The place of minorities in South Africa is a burning issue in South Africa, as in other democracies where the ruling party considers the demands of minorities troublesome and even vexatious. Such parties, and the ANC is no exception, treat community-based minorities and any form of nationalism as the threat to their idea of national unity

For the ANC there is no unity in ethnic diversity but dangers in diversity. This belief has deep roots in African history where the colonial rulers invariably exploited ethnic divisions in African society in a policy of divide and rule.

The Constitution of 1996 offered the hope of a new path to democracy and tolerance of ethnic minorities, but that hope soon faded.  Demands of Afrikaans-speakers for the recognition of language rights in schools and universities were soon denounced as longing for the past and a threat to national unity. The court action of the trade union Solidariteit against the singing of the song ‘Shoot the Boer’ was dismissed as an attack on the ANC’s political traditions.

As could be expected, Solidariteit, in taking legal action on the song, was immediately branded as an organisation that tried to capitalise on Afrikaner nationalist sentiments and was intent on pursuing destructive nationalist politics. Nationalism is an enemy that must be destroyed by any means.

Nationalism is often depicted as the Dark God that wrecks nations. But nationalism is not the enemy that causes catastrophes in one multi-national country after other. It is the failure of the constitutional democracy that cause the rise of nationalism.

The enemy is made up of people who abhor diversity, who want one nation, one language, one history, and of politicians who undermine and assail the Constitution.

The rerun of history

The tension between assertive minorities and an intolerant government is far from new. It is an old story that crops up often in South Africa. Only the terms and the concepts change. The underlying reason is that South Africa has always been an ‘empire’ – a conglomeration of stubborn national communities rather a nation united behind respected leaders and inspiring goals.

From the earlier times there were always government leaders and the acolytes who assured people that the country had never had it so good and all communities should be thankful for the privilege of living under such progressive rule.

For the British imperial government of the nineteenth century its the most popular subjects were the “Cape Dutch”; a small elite who underwent a form of assimilation through which they surrendered their language and every other form of difference in order to become part of the “progressive majority” in the British empire.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great political scholar of the nineteenth century, knew precisely what was being asked whenever minorities were expected to conform.

“There are communities in which the members of the minority can never hope to draw the majority over to their side,” he wrote, “because they must then give up the very point that is at issue between them.”

The writer Olive Schreiner – who had been a governess on Eastern Cape farms in the 1860s and 1870s – understood how aggrieved the the Dutch colonists were by this “progressive” haughtiness. “But that which most embittered the hearts of the colonists was the cold indifference which which they were treated and the consciousness that they were regarded as a subject and inferior race … [The] feeling of bitterness became so intense that about the year 1836 large numbers of individuals determined for ever the colony and the homes they created.”

At the end of the century Alfred Milner – a “progressive” reformer if there ever was one – coldly engineered the Anglo-Boer War. Afrikaner nationalism was driven by memories of this inhumane war, anti-imperialism and through the struggle for equal status between the Dutch and English languages.

In the competition between the two big white communities between 1910 and 1990 the term “minority” was never used. Instead, it was seen as a struggle between two “nationalities” or “races” (the “Anglo-Saxon” and “Boer” or “Dutch” races.)

Just after Union some English speakers believed that it would be “progressive” if English evolved into the sole national language. The Union constitution required that Dutch and English should enjoy equal status, but many English speakers rejected any practical efforts to secure real equality between the two as a form of racism.

The revered writer CJ Langenhoven once posed the key question to an English speaking politician: “Why is it that my politics is always racism and your racism is always politics?”

The term “minority”

The term “minority” first entered into popular use after the First World War. It was used to refer to the “national minorities” of Eastern Europe, each with their own culture, national history and area. In British-American parlance the term minority only really acquired weight in the 1930s, but with a completely different meaning. A “minority” was overwhelming used to refer to individuals from disadvantaged or stigmatised groups such as, for example, black people.

The different meanings of the term minority has occasioned great confusion. At a Moscow conference in 1988 Russian academics warned ANC representatives against alienating the Afrikaner minority if they wanted to govern a prosperous and stable country. The academics used the term minority in the East European sense and they were also worried over the fate of Russian minorities in some Soviet Republics.

The ANC delegation wanted to hear nothing of Afrikaners as a minority, which could lay claim to certain rights as such. Pallo Jordan said that while the acknowledgment of minority rights in the Soviet Union was progressive and a prerequisite for empowerment and self-determination it would be “reactionary” in the South African case. “It would subvert the rights of the majority and preserve the power of the oppressor minority.’

At the time the Afrikaners was a national community which wielded its political power in a futile effort to define all ethnic groups as national minorities while Afrikaners ruled alone.

Today Afrikaners do not conduct themselves as stigmatised minority. The defensiveness of the first ten years of the new order has given way to a quiet determination to lay claim to constitutional rights, to develop new strategies and to resist stigmatisation. Solidarity and AfriForum function as dynamic catalyst for communal action

‘Shoot the Boer”

Among the minorities in South Africa there is an increasing realisation that we now live in a state where the drums of blood and land are being beaten ever harder. In VS Naipul’s novel A Bend in the River, which was set in independent Zaire, Salim, a member of the Arab minority, describes a reality that is also applicable to the minority communities of South Africa.  A character in the novel says: “The world is what it is, men who allow themselves to become nothing have no place in it.”

Two weeks ago in Business Day Steven Friedman wrote in a column that the judgement in the “shoot the boer” case was unwise because it reifies the white minority’s economic and cultural dominance. I think there are some double standards here at work. It seems to go like this: Any victimisation of minorities is wrong except if it upsets the Afrikaners. If the song upset the Afrikaners there must be something right about it. But what would have happened if other communities had been targeted? How does “Kill the Jew (or Englishman) and kill the capitalist” sound?

Silence in the face of such vilification as “Kill the Boer” would reduce the Afrikaners to a powerless minority required to live on its knees. People who, as Naipaul phrases it, have “no place in this country.”

A symbol of identity

The Afrikaans language remains the most important symbol of Afrikaner social identity. Just as before 1950 those who campaign for Afrikaans as a public language are attacked when they question the growing dominance of English in government, business and the universities.

But it would be wrong to blame only the government. Gerrit Komrij, an academic from the Netherlands, placed his finger on the biggest problem: Afrikaans is being reduced to powerlessness by Afrikaners themselves. Komrij said Afrikaans is “living dead.” It is like a “healthy, struggling body which is having its limbs cut off.” Komrij concludes: “Whatever the future holds for Afrikaans, it is the Afrikaans speakers who are the biggest threat to the language.”Without much pressure from government the University of Stellenbosch has over the past decade reduced Afrikaans-medium classes to ten per cent. In some departments the extinction of Afrikaans-medium is in sight.

But the example of Potchefstroom under the visionary leadership of Dr Theuns Eloff, which has secured a proper place for Afrikaans, will haunt the other universities. The struggle will continue despite the best efforts of the “progressives”. It will be a long, merciless, struggle but not necessarily a hopeless one. Winston Churchill liked to quote the Dutch statesman William of Orange said in the seventeenth century: “Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. What ultimately matters is the determination to keep going.”

* This is an expanded version of an article that first appeared in By, the supplement that appears in Beeld, Die Burger en Volksblad on Saturday. It also appeared on Politicsweb on 10 October.

The formal policy towards the language of instruction outside the homelands was that Afrikaans and English had to be used on a 50-50 basis in black secondary schools, but it was not rigorously applied. Vorster himself did not object when homeland leaders in 1974 requested that the official language in the homelands (in practice, English) also be used in black schools else where.

Yet some of the officials of the Department of Bantu Administration and Development had almost become a law unto themselves. Andries Treurnicht, leader of the National Party’s right wing and deputy minister of Bantu Administration and Development, held the view that the government had the right to decide the medium of instruction in black schools because white taxpayers subsidised the schools. This position was sure to provoke hostility, particularly in Soweto, now with a population of well over a million. Most jobs in Johannesburg required a command of English, and a 1972 survey of young Sowetans found that 98% of them did not wish to be taught in Afrikaans. Half of those polled considered Afrikaners ‘the most cruel and least sympathetic people in South Africa’.

Ignoring all this, the Department of Bantu Administration and Development early in 1976 decided to push ahead. Inspectors in Soweto and other schools in the southern Transvaal area gave instructions that mathematics and arithmetic had to be taught in Afrikaans alone, despite the fact that most teachers and pupils probably had no command of Afrikaans.

Teacher organisations and black parents on school boards in the townships protested strongly, but the government ignored these protests and the warnings by the official opposition that a volatile situation was building up in Soweto.

Historians have tried to explain this by reference to the amabutho. These were originally work parties organised according to age, which rendered service to the chief. But by the late eighteenth century the need for Nguni-speaking communities to obtain more ivory for trade, and more land for cultivation, led to a reorganisation of the amabutho. Their size and range of duties were increased. The young men found themselves undertaking jobs such as hunting and herding on behalf of the chief and senior men. Later, towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, the amabutho seem to have taken on increased military duties. They were also brought much more closely under the control of their respective leaders. In the case of the Zulu the amabutho became a permanent feature of the kingdom centred at the royal household, and were recruited in agesets, rather than in regional communities, to offset local loyalties. Young women were similarly brought under chiefly control.

The female age-sets, or izigodlo, could be made to perform duties for the chief or could be given in marriage to powerful men in the chiefdom, thus ensuring their continued loyalty. These expanded powers allowed the ruling families to cement their control, and to offer economic security and protection which in turn attracted smaller or more threatened communities of individuals. In this way there was a centralisation of power and a growth in their size and administrative complexity.

The Irish Volunteer Monument was erected on Brixton Hill near the Hertzog Television Tower in Johannesburg. The architect was Jan van Wijk. Photo: Henk Oosthuyzen, Afrikanerbakens, FAK

By MARTHINUS VAN BART

In July 2011 the world media took prominent notice of the official visit to Ireland of the British queen, Elizabeth II. This should have been a non-event for the media, as Ireland has been a colony of England since 1177, when the Norman conquerors invaded and subjected Ireland. But the bloody history of English-Irish relations ever since, made this visit by the monarch very newsworthy. And then, in September 2011, it was world news again when in the wake of the apology of the prime Minister of Britain, David Cameron, for the massacre of 13 unarmed Irish protesters against the occupation of Ireland by British forces, London announced it was to pay compensation to the families of those killed in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, by the British Parachute Regiment on 30 January, 1972, also known in Ireland as “Bloody Sunday”.  The families of the martyrs declared that they could not be bribed with money, but that they wanted justice seen done in the courts. The killers had to be prosecuted. Over the 30 years of unrest in Ireland on the independence issue, more that 3 600 people has died. A precarious peace deal was clinched in 1998 which temporary ended the hostilities, but it Britain persists in refusing to bring the killer-parabats to jusctice in an open civil court of law, this offer of compensation could very well be seen as a gross insult to the Irish people and spark off renewed protests and massacres.

