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Apartheid, Afrikaner
Nationalism and the Radical
Right: Historical Revisionism
in Hermann Giliomee's The
Afrikaners
a
PATRICK FURLONG
a
Alma College ,
Published online: 14 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: PATRICK FURLONG (2003) Apartheid, Afrikaner Nationalism

and the Radical Right: Historical Revisionism in Hermann Giliomee's
The Afrikaners , South African Historical Journal, 49:1, 207-222, DOI:
10.1080/02582470308671455

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 South African Historical Journal 49 (Nov.2003), 207-222

Apartheid, Afrikaner Nationalism and the

Radical Right: Historical Revisionism in
Hermann Giliomees The Afrikaners

PATRICK FURLONG
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Alma College

The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. By HERMANN GILIOMEE. Cape Town

and Charlottesville: Tafelberg and University of Virginia Press, 2003. xxii + 698
pp. ISBN 0 624 03884 X.

The Afrikaners is an impressive book, daunting in length and sweeping in scope.

Professor Giliomee claims empathy but without partisanship @. xiii), yet
tellingly quotes Irish historian Roy Foster: apology is easier than explaining (p.
xvii), thereby pointing to the controversial perspective on Afrikaner nationalism
and apartheid that underpins this book, in which explanation at times becomes
defence. The author, striving to correct the unfairness and distortion of many
previous accounts, suggests that too often these overlook the Afrikaners
legitimate struggle for what N.P. Van Wyk Louw called survival in justice (pp.
xviii-ix, 663), a concept that is difficult to reconcile with the experience of
apartheid.
It may seem surprising that the author, a noted critic of apartheid, appears to
have embraced Afrikaner nationalism of a sort. Yet recently as a leader of the
Group of 63 he has become an outspoken champion of the Afrikaans language
and culture, and has been invited to address the Afrikanerbond - the non-racial
successor to the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) - and the Federasie van Afiikaanse
Kultuuwereniginge (FAK), formerly the chief AB cultural front organisation.
Disillusioned with many aspects of the new South Africa (including high crime,
the declining status of Afrikaans and reduced job prospects for whites), he argues
that in the transition from apartheid to democracy, F.W. de Klerk lacked the

1. See H. Giliomee, Die Rol van Kultuur in die Staat van die 2lste eeu, speech to Afrikanerbond,
Potchefstroom, 24 Sep. 2002 <http://www.groep63 .org.za/doW002/giliomee24092.html>; Die
Taal- en Kulturele Uitdagings van die Histories Afrikaanse Universiteite in Suid-Afrika,
FAK/D.F. Malherbe Lecture, University of the Orange Free State, Bloemfontein, 9 Apr. 2001
<http://www. fak.org.za/HermannGiliomee.htm>; and Die Soeke na n Sinvolle Siening van die
Afrikaanse Verlede, Hede en Toekoms, FAK Seminar on Historical Consciousness,
Garsfontein, Pretoria, 14 Nov. 2002 <http://www.fak.org.za/Hermann GiliomeeZ.htm>.

207
 208 PATRICK FURLONG

ruthlessness that characterizes most great leaders in turbulent times. According

to Giliomee, De Klerk needed to use his security forces to prove that the regime
was no pushover and to hold out for a balanced system that would have
protected majority and minority rights (pp. 636-8). Apartheid was, he insists, not
uniquely abhorrent and had much in common with Western colonialism and
American segregation. The apartheid government presided over dynamic growth
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and the development of a sophisticated infrastructure and a steady increase in the

life expectancy of all population groups (pp. 649-50, 666).
Even in the early chapters Giliomee expresses concern about the way in
which English-speaking whites portray South Africa to foreign visitors (p. xvi).
He is critical of how Afrikaners were represented after Britains conquest of the
Cape, often by writers who could not speak their language or pronounce their
names, and who considered them backward, lacking in industry and cruel and
unjust in their dealings with the indigenous people (p. xiv). He stresses the
jingoism and hypocrisy of many English-speakers (not a few of whom shared
Afrikaner racial prejudices), although he views liberal English solutions to South
Africas problems, such as a non-racial qualified common roll vote, as unrealistic.
He highlights Afrikaners who challenge the stereotype of insularity, xenophobia,
or extremism, such as Andries Stockenstrom, Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, Jan
Hofmeyr, and Breyten Breytenbach. Even in discussing mainstream Afrikaner
nationalism, pragmatists such as the anthropologist Werner Eiselen and the
churchman G.B.A. Gerdener are far more central to his story than hardliners such
as the anti-Semite Eric Louw, Ossewubrundwag (OB) boss J.F.J. van Rensburg,
or the frankly racist apartheid theorist Geoff Cronjt.
The heart of the book (and the main focus of this article) is his critique of
orthodox scholarship on the origins and nature of apartheid, especially that
stressing the influence on mainstream Afrikaner nationalism of the AB, the
European radical Right, Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism, or Transvaal neo-Calvinism.2
He argues instead for the essential moderation of this nationalism, especially in the
Cape southern wing (p. 418). He views anti-Semitism, biological racism (as
opposed to policies based on historical or cultural group differences), and ethnic
exclusivism as occasional afflictions of the more overtly white supremacist
northerners (he stresses the northern base of the AB), but marginal to the Cape
faction, which produced the real shapers of NP policy.

