Ethnos Theory, Volkekunde, and Bantu Administration

John Sharp has described the racial ideology that rapidly suffused the state during and after the 1950s as an anthropological variant of “ethnos theory.” ^[2] Although it served as a binding ideological glue that informed “Bantu administration” generally, ethnos theory was not crucial to urban administration. It was limited to a number of specific innovations, such as the ethnic zoning of locations, the supersession of advisory boards by ethnically based Urban Bantu Councils, and the introduction of “mother-tongue” instruction into “Bantu” schools. In the reserves, however, ethnos theory was the very stuff of Bantu administration, and Volkekunde (anthropology) its academic champion.

Ethnos theory grew out of the impact of two intellectual sources on a handful of young Afrikaner students in Europe in the first of half of the twentieth century. From Abraham Kuyper, a professor of theology at the Free University of Amsterdam, these students extracted (and significantly distorted) his argument concerning “sovereignty in one’s own sphere.” ^[3] In his own writings, Kuyper’s conception of “sovereignty in one’s own sphere” broadly resembles the institutions that comprise civil society. Describing these institutions variously as “natural,” “original,” and “organic” spheres, Kuyper invests them with a high degree of autonomy from the state: “the State may never become an octopus, which stifles the whole of life…and thus it has to honor and maintain every form of life which grows independently in its own sacred autonomy.” ^[4] Thus, he argued:

In many different directions we see therefore that sovereignty in one’s own sphere asserts itself—:

1. In the social sphere, by personal superiority.
2. In the corporative sphere of universities, guilds, associations, etc.
3. In the domestic sphere of the family and of married life, and
4. In communal autonomy.

In all these four spheres the State-government cannot impose its laws, but must reverence the innate law of life. God rules in these spheres, just as supremely and sovereignly through his chosen virtuosi, as He exercises dominion in the spheres of the State itself, through his chosen magistrates.^[5]

No doubt intriguing to Kuyper’s Afrikaner neophytes in the 1920s and 1930s were his meditations on the “problem of differentiation amongst the species.” In a lecture that directly confronted Darwin’s theory of the relationship between natural selection and ecological diversity, Kuyper rejected the “survival of the fittest” theory in favor of Calvin’s theory of “predestination.” Whereas Darwin ascribed the abundance of species and the hierarchical arrangement among different life forms to “a blind selection stirring in unconscious cells,” Calvin attributed these to the master plan preordained by God. Species did not “select” their positions in the natural hierarchy through competitive struggles; they were “elected” to their stations by a divine Will. Justifying the providential hierarchy that placed some species above others, Kuyper wrote, “To put it concretely, if you were a plant, you would rather be rose than mushroom; if insect, butterfly rather than spider;…and, again, being man,…of the Aryan race rather than Hottentot or Kaffir.” ^[6] Nevertheless, all nations possessed an intrinsic integrity: “For God created the nations. They exist for Him. They are His own. And therefore all these nations, and in them all humanity must exist for His glory and consequently after His ordinances.” ^[7]

Kuyper’s arguments were modified by ethnos theorists such as Eiselen and Nico Diederichs in two crucial ways. First, Kuyper’s four “sovereign spheres” were reduced to a single historical imperative, die volke. In a world populated by numerous volke, each volk possessed a categorical right to autonomy.^[8] Because each volk was a “natural sphere” created by God, a divine mandate obliged the state to preserve the diversity and integrity of all volke in South Africa. Second, these “sovereign spheres,” already collapsed into the notion of die volk, were subordinated to the state. Writing in 1936, Nico Diederichs deduced, “Only in the nation as the most total, most inclusive human community can man realize himself fully. The nation is the fulfillment of the individual life.…To work for the realization of the national calling is to work for the realization of God’s plan. Service to the nation is therefore part of my service to God.” ^[9] Such a view owed more to Nazi Germany than it did to Kuyper’s framework. Indeed, in his foreword to Diederichs’ book, Piet Meyer acknowledged the primacy of Nazi influences when he converted the phrase “sovereignty in each sphere” into “totalitarianism in each sphere.” ^[10]

