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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929–1948 375 Table 1. Percentage responses to the question of whether the basic idea of apartheid was good True Not true Don’t know All South Africans 39 55 7 Afrikaners 65 29 6 White English 36 60 5 Xhosa-speaking 18 73 9 Zulu-speaking 25 65 10 Downloaded by [Shanghai Jiaotong University] at 18:42 19 September 2012 models by appeals to science and experience, and employs that model in justificatory arguments in support of policy.’ 11 Norval argued that apartheid was about formulating ‘a new moral language’ with which to legitimate the project of radically restructuring society. Whereas segregation worked with the notion of race, the essence of apartheid was the family, the community and the ethnic group formed by both racial descent and the volkseie – the beliefs, customs, language and history of a community. 12 Where Norval emphasises the volkseie, Dubow highlights Christian-Nationalism as the core concept in the new moral discourse; both attach considerable importance to the racist thought of Geoff Cronjé and others. 13 Although not discussed in the existing literature, G. B. A. Gerdener, the main mission strategist of the Dutch Reformed Church, and N. P. van Wyk Louw, the premier man of Afrikaans letters, had, I would argue, a more lasting influence than any of the so-called Afrikaner nationalist intellectuals in constructing apartheid as an idealistic project, or what van Wyk Louw called a liberal nationalism as the basis for ‘survival in justice’. 14 Van Wyk Louw taught in the education department at the University of Cape Town during the 1930s and 1940s while Gerdener was one of the founders of the DRC (black) mission church in the Transvaal in the early 1930s. He arrived in Stellenbosch at the end of the decade to take up a chair at the Theological School. These two men, together with Albert Geyer, Phil Weber and Piet Cillié (successive editors of Die Burger in Cape Town), 15 and Hendrik Verwoerd, formulated apartheid in its most sophisticated guise. Van Zyl Slabbert, liberal academic and politician, remembers ‘the excitement, even the thrill’ of students when this variant of the apartheid ideology was explained during his study years at the University of Stellenbosch in the early 1960s. With African states all over the continent becoming independent, apartheid looked like an indigenous, post-colonial response. As an ideology it had ‘a coherence and systemic quality’ which could not be dismissed as racism; it made ‘logical sense and addressed some very prickly moral issues.’ 16 It is the idealistic variant of which Slabbert spoke that accounts for the resilience of the apartheid idea, even while most commentators think it is quite dead and discredited. At the end of 2001, the Institute for Reconciliation and Justice, founded to carry on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, asked in a poll for responses to this statement: ‘There were certainly some abuses under the old apartheid system, but the ideas behind apartheid were basically good’. Surprisingly large proportions in all communities still 11 A. J. Gregor, Contemporary Radical Ideologies (New York, Random House, 1968), p. 221. 12 A. Norval, Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse (London, Verso, 1996), p. 67. 13 S. Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 246–283. 14 N. P. van Wyk Louw, Versamelde Prosa (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 1986), vol.1, pp. 411–529. 15 From 1924–1945, 1945–1954 and 1954–1977 respectively. 16 Cited by Ivor Wilkins, Sunday Times, 19April 1981.
376 Journal of Southern African Studies Downloaded by [Shanghai Jiaotong University] at 18:42 19 September 2012 thought the basic idea had been sound, with only a third of Afrikaners believing it was bad. 17 Table 1 gives the responses in full. The poll question did not define apartheid, but it can be assumed that the African or coloured respondents did not yearn for undiluted white supremacy, but rather for the more refined apartheid version of the 1980s. According to this, each population group as designated by apartheid was held responsible for its ‘own affairs’, with representatives from each group sharing in decision-making about ‘general affairs’. Other polls show that members of apartheid’s statutory groups at present consistently name someone from their own group as the most popular leader. Finally, there are the approaches that emphasise the way in which apartheid deviated from the mainstream teachings of the Christian church and Western European liberal democratic experience. Moodie sees apartheid as conceived largely by exponents of a ‘neo -Fichtean’ romantic nationalism. He links this volksnasionalisme to German nationalism and National Socialism, and calls the belief that God made the Afrikaner people the object of his saving activity a ‘Christian heresy’. 18 A recent study by Furlong makes the same connection between German and Afrikaner radical nationalism. It argues that Malan’s National Party (NP), a paramilitary mass movement called the Ossewa Brandwag (OB) and Oswald Pirow’s New Order (NO) formed an ‘interconnecting web’. The Nationalists in the Transvaal, in particular, while never becoming a Nazi-style movement ‘in a real sense’, represented a ‘hybrid variant’ of ‘authoritarian and populist ingredients, reminiscent, although never an exact facsimile, of European fascism.’ The study makes a strenuous and often tortuous effort to underline the similarities between apartheid and Nazism, for instance between apartheid’s proscription of inter-racial sex and the Nazi race laws. 19 This article will first look at Afrikaner nationalism in the northern and southern regions of the country in the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that the development and dissemination of apartheid as the operational ideology of Afrikaner nationalism was a project that originated in the church in the Orange Free State and in the political and academic circles of the Western Cape rather than in the Transvaal-based Afrikaner Broederbond. It discusses this with reference to the debate in mission circles of the DRC, the efforts of the Cape National Party and Die Burger to find a counter to the ideology of the ruling United Party (UP), and the intellectual contributions of Afrikaner academics in Stellenbosch and Cape Town. A Tale of Two Regions There are two particularly strange features in the historiography of Afrikaner nationalism and the rise of the apartheid ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. The first is the assertion by Moodie and Furlong of a linkage between the Afrikaner nationalist movement and German nationalism of the 1930s. No one can quibble about the OB and NO, but Malan’s NP and the Afrikaner Broederbond are painted in similar, albeit more muted, colours. At a superficial level, the assertion may seem plausible. In the Transvaal, several prominent members of the Nationalist intelligentsia actively involved in elaborating a new racial ideology had Nazi sympathies, yet later became stalwart members of the NP and the Afrikaner Broederbond establishment. This was true of L. J. du Plessis, perhaps the most influential of all Broeders, H. G. Stoker, the leading Calvinist thinker, Piet Meyer, deputy 17 The source of the data is a survey conducted and published by the Cape Town-based Institute for Reconciliation and Justice (www.ijr.org.za). It was undertaken at the end of 2000 and beginning of 2001, and involved 3,727 interviews conducted in the language of choice of the respondent. 18 T. D. Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1974), pp. ix, 15. 19 P. Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika: The Impact of the Radical Right on the Afrikaner Nationalist Movement in the Fascist Era (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1991), pp. 102, 224–226.
Page 1 and 2: This article was downloaded by: [Sh
Page 3: 374 Journal of Southern African Stu
Page 7 and 8: 378 Journal of Southern African Stu
Page 21: Downloaded by [Shanghai Jiaotong Un

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

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?