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The Afrikaner and South Africa
By David J. Bosch

"The religious roots of Afrikaner nationalism … can be traced back … to the influences of Reformed evangelicalism, Kuyperian Calvinism, and Romantic nationalism….As of last year, however, the entire scene has changed fundamentally and permanently….What we see unfolding has the makings of a classical Greek tragedy. "

IT is often true that those who believe themselves to be the makers of history easily and frequently fall victim to their own past and become prisoners of their own history. In this respect, Afrikaners are by no means unique. In their case, the forces of history were so overwhelming and they themselves so puny in the face of those forces that the outcome of this crucible could not but be more dramatic than it was elsewhere. In saying this, I am not trying to absolve the Afrikaner; I am only suggesting that all of us are at the same time shapers and victims of history and that, in a given context, the one element rather than the other may predominate. In classic Greek tragedy, the actors are both subjects of the events that take place and pawns on a chessboard. They are free to act and, yet again, not free to do so.

The outside world frequently has only one explanation for the Afrikaner's life- and world-view and the policy of racial discrimination, namely, Calvinism. It is because they were Calvinists, so the argument goes, that Afrikaners, ever since the founding of a Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, have regarded themselves as a race apart, a specially chosen people, a latter-day Israel, sent by God to subdue Africa's original inhabitants and to transform the wilderness into a garden. They were, to quote the title of a well-known popular book on the subject, The Puritans in Africa.¹ Dutch and French Calvinists, so the theory has it, emigrated to South Africa before the major Calvinist tradition in Europe had relapsed into scholasticism or had begun to adjust to the changing intellectual and social world of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The "primitive Calvinism" of the early Dutch settlers at the Cape was transmitted essentially unchanged

David J. Bosch is Professor of Missiology and Dean, the University of South Africa, Pretoria. He is an ordained minister of the Dutch Reformed Church and holds the doctorate from the University of Basel. Dr. Bosch has been national chairman of the South Africa Christian Leadership Assembly (SACLA), and he is the author of Witness to the World (1980) and The Lord's Prayer: Paradigm for a Christian Lifestyle (1985).

¹ W.A. de Klerk, The Puritans in Africa (London, 1975).

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to successive generations. Its most basic tenet was the Calvinist notion of predestination with its concomitant concept of the elect.²

The first person to have suggested that Calvinism was the key to understanding the Afrikaner was, significantly, not somebody from. within their own ranks but the famous missionary-traveller David. Livingstone.³ From 1849 onwards, he was putting forward, in ever clearer terms, the theory that it was the Afrikaners' Calvinism that had. shaped their thinking and policies, particularly toward Blacks. He attacked the Dutch Reformed Church as the ideological fountainhead of.' persistent injustice to Blacks throughout the entire course of Afrikaner history. Since Livingstone, this hypothesis became almost universally accepted as the explanation of the Afrikaner's mentality and actions, first in English liberal circles and subsequently by virtually all nonAfrikaner students of Afrikanerdom.

It is one of the ironies of history that, from the late nineteenth century, Afrikaners themselves began to propound the so-called "Calvinist paradigm" as the key to the understanding of their history. But the Afrikaner version of the "Calvinist paradigm'' included an important modification. Whereas English liberal scholars regarded Calvinism as the ogre responsible for the Afrikaners' idea of racial superiority and their policy of subduing Black tribes and oppressing them, Afrikaner scholars of the late nineteenth and twentieth century understood their ancestors as having regarded themselves as God's chosen people who had the duty to subdue the Black tribes in order to civilize and uplift them. Thus, both friend and foe agreed that it was Calvinism that shaped Afrikanerdom; the one, however, wished to prove how bad Calvinism was, the other how good it was.

I

A handful of modern scholars have once again gone through the early records with a fine-tooth comb. The result of this research is an almost. total rejection of the "Calvinist paradigm" as explanation of early Afrikaner history and thinking. Two points can be identified in this respect.

