Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee

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СКАЧАТЬ electoral majority, which would have been a masterstroke against the efforts of Milner to provoke war. John X. Merriman, a leading liberal politician, made what a historian called the ‘characteristic assertion’ that women were quite unfit to exercise the vote.99 Of all the leading politicians President Steyn stood virtually alone as a strong and outspoken champion of the vote for white women.100

      By the turn of the century Merriman made an intriguing statement: ‘Oddly enough in South Africa the [Afrikaner] women have always exercised a great influence. I say “oddly” because they are so utterly opposed to the modern view of “women’s rights”.’101 By ‘the modern view’ he meant the views of the suffragette movement, which originated in Britain in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Frustrated by pervasive gender discrimination, the suffragettes formed a mass movement of predominantly urban, middle-class women to win equal rights and opportunities for women.

      Very few Afrikaner women joined when English-speaking women in South Africa began to campaign for the enfranchisement of women early in the twentieth century. For a start they suspected that the suffragettes in South Africa were above all interested in projecting the extension of the vote to women as part and parcel of the programme of imperial reform which had served as a justification for the war in South Africa.

      Afrikaner women only began pressing for the vote in the late 1920s. Both Olive Schreiner and MER, who had become one of the first full-time social workers, made revealing comments about the reason why women in some societies refrain from insisting on political rights for their own sex. After telling the story of an illuminating conversation she had with a traditional African woman who had stoically endured polygamy and other disadvantages, Schreiner recorded this important observation: no women of any race or class would ever rise in a revolt or attempt to bring about a revolutionary adjustment to their situation in their community while the community’s welfare required their submission. That stance would only end when changing conditions in a society made women’s acquiescence in the discrimination against them ‘no longer necessary or desirable’.102

      In 1922 MER wrote that Afrikaner women believed there were greater priorities than getting the vote. Of overriding importance were regaining the freedom of Afrikaners as a ‘conquered people’, the taalstryd, and addressing the impoverishment, ‘neglect and degeneration [of Afrikaner people]’. The vote for women did not appear to be an important factor in addressing these grave crises. MER added that the campaign to enfranchise women had been imported from Britain, and that in South Africa it had been propagated by English-speaking women who ‘cared little about the issues of vital concern to Afrikaners’.103

      Afrikaner women refused to join the suffragette movement in great numbers but many gave enthusiastic support to associations for women’s rights founded within the framework of the Afrikaner nationalist movement. After the Vroue Nasionale Party had been formed its mouthpiece, Die Burgeres, remarked that the NP leadership had not anticipated the force it would unleash when it called on women to organise their own political party.104

      In 1930 white women were enfranchised, but this important step was soon eclipsed by Fusion in 1934 and the rise of a radical Afrikaner nationalist movement dominated by men. Men now led the struggle for the advancement of Afrikaans and the rehabilitation of the poor, leaving church membership, charity work and domestic chores to Afrikaner women. Between 1934 and 1994 fewer than ten Afrikaner women went to Parliament and Rina Venter, the first woman to become a cabinet minister, was only appointed in 1989, the same year that the men in her party decided to give up exclusive white power.

      Conclusion

      Along with other women on both sides of the Atlantic, Afrikaner women were denied public office and the vote for more than two centuries after the founding of the settlement at the Cape. Nevertheless their legal position was probably stronger than that of any women in Europe or the European colonies. They could claim a fixed part of the estate and played a major role as partners of their husbands in running the farms. Their role was crucial in the forging of a racially exclusive Afrikaner people and a predominantly white church. Women demanded a share of the decision-making on the Great Trek. The last two years of the South African War were above all characterised by the unbending refusal of the republican women to surrender, something unique in the history of European settlement.

      From the 1870s onwards several developments, especially the introduction of primogeniture and urbanisation, undermined their position. Afrikaner women, however, refused to join in the suffragette movement as a separate cause, because they considered the taalstryd and the rehabilitation of the Afrikaner poor as more important than promoting women’s rights.

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