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Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee
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Автор произведения Hermann Giliomee
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
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Although coloured men who met the requirements of the Cape’s qualified franchise could vote up to the 1950s, I never heard of a single one in the town who was eligible to vote. Die Burger did not write about the fierce competition for the coloured vote during the 1920s in which the National Party had also participated. The paper frequently alleged that coloured voters were “open to bribery” and, by implication, did not really deserve the vote.
My parents supported the policy of apartheid. Their standpoint was that the policy was not only intended to bring about separation between white and coloured, but also helped to develop and uplift the coloured people by providing them with better mass education and social services. No doubt they endorsed the statement PW Botha made to his biographers: “The coloureds must first be uplifted and the consequences of that accepted.”18
The government’s spending on coloured education in the Cape Province had started increasing rapidly from 1935. In 1953 it was almost ten times what it had been in 1935. Between 1948 and 1951 it increased by 41%, and it did not slow down thereafter. In 1953 a study asked whether the “financial burdens” in this regard were not perhaps “disproportionate to the province’s carrying capacity”.19 Of course, the spending on white children was much higher, but no one asked whether this was disproportionate to the country’s “carrying capacity”.
But there was also another problem, which NP supporters only realised later. Improving a community’s education levels without giving them meaningful rights is a recipe for political alienation and revolt.
The Group Areas Act was the central aspect of the political debate in the early 1950s, at the time I started becoming politically aware. By law, coloured people had to be moved from the “white town” to separate coloured “towns” on the outskirts of, or a short distance from, the main town. It was said that the resettled people would get their own houses and shops there.
In Porterville, a relatively small proportion of the coloured community was moved during the period of NP rule to Monte Bertha, a coloured suburb that had been established as far back as 1937. But there were several towns in the Boland, notably Stellenbosch, Paarl and Wellington, which had large coloured or racially mixed neighbourhoods that were situated in the central business district. In the first two decades of NP rule, these neighbourhoods were all proclaimed white areas and the coloured residents were forced to move. The most prominent mixed area in the Cape was District Six in Cape Town, which had about 65 000 residents. While the majority was coloured, there were also black, Indian and white residents, including Afrikaners. NP propaganda portrayed District Six as “a den of iniquity”.
As an avid newspaper reader from an early age, I was certainly exposed to this propaganda that was peddled in Die Burger. This is apparent from my first article that ever appeared in print. It was written in 1951, when I was in standard 6 (now grade 8), and appeared in the school’s yearbook three years later.
In the article I gave an account of my first visit to Cape Town, and related how I had lost my way in the city centre and later found myself in a slum quarter where I saw only hovels around me. I wrote that I had no idea of how to find my way back, but fortunately ran into a policeman. He informed me that they had been looking for me everywhere, and that I had wandered into the heart of District Six. I wrote the story as if my straying into District Six had put my life in danger.
For coloured people, the forced removals and the break-up of established communities were a source of immense grief and heartache. I would only grasp this fully many years later, when I wrote about the forced removal of the coloured community from the centre of Stellenbosch in the late 1960s. This same story repeated itself in numerous towns without any protest from Afrikaners.
The only serious conversation I had with a well-educated coloured person at the time took place in 1966 aboard a ship on the way to Europe. He was a teacher headed for Canada to start a new life there, and I was travelling to the Netherlands to study at the University of Amsterdam. The sadness in his voice as he spoke of his humiliation made a lasting impression on me.
As I have mentioned, there were virtually no black people in Porterville. When the homeland policy was discussed, it was as if one were talking about some exotic experiment in a far-off land. In our student days at Stellenbosch, the only black people we interacted with were the waiters in the residence. Black residents of the town were subject to a curfew; every night at ten o’clock a siren would go off, which meant that no black person was permitted to be outside the township of Kayamandi. We did not think of the flagrant denial of a person’s citizenship it represented.
“The open conversation”
Our household subscribed to Die Huisgenoot in which the column “Die oop gesprek” (the open conversation) of NP van Wyk Louw, one of the leading Afrikaner intellectuals, appeared. On 8 August 1952 Louw’s column took the form of a letter adressed to “My dear young friend”. Van Wyk Louw’s article was prompted by the NP government’s efforts to remove coloured voters from the voters’ roll.
Louw was at that stage a professor in Amsterdam, and he wrote in general terms instead of criticising the decision to put coloured voters on a separate roll. In a letter to a friend at the University of Cape Town, he wrote that legislation “was not necessary for our preservation as a people”. It would be better to make the coloured people “nationalists again than to put them on separate rolls”.
Louw was referring to the 1920s when coloured voters constituted about a quarter of the electorate in constituencies such as Stellenbosch and Paarl. Along with the other parties, the NP competed fiercely for their vote. In 1929 Bruckner de Villiers, the victorious NP candidate in Stellenbosch, was carried shoulder-high into Parliament by coloured voters. After the 1938 election, in which De Villiers lost the Stellenbosch seat to the UP’s Henry Fagan by 30 votes, he commented scathingly on the “bright young men” in Parliament whose “clever plans” had cost the party several Cape seats, while they managed to win only one seat in the Transvaal.
In the battle to remove the coloured voters from the voters’ roll in the 1950s, the NP leaders and Die Burger kept silent about this history, or, when it did crop up, shrugged it off with the comment that coloured voters were bribable.
In his article of 1952 Van Wyk Louw wrote that a people could be faced with various crises of national survival: one was military conquest, and another would be if a critical mass of its members no longer considered it important to continue existing as a separate people. And then there was the third case: when a people, after it had done all in its power to survive, was faced with the last temptation: “to believe that mere survival is preferable to survival in justice” (Louw’s emphasis).
Louw realised that people would ask why an ethical crisis like this could threaten the survival of an entire people. He replied with a counter-question: “How can a small people continue to survive if it is something hateful and evil for the best within – or without – it?” He added: “I believe that in a strange way this is the crisis from which a people emerge reborn, young, creative, this ‘dark night of the soul’ in which it says: I would rather perish than survive through injustice.”
I have no memory of having read the article at the time, and Jaap Steyn writes in his biography of Louw that Die Huisgenoot received no letters from readers in response to the particular column. The article was republished in 1958 in Louw’s collection of essays Liberale nasionalisme when I was in my third year at university as a student of Afrikaans-Nederlands. There was no mention of this work in our classes.
But Piet Cillié, editor of Die Burger, wrote in an exceptionally positive review that Louw excercised his influence as an intellectual midwife. “He was more skilful and subtle than many other thinkers, but without the pretensions of absolute certainty.” During my student years, such thinkers were extremely rare at the Afrikaans universities.
Chapter 3
A university