First, it is becoming ever clearer that the parallel with the Puritans has little, if any, substance to it. In New England, no fewer than 130 university graduates, ninety-two of them ministers, were among the Puritans arriving in America before 1640.⁴ This highly educated group ensured vigorous theological and intellectual activity in seventeenth century Massachusetts and Connecticut, something that was totally absent in the Cape Colony which started as a refreshment post for ships

² Cf. also Andre du Toit, "No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of' Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology," The American Historical Review 88:4 (Oct. 1983), pp. 920-8.
³ For a summary of Livingstone's views on the Afrikaners, cf. Du Toit, op. cit., pp. 939-47.
⁴ W.S. Hudson (ed.), Nationalism and Religion in America (New York, 1970), p. 3, quoted in Andre du Toit, Puritans in Africa.? Unpublished paper, n.d., p. 4.

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bound for the East Indies. Relatively little intellectual activity was in evidence, the rudimentary ministrations of the few early clergymen left no recognizable theological impact, and the farmers in the outlying districts lived in almost total isolation from the already limited intellectual and social activities at the Cape itself.

Most of the early Afrikaners were unsophisticated and, in fact, barely literate. The Bible was often the only book they had, and they tended to interpret it literally, not only as the revealed word of God but also as the final source of all knowledge. These characteristics they shared, of course, with virtually all religious communities of simple people. Religious fundamentalism is, however, not the same as Calvinism. Neither did the fact that they all belonged to the Reformed Church automatically make them Calvinists. For more than a century and a half, all ministers came from Holland, but only very few could be regarded as classical Calvinists. Several of them had been influenced by the Dutch "Second Reformation" and by English and Scottish evangelicalism. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the impact of Reformed pietism at the Cape was undoubtedly greater than that of original Calvinism, particularly because of the ministry of H.R. van Lier and M.C. Vos.

Contemporary records concur with this observation. Until approximately 1870, more than two centuries after the founding of the Dutch settlement at the Cape, there is no direct evidence of the Afrikaners themselves appealing to their Calvinist beliefs as explanation or justification for their peculiar way of life. Where a link is seen, this is made without exception by outside observers who simply, on the basis of the fact that all Afrikaners were members of the Dutch Reformed Church and had applied the Bible to their own situation by means of a literal interpretation, deduced that Afrikaner political and societal attitudes and acts were to be ascribed to Calvinism.

This leads me to a second observation. Livingstone's view that early Afrikaners regarded themselves as a chosen people with a manifest destiny reveals more about Livingstone than about the Afrikaners. He and many other British colonial and missionary figures of this period were imbued with the belief that Britain had a divinely ordained civilizing mission in Africa and Asia. Victorians, as Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher put it, were "suffused with a vivid sense of superiority and self-righteousness, if with every good intention."⁵ Livingstone was no exception. He believed, however, that Afrikaner settlers in the interior of southern Africa had no right to such divine claims and so, after first having imputed to them the general Western notion of manifest destiny, he immediately proceeded to reject the legitimacy and validity of such a notion among Afrikaners.

⁵ Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of imperialism in the Dark Continent (London, 1961), pp. 2-3, quoted in Du Toit, "No Chosen People," P. 939.

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The fact is that Afrikaners during the first two centuries of settlement in southern Africa were, on the whole, Calvinists only in name, had no sense of manifest destiny, but were, by and large, unsophisticated folk. who reacted to the challenges of their context in an ad hoc manner and by means of a very literalist interpretation of the Bible. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, the situation began to change fundamentally.

II

In 1806, the budding Afrikaner nation was cut off from its mother country, Holland, not as was the case with Americans through a War of Independence which happened to be successful, but rather by means of exchanging a rather inefficient distant Dutch master for a much more efficient, yet totally alien, British one. This happened roughly in the same period that armed clashes with the Xhosa on the eastern frontier became more frequent. The Afrikaner settlers soon found themselves caught in a pincer between an alien and unsympathetic administration, bent on Anglicizing them, and the advances of the numerically vastly superior Black armies.

