Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

      Oor die veld kom dit wyd gesweef

      Die lied van ’n volk se ontwaking

      Wat harte laat sidder en beef…

      With its stirring description of the “mighty roar” of “the song of a nation’s awakening”, the verse still says something to me about the optimism with which the Afrikaners of my generation faced the future. A “nation’s awakening” had little or nothing to do with apartheid. As children, we felt we were part of a movement that would place us on an equal footing with the English community, that would proclaim a republic, that would expand Afrikaans, and that would conquer economic and cultural worlds. Viewing the volksbeweging and apartheid as one and the same is simply false.

      After the NP’s election victory in 1948, Afrikaans was for the first time treated on an equal basis with English in practice as an official language. Over the next forty years Afrikaans grew rapidly as a public language, especially because it was so firmly embedded in schools and universities. Afrikaans enabled me to master universal knowledge in my mother tongue and made it possible for me to express myself optimally. It has become an inextricable part of my social identity. After the appearance of my book The Afrikaners: Biography of a People in 2003, I was often asked what had been decisive factors in the Afrikaners’ rise in the twentieth century. My reply was always: mother-tongue education and committed teachers.

      Jean Laponce, a French-Canadian expert on the survival of smaller languages, later informed me that Afrikaans is one of only four languages in the world – the others are Hebrew, Hindi and Indonesian-Malay – that in the course of the twentieth century were standardised and developed from a low-status, informal language to one used in all branches of life and learning, including postgraduate teaching, science and technology. Hebrew and Afrikaans were the only two languages spoken by a very small speech community that had achieved this feat.

      How did Afrikaans manage to achieve the near unthinkable? An e-mail message I received after the appearance of The Afrikaners demonstrated the misconceptions about this issue that exist in some quarters. My correspondent posed the question: “How did Afrikaans reach such a level?” He provided his own reply: “It was forced on schools’ curricula and imposed on the civil service as a so-called official language.”

      The facts, however, are quite different. The Constitution of the Union of South Africa (the South Africa Act), passed in 1909, established Dutch and English as the official languages of South Africa, with equal status under the law. Neither language was “imposed” or “privileged”; the bilingual character of the state was the primary symbol of reconciliation between the country’s two white groups.

      In a contemporaneous article in The State, the writer and historian Gustav Preller described the Union’s promise to place the two official languages on a footing of “most perfect equality” as essential to Afrikaner support for the Union.17 Without recognition of the equal status of English and Dutch (which would be replaced by Afrikaans in 1925), it is most likely that a debilitating conflict would have developed between the two white communities, with grave consequences for the economy.

      But misunderstandings about what had been decided at the National Convention, the body that drafted the Constitution of the Union, would bedevil relations between the two white communities for a long time. FV Engelenburg, Louis Botha’s biographer and a staunch supporter of the South African Party’s ideal of English-Afrikaner cooperation, later wrote that whereas the fathers of the Constitution had accepted the absolute equality of both languages in good faith, English-speaking South Africans never took the matter seriously. Bilingualism was regarded as nothing more than a polite gesture towards the other section. According to Engelenburg, the average English-speaking South African was inclined to regard every form of political recognition of the Dutch language as a threat to the interests of “his own race”.

      From 1910 to 1948 the government of the day postponed consistent enforcement of Section 137 of the Union Constitution several times. The lack of suitable candidates in the civil service who were proficient in both languages was one of the reasons that were advanced for the lack of progress. By 1948, however, this was no longer a valid excuse. After its election victory in that year, the NP decided to systematically enforce the use of both Afrikaans and English as official languages in the civil service.

      Economic mobilisation and the development of Afrikaans as a public language went hand in hand with acknowledgement of the Afrikaners’ history and their contribution to the establishment of the South African state. In 1952 I attended the Van Riebeeck Festival in Cape Town, which celebrated three centuries of white settlement, as an adolescent member of the Voortrekker youth movement. There was one memory that lingered in my mind. As part of a torchlight procession of thousands of Voortrekkers who marched from Signal Hill to the stadium in the Foreshore area, I met with disaster. My torch died while we were still on the mountain, and I was mortified at having to complete the march with an unlit torch. In subsequent years, I would often wonder whether my extinguished torch had any symbolic meaning.

      It would be wrong to equate the volksbeweging with the National Party, or to regard the NP as an institution that dictated to the volksbeweging. In the first decade of NP rule there were still between 10% to 20% of Afrikaners who supported the United Party (UP), which had been formed out of a merger between General JBM Hertzog’s then National Party and General JC Smuts’s South African Party (SAP) in 1934. UP supporters were still commonly known as “Sappe” because of the link with the erstwhile SAP. Many Afrikaner “Sappe” felt equally strongly about the Afrikaans language and the upliftment of the white poor. The big difference between them and fellow Afrikaners who were NP supporters (“Natte”) lay in their support for South Africa’s participation in the Second World War and their veneration for the towering figure of Jan Smuts. I once asked Christo Wiese, who grew up in a “Sap” family in Upington and later became an outstanding entrepreneur, what had been the distinguishing factor between the “Natte” and the “Sappe” in our youth. His answer was simple but spot-on: Jan Smuts.

      Coloured Portervillers

      Porterville’s coloured residents spoke Afrikaans, but they were not regarded as part of the volksbeweging. The law determined the fate of white and coloured from the cradle to the grave. Everyone adhered to the same faith, but white and coloured worshipped separately; everyone spoke the same language, but white and coloured did not attend school, church or concerts together. Everyone played the same sports, but white and coloured never participated together in organised sports. There were undoubtedly secret relationships across the colour line. The many light-skinned children with reddish hair in the coloured neighbourhoods of Pella Park and Monte Bertha attested to that.

      The coloured community of Porterville consisted of people who were no longer able to live on the farms, or had chosen to leave of their own accord. While a few managed to make a living as artisans such as builders or carpenters, the majority worked as “servants” or gardeners for white people. In my childhood days, every white home seemed to have its servant.

      For a while our household also employed Japie, a coloured boy of my own age, who did odd jobs in the garden. He was exceptionally well built and self-­confident. Japie used to play cricket and rugby with me and my white friends in the backyard or in the street in front of the house. We were unable to get the better of him either physically or figuratively, which boosted his confidence even more.

      One day there was a confrontation between the two of us, and I spat in his face. As the enraged Japie made a rush for me, I fled into the house. It was only indoctrination that prevented him from pursuing me into the house and getting even. I was bitterly ashamed of the incident, and spoke to no one about it until Athol Fugard told me years later that he had been involved in a similar incident in his youth. It provided the inspiration for his play Master Harold and the Boys (1982).

      Farmworkers were worse off than most of the coloured people in town. In my schooldays, I sometimes stayed over with friends who lived on farms. The tot system of providing workers with wine throughout the working day was still in common use, and there was no pressure on farmers to abandon the practice. Still, there were also farmers who realised that it was wrong and who promoted abstinence from alcohol. They were also very critical