The Afrikaners: A Concise History

HERMANN GILIOMEE

The

Afrikaners

A Concise History

TAFELBERG

EPIGRAPH

The White English-speaking people of South Africa have only one thing in common and that is their language … We are a mixed bunch, and we don’t have the bonds that bind so many Afrikaners together, we never had a Karoo, we never trekked, we never developed a new language, we never were defeated in war, we never had to pick ourselves out of the dust.

Alan Paton, ‘The Afrikaners and the English’, Optima, 1981

PREFACE

This book originated in a request from Karen Meiring, head of the Afrikaans kykNET channels on DStv, that was too good to be true.

Meiring asked me to write the script for a documentary series of eighteen episodes of one hour each on the Afrikaners’ history based on my book The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Tafelberg, 2003; 2nd ed., 2009). In 2004 my Afrikaans translation, Die Afrikaners:’n Biografie (Tafelberg), appeared. I was also to present the series.

As the renowned journalist Rykie van Reenen remarked on my The Afrikaners, it is a ‘d-i-k-k-e boek’. A thick book indeed it was. Writing the book, I was determined to tell the Afrikaner story as comprehensively as possible.

Both the English and the Afrikaans editions run to some 700 pages. This abridged edition is only one-fifth of the length of the original The Afrikaners. Because the 2009 edition is extensively footnoted there are no footnotes in this edition. For sources that appeared during the past ten years, references are given in the text. At the end of this book there is a select list of sources instead of a bibliography.

Meiring’s request forced me to reflect on the challenge of writing for viewers rather than readers. This was an attractive challenge. In writing my book on the Afrikaners between 1992 and 2002 I was greatly stimulated by my editor, Jeannette Hopkins, whose wise advice was: ‘Tell your story’.

For me history became a living story in which people and communities take centre stage. The historian’s analysis and explanations can be woven into the narrative as it unfolds but must never obscure the story. The best narrative historians are like good novelists who know how to make characters come alive. If the historical account does not have a dramatic thrust the reader’s interest tends to wane. The Afrikaners do indeed have a dramatic history and it is one that rarely has been told well.

The best documentary series made for television viewers all emphasise the visual, dramatic and gripping elements of the past. Of those I watched the most outstanding are Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews, Jeremy Paxman’s Empire, Brian Lapping Associates’ The Death of Yugoslavia, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Making of a Holy City and Herman Binge’s Verskroeide aarde.

I wish to thank the management of the channel kykNET for commissioning and funding the television series on the Afrikaners, and Dagbreek Trust, which provided a generous grant. The series is marketed as a DVD set with English subtitles.

My thanks also to Tafelberg Publishers and particularly to Erika Oosthuysen, my publisher of nearly two decades, for her enthusiastic support and incisive insights; to Anton Naudé for invaluable research assistance and sound advice; and to Kabous Meiring, who took over from Herman Binge as the producer of the television series. My greatest appreciation is for my wife, Annette, for her interest in my work and her insights. In all the years we have been together she has been my greatest source of inspiration and comradeship.

HERMANN GILIOMEE

Stellenbosch

A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY

1652Jan van Riebeeck founds the Cape settlement

1657Nine servants of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), or Dutch East India Company, are released to become free burghers, producing food for the Cape market and passing ships

1658The first ship carrying slaves arrives at the Cape

1679Simon van der Stel founds Stellenbosch, the first inland town

1688A party of some 180 French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution arrives and settles in Drakenstein (Paarl) and Franschhoek

1699Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel comes to power. In violation of Company instructions, he and other officials begin producing for the market, threatening the livelihood of the free burghers

1707The VOC directors in Amsterdam recall Van der Stel and some other leading officials, signalling a major victory for the free burghers. Documents describing the strife between burghers and officials contain the first reference to a person with both parents born in Europe calling himself an Afrikaner

1745The district of Swellendam is established

1779–87The struggle of the Cape Patriots for better representation gains few concessions

1786The district of Graaff-Reinet is established and the Fish River proclaimed the colony’s eastern border

