Hewers of Wood, Drawers of Water

ress.ac.za ress.ac.za p [ chapter nine ] Hewers of wood, Free download from www.hsrc drawers of water [ chapter nine ] Hewers of wood, drawers of water The meeting had gone on all night, and there was a chill in the air when the two men emerged at dawn. It was the end of May and the icy cold of the ress.ac.za ress.ac.za Johannesburg winter was already upon the city. p The weather was of little consequence to them as they made their way down the street, mulling over strategies, ideas. But their conversation came to an abrupt end when they reached a newspaper stand. The headlines caught them completely unawares: the Nationalists had beaten Jan Smuts at the polls. It was unthinkable. It was also deeply significant to these two young men. Both lawyers, they naturally took a professional interest in the news of the day. But parallel with their interest in the law was a commitment to politics, to political change. The unthinkable victory of DF Malan intensified that commitment. Free download from www.hsrc And from that day on, the destinies of Nelson Man- dela and Oliver Tambo would be inextricably bound up with the electoral fortunes of the Afrikaner nationalists. Many years later, when the Nationalists had come and gone, Mandela would remember that morning vividly. ’The victory was a shock,’ he recalls in Long Walk to Freedom. The United Party and General Smuts had beaten the Nazis, and surely they would defeat the National Party. On election day, I attended a meeting in Johannesburg with Oliver Tambo and several others. We barely discussed the question of a Nationalist government because we did not expect one. Then, having been up all night and pausing now at the newspaper stand confronting the truth in the day’s lead story, Mandela was ’stunned and dismayed’. But Tambo, his partner in law, had a different view. ’I like this,’ Mandela remembers him saying. And Mandela was confused. Why would he like it? DF Malan’s 1948 victory brought deepening change. But you had to And Tambo explained: ’Now we will know exactly be an ass, one cartoonist suggested, to choose the Hitlerian option of conservative Afrikaner nationalism. who our enemies are and where we stand.’ PAGE 158 It was a turning point, politically, socially and The unexpected election win of DF Malan’s economically. It drew the battle lines between the Nationalists ended the era of more moderate enemies, as Tambo rightly saw it. Afrikaner leaders such as Jan Smuts, whose race The vision of Malan’s government, and that of policies were no doubt patronising and illiberal, but succeeding governments, was imagined 36 years not deliberately vindictive or nasty. Smuts, who was before when Pixley Ka Isaka Seme stood to address deeply disappointed, though still widely admired, delegates at the ANC’s founding conference in 1912. died two years later. Africans, Seme said then, were being treated as serfs And on the strength of promising that they were – as the Israelites had treated the Gibeonites, guided by a policy of ’preserving and safe-guarding according to the book of Joshua in the Bible – good the White race’, the Nationalists were to remain in for little more than cutting wood and carrying water. power for just a month short of 46 years. ress.ac.za ress.ac.za From May 1948, Seme’s biblical metaphor became p the virtual objective of government. By means of ––––– ––––– policy, law and decree, the single-minded Nationalists would attempt to construct a state and a society in The Broederbond (fellowship of brothers), a secret which, they dreamed, most blacks would be nothing Afrikaner organisation that had emerged in the early more than hewers of wood, drawers of water. decades of the century, came into its own once the Nationalists took power. ––––– ––––– Broeders in the civil service and the armed forces, in the teaching corps and in the professions, were There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into committed to advancing the interests of an ’Afrikaner- the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, dom’ that was defined by the exclusion of others, of and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. English-speakers and anyone who was not white. The broeders had been dead against the concil- So begins one of the most influential stories of the iatory theme of Smuts and Botha’s politics, the first years of post-war Nationalist rule in South Africa. emphasis on building a shared sense of South African- These opening lines of the novel Cry, The Beloved hood among Afrikaans- and English-speaking people. Free download from www.hsrc Country by Alan Paton, first published in 1948 and In 1945, Smuts had tried to break their power, reprinted many times in the years that followed, are ordering civil servants who were members of the deceptively