Many Afrikaners chose to attempt escaping from the pincer by trekking north, crossing the Orange River, and establishing the three northern republics of Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal. Time and again, however, their efforts at political self-determination were thwarted as the British annexed or conquered one newly acquired Afrikaner territory after the other: Natal (1842), Basutoland (1868), Griqualand West and the Kimberley diamond fields (1871), and the Transvaal (1877). In the First War of Independence (1880-1), the Transvaal was victorious, only to succumb, with the Orange Free State, during the Anglo-Boer War, twenty years later (1899-1902). The Afrikaners' situation was, in fact, always tenuous, to put it mildly, not only with respect to the steady encroachments of Britain, but also as regards their being vastly outnumbered by Blacks in their new republics.

Once again, reference to American history may be helpful to illustrate the differences. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, and eastern Indian tribes were directed to the vast Central Plains area. In the course of the next seventy years, scores of Indian tribes were relocated. They came from Florida and Georgia, from New England, from Michigan and Wisconsin, from Idaho and Oregon, from Texas and New Mexico. The Central Plains were not, however, destined to be a permanent sanctuary for the Indians, since year after year thousands upon thousands of whites were still pouring across the Mississippi. By mid-century, as many as 55,000 westward trekkers a year were breaching the Indian frontier. Treaties signed, treaties broken, more treaties signed-these were the legal weapons used to appropriate Indian lands and confine tribes to shrinking areas. The creation of the Oklahoma Territory in 1890 shrank Indian territory

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by about fifty percent.⁶ The white migrants and settlers never really doubted the outcome of the clash with the Indians; they were superior in numbers, in skills, in weapons, in sophistication, and in determination.

The scene in the interior of southern Africa was vastly different. At a time when 55,000 whites per year were crossing the Mississippi, the total Afrikaner population of the two remaining republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, then about twenty years of age, was still much less than 55,000, and they were vastly outnumbered by Blacks within their borders and much more so beyond them. Once again, Afrikaners were caught in a pincer: the encroaching British in the south and the Zulu, the Ndebele, the Shangaan, the Pedi, and the Tswana to the east and to the north. In these circumstances, Afrikaners found their identity and security, in a literal and figurative sense, in the laager, where their ox-wagons, drawn into a circle, would protect them against the outside world.

This laager mentality was immensely strengthened by the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) in which the remaining Afrikaner republics lost their independence. Hertz is correct when he says that "more than anything else, it is common grief that binds a nation together, more than triumphs."⁷ For Britain, the war was no more than a passing episode; for Afrikaners, who lost eight times as many women and children in the concentration camps as soldiers on the battlefield, this was the most crucial event in their history, the matrix out of which a new people was born. Immediately after the war, Lord Milner embarked on a vigorous policy of Anglicization and forthwith banned the use of the Dutch language from all schools. After having lost their political freedom on the battlefield, Afrikaners were now to lose their identity as well. In this, the Afrikaner's darkest hour, it was above all the Afrikaans churches that rallied to the people's aid. Church and people became virtually indistinguishable.

In the burgeoning civil religion of the post-war period, the young Afrikaans language was utilized to foster Afrikaner sentiments. Poets, particularly Totius (J.D. du Toit), had an enormous influence. In one of his poems, "Vergewe en vergeet" ("Forgive and forget"), he compared the Afrikaner with a small thorn tree which had been trampled down by a large ox-wagon, symbolizing Britain. The tree slowly stood up again, and healed its wounds with the ointment of its own resin. In another poem, Totius selected a semi-desert weed, the hardy and resilient besembos, and made it a symbol of the Afrikaner people. The besembos flourishes where most other and stronger plants die, Even if you burn it down, it sprouts forth anew and flourishes as before. These and other poems became a lens through which Afrikaners looked upon their past. They conveyed to generations of Afrikaners the notion that they were

⁶ Information gleaned from Central Plains (map nine in a series of seventeen on the Making of America), Supplement to the Sept. 1985 edition of National Geographic Magazine.
⁷ F. Hertz, Nationality in History and Politics (London, 1957), p. 12.

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there to stay, that they were irrevocably part and parcel of the soil of Africa, of the veld and the mountains and the rivers, and that no earthly force would ever succeed in subduing them, let alone routing them.

