when Huberte told her grandchildren about the wartime suffering, she also cautioned them to remember the kindness and humanity of those who had helped her ancestors: ‘You should always keep a balanced view, because wars are not caused by people; the cause is greed. Wars are always about greed.’
Huberte was born in 1919 in Pres. Paul Kruger’s official residence in Church Street, Pretoria, at a time when the house was rented by the Moedersbond maternity hospital before it became the Kruger House museum. Until the age of seven, she lived with her mother and older sister Bets at Rustenburg. The widow supported her daughters by sewing dresses for friends. She had inherited the family farm but derived no income from it: ‘just firewood and beetroot,’ Huberte recalls. As her husband had died so soon after starting to teach in South Africa, Mrs Goote only qualified for a tiny pension. ‘That is why I have respect for people who can make the most of their talents and can survive. I detest handouts; you have to retain your independence and honour,’ Huberte relates.
In 1927 Huberte’s mother remarried. Her new husband, Piet Wessels, was also a teacher and eventually became headmaster of Krugersdorp’s Monument High School, which Huberte attended. A clever child, she did her first three standards in one year and matriculated at a young age. Her interest in all forms of the arts dates from the time she first went to school. She acted in plays, sang leading roles in operettas and was a member of the choir, while also playing basketball and hockey. After matriculating she worked as children’s librarian at Krugersdorp for a year. Then, with the aid of three interest-bearing loans, she proceeded to university in Pretoria.
Huberte registered for a BA with Afrikaans-Nederlands and Afrikaans cultural history as major subjects. When her cultural history lecturer Kotie Roodt-Coetzee, who had become a good friend, learned about her library experience, she organised a post for Huberte in the university library and her tuition fees were waived. This lucky break enabled her to register for a diploma course in librarianship concurrently with the BA, which was permitted on condition she worked in the library two nights a week. With all that on her plate, she still found time for the SRC as well as her many other interests, mainly the arts. She was a member of the Castalides art committee and on the editorial board of its journal, Castalia. She belonged to a small group that met regularly to discuss art exhibitions. Intensely musical like the father she had never known, she was part of a group of music lovers that met on Sunday nights to listen to records. On top of that she chaired the ANS drama group and acted in productions at the Volksteater along with well-known actresses like the passionate Anna Neethling-Pohl. (In later years, whenever Huberte became somewhat agitated, Rupert would admonish her: ‘Don’t be like Anna Neethling-Pohl!’) Even with all her extramural interests, however, Huberte completed both her BA and the librarianship diploma successfully.
Rupert, who has often acknowledged his gratitude to Huberte for her support throughout his career, paid tribute to his wife in his chairman’s address at the 1996 AGM of Rembrandt Beherende Beleggings (Rembrandt Controlling Investments): ‘She has been my most loyal and faithful supporter and also my greatest critic. I think that is how it ought to be.’ On the same occasion he called to mind their student years, stressing that they were both children of the Depression, when about a third of Afrikaans-speaking whites were unemployed. ‘I think it leaves a mark on one and maybe makes one look at capital in a different way. Those who had cars – three out of UP’s total of 820 students – did not do well.’ Both of them had to borrow to pay for their studies. They knew money could do a lot of good but it could also be the cause of great evil. ‘It is like a rope: it can be used as a lifeline to save a drowning person, or as a noose to hang someone. That is money. It talks.’
At the end of 1936 Rupert obtained his BSc, majoring in chemistry with second-year courses in physics and mathematics. The next year he registered for an MSc in chemistry. He would be studying part-time, for he had to start earning a living. Jobs were scarce, but he was fortunate to get a post at the Pretoria Technical College lecturing to part-time pharmaceutical students. Their average age was 28. He was twenty.
It dawned on him even then that he was training Afrikaners to work for ‘the English’ − the language divide, reinforced by economic inequality, ran deep. Over the next few years he became increasingly convinced that Afrikaners would have to fight for their own niche in the business world and in public life, a view he shared with other Afrikaner intellectuals. Ever since Lord Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’ − the British team imported from Oxford after the Anglo-Boer War to run the administration − the civil service had been predominantly English speaking. In 1925 nearly a third of all public servants were unilingual; the lingua franca at the office was English. In the business world, too, Afrikaners had to relinquish their ethnic ties and communicate in English if they wanted to become part of the business elite. Many Afrikaners sensed that English speakers condescendingly looked down on them and considered their language and culture inferior. A considerable number of English-speakers still harboured feelings that had been rife during the Anglo-Boer War, when the English press in South Africa was predominantly imperialist and anti-Boer. Some of the worst jingoism was displayed in the area around Graaff-Reinet.3
In the anti-Afrikaans atmosphere, which would increase as a result of divisions after South Africa’s entry into the Second World War in 1939, Dr HJ van Eck, a brilliant chemical engineer and father of the South African industrial revolution, was refused membership of the prestigious Rand Club. (In 1945 Rupert cited this as his reason for declining nomination for membership, which, given his English name, might well have been granted by the club, considered the canteen of the mining fraternity.)
In 1937, the year Rupert started lecturing, a new Afrikaans morning paper, Die Transvaler, was launched in Johannesburg. He applied for a position at the paper and was interviewed by the editor, Dr HF Verwoerd, who offered him a job on the editorial staff. Since it would have meant furthering his study by correspondence, however, Rupert turned down the offer: he recalls his decision to return to the university and concentrate on his postgraduate studies as one of the most important in his early life. Besides, he had not been favourably impressed by Verwoerd, who came across as ‘restless, rather autocratic and opinionated’ during the interview − impressions that were confirmed in later life, when he and Verwoerd crossed swords on various occasions.
The centenary of the Great Trek took place in 1938. There was a huge upsurge of Afrikaner nationalism throughout the country, also on the UP campus. The Afrikaanse Taal- en Kultuurvereniging (ATKV, Afrikaans Language and Culture Society) organised a symbolic ox-wagon trek to remind the trekkers’ descendants of the arduous journey and many tribulations their forebears had endured on their way into the interior. The symbol was apposite and stirred up great emotion among the vast majority of Afrikaners.
Rupert, in 1938 already a lecturer in chemistry, chaired both the extramural SRC and the extramural students’ branch of the ANS, precursor of the later Afrikaanse Studentebond (ASB). He was also on the national executive of the ANS, at that time chaired by Dr Nic Diederichs, a future minister of finance. By that time Rupert was a supporter of Dr DF Malan’s Purified National Party, the opposition to the ruling United Party of Hertzog and Smuts that had been formed through the fusion of the NP and the SAP in 1934.
Rupert and Huberte were among the ringleaders of the centenary celebrations on the UP campus, where Afrikaner ardour was opposed by members of the National Union of South African Students (Nusas), the dominant organisation on English-language campuses. Huberte was incensed by their snide comments on the Voortrekker costume that was widely worn by Afrikaners in that centenary year. She organised a special day when she and her friends would attend classes en masse wearing long Voortrekker dresses and traditional bonnets. They borrowed costumes from the Volksteater with the aid of Huberte’s actress friend Anna Neethling-Pohl. The appointed day happened to be 14 September, which, someone pointed out, was the anniversary of the day when Afrikaans became the official teaching medium at the university. They decided to celebrate this event and it became the first ‘Spring Day’, as the annual commemoration of the day at the UP came to be called.
Some weeks later on 4 October 1938, Rupert’s birthday, he and Wouter le Roux went to Bloemfontein as SRC delegates to attend a tribute to Ds JD Kestell, a revered Afrikaner church leader known as Father Kestell. Rupert was deeply moved by the venerable old man’s message: ‘A nation saves itself.’ Kestell’s message,