believed that an English-medium education was the only realistic option. Insisting that girls had a right to a proper education, N.J. Hofmeyr, professor of the Theological School at Stellenbosch, in 1874 pleaded for government assistance in view of the fact that ‘the civilisation of a people depends more upon the culture of the women than the men’.91

      The leading reformer of education was the British-born Andrew Murray, moderator of the DRC and minister of the Wellington congregation, who attracted excellent American teachers to the private schools for Afrikaans girls belonging to his church. He also helped to found the Huguenot Seminary which opened in Wellington in 1874. This institution would later establish Bloemhof High School for girls in Stellenbosch and would also acquire a girls’ high school in Paarl, later called La Rochelle, as a branch institution.

      The Afrikaans journalist and writer MER, who was in high school in the early 1890s, argued that there was a clear difference between the British and the American female teachers sent out to teach in South Africa. American teachers would never break down a child’s self-respect by regarding with contempt the language he or she spoke. British teachers, by contrast, were inclined to be status conscious and were quick to disparage Afrikaans.92

      From the 1890s education for Afrikaner girls made rapid strides. Growing numbers enrolled in secondary schools, and by the end of the century some were going on to college where they received BA degrees. With men reluctant to become teachers, teaching was one of the few careers open to women. In 1905 the senior official of the Cape education department reported: ‘In truth it has become the proper thing among the fairly well-to-do farming class that the daughters of the family on completing their education should go out and teach for three or four years.’93

      Yet another development was the rise of nationalist organisations and publications. It is instructive to conceive of nationalism as built on the ideas of a patriarchal family and a fraternity or brotherhood of men. In this scheme of thought the traditions of the ‘forefathers’ are passed down through the generations to young men, who are deemed to be the heroic protectors of women and of the purity of the nation. Women were seen as the reproducers of the nation and the protectors of tradition and morality. Men had the obligation to shield them from public controversy and embarrassment, while women had to devote themselves to the welfare of their husbands and children.94

      The architects of the first Afrikaner political movement were nationalists in this mould. It was led by S.J. du Toit, minister in the town of Paarl in the western Cape, who, together with seven other men, founded the Genootskap vir Regte Afrikaners (GRA) in 1875. The GRA published the Afrikaans paper Di Patriot and several Afrikaans books, including a history and a volume of poems. From the outset Di Patriot refused to publish poems submitted in Afrikaans by women, which raises the question whether the decision was informed primarily by misogyny or the special circumstances in which the GRA operated.

      Misogyny characterised the thinking of Du Toit, who wrote the following, citing Nehemiah 13 verses 23–28:

      Seduction and degeneration usually slips in by means of the woman. Virtually every heresy counts women among its first adherents and most fiery disseminators. When they could not eradicate our nationality openly in our church and the state they directed their fire at our families. They took our daughters and educated them in American and other schools, in order to denationalise the future mothers of our generation and their children.95

      Du Toit was influenced by conservative Protestant Dutch literature of the nineteenth century which was suffused with old-fashioned biblical misogyny.96 However, his comments must also be seen against the background of the GRA’s objectives of elevating Afrikaans to the level of a literary language and of rehabilitating lower-income white Afrikaans-speakers. Poems sent from Huguenot Seminary in the neighbouring town of Wellington were unlikely to serve any of these purposes. Almost all the girls there came from upper-class homes. At best they considered Afrikaans as a medium for light-hearted fun; at worst they saw it as an impure language fit only for working-class or Coloured people.

      The manifestation of an aggressive British imperialism in the Jameson Raid and the South African War shocked Cape Afrikaner girls who attended English-medium private schools. Among them were Petronella van Heerden, who would become a physician and feminist, and M.E. Rothmann, who would later write under the name MER. Later in life they each gave an account of how they suddenly discovered that underlying the actions of imperialist politicians was a profound contempt for ‘Boers’ or Afrikaners. Both of them turned to a variant of Afrikaner nationalism that rejected the misogyny of Du Toit and some of his allies.

      During the South African War some 10 000 Cape Afrikaners became rebels by joining the republican forces, but the Afrikaner men were quiescent. It was Afrikaner women who organised and attended the fourteen protest meetings in the Colony that took place during the war at which imperialism was denounced. After the war the women regrouped first. Well before men founded the first cultural organisations, they established welfare organisations to address the needs of poor Afrikaners. These were the Afrikaanse Christelike Vrouevereniging in the Cape Colony, the Oranje Vrouevereniging in the Orange River Colony, and the Suid-Afrikaanse Vrouefederasie in the Transvaal Colony. Women ran these organisations entirely separately from the Dutch Reformed Church’s all-male hierarchy.97

      Women and the vote

      Although Afrikaner women held a strong and secure place in the family, particularly on the farms, their public position was weakened by a long history of discrimination. From the beginning of European settlement at the Cape a gendered definition of political rights and offices applied, with access to office in the state and church open only to European men. This continued under British rule. Women were excluded from the vote in both the liberal Cape constitution of 1853 and the constitutions of the Boer republics.

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