2. He singles out for criticism (pp. 418-21,443-4) C. Bloomberg, Christian-Nationalism andthe

Rise of the Afrikaner Broederbond (London, 1990); A. Sparks, The Mind of South Afiica
(London, 1990); P. Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika: The Impact of the Radical Right on
the Afrikaner Nationalist Movement in the Fascist Era (Johannesburg, 199 I); and I. Hexham,
The Irony of Apartheid: The Strugglefor Independence of Afrikaner Calvinism against British
Imperialism (New York, 1981). He surprisingly does not cite R. Citinos Germany and the
Union ofSouth Africa in the Nazi Period (New York, 1991) or A. Hagemanns Siidafrika und
das Dritte Reich: Rassenpolitische AfJnitat und machrpolitische Rivalitat (Frankfurt and New
York, 1989).
 HISTORICAL REVISIONISM 209

He is right to correct excessive focus on the north at the expense of

Stellenbosch intellectuals,the Cape Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), and the inner
circle of Cape NP leader Daniel Malan (first apartheid-era prime minister), which
included Paul Sauer, Albert Geyer, and F.C. Erasmus. Overstating the moderate
souths role is, however, equally problematic. J.B.M. Hertzog, the previous NP
leader (1914-34), was a Free Stater, and between Malans exit in 1954 and P.W.
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Botha (1978-89), Transvaal NP bosses J.G. Strijdom, H.F. Verwoerd, and B.J.
Vorster led the party. (While Vorster grew up in the Cape, his OB background and
close ties to Venvoerd kept him outside the orbit of moderate Cape nationalism.)
Giliomees heavy reliance on archival sources in Stellenbosch may help to
explain his Cape focus and his objections to linking the NP or apartheid to the
radical Right.3Apartheids roots, he argues, were not in Nazi racial dogmas, but
elsewhere: South African school segregation; DRC theology and the goal of self-
governing indigenous churches; racial discrimination in the United States;
imperialist theorising on indirect rule and trusteeship; and new theories of social
conflict in plural societies (pp. xvii-xviii).
While these elements assuredly fed into the historical and intellectualmilieu
that produced apartheid, the new intellectual currents and political trends in
interwar Europe and the related crisis of liberal democracy surely also affected that
milieu. They influenced not only the hyper-nationalist, authoritarian and
sometimes patently biological-racistwritings of northern intellectuals such as Piet
Meyer, Nico Diederichs, Gerrie Eloff, and Geoff Cronje. Giliomee concedes (p.
424) that Albert Geyer regarded Diederichs (AB chairman 1938-44, later finance
minister and state president) as a Nazi and also that OB ideologue Meyer (later
AB chairman and state broadcasting boss) published work that represented
thinking close to Nazi ideology, but considers such figures marginal to main-
stream NP thought.
Several of these ultra-nationalists key works, however, were published by
Nasionale Pers; which was so close to Malan that, according to Giliomee, the
editor of its chief newspaper, Die Burger, attended NP parliamentary caucus

Most ofGiliomees cited archival sources are held at StellenboschUniversity,including Malans

papers and correspondence between Phil Weber and Albert Geyer, successive editors ofthe Cape
NP newspaper Die Burger. There is no material from the major collections of Afrikaner
nationalists or organisations held in the State Archives in Pretoria, the Archive for Contemporary
History in Bloemfontein, the OB Archives at Potchefstroom University, or even the Eben
Donges papers (including AB records) in the nearby Cape Archives.
See N. Diederichs, Nasionalisme as Lewensbeskouing en sy Verhoudingrot Inlemasionalisme
[Bloemfontein, 1936); P. Meyer, Die Afrikaner [Bloemfontein, 1940); G. Eloff, Rasse en
Rassevermenging: Die Boerevolk Gesien van die Standpunt van die Rasseleer (Bloemfontein,
1942); and G. CronjB, n Tuiste vir die Nageslag: Die BIywende Oplossing van Suid-Afrika se
Rassevraagstukke (Johannesburg, 1945). Nasionale Pers published the fust three.
 210 PATRICK FURLONG

meeting^.^ The lines between the various strands of Afrikaner nationalism were
often blurred. Gustav Preller, for instance, whom Giliomee cites as being an
influential champion of Afrikaans language and culture and yet until 1924, a
Smuts supporter (pp. 364-5, 397), was also a pioneer Afrikaner nationalist
historian. Dubow argues that Preller played a vital role in elevating the Voortrek-
kers to pride of place in Afrikaner mythology. One would not know from The
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Afrikaners that by the 1938 Great Trek centenary, Preller was drawing parallels
between the Trek and German tribal migrations, that he used the Hitlerian
categories of Germanic races with creative intelligence (versus the imitative
intelligence of other races), and claimed that whites had much larger brains than
blacks6 Giliomee suggests, based on Venvoerds lecture notes and memoranda
from his teaching days at Stellenbosch, that he was unaffected by Nazi racial
ideology during the year he spent studying at German universities in the late
192Os, despite the fact that Nazism found an early audience among students and
professors there. By contrast, after a few months in the United States, American
sociology had supposedly made a lasting impact on him @. 350). In a recent article
Giliomee adds that in the USA Venvoerd was captivated by the new scientific
approach to curing social ills. Far from being a product of Nazi-style deviance,
apartheid developed within the mainstream of pre-Second World War racism and
social engineering enthusiasms in the West.
Even if one were to accept this claim, Roberta Miller, Giliomees chief
source for Venvoerds American ties, who stresses that the young Venvoerd
denied biological or intellectual differences between whites and Africans and that
he had commended the Jews for their contributions to world culture, argues that
he changed dramatically in the mid 1930s. In October 1935 in three articles on
white poverty for English-language newspapers he praised Nazi Germany for
encouraging pride in manual work and argued that Africans should be cared for
in the mines and reserves rather than the cities. In 1936 he was among the
Afrikaner intellectuals who led protests against the presence in Cape Town
harbour of a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Germany and was a featured
speaker at the congress of the ultra-nationalist Afrikaanse Nasionale Studente-
bond (ANS) founded by Piet Meyer in 1933, with avowed Hitler admirer and

