''D.F. Malan; Prophet of Apartheid'' by Lindie Koorts

Hello Hivers and Book Clubbers,

Back with the third installment of this review. The book in question is titled 'D.F. Malan; Prophet of Apartheid', written by Lindie Koorts. In the last part, I went through Malan's studies in the Netherlands, and talked background on the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. I also said that the relationship between the English-speakers and Afrikaners would be tested very soon. That 'soon' was World War 1.

War and Civil War

South Africa is one of those ends of the world (European perspective, mind you) that you don't think about when you mention World War I. Yet it put into motion many defining events of South African history. As a part of the British Empire, it was called into war against the Central Powers in 1914. It even received a mission: to take German South-West Africa (today Namibia) from Germany.

The idea of going to war for Britain was wildly unpopular among Afrikaners. Why fight for the British, when they had fought the British tooth and nail not 12 years prior, in the Second Boer War? All eyes went towards the Boer Generals, both in politics and outside it, to see what would happen.

Within politics, a split occurred. Jan Smuts and Louis Botha were willing to comply with the British war goals presented to South Africa, and were steering the South African Party in that direction. Jamez Hertzog was vehemently opposed, and this opposition led directly to the formation of the National party in the Free State in 1914.

Malan was very quickly scouted out as a possible player within this new party; his opposition to the war was known, his fight for Afrikaner rights also. Yet he was still a vicar, and the Dutch Reformed Church forbade its clergy to perform any direct role in politics.

Yet Malan was intimately involved in the events that followed. There were other Boer generals that were opposed to the war, and they were willing to fight about it. Christiaan de Wet assembled a force to fight the government, which was defeated by a force mainly comprising of Afrikaners as well. Thus, the affair turned into an Afrikaner civil war of sorts, though this was short-lived.

The Afrikaner's mood would be epitomized by the martyrdom of Jopie Fourie, a rebel who would receive the death penalty by the Smuts government, Malan was in Pretoria, hastily collecting petitions to waive the death penalty, unfortunately to no avail.

A change in career

This skirting of real politics would soon be his full-time work, however. The National Party was structured quite remarkably; it was federal, meaning that each of the four provinces had a seperate party, functioning indepentently, which met up occasionally. Thus, the Cape was looking to found its own branch in 1915, and several prominent people there wanted Malan as the leader of this branch.

Malan also ventured into journalism. There was a dearth of Dutch/Afrikaans-language newspapers at the time, compared to English-language ones. This was remedied somewhat with the foundation of De Burger in Cape Town in 1914, of which Malan became head editor. His role as far as the day-to-day of the paper was concerned, was quite small. He could, and did, use the paper as a soap-box for Afrikaner issues and his own opinions. Most of his time would be spent in politics.

Though it would take a while to get a seat in the Volksraad (House of Representatives). He was defeated twice before winning a seat in 1918. He would remain in Parliament until his retirement in 1954.

Victory from the mines

The National Party was slowly but surely picking up steam from its inception in 1914. From the beginning, its strongest electoral base was the countryside. The National Party was always looking out for farmers and the 'poor white problem', which was most visible on the countryside. Malan also, specifically, saw this problem expanded into the cities: over the 10 years since the start of the War, over 70.000 Afrikaners had moved from the countryside into the cities.

There, they became part of an ever-expanding industrial proletariat. Most of these Afrikaners were non-educated (sometimes even illiterate), and thus were only able to enter into lower-paying industrial and mining jobs. For these jobs, they sometimes had to compete with the couloured and (especially) black parts of the population.

Within the National Party, this was seen as a big issue. To look out for their fellow people, the NP quickly became advocates of a form of industrial segregation, with specific places of work for both whites and blacks. But since they were not in power, this remained only on their wish-list. A 'colour-bar' did exist already; meaning that blacks were unable to be promoted beyond a certain career-point. All the mining bosses were whites, either from an English (or Jewish) or less often Afrikaner background.

The mines would play a big role in the breakthrough of the National Party. In 1922, when the post-war recession was in swing in South Africa, the mines were looking to fire thousands of white workers, and have them replaced with blacks, whom they paid less, thus saving money.

Almost immediately, a massive strike occurred. One in which the English- and Afrikaans-speaking employees suddenly found themselves as allies against both the capitalist mining magnates and the Smuts/SAP government, who sided with the magnates.

This echoed onto the political arena, where the National Party found a new, if temporary, ally in the English-dominated Labour Party. They united on a pro-mining worker and anti-captalist platform, and made a pact into the next election.

Intermission

The next election would show that Smuts' actions in the 1922 Rand strikes were quite unpopular; the National Party and Labour got a hold of a majority in the Volksraad. Thus, Smuts was out as Prime Minister, and Hertzog was in. Malan, as one of the big names in the National Party, was appointed as Minister of the Interior, and Education, and Health (an improbably large dossier, but there were a lot less people in South Africa back then) in 1924.

After 10 years in politics, he would finally be in a position to change things, What Malan does with it, I'll tell in a next installment of this series. See you all in the next one,

-Pieter Nijmeijer

(Top image; self-made photo of book cover)