Towards a Unified Afrikaner Community

The election in 1948 of an exclusively Afrikaner government dedicated to advancing the interests of Afrikaners and to preserving 'white civilization' came about as a result of the changed loyalties of the Afrikaner dominated countryside. The senior members of the Afrikaner political class which has ruled South Africa since 1948 were raised in a rural, small-town world. This development of a racial and an ethnic political movement outside the major cities was shaped by two major forces, viz., a rural economic and social crisis which particularly affected Afrikaners, the whole complex phenomenon we include in the notion of 'poor whiteism'; and the response of Afrikaners to the conquest of their republics by Great Britain at the turn of the century. Poor whiteism was already well developed long before the outbreak of war in 1899, as the result of the increasing commercialization of agriculture and the incapacity of the South African countryside to support all who wished to farm on it with the wasteful methods of old.^[9] The war, with its devastation of the countryside in the Orange Free State (OFS) and the Transvaal, and the impounding of horses in Cape Colony, exacerbated the impoverishment of many and gave thousands of poor Afrikaners additional reasons to resent a condition that they would have resented anyway. Many went to the nearest small town, but the capacity of those towns to absorb additional population was limited by the lack of industrialization, and so a major drift to the large towns accelerated from the turn of the century on.^[10]

The war was not a process but a cataclysmic event, one of those phenomena which, in their impact, cut across divisions of class, region and sex, much like defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine left lasting bitterness at all levels of French society, something no politician could ignore.^[11] In South Africa the war was even more significant because it united Afrikaners in the colonies—the Cape and Natal—with their brethren in the republics in a way that they had not been before 1899. In particular, one of the war's spectacular impacts was on the women of the republics, and the death of 26,000 women and children in concentration camps came to be seen by many Afrikaners as a literal Murder of the Innocents.^[12]

The story of how Afrikaner leaders and followers, rich and poor, urban and rural, throughout South Africa reacted to the situation they found themselves in after 1902, to the fact of conquest, has not yet been told. The conquest of the republics affected all Afrikaners, including those in the Cape, and all were affected by the British attempt to follow the military victory by a cultural one, an attempt at cultural genocide. Lord Milner's attempt at wholesale anglicization was directed at Afrikaners in the OFS and Transvaal, but it affected Afrikaners throughout South Africa. The years 1902 to 1910 were crucial ones in which Afrikaner resentments began to be articulated, mitigating but not abolishing social divisions and leading, as we shall see, to the development of new institutions, new leaders, and an expanded role for women. Some of the developments in this period have recently been described in the context of the industrial Witwatersrand.^[13] But for Afrikaners the important changes took place in small communities: the urbanization of Afrikaners in the large cities was only beginning in 1902.^[14]

The South African War provoked a debate among Afrikaners as to how they should manage their relations with the other groups in South Africa. In particular, how was the recent past of only a section of the volk to be made that of the whole and to be used politically? Soon after the Union of the four colonies in 1910, there was a major political split and an organized Afrikaner ethnic movement was born, based on historic anti-British resentment, recently inflamed; a desire for the protection of language and church; the destruction of an English cultural ascendancy in South Africa; and an end to the patronage abroad of the imperial conqueror—a genuine Sinn Fein, 'our own', movement. In parliament the struggle was conducted in terms of language, symbolic constitutional issues such as the flag, anthem, and the British Commonwealth, and of more concrete issues like the handling of the problem of poor whiteism, the latter raising the possibility of articulated class division among Afrikaners. Locally, the raising of ethnic awareness was frequently indirect in such institutions as the church and local government, in both of which national political alignments were muted, and indeed explicitly abjured. But the muting of politics did not mean that the activity had no political effects. An important part of the political history of Afrikaners will be found in ethnic bodies such as the church, in which issues relating to cultural survival, welfare, and segregation—all sensitive politically—were constantly addressed.

The place of ethnic institutions in political history raises an important methodological issue. Some neo-Marxist scholars have recently studied Afrikanerdom in terms of its capital and class structure rather than the categories which Afrikaners themselves employed—language, church and party: to define Afrikanerdom in such terms, writes Dan O'Meara, is to perpetuate 'mythology'.^[15] So he explains the desertion of the pro-British United Party between 1938 and 1948 by the farmers of the Transvaal—the crucial shift in 1948—in terms of the economic interests of the farmers in relation to labour and to markets.^[16] But there are at least two types of historical writing involved here which are not mutually exclusive and may be reinforcing. An analysis of the capital structure of Transvaal agriculture may explain a great deal, but we require also analyses which will explain why it was the Afrikaner farmers, not all farmers, who deserted the United Party in 1948.^[17] We need, therefore, histories which delineate behaviour in ethnic institutions, like the church and its related bodies, as well as in inter-ethnic economic bodies, like farmers' associations and marketing boards. The scene of our investigation will be Cradock, a small town in the Karoo region of the eastern Cape.