5. H. Giliomee, The Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929-1948, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 2 9 , 2 (June 2003), 379. This article provides a useful summary ofkey arguments in The
Afrikaners.
6. See K.Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing (Athens, Ohio,
1988), 66-7 and S. Dubow, Illicit Union: Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge
and New York, 1995), 268-9.
7. Giliomee, The Making o f the Apartheid Plan, 379.
 HISTORICAL REVISIONISM 211

future OB chief Hans van Rensburg as president, and which sponsored student
tours of the Third Reich.
Another problem with emphasising American influences on the NP or
apartheid is that the inter-war United States, like much of Europe, was rife with
eugenic and pseudo-scientific racism, some not explicitly biological, but
nevertheless drawing on sociology or cultural anthropology to justify white
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supremacism and segregation. There was extensive interaction between scholars

favouring such views in the United States and Nazi Germany. Private American
funding of German pseudo-science continued even after Hitler came to power, and
sometimes it was the German scholars who looked to the West for ideas. On the
other hand, Giliomee himself notes that J.B.M. Hertzog saw the USA not as a
source of inspiration, but as a warning of the consequences of integration(pp. 30 1 -
2)! Giliomee overlooks such complexities in charging that in my recent study
Between Crown and Swastika (published in 1991) the attempt to depict the
nationalist leaders as proto-Fascists shows a poor understanding ofboth the Nazi
and the Afrikaner nationalist movement (p. 443). His singling out ofthis book for
criticism is odd, for while earlier scholars sometimes described apartheid as
Nazi or Fascist, Between Crown andSwastika rejects the simplistic equation
of the NP with Fascism (let alone its most radical variant, German Nazism).*The
basic thesis is that the complex and sometimes indirect influences of the radical
Right combined, pushed Afrikaner nationalism into accommodating aspects of
radical Right ideology. This produced a more all-embracing, authoritarian, and
racist model than had characterised the pre- 1934 NP.
Giliomee sets up a straw man here, mixing (inaccurate) quotes from different
parts of the book and giving a misleading impression of its logic. He quotes it as
arguing that Malans NP, the OB and NO [New Order] formed an interconnect-
ing web and that the nationalists in the Transvaal, in particular, were a hybrid
variant of authoritarian and populist ingredients, reminiscent, although never an

8. R.B. Miller, Science and Society in the Early Career of H.F. Verwoerd, Journal of Southern
African Studies, 19, 4 (Dec. 1993), 660; G . Shimoni, Jews and Zionism: The South African
Experience (Cape Town, 1980), 117-8; Furlong, Between Crown andSwastika, 78-81.
9. Useful relevant studies include S. Kiihl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and
German NationalSocialism (New York andoxford, 1994) and E. Black, WarAgainst the Weak:
Eugenics and Americas Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York and London, 2003).
10. He raises many of the same points of criticism, albeit in greater detail, in The Making of the
Apartheid Plan, esp. 376-9.
1 1. See, for instance, B. Bunting, The Rise of the South African Reich (Harmondsworth, England,
1969) and the chapter The Impact of Nazism in W. Vatcher, White Laager: The Rise of
Afrikaner Nationalism (New York and London, 1965), 58-75; also H. Simson, The Social
Origins of Afrikaner Fascism and its Apartheid Policy (Uppsala, 1980) and S. Mzimela,
Apartheid: South African Nazism (New York, 1983).
12. Werner Schellack argues that this study is an attempt to break away from the earlier mechanical
interpretations of relations between Nazi Germany and South Africa: see W. Schellack, The
Afrikaners Nazi Links Revisited, South African Historical Journal, 27 (Nov. 1992), 177.
 212 PATRICK FURLONG

exact facsimile, of European fascism (p. 443). The interconnecting web

reference actually refers to the AB and not the NO; the first part of Giliomees
sentence cites my discussion of the later war years and the period immediately
thereafter, whereas the second half refers to my analysis of Transvaler Purified
Nationalism alone (not in particular) almost a decade earlier. The quotation at
the end of the sentence does not appear on the pages (pp. 102,224-6) listed in his
footnote nor indeed elsewhere in Between Crown and Swastika. The hybrid
variant reference follows a description of Transvaal NP leader J.G. Strijdom as
an adherent of volk democracy, but far less constrained than the southerners,
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clearly differentiating between the Transvaal and Cape traditions. The original
passage continues by stating that this hybrid combined a militant radical
populism with signs of a creeping authoritarianism, nowhere near the dimensions
of full-blown European fascism . . . , I 3 which is far more cautious wording than
Giliomees quotation.
Radical populism and authoritarianism were certainly ingredients in most
Rightwing nationalist movements of the late 1930s; it is hardly exceptional to
detect both elements in the Transvaal NP of those years. In 1937 the Transvaal NP
Congress voted to nationalise the mines and to bar Jewish members from its ranks;
the party Executive adopted a quasi-Fascist, corporatist-style plan for representa-
tion of women, miners, and railway and factory workers at party meetings. The
Congress also gave the Executive the right to expel members without giving
reasons and to dissolve and reconstitute any level of party management, without
any right of appeal. This followed the Executives decision to give the much
smaller Management Committee power to appoint or dismiss fellow members or
members of the Executive or the partys key Organising C ~ m m i t t e e . ~
The words from Between Crown and Swastika in the first half of Giliomees
above-cited sentence, apparently summarising its argument, are not even part of
a discussion of the NP as proto-Fascists, as he suggests. They appear in the
context of analysing AB efforts to mediate between the OB and NP, and
examining their (incontrovertible) extensive overlapping membership and
leadership. In the opening stages of the war, before organisational jealousies led
to a rift, after which the OB moved in a more explicitly Fascist direction,I6 many
prominent Nationalists belonged to the OB, including Cape figures such as Paul

13. Furlong, Between Crown andswastika, 102.

14. Ibid.,102-3;on the Jewish ban, see F. van Heerden, Nasionaal-Sosialisrne as Faktor in die Suid-
Afrikaanse Politiek, 1933-1948(DPhil thesis, University of the Orange Free State, 1972),378.
15. Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika, 224.
16. C . Marx,TheOssewabrandwagas aMassMovement, 1939-1941,Journa/ofSouthernAfrican
Studies, 20,Z (Nov. 1994), 216-8.
 HISTORICAL REVISIONISM 213