At the end of September 1899, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War on 11 October 1899, some Irish nationals living in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (Tranvaal Boer Republic) in South Africa published an Irish Manifesto which was circulated among the Irish community of the Transvaal.

In this Manifesto the age old suppression of the Irish under the heel of England was sketched. It tells of the incredible suffering of the Irish folk – mothers, fathers and their children – their country devastated and it’s children moneyless and homeless driven to all the outskirts of the world.

“During the 60 year reign of Queen Victoria some 1,5 million Irish perished from famine whilst England forced  2,5 million pounds surplus revenue from Ireland at the point of the bayonet. A member of Her Majesties Privy Council  (probably refering to Cecil John Rhodes) has since 1895 been conspiring with British capitalists and hirelings to overthrow the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and to steal the beautiful, rich country of the Boers so that it could be added to the British Empire. Will you allow it that the self same catastrophe which devasted Ireland also lay the Transvaal to waste? Revenge Irishmen! We are calling you up to fight againt the nation who mercilessly suppresed your people for 700 years! The Irish must be the avengers and not the fellow-conspiritors of such crimes! “ (Breytenbach J.H.: Gedenkalbum van die Tweede VryheidsoorlogBreytenbach, Nasionale pers Beperk, kaapstad, 1949, 284-285)

The members of the Irish Brigade were notorious for handling dynamite to blow up bridges and supply trains of the British army during the Anglo-Boer War. Many were mine workers who knew how to get hold of dynamite and how to use is. Others were well versed in sabotage from their days in Ireland fighting against the occupational British forces.  The Boers called them “Het Wrekers Korps” (The Avenging Corps).

The Irish Brigade who fought alongside the Boers against the British army in the Anglo-Boer War. The commanding officer was Col. Y. Filmore Blake, sitting in the front row to the left of the accordion player.

After the Irish Brigade was formally introduced on 28 September 1899 in Johannesburg its officers were sworn in on the 2nd of October 1899. Col. John Y. Filmore Blake (an American Irishman) was elected by his men as their supreme commander. Blake was trained as a professionale soldier at the American Military College West Point and he saw action in many battles against the Redskins on the American Prairies. John McBride, one of Blake’s officers, was an exceptionally brave soldier. After the war he went back to Ireland and fought against the English occupational forces. In 1916 he was captured and shot by a firing squad.

Other Irish officers were Maj. Thomas Madden Menton, Capt. James Laracy and Capt. John Joseph Mitchell. They had one Boer officer in the corps, Capt. Charles Francois Coetzee, who organised the arms, equipment and food for the corps. The Irish Brigade consisted of some 200 men.

The supreme commander of the Irish Volunteers, Col. John McBride, formed three commando’s from the Irish Brigade:

1.) The first commando, consisting of 300 men,  fought in Natal under command of col. John Blake and distingued themselves at the Battle of Nicholson’s Neck and the Battle of Colenso.

2.) The second commando, under col. Arthur Lynch, from Australia,  consisted of 20 men who fought at Ladysmith and Glencoe.

3.) The third commando was actually an amulance unit consisting of 50 men, from America, under command of capt. O’ Connor. They were part of the Irish-American Ambulance Society,  Clan-na-Gael. Ten of these men were highly trained first aid attendants.

During the second fase of the war (called the guerrilla fase), after the occupation of Pretoria and Johannesburg mid 1900, the Irish volunteers joined whatever Boer commando they wished, were thus dispursed and no longer operated as three definite Irish commando’s or units.

American volunteers who joined the Boers against the British Empire. Col. Arthur Alfred Lynch, commander of the Irish Brigade, stands in the centre of the back row, wearing a white jacket.

Breytenbach mentions on page 296 that about 50 Americans decided in middel Feruary 1900 to come to the aid of the Boers.  J.A. Hassell, an American who lived in Vryheid, Orange Free State, took it upon himself to organise the  American  Reconnaissance Corps. He telegraphed this undertaking on 10 Februarie 1900 to the State Secretary of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (Transvaal Boer Republic) FW Reitz, and requested arms and equipment if the ZAR will be interested in this corps. His offer was accepted and JA Hassell was sworn in as commander of the American Scouts.

(Athough Breytenbach does not state so, it can be assumed that some of these Americans were of Irish descent.)

The following version of the Irish Manifesto of 13 September 1899 can be read on: http://www.blogstudio.com/woodgnome/irishboerwar.html :

The Irish Manifesto of Sept 13th 1899:

“The Government of the Transvaal being now threatened with extinction by our ancient foe, England, it is the duty of Irishmen to throw in their lot with the former, and be prepared by force of arms to maintain the independence of the country that has given them a home, at the same time seizing the opportunity to strike a good and effective blow at the merciless tyrannic power that has so long held our people in bondage. The position in the Transvaal to-day is exactly similar to what it was in Ireland at the time of the Anglo-Norman invasion.
The memory of the massacre of Drogheda by order of the infamous regicide Oliver Cromwell is still darkly remembered in Ireland, and England of that day applauded and justified the cold-blooded butchery as a righteous judgement executed.
With the story of Ireland’s wrongs and sufferings before them, no wonder the Boer people refuse to surrender their cherished independence to the hateful sway of Britain. England has been a vampire, and has drained Ireland’s life-blood for centuries, and now her difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity. The time is at hand to avenge your dead Irish. England’s hands are red with blood, and her coffers filled with the spoil of Irish people, and we call upon you to rise as one man and seize upon the present glorious opportunity of retaliating upon your ancient foe. Act together and fight together. Prepare! The end is in view. The day of reckoning is at hand. Long live the republic! Irishmen to the rescue! God save Ireland!”

The Irish Volunteer Monument was re-erected at Orania in die Northern Cape. Photo: Orania

IRISH VOLUNTEER MONUMENT:

In 1975 an important monument was erected in honour of the 500 Irish Volunteers, the Irish Brigade, who came from Ireland, America and Australia to South Africa to fight alongside the Boer freedom fighters against the professional army of the British Empire during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902).

The monument was inaugurated at the top of Brixton Hill in Johannesburg. This monument was an abstract work of art executed by Stocks Construction (Rand) in hammered concrete.

The recognition of the benevolent helping hand the Irish extended to the Afrikaners to defend home and hearth against the callous Empire, came a long way: In 1952 an Irish Commando Remembrance Fund,  Ciste ar son Briogaid na nGael, was created. Many important Irish and South African personalities served in the committee. They started collecting funds in aid of erecting some sort of monument in honour of the Irish volunteers who served with the Boer forces. In 1973 a firm of architects, Jan van Wijk & Associates, was asked to design a fitting monument in remembrance of  “The Irish Volunteers who fought with the Boers for Freedom.”

A peace of ground to the north-east  of the SABC Brixton Tower on top of Brixton Hill belonging to the SABC was swopped for an erf in Cottesloe. This was the chosen site for the monument. The Johannesburg City Council agreed to take ownership thereof and to see to the upkeep of the monument.

The architect, Jan van Wijk, studied Irish monuments through the ages and then decided to make use of Irish monumental symbolism to create the one he was contracted to do. He used the circular shape of the Irish berm, an earthern wall adjacent to a ditch, creating a bastion of support, as the basic plan for the monument. Pillars of fifferent sizes were then placed on a circular podium in the centrum. The berm’s diameter was 22 meter and covered by grass. To the western side an opening allowed the visitor to approach the centrum of the monument with its pillars.

The Irish Volunteer Monument was re-erected by a contractor, mnr. Danie Crafford, in 2002 at Orania in the Northern Cape. Dr. Pieter Mulder of the Freedom Front Plus intervened at the Brixton heritage site at Auckland Park when a developer wanted to demolish the monument with the permission of the Johannesburg City Council. Photo: Orania

On the podium four pillars of hammered concrete were erected,  all along the circular brim of the podium.  Anticlockwise the pillars were placed from great to small. The three small pillars are symbolic of the three Irish commando’s, supporting each other and leaning towards the huge pillar, symbolic of the Boer forces and Freedom. The diameter of each pillar is 900 millimeter. The huge one stands 3,5 meter high. It weighs 5 ton.

At the entrance a plaque in Afrikaans and Irish, crowned by an Irish harp, was placed. It read: “Erected in remembrance of the Irish who fought for the Boer nation in its hour of need 1899-1902. may their sacrifices for Freedom and Right cast an everlasting bond between the Irish people and the Boer nation, and may this monument be a symbol thereof.”

Jan van Wijk was also the architect of the Afrikaans Monument on the Paarlberg mountain-side at Paarl.

(Afrikanerbakens, Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge, 1989, 138)

An act of brutal vandalism and a national scandal:

In 1998 an investor/developer bought the monument site from the Johannesburg City Council, who resoned  it from heritage site to business site. The Monument’s Council didn’t do anything to prohibit this willful transgression of the Heritage Act. The new owner, a Mr. Vic Scott, planned to demolish the monument so  that he could re-sell the site and make a good profit.  Clearly he had no sympathetic feelings towards the heritage of the Irish, nor that of the Afrikaners, the descendents of the Boers. “If the City Council have no feelings for the sentiments of yesteryear, why should I,” he told a reporter of Rapport, Elize Smith (Rapport,11 February 2001)

A culture and heritage sensitive person who at the time lived near the site in Brixton, mnr. Sebastian Biehl, saw that Scott was planning to demolish the monument and alerted Dr. Pieter Mulder, leader of the Freedom Front Plus (VryheidsFront Plus), a political party, of  what was going to happen. In June 2002 Dr. Mulder intervened and raised R20 000 to pay for the basic transport and hoisting costs of mnr. Danie Crafford, a contractor, to remove the monument to Orania, Afrikaner town in the Northern Cape. (Beeld 24 June 2002) The monument was re-erected and re-inaugurated shortly after.

What the British have done over 700 years to the Irish, they did to the Afrikaners in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War - burning down homesteads, wrecking farms, destroying livestock and molesting the women and children, killing more than 27 000, mostly children, in concentration camps all across South Africa.

Why would an important heritage site such as this Irish-Boer-monument be treated with such contempt and callousness by the Johannesburg City Council? Why did the Johannesburg conservation societies not bat an eyelid? Where was the South African Heritage Resources Agency? Where was the Department of Arts and Culture? Can it be that the irrational contempt some people have for the Irish and the Afrikaners was a factor in this disgraceful act of blatant vandalism?

During the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) British soldiers removed the rocks at the Paardekraal Monument in Krugersdorp which were placed there shortly before the outbreak of the First Anglo-Boer War of 1880-1881 when the Boers vowed “to cast off the yoke of England” and re-take their beloved Republic of Transvaal, the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. The British soldiers dumped these rocks into the Vaal River at Vereeniging.

