Friday, 26 December 1986: The Puritans in Africa

9:00 PM, Helmsley Hotel, Cape Town, South Africa

Greetings from a city “where little cable cars, climb halfway to the stars” although unlike San Francisco in Tony Bennett’s song, these cars are suspended from cables and climb to the top of a 3000-foot mountain overlooking one of the world’s most beautiful cities – Cape Town. 

Earlier this evening, after a tasty vegetarian dinner, I walked all the way to the top of Molteno Road where the residential areas end just below the lower cableway station.  I passed an area of burned forest and grassland, the remnants of recent fires on Table Mountain which nearly reached some mountainside residences.  The fires were unfortunate, but what really made me sad as I looked over the lights of this splendid city, the harbor, Table Bay, and the Bloubergstrand (the beach on the other side of Table Bay) was the wasted potential of this beautiful place because of tragic, misguided politics.  I was fantasizing that my good friend Dan back in Denver (an anti-apartheid activist) was here enjoying a smoke of herb with me, and we were rapping about the South African situation. 

Last Sunday, Jan van Eck, the Member of Parliament that I wrote about in an earlier letter, recommended a book for me to read in order to get a better insight into the Afrikaner mentality.  It’s titled The Puritans in Africa.  Not having anything to do for Christmas, I bought it this week and devoured all 345 pages between Christmas Eve and Christmas night.  The author, W.A. de Klerk, qualifies as a South African Renaissance Man:  lawyer, novelist, playwright, and farmer.  He traces the history of the Afrikaners from the first arrival of the Dutch in the Cape in the mid-17th Century to recent times.  He shows how their Calvinist/Puritan heritage affected their world view.  By the end of World War II, there was a movement among conservative Afrikaners (and guided from within the Broederbund, a secret society of prominent male Afrikaners) to take power from the relatively moderate United Party led by Jan Smuts which (along with its predecessors) had ruled South Africa since its independence in 1910. 

 

As an African history buff, I found de Klerk’s book to be a good read but perhaps a bit too forgiving of the National Party agenda.

 

The conservative National Party won a plurality of Parliamentary seats in the 1948 elections and put together a majority by forming a coalition with a far right party.  Led by their new Prime Minister, D.F. Malan, the “Nats” set out to remake society through legislation.  They intended to improve the lot of the large number of economically disadvantaged urban Afrikaners and protect their jobs from the “teeming masses” of blacks who were now swarming into the cities.  They wanted to protect die volk (the people) and Afrikaner culture, maintaining its purity from threats of intermarriage with blacks and coloureds.  They also wanted to prevent dilution of the culture from black, coloured, Indian, and English influences.  Apartheid was their blueprint for creating an Afrikaner utopia.  Like all utopias, it ultimately has failed because it set out to artificially remake society through legislation.  It created a monster which bears no relationship to social reality.  De Klerk cites examples of the lunacy which resulted from this legislation.  One of my favorites was the cab driver who refused to give a ride to a blind white girl and her coloured maid because the law forbids whites and non-whites from riding in public vehicles together.  De Klerk notes that the Nats have pretty much given up on Apartheid, but they are totally dedicated to maintaining their power at all costs.  

De Klerk’s account is a relatively moderate, or even conservative, assessment of the Nationalists and their intentions.  Their leaders come off looking like sincere but misguided men who really believed that it was in the best interests of the black people to have their tribal cultures protected from white culture.  Having grown up during the American Civil Rights movement, it’s hard for me to buy into such illogical logic.