We should have taken their monument much more seriously. To non-Afrikaners, exploring the Voortrekker monument is a chilling experience but it offers the best clue to the nationalistic racial fervour gripping post-war Afrikanerdom. The architecture is ‘Nazi kitsch’, designed to overwhelm with massive scale and impregnability. Inside the vast gloom, marble friezes recount battles between brave Boers and primitive savages, climaxing with the Afrikaners’ own version of manifest destiny: like the Israelites of old, the trekkers are seen on the eve of the Battle of Blood River, making their solemn vow to a God who would seal their conquest over the Zulu in exchange for a promise of perpetual piety. Here, too, as in Westminster, ideology is baptised by theology, but unlike Westminster, no gentler, more altruistic forms of heroism offer any relief. If Westminster presents the British Empire as one on which the sun would never set, the Voortrekker monument, through a strategically placed aperture in its roof, ensures that on every anniversary of Blood River all the sun’s brightness would be focused in a narrow shaft falling on a sarcophagus representing the Afrikaner people alone.
The fragile 38-year experiment of white unity in partnership with the British Commonwealth of nations had tended to favour the South African English and now it was about to unravel. In his 1948 victory speech, Nationalist Prime Minister DF Malan proudly reversed the words of the young Elizabeth: “In the past we felt like strangers in our own country,” he said, “but today South Africa belongs to us once more. For the first time since Union, South Africa is our own.” The 1910 arrangement had also favoured South Africa’s two white tribes to the exclusion of millions of blacks, but the ‘us’ Malan now referred to meant Afrikaners only. On that May afternoon in 1948 the jeering youths who rained spittle on me as the train pulled out of Koedoespoort station had reason to celebrate. Their day of vengeance had come. The South African English had been brushed aside and for the first time South Africa would be ruled by their people alone.
2
Homes and Schools
Number 570 Schoeman Street in Pretoria wasn’t my first home, but it is the first that I recall with clarity. I had been born at 25 Muir Avenue in a town called Brakpan, where my dad was involved in building the new Methodist church. He was good at that sort of thing, and actually used our back yard to cast the rose window that would dominate the sanctuary. My birth at 3.30 am on a Sunday was apparently a difficult one and my mother often reminded me that I had been lucky to emerge alive, having been dragged out of her womb with a pair of callipers. She said it took a nurse and doctor 45 minutes to ‘bring me round’. These reminders often coincided with bad behaviour on my part. Her logic seemed to be that I owed her both gratitude for surviving birth and contrition for the tough time I had given her. Looking back I think Mom’s family were rather hard people and I’m not sure she was very good at showing affection – although, as is sometimes the case, I’m told that the primary school children she taught for many years experienced her quite differently. Dad was differently made. He was a gentle and sensitive soul whose heart had been softened first by the beauty of the Lake District poets and then captured by the servant-spirit of Jesus. I don’t recall him teaching me much in a direct way, but I watched his life and knew it was deeply good. In his leisure hours he was a craftsman of sorts, having inherited woodworking skills from his father. I never tired of watching him work the stubborn kiaat he used to make bedroom furniture and lounge stools. No mechanical tools in the 1940s and 50s – everything cut, shaped, planed and sanded by hand. He also loved to work with metal, and built an ‘O’ gauge scale model Class 23 locomotive, soldering the intricate bits out of odds and ends and filing pistons and drive rods out of nails. He had to wait until a couple of years after the war to power the loco with an electric motor from Britain. The train it pulled was modelled on the Orange Express, which used to ply between Joburg and Durban – altogether a remarkable work.
There lay between father and son a very ‘English’ reserve which meant that I probably learned more about Dad from his sermons than any conversation. It was in the pulpit that he could speak eloquently of the things that mattered most. Words like ‘Grace’ and ‘Love’, ‘Nobility’ and ‘Truth’ were the ones he most often used, and it was evident from his life that these virtues had taken up residence long since within. For him they were inextricably bound up with the experience of knowing Jesus. But there was another tributary too, from which a unique beauty had flowed into his soul: in one of his last letters he urged me to read the English poets. “Try Wordsworth’s Excursion,” he wrote. “It holds all the great spiritual values that have made our English tradition, which we dare not let die in South Africa without handing ourselves over to an inhuman authoritarianism.” He had been re-reading The Excursion and said he “knew again how our blessed tradition has moulded and sustained my thoughts of freedom and human dignity – in other words, why I think the things I do.” These may seem unfashionable words in our days of post-colonial revisionism, when the ugly underside of Anglo-empire is rightly exposed and trashed, but it is important that we do not forget the virtues he spoke about. They too are part of our bequest and over centuries those virtues have inspired many a determined resistance against tyranny. South Africa may be free, but freedom is not enough: the brutalities of the past survive under new guises and they have left us callous, uncouth and uncaring of human life. In our speech and in our actions, we are a violent people who have to relearn the virtues before we can become a kinder, gentler South Africa.
Brakpan was a grimy mining town on the East Rand, later claiming dubious fame for also being the birthplace of BJ Vorster, one of South Africa’s toughest apartheid prime ministers who came to power after the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd. Many years later I was to have a brief encounter with him, one with a friend’s life at stake.
Methodist ministers are committed to itinerancy, promising to go where the Annual Conference sends them, and when I was two years old Dad was transferred to Ermelo. There are snapshots only of life there. I have mentioned the impact of World War Two and the fall of Tobruk. It was in Ermelo that I made my first friend, Michael Russell. Michael fell out of Dad’s Chev one day as it went around a corner: one moment he was there, the next not. Luckily he landed in a sand-bank but carried a long scar on his forehead all his life. Our family, consisting of my parents, my older sister Valmai, our Airedale dog and I, lived in a church manse3 with a large field as our back yard and I recall thorny bramble bushes and two cows. I have a fairly clear mind-picture of the Methodist church where Dad preached, and a ministers’ concert at which the famous Reverend JB Webb conjured sweet music using a violinist’s bow on a carpenter’s saw gripped between his knees. It was when Dr Webb was suddenly moved to the prestigious Methodist Central Hall in Johannesburg, that Dad succeeded him at the main Methodist church in Pretoria and we took up residence in Schoeman Street.
The house had a big palm tree on the front lawn and a tennis court in the back yard. Methodist manses were social centres in those days so our home was constantly frequented by members of the congregation. Church youth and young adults used the tennis court on summer evenings and weekends. We also housed our ‘farm cousin’ Hector Thorne from Warmbaths, some 70 miles to the north, so that he could attend Pretoria Boys’ High. He got my bedroom and Dad built in a portion of the veranda for me. With just a quarter inch of hardboard between me and Pretoria’s bitter winters, I learned to deal with cold early in life.
My first school was Miss Mickey’s Kindergarten just up the road in Arcadia. There is a vague memory of getting into trouble for kissing a girl, but I cannot swear to it. Then on to Arcadia Primary School until Dad was transferred to Kilnerton Training Institution outside of Pretoria in 1948. Kilnerton demands a chapter all to itself, but in terms of schooling it meant that I was moved to Hatfield Primary on the eastern edge of Pretoria, nearer our new home. Both schools offered me a strong learning foundation. Memories of the classroom are minimal though and it seems that apart from the brief flirtation at Miss Mickey’s, I kept out of trouble. A scary exception was when, exploring a store-room in the rambling Kilnerton Mission House I found a small bottle of deadly strychnine poison and took it to school, proudly showing it off to my schoolfriends and then carelessly leaving it in a desk. My parents were summoned and had to witness me being dressed down by the school principal.