DF Malan and the Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism. Lindie Koorts
are now accommodated in the parsonage’s bathroom, which is a small corrugated-iron structure in the backyard.’[143] These words were written without any reflection – the undesirability of white children living with a coloured family was so overwhelmingly self-evident as to blur the squalor of their new living conditions. To Malan, raising funds to alleviate such a desperate situation was the most important issue at hand, and the image of the three orphans cramped into a corrugated-iron bathroom in the heat of the African sun was sure to move the more privileged Dutch Reformed congregants in the Cape to action.
The appeal for funds was to become a prominent part of his letters to the Cape Province, as Malan found the Dutch Reformed congregations in a desperate situation. Not only were they widely dispersed, they were also too poor to maintain full-time ministers of their own and received only the most sporadic of spiritual nourishment. Malan saw another threat looming over their heads. Their environment not only posed the danger of these people being lost to their church, it also posed the danger of their children being lost to their nation. In Southern Rhodesian schools, Dutch was barely tolerated, while in Northern Rhodesia no state funding was given to a school that taught any Dutch. Afrikaans-speaking children had to attend English schools where, according to Malan, they never heard the gospel in their own language and, to make matters worse, were taught to despise the language of their church and by implication their church itself.[144] For Malan, language, church and nation were so indistinguishable that disregard for one was disregard for all. Even worse, many of these schools were Catholic, which meant that Afrikaner children were falling prey to the menace of the ever-encroaching ‘Roomsche Gevaar’ (Roman Catholic Peril) as it made its way southwards from the Catholic colonial powers in Central Africa. Malan was convinced that the only way to withstand this threat was by establishing a buffer in the form of a strong, Protestant Afrikaner community in Rhodesia – and only the concerted efforts of a well-funded Dutch Reformed Church in Rhodesia could bring this about.[145] Malan’s appeals to his readers’ purses not only spoke to their spiritual conscience, but to their nationalist conscience as well.
Malan travelled further north and deeper into the Catholic heartland. He visited congregations in Northern Rhodesia and finally crossed the border into the Belgian Congo. He was headed for the train’s final terminus, the newly built city of Elizabethville,[146] where a few Afrikaner families had settled. The jungles of the Congo made him feel claustrophobic – the trees were so dense that he could see no further than a few metres at a time and in the thick growth he had no hope of determining his direction. Here, in this wilderness, the possibility of getting lost was a real threat. To Malan, such a place, infested with tropical diseases and tsetse flies, was no place for an Afrikaner. He was hardly impressed with the Afrikaners who had wandered so far to the north.[147]
These Afrikaners were a different breed. They were always trekking, not for any particular reason, but because it had become a religion to them. To Malan, it was a perversion of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination – the belief that whatever happens is God’s will. They justified their nomadic lifestyle by claiming that they were following the Spirit’s call into the interior. Malan was sceptical as to whether this ‘Spirit’ originated from God. The Afrikaners of the Congo did not fill him with any romantic notions harking back to the times of the original Voortrekkers. Trekking taken to such an extreme was nothing but detrimental, Malan wrote:
Here it is certainly not always easy to distinguish between the spirit and the flesh. This at least is certain, that the trekker often suffers great, almost irreparable damage to his most elevated interests. They live completely beyond the influence of the Gospel for months and years, the children grow up uneducated, and the people gradually become averse to regular or hard work. People even run the risk of losing the Bible and family devotions completely. Because, as someone told us, if one has to trek before daybreak in order to escape the heat, and if in the evening the wind blows out the candles in the wagon tent, soon there is no question of Bible study.[148]
Malan’s disapproval dripped from every letter. It is clear that he regarded any spiritual labour among these people as an attempt to plug a leaking dyke. He believed that they ought not to be there in the first place, and already belonged to the class of poor whites. Malan was gravely concerned about poor whiteism, which he believed had a direct impact on the Afrikaners’ God-given calling – as well as their continued existence. It had the potential to disturb the precariously balanced racial hierarchy.
Malan regarded poor whiteism not so much as a poverty of flesh than as a poverty of spirit and mind, when all sense of adulthood and even self-respect had been lost. The only remedy, as far as he was concerned, was to rebuild the character of poor whites.[149] It formed a crucial driving force behind his preoccupation with language rights, as he constantly made it clear that language was directly related to national self-respect, and self-respect, in turn, was directly responsible for character.
The white poverty that he encountered in the two Rhodesias was different. Malan dubbed it ‘pioneer’s poverty’. It was a temporary situation, caused by disasters such as the rinderpest or East Coast Fever, which depleted cattle stocks, or the trial and error that accompanies the establishment of a new settlement. Pioneer’s poverty did, however, pose the danger of converting to poor whiteism, as the above-mentioned disasters prompted people to take up the nomadic lifestyle of transport riding or, even worse, hunting, as a temporary remedy to their difficult situation. If the temporary remedy became a permanent one, family life – with its tender and elevating influence – became lost, one’s sense of responsibility was weakened, children received no education – or if they did, merely a smattering – and moreover, people lost the habit of working hard and regularly on a daily basis. When transport riding no longer offered a living, or when all the game had been shot, they found themselves unfit for anything else. ‘There is no doubt that the poor white problem was born in the back tent of the transport wagon, and mostly behind the butt end of a Mauser,’ Malan declared.[150]
It was essential to solve the poor white problem in order to fend off the ‘Swart Gevaar’ (Black Peril). Malan believed that those whites who tried to ward off the advancement of Africans by denying them the right to vote, or by denying them access to education, failed to grasp the essence of the problem. The racial balance was based on Europeans’ inherent superiority and Africans’ inherent respect for them. As long as Europeans acted in a manner that was worthy of that respect, African advancement, which was a natural process, did not have to be feared, as whites’ inherent superiority would always assure them an elevated position. But if this respect was destroyed by the appalling behaviour of poor whites, withholding education and political and social rights could not save the white race from what was to come:
The violent exclusion of civil rights, which even the most unworthy white may enjoy, will in this case make the eventual revolution only more inevitable and bring it about more rapidly, with the outcome even more ill-fated. If, through his behaviour, the white loses the respect of the native, it means, in any case for South Africa – the Deluge. For this reason alone, if for no other, the South African nation ought to have the highest spiritual and moral standing and be the most civilised nation in the world. From this point of view, the solution of the poor white issue is also the solution to the native issue.[151]
Malan implored his readers to shift their focus. Instead of feeling threatened by Africans, they had to feel threatened by the degradation of their fellow whites:
The Black Peril would not exist if it were not for a White Peril that is a hundred times greater, which undermines and destroys the black’s respect for the white race. That the Kaffir [sic] is wicked, is in the first instance not the Kaffirs’ [sic] fault, it is not in the least the fault of mission work, it is the fault of the many whites who live worse than Kaffirs [sic].[152]
In his travel diary, Malan pleaded incessantly for the Dutch Reformed Church to expand its work in Rhodesia and to build Dutch-language schools. There was, however, also a new, and crucial, turn in his thoughts. He had grown up in a political home, devoured newspapers since his student years, written reams and reams of political opinions to his family and friends, and made rousing speeches on the most politicised issue of his day – the language movement. Politics was like oxygen to him and yet, under Valeton’s influence, he had pushed it away and dismissed it as impure. While he was in Rhodesia, however, it became more apparent to