The Paardekraal Monument, erected by the Boers at Krugersdorp after they took a vow to free their beloved Transvaal from the clutches of the British Empire. They fulfilled this vow during the First Anglo-Boer War (Eerste Vryheidsoorlog) of 1880-1881. Photograph: Hannes Oosthuysen

Also during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) British soldiers demolished a beautiful Dutch Language Monument at Burgersdorp, erected by the Boers in honour of their “Holy Language of the Bible and the Church, High Dutch” and buried it in the Eastern Cape.  After the war Afrikaners located and dug out the broken statue, had a replica cast, and re-erected it at Burgersdorp. The broken statue was mended as best they could and re-erected it next to the replica. The head and one arm was never found.

What became of the Irish heroes?

After the war McBride went back to Ireland to fight against the British occupational forces. In 1916 he was caught and shot by a firing squad.

Arthur Alfred Lynch went back to France to continue his journalistic career at Journal, his original reason for coming to South Africa to cover the war for this influential newspaper.  It was genl. Louis Botha who convinced him to join the Boers and help fight for their freedom, right and continued independence. He helped to establish the Irish volunteer corps.

Getting back to France, he was contacted by his Irish compatriots and asked to stand as Independent nationalist for election by the citizens of Galway, although he was born in Australia.

His opponents found out he was involved in the South African War and that he fought with the Boers against the British army. He, however, wrote a letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons explaining that he accepted the terms of peace between Britain and the Boers. According to Edward Majoribanks’s biography Edward Carson QC, re-published by The House of Emslie, Edinburgh, 2011,  Lynch asked, in the words of Themistocles, that his fellow-members might nog beat him, but hear him.

Lynch then left France for England to take up his place in the British House of Commons as member-elect for Galway. Arriving at Newhaven on 1 June 1902, he was immediately arrested, charged with  treason under the old statutes dating from the 13th Century under Edward III. He was tried in the Court of the Lord Chief Justice before three judges, Chief Justice Alverstone, justice Wills and Justice Channell. Edward Carson, QC, also an Irish Nationalist MP and Attorney General prosecuted. Lynch was found guilty and condemned to be hanged from the neck until dead.

A short while later his sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life, but he was relase after an few months to take up his seat in Parliament. From 1909 to 1918 he was Parliamentary member for Clare, and he fought in the First World War for Britian as a full Colonel in the British Army.

An Irish poem in Gaelish for Boer-heroes

A poem for the brave Boers who fought against England during the Anglo-Boer War was written in Augustus 1902 by the Irish poet Tomás ó Flannghaile of Mayo. He was a teacher and publisher who lived in England.

The British soldiers came from all over the Empire across the globe to fight against a mere handful of Afrikaner farmers - who taught them no end of a lesson, as Rudyard Kipling wrote. Field Marshall lord Frederick Sleigh (Bobs) Roberts, was the supreme commander of the British army in South Africa during 1900. He gave the order to burn down farms, exterminate livestock and incarcerate all suspects. His greatest ordeal in this campaign was when he fell from his horse breaking his arm. His wife and two daughters accompanied him all across the country in his special white Emperial train. The only shots he ever fired, were his daily shots of whisky. So Bobs Roberts and his thousands marched to Pretoria declaring the victory was theirs, only to learn from a firebrand Boer teenager, Johanna Brand: "The war has just begun, Tommy Atkins!"

Caoineadh na g Curadh

– Tomás Ó Flannghaile (1846 – 1916)

Mo bhrón go deo, mo chreach mo chrádh!

Na leómhain fé dheoidh faoi neart a námhad –

An tsaoirse thíos, ’s laoich á gclaoidheadh,

A dtír fé chíos ’s a ndaoine ag caoidh!

Caoin, caoin, a chinneamhain ghéar,

Is bí go faoidheach ag sileadh dear,

’Na luighe tá mílte groidhe-fhear tréan

’S a sliocht gan bhrígh mo loma léin!

’S bhuaidhir mo chroidhe im’ chlí thar meodhan,

Gan truagh at tsaoighil do shíol na mBóer,

An domhan go dúr, gan rún gan báidh

Gan cabhair gan súil le congnamh d’fhagháil;

Caoin, caoin, an tsaoirse ar lár,

An comhthrom thíos, an claon ar bhárr,

Neamh-shuim ’sa cheart, ’san neart go géar,

Na gaiscidhigh theas, gan reacht gan réim!

Acht bíodh gur buaileadh líon a bhfear,

Is gidh gur chuaidh sé díobh le seal,

D’fhág siad a rian go dian go trom,

I lár na ndiabhal do chiap tré feall;

Cian, cian, bheidheas cumha na nGall

I ndiaidh an ghéar-chrádha fuair siad thall,

The Burgersdorp Monument for the Dutch Language (Hooghollands), erected in 1882 after High Dutch was recognised as an official language of South Africa next to English. High Dutch was the printed language of the Netherlands State Bible (Nederlandse Statebijbel) and also the written language of the courts and officialdom. Afrikaans was the spoken language, but was only formalised much later. The first Afrikaans Bible was printed in 1933. The picture shows the vandalised statue (by the British soldiers during the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902) and the replica to the left, erected in 1907. The mutilated statue was only found in 1939 in King William's Town, Eastern Cape, where it had been buried by the soldiers. The head and one arms was missing. The podium was removed by order of lord Alfred Milner. The broken statue was re-erected at Burgersdorp in 1957. Photo: Hannes Oosthuysen

Minic do theicheadar le n-a sluagh

Cois abhann is sléibh’ ó faobhar na mBuar.

Tá dóchas fós don laochraidh i ndán –

Ní neart i gcómhnaidhe bhéarfas bárr –

Fulaing fear groidhe don tsaoirse is síol;

Agus muinighin chroidhe ’seadh is treise brígh;

Éistigh le ciall, ní buan droich-riaghail,

Má’s tréan an diabhal, is tréine Dia,

Iad féin, leo féin, le congnamh Dé,

Beidh Bóeir fós saor ’na ndúthaigh féin.

Translation into  English

Lament of the Champions

My eternal sorrow, my strife my torment!

The lions at last put down by the strength of their enemy -

Freedom defeated, the heroes vanquished,

Their land under taxation and their people mourning.

Weep, weep, oh bitter fate,

And patiently be shedding tear,

In their graves lie thousands of strong men true

And their dynasty lifeless, oh my woe!

It worries my heart in my side beyond measure,

The absence of worldly pity for the Boer race,

The grim world, without intention without sympathy

Without help, nor hope of receiving aid;

Weep, weep, freedom absent,

Justice defeated, prejudice victorious,

Disinterest in right, in the bitter strength,

The southern heroes, without regime without power!

But be it that their men were beaten,

And although success evaded them recently,

They left their mark firmly and heavily,

In the heart of the devils which tormented them through treachery.

Sorrowful, sorrowful, will be the homesickness of the foreigners [Englishmen]

After the bitter-torment they received yonder,

Oft they fled with their crowds

By river and mountain from the blade of the Boer.

There is still hope for the heroes –

It is not always strength which brings victory –

Brave men suffer for freedom and race;

And confidence of heart yes and the power of their worth;

Listen to sense, no bad-rule is permanent,

If the devil is strong, God is stronger,

Themselves, alone, with the help of God,

The Boers will be free yet in their own homeland.

* For more about the former Irish Brigade Memorial in Brixton click here.

Download full article .

In the South African context it has been argued the prominence of white rugby on the public stage can be related to the particular power configurations which held sway over the country during the late 19th century and throughout most of the 20th century – a constellation of forces which inhibited black rugby to gain the same kind of exposure.

Political changes in the country since the 1990’s have not, however, had an appreciable effect in a re-acculturation of the game along markedly different racial lines. Of course it can be claimed that the period was too short to bring about significant change, but beyond that it is necessary to look at the changing dynamics of the game and in particular how a new variable, professionalisation, has affected the situation since 1995.  The impact of professionalistion is also explored in terms of what the process meant for “ordinary” rugby clubs away from the revenue generating urban centres as well as how “player culture” changed from the amateur era.

Download full article here.

C. Louis Leipoldt

By TREVOR EMSLIE

A few weeks ago, at a rather grand garden party in Bishopscourt, I fleetingly bumped into an acquaintance who is an attorney.  Seeing me, he stopped and told me, fairly abruptly, how he had recently discovered Leipoldt’s trilogy of historical novels set here in Clanwilliam and the Cederberg, how wonderful he thought it was, how he thought Leipoldt was South Africa’s Dostoevsky, who had said it all, and how fascinating it was to be living in this interesting time in South Africa’s history.

 One of the few things I am proud of is having published, for the first time ever, Leipoldt’s trilogy of novels entitled The Valley.  Leipoldt tried but failed to get The Valley published during his lifetime, his friends again failed to achieve this after his death, and it was only in 2000 – after it was brought to my attention by Paul Murray, a history teacher at Bishops – that The Valley saw the light of day, with Paul and me as editors.  It is long, and it is not easy reading, which is no doubt why it wasn’t published before, but it is incredibly rewarding for those who make the effort, and you can imagine that to hear my attorney friend call Leipoldt South Africa’s Dostoevsky was music to my ears.

 When just one person connects with The Valley, as my attorney friend obviously has, it makes the long hours of proofreading worthwhile; and I hope I can encourage those of you who have not yet done so to discover more about this man Leipoldt, who captures so quintessentially the problems and the poetry of our beloved country.

 In August 2003, I flew from Cape Town to London, arriving at the flat of friends at about eight or nine o’clock on a Saturday morning.  The purpose of my trip was to meet with Dr Peter Shields, one of the two youngsters who had lived with Dr C Louis Leipoldt in his house in Kenilworth in the 1930s, at exactly the time when Leipoldt wrote The Valley.

 The Shields family had sailed from England to South Africa, but tragedy struck during the voyage and Peter’s father, also a medical doctor, died on board ship in 1925.  His mother arrived in South Africa a widow, with five young children to care for.  After first settling in the Transvaal, as it then was, she moved with her children to Stellenbosch, where she struggled to make ends meet.  It was for this reason that her son Peter came to live with Leipoldt, and spent his teenage years in Leipoldt’s home.

And so it was that some seventy-five years later, I arrived in London on a mission to meet with Dr Shields in order to hear from him his stories about Leipoldt.  Having exchanged post-flight Saturday morning pleasantries with my London friends, I phoned Dr Shields to inquire when it would be convenient for me to come and see him.  He replied, “What about this afternoon?”  And so I cast about unsuccessfully for a tape recorder, succeeded in borrowing only a video camera which also recorded sound, caught a train from London to Berkhamsted, not far north of where I was, and phoned Dr Shields from the Berkhamsted station.  The sprightly eighty-something year old came to fetch me in his car, and we set off for his home not far away.

 Thus at about two thirty on that Saturday afternoon I found myself, weary after a sleepless night on the aeroplane, clumsily trying to point a video-camera not too obtrusively so that I could record our discussion, and enjoying a welcome cup of tea with Dr and Mrs Shields.  Dr Shields pointed out a Hugo Naude portrait of a French woman hanging on his wall, which used to hang on Leipoldt’s wall.  Leipoldt always referred to the subject of the painting as “the lady of the house”, he told me, and he said that he truly cherished this painting.  After showing me the two gold medals that Leipoldt had won while a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in London, the two of us settled down to discuss Leipoldt.

