SOUTH AFRICA NEW NATIONALISTS AS THEY SEE THEMSELVES

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27565, 24 January 1955, Page 8

SOUTH AFRICA NEW NATIONALISTS AS THEY SEE THEMSELVES

[By a Correspondent of ‘’The Times” lately in South Africa] I This is the first of a series of five articles, in which a correspondent of “The Times” discusses conditions in the Union of South Africa with special relation to the aims and objectives of the present Nationalist Government.

Mr Strydom and his political followers believe sincerely, resentfully, and net without justification, that they are misunderstood in Europe and America. “You speak and write about us,” one of them said, “as though we want to treat the natives as Hitler >*eated the Jews.” Another complained of “itinerant clergymen bringing what he called “grave and baseless charges.” The Nationalists are very far from feeling guilty men. They are full of confidence in both the wisdom and the righteousness of their policies; and their contempt for what they dismiss as “jingo” criticism is profound. This sense of grievance is made the more acute by the absence, until recently, of a platform of their own. There are now several wellestablished and well directed Nationalist newspapers. But it is not so long since these were written by politicians for politicians, and so failed to appeal to the man in the street, and still more to the man on the farm. The first point to note about the new Nationalists is that they are in the throes of an Afrikaner independence movement that has not yet run its. full course. As always with such movements, it is based on a long memory of historical grievances that other persons have forgotten or never knew. The men who have lately come to the top and their keenest rank and file supporters are. with few exceptions, of one type. They come of Dutch, Flemish, German, or Huguenot stock. But they have no links with, and no loyalties to any European homeland. They are children of the veld, brought up on farms and educated at Stellenbosch, Pretoria, or Potcheistroom universifies. There, they learnt history from an angle that must be seen by outsiders if present-day South African politics are to be understood. For these ardent Nationalists, 1815 is the year not of Waterloo but or Slachter’s Nek. That was a rebellion, starting with the refusal of a Boer to obey a summons of the Courts to answer the charge of cruelty to a Hottentot servant and ending with public hangings. From that far-away year onwards, the young Afrikaner is taught of episode after episode m which the British lay authorities and their missionary allies follow a recurrent pattern of interference. Slavery is abolished and the slave owners cheated of their compensation. Trekkers, fleeing from imported liberalism, establish a republic in Natal. It is annexed and turned into a British colony. The same fate befalls the Orange Free State and the Transvaal because foreigners covet the diamond and gold treasure troves. Wars of Independence Two “Wars of Independence” are fought, the one (Majuba) ending in victory and the other (the AngloBoer War) leading to defeat and a period of humiliation for the Afrikaners. while they were underdogs, being made to perform to the crack of the ringmasters of the “Milner Circus.” The commonly accepted view in Britain is that Gladstone was magnanimous—or foolish —after Majuba and that the Campbell-Bannerman Government generously laid the foundations of a contented Dutch and British union. The modern Afrikaner does not see it like that; he agrees that Botha and Smuts were great men, but he regards them as having been too easily flattered by the wide imperial wcrld outside South Africa. There has always been a clash among the Afrikaners between “Die-hards” and “Hands-Uppers”; and every Afrikaner statesman who has cooperated with the British has lost some popularity with his own people through being regarded as a “HandsUpper.” Language, as always happens in a Nationalist movement, touches deep chords. Afrikaans is a parvenu tongue and elderly speakers of it vividly remember the days when its chances of survival were threatened. It was not commonly written until towards the end of the nineteenth century. Until then it was a dialect, called the “taal,” and despised as a cultural medium by many of those who had learnt it at their mothers’ knees. High Dutch, the language of Holland, was the medium of the Church and of education, and there was considerable opposition to the building up of Afrikaans. A vigorous and unsuccessful attempt was made, in the years just after the Anglo-Boer war, to establish English as the dominant language. As this happened during the school days of Mr Strydom and of some of his righthand men, their loyalty to Afrikaans has become the more heart-felt.