Sauer, P.W. Botha, and H.B. Thom, and leading Free State Nationalist C.R.
Swart.
Giliomee in any case overlooks the origins of the NO in 1940 as a pressure
group inside the Reunited NP.18 He states only that in 1942 the NO had 17
Members of Parliament, all elected on a United Party ticket (p. 442). In fact, one
(C.W.M. Du Toit) had been a leading Purified Nationalist, and all remained inside
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the NP (led by Malan since Hertzogs departure in late 1940) until January 1942,
when NP rejection of national socialism for South Africa led to their exit from
the party. In March 1941 Malan defended his right-wing credentials by stating
that 80 percent of NO leader Oswald Pirows Nuwe Orde (the NO basic
programme) was already part of the NP programme, and would be carried out in
letter and in spirit once they were in power.* Even after the bitter 1941 break
between the NP and OB (as well as the NO), the AB strove behind the scenes to
patch up their differences. This was understandable, as the AB Executive included
leading Nationalists (Verwoerd, Eben Donges, and J.H. Conradie - the last two
from the moderate Cape NP - as well as the pre-war NP co-Deputy Leader in the
Transvaal, L.J. du Plessis, who became a leading OB theorist),* while many
leading OB members or sympathisers were prominent in the AB and its front
organisations.
There are other problems with Giliomees analysis of the NP-radical Right
relationship. According to him, Fascist and other radical right-wing movements
were driven by a singular commitment and blind obedience to a leader, a belief in
the redemptive power of violence, excessive nationalism and an operational
ideology prescribing action; it is therefore far-fetched to describe the NP as
Fascist or proto-Fascist in this.sense (pp. 443-4). This assumes an unduly narrow
definition of fascism, let alone the radical Right, which works, up to a point, for
the Italian model or Nazism, but overlooks the controversy over defining
fascism,**or the extremely varied expressions of radical Right movements.
Even Italian Fascist intellectuals disagreed on defending violence and
dictatorship and on dismissing theoretical reflection in favour of action. In 1924

17. P.W. Coetzer, ed., Die Nasionale Party: Deel 5 - Van Oorlog tot Oonvinning 1940-1948
(Bloemfontein, 1994), 80, 82.
18. Ibid., 12.
19. P.W. Coetzer and J.H. Le Roux, eds, Die Nasionale Party: Dee14 - Die GesuiwerdeNasionale
Parry 1934-1940 (Bloemfontein, 1986), 9-10,290-2, 304; Coetzer, ed., Die Nasionale Party:
Deel 5 , 76,78.
20. Die Burger, 25 Mar. I94 1 .
21. Coetzer and Le Roux, eds, Die Nasionale Party: Deel 4, 17; Mam, The Ossewabrandwag as
a Mass Movement, 215-16.
22. See, for instance, E. Weber, Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth
Century (Princeton, New Jersey, 1964); Z. Stemhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology
in France (Princeton, New Jersey, 1986); A.J. Gregor, Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (New
Brunswick, New Jersey andLondon, 1999), and R. Griffin, ed., InternationalFascism: Theories,
Causes and the New Consensus (London and New York, 1998).
 214 PATRICK FURLONG

Giuseppe Bottai, a prominent Fascist philosopher, told party members that

Fascism is a revolution of intellectuals and that it was a lie that their revolution
was the result only of muscular effort ....23 He argued that dictatorship had been
needed to re-establish authority after the post-war crisis, but was not a fundamen-
tal or essential defining feature of our methods ofpolicies, as the new constitution
guaranteed the balance between freedom and authority and fascism defended
not the freedom of a single class but the freedom of all Italians [emphasis in
original] . . . r . 2 4 The 1919 platform of Mussolinis Fasci di Combattimento,
forerunner of the National Fascist Party, did not mention dictatorship. It favoured
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universal suffrage (including extending the vote to women) and lowering the
minimum voting age.25
Giliomee also overlooks the complex relationships between conservatives
(authoritarian or democratic), and overtly Fascist or radical Right groups.26
Conservatives have long borrowed from or been influenced by the radical Right
while remaining distinct, from Ftancos co-option of the Falange to Chiracs
Gaullists adopting some anti-immigrant measures pushed by Le Pens National
Front. Giliomee approvingly quotes Lewis Ganns comment that theNP resembled
a pre-Second World War Eastern European peasant party: anti- capitalist, anti-
urban, ethnocentric and anti-Semite (p. xv). The environment that produced such
parties, however, also provided fertile soil for competing fascist movements
(Hungarian Arrow Cross, Romanian Iron Guard, Latvian Thunder Cross, and
Croatian Ustasha) and a host of lesser imitators and authoritarian or semi-
authoritarian regimes (King Alexander in Yugoslavia, King Carol and Antonescu
in Romania, Dollfuss in Austria, Horthy in Hungary, Pats in Estonia, Ulmanis in
Latvia). The latter borrowed from the far Right, even as they feuded with outright
Fascists as often as they cooperated with or sought to tame them by including them
in a larger, more pluralistic conservative ~oalition.~
Giliomee stresses that, unlike in Fascist movements, leaders in the NP were
elected and could be outvoted; members differed on many issues and even
denounced NP leaders who rejected violence and found distasteful the efforts to
imitate the para-military style of the Fascist movements. He denies that radical
Right movements like the OB or Greyshirts had anything but a fleeting impact on
the Afrikaner nationalist movement or on apartheid as an ideology (p. 444).
Fascist or broader movements of the radical or conservative Right, however, were

23. G. Bottai, Fascism as Intellectual Revolution ( 1 924), in J.T.Schnapp, ed., A Primer ofItalian
Fascism (Lincoln, Nebraska and London, 2000), 76-8.
24. Bottai, Fascism as Intellectual Revolution, 78-80.
25. Platform of the Fasci di Combattimento (1 919), in Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism,
3-5.
26. See, for instance, M. Blinkhorn, ed., Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the
Establishment in Twentieth-Century Europe (London, 1990).
27. See S. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Understanding (Madison, Wisconsin, 1980), 107-28.
 HISTORICAL REVISIONISM 215

successful precisely to the extent that they reflected indigenous values and culture
rather than simply imitating Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. The limited pluralism
and internal debate in the NP were perhaps what made it more lasting than more
obviously imported forms of authoritarianism such as the OB (especially the more
overtly Fascist post- 1941 OB).
Giliomees position parallels the view of Frederik van Heerden, who three
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decades ago conceded only a few NP superficial experiments with National