 I am not an experienced interviewer, except perhaps in preparation for litigation, and I had no list of questions or prompts to assist me.  My only strategy, if you can call it that, was to say as little as possible and let Dr Shields do the talking.

 The time flashed by, and after about three hours Dr Shields kindly took me back to the station, and I entrained for London.  It was such a lovely long summer’s evening, with the sun still shining, that I decided to walk from King’s Cross Station back to my friends’ flat rather than take the tube, and I dawdled at such a leisurely pace, drinking in the late English summer air and thinking about our discussion of matters Leipoldtian, that I must have sent out mixed signals – for I was propositioned by a lady of the night on an early shift, and was also offered drugs for own consumption.  This had never happened to me before, and it has never happened since.  Undeterred, I dawdled on, lost my way, and eventually arrived at my destination, able to relax at last.

 Over the next few days I typed up Dr Shields’s comments, laboriously winding and re-winding the tape in the video camera, until I had down what I considered to be a reasonable version of what he had said.  Dr Shields had told me that he was not a writer, and could not put pen to paper about Leipoldt, and this is why I typed up the contents of his share of our conversation.  I then sent him my transcript of what he had said, he confirmed that it was accurate enough and that I could use it as an introduction to Leipoldt’s Food & Wine , and thus I am able to relate what he told me about this amazing South African, Christian Frederik Louis Leipoldt.

 Before I quote Dr Peter Shields, let me say three things about Leipoldt.

 First, Leipoldt was a man of the world in the sense that after he left Cape Town in the closing stages of the Anglo-Boer War, he lived overseas for about twelve years, travelled widely, and acquired a wide international experience that he was able to bring to bear in his writing and his life generally on his return to South Africa in 1914.

 Secondly, Leipoldt was quintessentially South African.  Given his status as one of the major early Afrikaans poets, no one is likely to quarrel with this statement.  Indeed, it almost goes without saying, but not everybody appreciates how broad his South Africanism was.

 Thirdly, Leipoldt was, to the depths of his soul, a man of Clanwilliam and the Cederberg, until the end of his life.

Let me turn now to what Dr Peter Shields authorised me to say, in his words, about the man he called “Doc”.

 I was twelve years of age when, in 1930, I went to live with Leipoldt at his house, Arbury, in the Cape Town suburb of Kenilworth. ‘Doc’, as we called him, had an adopted son, Jeff, a few years younger than me, and the three of us lived together until Jeff and I went off to fight as volunteers in World War II.

 Although I have now lived for the past –twenty-five years in England, where I was born, my impression is that most South Africans think of Leipoldt as an Afrikaans poet, but do not know enough to appreciate the many other sides of this versatile man.

 Doc was very liberal for his time.  He was also great fun and was very, very mischievous.  You never quite knew whether he was pulling your leg – it was always a problem to know whether or not to take him seriously.  For instance, I remember him telling us that in China it was considered a delicacy to take a live baby mouse by the tail, dip it in honey, put it in your mouth, and let it scamper down your throat!

 Doc claimed to be a Buddhist.  I think he needed to break free of the dictates of his strict Protestant upbringing, remembering that his father had been the dominee of the Dutch Reformed Church in Clanwilliam and that he never went to school – he was taught by his father and could recite long extracts from the Bible.  We didn’t go to church.  Doc wasn’t against organised religion – he just wasn’t interested in it.

 Doc played a lot of tennis.  I remember that Mr Justice van Zyl often came to tennis on Sundays (we had a court at Arbury) and that his daughter was a very good tennis player. Doc did no running on court, but was nevertheless an effective and dangerous player:  he would stand there and place his lobs with great skill.

 He was a brilliant billiards player; and played a great deal of bridge, often with Mrs Bolus – I think the Boluses were like family to him.  He must have been a very good bridge player as he had a formidable memory.

 Doc had no dress-sense whatsoever.  I remember going swimming with him at St James pool, and his swimwear was so ghastly that Jeff and I didn’t want to be seen near him.  He probably didn’t care.  One Saturday evening he ventured forth in a dinner jacket with his bowtie so unbelievably skew that I instinctively went up to him to straighten it.  He stopped me, saying: ‘Don’t.  They won’t recognise me if you do that.’

 For many years we didn’t have a wireless at Arbury – Doc wouldn’t allow it.  But in 1937 he suddenly went out and bought a very large one.  He would sit and listen to Adolf Hitler’s speeches, getting very angry.  Of course, he could understand German, whereas the rest of us couldn’t.

 We spoke mainly English at home, and Doc actually did a lot of his writing in English.  He wrote several poems in English that were published under the pseudonym Pheidippides.  I would say that about half of Doc’s friends who visited the house were English-speaking, and the other half Afrikaans.

 We used to go for wonderful trips in the countryside, and one always met lots of interesting people in his company.  I remember visiting General Smuts on his farm at Irene, outside Pretoria, and thinking that his wife, Ouma Smuts, was the maid, so unpretentious was she.  We often visited General Smuts.

 Doc loved Clanwilliam and the Cederberg, and went there fairly often.  They were his spiritual home.  He knew a teriffic number of people in that part of the world, and wherever he went he would call on friends.

 Doc would always sing while he drove.  He would tease me about the Irish Republican song, the one about hanging men and women for wearing the green, and he would often sing this song while driving.  He wasn’t really musical, but he loved church music and would go to church to listen to musical performances.

 After the war Doc didn’t drive much, and he gave me his car when I was demobilised and returned to Cape Town.  Occasionally he would borrow it to go off botanising, and it was always filthy when he returned it.

 Doc used to tell wonderful ghost stories, especially when we were out camping.  Of course he would tell them at night, just before we went to bed.  They were always made up on the spot.  I particularly remember one about people being poisoned by mushrooms, and about the horrible deaths they died.  (Needless to say, Doc used to collect mushrooms himself when the opportunity arose.)

 Doc did not cook on an everyday basis.  He employed a cook for this purpose.  One cook he employed just before the war was a German woman, and I remember that we gave her quite a hard time.  I didn’t then give much thought to the food we ate; and while I can say that we always ate extremely well, I cannot say that it was particularly exotic.

 Doc himself cooked when he gave a dinner party, which he did fairly often.  There were always interesting people at his dinner parties, and Jeff and I were always included.

 Doc loved arguing.  He would have made a great lawyer.  He was also a great talker, continually asking questions – usually pulling your leg.  He would suddenly decide to give you a hard time, and then the temporary verbal assault would begin.  He loved to present you with an alternative view of whatever point you were making, even if you were merely stating a fact.

 There were rules in the house, but Jeff and I were never afraid of Doc.  He instituted a sort of ‘prefect’ system with older boys, usually medical students, looking after us, as he was often away lecturing at the University of Cape Town Medical School in the evenings.  He instituted a ‘black book’ system, something I think he had picked up at Rugby School in England.  Five black marks meant a hiding – but Doc wasn’t really a disciplinarian and the hiding never materialised.  Where he was strict was on one’s attitudes to people.  If Jeff or I commented disparagingly on other people, he would always say:  ‘Don’t be such a snob.’

 Doc had worked as a medical inspector of schools in England and he held a high opinion of English public schools.  He approved of them.  He would say to Jeff and me that we really ought to be at school at Rugby in England.

 He did get fed up with us at times, for instance if one of us trod on one of his best flowers.  Then he would storm off in anger, but generally he was very even tempered.

 Doc would set Jeff and I ‘exams’ approximately once a month.  He didn’t test what we knew, but set us tasks to find out and discover things before the next ‘exam’.  In retrospect I think this was very worthwhile.

 I think Doc was reasonably comfortably off, but not wealthy.  He left cash of about £20 000 in his estate, and Jeff and I each inherited some £10 000.  (I was the executor of his literary estate, and in this capacity I assigned the copyrights owned by his estate to the University of Cape Town when I left South African in 1978.)

Doc always had wine with his meals, and Jeff and I were also always given wine.  Doc used to make us describe it, something I wasn’t much good at.  He considered wine to be a good thing, and we all enjoyed it.  My recollection is that Doc’s preference was for red wine.  He was never snobbish about wine, or about anything else for that matter.  I never saw him ‘tight’.  He seldom had more than two glasses of wine.

  Doc would have loved to see the current state of development of South African wine, which was still very ordinary in the 1940s, and he would no doubt be pleased to know that in the twenty-first century I remain very fond of wine.

 Doc used to come home with his medical bags stuffed full of books, having stopped off at the library on his way.  He was a very fast reader and would borrow about five books at a time, often reading all five in one night.  Sometimes he would toss one at me, saying as it flew through the air:  ‘Here, this might interest you.’

 He had many books.  One wall of his study was lined with them.  These he bequeathed to the South African Library.

 Many people seem to think that Doc was, or might have been, homosexual.  I must say that I cannot see that it matters; but if he was, we never saw anything of it at all.  Not a hint.  Of course one didn’t discuss such things in those days, at any rate not in the way people do nowadays, but quite frankly the possibility never crossed our minds, and I am absolutely certain that there was nothing like that at all in our household.  There is no question of it being otherwise.

 It is true that he didn’t have much to do with women, except women friends of long standing.  And he didn’t have women in the house, except our German cook.  I remember him kicking up a fuss when her daughter came to stay, but I imagine that that had more to do with us – he was afraid one of us might get her into trouble.

 Doc had a Hugo Naude portrait of a French woman handing on his wall at Arbury.  He found it stuffed behind a couch at Naude’s house, said to Naude: ‘Don’t you want this?’ and Naude asked him whether he would like it.  It now hands on my wall, and I love it.

 On the subject of the Anglo-Boer War, my impression is that towards the end of the war Doc had blotted his copybook, so to speak, in the eyes of the British.  He was reporting on the war from the Boer side, and he had annoyed the military authorities.  I think it was important for him to leave Cape Town when he did, or he would have landed in trouble.

 Oom Gert Vertel and other poems dealing with the war were, I think, based on real incidents.

 I imagine that living in England must have changed Doc’s attitude to the English, whom, until then, during the war, he had had every reason for regarding as the enemy.

 A lot of things Doc said were taken up the wrong way, for example the controversy over his statement that it would be better for schoolchildren to be given wine than milk.  At that time milk was dished out to schoolchildren in mugs, and it was often contaminated.  This was the context of his remarks about wine being better for schoolchildren than milk.

 I was a Medical School after my return from the war, when they called me out of a lecture with the news that Doc had had a heart attack.  I went straight to see him, and visited him every day until his death about five days later.  I used to take him books.  I think he sensed that the end was nigh for he said to me: ‘I see the little goblins.  They’ve come to get me.’  (He always used to joke about goblins or little something-or-others.)

‘Oh nonsense,’ I replied, but he died during the night.

 I greatly enjoyed living in Doc’s home, and I learned an immense amount from him.  Thinking back, I was exceedingly fortunate – I had lost my own father, also a doctor, who died in 1925, and whom I adored; but Doc stepped in and provided me with a good, wholesome, easy childhood.

