Of God & Hate
(Sec Cover)
On one toe of Cape Town's Table Mountain, that looks toward the point where the royal blue waters of the Indian Ocean merge into the Atlantic, a huge and stately house rears its white bulk among acres of hydrangeas. The house is Groote Schuur (Great Barn); once it belonged to famed Empire Builder Cecil Rhodes; Rudyard Kipling used to winter there. Past its well-stocked deer park one morning last week sped a shiny. Packard sedan, followed by a Ford. Shortly after 11 a.m., the Packard drew up outside South Africa's Parliament House in Cape Town six miles away. The Ford parked behind, and its driver, a burly, red-faced cop, ran to the Packard. He leaned inside and slowly, very slowly, helped out the most powerful man in Africa: Prime Minister Daniel Franc,ois Malan. Half supported by his bodyguard, 78-year-old Daniel Malan mounted the steps and disappeared inside. A watching Negro spat. That afternoon, Malan (pronounced m' lawn) squatted on the front bench of the House of Assembly and heard the opposition call him a "Hitlerite," a charge which he has certainly invited but not yet fully earned. His government had just introduced a bill designed to destroy the independence of South Africa's highest court; if passed, it would give absolute power to the majority Nationalist Party. As explained to Parliament by Nationalist Minister of the Interior Dr. Theophilus
Doenges, the "High Court" bill would make a joint parliamentary session (controlled by Nationalists) the supreme arbiter of whether the laws passed by Parliament are or are not constitutional. Malan called the bill a democratic measure to establish the supremacy of Parliament. But its real purpose was more sinister. Six weeks ago, South Africa's Supreme Court declared unconstitutional one of Malan's Jim Crow laws which disfranchised 50,000 half-caste voters. (It had been passed without the necessary two-thirds majority.) Instead of obeying the court, Malan decided to change the rules.
In the House of Assembly, United Party Leader Jacobus Gideon Strauss rose in deadly earnest to denounce the new bill as "bogus" and "a fraud." All week long the House hotly debated the bill. In all the hue & cry, the hurling of insults and shaking of fists, Malan was the calmest man there. He had the votes.
Rumors of Rebellion. The Strauss party carried the fight to the country. Strongarm squads of both sides brawled in the streets and there were rumors that would not be downed of rebellion and civil war. "The time has come," wrote an Orange Free State Boer to his local newspaper, "when all burghers should be armed . . . with a rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition. Who knows what lies ahead?" A German South African who had fled from Hitler thought he knew.
"I've seen it all before. You've got Naziism in the first degree: crowds of students breaking up opposition meetings, the highest court being overruled, huge 'strength through joy' festivals, frenzied resentment of criticism from abroad. I'm leaving."
It was not yet Naziism; it was not and might never be civil war. But it was portentous. In this faraway land, closer to the South Pole than it is to the U.S., the problems are homegrown and special, but the fears and passions which they generate are as universal as man's inhumanity to man.
The Triptych. The conflict in South Africa is not simply a matter of black v. white. It is a triptych of Boer, Briton and Bantu Negro.
The Boers (1,500,000 strong) are the inbred descendants of Dutch, French and German immigrants who settled in South Africa some 30 years after the Mayflower. The last big migration ended in 1707. Proud, hardy men, seeking freedom, their claim to the country is older than that of the Bantus: the blacks, sweeping down from Africa's interior, came later. With their flocks and tented ox-wagons, and their Bible, the Boers trekked across the veld in search of the Promised Land. The isolated life of the veld stamped itself upon them and they did not notice the world change behind their back; the French and American revolutions passed them by.
The Boers regard South Africa as their only home; unlike the British, they have nowhere else to go. Bruised into self-consciousness by British imperialism, which snuffed out their independence in the bloody Boer War (1899-1902), they are the backbone of Malan's Nationalist Party, which seeks to separate South Africa from the British Commonwealth.
South Africa's British (1,000,000) are clustered in Natal and Cape Province. They are mostly city folks--traders, bankers and bus drivers who have exported a little bit of Britain to South Africa. Against the Boers' fervent nationalism they have no spiritual counterforce. So long as they are making money (as they are), British South Africans tend to sit back and sip their tea while the Boers make the politics. And in their hearts many of them agree with the Nationalists' persecution of the Negroes. "The Dutchmen can handle the coons" is a frequent British attitude.
