Kathleen Fitzgerald

Gengenbach/Osborne
January 13, 2006
Apartheid’s Afrikaner Roots
When the Nationalist Party won the election of 1948, the party leaders who gained

governance over South Africa were those who had an “alliance with the Afrikaner Party of N.C.

Havenga, which [were] essentially those who remained faithful to Hertzog’s legacy.”1 This

Nationalist win ushered in the beginning of a new legal age—that of apartheid (lawful

‘separateness’). The apartheid age was a time in which many violent actions and oppressive

laws were forced against black Africans.2 In order to truly understand the ruling class’s

motivation for enacting these violent legal measures during apartheid, it is necessary to first

comprehend the historical journey that brought the ruling party—the Afrikaners—to that point.3

By following the BoerAfrikanerNationalist struggles, it becomes clear that the racist

ideology which motivated Afrikaner hatred towards the black Africans had existed since the

seventeenth century. The forefathers of Hertzog’s Afrikaner radical ideology had always been

driven by their biblically-based belief in white supremacy and God’s destined (Manifest Destiny-

style) plan for his “Elect” people. But while these Afrikaner predecessors, the Boers, had never

hesitated to use violence or force against the black Africans, it was only after living under British

rule for over one hundred years that this soon-to-rule Dutch cohort truly understood the value of

legal subordination—that is, they recognized how the British (whose comprised a minority of

South Africa’s white population) had used laws to force the majority of dissenting whites (the

Afrikaners and their sympathizers) to submit to their imperialist, political desires. Thus, the

1
Ross, p. 114.
2
Brown, p. 32. The Immorality Act of 1950 provided “imprisonment and flogging for any sexual crossing of the
colour line, [and] produce[d] so many successful prosecutions a year.”
3
Although Hertzog had differed from the hard-liner Afrikaners when it came to issues such as entering World War II on
the Nazi side, most of the emotional and legal issues the entire cohort of Afrikaners experienced were similar. Neither
side really disagreed about the necessity and productivity of the apartheid system. Thus, such isolated differences are not
disruptive enough to constitute a discussion on the differences between the Hertzog-ian and more radical Afrikaners. The
purpose of this paper is not to give a detailed journey of the Afrikaner ideology, but to present the few defining Afrikaner
experiences that enabled them to even conceptualize a legal institution such as apartheid.

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Afrikaners realized they too could utilize a system of laws to subjugate the black majority of

South Africa to their plans.

Afrikaner frustration with these laws quickly turned to angry rage after the concentration

camp atrocities of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), from which the Afrikaner people took

horrific images and stories to support their claims against the ‘bullying’ British. These long-

standing feelings of persecution added to the base racist ideology that the Afrikaners had always

possessed. This anger and hatred mixed with their newfound appreciation of legal force to create

the perfect motivating palate for the 1948 Afrikaner-dominated South African government to

ratify a violent, legalized form of racial insubordination—a form of government known as

“apartheid.”

From the very beginning of Dutch colonization in South Africa, the Boer/Afrikaner

interpretation of the Bible led them to believe they were a part of God’s “Elect” or chosen

people, and as such, that God expected them to ensure His plan for their dominance at any cost.

By 1690, agricultural and political frustrations with the Cape rule drove settler farmers across the

mountains and onto land that was previously that of the Khoikhoi peoples.4 These Dutch farmers

immediately identified themselves with the Israelites, as both were distinctly identified as “God’s

people,” who suffered in the wilderness, but were actively guided through a history of hardships

by God.5 These Afrikaner predecessors “had confidence that they had a special mandate from

God to possess the land, and that God was protecting their faith as well as testing it.”6 For the

“Elect,” the first of these so-called “tests” had recently come in the form of the indigenous black

African.

4
Ross, p. 25.
5
Moodie, Intro., ix.
Templin, p. 7 Even much later, in Rev. Coenraad Spoelstra’s 1897 sermond, he says: “Brothers & Sisters, there are
repeated instances of the noteworthy similarities which exist between Israel’s history and the history of our land and
people.” Obviously this emotion continued to resonate amongst the Afrikaners for centuries.
6
Templin, p. 19

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 The black Khoikhoi peoples had first tested “God’s plan” by refusing to supply the Cape

colony with sufficient cattle in the earliest days of the Dutch colony. Within one decade of

settlement, it became clear “that even under duress the Khoikhoi were unable or unwilling to

supply the meat demanded by several thousand.”7 For the Dutch ancestors of the Afrikaner, this

was not only intolerable to them, it was also most unacceptable in the eyes of the Almighty.

