At that time quite a number of coloured people, who then still had the vote in the Cape Province, lived in the town of Graaff-Reinet. In Cradock Street alone there were 25 houses belonging to coloured families. John Rupert did not hesitate to appear for coloured people, sometimes pro bono, at a time when such actions were viewed with scepticism by conservative white communities like Graaff-Reinet’s. Coloured townspeople referred to him as Groot Seur (Big Sir); later his son Anton was called Klein Seur (Little Sir). Anton Rupert was to consider the later removal of coloured people from the centres of towns such as Graaff-Reinet and Stellenbosch under the Group Areas Act of 1950 one of the great follies of the NP’s policies of rigorist racial separation.
John Rupert counted among his good friends and clients the local DR minister Ds Jozua Francois Naudé, and his wife, Mrs Ada Naudé. Ds JF Naudé was a co-founder and the first president of the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB), the secret organisation established to promote Afrikaner interests as a counterweight to the Freemasons and Sons of England. The couple were the parents of the later anti-apartheid activist Dr CFB (Beyers) Naudé, named after Christiaan Frederick Beyers, the Boer general under whom his father had fought in the Anglo-Boer War and who drowned in the Vaal River in the Rebellion of 1914.
Ds Naudé was also chairman of the governing body of the Hoër Volkskool in Graaff-Reinet, the first Afrikaans-medium secondary school in the Cape Province, where Anton Rupert was to matriculate. John Rupert was a co-founder and for 21 years honorary secretary of the governing body. At one stage he successfully waged a one-man campaign against the abolition of Latin, which he considered an essential basis for language instruction, as a subject at the school.
In 1922, a year before Boetie Rupert started school, the Hoër Volkskool – with its motto Ons Sal Handhaaf expressing a commitment to uphold the linguistic and cultural aspirations of Afrikaners – moved into the stately premises of the erstwhile Midlands Seminary. The principal Dr G von W Eybers, who had obtained his doctorate in London, was a firm believer in mother-tongue education. Already in 1919, six years before Afrikaans was recognised as an official language, he started teaching in Afrikaans instead of Dutch. This unleashed an educational language dispute in the town that resulted in the establishment of the Union High School, an English-medium boarding school.1
The language question also led to division in the DRC. In 1921 Ds Naudé, one of the six Bittereinders (bitter-enders) who at the end of the Anglo-Boer War had refused to sign the terms of surrender at Vereeniging, gave his inaugural sermon in Afrikaans. Aggrieved members of the congregation, many of whom considered Dutch the appropriate language for church services, protested vehemently against the use of ‘kitchen Dutch’ in the ‘Great Church’ of the Murrays. One Sunday the organist, Amy Asher (born Murray), even played ‘God Save the King’ after the service. It ended in schism when the ‘New Church’ seceded.
Anton Rupert’s wife Huberte recounted in an interview that her father-in-law had lost clients during a court case in which he acted for the wife of a friend. It offended some people that John Rupert had defended her – a portent of the loyalty principle that would count for so much in his son’s career.
When Anton’s father died in 1961, he thought he would ask Beyers to bury his father, Huberte said. Dr Beyers Naudé, then minister of the DR congregation of Aasvoëlkop in Johannesburg, related during the funeral service that as a child, he often had to take messages from his father to the deceased. He had been struck by John Rupert’s ‘sincere modesty, genuine love for his people, broadness of vision and sense of justice’.
John Rupert met his future wife Hester Adriana van Eeden, sister of a friend, on a train from Port Elizabeth to Klipplaat, a small railway siding near her father’s farm in the Jansenville district. They were married in December 1915 and a year later Anton was born in their stone house at 110 Cradock Street, Graaff-Reinet. The family later moved to 84 Cradock Street.
Anton Rupert was born two years after the outbreak of the First World War on 4 August 1914. In South Africa, Botha and Smuts’s decision to invade German South-West Africa (today Namibia) in support of the hated British Empire once again divided the country. A rebellion broke out after Gen. Manie Maritz had joined the German forces. Although the Rebellion of 1914 was quelled, resistance grew against the conciliation politics of Botha and Smuts aimed at national unity between Afrikaans- and English-speaking South Africans and cooperation within the Commonwealth, especially after Hertzog had proclaimed his policy of ‘South Africa First’. Smuts’s execution of the rebel leader Jopie Fourie also earned him bitter reproaches that would dog him for the rest of his life.
An important consequence of the Rebellion was the establishment of the Helpmekaarvereniging, a mutual-aid society to assist rebels with the payment of fines and compensation claims, at a time when the Poor White problem was worsening in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War. Following from the Helpmekaar movement’s first fundraising drive that yielded £250 000, a national congress was held at Graaff-Reinet’s neighbouring town of Cradock in 1916, the year of Anton’s birth, to investigate the problem of poverty. It turned out that there were 105 518 indigent whites, 39 021 of them in dire straits, and that a quarter of the country’s 280 000 white children were not attending any school.
Although the congress was unable to do much to stem the impoverishment, the Helpmekaar movement provided one of the most important launching pads for the economic independence of Afrikaners. The mustering of Afrikaner capital during the First World War led to the establishment of a number of big Afrikaner enterprises that became success stories, notably the media company Nasionale Pers (later Naspers) in 1915 and the insurance giants Sanlam and Santam as well as the Koöperatiewe Wijnbouwersvereniging van Zuid-Afrika Beperkt (Cooperative Wine Farmers Society of South Africa Ltd, the KWV) in 1918. Some of these enterprises were to play a role in Anton Rupert’s life, while he would also later become involved in the Helpmekaar educational fund.
A major driving force behind the Helpmekaar movement was Ds JD Kestell, who would later be a decisive influence in the young’s Rupert’s life. Kestell conducted the funeral service of former Pres. Steyn, who was buried at the foot of the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein after having said in his last speech on the day of his death in 1916: ‘The Helpmekaar has been born from God.’
Anton Rupert’s mother Hester, one of ten children, was a caring, loving woman who ‘kept the family together’ and had a great influence on her eldest son. He often quoted moral guidelines she had given him, such as: ‘Of what use is it to conquer the world and lose one’s soul?’ And: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shall find it after many days.’ At her funeral in 1944 a coloured woman told her daughter-in-law Huberte Rupert that ‘she had given much to our people’.
After Dr DF Malan’s departure from Graaff-Reinet Mrs Hester Rupert became the secretary of the Jong Zuid-Afrika (Young South Africa) association. It had originally been called Zonen van Zuid-Afrika (Sons of South Africa) as a counterweight to the Sons of England, with the aim of promoting a common South African patriotism, supporting the Dutch language and advancing the material and spiritual interests of the Afrikaner people. In 1912 it was decided to admit women as well and the name was changed. In due course Jong Zuid-Afrika sided with Hertzog’s NP against Prime Minster Louis Botha.
Mrs Rupert’s father, Mr Jacobus Albertus (Oom Kootjie) van Eeden, a Cape Patriot and co-founder of JH Hofmeyr’s Afrikanerbond, South Africa’s first political party, also had a significant influence on his grandson Anton. Up to Oom Kootjie’s death at the age of 84, this successful farmer who had 500 morgen agricultural land under irrigation on his farm Gannavlakte often discussed national affairs with his grandson. Oom Kootjie was a descendant of one of the oldest Dutch families in South Africa – the first Van Eeden arrived at the Cape in 1662. On his mother’s side Anton Rupert is a ninth-generation South African.
Oom Kootjie had a chequered history. His father died when he was