There are 10,000,000 non-Europeans in South Africa. The vast majority (8,500,000) are black Bantus. A third of them are still semibarbarous, living in kraals and reed huts on the native reserves; few speak the white man's language. Alongside the Bantus live 300,000 Indians, most of them shopkeepers and plantation laborers in sugar-growing Natal, and 1,100,000 Cape Colored, i.e., mulattoes, coffee-colored descendants of early Boer settlers.
The mulattoes until recently had limited civil rights, e.g., in Cape Province they could vote for white M.P.s. The blacks and browns have none, and in official census reports, they often do not count as population.
Thin Bridgehead. The two white groups--British and Boer--fight among themselves. They are engaged in a second and so far bloodless Boer War to determine whether essentially British ideas or essentially Boer ideas are going to run South Africa. But behind every feud and behind every raw nerve booms one supreme fact: the whites fear the docile blacks. Outnumbered four to one, they see themselves as a thin bridgehead of "European civilization" braced against an ever-pressing tide of black men. In their hearts are bloody remembrances of the "Kaffir Wars" fought by their fathers against the southward-marching legions of Matabele and Zulu, and in the teeming black slums fringing their cities they see, or imagine they see, shadows of Tchaka the Zulu, who slaughtered 7,000 women in honor of his mother, and of Dingaan the Vulture, whose assegai-hurling warriors massacred 600 Boers in 1838.
In the frontier battles of rifle against spear, the white man was victorious. In the battle of populations, he is steadily losing ground. Three million Bantus (four-fifths of South Africa's industrial labor force) have swarmed into the mushrooming cities and labor camps to mine the white man's gold, wash his dishes, mind his babies, empty his garbage cans, and dig his grave when he dies. Another 3,000,000 harvest the nation's corn, herd its cattle and gather its grapes for the wine press. Without the black man's labor, the white man's civilization would shrivel up and die.
This fact frightens the white man more than Dingaan the Vulture did. He is hagridden with fear that little black children will one day play in the ruins of his cities. The rising black tide already seems to press against the poorer whites, most of them the sons of Afrikaner farmers, who come to the town for jobs. They rely on Malan.
Prime Minister Malan has compared the clash of urban black & white with the Battle of Blood River, where Boer pioneers fought and defeated the Zulu. "The towns," said Malan, "are becoming blacker. On this new Blood River battlefield, our people and the non-Europeans . . . are in much more stressful struggle than 100 years ago when the white-tented wagons protected the laager, and rifle and assegai clashed . . . The [Boers] meet the non-Europeans half or completely unarmed, without the entrenchment between them and without the protection of the river. They meet him defenseless in the open plain of economic equality."*
Velevuta. It is Daniel Malan's self-appointed task to deepen the entrenchments and widen the rivers between black & white. He has dedicated his life to protecting "the sacred Boer race" from "pollution" by the black man. A bold paunchy Boer with restless little eyes and a pale square face, he is a man of enormous, if misguided, conviction.
When Malan speaks--which is often--he is apt to enmesh his audience in thickets of Old Testament references: "We must be cautious as snakes and sincere as doves." Africa's black men, who hate and fear Daniel Malan, call him Vele-vuta, "the man born with a fire inside him." His fire is religious. Trained as a
Calvinist divine, a predikant (i.e., pastor) of the Dutch Reformed Church, he has a contagious sense of mission, derived somewhat illogically from Calvin's doctrine of predestination. As Malan sees it, God made unalterable 1) the "superiority" of His chosen race, the Boers; 2) the "inferiority" of all other races.
Malan is convinced that he has been "elected" by God to lead the Boers to a "New Jerusalem," by which he means a Boer republic.
Thou Shalt Not. Malan got religion early. He was born of French Huguenot stock in a farmstead named Allesverloren (Everything Is Lost), which snuggled among the soaring mountains and vine-garlanded valleys of West Cape Province. In his parents' devout household, the rule was "Thou Shalt Not." Each evening "Danie" and his younger brother Fanie were called indoors to hear spade-bearded Papa Malan reading from his family Bible to his black servants.