1795Britain occupies the Cape

1803Britain hands over the Cape to the Batavian Republic in the Netherlands

1806The Cape becomes a British colony

1808Slaves march to Cape Town to demand their freedom

1809The employment of Khoisan labourers is regulated

1820Some 4 000 British settlers arrive. There was at this point also a burgher population of 43 000 as well as a combined total of 42 000 slaves, free blacks and Khoikhoi

1825Slave uprising at Houd-den-Bek

1827English becomes the only official language; a jury system is introduced in courts; magistrates replace boards of landdrost and heemraden

1828Ordinance 50 declares all free people equal before the law; Khoikhoi no longer have to carry passes

1834Emancipation of slaves

1835–45Some 17 000 Afrikaners leave the colony on the Great Trek

1852Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek proclaimed in the Transvaal

1854Representative government introduced in the Cape Colony; the Republic of the Orange Free State is proclaimed

1869Discovery of the Kimberley diamond fields

1872The Cape is granted responsible government

1886Discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand

1899–1902The South African War

1910The Union of South Africa is inaugurated. The South African Party (SAP) under Louis Botha forms the first government

1912The South African Native National Congress is established

1913The Natives Land Act is promulgated, allocating to black people land that would later be fixed at 13% of the total landmass; the rest is deemed to belong to white people

1914The National Party is founded

1914–15Some 12 000 Afrikaners rise up in an armed rebellion against South Africa’s participation in the World War I

1924The Pact government, formed by the National Party and Labour Party, comes to power after defeating the SAP

1933–48The United Party, led first by JBM Hertzog and then by Jan Smuts, governs South Africa

1948–94The National Party is in power and imposes apartheid

1961The Republic of South Africa is proclaimed

1990All-party negotiations for a post-apartheid society begin

1994A government of national unity led by the African National Congress comes to power

1

FREE BURGHERS: ‘DEFENDERS OF THE LAND’

In 1652 some 90 Europeans under the leadership of Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape of Good Hope. His instruction was to establish a refreshment station for the ships of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), or Dutch East India Company, on their way to and from the East. Like its English counterpart, the English East India Company, the VOC, first founded in 1602, controlled an extensive trading empire. It could be called one of the world’s first multinational corporations. Its ships brought spices, sugar, tobacco, timber and manufactured articles from across the globe and particularly from its trading networks in the East to Amsterdam, from where they were sold across Europe. In the first decade after the Cape of Good Hope was founded, 205 ships with 40 200 people on board sailed to the East, while 103 ships with some 13 000 people returned to the Netherlands.

In 1619 the VOC had introduced a proper government in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) under a governor general, who presided over the Council of India. The city became the capital of the VOC’s eastern trading network. When the Cape was founded, the VOC placed it under the authority of both its board of directors, called the Lords Seventeen, which sat in Amsterdam, and the Council of India in Batavia. As a result, the Netherlands, from which most of the immigrants first came, and the East, where the VOC’s trading empire lay, exerted very different influences that shaped the character and life of the European community at the Cape.

On the one hand there was the egalitarian tendency present in Dutch society and particularly in its increasingly confident burgher community. Compared with the rest of Europe, the social structure in the Netherlands was fluid and unique in both the social mobility that individuals enjoyed and in the absence of sharp class cleavages. Below the fairly small stratum of the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie, there was a large group of the ‘broad citizenry’ and ‘middle estate’, comprising skilled artisans, shopkeepers and suppliers of goods. Below them was the proletariat engaged in poorly paid but regular work and, at the bottom, the grauw, the underclass. A poor man could aspire to rise from the proletariat and enter the middestand, the middle class. Burghers in the Netherlands had more liberty to pursue their own interests than elsewhere in Europe. Slavery was not permitted.

In the province of Holland the established law was Roman-Dutch law, which conferred no special privileges on the nobility. In the words of the great scholar Voetius, it preserved ‘equality and binds the citizens equally’. As a French visitor remarked in 1665, Dutch servants enjoyed so many privileges that their masters could not even hit them. It was this law with its egalitarian character that would be applied at the Cape.

Running counter to the European influences at the Cape were those derived from the practices and institutions that developed in the Dutch East Indies. The Cape would acquire many of the characteristics of Batavia: the power that the VOC officials wielded, the strict Company etiquette, the weakness of the church as an institution, a defective system of education, the conspicuous consumption among the wealthy, the dependence on slave labour, the use of Malay and Portuguese as linguae francae in the early decades, and the introduction of the office of fiscal to maintain law and order.