Onto this seminal framework was grafted a Fichtean structure that Afrikaner students picked up, and again distorted, at universities in Germany. The kernel of the lesson they learned from the theories of such ardent German nationalists as Johann Herder, Friederich Schleiermacher, and most importantly Johann Fichte was the contention that the destiny of every people was bound by nation, volk, and language, and that the life of the individual was wholly subordinate to that of the nation.^[11] Fichte’s language proved to be a fountainhead for apartheid ideology. Fichte wrote, for example, that “Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that quality—then, and only then, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be.…” ^[12] These were the basic lessons that Afrikaners such as Geoff Cronjé, Verwoerd, Piet Meyer, and Nico Diederichs brought home and reworked into the first comprehensive statement of apartheid’s political philosophy.^[13]

Between 1935 and 1944, Broederbonders such as Piet Meyer, Verwoerd, Geoff Cronjé, Henning Klopper, and other dominant members of the Dutch Reformed Church met almost nightly, fashioning a policy that synthesized Fichtean-Kuyperian philosophy with the historical circumstances in which the Afrikaner volk continued to struggle toward its destiny. The first results were captured in ’n Tuiste vir die Nageslag (A Home for Posterity, 1945), which Geoff Cronjé published in 1945. As a doctoral student in Germany in the 1930s, Cronjé had absorbed the virulent creed of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) championed by the Nazi state. These sentiments—particularly the belief that whites were both culturally and biologically superior to blacks—saturated his book and underscored the Fichtean rationales he advanced for demanding a “national home” for Afrikaners. Cronjé argued that the leaky customary and legal pattern of segregation developed over almost three centuries in South Africa was incapable of fulfilling the divine task of preserving the purity of different races, and of Afrikaners in particular. Nothing short of complete racial separation in all walks of life, he argued, could spare the various cultural groups from “miscegenation and racial conflict,” the “core of South Africa’s racial problems.” ^[14] Having themselves done battle with the “unscrupulous imperialist-capitalist system,” Afrikaners were particularly well qualified to “show the way in which the native must be led in his own interests and with a view to his own development.” ^[15] Suddenly, a halo was hung above the head of even the most minor official in “Bantu administration.” Transforming the business of oppression into God’s pastoral work, ethnos theory remade the image of the lowly Native Commissioner, elevating him into a selfless foot soldier in the crusade to “develop progressive Bantu communities.”

It has frequently been observed that these ideas were developed in response to the broad-based nationalism championed by the ANC as it sloughed off the old regimen of polite pleas and cooperation with liberal white bodies.^[16] Yet, well before Cronjé’s book consolidated the essentials of apartheid ideology, a slightly different strain, that took the Afrikaner’s civilizing mission somewhat less cynically, can be traced in the writing of W. W. M. Eiselen. Like many of his colleagues in the Broederbond, Eiselen had also studied in Germany, but perhaps because he had done so in the 1920s, before Nazism’s noxious creeds had congealed in the German academic establishment, the virulent racism that saturates the work of men such as Piet Meyer and Nico Diederichs is not evident in his own work. From the outset, Eiselen’s principal concern was to identify and preserve the cultural patrimony of African ethnic groups. From the 1920s until he retired from Bantu affairs in 1959, Eiselen held that the mission to distinguish and protect the “soul” of the Afrikaner volk could be morally justified only if Africans were accorded the same opportunity as whites.

Sharp suggests that it is more than likely that Eiselen was influenced by the German anthropologist W. E. Mühlmann, whose own views on ethnos theory had been influenced by the Russian anthropologist S. M. Shirokogoroff.^[17] According to Shirokogoroff, the term “ethnos” described the process that “ethnical units” experienced in the course of their history. The process could have many possible outcomes, and Shirokogoroff argued that one possibility was that ethnical units might stabilize and develop a strong group consciousness. According to Shirokogoroff, “…such a crystallization may occur in groups.…Yet such a crystallized state is not always observed and in some groups it rarely occurs, as for instance, in groups based upon religious or economic differentiation. This is a process which only may result in the formation of ethnical units, and the process I have called ethnos.” ^[18] Shirokogoroff’s own formulation thus permitted historical variation in the process of ethnos formation, but was undermined by the sharp juxtaposition of “ethnic” to “religious” and “economic” groups. Eiselen adapted Shirokogoroff’s theory in two critical ways. First, he posited language-based groups as the principal actors in history, subordinating all other qualities to ethnicity. Second, he did not interpret “ethnos” to be an historical process, as Shirokogoroff did, but ascribed it to the group itself, an entity whose essential characteristics were fixed in time and space and could therefore be taken for granted.^[19] This modification significantly narrowed the intellectual distance that separated Eiselen from the group of Afrikaners consciously crafting an ideology that would give Afrikaners control over the state. Still, Eiselen’s anthropological interest in preserving African cultures distinguishes him somewhat from this group, for whom apartheid was preeminently a divide-and-rule strategy. Indeed, Eiselen was perhaps the most liberal NP ideologue within the apartheid state in the 1950s.

