Revived Ethnic Mobilization After 1910

But Botha and Smuts as leaders of the Het Volk failed, in the end, to harness the support of this separatist political ethnic consciousness. Once in power, these leaders increasingly were drawn into the developing state-capital symbiosis. This symbiosis depended on industry providing an environment which ensured profits and attracted an expanding supply of finance capital from abroad. Locked into the international capitalist system, Botha and Smuts embarked on policies of reconciliation calculated to attract investors and political support from beyond their ethnic base. This meant dropping the popular anti-(British) capitalism plank of Het Volk and shelving the idea that the mines should solve the acute white unemployment problem by using unskilled whites in the place of blacks. It also entailed giving only lukewarm support to Dutch-Afrikaner cultural aspirations about which neither Botha nor Smuts cared very much.^[102]

The period between 1905 and 1915 witnessed the emergence of the constituent parts of the subsequent nationalist alliance in the Transvaal. In the vanguard was the Afrikaner educated stratum, particularly ministers of religion, teachers and journalists. This stratum saw the danger of one large section of the volk lapsing into what Gustav Preller, one of their spokesmen, called 'an ignorant, uncaring proletariat while another part was leaning to English'.^[103] Like their counterparts in the Western Cape, Preller and other intellectuals in the North believed English could be countered only by Afrikaans. But Afrikaans should be promoted as a professional, 'civilized', white man's language, with a proper body of literature. Occupationally these men were often insecure. As teachers, they faced a distinct trend towards anglicization in the schools; as clergy they were painfully aware of the loss of members of their congregations as a result of poverty and proletarianization; and as writers they saw the market being flooded by English newspapers and cheap English novels. This educated stratum had an overriding interest in creating Afrikaners who would refill Afrikaner churches, attend Afrikaner schools and buy Afrikaans books.^[104]

This was a massive task. A prominent part was played by the Doppers of Potchefstroom. Deriving their theories from the Dutch neo-Calvinists, they built 'Christian National' schools and disseminated the message that the Afrikaners were a unique people whose strength lay in isolation with freedom to practise apartheid with respect to both the English and the Africans.^[105] The Doppers, however, represented only one strand. The principal cultural entrepreneurs were the journalists and writers who, in newspapers and journals such as Die Brandwag and Die Huisgenoot, presented Afrikaner history as a heroic epic and tried to redefine almost every aspect of everyday life in Afrikaner terms. This message found a particular resonance among women and in the family context.^[106]

When the National Party was founded in 1913, the educated stratum was the first of the disaffected groups that flocked to the banner of Hertzog. The intellectuals sought allies amongst the Dutch-Afrikaner workers but found that they were a difficult class to mobilize by ethnic appeals, which failed to meet their material demands for employment and relief. A recent study concludes that the workers were unwilling to try on 'the yoke of a nationalist dominated labour movement'.^[107] The Dutch-Afrikaner workers only turned away from the English-dominated Labour Party after they had been shunned persistently by the formal trade union movement.

The poor farmers were another group that proved hard to mobilize. Botha and Smuts represented the gentry classes of farmers who just before and just after the war bought out large numbers of the poorer farmers and pushed many bywoners

off the land. Many small farmers became alienated from the rich landholders. One spoke in 1905 of 'these selfish, self-righteous blood-suckers. . . . Even our great generals who make such grand speeches, oppress the poor in private and enrich themselves from the impoverished'.^[108] After the National Party was formed the rural poor gradually rallied behind its banner, particularly after the Rebellion of 1914–1915. The National Party's open identification with the rebels persuaded the poor that the party might challenge not only imperialism but also the entire capitalist order. The rural poor were equally attracted to the explicit racism of the National Party, believing that only a tough policy towards blacks would solve their acute labour problems. After a tour of the Transvaal rural districts in 1921, Smuts noted that 'the landless "by-woner " is very definitely attaching himself to the Nationalist cause'.^[109] Accused by the exclusive nationalists of being traitors because of their pro-British stance during World War I, Botha and Smuts bitterly responded that those who accused them were 'hendsoppers' and 'joiners' in the Anglo-Boer War.

Building an Afrikaner ethnic consciousness that could assert itself as a decisive political force remained a long-term project requiring hard ideological work by politicians and cultural entrepreneurs. Before the day was won, class interests had to be redefined as ethnic interests and the invention and popularization of an Afrikaner national culture had to proceed much further. It is clear, however, that the Rebellion of 1914–15 was a crucial event which allowed the National Party to unite the anti-imperialist and anti-(British) capitalist strands in Dutch-Afrikaner history and present them as the main thrust of the new ethnic ideology.

It was also in the aftermath of the Rebellion that the most powerful of the churches, the DRC, really began to rally behind the ethnic movement and ideology. At a special conference of DRC clergy in 1915 the church did not censure the rebels (as the government would have wanted). Instead it accepted Malan's view that the church had a distinct calling with respect to the 'Dutch-speaking' population group and consequently had the duty to be 'national' and maintain 'national interests'. 1^[110] Andrew Murray, champion of the once-dominant church tradition of Evangelism with its universalistic message, was deeply troubled, but he sensed that it was impossible to stem the nationalist tide.^[111] In the general election held at the end of 1915 Hertzog's National Party made a net gain of 15 seats country-wide. The astute politician John X. Merriman noted gloomily that only the richer and older Afrikaners still supported Botha and Smuts.^[112] An exclusively defined ethnic consciousness was passing them by as a political force.