Also transmitted were subtler influences, which Pauline Milone has described in her study of the composite culture of Batavia as ‘the pace-of-life, graces, aristocratic attitudes, and arrogated privileges of Indonesian civilization mixed with some of the material uses, technology, fashions and Christianity of European society’. These were brought to the Cape by senior Company servants who had earlier served in the East, and by Eastern slaves, who were to make up an important part of the Cape’s slave population. During the first 80 years of the settlement, when European women were in short supply, many European men married manumitted slaves from the East.

As in the East, the senior Company officials at the Cape, followed by the wealthiest burghers, set the tone in the development of a new composite culture. They clung tenaciously to their rank and right of precedence. Rank determined where one sat in church and at public functions, and one’s place in funeral processions. The sumptuary laws of 1755 prescribed in detail, according to rank, which category of person could, for example, use a large open umbrella, how many horses could pull a carriage, and what uniforms the coachmen and footmen could wear. As in Indonesia, rearing European children at the Cape would be left almost entirely to female slaves. These slaves contributed greatly to the local culture in terms of their dress, household remedies and food preparation.

But the greatest influence at the Cape was the control exercised by the VOC as a trading company over its subjects. Its main goal was to make a profit. The Company paid its officials so little that many, including Van Riebeeck, resorted to corruption and profiteering on the side. At all times, the Company put its own interests above those of its subjects. Indeed, apart from its use as a halfway station, the Cape was of little value to the VOC. It had no great staple products, like rice, sugar, tobacco, wool or timber. Beyond its coastal mountains the climate was harsh and the soil poor. Apart from cattle, the prospects for trade with the indigenous Khoikhoi and the Bushmen (or San) were limited.

The VOC imposed the administrative system of its trading post of Batavia on the Cape. Three main status groups were recognised: Company servants, burghers, and slaves. The indigenous Khoikhoi, who were considered ‘aliens’, were at first not regarded as subjects falling under the colony’s laws. The Company’s proclamations made no reference to race or colour. But almost all the free burghers came from Europe and soon there developed a close correlation between European ancestry or origin and citizenship.

At first it appeared as if the Europeans at the Cape might develop into a mixed community. In the first 50 or 60 years there were many more European men than women. There was also no strong sense of colour consciousness. The mother of Simon van der Stel, who became commander of the Cape in 1679, was the daughter of a Dutch sea captain and Monica da Costa, a local woman from Goa. At the Cape people did not make special claims on the grounds of their race or colour. Indeed, racial or ethnic terms were almost never used.

Many men in the early decades of settlement married women who had been slaves or took slaves as mistresses or concubines. Several Afrikaner families have a slave woman as their progenitress.

But from about 1730 the disparity between the sexes in the white community began to shrink rapidly. Marriages thereafter in the community were formed almost exclusively between Europeans. Those European men who could not find a European wife tended to remain unmarried. Many European men fathered children with slave women out of wedlock, but they seldom admitted paternity, which was a requirement to have the baby baptised. In this way a white community developed side by side with a racially mixed community.

The Europeans at the Cape did not call themselves whites or Europeans but Christians. The distinction between Christians and heathens was indeed the main one in society. Over time the notion developed among the burghers that some kind of covenant existed with God to preserve their community with its cultural characteristics. According to this covenant theology, there was continuity between God’s covenant with the Jews and the one God had with Christians. It reinforced the idea that Christianity marked the community of burghers. It was birth rather than personal conversion that determined who the ‘real’ Christians were. Hence, they formed a particular social group rather than a community of the faithful. As the historian Jonathan Gerstner has observed: ‘The continuity, through the covenant, of Christians with the Old Testament people of God provided a ground for group cohesion in the midst of the individualism inherent in Protestant doctrine.’

Until about 1700 the term Afrikaner was occasionally used for the children of slaves and free blacks who were born locally. It was only in the final decades of the eighteenth century that Afrikaner became the common name for people who were burghers and predominantly of European descent.

During the first 150 years of the settlement Afrikaans developed as the medium of spoken communication between masters and their slaves and servants and, later, among people in all these communities. The language was the collective creation of slaves, burghers, Khoikhoi and San.