Before his appointment as SNA, Eiselen had been a lecturer in Bantu languages at Stellenbosch University, Chief Inspector of Native Education in the Transvaal, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pretoria. His association with E. G. Jansen was not a dynamic one. Jansen and Eiselen were not aggressive men,^[20] and it was only after Broederbonders in the Naturellesakegroep succeeded in getting Jansen kicked upstairs and replaced by Verwoerd that Eiselen’s contribution to policy would become clear. If it fell to Verwoerd to render African policy feasible in practice, it was almost certainly Eiselen who formulated the moral rationale that guided the project in its early years. His track record in this area was established and well known. For years, Eiselen had been insisting that segregation was morally suspect. As early as 1929, for example, he had argued that Hertzog’s solution lacked anything “positive” for the various ethnic groups that comprised the African population because it concentrated simply on drawing a racial line between white and black. Hertzog’s “Native policy” had therefore encouraged an oppositional black nationalism that would ultimately overwhelm whites. In contrast, Eiselen proposed that African “cultures” deserved to be treated with the respect that any ethnic group anywhere in the world deserved. The common denominator in this panhistorical view of ethnicity was what he called “the will of the people.” This will was congealed in language:

…there is one factor, and that the most important factor, which I have not yet mentioned. That is the will of a people to stand on guard [handhaaf], to remain immortal as a people. If such a will exists, then it can only operate through the medium of a unique ethnic language. From the history of the Boer people we learn how a people can retain its identity despite insuperable difficulties and economic disadvantages.…Because we refuse as government and People to recognize Bantu culture, because we measure the native with the measure of European culture and on that basis classify them as raw or civilized…[segregationist policies] were, albeit unconsciously, apostles of assimilation.^[21]

In contrast, Eiselen advocated a “positive” approach to the question of ethnic relations. He played a leading role in popularizing the use of the more anthropologically acceptable term “Bantu” in place of “Native” within the discourse of state officials.

Eiselen had sought to influence the Union’s African educational policy well before he was appointed to the civil service in the apartheid era. In 1942, for example, he sat on the Committee on Bantu Languages in his capacity as Inspector of Native Education and because of his “specialised knowledge of the Bantu languages and of the educational requirements of the Bantu.” ^[22] The committee had been assembled to explore the possibility of making African languages available to African students at a higher grade. Eiselen’s expert knowledge of African languages is readily apparent throughout the committee’s report. The committee resoundingly rejected the argument “prevalent in certain quarters” that several African languages were so similar that the added expense of devising different syllabi could not be justified. The report tartly observed that if it was systematically observed, this argument would preclude “examinations given in Portuguese or Hebrew…and other languages foreign to the country.” Exclusion of indigenous languages was “not merely a deplorable illogicality, but a hardship so grievous as to amount to a positive injustice.” In a section redolent with Eiselen’s specialist training, the report contended that “The differences between the four South African Bantu language groups are profound—comparable at least to those pertaining to the Anglic, the Low German, the High German and the Scandinavian branches of the Gothonic group, and possible even to those between the Gothonic, the Romance, the Keltic and the Slavic groups in the Indo-European family.” ^[23] Later, Eiselen himself championed the idea, raised in the committee’s report in 1942, that all South Africans should be required to study an African language as a third official language to “improve race relations.” The major reason, however, for compelling Africans in particular to learn their own “mother tongue” was rooted in ethnos theory. The Committee on Bantu Languages had encountered opposition among whites to the idea of introducing African languages into academic curricula on two standard grounds: fears about “the multiplicity of Bantu languages” and “white opposition to a third official language.” Eiselen’s paternalist response to these objections was shaped by his sincere anthropological faith in cultural relativism and his belief that showing genuine respect for African languages also had implications for the humanity of the herrenvolk: “From our side, we can do much to encourage these Peoples in their struggle for cultural existence if we try to understand and respect their language and culture.” ^[24]