Since the Anglo-Boer War, eighty years ago, this sentiment has, on the whole, grown in strength. For many decades, the National Party and the Dutch Reformed Churches were seen as jointly responsible for keeping the laager intact, buttressing the weak spots and keeping up the morale of the people. After the National Party came to power in 1948, the entire legislative machinery was harnessed with this one purpose in mind, namely, to safeguard Afrikaner identity once and for all so that it would never again be exposed defenselessly to the onslaughts of the outside world.

This then, very briefly, is the historical matrix out of which the Afrikaner people emerged. A small white tribe, in the extreme southern tip of a vast Black continent, cut off from the mother country almost two centuries ago, threatened with extinction from two sides, they were determined to maintain and defend their identity. This historical reality in the course of time coalesced with what may be called "forces of the spirit" to shape the contemporary Afrikaner. Let us draw attention to three of these forces.

III

The first and oldest of these spiritual forces is Reformed evangelicalism. During the latter part of the eighteenth century, a few Dutch pastors who had been deeply influenced by the Dutch "Second Reformation" and the evangelical awakenings in the British Isles served at the Cape. The two best-known were H.R. van Lier and M.C. Vos. Through their ministry, an indelible stamp of evangelicalism was put on the Dutch Reformed Church. In the course of the nineteenth century, this trait was immensely strengthened by the arrival at the Cape of Scottish Presbyterian ministers who, incidentally, at one stage outnumbered those of Dutch descent. The most famous person to come out of this group was Andrew Murray, Jr., whose pastoral career spanned an almost incredible sixty-nine years (1848-1917).

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, this broad and rather amorphous evangelical tradition comprised, generally speaking, three groups:

(1) A small, more pietistic and revivalistic group who were inclined to other-worldliness and eschewed politics altogether.

(2) During the period of the awakening of Afrikaner nationalism, particularly after the Anglo-Boer War, the idea of a volkskerk (church of the people; national or ethnic church) gradually took root. The volkskerk idea took concrete shape in the church's concern for the plight of the Afrikaner after the war. In this group, the church's concern for people's social and political plight was, on the whole, limited to the Afrikaner.

(3) A third group kept alive the missionary spirit of the eighteenth century awakening. They knew that it was impossible to be concerned with the spiritual needs of Blacks without at the same time getting involved in their very real bodily and social needs. The scores of Dutch Reformed Church

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missionaries who went to Malawi, Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, as well as those who worked within the borders of South Africa, virtually all came out of this third group. In the course of time, it was out of this group that the first voices of protest against Afrikaner politics came.⁸

IV

The second major religious force to shape Afrikaner civil religion was Kuyperian neo-Calvinism. When Abraham Kuyper and his supporters used the slogan, "In isolation lies our strength," their intention was to rally the small, scattered forces of authentic Calvinism in Holland, unite these, and spread their message throughout the Dutch nation. The slogan thus propagated isolation for the sake of mission; it aimed at winning the Dutch people back to original Calvinism. In fact, Kuyper was so imbued with missionary zeal for Calvinism that racial differences presented no problem to him. In his Stone Lectures, delivered at Princeton Seminary in 1898, he argued that

the commingling of blood [was] the physical basis of all higher human development…. Groups which by comingling have crossed their traits with those of other tribes … have attained a higher perfection. It is noteworthy that the process of human development steadily proceeds with those groups whose historic characteristic is not isolation but the comingling of blood … [sometimes] of very different tribes…. The history of our race does not aim at the improvement of any single tribe, but at the development of mankind taken as a whole, and therefore needs this comingling of blood in order to attain its end. Now in fact history shows that the nations among whom Calvinism flourished most widely exhibit in every way this same mingling of races.⁹

Kuyper's concern was for a militant expansionist Calvinism. On South African soil, particularly after the Anglo-Boer War, Kuyper's ideals were adapted to local circumstances. As they blended with the existing socio-political realities, they underwent significant mutations. The very survival of Afrikanerdom was at stake during those years. Thus, the slogan, "In isolation lies our strength," was not understood, as it was in Holland, in terms of isolation-for-mission, but in terms of isolation-for-survival. For the first time in South African history, one now encountered sustained theological (or ideological) arguments according to which Afrikaners should neither fraternize with foreigners nor break down the walls of racial separation instituted by God. Like Israel, the Afrikaner's salvation lay in racial purity and separate schools and churches. One of the first proposals for a thorough-going political and social segregation was put forward by a Kuyperian pastor, the Rev. W.J. Postma, in 1907. His suggestion was to "give the Black nations a piece of ground where they can establish their own schools, churches, prisons, parliaments, universities. If we go there, we must not ask to own