In the early years there was no intention on the part of VOC to establish an expansive settlement. The instruction to Van Riebeeck, the first commander, was simply to feed the people of the small refreshment station and the crew of passing ships. To do this he had to lay out a garden to produce fruit and vegetables, make bread and wine, and barter cattle with the Khoikhoi to obtain enough meat.

Quite soon Van Riebeeck realised that the soil on the eastern flanks of Table Mountain was excellent for farming. In 1657, acting on instructions from the Company, he released nine of its employees to become free burghers. On their plots of 13.3 morgen (about 11.4 hectares) along the Liesbeek River they had to sow and plant what the Company prescribed and accept the low prices it set for their produce. At its height as a refreshment station the Cape could supply food to about 6 000 people annually who arrived on board ships and who usually stayed over for about ten days.

Company servants also successfully applied to be released from service to become tradesmen, carpenters, bricklayers or innkeepers. Unlike the farmers, they were not subject to fixed prices set by the Company for their products or services. In addition, the farmers had to defend the frontiers of the settlement and, as they were the main providers of food, they insisted that the officials treat them with respect.

The first clash between burghers and officialdom came in 1658 when the farmers tried to learn what price the VOC would pay for the wheat they had sown. When harvest time arrived, they refused to deliver the wheat if not told the official price they would receive. They also complained that they had to fend for themselves against threats by the indigenous Khokhoi to their lives and livestock. But their greatest grievance was the ban on bartering cattle from the Khoikhoi. Underlying the petition they presented to the government was a sense of outrage that such things could be done to them, ‘the defenders of the land’, as they described themselves. They refused to be the Company’s ‘slaves’. Instead of ‘being assisted, they were being oppressed’.

In response, Van Riebeeck admonished them to behave ‘as behove obedient servants’. The Company had fed them and had provided them with everything they needed. It had raised the burghers ‘from a lowly position and at great expense to itself’. Although not the Company’s slaves, they were its subjects.

Over time a serious consideration for the government became the lack of opportunities for the burghers. The section of the farming population that might be considered prosperous at the end of the seventeenth century could be put at about 7% of the free population. About two-fifths of all households reported no assets whatsoever.

The burghers living near the Cape market produced wheat, wine and vegetables. Wheat had to be offered first to the Company at prices that it fixed. The Company also had first claim on vegetables and fruit. It leased the wine trade to a contractor, who had to supply wine to the Company at low prices. The contractor had a monopoly to sell wine to the numerous taverns in the port city, which meant that farmers could not sell their wine on the market. The sale of meat was leased in a similar way as a concession. With the burghers under instruction to sell their produce to ships only three days after they had docked in Table Bay, large-scale smuggling of all kinds of products was the order of the day.

So limited were the general prospects for the farming burghers that a visiting commissioner said in 1676 that the ‘Dutch colonists here bear the name of free men but they are so … restrained in everything that the absence of freedom is rendered only too evident’. He thought that if all the regulations were strictly adhered to, the burghers would be ruined. Governor Simon van der Stel wrote that the burghers were hard put to support themselves, ‘having, generally speaking, come hither empty-handed, and being obliged to take up on credit from the Company … which must press heavily on them before they can get rid of it’.

The free people living in the town around Table Bay had somewhat better opportunities. They kept boarding houses and frequently circumvented the restrictions on selling merchandise to passing sailors and on buying European goods. More than one senior Company official expressed the desire to rid the Cape of the ‘scum’ living in the town.

After three decades the Cape refreshment station started bursting at the seams. The Company now ordered the commander, Simon van der Stel, to expand it. In 1679 he established the town of Stellenbosch. By the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century the hamlets of Drakenstein (later called Paarl), Franschhoek, Wagenmakersvallei (Wellington), Swartland (Malmesbury) and the Land van Waveren (Tulbagh) had all sprung up. The district of Swellendam was established in 1745 and that of Graaff-Reinet in 1786.

In each district an official, called a landdrost, was made responsible for maintaining order. Assisted by four burghers, or heemraden, he formed a board that administered the district. They presided over minor judicial cases and settled disputes.