For Eiselen, the virtues of racial domination were of secondary importance to the Afrikaner’s more noble mission of preserving ethnic diversity among Africans. At the very end of his career in the public service in 1964, he was still arguing that the Afrikaner’s “task in South Africa is not the solution of a race problem but the creation of different ethnic groups [Volksgroepe]. ” ^[25] It was Eiselen, too, who sensitized state planners to the possibility that development plans in the reserves could be significantly accelerated, enabling the reserves to retain Africans and to absorb those whom influx controls would eject from the urban areas. This he did with a backhanded compliment that scotched “the commonplace assumption [among liberal segregationists] that Natives will require centuries of contact with western civilisation before attaining intellectual parity with Europeans.…” ^[26] The point, as Ashforth observes, was not that individual Africans were incapable of readily “progressing” along Western lines, but that the progress of individuals should not occur at the expense of “tribal cohesion.” ^[27]

The close cooperation between Verwoerd and Eiselen in the 1950s concealed this important ideological difference between them: for Verwoerd, the racial question was unquestionably supreme, and racial domination the prime object of state policy. The racial view that would soon become apartheid orthodoxy was widespread in European thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and not much weight was attached to the importance of tribal variation. As John Sharp observes, “…although it was recognised that Africans in South Africa belonged to several different ‘tribes,’ it was often argued that these were (relatively recent) offshoots from a single group with uniform racial and cultural characteristics,” so that “a great deal of scholarly effort…went into the speculative reconstruction of the common origins of the African population.” ^[28] Under Eiselen and Verwoerd, attention shifted decisively to the distinctions between ethnic groups, although for somewhat different reasons.

Although they differed significantly from segregation ideology, apartheid strategies for redesigning the reserves also elaborated on themes that had been basic to the paternalist model. Like the conservative ideology out of which benevolent paternalism was fashioned, apartheid philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s was resolutely opposed to the conception that society was composed of a collection of free-floating individuals. In keeping with conservative philosophy, apartheid ideology conceived of the individuals as members of groups intermediate between the individual and the state. Described, for example by Edmund Burke and other English conservatives, as “estates,” “interests,” and “classes,” these mediating communities were projected as bulwarks against the anarchy that rampant individualism, unhinged from its communal moorings by laissez-faire capitalism, threatened to unleash on society. For, “above all, conservatives feared rootlessness, the destruction of the restraining tradition, weakening of intermediate groups, the release of social control: they feared the mob.” ^[29]

Apartheid ideologues, apprehensive of individualism to a much greater degree than were their liberal predecessors in the state, consigned all individuals to the intimate, moderating influence of smaller ethnic groups. Whereas liberals embraced individualism among whites while expressing strong reservations about its influence among Africans, Afrikaner intellectuals displayed a general suspicion about individualism—certainly among Africans, but also as a matter of philosophical principle. The Fundamental Principles of Calvinist Political Science, issued by the Council of the Nederduits Gerformeerde Kerk in 1951, for example, expressly rejected the liberal claim that “the sovereign individual with its own interests is the highest good.” Thus, in the view of the council, the aggregate sentiment of individuals could not determine the policies of the state, described in its Fundamental Principles as “God’s authority-structure” on earth: in the liberal state, “franchise is pure vanity of sovereignty, rebellion against God.” ^[30]

At the same time, apartheid ideology placed a premium on humanitarian concern for those considered less fortunate. For Eiselen, at least, genuine respect and goodwill toward African tribes were essential components of the Afrikaner hegemony to which he and his colleagues in SABRA were committed. In an oblique criticism of Verwoerd’s response to the Tomlinson Commission’s ambitious development plan for the reserves, SABRA member Dr. C. H. Badenhorst exhorted the three Afrikaner churches to support the “maximum development” of both the political and “spiritual” missions of apartheid: “one does not ask: ‘How much will it cost?’” ^[31] Verwoerd’s conviction in this principle was undoubtedly of a lower caliber than Eiselen’s. From the outset of their collaboration in Native affairs in 1950s, Verwoerd’s steely approach to practical administration overshadowed Eiselen’s idealism. Eiselen appears to have grown jaded as the Bantu Authorities system became identified with violence and coercion—a consequence, he suggested in 1972, of the state’s decision to place autonomy for the reserves ahead of their economic development.^[32] The minister, however, remained unswervingly convinced that such events were little more than teething troubles or the handiwork of malevolent “agitators,” unwittingly aided and abetted by Afrikaner dissidents in SABRA—that is, that they did not detract from the essential correctness of the apartheid project itself. In Verwoerd’s hands, ethnos theory quickly drifted far from the moral moorings to which Eiselen hoped to anchor it. By the mid-1950s, it had become little more than an artifice to fracture black nationalism.