DF Malan and the Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism. Lindie Koorts
since both his younger brothers were engaged by that time, but he responded that he had given up on romantic prospects.[62] Nettie was a friend, and nothing more.
Back in Utrecht, Malan threw himself into his work, but theology was never the only interest in his life, and his years in Europe were not necessarily defined only by his studies. Malan’s presence in Utrecht afforded him the rare privilege of meeting the Boer leaders when they visited Europe. By this time, Kruger was living in Utrecht, and Malan used the opportunity to visit him. More than fifty years later, he recalled (and maybe even romanticised) the scene that greeted him: an old, bent figure, with the Bible open in front of him.[63] He also witnessed Kruger’s decline. As the war reached its final months, Malan wrote to his parents that ‘Oom Paul’ was very quiet and kept to himself. He only left his house on Sundays to attend the nearby Dopper church. ‘His time has passed,’ Malan concluded.[64] Malan found Kruger’s last public appearances tragic. Within months after the conclusion of the war, the Boer generals Louis Botha, Koos de la Rey and Christiaan de Wet visited Europe. Utrecht held a special meeting for them in the Domkerk, which Malan attended. Here he witnessed the passing of the older generation and the rise of the new generation, whom he himself was to succeed:
At the close the ‘oubaas’ himself ascended the pulpit and addressed the generals and the audience … Though he said nothing particular, yet it was a most imposing and pathetic spectacle to see the oldman [sic], so strong and mighty in his days, now bowed down with age and disaster stand up before an audience perhaps for the last time. In the evening, the generals addressed a meeting in a large hall, and spoke well and made a favourable impression. De Wet especially spoke well … About the reception in Paris and Berlin you would have read. In spite of the Kaiser and his government, it is freely stated that Berlin has not seen the like in the last thirty-two years.[65]
Malan now joined the Dutch in their near hero worship of these men who had stepped forward as the new generation of Boer leaders. Christiaan de Wet, in particular, had been the darling of the Dutch press throughout the war. He was hailed as the architect of the guerrilla campaign, and his ability to outwit his adversaries and escape their ‘drives’ to hunt him down time and again kept the Dutch public enthralled.[66] The Dutch public’s admiration for the generals filled Malan with pride and reinforced his belief in the Afrikaners’ moral superiority to the European nations:
The generals are making a profound impression everywhere, especially because of their faith and their simplicity. In a society that is paralysed by faithlessness and where they are taught since childhood to feign behind a mask of so-called civilised etiquette, the appearance of three men so world-famous – and yet so unpretentious, so natural, so full of faith and so forceful – is a true wonder.[67]
In contrast to his admiration for the Boer generals, Malan had nothing but disdain for the Cape politicians and their tradition of conducting politics in the tolerant and accommodative manner that he had known all his life. In Stellenbosch the younger generation had already demonstrated that it was less tolerant than its elders. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Malan’s words showed that his tolerance was gone, as he rejected the ways of the older generation:
In the Cape Parliament our case seems to be doing excellently thanks to the foolishness of the ultra-jingo party. The only thing that I find very hard to stomach is that there is apparently so much sacrificing of principles, so much trading in principles. Of course it is all for sound political reasons, but that does not take away the immorality of it all. But the struggle between politics and principles is as old as Ahab and Elijah, and no one has ever succeeded in uniting the two.[68]
This condemnation of politics as something that was immoral and irreconcilable with principles was not only Malan speaking. It was a sign of the influence of his new mentor, his landlord Professor J.J.P. Valeton Jr.
Valeton specialised in the history of religion and literature in Israel as well as the Old Testament and was a prominent Dutch theologian, one of the three leading representatives of the ‘later’ Ethical theologians. He published a number of pamphlets on Ethical theology, but these were not his only publications – he also wrote religious tracts, and pamphlets that dealt with mission work and Old Testament history. His most specialised works concentrated on the prophets of the Old Testament.[69] In April 1900, six months before Malan’s arrival in the Netherlands, Valeton delivered a lecture entitled ‘De strijd tusschen Achab en Elia’ (The battle between Ahab and Elijah).[70]
In this lecture, Valeton created a dichotomy between politics and religion. The biblical story of Ahab exposed the difference between worldly and political views and motives on the one hand, and religious, spiritual values on the other.[71] Ahab was a shrewd political strategist – especially in his creation of alliances with his neighbours, be it through marriage or through showing mercy to those whom he had defeated in war.[72] Elijah was Ahab’s antithesis: the man of God whose only concern was service to his Creator. Elijah regarded politics and the interests of state – which were Ahab’s main concerns – as inconsequential.[73] To Valeton, the rivalry between Ahab and Elijah was the personification of the even greater rivalry, ‘the battle between politics and religion, between the interests of state and faith, between opportunism and principle’.[74]
Valeton saw a clear correlation between the story of Ahab and Elijah and the nature of his own society. If the story were to be retold in plain historical terms, without the moralising influence of Bible teachers, contemporary society would applaud Ahab as the ‘liberal’ man, the man of his times. Elijah would stand in stark contrast to Ahab:
Elijah is the narrow-minded man, one who has but one end in mind, and who sacrifices everything for its sake. Elijah is intolerant and hard, well, yes, great and impressive, but in a manner that inspires respect but also indignation. He sacrifices everything for an idea, human lives are nothing to him … the interests of the state are also nothing to him. What a man! A gale-force wind, a bolt of lightning, all-conquering and all-destroying, to be admired from a distance and when close by, to be avoided as far as possible.[75]
Despite the public’s inevitable disapproval of such a hard and narrow-minded prophet, Elijah was clearly the better man – one who did not seek his salvation in the state, but in God who was eternal and unchanging. Valeton invoked the old biblical maxim: ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’[76]
Valeton portrayed politics as something dirty, something that could not be reconciled with religion. He created Elijah as the ideal man: one who was unbending, unpopular and isolated, but nevertheless one who was superior to a likeable man, as personified by Ahab. Elijah was a man who was willing to serve his principles without expecting to see the results in his lifetime. In Valeton’s eyes, Elijah was equal to Moses, the man who had led his people to the Promised Land.[77]
It is unmistakable that Malan had made these ideals his own. He too began to regard religion and politics as two irreconcilable poles. He became convinced that the only way in which one could be successful in politics was by adhering to the compulsion ‘to be silent, to cloak, to cover up, to almost approve of, and to applaud, the criminal’.[78] Even worse, in his eyes, were those politicians who played on their supporters’ religious beliefs in order to get ahead:
Religious principles … according to my insight, should pursue and defend justice and truth in the name of God, and therefore all injustice and crime and sin in friend or foe, in a single individual or an entire nation, should be exposed and condemned. And when one drags religion by its hair into politics in order to obtain political capital, one is sacrificing eternal interests for the temporary – one humiliates religion.[79]
In the aftermath of the South African War, as the Afrikaners began their quest to regain political power through constitutional means, Malan grappled with the nature of that endeavour. At this stage, only the Cape Afrikaners were enfranchised – the first elections in the Transvaal and the Free State would only be held in 1907. The Cape political tradition of tolerance and accommodation was the only means of political expression, and the only means to power. Malan found it difficult to reconcile this with his now firmly entrenched belief in non-negotiable principles and the primacy of eternal interests over temporal ones. He could not refrain from condemning Cape politics, even if it was an avenue to political power.