 And yes, I loved him.  He was like a big bear, with a somewhat gruff voice.  I always think of him as a big bear.

 Doc was happiest, I think, when he was out on the veld botanising.

 Christian Frederik Louis Leipoldt, who was born in 1880 and died in 1947, was an amazingly versatile man. It is no exaggeration to call him a poet, playwright, paediatrician, botanist, journalist, novelist, cook and connoisseur of food and wine. The evidence is manifest: there is a Louis Leipoldt Medi-Clinic in Belville, there is a restaurant called Leipoldt’s in Pretoria, there are botanical plants that bear his name, and there is a body of published work – in both English and Afrikaans – that establishes him as a seminal writer and poet.

In 1829 Leipoldt’s paternal grandfather founded the Rhenish mission station at Wupperthal, about 75 kilometres from here in the Cederberg mountains.  Leipoldt’s father, who was sent to Germany at a tender age to be educated there, also became a Rhenish missionary and served, with his wife, in Sumatra, returning to the Cape Colony about a year before Leipoldt was born in Worcester on 28 December 1880.  After a few years of service in Worcester, Leipoldt’s father joined the Dutch Reformed Church and became the dominee here in Clanwilliam, where the family moved in June 1884, when Leipoldt was three years of age.

 Leipoldt’s father was a talented and accomplished violinist, and when he first came to the village he used to play the music of Mozart, Beethoven and other composers on his violin in the twilight of evening. After a while he received a deputation from his congregation requesting him to stop playing godless music on the fiddle. He listened to their complaints, gave the members of the deputation coffee and cake, and with almost unbelievable acquiescence locked his violin case and never opened it again until the day he died.  Years later, as he lay on his deathbed, he called for his violin and actually died holding the instrument that was so dear to him.

 Leipoldt’s father had been educated in Germany and had wanted to pursue a musical career, but bowed to the wishes of his father and became a missionary instead. One imagines that the entire Leipoldt family must have experienced the psychological consequences of the repressive silencing of the talented violinist – who first sacrificed a musical career in favour of becoming a missionary, then sacrificed his instrument altogether for the sake of harmony in his congregation.

 Leipoldt never attended school – a fate he shared with Olive Schreiner, South Africa’s first writer to achieve international acclaim. Mrs Leipoldt took the somewhat haughty attitude that her children would not be educated at the local school here, and so the Leipoldt children were educated at home, principally by their father, a learned and sophisticated man who spoke German, English, Dutch, French and Batak, and was in addition something of a classical scholar.  Thus from an early age the young Leipoldt learned the classics as well as French and German, and by the age of twelve he was fluent in Dutch, German, English and French, and knew Latin and some Greek.  He later said that he could not have told you which of German, Dutch or English was his home language – they spoke all three interchangeably.  Needless to say, the quality of his education was uneven – his maths, for example, was never what it might otherwise have been, a shortcoming that manifested itself in his matric exam results and again when he studied medicine. But he was widely read and his linguistic ability was outstanding.

 When he was eleven years old Christie – as he was known to his family – entered a competition for a ‘Story Needing Words’ in The Boy’s Own Paper, sending his entry to England from here, and about three months later he received a postal order for ten shillings and six pence, and a certificate stating that he had won first prize in the age group twelve to sixteen years. When his mother discovered that he had won a money prize, for his parents had not known that he had entered the competition, she insisted that he donate his prize to the missionary fund. This experience, the brutal silencing of the violinist in his father, and his strict Protestant upbringing help explain Leipoldt’s lack of interest in conventional religion.

 What Leipoldt, who experienced a lonely childhood, was interested in was the whole world of nature that surrounded him in the Cederberg.  His botanical expertise was evident when as a youth he accompanied the German botanist Rudolph Schlechter on an expedition into the veld, and he conversed with Dr Daniel Hahn, Professor Peter MacOwan and Dr Harry Bolus, bringing samples with him when he accompanied his father to synod meetings of the Dutch Reformed Church in Cape Town.  His love of natural beauty captivated him as a child and brought him refuge as an adolescent.  It embodied both practical knowledge and poetic love of the world around him, and throughout his life it was an important example of what one might call the Leipoldtian duality – ars practica et ars poetica.

 Leipoldt submitted articles which were published in Cape Town newspapers while he was still a young boy in Clanwilliam, and years later when he was in Cape Town the journalists concerned expressed astonishment when they discovered how young he had been when his articles were first published in the press.

 Having matriculated, Leipoldt left Clanwilliam at the age of 17 years, worked in Cape Town as a full-time journalist for first De Kolonist and then for The South African News, in addition freelancing for several overseas publications on the subject of the Anglo-Boer War, writing in particular about conditions under martial law in the Cape Colony.  He was, for example, present at the court martial of Gideon Scheepers, who was sentenced to death, in Graaff-Reinet.  He later acted as editor of his pro-Boer English newspaper, The South African News, when his predecessor, Albert Cartwright, was arrested and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, serving as such until the newspaper was closed down by the Cape Colonial authorities.

 Thereafter he wisely departed for London in January 1902, four months before the end of the Anglo-Boer War, or his fate might have resembled that of Albert Cartwright.  He enrolled as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, and continued with part-time journalism for many varied publications while he was a student at Guy’s.

 Leipoldt did not have a good relationship with his mother, and I think it is correct that he did not see her again after he left Clanwilliam for Cape Town.  She died not long after he moved to London.  His father also died while he was still in London, but he certainly did see his father again.

 Leipoldt’s medical studies were financed by Dr Bolus, the Cape Town botanist, which says a great deal about the friendship that blossomed between this young boy growing into manhood, and his intellect, which was obviously advanced for his age.  Dr Bolus saw the potential in Leipoldt, knew that he wanted to study medicine, and so he offered to finance Leipoldt’s sojourn at Guy’s Hospital.  Leipoldt repaid what had been advanced to him, and also worked part-time as a free-lance journalist and washed dishes in London’s top hotels – where he met the famous chef August Escoffier, not by coincidence but because his lifelong interest in food had already been kindled way back in Clanwilliam – to keep himself afloat in London.

 Leipoldt’s letters to Dr Bolus are published in the book entitled Dear Dr Bolus.

During the Anglo-Boer War, opposition to the war had been expressed in The New Age, a weekly journal published in London.  Six South Africans, Leipoldt, Betty Molteno, Alice Greene, Albert Cartwright, Friedrich Kolbe and Anna Purcell, all of whom knew each other and operated almost as a small secret society, together with Maria Koopmans De Wet and Olive Schreiner (who was however under house arrest in Hanover in the Karoo), published pro-Boer, protest poems anonymously in The New Age.  The poems written by the South Africans were anonymous because of martial law.  They could have been charged with treason if it had become known that they had done so.  After Leipoldt’s arrival in London, it was decided to publish in book form some of pro-Boer poems that had appeared in The New Age, and in this way Songs of the Veld and other poems appeared just after the end of the war in June or July 1902.  We think Leipoldt was the driving force behind this publication, and it contained his first published poem, entitled The Executions in Cape Colony, a fragment.  It reads as follows:

 “The gibbet and the grave gave life, and will

Give life again to those that strive and strain

For freedom and its cause; nor strive in vain

Those whose desires need force and cords to kill.

 The thing is done; or right or wrong ’tis done

And only the remembrance shall endure.

But not the memory of a wrong shall stand

More firm or rooted faster or more sure.

And it shall serve to keep this dismal land

More dismal till the final aim is won.”

 Interestingly, and ironically given what happened decades later, the consignment of Songs of the Veld was destroyed when it arrived in Cape Town on board ship, and the book was banned by the British.  Only a few copies were smuggled in to South Africa – enough, however, for the book to be unearthed years later and published as a facsimile edition in 2008.  After 106 years, then, it became freely available in South Africa.

 After finishing his medical studies, Leipoldt stayed in London, working as a medical inspector of schools.  But he also travelled widely on the continent, and spent six months as the personal physician to the American publisher Pullitzer, after whom the Pullitzer prize is named, on his private vessel.  In truth his services were required more as a conversationalist and man of letters than as a doctor, but this was his designation while he was employed by Pullitzer.

 Leipoldt visited the East, where his father had been a missionary, and it seems that both father and son had a fascination for the East throughout their lives.

Eventually Leipoldt returned to South Africa in 1914, taking up a post as the first medical inspector of schools in the Transvaal.  It is from this experience that his book in English, Bushveld Doctor, emerged.

 For a while during this period Leipoldt shared a house in Pretoria with Eugene Marais.  He also stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for Smuts’s South African Party.

 Later, in the 1920s, Leipoldt returned to Cape Town, where he obtained a lecturing post in paediatrics at UCT, became editor of the South African Medical Journal and secretary of the SA Medical Union.  He had charge of a paediatric ward at the Somerset Hospital near what is now the Waterfront.

 He set up home in the Cape Town suburb of Kenilworth, at a house called Arbury, just below the railway line, and it was during this time that he adopted a son, Jeff Leipoldt, and opened his home to Peter Shields, who was not formally adopted, presumably because his mother was nearby in Stellenbosch.

 It was also while at Arbury that Leipoldt became well-known – in Cape Town circles – for his dinner parties and his culinary expertise.  (He had of course written Kos vir die Kenner in Afrikaans in 1926.)

 After Arbury was sold, Leipoldt boarded at the home of a fellow-doctor, Dr Bobby Forsyth, in Newlands (just off Palmyra Road), and then later in Sea Point, which was where he died.

 It was said of Leipoldt after his death that: “He preferred to contradict. He was the apostle of the opposite view.”  The concept of “political correctness” would have been anathema to Leipoldt, who might also have been termed the apostle of political incorrectness.  He would have enjoyed the jest – when in Rome, do as the Carthaginians do.

 Teetotalism was not only foreign to Leipoldt, but one of his pet hates. He held strong views about abolitionism and the damage done by its advocates.

 Although he was indifferent to conventional religion, Leipoldt accepted the need to live life according to a code; and he claimed to be a Buddhist.  It is tempting to dismiss this claim as simply another instance of his contrarian instincts, but it seems that his missionary background – his parents and both sets of grandparents were missionaries – exerted a strong influence on him, and all the evidence supports the view that Leipoldt’s own closely held belief in the power and endurance of the highest form of love – that which expects nothing in return – was the code that he chose to live by.  He certainly believed in the endurance and supremacy of this kind of love, and this, together with the value of service to others he must have imbibed from his own family, explain much about the way he lived his life, often taking groups of boys on camping outings or travelling with them.

His remains lie in a beautiful place of stillness on the Pakhuis Pass, not far from here.  This was organised by his friends after his death.

 If you read The Valley, which is made up of the three novels Gallows Gecko, Stormwrack and The Mask, you will find strongly biographical elements in all three novels, which cover the period 1820 to 1930 in the Clanwilliam area, which is however never mentioned by name.  When he discusses, as he does, matters such as botanical, medical or culinary matters, it helps to know that the author was an expert in all these fields.