Papa Malan had intended his elder son to take over the farm. In accordance with Boer tradition, he earmarked for the future master a fine riding horse. Curled up with a book, Danie didn't even go to the stable to see which horse was his. "You'll never be a farmer," sighed Papa Malan.
Rivals. One of Malan's school friends was a long-legged Boer farm boy named Jan Christian Smuts. The Smutses and the Malans were neighbors, and twice each month Jannie Smuts and Danie Malan sat down together to polish off a huge Sunday dinner of pumpkin and mutton. A brilliant scholar and athlete, young Smuts went off to Stellensbosch University to study poetry and philosophy. Four years later, Danie came plodding after. He was barely 20, yet he had already developed a double chin. Smuts met him at the station with a cry of "Dear Danie," tapped him for his own university debating club. But the two boys were as different as fire and clay.
Jannie was a big man on campus; Danie an obscure little swot. While Smuts rose like a rocket to become at the age of 31 a world-famed Boer War general, Malan studied theology under the protection of the Union Jack. His usual explanation of how he missed the fight: "There was martial law, and anyway the front was 500 miles away" (sometimes he makes it 700 miles). Jannie and Danie became lifelong public enemies. Smuts, who had fought the British, lived to become a British field marshal and one of the stout pillars of the British Commonwealth;* Malan, who never heard a shot fired, is a bitter Anglophobe. Smuts, a great internationalist, twice declared war on Germany in the name of democracy; Malan admired both the Kaiser and the Nazis, publicly announced that he hoped Hitler would win. Both men became Prime Ministers of South Africa.
They lived to hate one another and call each other names ("Smuts," said Malan, "is a renegade." "Malan," said Smuts, "is a fanatic"). Yet when Jannie died in 1949, Danie put his head in his hands and wept like a child.
"Stug." When Smuts made peace with the British after the Boer War, the Rev. Daniel Malan, M.A., D.D. (cum laude) was studying theology at Holland's Utrecht University. He wrote a learned 251-page dissertation (The Idealism of Berkeley) and earned on campus a reputation of being "very stug."/-
In 1905, he sailed back home, to deliver his induction sermon at Riebeek West, his home town. It was an hour-long diatribe breathing hellfire and damnation, subtly hinting that the British, the Jews and the Kaffirs were robbing the Boers of their "racial heritage."
Malan lasted only a few weeks in his first pastorate because his wine-growing parishioners failed to understand his urgent demands for prohibition. In his next parish, Graaff Reinet, a wool-growing town, he encountered a group of Boer children playing in the gutter with a gang of colored kids. Forty-two years later, as Prime Minister, he told the House of Assembly: "It was thus that the seeds of apartheid were planted in my mind."
For ten years as a parson, Malan drummed home his favorite theme: Africa for the Afrikaners. At 39 he read Marx, and wrote a 30-page pamphlet extolling socialism and praising Marx. For his assault on the Kaffirs he relied on cropped passages from the Old Testament. Example : ". . . Let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water."
For the Glory of God. The fame of the "Boer Moses," as his critics call him, soon reached the ears of General James Barrie Munnik Hertzog, leader of the Boer opposition party. South Africa had just entered World War I at the side of the
British, and Hertzog needed a hatchetman to denounce this "treachery." Malan quit his pulpit to become editor in chief of Cape Town's Die Buerger, an anti-Semitic daily. The title of his first editorial: "For the Glory of God."
He got into politics, first as M.P. for Calvinia, then as Minister of the Interior. His first important achievement was to insert a new clause in South Africa's constitution: "The people of the Union acknowledge the sovereignty and guidance of Almighty God."
"The Seven." In 1933, a depression-struck world went off the gold standard. Gold-producing South Africa went broke, and so did thousands of Boer farmers. Pastor Malan promptly accused the government of "selling the Boer people to Hoggenheimer."* With seven supporters, Malan formed a "Purified Nationalist Party." "Hitler started with seven," he observed approvingly.
Malan's greatest political asset, aside from his religious zeal, was his ability to provide scapegoats for the Boers' depression troubles. "Rich Jews," he said, "make poor whites." So do poor blacks. "The Negro does not need a house," said Malan. "He can sleep under a tree. So he can work for less pay than the white man. The Negro has a job while the white man walks the streets foodless and workless."