Socialism.28In fact the NP adopted a modified form of the Fascist leadership
principle (to accord with traditional notions of Volksdemokrasie supposedly
derived from the Boer republics) when its June 1941 Union Congress unanimously
elected Malan as Volksleier, with power to exercise all functions of any NP
executive or congress. It also passed a reorganisation scheme developed not in the
north but by Malan and his Cape lieutenants, including Sauer, Botha, and F.C.
Erasmus, whereby existing branches and committees were replaced with a
hierarchical quasi-Fascist structure of cells, wards, and districts, each headed by
a leader (elected rather than appointed, unlike the OB). Thus, the NP would
outflank the OB with its own model of a disciplined Afrikanerdom.
If some dissent within the NP was tolerated, some Nationalists displayed a
more authoritarian and even violent streak toward external foes. In January 1940
Oudtshoorn Member of Parliament S.P. le Roux claimed that only MPs from the
NP had the right to vote on the war; in April Transvaal NP leader J.G. Strijdom
urged that rural (mainly Afrikaner) districts be even more favourably represented
in Parliament than under the prevailing system of loaded rural votes? The 1940
Transvaal NP Congress resolved that once in power it would pass a law unseating
MPs who had voted for war.3In March 1941 NP MP for Harrismith, E.R. Strauss,
warned in Parliament that those responsible for emergency measures would be put
up against a wall.-In the same year, two NP MPs, Jan and Jacob Wilkens, were
convicted of public violence for leading a crowd that assaulted Interior Minister
Harry Lawrence at a UP meeting in Klerksdorp.-
The paramilitary style of fascism, far from being distasteful, even affected
the Cape NP. In the 1930s Cape NP secretary Frans Erasmus (whom Giliomee
cites as a principal influence on Malan, p. 422) issued a brochure advertising a

28. Van Heerden, Nasionaal-Sosialisme as Faktor, 385.

29. Cape Archives, Albert Geyer Papers, Vol. 1, diary, 25 May and 6 June 1941, cited in Furlong,
Beiween Crown andswastika, 197-8; E. Louw, Voorligting aan Ampsdraers, in F.C. Erasmus
and E. Louw, Handleiding van die Herenigde Nasionale Party (Cape Town, ca.1942), 13-25;
see also M. Roberts and A.E.G. Trollip, The South African Opposition 1939-1945: An Essay in
Contemporary History (London, 1947), 80-9.
30. The Star, 31 Jan. 1940; M. Ballinger, Nazi Principle in Blatant Form: Exclusive Conception of
Afrikaner Culture, Sentiment and Tradition, Forum, 20 Apr. 1940, 10.
3I . Die Burger, 6 Dec. 1940.
32. House ofAssernbly Debates, Vol. 42, 19 Mar. 1941, col. 4897.
33. J. Lawrence, Harry Lawrence (Cape Town and London, 1978). 122-7.
 216 PATRICK FURLONG

quasi-military Orange Shirt uniform. This was available at the Cape Town store,
Fletcher and Cartwright, for Junior Nationalists, and included black military
leather buttons, a black scarf and for men a shoulder belt.34After the 1941 NP
reorganisation (and months after the final NP-OB split), Erasmus advocated that
members form a guard of honour (erewag)for speakers at NP meetings; guards
could wear an orange or Vierkleur scarf while a Struggle Team Leader
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(Strydspanleier)could wear an orange or Vierkleur armband. Such teams were to

maintain order at meetings, promote the building up (opbouing) of a spiritually
and physically healthy Afrikanerdom and form groups to study topics such as the
differences between the Boer Republics, communism, national socialism, and
British-Jewish dem~cracy.~
Giliomee also downplays NP anti-Semitism, denying that it was worse in the
late 1930s than before, that Malan had done a volte-face, or that Nazi influences
played any role (pp. 41 7-8) (on this subject he cites disapprovingly the same pages
of Between Crown and Swastika as in his previously discussed critique of that
work, even though the book includes none of these points, nor indeed the subject
of NP anti-Semitism, on those pages) . Instead, he argues, Nationalists such as
Verwoerd opportunistically but only temporarily embraced traditional rural
economic anti-Semitism. NP solutions did not involve expulsion or confiscating
property, but unusual schemes such as Verwoerds idea of quotas: refusing
further occupational licenses to Jews until their representation in each field had
shrunk to their proportion of the white population (pp. 416-8). Yet, by the late
1930s, NP attitudes to Jews had changed. Malan had eagerly sought Jewish votes
in the 1920s and even in 1936 was ambivalent on anti-Semitism, but by 1937 he
was blaming even Fusion on Jewish organisation, while the Transvaal NP barred
Jewish members.36
As Milton Shain argues, when academics like Verwoerd explained that it was
only that they feared economic competition, they used an old local anti-Semitic
argument. But hostility was now primarily a product of exclusivist or Volkish
ideas, central to Afrikaner nationalism at this time. Moreover, anti-Semitism
remained prominent in the Afrikaner Right even after the economy improved in
the mid 1930s, and influenced by the rise of rightist politics in central and eastern
Europe, had become part of an acceptable political di~course.~ Even Van
Heerden argues that by 1937 the NP struggle against the Jew as economic power
was now a struggle against the Jew as race and that as Malan denied the impact

