Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Nationalists’ tenuous victory
Some key events from this week in history are reflected in the following reports from the archives of the Argus’s 160-year-old titles
BRITAIN’S Daily Mail headline of late May 1948 – “Where goes South Africa?” – might well have been every bit as apt in the last days of May in several other key years of South Africa’s 20th century.
By one of those curious accidents of history, the end of May delivered turning points – the signing at Melrose House in Pretoria of the Treaty of Vereeniging that ended the Boer War in 1902, the inauguration of the Union of South Africa in 1910, and the ratification of republican South Africa’s go-it-alone departure from the Commonwealth in 1961.
Arguably, it is a single strand of nationalism that links these dates, at least in the main effects of the events, the histories that produced them having been altogether more complex. In this limited sense, it is the late May of 1948 that stands out – counter- posed, or annulled, though it was by events in May 46 years later.
In 1948, the young black leader who would become the country’s first democratically elected president in May 1994, Nelson Mandela, was every bit as surprised as the National Party when the outcome of the “where-to-now?” election that introduced apartheid was confirmed. He and colleague Oliver Tambo had spent the day at a meeting in Johannesburg where, he later recalled “we barely discussed the question of a Nationalist government because we did not expect one”.
And the fact was, DF Malan’s Nationalist victory was tenuous. Though, together with the Afrikaner Party, it had won 79 seats to the combined total of 74 won by Jan Smuts’s United
Party coupled with the handful delivered by the Labour Party, the Smuts alliance had actually won 16% more votes ( Smuts – 58.2%; Malan 41.6%).
There were market jitters. The Weekend Argus of May 29, 1948 reported that the defeat of the United Party “resulted in a wave of liquidation on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange at the opening today”.
The same paper led with a story headlined “Talk of a fresh election – Dr Malan’s small majority” which, with evidently exaggerated optimism, began: “Opinion is hardening in political circles that Dr Malan will be compelled to dissolve parliament and go to the country soon in an effort to increase his slender majority in parliament. The margin of five votes, including the Speaker, at his disposal, is so small that it scarcely constitutes a workable majority.”
Well, there was no new election, and the Nationalists’ remained in power for virtually the rest of the century.
One detail in that story is the prediction that Malan “would frequently find the going heavy in the Senate, where the United Party is in the majority”. His successor, JG Strijdom, dealt with this difficulty in due course by simply packing the Senate with supporters.
Within weeks of the election, the first apartheid meas- ures began to be introduced.
In time, too, as the Daily Mail forecast in May 1948 – “if Dr Malan becomes head of the administration it may mean a weakening of the bonds uniting South Africa to the Commonwealth” – South Africa set a course for republican independence (May 1961), and, as racial repression deepened, the international isolation that earned.
Lingering Boer War resentments were certainly exploited by Nationalist leaders in the 1948 campaign, the peace of May 1902 never having wholly sealed the bloody affair.
What the peace did do was reach decisively into the future: to put off for a later day the question of citizenship for the South African majority.
Thus, when the Union was ratified in 1910, the country absorbed an awkward mix of a franchise for coloured and black people in the Cape and Natal, and none in the Free State and the Transvaal. Over the next few decades, as liberals had warned, even before apartheid was crafted, black rights were diluted and the problem became greater.
In 1910, relief that the warring “races” – the white ones – had managed to agree on a way forward almost, though not quite, overshadowed the lingering anxieties about ignoring the real challenge of the future.
From London, Cape Town readers learned: “Hearty and widespread rejoicing, coupled with warm wishes to enduring peace and prosperity, with vivid contrasts drawn between the devastation and desolation of South Africa eight years ago, and Lord Gladstone’s reference in his first speech to ‘the day of high hopes and ennobling memories of the day of peace’ – such are the keynotes of newspaper articles greeting the dawn of Union Day.”
What was regarded as a “jarring note” was delivered by the Daily News, which “wonders how the new Legislature will look at the coloured franchise question, and whether the old cosmopolitan forces which worked for Chinese servitude and forced native labour will renew their intrigues”.
From Canada came news of the Union Jack being “flown from all public buildings and schools”, where “teachers will deliver addresses on the history of the South African confederation”.
In Cape Town, “flags of all nations fluttered on numberless buildings, and from many quarters strains of music came to the ear, well expressing better than any words the quiet exultations in the heart of United South Africa from Cape Point to the Soutspansberg”.
It went on: “A decade since our country was convulsed in civil war, and today the former combatants together bow the knee in solemn thanksgiving for national liberty”.
There was thanksgiving at St George’s Cathedral, too, though Archbishop William Carter was clearly mindful of the bigger picture.
“This country has a problem of its own to solve,” he said, “different to that of any other country in the world; and it has got to solve it in justice.”
The Union, he added, “is a country in which not merely two great white races, each justly proud of their great tradition, have to work out their
own salvation, but the salvation of a race in as yet a lower scale of civilisation, a race which outstrips them both very largely in numbers, which is developing fast, different in colour and nationality, the great mass of whom has no place as yet in the council of the nation.”
It would take a while to get to this mutual council of Carter’s imagining, and not without difficulty – even for the apparent inheritors of 1910, 1948 and 1961.
A late-May postscript comes from the more recent days of 1986, a news report headlined: “The battle of Pietersburg”.
It was, it began, “the battle of the burgers”.
“Afrikaner fought Afrikaner as the simmering feud between the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and National Party supporters finally erupted into a bloody battle in the Jack Botes Hall. The evening ended with Pietersburg celebrating its centenary with its civic centre in a cloud of teargas fired by police after AWB members overran the stage and prevented the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Pik Botha, from speaking.
“Millions of American and British TV viewers last night saw South African Police taking heavy action as radical white right-wingers and their moderate compatriots launched into one another. They even saw a white policeman running from eye-stinging teargas.”
Retreating from the promises of 1948 was no easy thing, the report suggested: “For many viewers, it must have been a first appreciation of the serious political problems facing the South African Government on the right.”