⁸ Cf. J.J.F. Durand, "Afrikaner Piety and Dissent," in Charles Villa-Vicencio and John W. de Gruchy (eds.), Resistance and Hope: South African Essays in Honor of Beyers Naude (Cape Town and Grand Rapids, 1985), pp. 42-5.
⁹ A. Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, 1961), pp. 35-6.

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ground or vote... If they come here to work, they must not play tennis."¹⁰

In this way, Calvinism indeed became the basis of an ideology that was used to keep Afrikaners apart from other people, but it was Kuyperian neo-Calvinism, and it came only at the dawn of the twentieth century. During the ensuing decades, it would grow steadily, both in strength and in sophistication. It gradually began to overshadow the older evangelical tradition, which tended to be much more pragmatic and less likely to justify its actions by an appeal to unchanging biblical principles. "It became increasingly difficult for any Afrikaner theologian openly to oppose the Kuyperian system in its South African version. Opposition to it could not only be misconstrued as treason to the Afrikaner cause, but also as an indication of theological unreliability and as a threat to the Reformed tradition as such."¹¹

V

The hope of any fundamental theological change disappeared almost completely when, during the 1930s, Kuyperian neo-Calvinism and the volkskerk current in Afrikaner evangelicalism blended with a third religio-ideological force, namely Romantic nationalism. Romantic nationalist ideas were disseminated in South Africa by young Afrikaners who had studied in Germany in the 1930s. Several of them rose to prominence and dominated the political and cultural scene from the 1950s to the 1970s. One of these was Dr. H.F. Verwoerd, who was to become the great theorist of "separate development" and Prime Minister in the 1950s and '60s. Another was Dr. Piet Meyer, for many years chairman of the Afrikaner Broederbond and head of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, the man who shaped and moulded that organization into what it is today. A third person was Dr. N.J. Diederichs, who later served as cabinet minister and also as state president. Yet another was Dr. Geoff Cronje, sociologist, who, in 1945, published his 'n Tuiste vir die nageslag (A Home for Posterity), which became the object of intense study and discussion in Afrikaner circles. This book was dedicated to Cronje's wife "and all other Afrikaner mothers, because they are the protectors of the purity of blood of the Boer nation."

In December 1941, Meyer read a paper, entitled "Die vooraand van ons vrywording" (The Eve of our Liberation), at an Afrikaner national youth congress. His definition of a Calvinist-Christian view of life (which he labelled "Krugerism") was clearly influenced by contemporary events in Germany. The organic national community is seen as a pyramidical structure with the leaders at the top who have acquired that position because of their charisma and drive. At the very top, we have the "natural leader of the people, called by God and endowed with the

¹⁰ Quoted by Irving Hexharn, The Irony of Apartheid (1981), p. 180.
¹¹ Durand, op. cit., p. 41.

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necessary authority to rule the people according to God's will."¹² The leader called by God is apparently not elected by the people but only "confirmed" by them, since his authority is "organic."¹³ Political groupings who oppose the implementation of the national calling cannot be allowed to operate.¹⁴ The battle now (1941) raging in Europe was a battle for rejuvenation, between the emerging organic national idea and the liberal individualism of the, previous century. The gist of the national idea is the view that the people is an organic community of soil, blood, language, culture, state, tradition, world-view, and destiny. This movement of the people (volk) has found its purest and most powerful manifestation, first, in Italian Fascism and, then, in German National Socialism.¹⁵ Since the victory of the latter is imminent, Afrikaners find themselves on "the eve of our liberation." Thus, the title of the paper becomes transparent.¹⁶