34. F.C. Erasmus, Junior Nasionaliste: Oranjehemp-Drag (Cape Town, n.d.); the hairstyle of the
woman whose uniform is illustrated in this brochure is clearly from the 1930s rather than the
1940s.
35. F.C. Erasmus, Die Strydspanne van Ons Party, in Erasmus and Louw, Handleiding van die
Herenigde Nasionale Party, 25-7.
36. T.D. Moodie, The Rise ofAfrikanerdorn: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), 165-7; Furlong, Between Crown andSwastika, 49-50,64-5.
37. M. Shain, The Roots ofAntisemitism in SoufhAfrica (Charlottesville and London, 1994), 144-6.
 HISTORICAL REVISIONISM 217

of Hitlers or the Greyshirts activities, this coincided with sharpened campaigns

against the Jews by Hitler and the grey shirt^'.^^
It does not really matter whether anti-Semitism had earlier roots in South
Africa (that was true even in Germany) or that much of NP anti-Semitism was
opportunistic (many adherents of Nazism and other anti-Semitic movements were
not initially committed anti-Semites). The Nationalists, like anti-Semitic parties
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elsewhere, took advantage of a climate in which the voters they sought were open
to such a message. Malans post-1945 shift in stance is also irrelevant here; most
Germans, like most Afrikaners, rejected anti-Semitic poIicies after 1945, but even
then some Nationalists, such as Strijdom, C.R. Swart and Louw had difficulty with
this. Strijdoms Transvaal NP did not admit Jewish members until 1951.39
Nor was NP anti-Semitism an exclusively northern phenomenon. The
Transvaal NP signed pacts before the 1938 election with the smaller shirt
movements such as the Blackshirts or Strauss von Moltkes South African
Fascists, Blackshirt leader J.A. de Flamingh was the NP candidate in Vrededorp,
and Von Moltke addressed NP gathering^.^' Strijdom rehsed talks with the main
Greyshirt organisation, but the moderate Cape NP negotiated with the Greyshirts
for several months about an election pact, before withdrawing on the same
grounds as Strijdom- Greyshirt opposition to multipartyism: Malan himselfused
the kind of phrasing that Giliomee argues was confined to Eric Louw among
future NP leaders about a world Jewry exerting a malignant political influence,
the language of Hitler (p. 41 8). At the 1938 Union N p Congress Malan asserted
that behind the gelykstellingsideewas the huge and steadily growing might ...
of organized Jewry, everywhere gathering to himself far more than what is his
right by virtue of his strength in numbers.42In 1939 the NP backed Louws Aliens
Amendment Bill to block even British-born Jewish immigrants. This Bill
displayed unvarnished racial anti-Semitism, defining a Jew even more broadly
than the Nazi Nuremberg Laws (which targeted only those with at least one
grandparent of the Jewish faith), whereas Louws measure included anybody
whose father and mother are or were wholly or partly Jews, whether or not they
profess the Jewish religion.43
Nor was the DRC always a moderating influence. In April 1945 as Allied
forces entered the Nazi camps, the Commission on Current Affairs of the Federal

38. Van Heerden, Nasionaal-Sosialisme as Faktor in die Suid Afrikaanse Politiek, 378.
39. Furlong, Between Crown undSwustiku, 236.
40. J.L. Basson, J.G. Slrijdom: Sy Politieke Loopbuun vun 1929 to# 1948 (Pretoria, 1980), 164-5.
41. Basson, J.G. Strijdorn, 165-66; Van Heerden, Nasionaal-Sosialisme as Faktor in die Suid-
Afrikaanse Politiek, 88-9.
42. Die Groot Beslissing, speech at NP Union Congress, Bloemfontein, 8 Nov. 1938, in S.W.
Pienaar, ed., Glo in U Volk: D.F. Mulun us Redenuur (Cape Town, 1964). 112.
43. University of the Witwatersrand, Cullen Library, J.H. Hofmeyr Papers, Dh File 2, Louws
Aliens (Amendment) and Immigration Act, 1939: An Analysis and Press Report (No.122).
I.
 218 PATRICK FURLONG

Council of Dutch Reformed Churches (including the Cape) presented a report on

anti-Semitism in which it was argued that Jews were themselves responsible for
the closed doors of other lands. It mockingly referred to the fact that although
Hitler had conquered many countries, he according to the Jewish testimony only
tried to exterminate the Jews! The council did not adopt the report. It did,
however, vote to remove the word toleration (verdraagsaamheid) from a
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resolution urging that charity, justice and truth be extended to Semitic racial
groups.
On the colour bar, Koot Vorster, an editor of the influential neo-Calvinist
journal Koers and later Cape DRC moderator, argued in 1938 that feelings of
racial superiority could not simply be understood as the psychological response of
a dominant group; colour difference reflected a deep, radical physical and
psychological difference willed by God.45Johann Kinghorn argues that the DRC
use of the Babel story from the 1930s to 1986 to justify apartheid served to
elevate the policies of separation beyond the grasp of moral debate, enforcing a
totalitarian principle of societal regulation that helps explain the NP stress on law
and order, culminating in the sometimes fanatical drive in the 1980s to
cleanse South African society of alternative voices.46
Earlier DRC segregationist practices cannot be used, as does Giliomee, to
argue for the roots of apartheid in a relatively liberal missionary theology distinct
from AB-coordinated efforts. Before the DRCs adoption of a new Missionary
Policy in 1935, a case could perhaps be made that it was guided by pragmatic,
limited notions of segregation. But by that time the rise of a more fundamentalist,
neo-Calvinist element was already moving the DRC toward a more systematic
concept of apartheid and convergence with the AB and the AB- linked Bond vir
Rassestudie interest in race p01icy.~
Giliomee is more in the historiographic mainstream in discussing the apogee
of the apartheid regime, particularly the Verwoerd era. He views Verwoerd as a
negative force, portrays him as bullying Afrikaner dissenters, notably in the Cape,
and acknowledges that his premiership marked the heyday of the AB. However,
he downplays the AB influence in earlier years, especially in developing apartheid
policy, and denies that it controlled the NP even in the Verwoerd era (pp. 420-1).
He dismisses most published studies of the AB, preferring to rely chiefly on an
unpublished 1998 history by E.L.P. Stals, a Broeder who was given unrestricted
access to the AB archives. This is problematic. Why did the AB permit this
insider scholar such access? Is it fair to use such a private source? Would not
an insider writing after the transformation of the AB into the more palatable