 Let me read you an extract from chapter 8 of Stormwrack, where Leipoldt describes how the villagers of Clanwilliam used to gather twice a week for wait for the post-cart to arrive with their mail and their newspapers.  Clanwilliam was an isolated village then, and the nearest railway station was about a hundred miles away.  What Leipoldt describes is a mail day early in January 1896, just after the Jameson Raid, with the villagers anxiously waiting for more detailed news of what had happened, and it is almost certain that Leipoldt himself would have been present on this occasion.  Note the reference to the Reverend Christian Uhlmann, one of the main characters in Stormwrack, who is based on Leipoldt’s father, the Reverend Christian Leipoldt. Leipoldt writes as follows:

 “Here, in front of the courthouse, the village, or at least the adult, adolescent and older juvenile male portion of it, congregated on mail days. Some of them came to get their letters and parcels, but the majority had no expectation of any postal harvest and loitered for the simple reason that attracts any crowd – the chance of gossip, of novelty in some form or other, of interest, of mild excitement, a chance ever present when the only link between isolation and the larger civilisation three hundred miles away lies in the arrival of the weekly mail. Such occasions were made the opportunity for the interchange of opinion, for discussion between the older and more sedate members of the community, and for mild bickering and horseplay between the juveniles, who on these weekly gathering-days were allowed more liberty of action than was usually considered advisable in so conservative a community.

 The post-cart was scheduled to arrive promptly at four o’clock in the afternoon, but the experienced knew well enough that the schedule was never strictly adhered to and that considerable latitude was granted to the driver. In winter, when the air was cold and rainy, few grouped themselves around the thorn tree much before sunset, and the gatherings were always smaller. In summer, when the heat of the day had died down and the air was pleasantly cool, it was another matter. Then there was no discomfort in loitering underneath the thorn tree, chatting with one’s acquaintances, observing with mild interest what went on, and smoking – in leisurely satisfaction – the fragrant home-grown tobacco whose smoke curled lazily into the air. There was no loss of dignity attached to that democratic intercourse, and in consequence the village had no scruples in attending. On such occasions one could see not only the magistrate, the chief constable and the local attorney among the little throng that clustered in the vicinity of the thorn tree, but practically everyone who counted for anything at all in the village, including the Reverend Mr Mance-Bisley, who took advantage of these opportunities to discuss the various questions with the parents of his scholars, and the Reverend Christian Uhlmann who, with a gravity befitting his position and with a childlike shyness that was temperamental, stood modestly aside and engaged in conversation only when he was directly approached. It took some time to sort the mail, and when the doors of the post office were opened there was a rush towards the counter and a quick dispersal of the waiting crowd homewards.”

 Isn’t it wonderful? And it was just a short distance up the road outside from where we are now, 112 years ago.

 I am still asked by people whether I translated The Valley into English, which only goes to show how Leipoldt has become typecast and pigeonholed as an Afrikaans writer and poet.  No one other than Leipoldt could have written the English contained in the The Valley, and South Africans have yet to truly discover Leipoldt in English.  What many people also don’t know is that several of his Afrikaans poems were first drafted in English.

 Leipoldt’s real triumph is that he truly understood the South African predicament, our tendency in all sorts of contexts to divide ourselves into “us and them”, and the subtle but strong message of The Valley, for those who read between the lines, is that redemption lies in overcoming the divides between, say, English and Afrikaans, or black and white.  In this Leipoldt was prophetic; and, writing about the past in 1930, he has a remarkably modern message for us in 2010.  But never simplistic, never didactic, always balanced, human, endearing, subtle, sympathetic, and always debatable.

 Leipoldt reminds us of the obligations we owe to the past – the obligation “of living for this country”, as one of his characters, old Charles Quakerley, puts it in Gallows Gecko – even as we face the future.  This includes the obligation to transcend the divisions of the past, including but not limited to the divisions between English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, exacerbated by the Anglo-Boer War; to set aside the “us and them” attitude; and to work for the common good of this country.

 This is why Leipoldt continues, not only to charm, impress, entertain and fascinate us, getting under the skin, as it were, of his characters, and of South Africa and her problems, but challenges our views and the way we live our lives in South Africa today, one and all.

* This article is based on a speech delivered at the Yellow Aloe, Clanwilliam, 1 May 2010

Secondly, people believe that a study of the past can help the present generation to deal with intractable problems their society faces and also to become good citizens. A corollary of this is the view that communities that do not heed the lessons of history are bound to repeat past errors and blunders.

There is, thirdly, the belief that a deep understanding of history helps us to discern the shape of the future.

To summarise the three claims briefly:

• History tells us who we are and where we came from;
• It helps us to deal with the problems we currently face and to become good citizens; and
• With a good grasp of history we can anticipate the future.

This article attempts to assess these claims critically.

Read the full article (PDF) by professor Hermann Giliomee.

CAPE TOWN – The relative success of the Democratic Alliance (DA) in South Africa’s local elections of 18 May 2011, as also the noticeable decline in the vote of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has posed many questions and possibilities.

The first point to notice is that turnout was sharply up from 48.4% in 2006 to 57.6% in 2011 – an increase from 9,852,099 votes cast to 13,353,987 votes cast. This very large (over 35%) jump in turnout levels is most uncommon in local elections anywhere in the world. This is in itself a strong indication of what is happening.

In effect most South Africans regard the follies and corruption of national elite-level politics as something they can only sigh about. Both the ANC and DA have deliberately de-emphasised the role of Parliament – neither of their party leaders actually sit there – which as a result has been diminished to a degree where the press hardly bother with it and where the names of frontbenchers on either side are obscure to almost everyone. This in turn has had the perverse effect of presidentialising politics far more than before.

Thus, for example, under the previous DA leadership of Tony Leon (and Leon did sit in Parliament) all the DA frontbenchers were extremely prominent and well-known. Now their names are unknown and the party is wholly identified with its leader, Helen Zille, while the second best known figure is the party’s new mayor of Cape Town, Patricia De Lille who, again, is not an MP.

Typically, the DA posters featured three women – Zille, De Lille and spokesperson Lindiwe Mazibuko. De Lille was there because she and Zille had made a private deal for De Lille to become mayor, while Mazibuko was there because she was a Zille appointee. The ANC posters featured Jacob Zuma, who was not a candidate at any level at all.

Unable to effect any change in the incompetence and venality of their national leaders, South Africa’s voters have instead focused far more on service delivery at a local level – something of immediate importance in people’s daily lives and something they can actually hope to influence. This has been noticeable both in the literally thousands of riots and protests against poor service delivery in towsnships and squatter camps and in the DA’s strong emphasis on their own superior performance in local government.

Moreover, under Zille the DA has settled for a quite public strategy of attempting to conquer local power first in the Western Cape, then hope to use that as a springboard to win local power elsewhere in South Africa and only finally to offer a national-level challenge to the ANC.

Given this strategy, the municipal elections were actually the real elections for the DA, and the logic of this challenge was taken up by the ANC which, in the end, was able to contain the DA challenge by pushing up its own turnout as well. Nonetheless, the ANC declined from 65.7% of the vote in 2006 to 62% now, while the DA surged from 16.3% to 23.9%.

As will be seen, this meant that the two party share of the vote – even at municipal level, which encourages all manner of independents and small parties – increased from 82% in 2006 to 85.9%. This increasing two party polarization – which led to the decimation of most of the smaller parties – is quite extraordinary in what is the most extreme proportional system in the world.

All the structural and institutional incentives are towards multiparty proliferation, yet the opposite is happening. This is simply because the political culture is so much more powerful and because it has been moulded by decades of polarity between the System and the Struggle.

To be sure, the two sides have been swapped over but the electorate’s sense of dualism remains. At popular level one normally finds that voters usually think simply in terms of “the old regime” and “the new regime”, and the ANC tries hard to insist that the DA is identical to the old regime. In fact, of course, the DA and its lineal ancestors were very much opposed to the old regime and no one at all really wants the return of the old regime (apartheid), but that is less important than this underlying sense of dualism. In reality the ANC is now really the party of the System and the DA the party of Struggle against it. These are simply the forms of political life in which South Africans grew up and to which they are habituated.

This is why those commentators who have attempted to make a sharp differentiation between the DA of Tony Leon and his famous “Fight Back” campaign of 1999 on the one hand, and the supposedly softer and more inclusive style of Helen Zille on the other, have entirely missed the point.

In fact there is a perfectly continuous narrative linking the Leon and Zille periods. Leon’s great achievement through the Fight Back campaign was to catapult the DA (then the DP) to its status as the main Opposition party. This in turn guaranteed that polarization works to its advantage. Zille has merely built on the platform thus created.

Moreover, Zille’s rhetoric is in many ways even harder than Leon’s – she accuses the new elite of being “blue light bullies” and of creating a failed state, accusations tougher than anything Leon made. But the logic of being the Struggle party, the one which attempts to incubate the new society within the womb of the old – once the ANC’s “liberated zones”, now the DA’s successfully run municipalities – is really the continuous thread through both periods.

In that sense, every DA campaign is a “fight back” campaign. It rallies the Opposition against the rich and powerful ruling elite, just as the ANC once did. Naturally, the ANC greatly dislikes this role reversal but its problem is that the wealth and fecklessness of the new elite, its Lamborghini cars and Breitling watches, its five star luxury and its private jets, are there for all to see.

The electoral map is highly revealing, showing a spreading stain of DA municipalities moving outwards from Cape Town. Of the 30 municipalities in the Western Cape the ANC won only one, Beaufort West. The DA won 16 and will probably create majority coalitions in many of the rest. Beyond that, the sole DA municipality is Midvaal, won by a largely increased majority. It is true that the DA vote increased right across the country but the fact is that the Western Cape is now a DA country.

This is exactly how visitors from Jo’burg or Durban (or abroad) react: why, they say, it’s like a different country here. Things work, the roads are mended, traffic lights operate, the litter is cleared, the verges get cut, the city centre still works. None of this is true where the ANC rules. No wonder the Western Cape is growing faster than the rest of the country, as people and businesses struggle to re-locate there.

This reflects several things. Most obviously, there is the swing of Coloured voters to the DA – so great that even in Mitchell’s Plain the party garnered 80%. In effect what has happened is that the more sophisticated Cape Town Coloureds have moved to the DA and their country cousins have increasingly taken their lead from them, sending DA ripples all the way up the West Coast and up the Garden Route.

The logic is clearly of a further expansion of DA influence into the Northern Cape (with its Coloured majority). This election saw that process begin but it will continue. It also reflects the fact that under Zille the DA has become a Cape Town party. She herself is from Cape Town. So is Patricia De Lille. Lindiwe Mazibuko may be a Zulu, elected on the DA’s KwaZulu-Natal list, but she was a student at UCT and has effectively become a Cape Town resident both as an MP and Zille’s spokesperson.

