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Book:
The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power
Author:
Hermann Giliomee
Publisher:
University of Virginia Press
Genre:
Books / Politics
Year:
2013
City:
Charlottesville
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Finalist for the Alan Paton Award

In his latest book, renowned historian Hermann Giliomee challenges the conventional wisdom on the downfall of white rule and the end of apartheid. Instead of impersonal forces, or the resourcefulness of an indomitable resistance movement, he emphasizes the role of Nationalist leaders and of their outspoken critic Frederick van Zyl Slabbert. What motivated each of the last Afrikaner leaders, from Verwoerd to de Klerk? How did each try to reconcile economic growth, white privilege, and security with the demands of an increasingly assertive black leadership and unexpected population figures?

In exploring each leaders background, reasoning, and personal foibles, Giliomee takes issue with the assumption that South Africa was inexorably heading for an ANC victory in 1994. He argues that historical accidents radically affected the course of politics.

Drawing on primary sources and personal interviews, Giliomee offers a fresh and stimulating political history that attempts not to condemn but to understand why the last Afrikaner leaders did what they did, and why their own policies ultimately failed them.

A 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Reconsiderations in Southern African History

Hermann Giliomee: author's other books

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The Last Afrikaner LeadersReconsiderations in Southern African History Richard - photo 1

The Last Afrikaner
LeadersReconsiderations in Southern African History
Richard Elphick, Editor

HERMANN GILIOMEE

The Last Afrikaner
Leaders

A Supreme Test of Power

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

To Annette

Published jointly by

Tafelberg

An imprint of NB Publishers

40 Heerengracht, Cape Town, 8000

South Africa

www.tafelberg.com

University of Virginia Press

P.O. Box 400318, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318

USA

www.upress.virginia.edu

2012 Hermann Giliomee

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording, or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First University of Virginia Press edition published 2013

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Giliomee, Hermann, 1938

The last Afrikaner leaders : a supreme test of power / Hermann Giliomee. First University of Virginia Press edition.

pages cm. (Reconsiderations in southern African history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3494-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-8139-3495-2 (e-book)

1. National Party (South Africa)History20th century. 2. PoliticiansSouth Africa20th century. 3. ApartheidSouth Africa20th century. 4. Power (Social sciences)South Africa. 5. South AfricaPolitics and government19481994. 6. South AfricaRace relations20th centuryPolitical aspectsHistory. I. Title. II. Series: Reconsiderations in southern African history.

JQ1998.N2G55 2013

320.968dc23

2013015101

Set in Minion / Book design Nazli Jacobs / Index Sanet le Roux

Excerpt from a poem Robert Burns wrote in 1785
as an apology after accidentally overturning a
mousess house in a cornfield:

But, Mousie, thou art not thy lane [you are not alone],

In proving foresight may be vain;

The best-laid schemes o mice an men

Gang aft agley [often go awry],

An leae us nought but grief an pain,

For promised joy!

Contents

Introduction

A Tragic Dilemma

IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, SOUTH AFRICA WENT through two revolutions. The first was the implementation of the apartheid policy, accompanied by massive social engineering, which more comprehensively segregated races than any other racial policy in the world. The second was the unprecedented handing over of power by whites to blacks, although the state, based predominantly on the white minority, was neither defeated nor bankrupt. This book is about five white leaders Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster, PW Botha, FW de Klerk and Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and their roles in one or other of these revolutions.

Writing well before apartheid was fully introduced, Alan Paton published two novels, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Too Late the Phalarope (1953), about the unfolding political drama of what he called the tragic dilemma of the white man. A man is caught on the face of a cliff, Paton writes. As he sees it, he cannot go up and he cannot go down; if he stays where he is, he will die. All those who stand watching have pity for him. But the analogy, alas, is obviously incomplete, for the worlds spectators of our drama are seldom pitiful; they are more often reproachful. From their point of vantage they can see which way we ought to go, but they see us taking some other way which will lead us to our destruction. And the world looks at us in astonishment, wondering what madness has possessed us.

In the mid-1960s British journalist Douglas Brown remarked that apartheid had no counterpart in history and that no race has ever been so universally condemned for preserving its identity than South African whites.

There was a reason why Brown and Drury were so certain there would be no surrender of power. The people in power were Afrikaner nationalists who, more than the English-speaking community, were rooted in the land. They controlled a state

To most informed commentators writing in the 1960s and 1970s it was inconceivable that Afrikaners, with such a large stake in the state, would give up power voluntarily. From the early 1960s Afrikaners had begun to dominate the senior levels of the civil service, security service and public corporations. They would be the first targets of a new government committed to racial transformation.

Also likely to be affected was Afrikaans, enjoying equal status with English as an official language as part of an English-Afrikaner pact in the drafting of the Union Constitution of 1909. Afrikaans along with Hindi, Malay-Indonesian and Hebrew became one of only four languages in the world that were standardised in the course of the twentieth century and came to be used in all branches of life and learning, including postgraduate studies and science and technology. In 1990 a commentator considered Afrikaans the strongest language in South Africa as it was used countrywide, both formally and informally. Given the haste with which newly independent African states elevated the colonial language to the status of the only national language, it could be expected that a new government in South Africa would waste little time in doing the same.

There were also fears that the overthrow of the government could be accompanied by attempts at retribution. In early 1973 the United Nations General Assembly declared apartheid a crime against humanity and agreed to the drawing up of an International Convention on the Suppression of the Crime of Apartheid. An obvious attempt on the part of the Soviet Union to embarrass the West, the Convention was ratified first by twenty countries in the Soviet bloc that had no record of protecting human rights themselves. Although leading Western nations openly refused to endorse the resolution or ratify the Convention, the African National Congress (ANC), through skilful propaganda, manufactured the impression that the entire world considered apartheid a crime against humanity.

The four National Party (NP) leaders featured in this book all believed the power they held conferred on them the huge responsibility not to put at risk Afrikaner political power and the prospects for Afrikaner survival, which they closely linked. From the early 1960s they increasingly blamed agitators, communists or black nationalists for any resistance to apartheid. The fifth leader discussed here, Van Zyl Slabbert, never held political power, but would in my opinion have reached the highest political position in the land if, during the mid-1960s, he had chosen the career path that the Afrikaner nationalist establishment aware of his remarkable abilities had marked out for him.

Slabbert was fully aware of white fears, both rational and irrational, but argued that apartheid, not communism, was the real cause of the conflict. He became the most formidable critic of the policy, using a unique combination of intellectual, economic and moral arguments. Like some of his academic contemporaries, Slabbert was gripped by the ideas of NP van Wyk Louw, the pre-eminent Afrikaner poet and essayist, who had argued in a book published in 1958 that the challenge for the Afrikaners was not merely to survive, but to survive in justice.

In the first half of the 1990s the second revolution occurred. Afrikaners did what few expected: they accepted majority rule without having suffered a defeat at the hands of the subjugated population. The army and the police remained intact and loyal to the NP government. There is no other example in recorded history of such a surrender of power without defeat. It is true that sanctions, black opposition and white demographic decline (whites as a proportion of the total population sank from 19% in 1951 to below 10% by 2005) put strong pressure on white minority rule. Yet a government determined and bloody-minded enough could, through skilful cooptation of both black and business leaders, have held on for quite some time. This was one thing on which FW de Klerk and Van Zyl Slabbert agreed.

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