A respected burgher was appointed as field cornet in every ward of the district. His duty was to ensure that people remained informed of the government proclamations. If danger threatened or if livestock was stolen from the farmers, the field cornet could call up the burghers in his ward for commando duty. Larger commandos were raised under a commandant, who also happened to be a burgher. In this way the burghers took control of the administration and defence in the interior.

The driving force behind the expansion of the settlement into the interior was the trekboers. Though capital and labour were scarce, beyond the outskirts of Cape Town land was abundant. Moreover, the greater the distance from the market at the Cape, the more attractive it became to switch to extensive agriculture. Land suitable for arable farming was mostly used for grazing.

Early in the eighteenth century the government stopped trying to prevent burghers from settling beyond the first mountain ranges. It first issued grazing permits and then in 1714 extended the practice to what became known as the loan farm system. On the payment of an annual fee a landholder acquired exclusive control of a minimum of 6 000 acres of pastureland. Although the Company could revoke a loan farm, for example when the annual rent was not paid, it rarely did so. No statutory restrictions prevented non-Europeans from acquiring farms, but it became customary, in the course of the eighteenth century, that only people of mainly European descent, usually burghers, received loan farms.

As the burghers moved deeper into the interior, they developed a stronger sense of self-reliance and independence. Simon van der Stel had a premonition of what would happen. He wrote, ‘All of Africa would not be enough to suit and satisfy this class of people.’ Every son of a farmer wanted to have his own farm.

For the first three decades of the settlement, most of the immigrants were single Dutch males. Many had signed up with the Company as sailors or soldiers. A career on the lower rungs of the VOC was not a promising one. Few inhabitants of the Netherlands would enlist except out of dire necessity. The daily wage of a sailor or a soldier in Company employ was five times less than that received by a polder boy or a peat-cutter in the Netherlands.

In 1688 a party of some 180 French Huguenots arrived at the Cape, fleeing religious persecution. Over subsequent years a total of 250 settled here. Some had enjoyed prosperity before they fled. Jacques de Savoye was a prosperous trader; Josua Celliers, Jacques de la Porte and Isaac Taillefert were wine farmers; Jean Prieur du Plessis a physician; and Estienne Bruère a wagon-maker.

The Company hoped that some of the Huguenots who settled at the Cape would develop products for export. Earlier attempts to export olives failed because they were too small in size. Subsequently the Company turned its attention to silk. In 1726 it commissioned François Guillaumé, who hailed from Languedoc, where the silk industry flourished, to start a similar venture at the Cape. In the centre of Cape Town there is still a Spin Street, which commemorates the place where his ‘factory’ once stood. But this venture also failed. The Company, with its single-minded pursuit of profits, paid far too little to make it worthwhile for Guillaumé and other burghers to produce silk.

The Huguenots did much to stabilise the free burgher population. Without a fatherland to return to, they had to take root at the Cape or disappear. Religious persecution made them more determined to overcome obstacles. Descendants of the Huguenots were to establish positions of leadership in Afrikaner society in later centuries out of all proportion to the numbers of the original immigrants.

They also made a difference in another important respect. Previously the shortage of European women had prompted many men to take slaves as brides or mistresses. The Huguenots were generally already married, young as well as fecund. As the girls in these large families grew up and reached marriageable age, the tendency for men at the Cape to form stable liaisons with non-European women declined. By the early years of the eighteenth century a clear pattern of endogamy had become established among the burghers.

The French immigrants were allowed to establish their own congregation. In 1699 Drakenstein became the third congregation after Cape Town and Stellenbosch. Shortly thereafter, the Lords Seventeen ordered that measures be taken ‘to ensure the gradual disappearance of the French language’. By 1750 no one under the age of 40 was still able to speak French.

Apart from the Dutch and French immigrants, Germans added to the ranks of the free burghers. Most of them were single men who signed up with the VOC. OF Mentzel, who wrote about the Cape in the 1730s, described a typical German seeking employment as follows:

Poorly clad and without a penny to his name he arrived in Amsterdam. While waiting for the VOC to recruit soldiers or sailors, he would fall into the hands of a so-called sielerverkoper (‘seller-of-souls’). The latter would advance him some money to stay alive until he received his first wages. In some cases it took up to five years to repay. At the Cape he had to live frugally. He received 28 stivers per month in cash, and a