World War II brought the Malanites to prominence. They were openly pro-Nazi. The Rev. Jacobus Daniel Vorster, preaching at Potchefstroom University, told the Afrikaner Student Union: "Hitler's Mein Kampf points the way to greatness. Afrikaners must be fired by the same holy fanaticism that inspires the Nazis . . ."
Vorster went to jail, and the Nazis lost the war, but in 1948 the Malanites had a chance to win South Africa's elections. Malan stumped the veld, urging South Africans to vote for segregation for the Negroes and separation from the British. "God," he announced, "is on our side."
Half a million South Africans (including Cape Province's 50,000 haif-caste voters) voted against Malan, only 400,000 for him. But South Africa's electoral laws, like Georgia's, are loaded in favor of rural constituencies, where Afrikaners predominate. Result: the Malanites squeaked into power by 70 seats to 65. "South Africa," exulted Malan, "is once again ours."
News of Malan's victory sent gold shares plummeting on London's stock exchange. In the Afrikaner countryside, it sent Boer hooligans on a looting spree directed at Jewish stores. To Daniel Franc,ois Malan, the new Prime Minister, it was a signal from heaven to build in South Africa the New Jerusalem. He enlisted as architects a 14-man cabinet, which included not one representative of the English-speaking population.
Ten of the new ministers, like Malan himself, belonged to the Afrikaner Broederbond, a fanatic secret society which Smuts had once banned as subversive. Included too, as the 18th (unofficial) member, was the Prime Minister's closest adviser, Mistress Maria Ann Sophia Malan, his plump, splendidly corseted second wife, whom he married in 1937. A seasoned politician ("I ate and drank politics from the time I could toddle"), 49-year-old Mistress Malan acts as secretary, housekeeper, chauffeur and nursemaid to her aging, ailing and absent-minded husband. She holds his hand at public functions, mops his brow when he sweats over meals. Every morning she summarizes the news for him as they sit at breakfast.
With Maria at his side, and a host of political predikants of the Dutch Reformed Church to supply biblical authority for whatever he did, Prime Minister Malan set about fulfilling his election promise to "keep the Kaffir in his place." Malan's solution: apartheid (pronounced apart-hate), an Afrikaans word meaning literally "apartness." Apartheid, ideally, is supposed to segregate white & black into separate territories where each can develop independently of the other.* "Far from it that the Word of God demands equality," said a Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in April 1951, "it is scriptural principle that there should be a definite authoritarian relationship . . . between man & wife, employer & worker, authority and subject . . . The Christian calling lies in acceptance of the place which God has given."
Total apartheid, as the churchmen defined it, is, Malan admits, "a visionary ideal." It cannot work for the simple reason that the white man cannot afford to let it work. White South Africa's economy would collapse overnight if it were deprived of cheap black labor.
Workaday apartheid, as applied by Malan, is simply another word for turning down the screws on the blacks. It is 100,000 Negroes jailed each year for failing to carry a pass. It is 60-year-old Jane Zuma, a Johannesburg washerwoman, trudging ten hot miles to deliver her mistress' laundry because she is not allowed to ride on the white man's buses. It is Veteran John Kumalo, a talented Negro broadcaster, beaten up and jailed on the way to his broadcasting studio, and released three days later, innocent of any offense. In Malan's "New Jerusalem," the black man works but he does not vote; he pays taxes, but government schools for Negroes scarcely exist. If he is sick and visits a white doctor he must wait outside or go to the back door.
"I Can't Sleep Nights." Unable to see any prospects of bettering themselves, thousands of Negroes have turned in sheer hopelessness to drink, drugs and crime. In the noisome slums that disfigure the outskirts of Cape Town, 200,000 Cape Colored live in fear of the Skolly Boys, a gang of Negro gangsters whose favorite murder weapon is a bicycle chain. In Johannesburg, it is the "Russians" who terrify white & black alike, chopping their victims with axes and leaving the bodies to be carried away by the night soil removers. In the Rand goldfields, police estimate, there are three murders every two days; in the concrete "locations" where the black miners live, separated from their families, prostitution and sodomy flourish.
