smilingly, pointing to the bullet scars on his face. In my layperson’s view, it was clear that the assault on his life had caused no psychological damage. Thereafter I took scant notice of claims that Verwoerd regarded his survival as tangible proof of divine intervention and of the special blessing that supposedly now rested on him.
Years later, in my book The Last Afrikaner Leaders (2012), I gave a more favourable assessment of Verwoerd than is the norm. I believe this had much to do with my first-hand exposure to the force of his personality and his powers of persuasion during that weekend in 1960.
The publisher Koos Human had a similar experience. He and José Burman, the author of a book on mountain passes in the Boland, asked Verwoerd to write a foreword, as it was known that Verwoerd and his wife were keen mountaineers. Verwoerd invited Human and Burman to his office where, after informing them that he had read the entire manuscript and had written the foreword himself, he elaborated expertly on the subject in a ten-minute monologue. Human made an observation that I can endorse wholeheartedly after the weekend at Welgevonden: “Never before (or since) have I been in the presence of such an almost unbelievably dominant personality. After this brief encounter, there was no doubt in my mind that he had his cabinet, caucus and party under his absolute control.”20
The struggle against the English
The political struggle of the 1950s had two facets: one was the overt competition for power between the National Party and the United Party (UP); the other was the veiled competition for status between the Afrikaans- and English-speaking white communities. By 1955 English South Africans had started realising that the UP would in all likehood never regain political power. Like the Afrikaners after their loss of power in 1994, they were resentful of their diminished status and political marginalisation.
The political activist and writer Patrick Duncan expressed their sense of disgruntlement as follows: “English South Africans are today in the power of their adversaries … They are beginning to know what the great majority of South Africans have always known – what it is to be second-class citizens in the land of one’s birth.”21
After 1948, it was English commentators who “interpreted” the Afrikaners to foreign journalists and diplomats and, through them, to the entire world. Some commentators and historians declared that the Afrikaners were simply and solely driven by apartheid and other racial obsessions.
English South Africans’ opposition to apartheid and their dissatisfaction about the fact that the Afrikaners were in power were often indistinguishable. David Yudelman, an esteemed historian, criticised English-speaking opinion-makers for disseminating a distorted picture of Afrikaners to the world. South African anglophones, he wrote, were not significantly more liberal than the Afrikaners on race questions, yet they tended to present the Afrikaner as “the villain, the fanatic, who created or at least perfected institutionalised racial discrimination”. Whites of British extraction, on the other hand, supposedly accepted segregation and apartheid only passively.
The anglophones, Yudelman added, were quite prepared to “use apartheid as a pretext for indirectly expressing their culturally chauvinistic distaste for the Afrikaners while continuing to enjoy the benefits of white supremacy”.22
The person who had the greatest political influence on me up to the mid-1960s was Piet Cillié, who became editor of Die Burger in 1954. Long before Yudelman, he expressed a similar view. He was a razor-sharp political commentator and, along with NP van Wyk Louw, the best political essayist in Afrikaans. Cillié headed a brilliant team that included three outstanding journalists: Schalk Pienaar, JJJ Scholtz and Rykie van Reenen.
From my high-school days I read the daily editorial in Die Burger as well as the political column under the pseudonym “Dawie” that appeared on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The collection of articles from this column, Dawie, 1946 tot 1964 (Tafelberg, 1966), provides a better perspective on the surging Afrikaner nationalism of the 1950s than any other book. This was before the dogma of apartheid began to stifle Afrikaners’ cultural nationalism.
Cillié often drew attention to the far-reaching way in which the “first-past-the-post” electoral system influenced politics and racial policy in particular. In the first place, the system made it possible for a party that had won a minority of votes to form a government. This was indeed what happened in South Africa between 1948 and 1958. Secondly, in countries that used this electoral system, there was a strong tendency that power ended up in the hands of the biggest ethnic group among the electorate and that the leaders tightened their grip on the group through a form of ethnic mobilisation that radicalised the political system. Between 1948 and 1994, Afrikaners at all times constituted more than 50% of the voters.
There was also a third trend associated with the system. Vulnerable racial or ethnic groups that held the balance of power between two big parties were often shut out. An example of this is what happened in the southern states of the United States in the 1890s when the Democratic Party spearheaded the large-scale disenfranchisement of black people. During the 1960s, it would take all of President Lyndon Johnson’s legendary ingenuity to get black people back on the voters’ roll. He did this even though he knew his party would pay a high price in the South for a generation or two.
In the general elections of 1948 and 1953 the English voters voted solidly against the NP, while the UP captured about 20% of the Afrikaner votes. In the 1948 election there were only 130 000 more potential Afrikaner votes than potential English votes. Up to the mid-1950s, NP fears that the UP could win an election with the help of coloured votes were not unrealistic. These fears are sometimes dismissed with the statement that there were only eight constituencies in which coloured votes could tip the scales. This argument misses the point that in 1948 the NP had an effective majority of only five seats.
Piet Cillié was pre-eminently the person who took up the cudgels against the view that the English-speaking community was supposedly above racial discrimination and racism. During election campaigns he seldom defended apartheid on its own terms, but described the English-Afrikaner contest and the contest between white and non-white as struggles that were inextricably intertwined. He rejected the liberals’ insistence that they had no ulterior motives in promoting equal rights for all. To Afrikaner nationalists, he wrote, the English liberals had always seemed to be more English than liberal, and more interested in power for the white English speakers than in power for black or coloured people.
A recent biography by Jaap Steyn clarified for me why I felt such an affinity with Cillié. In 1952 Cillié wrote to the Rev. Ben Marais, whose aforementioned book Die kleur-krisis en die Weste had just been published: “I agree wholeheartedly with you that the efforts to find Scriptural supports for apartheid, in the naive form that this quest mostly assumes, are doomed to failure … I know only one old man who believes that coloured people are descendants of Ham and eternally cursed, and no coherent pseudoscientific myths about race are being propagated deliberately in South Africa.”
He expressed his doubts as to whether the statistics Marais had quoted to prove that, inherently, races and ethnic groups differed very little from each other, were of any practical value for the problem in South Africa – how would it help Jews and Arabs in Palestine, for instance, to know that there were more similarities than differences between people?23
According to Cillié, colour was only salient in South African politics to the extent that it represented the boundary between “peoples” or “nations”. He referred to the Afrikaners’ reaction to the superior number of black people as “national instincts”. He criticised Ben Marais for not addressing the issue of “political power that lies at the root of race relations”. For Cillié, apartheid had to ensure that the Afrikaners and the broader white community retained power over themselves while they were building the state and the economy in the ultimate interest of all.
Cillié had an element in him of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose thinking had interested me from an early age. The Florentine is often erroneously described as a thinker who was prepared to argue that power be gained through the most immoral methods. Machiavelli did believe that the state’s task was not in the first place to be fair to all, but to ensure its citizens’ safety. But that was not an end in itself. The ultimate goal was a strong, effective state from which