After all, to them, the Bible seemed to support the white Elect’s claim that blacks should aid

God’s chosen people as a subservient labor force. The Dutch viewed their Elect status as a

guarantee that their culture would remain dominant in South Africa. 8 Since the black Africans

were obviously not a part of the chosen people’s culture—due to dissimilarities in skin color,

religion, etc.—then God must have intended for blacks to subserviently assist the “Elect” on their

journey towards fulfillment of His Will. Consequently, the Boers saw the black African as a Son

of Ham, “destined to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water for his white compatriot.”9 When

the black Khoikhoi, however, refused to satisfy this intended role, the more radical of the Boers

(who were also the predecessors of the Afrikaners) started to see the black Africans as a threat to

God’s plan and their very own way of life. “Because of the divine election of Afrikanerdom,

anything threatening [the] Afrikaner…became demonic.”10 Thus, the more radical members of

The Elect began to develop a fearful disdain for their unfriendly African neighbors.11

This disdain quickly manifested itself into anti-black violence. The VOC “frequently,

and with great brutality, would maintain the authority of the free over the [black] slaves.”12 And

later, after the Dutch Boers had forcibly stripped the Khoikhoi of their land in order to make

7
Ross, p. 22.
8
Templin, p. 9. Understanding themselves to be God’s Elect people caused them to see cultural destiny as one which
should dominate. Because black Africans did not possess the same European culture, it was obvious to the whites that the
blacks were not to dominate, according to God’s Will.
9
Moodie, p. 245.
10
Ibid., p. 15.
11
Ibid., p. 15. This disdain soon became fear of the black man and lasted for centuries. “Fear of the black man was ever-
present in Afrikaner consciousness.”
12
Ross, p. 23.

3
room for farms, the Khoikhoi retaliated by waging a guerilla war against the colonists, which

included raiding and burning farmland, driving off the boersmen’s cattle, and often driving the

herdsmen off their land.13 When this was done, however, the burgher militias known as

commandos responded even more violently with the genocidal practice of ‘extirpatation,’ which

they used secretly throughout the eighteenth century; this practice killed hundreds of San and led

to many children being taken as de facto slaves.14 Thus, even before the British imperial rule

began in 1806, the Dutch ancestors of the radical Afrikaners were already utilizing violent force

to ensure their God-given right to dominate the inferior black race.15 And “from the standpoint

of the Afrikaner Christian, all seem[ed] extremely logical, biblical, and thoroughly justified.”16

Their violence was not only justified—God indirectly necessitated it by instructing them to fulfill

His Will at any cost.17 For the most part, however, these Afrikaners had not really legalized their

racially repressive practices. They simply used brute force. In the modern world that arrived

two hundred plus years later, however, brute force would not have worked. If the Afrikaners

ever wanted South Africa to be seen by the western world as a civilized nation—and the

Afrikaners desperately wanted this to happen, they needed to formalize a legal manner of

enforcing God’s Will at any cost—however violent. And it was only after the British imperial

rule that the Afrikaners were able to model themselves after the Brits’ legal model in order to

utilize a smokescreen legal system that enforced their political agenda, without seeming too

arbitrarily violent.

To the highly independent Afrikaners, the 1806 British takeover threatened their God-

given gift of freedom—a God-given freedom, which the Afrikaners believed, “must be

13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Moodie, p. 247. For Afrikaners, there was no need to “argue white superiority—they assumed it.”
16
Templin, p. 296.
17
Templin, p. 7. “The reaction of the Afrikaners in the various cultural crises was colored by a prior assumption that they
could discern God’s Will and were in some sense chosen by God to maintain His culture in the face of all odds.”

