to tell the story of a session of the synod that took place in the election year of 1953, shortly after he had spoken out in his book against the efforts to justify apartheid on Christian grounds. An elder berated him: “Oh, dominee, you have now completely spoilt this year’s wonderful election result for us.”
A sense of community
There was no neighbourhood in Porterville that was conspicuously rich or poor. In several streets, rich and poor lived side by side. While the homes of the more affluent were comfortable, there were no ostentatious houses. Plot size was the most noticeable difference. Some residents not only had a flower garden but also fruit trees, vegetable patches and even a vineyard. The big municipal dam was fed by water from a kloof in the mountain. The weekly turn to irrigate one’s garden was a major event for the townspeople. Though my father was not a keen gardener, he did not easily miss his irrigation opportunity.
Wheat farming was the district’s principal economic activity, but by the 1950s there was already considerable diversification. On the mountain farmers grew fruit, berries and disa plants, and on the farms below the mountain one found fruit, vineyards and mixed farming. Export grapes and wine grapes were produced in the Vier-en-Twintig-Riviere area, south of the town, while wheat farming predominated in the Rooi Karoo, northwest of the town.
Until about the year 2000 most of the farms were between 300 and 500 morgen in size, considerably smaller than those in the Swartland districts such as Malmesbury and Moorreesburg. This was the main reason why no significant class differences developed among the white community in the Porterville district. There was no question of poor Afrikaners belonging to a lower class. White people regarded each other as equals, irrespective of income differences.
Portervillers tended to look askance at anyone who paraded their wealth or education. People even hesitated to talk about an overseas trip for fear that they might be suspected of showing off. In the early 1960s, when my mother mentioned to an acquaintance, Oom Dais Toerien, that she and my father had just returned from a visit to London and Paris, he swiftly trumped her with an account of his recent trip to Oudtshoorn.
My recollection is that the Afrikaner community, whose lives revolved around the church and the school, were reasonably content with their lives, mainly on account of the lack of conspicuous class differences but also because there was no television that could broadcast images of the lifestyle of wealthy South Africans.
A scientific study carried out in the 1950s in more than a dozen countries around the world indicated that, on average, the citizens of poor countries were no less satisfied with their lives than those of rich countries. When a similar study was conducted in the mid-1980s, the results were dramatically different. According to their responses, citizens of richer countries were distinctly happier than those of poorer countries. The crucial difference was television. Almost everyone could see how the middle class lived in the world’s advanced democracies, and almost everyone now hankered after that lifestyle and at the same time detested the rich.14
White people’s strong sense of community had struck my parents from the outset. The church and the school occupied a central place in social life, and there was a spirit of mutual caring that went hand in hand with an engaging unpretentiousness. People showed respect towards the minister and the teachers, but did not shrink from criticism when they neglected their duties. The school achieved good academic results over the years.
In one of the school’s yearbooks, three school inspectors highlighted the great value of “platteland schools for platteland children”. My subjective impression at Stellenbosch, both as student and as lecturer, was that outstanding students who had matriculated at obscure platteland schools almost always performed better than good students who had attended the top schools.15 Malcolm Gladwell recently proved this theory statistically in the context of American schools and universities in his David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants (2013).
A national movement
Participation in the volksbeweging was a formative influence in my life. It instilled in me a sense of involvement with Afrikaners as a community that was numerically small and still at an early stage of its cultural development. As strange as it may sound today, the volksbeweging did not arise in reaction to any perceived threat from coloured or black people.
The volksbeweging was especially aimed at liberating Afrikaners from their sense of inferiority towards the wealthier and more confident English-speaking section of the white population. Besides the upliftment of the so-called poor whites, the national movement had other important objectives: the establishment of Afrikaner business enterprises which would, in turn, employ Afrikaners, and the development of the Afrikaans language and culture.
My mother played an active role in the upliftment of the town’s poor. She was a member and, later, chair of the Porterville branch of the Afrikaanse Christelike Vrouevereniging (ACVV). This Christian women’s organisation, which had branches across the Cape Province, had been founded in Cape Town in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War to relieve the distress of destitute Afrikaners.
My mother often visited the poor herself to distribute food, clothing or reading matter, and sometimes she would send Jan. Her greatest frustration was that the poor did not want to read. She wanted to help uplift them intellectually so that they could be full members of the Afrikaner community and not only candidates for charity. This was a message that went out particularly from Dr DF Malan, editor of Die Burger and the NP leader, and ministers of religion.
The Stellenbosch economist Professor Jan Sadie has pointed out that the project of middle-class Afrikaners to uplift their own poor was an unusual phenomenon. It had much to do with the fact that the English-speaking elite tended to look down on Afrikaners collectively as a lesser “race” or community. Some tried to substantiate this theory of inherent inferiority by noting that more than 80% of poor whites were Afrikaners.
As a young newspaper reporter, MER (ME Rothmann), the Afrikaans writer who worked full-time for the ACVV for much of her life, heard a speech by Sir Carruthers Beattie, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, that upset her greatly. He stated that poor whites were generally “intellectually backward” and that there was something “inherent” in the Afrikaners that resulted in the phenomenon of poor whiteism assuming such alarming proportions in their case. MER wrote: “His audience raised no objections to this statement.” As Sadie put it, Afrikaners of all classes resolved to form a united front against English speakers, who looked down on them, especially their poor.
Most of the coloured people were, of course, even poorer than the poor whites. I once asked my mother whether she should not try to help the coloured poor as well. Her reply was that one could undertake only one great social task in one’s life, and the upliftment of the Afrikaner poor was her great task.
Economically, the Afrikaners still lagged far behind their English-speaking counterparts. In 1938, the year of my birth, the Afrikaner share of the private sector stood at less than 10% (excluding agriculture). Referring to the accepted correlation between Protestantism and capitalism, a respected analyst observed recently that “the failure of the Calvinist Afrikaners to develop a thriving capitalist system until the last quarter of the [twentieth] century” is an anomaly.16
In 1939 Sanlam and the Afrikaner Broederbond organised an economic volkskongres (people’s congress) in Bloemfontein to promote the establishment of Afrikaner companies. From their side, Afrikaner companies had to undertake to employ Afrikaners and to place those who excelled in management positions. The central idea was to increase the Afrikaner share of the economy in a way that would command respect.
After the congress TE Dönges, who later became a cabinet minister, defended the economic mobilisation of Afrikaners in a way that was also wholeheartedly endorsed by my parents. The Afrikaners, he said, were determined to act as a group to increase their share of the economy fairly and peacefully. They felt that they had no right to expect others to help them, and were too proud to ask for help from others to work out their economic salvation. Dönges emphasised that the Afrikaners had no intention of boycotting English firms. All that they asked was for the English-speaking community to maintain at least a “benign neutrality” to allow Afrikaners to find their “economic