Note: This article was published in South African Journal of Philosophy, 19, 4 (2000), pp.321-39. Permission from the editors to put in on the Web is gratefully acknowledged.
Hermann Giliomee
Apartheid dominated the political thinking of two generations of Afrikaner intellectuals from its first conceptualization in the early 1940s to its disintegration as an ideology during the 1980s. Western Cape politicians, academics, journalists and church leaders were the main contributors to the Sauer Report, which was the greatest influence on the apartheid plank of the National Party’s 1948 platform. Although apartheid as a policy did not clinch the NP victory, it won steady support in the course of the 1950s. The article discusses the work of four Afrikaner critic of apartheid as it was conceptualized and implemented in the first decade of NP rule. The most striking observations were those of the ambivalent figure of the poet and essayist N.P van Wyk Louw, who has remained an important moral voice in the Afrikaner political tradition. Andre du Toit’s Die Sondes van die Vader (1983) built on some key arguments of Louw in arguing for the abandonment of apartheid as a way of securing Afrikaner survival.
Introduction
Although apartheid is one of the most discussed ideologies of the twentieth century there still is no clarity about its main architects. Between the election campaign of 1943, when the term apartheid was not used, and that of 1958, these architects were responsible for turning a lose body of theories, pseudo-theories, folk beliefs and simplistic generalizations into an ideology. The literature has paid considerable attention to the elaboration of apartheid by intellectuals closely tied to the Suid-Afrikaanse Buro vir Rasse-Aangeleenthede (SABRA) and the Tomlinson Commission. By contrast, comparatively little has been written about Afrikaner intellectuals in the period 1948-1958 who, in book-length studies, either opposed apartheid or criticized aspects of its implementation. The article focuses on four of the most important of these studies.
This essay is offered as a tribute to Andre du Toit. Both of us took up positions at the University of Stellenbosch during the late 1960s. Both of us became members of a discussion group of young Stellenbosch lecturers that Johan Degenaar founded in 1966. Counting Among its members were also academics like Johan Groenewald, Van Zyl Slabbert, Jannie Gagiano, Andreas van Wyk and Wolfgang Thomas. The discussion group was for several of us one of the most formative political influences in our early career. We all started our academic careers at the point apartheid started unraveling, but Stellenbosch was the place where we were confronted with academics who were producing the most sophisticated apologies for apartheid within the ruling Afrikaner establishment. Enmity is too strong a word, but the relationship was adversarial.
During the late 1970s Du Toit and I began our collaboration on a study that later appeared as Afrikaner Political Thought, 1780-1850 (1983). It soon became apparent how rich a contribution his rigorous method of criticism was making to our historiography. Du Toit spent much time demolishing one of the core historical myths of apartheid, namely the conception of the Afrikaners as a Chosen People. Historians were bewildered by the demolition job he did on some of the work of F.A van Jaarsveld. Du Toit was nothing if not thorough – a false or wrong argument did not only have to be critisised, it had to be utterly crushed and destroyed. I myself thought that he was not always quite fair, at least by the standards of historians towards Van Jaarsveld and that his argument came close to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Rude (1980) distinguishes between abstract, derived ideas, on the one hand, and, on the other, “inherent” believes transmitted through oral traditions and folk memories. The Calvinist-inspired Chosen People ideology fell in the former category. Du Toit was right to conclude that this ideology was of fairly recent origin, but he left out of his account inherent beliefs. They included the conviction of ordinary Afrikaners that God had made them different from other peoples and had assigned to them a special mission. This dates back to a much earlier stage than that suggested by Du Toit.
Yet few would deny Du Toit’s great value as a critic in the latter part of the apartheid years as an academic who refused to make any compromises in speaking the truth. He was a critic in the mould of the prophet Amos, who looked at the city, and at the rich and powerful, from the perspective of those they oppressed, invoking values that even the oppressors pretended to share. As it is phrased by Walzer (1987:88): “The prophesies of doom, which make up so much of Amos’s message, are designed to dispel … the confidence of the unconventionally pious … [The] substance of Amos’s argument is ‘justice’ and ‘righteous’.” Du Toit’s Sonde van die Vaders (1983) was an Amos-style critique of the moral crisis with which Afrikaner nationalism was confronted. It argued that the greatest threat to Afrikaner survival would be to cling to power at all costs in a quest for ethnic survival.
As a team we jointly built up Die Suid-Afrikaan along with embers of the editorial staff like Chris Louw. We produced what I still think was one of the best serious political journals South Africa has known. Although major differences have developed between Du Toit, and me they do not distract from my admiration for his great dedication as teacher, which I, along with other colleagues in UCT’s Department of Political Studies, witnessed with some awe, his incomparable thoroughness as researcher and his brilliance as analyst and creative thinker.
2 The Rise of a dominant ideology, 1938-1948
3 Critical Afrikaner intellectuals and apartheid, 1948-1958
4 The case of N. P. van Wyk Louw
Conclusion
According to the most recent biographer of Alan Paton, the novelist from the early 1950s believed that it was not possible for blacks to force Afrikaners to give up power. The initiative would, in his view remain with the Afrikaner until he discovered, in Paton’s words, that “total apartheid was impossible”, and chose to give up power. It was most likely to be Afrikaners that would succeed to persuade his fellow – Afrikaners to give up power (Alexander 1994: 299 – 300).
Ben Marais, Bennie Keet, Henry Fagan, Gert Scholtz and N.P. van Wyk Louw all chose the role of the connected critic within the Afrikaner community because they believed it would be more effective. For Keet, Marais and Fagan this meant opposing apartheid at a fairly early stage. In the case of Louw there never was a similar clean break, but his comments on the ethical quality of Afrikaner survival would continue to impact on the Afrikaner debate in the 1970s and 1980s. It is noteworthy that after the crucial 1992 all – white referendum which gave the government a mandate to proceed with negotiations, F. W. de Klerk began his victory speech with the lines from a Van Wyk Louw poem. Here he talks about a “wide and woeful land” and asks whether “never a mighty deed would occur” that would “echo over the earth” (Butler 1962: 135).
For De Klerk the yes – vote and the possibilities it opened for reconciliation was such a deed – after all the “woeful” years of black dispossession, segregation and apartheid. Louw and most, if not all, the Afrikaner critics of apartheid of the 1950s would probably have shared the sentiment.
