had hit South Africa. The Wall Street crash happened in 1929, when the Dow Jones index dropped from 312,76 to 230 points in five days. The slump continued for three years to a low of 40,56 points and American industrial shares fell by as much as 90%. The ripples spread around the globe, as far as South Africa. Here, meanwhile, rural poverty in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War had led to rapid urbanisation: between 1900 and 1926 the rate of urbanised Afrikaners rose from 10 to 41%. By 1933 the Carnegie Commission of Inquiry on the Poor White Question found that the number of desperately poor whites had grown from an estimated 106 000 in 1921 to 300 000, hence 30% of Afrikaners and seventeen percent of the white population as a whole. The Great Drought of 1933-1934 did not improve matters and many more farmers were forced to migrate to the cities, where they were largely dependent on welfare organisations and many women eked out a living for their families by running boarding houses.
The Hertzog government’s stubborn insistence on sticking to the gold standard exacerbated the situation. In 1931 England devalued its pound but South Africa, a gold-producing country, did not follow suit. Exports became uncompetitively expensive: South African wool cost 40% more than that of Australia. Currency speculation caused an outflow of capital and South African mining houses, which sold gold for sterling, hoarded their profits abroad.
The Ruperts did not escape the general hardship. John Rupert’s annual income dropped from £3 000 to £120. The family car stood idle in the garage for several years. At the age of sixteen young Anton had sufficient prescience to realise that South Africa would be compelled to leave the gold standard. His father, trusting Finance Minister Klasie Havenga to stick to his word, refused to believe him. This led to what was to be Anton’s first business deal. He had been begging his father to exchange his paper currency for gold. On 28 December 1932 Havenga announced that South Africa was abandoning the gold standard. John Rupert manfully admitted that his son had been right. He opened his safe, which contained seven gold pounds. ‘Take them, you deserve them,’ he said. Each pound was worth 27 shillings instead of 20 − a lucky windfall for a young man who had to make his way through university.
Nonetheless he had to review his plans for the future. The only two medical faculties at the time, at the universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand, were way beyond his means. For £100 a year he could do a BSc at the University of Pretoria. At the beginning of the 1934 academic year he enrolled.
Commenting on this life-changing decision in later life, he said: ‘I have often thanked Providence for things I didn’t get when I wanted them.’
Chapter 4
Student during the depression
Early in 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, Anton Rupert left the Karoo for Pretoria, the administrative capital of the Union with a burgeoning Afrikaans university. On 26 February he registered for a first-year BSc course at what was popularly known as TUCs1 − the University of Pretoria (UP), his alma mater, of which he would later become chancellor and Alumnus of the Century. The course was designed to serve as an admission qualification to a medical degree at one of the other universities.
His decision to attend the UP instead of the older universities of Stellenbosch or Cape Town was directly related to his love for Afrikaans. When he read in a newspaper report in 1933 that the city council of Pretoria had withdrawn its annual contribution to the UP on account of the university becoming an Afrikaans-language institution, he decided that this was where he wanted to study, as one of the first generation of Cape school children who had been educated fully in Afrikaans.
In Rupert’s first year he was in Sonop men’s residence. The first ten days the newcomers were subjected to a gruelling initiation programme. Most of it happened at night, so they got precious little sleep. They were tossed out of their beds, had to crawl through a stream, which they were told contained hidden barbed wire, and sent on long-distance jogs across the city on senseless errands like counting the steps of the Union Buildings. The young entrepreneur sized up the situation and, on his way to purchase a box of matches for a senior student at the railway station several kilometres away, he stopped off at the house of his former headmaster Dr Eybers, who had moved to Pretoria in the meantime. From him he borrowed enough money to buy a dozen boxes, which he hid on the sports grounds in case he was sent on the same silly errand again. At the end of the ten days two first-year students were in hospital and a third in a psychiatric institution. On 7 March 1934 the rector, Prof. AE du Toit, put a summary end to all initiation in the residences and instituted a committee to investigate the matter. On its recommendation, initiation rituals entailing physical exhaustion and nocturnal activities were declared taboo.
In the midst of this ordeal Rupert for the first time in his life wrote an intelligence test. The result was sufficiently impressive to secure him a bursary of £40 per annum for three years. On his slender budget it was a substantial amount. By then the Depression was affecting student numbers at the UP. In 1930 there had been 1 074 students. By 1934 enrolment was down to 829, including extramural students, plus 25 in Johannesburg. Those on the Pretoria campus knew each other well and Rupert was soon actively involved in student life, where he emerged as a natural leader.
At the end of his first year he was one of two students out of a class of seventeen to qualify for admission to study medicine at the universities of Cape Town or the Witwatersrand. Still unable to afford it, he changed to a straight BSc with chemistry as his major subject. His academic performance suffered a setback in his second year when he incurred inflammation of the middle ear and missed several months’ lectures. There were no antibiotics in those days, and the somewhat primitive treatment left a permanent scar behind his ear.
In his final year Rupert met Huberte Goote, a first-year BA student. He had first heard about her when his close friend Colijn van Bergen sang her praises while they were sitting in a car outside the house of Fritz (FS) Steyn, the university’s propaganda secretary and later a member of parliament, diplomat and judge, where Rupert was staying at the time. Student friends told Huberte about the Afrikaans-Nasionale Studentebond (ANS, Afrikaans National Students’ Association), where she met Rupert. She represented the first-year students on the students’ representative council (SRC), of which he was chairman. Huberte would spend the coming decades at the side of the tall, dark-haired student of whom she said in an interview: ‘Anton was shy, but he had charisma. I was already fascinated by him at the first mass meeting.’
Huberte came from a Western Transvaal family, one that had also experienced hardship. She was the daughter of a Dutch immigrant teacher, Hubertus Johannes Goote, who had died five months before her birth during the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic, and Johanna Adina Goote, née Bergh. When her grandfather in the Netherlands received a cablegram announcing her birth, he got the impression that he had a grandson and proposed that the baby be given the family name of Hubertus Gerardus, which was duly done. Understandably, the name gave rise to a lot of teasing, also from a good family friend, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Hubert, as she spelled her name initially, objected to Prince Bernhard calling her ‘Hubertus Gerardus’. He suggested she should be Huberta but she refused – Huberta was a hippopotamus, she said. In the end they agreed on Huberte, the French feminine form, which she prefers.
Like her daughter, Huberte’s mother had also been born after the death of her father. Mrs Johanna Adina Goote was orphaned at the age of six when her mother Mrs Bergh (née Riekert) died. Huberte’s grandfather Bergh was a descendant of the Swedish adventurer Olof Bergh, a member of the Political Council at the Cape, who gained fame through exploits such as leading the journey of exploration to Namaqualand in 1682-’83. He had been married to Anna de Koning. After the loss of her mother, Huberte’s mother was raised by her grandparents, Comdt PJ and Mrs Lenie Riekert, on the farm Derdepoort. It was in the same district, near Pilanesberg, that Huberte’s mother met her Dutch father, who was then head of a farm school with three teachers.
One of Huberte’s clearest memories, one that she has carried with her since childhood is the story of the infamous murders on Derdepoort on 25 November 1899, a few weeks after the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War. Her great-grandfather Comdt Riekert owned the large farm Derdepoort along the Marico River on the border between Marico-Bushveld and the then Bechuanaland. An attack on a Boer settlement of about thirteen families on the farm was the first in which the British forces used black people and in which Boer women