They see themselves as just emerging from the status of under-dogs, and they complain that they deserve, but do not get, credit for respecting, now in the time of their strength, the linguistic rights of the English. Have they not, they argue, acquiesced in keeping two official languages, although the Republican Constitution, drawn up some years ago, lays it down that Afrikaans, “as the language of the

original white inhabitants of the country, will be the first official language.” They also point, as a further proof of broad-mindedness, to the change in their attitude towards a republic. The Constitution, as drafted by the party, allows for a “Christian National” Republic, “a perfectly sovereign and independent State”; and when this was agreed, there was no question of remaining within the Commonwealth. Now that republicanism has been shown to be compatible with membership of the Commonwealth, they are prepared at least to think again.

All this justifies the present government, in its own view, in claiming to be more mellow than were its predecessors of the Nationalist movement going back into history. As long ago as the eighteen-seventies a respected patriot, the Reverend Mr du Toit wrote, “there must be no English shops, no English signboards, no English advertisements, no English bookkeepers. A national bank must be started to replace the English banks.” (This, by the way, has recently been done.) “So must we become a nation.” Mr Strydom prides himself on seeking to shape a nation in which all true (and white) South Africans shall enjoy equal rights. Hated Liberalism But what of the non-whites, Africans, Coloureds, and Indians? Here the traditional force of the impulses that are welding the Nationally Afrikaner State come heavily into play. Afrikaner politicians loathe with every fibre of their being, the word liberalism. For them it Is the symbol of an unctuous, hypocritical ideology. They see it first making its obnoxious influence felt under Dr. John Philip and the early missionary societies. Liberals in and out of holy orders still lecture them (the Afrikaners protest) as though they had not got, m the Dutch Reformed Church, a Christian tradition as sound as that of any European. They and not their critics are the true friends of the Africans.

One Afrikaner missionary put it like this: “To tell the Africans about social equality, political freedom, integration, and the like is nothing but a Judaskiss, and they will not take long to discover their betrayal. Go to any British possession in Africa and you will understand what I mean. In the Council Chambers of State you will get a few privileged Africans side by side with the European delegates. Daily they partake in debates on social and political equality and the banishment of the colour-bar. In the newspapers the less privileged Africans read about their noble and generous European brothers oversea; but in the streets they are only too often barked at like dogs. Do you want a full proof of the outcome of all this suppressed hatred in lands of so-called brotherhood and equality? Then remember the Mau Mau and the Kenyattas of Kenya, the product of the liberal’ attitude.” Apartheid is thus seen as the only practical Christian way of tackling the native problem. It allows, in theory, for these still largely primitive people to develop whatever latent qualities, spiritual and intellectual, they may possess. And the Nationalist emphasises that neither he nor anyone else can tell to what heights of civilisation the African may ultimately climb. But believers in apartheid claim to recognise, as no-one else does, that unless the colours are kept rigidly and frankly apart the majority will swamp the minority and there will b* an end of white civilisation in South Africa.

Conviction that depotism, benevolent and patriarchal, is the wise way of governing this revolutionary modem world, lies at the root of the Nationalist faith. It explains why those new in power in the Union regard even the possibility of granting democratic rights to the natives as a whimsical heresy. It explains why they prefer to be accused, at the United Nations, of misbehaving in South-west Africa rather than to encourage international scrutiny of what is, in fact, a not illmanaged and a much maligned stewardship. It explains why they sec nothing wrong in giving Ministers and civil servants wide and ill-defined powers, which, by British and American standards, are disquieting in their probable consequences. Conscious that they are kindly, hospitable folk, rearing large families of healthy children in the sunshine, happy in the relations they have with the natives in their immediate domestic and farm circles, contemptuous alike of bishops and journalists who attack them, they are resolved to work out their own destiny. When, in an unguarded moment, somebody challenged the man m the British street with “the gentleman in Whitehall knows best,” there was a row. No such hostile reaction disturbs the Nationalist leaders—on their hom« front—when they assert, as confidently they do; that “the man in Pretoria knows best.” (To be continued.)