44. Raad van die NG Kerke, Handelinge, 1945,45, 50; Supplement, 8.

45. Dubow, Illicit Union, 258, 264.
46. J. Kinghorn, Social Cosmology, Religion and AfrikanerEthnicity,JournalofSouthernAfncan
Studies, 20,3 (Sep. 1994), 398-400.
47. Dubow, Illicit Union, 250-4.
 HISTORICAL REVISIONISM 219

Afrikanerbond, (designated by the post- 1994 government as its preferred

Afrikaner organisation) (p. 660), be inclined to present the AB as the fairly
innocuous, often weak and divided organisation that emerges via Stals in The
Afrikaners?
While the NP, even under Venvoerd, insisted that the AB stay out of party
politics, and Malans Cape NP was less susceptible to AB pressure than the
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northerners, one cannot underestimate the ABs role behind the scenes, coordinat-
ing and mobilising Afrikaner society, not only in the north, in projects such as the
Afrikaner economic movement.48Nearly all leading Afrikaner intellectuals who
studied the race question in the 1930s and 1940s were Broeders. The key 1944
Volkskongres on Race Policy was held under auspices of an AB front, the FAK.
It was arranged by a commission convened by Broeder CronjC and consisted
chiefly of members of the AB Executive (including Diederichs) and the Bond vir
Rassestudie. There was striking agreement between the report of this congress and
the more southem-based NP Sauer Report that formed the basis of the 1948 NP
platf~rm.~ Even Dan OMeara, who denies that the AB ran South Africa, agrees
that through its genuine hegemony over Afrikaner civil society and civil religion,
it was one of the essential institutions through which political power was
constructed and wielded in the South African state after 1948.
One of Giliomees most problematic assertions is that the NP victory in 1948
was not the outcome of the formulation of apartheid. Indeed he argues that the real
turning point was not 1948, but earlier, resulting from Afrikaner outrage at being
taken into the Second World War on a split vote and from the disruption caused
by the war effort (p. 446). This is a stance close to that of Newel1 Stultz, who
claims that the 1948 shift in votes was a probable, if delayed, consequence of the
UP split in 1939.5Giliomee also rejects the myth of a mild racial order prior to
the late 1940s (which he wrongly ascribes to foes of apartheid in the 198Os, by
which time there was considerable work on its pre-1948 precursors). He argues
that war fatigue and restrictions, a government unsympathetic to Afrikaans culture,
the treatment of ex-servicemen, the threat of massive immigration, rising living
costs, workers inability to compete forjobs, and a labour shortage on farms were

48. See D. 0Meara, Volkskapitalisme:Class. Capital andldeology in the Development ofAfrikaner

Nationalism 1934-1948 (Johannesburg, 1983). 59-1 16.
49. See J. Brits, Op die Vooraand van Apartheid: Die Rassevraagstuk en die Blanke Politiek in Suid-
Afrika, 1939-1948 (Pretoria, 1994), 79-80.
50. D. OMeara, Forty Lost Years: The Apartheidstate and the Politics of the National Party. 1948-
1994 (Athens, Ohio, 1996), 46,48.
51. See N. Stultz, Afrikaner Politics in South Africa. 1934-1948 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974).
152.
52. See, for instance, I. Goldin, Making Race: The Politics and Economics of Colored Identity in
South Africa (London and New York, 1987); M. Lacey, Workingfor Boroko: The Origins of a
Coercive Labour Sysytem in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1981); or G. Lewis, Between the Wire
and the Wall: A History of South African ColouredPolitics (Cape Town, 1987).
 220 PATRICK FURLONG

all more important than apartheid, which as a policy plank had played a relatively
minor part in the campaign (pp. 480-1).
No doubt these other considerations were important, but while the role of the
war in reconfiguring the political landscape cannot be underestimated, this is not
at odds with stressing the significance of the 1948 election or apartheid as a major
factor in its outcome.53It also took some years for that landscape to become clear,
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with most Afrikaners backing a NP-Afrikaner Party alliance. Were the war vote
so critical in 1939, Afrikaners would have formed a solid bloc around Hertzog and
Malan rather than feuding, and Malan would have drawn so many votes that he
would have won the 1943 election rather than only that of 1948.
A 1948 memorandum by Eric Louw, Tips for Home Visits (Wenke vir
Huisbesoek), for NP election workers in his Beaufort West (Cape) constituency,
treats briefly many issues listed by Giliomee. But the Colour Question
(Kleurvraagstuk)gets a whole page, after an introduction entitled What the
election is about, beginning: The main matter about which this election is
concerned, is the extremely important COLOUR QUESTION. White survival
could be secured only by applying the NPs policy of apartheid, i.e. separation
(skeiding)between what is white and non-white, in all area^'.'^ The language is
not that of anthropological and theological euphemism, which Giliomee claims
had superceded crass racism among NP leaders. In the past, Louw states, Africans
lived in their own kaffir areas (kufer-gebiede), but now they streamed into white
areas, incited by Communist agitators, pushing equality that would end in
bastardisation (verb~srering).~~
Giliomee stresses the lack of biological racism in main-stream apartheid
thinking; for instance, he regards the visionary, relatively liberal Cape DRC
theologian G.B.A. Gerdener, an advocate of total apartheid and the later
separate development (pp. 483-4), as having a far more lasting influence than the
hardliner^.^^ Such distinctions are difficult to sustain. He notes that in 1942
Gerdener (the lone theologian on the 1947 NP Sauer Commission) became
chairman of the DRC Federal Mission Council, which submitted a petition to the
government to introduce segregation. This petition included a memorandum by
British-born biologist H.B. Fantham (who influenced Eloff and thus Cronje), in
which it was argued that children of mixed unions were mentally and socially
weaker (p. 461). Eloff and Fantham had a common source too: German eugenicist
Eugen Fischer, who later became head of the Nazi Institute for Racial H~giene.~