4
maintained against [all] political intrigues.”18 Freedom to ensure the dominance of God’s

“Elect” had been on the Boer mind early on. During the first decades of the Colony, the Elect’s

“growing group consciousness” had caused them to fight with the Dutch VOC about their

rights.19 The first free burghers “thought they should have more rights concerning with whom

they could trade, the quality of animals they would receive from the Company, prices that were

established, and protection from the Khoikhoi.”20 They did not, however, see governmental

legislation as a course of change. Rather, in the mind of the Boersman, laws and freedom

seemed, at first, mutually exclusive. They “continually rejected governmental authority for the

sake of freedom.”21 On the frontier, the Boers dealt with the black Africans simply and with

force—stealing their grazing lands or enslaving the people themselves.22 “In neither case, among

the [early] Dutch, was there any sense either of establishing a colour bar.”23 In fact, among the

Boers, official “‘Race relations’ had not been invented in the seventeenth century.”24 This all

changed, however, once the British began ruling South Africa, guided by what many Boers

perceived as a “ ‘liberal’ [legal] policy…toward black Africans.”25

Afrikaners were worried about British rule from first day it began. In fact, “the first

thirty years of British occupation convinced the Boers that their basic ideology was being

challenged to the core by British ideas.”26 Within three years of gaining power in 1806, British

officials proceeded to pass laws which regulated the relationship between the Khoisan and their

Dutch employers.27 Even though these laws, known as The Caledon Codes, left the balance of

18
Templin, p. 290.
19
Templin, p. 19.
20
Templin, p. 19.
21
Templin, p. 87.
22
Ross, p. 22.
Brown, p. 36.
23
Brown, p. 36-37. Earliest Boers and their descendants merely “took people as [they] found them.”
24
Brown, p. 36.
25
Moodie, p.3.
26
Templin, p. 9.
27
Ross, p. 36.

5
power “heavily in favour of the employers,” the Dutch burghers in South Africa still viewed

them as a “ ‘foreign’ and even ‘repressive’ encroachment of the British empire.”28 And when the

Khoikhoi became partially protected by the law of 1809, the Boers became upset that the black

Africans “could [no longer] be exploited as the farmers might have wished,” and that “the British

law courts…were robbing them of needed laborers.”29

As the nineteenth century continued, British imperial mentality shifted even further away

from that of the Afrikaner, as ideas born during the Enlightenment period began to take deeper

European root. During this time, British imperialists grew increasingly concerned with equality,

the abolition of slavery, and philanthropy.30 In the spirit of that new mindset, a man by the name

of Dr. John Philip, who was aware of “the interest in philanthropy, abolition of slavery, and

humanitarian activities in England,” traveled throughout South Africa, documenting the troubles

of the oppressed Khoikhoi and convinced the Cape government to pass Ordinance No. 50 in

1828.31 “This law of 1828 ensured that Africans were persons with civil rights and human

rights,” by removing the legal disabilities of the free people of colour.32 But the Boers’ adamant

objection to that type of mindset had always been clear—“there was to be no equality between

black and white in any area where the Afrikaner had his say.”33 To them, social equality between

the races led to the direct mixing of black blood with white, which caused the subsequent

destruction of white Afrikaner culture, and ensured the ruin of God’s intention for the white

race.34 Thus, the “British imperial refusal to make [consistent] racial distinctions linked, in

Afrikaner minds, the English threat with that of the black masses.”35 Then, in 1832, the Boer
28
Ross, p. 36.
Templin, p. 6.
29
Templin, p. 81.
30
Templin, p. 83.
31
Templin, p. 83.
Ross, p. 37.
32
Templin, p. 83.
33
Moodie, p. 245.
34
Tatz, 1962, p. 76. As cited in Moodie p. 246.
35
Moodie, p. 15.

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frustration doubled when Britain outlawed throughout its empire.36 Not only were the Boers

frustrated that this measure stripped them of their God-given and necessary black servants, but

they grew even angrier at Britain’s failure to fulfill their promise of “full compensation” for the

Afrikaners.37 This Afrikaner perception of the “ ‘liberal’ policy of the British toward black

Africans seemed particularly designed to provoke the Afrikaners,” and led them to rebel “against

liberal nineteenth-century laws concerning equality.”38

Boers grew increasingly aware of the legal power the British had over them. No longer

could the frontiersmen enforce their violent, martial justice against the black Africans as they

had always done. For the first time, the radical Boers were subject to a law they could not bend.