The chairman of the party’s Federal Executive, James Selfe, is a Capetonian and so is Wilmot James, the party’s chairman. This is a party whose entire leadership lives within a square mile or two of one another. This is, of course, strongly self-reinforcing: it undoubtedly helped De Lille become, effectively, the party’s No.2, and it leads many to tip Mazibuko as a future leader.

Under Zille, all leaders come from Cape Town. In addition, of course, all the DA’s key support staff is there, some of them now employed in Zille’s Western Cape administration. This provincialisation is, of course, a threat at one remove to the DA’s national vocation.

However, it is important to realise that something similar is happening to the ANC, which is now ever more clearly head-quartered in KwaZulu-Natal. For the second election in a row, the ANC lost ground almost everywhere but gained in KZN, as the party feasted off the rotting remains of the Inkatha Freedom Party.

Much fuss was made this time of the relative success of the National Freedom Party, an IFP breakaway, but it is surely sensible to view the NFP as merely a stage in the decomposition of the IFP majority which ruled KZN until 2004. a process which seems certain to continue at least while Zulu votes can rally behind a Zulu President.

The enormous symbolic magnetism of that simple fact is, of course, greatly reinforced by a system of elite-level power and local patronage. This is particularly noticeable in two areas, Justice and Security, and Communications. Thus we find Zulus as Minister of Justice (Jeff Radebe), Sandile Ngcobo as Chief Justice, as chief of police (Bkeki Cele), as National Public Prosecutor (Menzi Simelane) as well as Lizo Njenje (head of the National Intelligence Agency) and Siyabonga Cwele (Minister of State Security).

In addition, of course, there are Zulu ministers at Home Affairs (Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma), Transport (Sbu Ndebele), Public Works (Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde) and Public Enterprises (Malusi Gigaba). The SACP is neatly folded into this Zulu hierarchy with the presence of its leader, Blade Nzimande, as Minister of Higher Education.

Finally, one must take cognizance of the fact that Durban Indian politicians who make it up to the higher levels of the ANC are inevitably men who throughout their careers move in a Zulu-dominated world, are beholden to Zulu political bosses and rely on Zulu votes to get elected. To all intents and purposes they are an extension of this Zulu network.

This applies to Pravin Gordhan, the Minister of Finance, as also Roy Padayachie, the Minister of Communications, seconded by another Zulu, Ben Ngubane, as head of the SABC.

The municipal elections saw the decay of the IFP taken a further stage by the breakaway of the NFP, though doubtless the larger narrative is the continuing collapse of the entire Zulu vote towards Zuma. This in turn has made the ANC more and more heavily dependent on the Zulu vote. At the ANC’s September 2010 National General Council KwaZulu-Natal was the only province to report increased party membership, a fact which made it the ANC’s biggest provincial branch.

Somewhere between a quarter and a third of all delegates to the NGC were Zulus, by far the largest single group. This in turn made any possibility of a challenge to Zuma’s leadership somewhat remote. It is ironic that just as the ANC musters itself to celebrate the centenary of its founding in January 1912 this process of “Zulufication” is taking place, for the original point of the ANC was to put ethnic questions behind it.

“Zulufication” is a comforting process for the ANC at the moment, helping to staunch its losses.  Thus in eThekwini (Durban) the ANC’s vote has gone from 46.9% in 2000 to 57.6% in 2006 to 61.1% in 2011, and this last result on a high 59.3% turnout. In the longer term, however, it is obviously dangerous.

For one thing, it is liable to keep Jacob Zuma in power and these elections showed again that he enjoys no influence or respect among the nation’s minorities. It could, moreover, make it difficult for the ANC to consider non-Zulus for the Presidency. It is true that after three consecutive Xhosa leaders a yet further period of Xhosa rule would have been greatly resented by other groups, but that does not mean that there is not a feeling of resentment and disempowerment among many Xhosa now.

Such feelings undoubtedly helped spark Cope’s breakaway from the ANC and in 2011 may well have fed into the slump in the ANC vote in Nelson Mandela Bay Metropole (Port Elizabeth) where turnout this time soared to an extraordinary 81.2%. The ANC fell from 66.2% in 2006 to 51.9% while the DA soared from 24.4% to 40.1%.

Throughout the campaign the DA’s tracking polls suggested that around 17% of African voters would vote for it this time, a huge leap from the 2% who previously had. In the last week or two of the campaign, however, the ANC moved into top gear, attempting to pull back such defectors by naked appeals to racial solidarity and, often, straightforward intimidation. Ever since 1994 it has used these two weapons to telling effect.

In 1994, for example, poll after poll suggested that at least 5% of the African vote on the Reef would go to the IFP and another 5% to De Klerk. In the event both minorities faded into virtual invisibility by polling day. It was the same this time with the DA ultimately taking only 5%-6% of the African vote. Even this, however, had to be accounted a considerable breakthrough. The DA vote was noticeably up in almost all black areas and the party even won a small number of all-African or mainly African wards.

Hence the conventional wisdom that the DA, having made this breakthrough, now stands poised to make further advances. The party’s electorate is already 20% African, making its easily the most multi-racial party in the country and, indeed, in South Africa’s history.

The ANC, naturally, continues to insist that the DA is a “white” party but whites now make up only 9.7% of the population while the DA scored 23.9%, so go figure. Although politicians of all stripes like to expound their allegiance to non-racialism, the fact is that a truly non-racial party is such a novelty in South Africa, where identity politics remains so strong that one should not take for granted the DA’s continued growth along this path.

The notion is, clearly, that 17% of Africans came close to voting for the DA but only 5% or 6% did, which leaves 10% or more trembling on the brink. The DA’s hope is that by the next election this group, buoyed by the sight of many Africans already having crossed the line into the DA and, doubtless, further alienated by ANC misbehaviour, will also cross that line – and so on. This narrative, in which the DA continues to gain and the ANC faces a downward slope, was widely accepted by the media in the wake of the elections.

The great question is, what will be the ANC’s response to that prospect? Its initial response was simply denial: the ANC had won a great victory, the DA had merely taken votes from the small parties and the media were wrongly writing that up. In Cape Town, the ANC’s losing mayoral candidate, Tony Ehrenreich, proclaimed himself “the mayor for the poor”, grandly ignoring the fact that the Coloured working class, which he represents, had swung more massively than ever to the DA. But without doubt the ANC had had a bad fright.

Its early campaign had sputtered poorly and its own internal polling suggested the possibility of a major debacle. But in the end the party had even pulled out its vote in townships and settlements that had been racked by service delivery protests. This was not, however, quite as remarkable as it seemed for such protests invariably have their origins in factional conflicts within the ANC in any given area, with the “out” group furiously demonstrating against the looting and corruption by the “in” group, the objective simply being to replace the “in” group as beneficiaries.

These local squabbles over jobs, tenders and perks do not signify any lesser attachment to the ANC as the necessary vehicle which all of these groups hope to utilise to their own benefit.

In Midvaal, the DA’s only outpost in Gauteng, where the ANC had made a particularly strong effort to roll back the Opposition, the DA won again by the healthy margin of 56.4% to 41.5%. Timothy Nast, the DA mayor commented that “We could not have won but for the black votes”. This was a problem for the ANC which wished to argue that the DA had won by appealing to the racist fears of the minorities – a narrative spoilt by the DA’s gains among Africans.

Immediately after the result an angry group of ANC supporters toured Midvaal’s African areas, demanding to know how people had voted and vowing to burn down the houses of African DA voters. Within days President Zuma had ordered the Special Investigations Unit to carry out a probe into alleged corruption and misgovernance in Midvaal, a move which was difficult to interpret as other than punitive given that the Auditor-General has given Midvaal a clean bill of health for eight years in a row.

The same anger was evident in Port Elizabeth where the ANC’s regional chairman, Nceba Faku, poured out his anger against the Eastern Province Herald (which had published articles linking Faku to corruption and tender irregularities). Faku called on his supporters to “burn the Herald down” and to “drive into the sea” black voters who had supported the DA. Luthuli House disavowed such sentiments and in the event the ANC’s anger was vented in burning down the shops and houses of local Somali traders, for in South Africa anger in the streets is always likely to find a xenophobic outcome.

At Luthuli House the ANC Secretary-General, Gwede Mantashe, continued to rail against the media and also against the independent Municipal Demarcation Board which he accused of having altered ward boundaries in order to favour the DA. (In fact the MDB’s brief is simply to ensure that wards remain of equal size despite demographic change.) Meanwhile the ANC decided to charge ahead with its anti-media Protection of Information Bill, brushing aside all amendments and compromises it had previously agreed to.

Even more than a week after the elections the ANC’s anger was palpable, as Sam Mkokeli reported in Business Day (May 27):

“Last week’s local government election results have left the (ANC) in a spin….its deep-seated anger at the media has emerged again….the ANC is seething….as the dominant party it wants to have a hand in every part of society. This is a ruling party that expects to be feared by a media that it increasingly tries to bully.”

It must be realised that this anger is not the same as the disappointment that other parties might feel at an election reverse: the ANC is sui generis. In its own self-conception it is both a vanguard and a hegemonic party and it is still a liberation movement so that when it wins a ward or a town it talks of those areas as having been “liberated”.

It is thus extremely painful and upsetting for it to witness the conquest of towns and cities by the DA for, by definition, this means the tide of liberation has been turned back. Rather as Mussolini decreed that his Fascists must not march but run because fascism was an intrinsically dynamic movement, so in the ANC’s narrative the forces of liberation must always be going forward, must always be gaining – “the ANC leads”. This whole narrative is upset if people like Sam Mkokeli describe it, in his dread phrase, as “a party in decline”.

Similarly, the ANC leadership talk rather as if it was the duty of the media to see things the ANC’s way. When faced with clear media bias, as in the SABC’s decision to refuse to screen the DA’s final rally but to give two hours interrupted coverage to its ANC equivalent, the ANC’s assumption is that this is simply “normal”: the rest of the media ought to behave the same way.

If the notion that the ANC is “a party in decline” is accepted then logically its leaders and members must accept the possibility that one day they will lose power not just locally but at the centre. This, of course, they are adamantly disinclined to do not only because they do not wish to surrender power and its fruits but because in their eyes such an outcome would mean the complete reversal of “liberation” and their “revolution”.

Already in the case of DA-ruled Cape Town since 2006 there have been multiple attempts by the ANC to subvert DA control by almost any means it could lay its hand to. The real question thus becomes whether the ANC will seek to turn back the electoral tide by foul means. Even in 2011 it is quite possible that the ANC held on to Tshwane (Pretoria) only because of a gerrymander which added large peri-urban areas to the city.

The key to answering this question will lie in how the ANC behaves towards the African voters who voted DA this time. It is no accident that in both the Midvaal and Port Elizabeth examples cited above, the knee-jerk ANC reaction was to go after these defectors: in Midvaal the threat was to burn down their houses, in PE they were to be driven into the sea.

