Conclusion

The material in this essay shows a group of Afrikaner women organizing themselves to protect and enhance the institutions which were fundamental to the survival of the Afrikaners as a separate cultural group—church and language. The ACVV had as its raison d'être the perception of its middle class leadership of the multiple threats facing Afrikaners as a separate racial and ethnic group. Those threats were made dramatically manifest in the Anglo-Boer War, and they persisted. There was a racial threat insofar as it was feared that many Afrikaners, locked into chronic poverty, would become coloureds unless uplifted and protected by segregative devices, such as separate housing, adequate social work, free education, and public health: the Carnegie Commission acknowledged miscegenation between poor whites and coloureds and urged policies to counteract it.^[132]

The second threat was an ethnic one, a threat on the white side of the racial divide, which persisted even if Africans, coloureds, and Asians were all kept in their place. Looking to the future, they seem to have said that the poor Afrikaner youth would have a future only if they were educated to take advantage of the opportunities in an urban economy, thereby competing effectively with English-speakers; and that they would remain Afrikaners culturally only if the battle for bilingualism—which came to mean a victory for Afrikaans—was fought and won. This applied particularly to young women for whom there was even less work than

for men in the countryside, then or now. In taking this view, the ACVV showed an acute strategic sense and an impressive degree of public spirit within an ethnic context which led them to put in a great deal of work for which they received no material reward.

The rewards which these women received were political and cultural. But the link to politics was indirect. They made Afrikaners their special care, and by playing such a public and such an important role in cultural affairs and in social welfare, they ensured that the poor were helped, and were seen to be helped, by an organization most of whose leading members were also highly visible and active Nationalists. There was no need for the ACVV as a body to take explicit public stances on political issues: the members could do that equally well in political parties. Their position was comparable to that of the Dutch Reformed Churches in the period after the Anglo-Boer War: domiaees gained great influence because of their activities on behalf of the poor.^[133]

In these social welfare activities, the ACVV had no competition from their political opponents in the South African (later the United) Party. English-speakers had no large body of poor in their own communities: new English-speakers were relatively wealthy and had little interest in the Afrikaner poor, or even in local politics generally. English-speaking women were indeed interested in social welfare: there was the problem of policing drunkenness—drunkenness by coloureds and Africans in the streets—on which whites could easily agree. It was also a licensing matter as to whether a local authority should have the right to declare its area 'dry'. This was a burning issue for white Methodists and Baptists, most of whose women were active in the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and to some Dutch Reformed Church members, but not to most Anglicans. There was, however, little political capital to be made from it among the white poor, urban and rural, English and Afrikaner.

What then was the role of the ACVV in politics? As an organization it had no role. But, as we have seen, the gaining of the franchise by white women in 1931 certainly did not initiate an active role by Afrikaner women in politics, as John X. Merriman's statement recognized.^[134] Busy though they were in church matters, in the ACVV, and in the education of Afrikaner children, they were important in political organizations as well. They were always ready to put on suitably sober receptions to celebrate political victories, and National Party parliamentary candidates thanked them for their aid.^[135] That aid was certainly more than simply providing tea; by the 1920s it was already clear that the local National Party was far more efficient in its attention to the voters' roll than its South African Party opponents. Much of the tedious clerical work required was probably done by women, leaving to the men the filing of applications for the vote with the magistrate and the challenging of names already on the roll in the registration court, public activity where male status would clearly be of value.^[136] In addition, Cradock had its branch of the Vroue Nasionale Party, an active body which passed resolutions for annual congresses and raised local issues.^[137] After they had been given the vote, the Vroue party disappeared, but the role of women was by no means diminished. One informant told me that when in 1938 the Malanite Gesuiwerde (purified) National Party candidate was defeated by a United Party man, a livid Elizabeth Jordaan castigated one unnamed male member of the party over the telephone, assuring him that 'We shall begin tomorrow at my house organizing for the next election.'^[138] The National Party did win the seat in 1943, whether from Elizabeth's house or not is unclear, but the anecdote is wholly plausible.

In looking at the recent history of Afrikanerdom, scholars have frequently

commented on the mobilization of Afrikaners in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly through the exploitation of such historic events as the celebration of the Great Trek in 1938.^[139] The idea of Afrikanerdom, as a touchstone by which to judge all sorts of public activity, became in a sense 'hegemonic' among Afrikaners, an overall means of judging whether a person was a ware Afrikaner, a 'true Afrikaner', or not.^[140] Before the 1930s it was possible to be a good Afrikaner by being a good churchman and guarding the equal rights accorded to Afrikaans in the South Africa Act. As the mobilization of Afrikaners proceeded, the notion was extended in two directions: the patronage of Afrikaner business—with only moderate success^[141] —and the support of the National Party where it was crucial in providing the narrow margin of victory in 1948.^[142]

This use of 'hegemonic' differs from that of Gramsci, who coined it in relation to dominance by the state: modern states, he argued, had within them 'dominant groups' who elicited ' "spontaneous consent" caused by the prestige which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production'.^[143] In South Africa the hegemony by 'spontaneous consent' was achieved only within the ethnos ; outside, its various forms of direct domination were used to achieve compliance from other whites as well as non-whites. Thus Afrikaner mobilization did not, as Greenberg writes, simply involve the inclusion of a wider range of class actors.^[144] That inclusion took place only within Afrikanerdom and the 'spontaneous consent' was achieved with the object of cutting across class alignments which divided Afrikaners from each other. To what extent the successful creation of what can be called an 'ethnic envelope' was due to prestige derived by a set of actors from their 'position' in 'production', is another question altogether.

Yet the question of class alignments within Afrikanerdom cannot be so cavalierly pushed aside. As Van Onselen and Giliomee have shown, there was genuine class conflict among Afrikaners.^[145] As early as 1913, however, Afrikaner trade unionists were already heeding the call of the volk rather than that of the working class on the mines.^[146] Yet the middle class character of the ACVV in Cradock itself suggests the need for further inquiry. Why do certain individuals participate in public activity, what are the economic roots of such impressive public spirit, and why do comfortably-off families divide on political questions? So far, the Cradock material has not shown any class alignments, or publicly expressed resentments, based on the migration of poor whites from the countryside. Nor does it suggest that the Afrikaner members of the middle class saw the depressed poor whites in town as a threat in the sense that that they might join a self-conscious proletariat dedicated to overthrowing the bourgeois capitalist order. Rather, the evidence collected thus far suggests that they saw poor whites in characteristically South African terms, as a group on the way down to racial perdition, to miscegenation and therefore exclusion from the volk . That approach was adopted in the context of their bitterness at their conquest by Britain; in working for the opheffing (uplift) of poor whites, and for the integrity of church and language, they were meeting the racial and the ethnic, i. e. cultural, threats at the same time. More detailed work on the economic history of such communities may help us yet to explain better how and why these women combined present threats with shared experiences to preserve, in church and language, the living hand of the past.