Native crime has made white South Africa tense and fearful. Johannesburgers barricade their doors at night, and many sleep with .25 automatics tucked under their pillows. Yet fear seeps in. It is an inward-growing fear, the kind that made a Nationalist M.P. cry out recently: "I can't bear this apartheid. I don't know what to do." It was a fear movingly described by Author Alan Paton in Cry, the Beloved Country: "Which do we prefer, a law-abiding, industrious and purposeful native people or a lawless, idle and purposeless people? The truth is that we do not know, for we fear them both . . . For we fear not only the loss of our possessions, but the loss of our superiority and the loss of our whiteness."*
Malan has a naively simple solution to the problem of native crime: hire more cops, build more prisons. (The jail population of South Africa is greater than that of Britain, which has four times its population.) But increasing numbers of South Africans--both Boer and British--are beginning to realize that jails are not enough. They recognize--though somewhat reluctantly--that, short of mass murders, there is nothing that can prevent the black man from eventually attaining political and economic rights, either by law or by revolution. It is for the white man to choose which way.
Hard Solution. Jan Christian Smuts used to say, "If we see any wrong, let's put it right without bothering about possible repercussions on our grandchildren." But Daniel Malan, stiff-necked in his self-righteousness, has chosen to force a hard solution. The heirs of Smuts in Parliament are ineffectually led by boyish-faced Jacobus Gideon Strauss, an anglicized Boer who apes Smuts's mannerisms but lacks his master's voice. Outside Parliament they have found an idealistic but impulsive leader in Adolf ("Sailor") Malan, a cousin of the Prime Minister's and an ex-R.A.F. group captain in the Battle of Britain. Sailor Malan has organized 175,000 World War II veterans in his Torch Commando, which is pledged to defend the constitution--if necessary, by force. Said he last week: "I make this last-minute appeal to Prime Minister Malan to turn away from this dangerous path before it is too late."
The moneyman behind the opposition is South Africa's wealthiest man: fabulous Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, the diamond king, who owns gold and uranium mines, railways and newspapers as well. The industrialists want cheap Negro labor. Neither industrialists nor liberals want to abolish South Africa's color bar, but both are willing to give the blacks more education and opportunity. In the heightened emotions of the present crisis, they find it necessary to show that they are not "nigger lovers." Arguing in Parliament for technical training for black workers, Jacobus Strauss declared, "Higher skills are in any case beyond the capacity of Negroes." Oddly enough, it was an ardent Malanite who set him straight. "Negroes can do skilled work if trained for it," replied Malan's Labor Minister Barend
("Ben") Schoeman. "That's just why we must not let them, for it would imperil white civilization."
Slow Awakening. Confused though they might be by the problem of a white minority in a black man's continent, the heirs of Jan Christian Smuts yet saw very clearly last week the dangers of dictatorship in the swaggering advance of Boer nationalism. British South Africans, for so long politically apathetic, had at last bestirred themselves. A moral awakening was taking place in South Africa. There were signs of new alliances to meet the common threat to constitutional liberties. Even many law-abiding Boers were distressed by Premier Malan's extra-legal methods, and some of his own party thought he was going too far. They found ominous the sights & sounds of Boer chauvinism: the way Malanite musclemen break up opposition meetings with eggs, tomatoes and stones; the budding of a private Nationalist army (Skietkommando) along the lines of Hitler's SS; the uniformed children chanting "Hou Koers" (Hold steadfast).
Fervent Daniel Malan's divided nation has become a tense and uneasy place. His attempt to put his regime above the courts seemed certain of passage in Parliament, and is plainly a big step to committing South Africa to a one-party totalitarian state. It is no better for being done in God's name.
* The white man is economically well protected by such legislation as the 1926 "Color Bar" Act, which forbids black laborers to perform "white," i.e., skilled, jobs.
* Even the name was his. He proposed the "Commonwealth" during World War I.
/- Meaning anything from stuffy to surly.
* A bejeweled, cigar-smoking cartoon character used by Malan in Die Buerger to lampoon the Jews.
* It was not a new idea: around 1655, Jan van Riebeeck, first governor of Cape Town, planted a bitter almond hedge to separate his colonists from the aborigines (1,100,000 Cape Colored half-castes prove that the hedge was not very effective).
* Malan attended the world premiere in Johannesburg of the movie version of the book. Said he: "I enjoyed it. That's all. Don't ask me any more."
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