Hermann Giliomee: Historian. Hermann Giliomee

He is a nice boy through and through, with no trace of haughtiness; but lacks all the qualities of someone in his position.

      This assessment was not wide of the mark. Twelve years later, the Prince ascended the throne as Edward VIII. A few months later he abdicated after having committed the cardinal sin of refusing to give up his plan of marrying a divorced woman. Thereafter he took the title of Duke of Windsor. Winston Churchill dismissed him as “a little man, dressed up to the nines”.

      After obtaining a BA degree in 1925, Oom Johann worked in Pietermaritzburg for two years as editor of The Times of Natal. In 1928 he returned to Stellenbosch and completed his legal studies.

      When the university Senate decided to ask a student to address the audience on graduation day, the choice fell on Oom Johann. After speeches by the rector, the vice-chancellor and one or two other office-bearers, it was finally his turn. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “you have listened to words of wisdom. Now you can listen to words of common sense.” He continued:

      I have been at Stellenbosch for ten years now. In the course of these ten years, there have been many changes. New university buildings have been erected … And whether it’s true or not I can’t say, but there are students who claim that during these ten years there have even been changes in some professors’ notes.

      The students cheered him, but the vice-chancellor, Professor Adriaan Moorrees, was not amused.

      “Brilliant writer”

      Markus Viljoen considered Johann Buhr one of the most versatile and talented journalists he had ever encountered. “He was a born humorist who could be funny without even intending it.” Because the editorial team of Die Burger was so small in those early days, Johann had scant opportunity to give his humoristic bent free rein. The paper even offered him the position of sports editor.

      Among his best-known reports was his account of Malcolm Campbell’s attempt to break the world land speed record at Verneukpan in 1929. He also accompanied the first Afrikaans theatre companies on their tours as a reporter, and wrote about pioneering actors such as Paul de Groot and Wena Naudé in his series of articles “Agter die sterre” (Behind the stars). The actor and director André Huguenet described Johann Buhr as a “brainy and brilliant writer” who did much to stimulate the public’s interest in theatre.

      In 1930, at the age of 30, he resigned for health reasons after having contracted turberculosis. In his entire life, he had spent less than six years in a full-time position. He returned to Grasberg, and for some while stayed in a mat hut at a remote cattle post in Bushmanland in the hope that the dry air would cure him of the disease.

      Nevertheless, during the 1930s he still contributed several short stories and articles of exceptional quality to Die Burger and Die Huisgenoot.

      A year or two before his death in 1940 at the age of 40, some of his student friends visited him at his lonely hut at the cattle post to say their goodbyes. ID du Plessis, who would later receive the Hertzog Prize for poetry, delivered this touching tribute:

      Judged by outward appearances, Johann Buhr was unimpressive. But it was only poor health that prevented him from achieving much, both as journalist and as literary writer with a light satirical touch; for behind that exterior lay a remarkable mind: a scintillating intelligence, a fine sense of humour, a quicksilver wit that could have given a new dimension to Afrikaans journalism.

      If he could have devoted his talents to column writing from the outset, no doubt we would have been enriched today by a contribution of lasting value in his particular field.

      In the last years of his illness he had to spend the winter months at an isolated cattle post. Through the agency of his friend Recht Malan, he received reading matter from Cape Town: a gesture for which he was poignantly grateful; because for this endearing person it always came as a surprise that others could be so good to him.

      My last impression of him was at Nieuwoudtville, when a few of us visited him in the final year of the eclipse. That day he told me: “What a wonderful privilege it must be to be able to fulfil oneself in poems.”

      What would have passed through his mind as he stood watching us drive off: we who were headed for a life filled with all the possibilities that he, with his shining talent, was not destined to enjoy?

      On his death in 1940, Die Burger wrote: “As sincere and faithful as he always was towards friends, so he was towards the Afrikaner cause, which he promoted to the best of his ability.” The Cape Times commented that his friends had expected him to make a contribution to “the virile Afrikaans literature”, but, sadly, a very good brain had been housed in a weak body. In his memoirs Spykers met koppe (1946), Johannes Steinmeyer referred to Johann Buhr as one of his colleagues in journalism who were regarded as “men of great repute”.

      The tragedy of her brother’s early death left a deep impression on my mother. There must have been a strong bond between them, as he had nominated her as executrix of his estate. Whenever I underachieved, I felt that my mother was especially upset because she thought I was squandering my opportunities.

      In 1980, forty years after Oom Johann’s death, Anthony Heard, editor of the Cape Times, and Gerald Shaw, the deputy editor, invited me to write a column for the paper on the recommendation of the well-known journalist Anthony Delius, whose acquaintance I had made during the 1977-78 academic year at Yale University. I wondered what Oom Johann would have made of the opportunity to write his own column – a role for which he had been eminently equipped.

      Chapter 2

      “The song of a nation’s awakening”

      My parents were Gerhardus Adriaan Giliomee (1905–1986), born in Villiers in the Free State, and Catharina Gesa Giliomee (1903-2001), whose birthplace was the farm Grasberg, near Nieuwoudtville on the Bokveld Plateau. My paternal grandfather’s participation in both the Anglo-Boer War and the Rebellion of 1914-15 had shaped my father politically. Notable political influences in my mother’s case included her German father, Hermann Buhr, and the colonial patriotism that had developed among Cape Afrikaners in the nineteenth century.

      At the time of my parents’ birth in the early twentieth century, Afrikaners lagged far behind the English-speaking community. At the root of this disparity were the poor educational and cultural foundations that the Dutch East India Company had laid down in the first 150 years of the settlement. When the British first occupied the Cape in 1795, there were no locally produced newspapers, magazines or books. The Dutch-speaking burgher community was isolated, poorly educated, and far behind developments in Europe.

      The British rulers decided to make English the only official language and the language of instruction in schools. The isolated life on farms and a huge shortage of schools in the country districts made it difficult for Afrikaners to establish a culturally conscious middle class.

      By 1930, when my parents left university, a commission found that a quarter of the Afrikaners could be classified as poor whites – so impoverished that they lived far below the level that was considered then appropriate for white people. In the bigger towns and the cities, many lived in wretched conditions. Here, English was the dominant language. The English-speaking community set the tone in the spheres of fashion, architecture, language, good manners and polite conversation.9

      My parents studied at the University of Stellenbosch, where both of them trained for the teaching profession with the aim of devoting their lives to the building of the Afrikaner community. They married in 1933. In 1935 my father obtained his first permanent appointment, at a high school in the village of Ugie in Griqualand East.

      Destitution was rife in Ugie. Those were the years of the Depression and prolonged drought. Many farmers had thrown in the towel and moved to town. In addition to all the poor farm children, the town had a large orphanage that could accommodate 400 youngsters. It had been established by the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape Province in the wake of the flu epidemic of 1918, which left many orphans. Over the next forty years, the institution would send more than 4 000 children into the world equipped with a good school education.