In 1936, Nico Diederichs, then Professor of Philosophy in Bloemfontein, published his Nasionalisme as Lewensbeskouing. Only in the nation, as the most total comprehensive human community, he noted, can the individual find true fulfillment.¹⁷ A nation is first and foremost a unity of love; love of what is eternal and super-temporal.¹⁸ It permeates everything and embraces the whole person. It is the most complete community imaginable. A person is first of all a member of the nation. Love for one's nation is the highest and most sublime love one can experience in the earthly realm, but only if it forms part of one's love to God. Service to nation is part of service to God, for love of nation is part of love to God.¹⁹

In an illuminating paragraph, Diederichs-and we should remember that this was written when Hitler was dictator in Germany-redefines democracy.²⁰ The number of individual votes supporting a specific policy does not matter, he says. A democratic government is not one which enjoys numerically superior support, but one that is representative of the values, ideals, and principles of the nation; in other words, a government that mirrors the "totality of the nation." A national democratic government may consist of one person, or of several; he or they may be elected or self-appointed. The essential criterion is simply whether he or they truly represent the total essence of the nation as spiritual unity. The

¹² P.J. Meyer, Die vooraand van ons vrywording (Potchefstroom, 1941), p. 25 (my translation).
¹³ Ibid., p. 25.
¹⁴ Ibid.,pp. 25-6.
¹⁵ Ibid., p. 30.
¹⁶ A year later, Meyer read a paper at the annual congress of the Afrikaanse Nasionale Studentebond in Pretoria, where he developed his ideas in more detail. Cf. "Die toekomstige ordening van die volksbeweging in Suid-Afrika," Wapenskou 3:3 (Sept. 1942), pp. 28-37, 50--3.
¹⁷ N.J. Diederichs, Nasionalisme as lewensbeskouing (Bloemfontein: Nasionale Pers, 1936), p. 18.
¹⁸ Ibid., p. 37.
¹⁹ Ibid., p. 63.
²⁰ Ibid., pp. 55-7.

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similarities between what Diederichs says and what Meyer was to say five years later are striking indeed.

This general climate became the springboard for the creation of the Ossewa-Brandwag and related movements (such as Oswald Pirow's "Nuwe Orde" and the anti-Semitic "Gryshemde"). In addition, Afrikaner nationalism was invigorated tremendously by the Simboliese Ossewatrek (Symbolic Oxwagon Trek) of 1938.

Less than a year after the Symbolic Oxwagon Trek, South Africa was involved in a war with Germany-a war in which the sympathy of the majority of Afrikaners was with Germany rather than with Britain. The secret semi-military Ossewa-Brandwag aimed at the establishment of a South Africa under exclusive Afrikaner rule. As early as 1934, the Broederbond made it clear in a circular to its members that the ultimate aim of the Afrikaner was to rule South Africa. As long ago as 1881-during the First War of Independence-Jorissen wrote: "Let it be from the Zambesi to Simons Bay: Africa for the Afrikaner!" These were also the words with which Eene eeuw van onrecht concluded, and the phrase was again taken up by P.J. Meyer in his 1941 paper.²¹ The Ossewa-Brandwag, which at one stage had a membership of over 200,000, was prepared to work for this ideal with all means at its disposal. Only one nation could be recognized in a state, and the state had to be the vehicle of that nation's personality. In South Africa, that nation was the Afrikaner, who claimed a birthright and with whom the English could not expect to be treated on an equal footing. The English had to relinquish their separate existence as a national group and be assimilated with the Afrikaner nation or else emigrate.²² Nobody even bothered to argue that the Blacks had no stake in South Africa; this was simply taken for granted.

The excesses of the Ossewa-Brandwag brought it in confrontation with the National Party, under the strong leadership of Dr. D.F. Malan. A bitter struggle ensued until the Ossewa-Brandwag was suppressed in 1944. Despite war-time charges, neither Malan or J.G. Strijdom were Nazi in belief, though staunch segregationists. Details of Malan's successful under-cover fight against Nazism inside Afrikaner nationalism only came to light in the 1960s. Many Afrikaners, however, definitely cherished Nazi ideals and sentiments.

