Treasure trove makes for rich read
• Autobiography of highly rated dissident Afrikaner political scientist, historian and journalist focuses spotlight on federal system and cracks in Constitution
Historian: An autobiography Hermann Giliomee Tafelberg Publishers
In these times, when the Constitution is under assault from a black economic empowerment elite, but also shows its worth and that of the institutions it enables, it may seem blasphemous to suggest that no constitution can ever be complete and that SA’s has some glaring deficiencies in meeting the country’s unique challenges.
But, along comes Hermann Giliomee’s autobiography, offering a veritable treasure chest of perspectives and alternatives from the past and something such as blasphemy becomes almost mandatory: SA’s future is far from settled and a lot of work remains. Giliomee is worldrenowned as a historian due to his majestic The Afrikaners, A Biography — one of the all-time best-selling South African books. So wide has been the range of his interests and activities that he could equally be regarded as one of SA’s most erudite political scientists, a first-rate journalist or freelance constitutional facilitator.
If journalism is the first draft of history, Giliomee’s interventions in the practical hurly-burly — from his Afrikaner thinktanking and meeting the then banned ANC in Dakar, to giving direction during the language debate taking place at the University of Stellenbosch — often provided the first draft of an analysis of the situation.
Such is the wealth of ideas in this book that even the deadpan style, verging on a dull monotone, cannot put readers off.
It is like combing a deserted beach, metal detector beeping every few steps and finding a gold nugget here, an ancient sword there, a king’s ring buried and forgotten — but still worth a great deal.
These range from the peripheral, such as when a colleague tells him that to be assured of a good meal, he should avoid a restaurant with a stunning view, to stimulating revivals of forgotten arguments such as the riveting correspondence between him and Dave Steward on Giliomee’s contention that FW de Klerk was a failure as a negotiator with the ANC.
Being the story of a historian, the book provides an alibi for the reader. It is about battles past — some of them personal and in the category of getting his own back at colleagues from the previous century, yet no less fascinating, as it raises enduring issues — but they can be reconsidered without betraying a current stance.
Since his career has overlapped with the most tumultuous times in SA’s history, this compendium of rejected ideas becomes something of a mustread for an introduction to alternatives for the country.
Take the short sections on Giliomee’s participation in the Buthelezi Commission in the 1980s, broadly seeking a federalist solution for a country in crisis. I came of academic age in this time, and remember how disgusted I was with Giliomee and his bosom friend, sociologist Lawrence Schlemmer, for what I regarded as right-wing follies.
When his apologists said he was once regarded as an “oorbeligte” — Afrikaner reformists who wanted to completely abandon National Party policies in favour of majority black rule — I thought we had the typical establishment Afrikaner’s succumbing to the ethnic pull. Many of his detractors may still hold this view, but his autobiography shows how wrong that would be. Several key thinkers have supported a federalist system, including Alan Paton.
With SA still in economic survivalist mode, the electorate only trusts the ANC to deliver the patronage that will allow them to make it through another day. But a well-fed, better-educated black elite may be better served by a federalist system in the future.
Giliomee, by virtue of his dissident status, was frequently flown from Pofadder to Timbuktu in the late 1970s and 1980s by a range of benefactors in business, diplomatic circles, the media and academia trying to bring people on the opposite sides of the great racial divide together. He provides a revaluation of the origins of the word apartheid, first used by Protestant missionaries in the 1930s who were resisting the British imperialist orthodoxy that religious conversion meant foregoing vernacular cultures in favour of Englishness.
He explains how Afrikaners changed from accepting coloureds in their ranks by virtue of shared language and religion to rejecting them out of pure racism — an evil that came to haunt them in the current language struggle.
There is some counterfactual musings on how SA might have turned out if HF Verwoerd’s proposal, made in 1950 when he was minister of native affairs, for urban blacks to be given selfgovernment, had been accepted by the Natives Representative Council — they rejected it in the belief that the Nats would soon be out of power.
Giliomee has his blind spots, especially an underestimation of the fascist nature of National Party rule, which gave decisive impetus to the Mass Democratic Movement in the 1990s, which, in turn, forced De Klerk’s hand, rather than Nelson Mandela’s skill as a manipulator of the Codesa negotiations.
In dismissing the belief that apartheid was a crime against humanity, he rightly rejects Kader Asmal’s claims of genocide, relies on inadequate indicators to soften the effect of his argument, and neglects the immeasurable psychological destruction apartheid has wrought. Nevertheless, his views go some way towards providing a frame for approaching SA’s seemingly intractable problems from educational failures to tenacious inequality.
There are some very useful sections segueing into the concept of “democratic exclusion”. It is hard to find a better example of such exclusion than in an issue with which Giliomee has been deeply involved in his senior years — language policy at Stellenbosch University. It is a deeply ironic involvement, in the light of his accounts of his battles with the university’s narrowminded National Party sycophants of the past.
When the work of several generations in building up a university is put into the balance by the demands of adolescents who have just emerged from a highly deficient school system — of whom half are destined to fail — and when learned legal experts use vague spots in the Constitution to validate teenage consumerist desires, clearly there is a problem with the Constitution. Giliomee links this to De Klerk’s failure to insist on minority rights, and positions Afrikaners and their destructive policies as resisters of the British imperial might, while arguing that Afrikaners have not been more privileged than white English speakers.
But Giliomee misses the key point about South African English — that its relevance for the majority lies in its use as a unifier, transcending the ethnic differences that the Nats and British colonialists had so devastatingly exploited to divide and rule the majority. Democratic exclusion as a political science concept is far more useful than from Giliomee’s historical vantage point.
Another example is the discourse around white privilege. It is not fair, for example, to be democratic and allow all comers a chance at employment, while disregarding the privilege granted to some by their superior upbringing due to the accident of their race. Hence the justice of affirmative action.