Religious pluralism ultimately ensured language pluralism. Hand in hand the VOC and the Dutch Reformed Church promoted the Reformed faith and the Dutch language. Only in 1778 did the government allow the Lutherans to worship in public. After the British took over the Cape in 1795 the British government kept the Dutch Reformed Church as an established church, along with the Anglican Church. It paid over to both a large amount in subsidies to defray salaries and part of the expenses for erecting new church buildings, but retained the right to station, transfer and depose ministers.
It also permitted the Malay community the right of public worship. In 1804 the Batavians offered ‘the protection of the law on equal terms’ of religious associations that ‘respected a Supreme Being’. Roman Catholics and Jews now also settled at the Cape.
The spectacular advance of Britain as a world power bred a conviction among itssubjects that their way of doing things was superior. In 1822 the colonial secretary, W.W. Bird, who was married to a Dutch-speaking woman, wrote of the Englishman’s conviction that ‘nothing can be right or proper that is not English, and to which he is unaccustomed’. An English nationalism became the dominant ideology in urban life across much of South Africa, expressed in the English language and reinforced by its symbols of dress, emblems, architecture, food and polite conventions. Robert Ross made the valid point that an English nationalism was the ‘prime nationalism to which both Afrikaner and African nationalism reacted’.
The Dutch-speaking colonists found the idea of English cultural supremacy difficult to refute. By 1806 the colony could boast of no great economic advances or cultural achievements, apart from the Cape Dutch homesteads ( see Architecture of the colony). There were no books, paintings or innovations on which Afrikaners could pride themselves. They were a rural, isolated, relatively backward people, with only a few receiving more than a rudimentary education.
English commentators deplored the social distortions and lack of cultural achievements they found at the Cape. A general theme was that the Dutch East India Company was unfit for governing such a place. It had neglected education, stifled trade and enterprise, supported slavery and its pernicious social influences, failed to check trekboer expansion, and allowed the oppression of the indigenous Khoisan.
After formally acquiring the Cape in 1814, Britain resolved to develop it, extend it and ‘civilise’ it. The first big step was a new language policy. In 1821 Henry Ellis, the deputy colonial secretary, argued that the proclamation of English as the language of government had become essential.
The changes in the judicial system made a serious dent in the self-esteem of the Afrikaner colonists. From 1828 English was formally the only language of the courts; evidence given in Dutch had to be translated. The British jury system was introduced to decide on matters of fact, with proficiency in English the principal criterion for selection. After 1834 jurors who failed the language test could be challenged. For English to become the sole public language, it had to prevail in the schools, and above all the press. It failed. The government established free public schools giving instruction in English in the main towns, but the initial enthusiasm among the colonists dwindled because the syllabus was often irrelevant to people in the veld. Very few learnt English. In 1863 the chief official for education stated that only one-tenth of children in the colony could read English ‘with tolerable accuracy and intelligibly’. In higher education English prevailed. The leadership of the Dutch Reformed Church did not mind that most of the staff of the Athenaeum (later the South African College and yet later the University of Cape Town), which it helped to found in 1829, was English or Scottish, but became upset when the college wanted to offer religious instruction. It feared that students would end up as members of an English church.
Dutch also held its own in the press under British rule. No Dutch newspaper or magazine in the modern sense of the word had appeared during the period of rule by the Dutch East India Company, nor for more than two decades of British rule. In 1824,the same year in which The South African Commercial Advertiser was published for the first time, a Dutch magazine appeared – Het Nederduitsch Zuid-Afrikaansch Tijdschrift (NZAT),edited by Abraham Faure, minister of the Dutch Reformed parish in Cape Town. Faure joined George Greig, John Fairbairn and Thomas Pringle in fighting an effort by the governor, Lord Charles Somerset, to clamp down on a free press.
The Dutch colonists groped for a new definition of themselves as a community. Faure’s NZAT proposed a dual identity. The burghers had to be loyal British subjects, but also identify with their particular history and cultural distinctiveness. In its first editorial, published on 9 April 1830, the first Dutch newspaper, De Zuid-Afrikaan, declared that it ‘wanted to hoist a banner which will serve as a rallying point for all colonists, old and new’. It gave the name ‘Afrikaner’ to these old and new colonists: ‘All who inhabit this land and derive nourishment from its bosom are Africans [sic].’ In the Dutch text the name ‘Afrikaner’ was used.
But the crucial test was the church. Aware of the Dutch Reformed Church’s importance, Lord Charles Somerset, who served as governor between 1814 and 1826, first sought Dutch ministers to fill vacancies in the Dutch church. When that failed, he recruited Scottish ministers, who had to become proficient in Dutch. (By 1834, of the 22 Dutch Reformed ministers, twelve would be Scots.) Somerset began urging the Cape clergy to use English in the church, pointing out that proficiency in English would benefit colonial youth who desired employment in government.
Chief Justice J.A. Truter urged the government to exercise caution. Only when everyone was proficient in English could the step be undertaken ‘without any humiliating feeling’. The Dutch Reformed synod that year refused a request by the Scottish ministers to offer some of their services in English. De Zuid-Afrikaan warned that English church services would have unintended consequences. In 1834 it wrote: ‘Members of the Synod consult ancient history to persuade yourselves that to change the language of your religion you would be taking the first step to betray your belief and religion.’
The battle for a colonial parliament that started in all seriousness in the 1830s once again drew the white colonists nearer to each other. Spokesmen for the two white communities downplayed cultural differences to avoid the impression of any rift between them. In 1837 Brand remarked: ‘England has taken from the old colonists of the Cape everything that was dear to them: their country, their laws, their customs, their slaves, yes, even their mother tongue.’ The Afrikaner colonists had done everything to prove they were British, but ‘their conquerors had continually worked to remind them that they were Hollanders’.
For Brand the goal was the amalgamation of the two white sections. In 1841 he wrote: ‘[We] are two who must become one and by doing so raise the banner of unanimity in public affairs.’ English commentators left little doubt that this ‘unanimity’ would increasingly be expressed in English cultural terms.