It was a law written by a people, who were different from them, “not only in the concept of the

law and of the relation to the Africans, but differences appeared also in the religious faith.”39 At

this point, the radical Boers believed they had no way of escape other than to flee. Thus, within

four years of 1832’s slavery abolition, the Trekboers made their infamous Great Trek into the

“unknown wilderness of the North,” where “they could be free from British domination and deal

with the black Africans as they saw fit.” 40 The Afrikaner ancestors had finally understood the

power of the law will always defeat the power of the force. After all, the British minority of

36
Moodie, p. 5.
37
Moodie, p. 5.
38
Templin, p. 87.
Moodie, p. 3.
39
Templin, p. 86.
Ross, p. 38. Despite these burgeoning humanitarian ideals, the British still continued to treat the black Africans
inhumanely. “From 1811 onwards, the British army was used in conflicts on the eastern frontier…[they won] “by
reducing the amaXhosa to poverty, burning their fields and huts and driving off their cattle.” The British destroyed the
Xhosa “with callous brutality.” Therefore, the Afrikaners might also have looked back on this legislative hypocrisy with a
keen eye when they were attempting to make apartheid seem socially acceptable to the western world. They would then
establish apartheid to fulfill their personal religious desires. Brown, p. 121. “The law, indeed, in its workaday guise, has
very little majesty in South Africa, which must be the only highly developed country where the administration of ordinary
justice is mixed up with petty administration.”
40
Reitz, 1900, p. 92-93, as cited on Moodie, p. 5.
Ross, p. 39-40. The destruction of farm lands caused by the British Eastern Frontier Wars with the amaXhosa from 1834-
35, combined with the Boer displeasure with British legal policy (notably Ordinance 50), led to the Great Trek of the
people now known as Afrikaners.
Moodie, p. 7.

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whites had been able to bend the Afrikaner white majority to their will.41 Eventually, the

Afrikaners would show they had learned their legal lesson as they established apartheid laws that

subjugated the black South African majority to the political ideals of their white Afrikaner

minority.42

The Afrikaners’ view toward legal politics continued to shift throughout the remainder of

the nineteenth century. By the end of the Afrikaner ideological progression, they had come to

view politics and legislation as a means by which they could regain their power and

independence.43 As time wore on, the Afrikaners began to release harbingers of what was to

come in 1948. When a 1905 court decision gave black Africans the right to buy land in their

own name on the Transvaal and informed the share-cropper that he was “to look on the

landowner as his equal, not as his master, [the radical whites saw this as] a dangerous subversion

of the hierarchies which the whites propagated.”44 But the Afrikaner had taken the British legal

example to heart and following this court precedent, the agrarian Afrikaners put up a bit of a

counter-revolution and got the Natives (now Black) Land Act of 1913 passed, which made a

clear distinction between African reserves and white farming areas.45 The Afrikaners had

obviously learned the power of laws and were now using them to promote their cultural and

political doctrines.

At this point, the Afrikaners possessed the a powder keg of theological motivation and

legal awareness—all they needed now was an angry match to unite more people to the Afrikaner

cause and incite them to burn for apartheid.

41
Ross, p. 81. There was never going to be a British majority…even among whites.
GET more POPULATION STATISTICS FOR MID-1800S WHITE SOUTH AFRICA!!
42
Brown, p. 9.
In 1966 South Africa, there were three-and-a-half million whites dominating 13.5 million darker people.
43
Patterson, p. 73.
44
Ross, p. 88.
45
Ross, p. 88.

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 That metaphorical match would arrive in the form of the British concentration camps

used during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). In many ways, the Afrikaner society had retained

its seventeenth-century character until after the Boer War.46 The Trekboers had fled British legal

persecution decades earlier and found solace in two independent republics—the Orange Free

State and the Transvaal respectively.47 With “a steady increase in the demands made by the

British Empire,” however, Kruger had to make a decision whether to dissolve the Transvaal

state, as they had known it, or to choose war with Britain; together with the Orange Free State,

the Transvaal chose war. 48 What followed would serve to be a unifying horror that later helped

unite even more to the Afrikaner Nationalist cause. During the three years of war, the British

would burn the farmlands and implement concentration camps to hold the fleeing Boer women

and children captured during the war.49 But these camps were not humanitarian cites one might

expect from the Enlightened British. The concentration camps were poorly organized and run,

with little food and few hygienic measures in place. Thus, the Boers, whose previous isolation

from the diseases of the Cape had lowered their immunities, began to contract typhoid, enteric,

and measles that ravaged through the compact camps.50 More than 26,000 women and children

died in the concentration camps, following the Anglo-Boer War; “the child mortality in some

camps would have been sufficient if continued to ensure the extinction of the entire child

population.”51 These camps created fierce hostility and bitterness among the women and

children of that generation.52 It was said that, “when every other memory of the war will have

