The Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929-1948* - CC

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 29, Number 2, June 2003 The Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929–1948* HERMANN GILIOMEE (University of Stellenbosch) Downloaded by [Shanghai Jiaotong University] at 18:42 19 September 2012 Apartheid as an ideology and operational plan for the Afrikaner nationalist movement was not, as the current orthodoxy suggests, the product of an Afrikaner Broederbond intelligentsia based in the Transvaal and affected by German romantic nationalism and Nazi racial thought. The main influences were German missiology, as applied by Dutch Reformed Church missionary strategists in the Orange Free State and, more importantly, the secular intelligentsia in the Western Cape with good access to D. F. Malan’s Cape National Party. Both the missionary strategists and Western Cape secular intellectuals were in the mainstream of the scholarship of racial thought and social engineering in Western Europe and the USA. The segregationist practice of the American South was particularly influential. The break with traditional South Africa segregation that apartheid represents was due mainly to party political competition between the National Party and United Party, obliging the former to come up with an alternative that was both more radical and more ‘idealistic’, and to the polarisation of white politics after South Africa’s controversial entry into the Second World War. In essence, apartheid was a modernised form of both paternalism and trusteeship, on the one hand and, on the other, elements of liberal ideology not used by segregationists. The most sophisticated version, espoused first by N. P. van Wyk Louw and G. B. A. Gerdener, had a surprisingly enduring appeal. ‘n Boer maak ‘n plan (Afrikaans proverb) Introduction For a concept that has dominated South African politics for the past 50 to 60 years, some aspects of apartheid have a remarkably obscure history. To start with the simple question: where and how did the term originate? Hexham records an early but eccentric use of the term in Potchefstroom in 1905. 1 Davenport and Saunders accept the view of Nic Rhoodie that the term originated during the 1930s in the Transvaal and, more specifically, in the political circles in which M. C. de Wet Nel, a later cabinet minister, moved. 2 Both these ascriptions ignore the much stronger claim of Rev. J. C. du Plessis that he was responsible for the first recorded use of the term in the sense that it became accepted in the 1940s. In 1929, when a Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) pastor in Bethlehem in the * Afirst draft of this paper was presented at the conference on ‘An Apartheid of Souls’, held at the London School of Economics in December 2000. The author thanks Richard Elphick and the JSAS referees for comments. 1I.Hexham, The Irony of Apartheid (Toronto, Edward Mellen, 1981), p. 188. 2R.Davenport and C. Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History (London, Macmillan, 2000), p. 373. ISSN 0305-7070 print; 1465-3893 online/03/020373-20 © 2003 Journal of Southern African Studies DOI: 10.1080/0305707032000075876
374 Journal of Southern African Studies Downloaded by [Shanghai Jiaotong University] at 18:42 19 September 2012 Orange Free State, he addressed a DRC conference on the ‘native question’ held in Kroonstad in the province. Rejecting a missions policy that offered blacks no ‘independent national future’, he pleaded for the Gospel to be brought in a way that fitted the African ‘character, nature and nationality’. He said, ‘In the fundamental idea of our missionary work and not in racial prejudice one must seek an explanation for the spirit of apartheid that has always characterised our [the DRC’s] conduct.’ 3 It was only in the early 1940s that the idea of apartheid became crystallised. Die Burger first used the term ‘apartheid’ in 1943 when it referred to the ‘accepted Afrikaner viewpoint of apartheid’. 4 In January 1944, D. F. Malan, speaking as Leader of the Opposition, became the first person to employ it in the South African parliament. A few months later he elaborated, ‘I do not use the term “segregation”, because it has been interpreted as a fencing off (afhok), but rather “apartheid”, which will give the various races the opportunity of uplifting themselves on the basis of what is their own.’ 5 There also exists no consensus on what the policy represents in the larger scheme of things. Was it simply an extension of the ‘traditional’ policy of segregation and a marginal refinement of the racial ideology that justified segregation? Was it a modern ideology justifying Afrikaner domination in an era of decolonisation? Or was it something deviant that appealed to the same racist obsessions as those of the Nazis and to a heretical interpretation of the Bible never used before? Shortly after the 1948 election, Keppel-Jones, a young liberal historian, unequivocally declared that apartheid was simply a warmed-up version of segregation. ‘One of the psychological curiosities of our history is the sudden substitution of the word apartheid for the word segregation, which means the same thing.’ It was a case of ‘same firm, same product, new label’. 6 More than 50 years later, a general history expressed almost the same opinion: ‘It was really an elaboration of earlier segregationist traditions derived partly from Stallardism, partly from the thinking of Broederbond circles in the 1930s.’ 7 Legassick proposed a variation on the theme in suggesting that apartheid was an adaptation of the traditional labour policy and practices to an economy whose base had shifted from mining to manufacturing. 8 O’Meara argues that apartheid developed as a plan to secure a stable and cheap labour supply for farmers and the emerging classes of Afrikaner capitalists. 9 Posel’s work opened up a new perspective in depicting apartheid as a policy and ideology largely shaped by post-1948 struggles within the Nationalist movement. 10 But she, too, see conflicts over the labour supply and influx control as of paramount importance rather than the quest to find a justification for Afrikaner political domination. The analysis by Gregor was one of the first to project apartheid as a novel, post-Second World War ideology that went well beyond a justification for labour control in the specific South African circumstances. Written in the mid-1960s as part of a study of radical ideologies, it depicted apartheid as a secular social and political ideology typical of the twentieth century. ‘It advances its own normic model of man and society; defends its 3 ‘Dawie’, Die Burger’s columnist, discussed the issue on 24 March and 14 April 1951. The speech is published as ‘Die Ideale van ons Kerk in Sendingwerk’, Die NG Kerk en die Naturellevraagstuk (Bloemfontein, Nasionale Pers, 1929), pp. 22–25. I wish to thank Rick Elphick for pointing me to the document. 4L.Louw (compiler), Dawie, 1946–1964 (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 1965), p. 49. 5 House of Assembly Debates (HAD), 1944, col. 75; Die Burger, 8May 1944; Louw, Dawie, p.48. 6A.Keppel-Jones, Friends or Foes? (Pietermaritzburg, Shuter and Shooter, 1949), p. 48. 7 Davenport and Saunders, South Africa, p.373. 8M.Legassick, ‘Legislation, Ideology and Economy in post—1948 South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 1,1(1974), pp. 9–10. 9D.O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934–1948 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 171–177. 10 D. Posel, The Making of Apartheid (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997).
Page 1: This article was downloaded by: [Sh
Page 5 and 6: 376 Journal of Southern African Stu
Page 21: Downloaded by [Shanghai Jiaotong Un

The Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929-1948* - CC

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?