DF Malan and the Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism. Lindie Koorts
in our hands, then He also has the right – and He also will demand – that body and soul from our hands … our own salvation depends for a large part on the manner in which we deal with the salvation of another. Let us not forget that God places a high, priceless value on every human soul … He has imprinted upon it His own image, His mark of ownership … He was ready to pay for it, yes, for the soul of the poor drunken coloured lying next to the street, a high price, the highest price ever to be uttered by human lips, the blood of the eternal Son. Can He be anything other than filled with a holy solemnity about the salvation of such a soul? Can He demand anything other than a strict account from everyone who had it in his power to save or ruin a soul?[80]
Through the Cain and Abel metaphor, Malan made it clear that the white community in Montagu was indeed its coloured brothers’ keeper. White petitioners had to take responsibility for their position of power. They had it within their power to provide already weakened alcoholics with even more temptation – or to limit the temptation and thereby aid a struggling soul.[81] There was another important component to Malan’s thinking: social ills had to be fought by authoritative measures from the top – it could not be left to the individual to fight them on his own. In this one recognises a mind-set that believed that most problems could be solved by the appropriate regulations, and it was to characterise his solutions to many difficult questions.
Malan’s appeal, which linked his congregation’s Christian conscience to their racial status, struck a deep chord. His views were received enthusiastically. A direct result of the sermon was a draft petition by his congregation to close a number of the town’s canteens. The petition was successful and elicited added measures, such as a limitation on the hours during which alcohol could be sold.[82] Malan, who had expected an angry rebuttal from his wine-producing flock, was astonished by the overwhelmingly positive response.[83] The experience must have diminished his initial fear of tackling sensitive issues – a valuable lesson indeed for a future politician.
At this stage, Malan did not realise that his sermons were paving his way to the political platform. The less educated among his flock might have struggled to follow him at first, but to a discerning listener, Malan’s sermons were an oratory feast, for which they were willing to travel a good distance. M.E. Rothmann (M.E.R.), who would become a well-known Afrikaans author, heard Malan’s sermons in Montagu. She recalled Malan’s sermons as befitting Matthew Arnold’s description of style: ‘Have something to say, and say it as clearly as possible.’ He had the ability to keep his audience spellbound for longer than an hour, and his oration would neither weaken nor waver for a moment. This was due to the incalculable amount of time Malan spent in formulating his arguments. He even refused to address a simple prayer meeting unless he had had the time to prepare. The notes to his sermons became collector’s items among his many admirers.[84] One of these was Andrew Hofmeyr, the nephew of Malan’s Stellenbosch professor N.J. Hofmeyr, who practised law in Montagu. He made copies of Malan’s sermons and sent these to his brother, Willie Hofmeyr. Willie Hofmeyr was a partner in a Cape Town law firm and knew Malan as a fellow founding member of the ATV.[85] It was Willie Hofmeyr who would later persuade Malan to enter politics.
In the meantime, Malan busied himself with the matters of the church – which inevitably reflected the matters of state. The four colonies moved closer together and in 1910 became the four provinces of the Union of South Africa. By the end of 1911 and in the course of 1912, the political parties that represented the Afrikaners in the Cape, the Transvaal and the Free State – the Afrikaner Bond, Het Volk and Orangia Unie respectively – dissolved themselves in order to form the South African Party (SAP). The SAP represented a new ideal: the unification of Afrikanerdom into a single party – although its membership included a few moderate English speakers.[86] The unification of the colonies prompted the DRC to consider its own unification across the new provincial borders. The debate concentrated most of its energy on the position of coloured congregants in the Cape Province. Although the Mission Church had been established in 1881 to provide for segregated worship,[87] coloured members still had the right to belong to the DRC. This right, however, did not extend beyond the borders of the Cape Province, and the northern provinces baulked at the idea of even one or two coloured members from the Cape participating in the national Synod. On this point, church unification broke down,[88] and it would only be achieved after Malan’s death.
Malan himself was in favour of the unification of the church, which he regarded as part of the broader unification of the Afrikaner nation itself. The political unification of South Africa was a dream come true and, initially, it filled Malan with cautious hope. In the light of this victory for Afrikaner unity, the failure of church unification was a genuine disappointment. Malan felt that coloured representatives in the Synod were in such a minority that their presence was negligible and could not constitute a threat to the northern provinces.
In a letter written in May 1912, he lamented the outcome, which he believed was due to poor timing – ‘[n]otwithstanding the new Union, the nation is far from realising that it is now truly one’.[89] The reality was that, among Afrikaners, provincial loyalties ran much deeper than the new loyalty to a united South Africa in which English and Afrikaans speakers formed a single nation. This provincial loyalty was manifested in a near hero worship of prominent personalities who were seen to represent a particular area. Especially in the northern provinces, the heroes of the South African War enjoyed an unrivalled amount of respect. The Transvaal was a Louis Botha-Jan Smuts stronghold, while the Free State adored ex-President Steyn and General J.B.M. Hertzog. In the Cape, admiration for its former prime minister, John X. Merriman, still ran very deep.
A new generation of Afrikaners was on the rise, however. They had not experienced the South African War, and did not have as strong a loyalty to its icons. They began to challenge Prime Minister Louis Botha’s attempts at conciliation between Afrikaners and English speakers. Botha recognised this, and it worried him. What worried him even more was the fact that the younger generation seemed to form an alliance with the most powerful of all Afrikaner institutions, the Dutch Reformed Church. He saw fit to warn Smuts against this impending threat:
Jannie, you and I will now make a stand somewhere – that is certain, for it seems clear that there is underhand collusion against our principles and moderate policy … The young Afrikaners, and especially our Church, are now going too far; we must turn them back before it is too late, for it cannot go on like this.[90]
Unfortunately for Botha, the wave of Afrikaner nationalism within the church, and among the younger generation, continued to swell, with Malan headed towards its crest. In 1911, the students of Stellenbosch organised a language conference to celebrate the Union constitution’s entrenchment of equal language rights for both Dutch and English, which marked a departure from the hegemony of English in the pre-Union colonies. At this conference, Malan gave a moving speech entitled ‘Taal en Nationaliteit’ (Language and Nationality).[91]
In his address, Malan distanced himself from the convoluted problems of linguistics once again and, instead, tied language to a broader nationalist ideal. He was convinced that all of the problems experienced by the Afrikaner community were the result of their national identity and language not being acknowledged, and because they were made to feel that theirs was an inferior culture. The situation was especially acute in schools, where the Afrikaners’ language and history were hushed into a corner. This had a detrimental effect on the Afrikaners’ character, Malan argued, since a nation that had lost its national self-respect could not hope to have a strong character.[92]
The speech revealed Malan’s interwoven world-view, as he intertwined all that was dear to him: language, nationalism and religion. Language was more than just a means of communication:
The language is the membrane that binds everything that belongs to a nation together and makes it one. It is the peel around the fruit, the skin around the body, the bark around the tree; it is not only there to bind together and to include, but also to fence off the outside and simultaneously to make all healthy growth and expansion possible.[93]
To Malan, nationalism was a living, growing organism. It was holy, since the nation only existed because God had willed it so. Malan believed that God revealed himself in history, which proved time and again that disintegration, rather than integration, was the natural order. The tale of the Tower of Babel was an expression of this