Quite apart from the complicated issue of overt or covert Nazi sympathies, it is beyond doubt that Romantic nationalism made deep inroads into Afrikaner thinking. In the 1930s and 1940s, the conviction grew that the ethnic purity of a nation had a metaphysical base. It was, therefore, divinely ordained and commanded. It is in this kind of thinking that the religious roots of the law prohibiting inter-racial

²¹ Cf. Meyer, op cit., p. 37.
²² Refernces in H. Giliomee, "The Development of the Afrikaner's Self-Concept,"in H.W. van der Merwe (ed.), Looking at the Afrikaner Today (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1975), p. 25.

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marriage are to be found. A.P. Treurnicht proudly recalls that the petition presented to Parliament in 1939 pleading for segregation between white and Black and for the prohibition of mixed marriages was the one with the largest number of signatures ever-almost a quarter of a million. He adds: "And at the head of the petitioners was a man of the church, Vader Kestell."²³ It was, once again, representatives of the Afrikaans Reformed churches who, in the 1940s, petitioned, first, the Smuts government and, then, the Malan government with requests that such a law be introduced. It was, in fact, one of the very first laws to be promulgated by the Nationalist government after it came to power in 1948.

VI

The religious roots of Afrikaner nationalism, as it reached maturity in the 1940s and 1950s, can be traced back, as we have seen, to the influences of Reformed evangelicalism, Kuyperian Calvinism, and Romatic nationalism. It is, indeed, a curious blend of all three of these, having gleaned from each what best suited the peculiar situation of the Afrikaner.

Since the beginning of the 1960s, however, the monolith slowly began to crack and break up. To some extent, this came because of the growing awareness of the domestic and international situation, as Afrikaners slowly became conscious of the reality of the winds of change blowing over Africa. Another reason for the breaking up of the monolith was a theological awakening that began to manifest itself among a younger generation of Afrikaners. Most of these came from the Reformed evangelical wing of the Dutch Reformed Church, and many of them were working in and with the Black church. The majority of them were, in addition, influenced by the theology of Karl Barth. Since the early 1960s, Dr. Beyers Naude currently General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches after having been banned for seven years, became the undisputed symbol of theological dissidence in the circles of the Dutch Reformed Church. But there were many others, besides Naude who had been challenging the theological support for apartheid since the 1950s, and even earlier.²⁴

These voices were, however, not heeded. During the 1960s, in particular, virtually every voice of protest, whether in church or in politics, in the ecclesiastical or the secular press, was quashed. Those who nevertheless did speak out were ostracized. In the wake of the Cottesloe Consultations (Dec. 1960), the Dutch Reformed Church (Cape Province and Transvaal) terminated its membership in the World Council of Churches and increasingly isolated itself from other South African churches. Beyers Naude founded the Christian Institute and

²³ A.P. Treurnicht, Credo van 'n Afrikaner (Cape Town, 1975), p. 78.
²⁴ The two first theologians who have, since the 1940s, been criticizing the Nationalist paradigm were Prof. B.B. Keet (Stellenbosch) and Prof. B.J. Marais (Pretoria).

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became its first full-time director, a step which cost him his status as minister. When, soon after this, he was elected elder in the Parkhurst congregation, the Presbytery of Johannesburg declared the election null and void, arguing that Naude, in accepting the directorship of the Christian Institute, had "disobeyed the guidance of the Bree Moderatuur" (Moderators of the General Synod). The 1966 General Synod, with one dissenting voice, condemned the Christian Institute as representing false doctrine and ordered all Dutch Reformed Church members and officials to resign from it. Henceforth, only official National Party policy and official church views would be tolerated.

During the 1970s, the climate began to change somewhat. It again became possible-though still only in a limited way-to propagate alternative political and ecclesiastical paradigms in Afrikaner circles. Meanwhile, frustration in the Black community had reached breaking point. On June 16, 1976, Soweto erupted in violence which soon spread across the whole country. Just over a year later (Sept. 12, 1977), Steve Biko, the father of the Black Consciousness Movement, died in detention, after having been kept in police cells naked and manacled for weeks. When the Minister of Police was confronted with this in Parliament, his reaction was: "Steve Biko's death leaves me cold." A few weeks later (Oct. 19, 1977), several organizations, including the Christian Institute, were banned, many people arrested, and others served banning orders. Violence continued to erupt in the Black townships but was, on the whole, quelled reasonably effectively. White South Africa heaved a sigh of relief. It looked as though things were returning to "normal."