53. See Brits, Op die Vooraand van Apartheid, 113-33.

54. Cape Archives, T.E. Donges Papers, Vol. 100, Eric Louw, typescript memorandum, Kiesaf-
deling Beaufort-Wes: Aan Alle Ampsdraers en Werkers van die Nasionale Party - Wenke vir
Huisbesoek, 1948, 1-2.
55. CA, Donges Papers, Vol. 100, Louw, Wenke vir Huisbesoek, 2 , 4 .
56. Giliomee, Making of the Apartheid Plan, 375.
57. Black, WarAgainst the Weak, 279-80,287, and 316-17.
 HISTORICAL REVISIONISM 221

In 1948 Gerdener lauded the hardline Cronjes ideas, such as autonomous

development (eiesoortige ontwikkeling) for each group: R.T.J. Lombard argues
that the 1950 DRC Federal Mission Board Congress, chaired by Gerdener, which
proposed a comprehensive scheme of separate development, clearly showed
Cronjts infl~ence.~ Giliomee notes that in 1941 Stellenbosch anthropologistP.J.
Schoeman urged the creation of large African reserves to promote black pride,
that the first book ... propagating a policy called apartheid in social science
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language was written by three Stellenbosch academics (anthropologist P.J.

Coertze, native administration expert F.J. Language, and linguist B.I.C. van
Eeden), and that in their preface they acknowledged Gerdeners influence (p. 467).
He does not mention that all four leaned toward the OB and that the OB press,
PublicitC, published their book. He also does not mention that CronjC frequently
cited them in his work, or that Wapenskou,where the Schoeman study appeared,
was the journal of Diederichss ANS!59
Nor did Cape NP moderation take over after a few brief experiments with
extremism. E.G. Malherbe relates that within weeks of the 1948 NP victory, the
new (Cape NP) Defence Minister, Erasmus, took from the Military Intelligence
Directors office massesof secret files on the subversive activities of OB and AB
members. Malan blithely dismissed Malherbes complaint about this.6oOne of
Malans first acts once the NP had come to power was to free Eric Holm (voice of
the Nazi Zeesen Radio) and Robey Leibbrandt (would-be assassin of Smuts).
Strijdom put Greyshirt leader Weichardt in the packed Senate (expanded to push
through the legislation removing Coloured voting rights). NO leader Pirow was
appointed prosecutor in the 1950s TreasonTrial, and Strauss von Moltke became
NP leader in Namibia. Consider too the places in the Nationalist establishment
given to Diederichs, Meyer, and OB generals B.J. Vorster and Hendrik van den
Bergh.6
It is difficult to accept that the peculiar feature of apartheid as an ideology
was its attempt to reconcile the demands for white survival and justice (p. 461),
or that the desire for survival and segregation grew out of historical experience
rather than notions ofbiological racism or superiority. The evils of apartheid (such
as Immorality Act prosecutions, forced removals, and race classification fiascos)
then become over-zealous application or selfish reluctance to apply the policy fully
(true partition). Dubow, however, argues that while idealist notions of nation,
volk, and culture made it possible to dispense with full-blownracist explanations

58. G.B.A. Gerdener, review in Die Kerkbode, 10 Nov. 1948; R.T.J. Lombard, Die Nederduitse
Gereformeerde Kerke en Rassepolitiek: Met Spesiale Venvysing nu Jare 1948-1961 (Pretoria,
1981), 94,259.
59. W.L. von R. Scholtz, Die Rol van Politieke Opvattinge en Sosiaal-Ekonomiese Faktore in die
Ontstaan van die Wette, in E. de Villiers and J. Kinghorn, eds, Op die Skaal: Gemengde
Huwelike en Ontug (Cape Town, 1984), 17-8; Moodie, Rise ofAfrikanerdom, n13,274-5.
60. E.G. Malherbe, Education in South Africa. Volume II: 1923-75 (Cape Town, 1977), 683.
61. See Furlong, Befween Crown andSwastika, 244-8.
 222 PATRICK FURLONG

of human difference, [b]iological notions of race were not necessarily repudi-

ated. Rather they were incorporated within a cultural form of essentialism that
encouraged the articulation of human difference without explicit recourse to
arguments based on biological determinism.62Even before the war Preller had
linked historical experience and racial science by arguing that early Afrikaners
prejudice and paternalism showed a remarkable grasp of innate differences
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between whites and blacks, including the allegedly stunted intellectual develop-
ment of blacks!63
The desire of some apartheid ideologues such as Gerdener and Eiselen after
the Second World War to distance themselves from anything smacking of Nazism
and to prefer theological, anthropological or practical arguments for apartheid
is understandable, but does not require reading back into the earlier period an
idealised interpretation of apartheids roots. Nor can one assess the conservative
revolution of 1948 only in terms of apartheid. It is not difficult to find earlier racist
measures which appear to lay some of the groundwork, such as the 1927
Immorality Act (which on p. 344 Giliomee wrongly dates to 1928 and describes
as barring marriage between whites and blacks, rather than simply extra-marital
sex). The new regime also marked a sharp break with the liberal state which,
despite its limitations, the pre-1948 state still was, at least for whites and to a
degree for Coloureds. The flaws in the apartheid state were not just problems in
application. Whatever the difficulties in post-apartheid South Africa, there is no
reason for nostalgia about lost opportunities to preserve the good in apartheid,
even if a 2001 poll (p. 655) suggests that many (especially white) South Africans
share such feelings.
Giliomee has in many respects written a masterwork, but the lengths to which
he goes in seeking to balance criticism with empathy come perilously close to
defending the system that he so long opposed. The result is a frustrating and
sometimes deeply troubling work, especially coming from one of South Africas
greatest historians, whom liberals have long considered a kindred if maverick
spirit. It is ironic that in The Afrikaners Giliomee, who suggests elsewhere that the
historiography of Afrikaner nationalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century
suffered from what Harrison Wright called the burden of the present@ seems
similarly so affected by the burden of an Afrikaner society coming to terms with
a painful past and an uncertain future.

62. S . Dubow, Ethnic Euphemisms and Racial Echoes, Journal of Southern African Studies, 20,
3 (Sep. 1994), 359.
63. Dubow, Illicit Union,268-9.
64. Giliomee, The Making of the Apartheid Plan, 377.