Note that no such threats were made against the minorities who had supported the DA; that might even be conceded as, in a sense, normal. While the DA’s support remains confined to the minorities it can never be a serious threat. It is the possibility of further waves of African defectors moving to the DA which really threatens the ANC – and, of course, such voters are by far the most vulnerable to pressure, living as they do in (mainly ANC-controlled) townships and informal settlements. In those few cases where black areas actually gave a majority of their votes to the DA, such voters will be easily exposed and even elsewhere they will often be known.

So while the immediate talk within the post-election ANC was of the need to recapture lost ground amongst the minorities, potentially far more sinister will be ANC attempts to “mobilize” within African communities. Both the Opposition and the media will need to keep a very sharp eye on this front. For South Africa is not yet Zimbabwe. The Independent Electoral Commission has had seventeen years of conducting elections and is justifiably proud that they remain (largely) free and fair. Beyond that, the general public assumption among South Africans of all races is that electoral intimidation is wrong and unacceptable.

With the DA now nearing a quarter of the total vote, we have clearly reached a turning point. Until now the ANC has been able to have it both ways. On the one hand it has boasted of its proud non-racial tradition whenever it has suited it to do so. On the other hand it has based itself securely on the racial solidarity of the African voting bloc.

Now, however, it must choose. If it really sticks to non-racialism it may have to watch, agonised, as African racial solidarity decays, to the benefit of the DA. If, on the other hand, it decides to enforce African racial solidarity with a big stick, it will bid goodbye to its claims to non-racialism and to much else besides. The future of democracy in South Africa will depend on what happens next.

* This article originally appeared on Politicsweb.

Friedrich Carl Kolbe, Roman Catholic clergyman and editor of The South African Catholic Magazine.

By MARTHINUS VAN BART

A remarkable Anglo-Boer War anthology, Songs of the Veld and Other Poems, which was published in 1902 in London and subsequently banned in South Africa, was conceptualized in Cape Town, South Africa, during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) when martial law prohibited any public protest against the war and the atrocities committed by the British troops on the citizens.

No mass meetings of protest  were allowed, and articles in newspapers and magazines, even ordinary letters in the ordinary citizen’s mail service, were sensored by the military.

Six intellectuals, eduactionists and journalists, based in Cape Town then in defiance wrote anti-war poetry and sent it to The New Age, an important literary magazine in London with a worldwide circulation to all countries where the English language was read. The New Age published these poems anonymously from time to time, and the readers world wide reacted in the same vein by submitting their own anti-war poems condemning  Britain and its immoral war.

In 1902 the best poems were selected and published in the anthology  Songs of the Veld and Other Poems.

The copies sent to Cape Town by ship were seized by the British authorities in Cape Town dockyard and destroyed.

In 2008 it was reprinted and published for the first time in 106 years in South Africa.

Songs of the Veld and Other Poems, left, and the six intellectuals who battled Britain with the pen. On the left from top to bottom is C. Louis Leipoldt, journalist, Elizabeth Molteno, educationist, and Anna Purcell, journalist. On the right from top to bottom is Friedrich Carl Kolbe, clergyman, educationist and journalist, Albert Cartwright, journalist, and Alice Greene, educationalist.

One of these Cape Town poets was a Roman Catholic clergyman, Monsignor Friedrich Carl Kolbe, editor of The South African Catholic Magazine.

In 1876 he joined the Roman Catholic Church  and studied theology at the Vatican for five years. On graduation he was awarded a gold medal for his outstanding academic achievements. In 1882 he was ordained a priest.

In The South African Catholic Magazine his editorials were very outspoken. He repudiated the British Empire for its “unrighteous capitalistic war”.

He was subsequently removed from his position by the Church authorities, who were pro-British. It was only after the war that he was allowed to resumed his work at the The South African Catholic Magazine. He then dedicated himself to the arts, literature and education.

Friedrich Carl Kolbe was through his struggle against evil an outstanding and remarkable person, indeed a Christian in the strictest sense of the word. It is truly strange that the Roman Catholic Church has not yet honoured him for his humanitarian work in South Africa and his stance for civilization as a true Soldier for the Faith.

St. Mary's Cathedral in Cape Town where Friedrich Carl Kolbe was the editor of the South African Roman Catholic Magazine. Photo: Marthinus van Bart

Biographics:

FRIEDRICH CARL KOLBE (1854-1936) was a Roman Catholic priest (Monsignor), theologian, lawyer, philosopher, journalist, critic, botanist, educationalist, poet and writer. His father, Friedrich Wilhelm, was a missionary of the Rhenish Missionary Society and rector of the Congregationalist Missionary Church at Paarl. Kolbe’s mother, Isabella Elliott, was a granddaughter of the well known magistrate H.L. Bletterman of Stellenbosch. The Reverend Abraham Faure, an uncle of Anna (Faure) Purcell, was married to a sister of Kolbe’s maternal grandmother.

Kolbe could read from the Bible at the age of four and from his sixth year he was taught Latin by his father. In 1862 he left for Blackheath, London, for his formal education. He came first in his class for five consecutive years. By his twelfth year he had read all Shakespeare’s works and studied Greek. In 1869 he returned to Cape Town.

The Reverend Andrew Murray jr. endeavoured to enlist Kolbe as student in theology at the Stellenbosch Seminary of the Dutch Reformed Church, but the young man preferred to study at the SA College. To pay for his studies, he gave private lessons in Latin and arithmetic at the SA College School (SACS). In 1874 he became the first graduate at the SA College as well as the first BA graduate registered on the graduandi roll of the newly established University of the Cape of Good Hope.

The South African College, later University of the Cape of Good Hope, where Kolbe in 1874 became the first graduate as well as the first BA graduate registered on the graduandi roll of the newly established University of the Cape of Good Hope.

Shortly hereafter he received a bursary to study at the London University College where he obtained his B.A. and LL.B. degrees cum laude and was admitted to the Inner Temple. In 1876 he joined the Roman Catholic Church  and studied theology at the Vatican for five years. On graduation he was awarded a gold medal for his outstanding academic achievements. In 1882 he was ordained a priest. In his 28^th year he was offered a professorship in philosophy at St. Edmund’s College in England, but he declined as he wanted to return to Cape Town.

In Cape Town he lectured at the teachers’ training institute for Roman Catholic schools. For 20 years he was an external examiner for Literature and Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. In later life this remarkable man was awarded two honorary doctorates by, respectively, the University of Cape Town and the University of South Africa. He was co-founder of the Michaelis Art School at UCT.

The University of the Cape of Good Hope Administration Centre, now the Centre of the Book, a satellite of the SA National Library. Photo: Marthinus van Bart

In 1887 Kolbe wrote the anthem of the University of the Cape of Good Hope, later renamed the University of Cape Town. His cousin dr. J.H. Meiring Beck set it to music.

One of Kolbe’s poems, “Two June Pictures”, dated June 18, 1901, was published in The New Age and included in Songs of the Veld.

The Doornkop Monument of 1898, designed by Anton van Wouw, scultor of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. It was never built, as the Anglo-Boer War broke out in 1899. The Boers lost the war and the British never erected it to commemorate the victory in 1897 of the Boers over the Jameson and Rhodes Raiders.

A Boer farmstead being burnt down by the British military.

“It is not the first time that England has used a lofty moral cry to hide the purposes of a monstrous injustice”, he wrote in the June 1899 edition of The South African Catholic Magazine, IX, no 102. He concluded his editorial, “The Transvaal Crisis”, with: “Mine may be only a voice in the wilderness, but I earnestly protest against this threat of an unrighteous war, and if the war is actually entered upon, I for one have no desire to see the imperial arms successful. I will not wish God-speed to my country in an unjust cause.” (Hale 2003:[9])

Kolbe was initially sharply attacked in the Cape pro-British press, especially in the Eastern Cape newspaper The Cape Mercury. When he persevered in his single-handed campaign, he was forced by the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church to resign. He was immediately replaced by an accommodating editor who delivered pure pro-Empire and anti-Boer propoganda for this journal.

When the editor of the Cape Town pro-Boer newspaper South African News, Albert Cartwright, was imprisoned at the Tokai jail under martial law from April 1901 to the end of March 1902,  Kolbe wrote editorials for the paper from June to October 1901 and gave his renumeration to Cartwright’s family.

Albert Cartwright, editor-in-chief of the South African News. He was jailed for writing about the war crimes of the British military in South Africa.

In March and April 1901 Australian soldiers attacked the newspaper building, destroying the printing equipment and wrecking the offices.

Kolbe, who associated himself with the Cape Liberals before the outbreak of the war, in 1900 participated in protest gatherings across the Cape Colony. In a speech at the National Congress (Volkskongres) of December 6, 1900 at Worcester, he launched an attack on Britain’s war against the Boer republics, the concentration camps and the banishing of Boer prisoners of war to camps abroad. Kolbe pointed out that Britain ignored the national aspirations of the Afrikaners. He also said South Africa must constitutionally develop in such a way that the country is governed by South Africans and not by Britain.

Richard Caton-Woodville, British war artist, made this painting of an actual incident in the Anglo-Boer War. British soldiers burnt down the homestead of a Boer officer and put his daughter and mother in a concentration camp. His wife had died before the war. The horses were put in their stable and the stable put alight, burning the animals to death.

After the war he resumed his work at the The South African Catholic Magazine and dedicated himself to the arts, literature and education. Only during the First World War (1914-1918) and the Rebellion against the South African Party-government of Louis Botha and Jan Smuts (1914), he ventured into the political arena again. In a pamphlet in Afrikaans and English, “The national crisis: an appeal to the Afrikaner nation”, he appealed to the Afrikaners to stand united.

In 1926 the Hertzog-government requested Kolbe to serve on the Flag Committee for the design of a National Flag, which served as the South African flag till 1994.

In Kolbe’s only (identified) poem in Songs of the Veld, “Two June Pictures”, dated June 18, 1901, he contrasts the beauty of spring in England with war-torn South Africa with its burned down houses, the scorched, dry earth, the cold rain and the whimpering of the hungry and diseased children in the heavily guarded concentration camps – innocent blood which rests on the head of a proud England.

The journalist, poet and medical doctor C. Louis Leipoldt hailed Friedrich Carl Kolbe as a national Afrikaner hero of South Africa. He was truly a Soldier of God, going off to war for righteousness and the common good of mankind.

Was it not for the post-war Afrikaners’ Protestant prejudice against Kolbe’s Roman Catholic beliefs, he probably would have been hailed an Afrikaner hero. At Kolbe’s death in 1941 Leipoldt in an orbituary said: “We must hail him as our greatest, culturally most powerful Afrikaner we have brought forth so far. In the cultural field he possesses the same importance as does (pres. Paul) Kruger for our national conciousness.” Leipoldt strongly dissaproved of the “prejudice against one of our own people who became a Roman Catholic.” Especially some Afrikaans (Protestant) clergymen resented Leipoldt’s sentiments.

* Songs of the Veld and Other Poems can be ordered from the publisher, Cederberg Publishers of Cape Town. The website address is: www.cederbergpublishers.co.za.