46
Templin, p. 9.
47
Ross, p. 72.
48
Ross, p. 72.
49
Patterson, p. 33-34. “The women and children and the farm servants whose homes were thus destroyed were hurriedly
concentrated into canvas camps, mainly against their will.” “Despite the protests…[the British] applied a scorched-earth
policy so indiscriminately that by the end of the war hardly a farmhouse was left standing, while crops were destroyed and
stock driven away or slaughtered.”
50
Patterson, p. 34.
51
Patterson, p. 34. The fact that camp conditions were slowly improved by British humanitarians such as Emily Hobhouse
did not have as great an emotional impact on the Afrikaner identity. Like any people who experience such human horror,
the memory of the tragedy overwhelms any other ameliorating factors.
52
Patterson, p. 35.

9
faded away, the nightmare shadows of the camps will still remain.”53 This turning point changed

Afrikaner society from one that had been in a “process of development and adaptation” before

the war, to one which “solidified so much of the tradition and many ideas the people had about

their society.”54 When Sheila Patterson wrote her book, “The Last Trek” in 1957, she said:

The concentration camps were nevertheless to become the ultimate

indictment against Britain. It is an indictment which persists to this day, in a form
which permits national-minded Afrikaners who have experienced neither at first-
hand to compare Heilbron and Vredefort with Belsen and Dachau.”55

The Boers saw their loss to the British merely as a test from God rather than a total

defeat.56 “The South African War, especially, ‘taught the Afrikaners that they were a people.’”57

It was now a holy war for the Elect. And although Union came one decade later, “bitter

memories of the recent struggles between Boer republicans and British imperialists throughout

the last quarter of the nineteenth century were still fresh in the minds of many persons.”58 With a

strong feeling of theological interpretation of these events remaining with “nationalist policy a

half-century later,” it should be no surprise the politicians of the Nationalist party used the

history of Afrikaner oppression by Britain during the Boer War concentration camps to “foist

upon South Africa a policy of oppression, racial hatred, bigotry and intolerance.”59 At the time,

Besembos, the student journal at Potchefstroom University, wrote, “That brutality…cries out to

heaven. The mark is too deeply branded into our heart; it is too close to our heart ever to

forget…” Fifty years later, that branding continued to bleed so much hatred and resentment that

the Afrikaner Nationalists were able to channel their peoples’ emotions into persecution of God’s

continuous test—the black African.

53
Patterson, p. 35.
54
Templin, p. 10.
55
Patterson, p. 35.
56
Templin, p. 296.
57
Eric A. Walker, A History of Southern Africa (London: Longmans, Green, 1962), p. 513. As cited in Stultz, p. 9.
58
Stultz, p. 1.
59
Patterson, p. 36.

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 “Long before the Nationalists came to power in 1948, the essentials of apartheid were in

full force in South Africa.”60 Racism, religion, laws, and anger had combined by the early

twentieth century to form a lit fuse. It was only a matter of time before new sources of Afrikaner

resentment would overwhelm the fuse and lead to an explosion.61 While the Afrikaner ideology

gave them a foundation for their racially-driven ideas, the British supplied them with enough of a

unifying persecution complex and enough respect for laws that the Afrikaners were then able to

turn their racist beliefs into an oppressive system of laws, reactionary, persecuting, and violent in

its nature.

60
Brown, p. 40.
61
Moodie, p. 37. WWI and WWII political entry continued to incite Afrikaner feelings of resentment toward the
ruling powers. They were still frustrated by the fact they could not enter the war on the side that they wanted to
support—the side they felt God wanted them to support. Furthermore, their religious feelings regarding blacks and
Afrikaner election had not changed, nor had their residual anger from the Boer War persecution. Thus, nothing new
really incited them between 1902 and 1948. The seeds necessary for apartheid were already in place by that time.

11