As of last year, however, the entire scene has changed fundamentally and permanently. Violence of both kinds-structural and revolutionary-is no longer sporadic; it has become endemic. In the Black communities, those who are regarded as collaborators with the system are no longer just ostracized; they are executed. The spiral of violence is rising. The irony is that the year 1985 has seen more fundamental political reform in South Africa than the total preceding period, including restoration of citizenship to Blacks, scrapping of Influx Control and the passbook system, scrapping of the Mixed Marriage Act, assurances that Blacks will be included in decision-making processes at the highest level, and so forth. These reforms, however, have not in the least changed the mood in the Black community. Why not? First, because these reforms are being introduced piecemeal, in small installments, and not as part of a comprehensive new strategy. Secondly, the reforms are clearly the results of Black pressure; so they seem to suggest that pressure should be increased rather than decreased in order to wring even more fundamental changes from the Government, particularly to bring the Government to the point where it might surrender altogether. A third reason is that none of the changes introduced, important as they are in themselves, really suggests that the white minority is willing to jeopardize, even theoretically, its position of power

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and privilege. Only a few months ago, an opinion poll revealed that two-thirds of all white South Africans believe that South Africa will never have a majority (Black) government.

The ruling National Party has, indeed, become more pragmatic in recent years. The pure and unadulterated expression of classical Afrikaner religio-political thinking is no longer embodied in the National Party. The two ultra right-wing parties (the Herstigte Nasionale Party, founded in 1969, and the Conservative Party, founded in 1982) can, indeed, claim to be the heirs to that legacy. Still, for all its growing pragmatism, the National Party finds it impossible to break out of the ideological straight-jacket it donned generations ago. So, we see the realities of present-day southern Africa leading the main body of Afrikaners to a curious mixture of ideological motivations and pragmatic considerations. In the final analysis, the forces that molded the Afrikaner and Afrikaner civil religion continue to determine Afrikaner attitudes and prevent them from embracing a new paradigm. They are prepared to make concessions, but refuse to be pushed too far. While propagating changes and a modicum of compromise, they are at the same time developing a Masada complex. The resoluteness of the Afrikaner to fight to the bitter end should not be underestimated. Therefore, unless all parties can agree to meet around a table and thrash out a new political and societal blueprint, and do so very soon, the stage is set for a civil war which may last decades and leave the entire sub-continent in ruins. Whether we will have a negotiated settlement or a long drawn-out revolution is hard to tell. The portents are not promising; in fact, the gap between white intransigence and Black demands seems to be widening.

VII

What we see unfolding has the makings of a classical Greek tragedy. The stage for this tragedy is an area as large as Western Europe and most of the millions of actors seem to be incapable of comprehending where they are heading. They "stride to their fierce disasters in the grip of truths more intense than knowledge," captives of their respective histories.²⁵

Tragedy, so George Steiner reminds us is by definition irreparable. We remain pawns, turned over to the capriciousness of a malevolent god, to blind fate, the solicitations of hell, or to the brute fury of our own animal blood, which is waiting for us in ambush at the crossroads, mocking us and destroying us.²⁶ But Steiner also points out that we encounter tragedy in Greek antiquity and in Shakespeare, not in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and tradition. I stand in this latter tradition. This means that I am an anti-tragedy person. I am in the hope business. I know of judgment, which is not the same as tragedy. I also know of

²⁵ George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London, 1974), p. 7.
²⁶ Ibid., pp. 8-9.

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repentance and forgiveness, of reparation and restitution, of a new life beyond the grave, of a kingdom which is coming. And, of course, I arn not alone in this. There are also Desmond Tutu, Beyers Naude and tens of thousands of others; there is still a silver-haired Alan Paton who first aroused our consciences when he wrote Cry, the Beloved Country, forty years ago, and who, just months ago, opened our National Initiative for Reconciliation with a reading from Psalm 130. The night is dark, but there have always been and there still are the watchmen crying out their messages of hope, reminding us that when the night is at its darkest, dawn draws near.