pretty. What the book really describes is the secret organisation to resign, or face dismissal. A bewilderment, despair and brutalisation of urbanising little more than 1 000 resigned. Two were dismissed. black society under the pressure of white fear and One of them, Wentzel du Plessis, had the satis- prejudice. It was a warning of sorts of the mounting faction of taking Smuts’s Standerton seat from him social disintegration that was already occurring in the 1948 election. across South Africa, and which would intensify. From May 1948, the ’affirmative action’ of the It influenced people in South Africa and around the world into viewing the country differently. But while virtually every enlightened white household in Partners in law, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, who were the Nationalist state had a well-thumbed copy of the destined to become giants in black politics. book, it became clear to the new generation of young black leaders that sympathetic attitudes among a liberal minority of whites were not, and would never be, enough. Paton’s book ends on a note of hopelessness, or at least of almost hopeless uncertainty: But when that dawn will come, of our emanci- pation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret. It wasn’t a secret in the usual sense. But it felt like one. PAGE 159 time – though it wasn’t called that – ensuring that the sentiment of the was vigorously applied and the Bench was pro-Nationalist. To make Broederbond was the pool from doubly sure of success, he ’packed’ which the Nationalists drew recruits the Senate, enlarging it from 48 to for top government posts. And 89 seats. Most of the new members through the Broederbond, the were Nationalists. government reached deep into civil This time, in the face of the society to consolidate its national secret, powerful workings of the mission. Broederbond and the cunning deter- The cohesion of Afrikaner nation- mination of the Nationalists over six alism was vital to the government in years, the Cape’s 45 000 coloured ress.ac.za ress.ac.za its first years in power. voters were stripped of their p The men who ran the armed franchise in 1956. It made clear to services, government departments many of them that their true and big state corporations such as JG Strijdom succeeded DF Malan in the interests lay in joining forces with the railways were soon Broederbond early 1950s. black South Africans. appointees. They became increasingly powerful in business, too, especially through institutions that ––––– ––––– were formed in the years before the Second World War with the express goal of establishing an By 1954, the legal framework of post-war apartheid independent Afrikaner stake in the economy. Among was already fastidiously complex. Because the them were the insurance corporation Santam, the common law – drawn from the law of ancient Rome, life assurance company Sanlam, the winegrowers’ and of Holland and England – was and remains cooperative, KWV, and the Volkskas bank. colour-blind, every element of discrimination intro- But the most dramatic and cynical use of loyal duced by the Nationalists had to be carefully codified Nationalists was in the removal of coloureds from the in new laws. voters’ roll of the Cape. So-called ’petty’ apartheid was well established … Free download from www.hsrc Most coloureds had voted for Smuts in 1948 and whites-only trains, park benches, beaches, post office Malan wanted them rendered powerless as soon as entrances, cinemas, restaurants and so on. It was the possible. It took a while. There was a constitutional apartheid of ’separate amenities’. Wherever people hitch: a two-thirds majority in a joint sitting of both worked or played, racial separateness was laid down houses of the Union parliament – the Senate and the by law. House of Assembly – was needed to change their But there was more. electoral status. Malan tried a different tack: having a Nationalists who prided themselves on self- law passed in each house separately, but by a simple righteous Christian piety had no difficulty devising majority, 50 percent plus one. However, four brutal laws that denied human love. A year after coloured voters – a van driver and a bricklayer from coming to power, they passed the Prohibition of Woodstock, a trade union worker and a businessman Mixed Marriages Act. It speaks for itself. It split – challenged this in the courts, and the Appellate families, and further entrenched racial division. A Division of the Supreme Court, the highest court in year later, a supplementary law prohibiting sex the land, ruled unanimously in their favour. The between people of different races – expanding a law government tried again, this time introducing a law from 1927 – became known as the Immorality Act.

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