still harboured feelings that had been rife during the Anglo-Boer War, when the English press in South Africa was predominantly imperialist and anti-Boer. Some of the worst jingoism was displayed in the area around Graaff-Reinet.3
In the anti-Afrikaans atmosphere, which would increase as a result of divisions after South Africa’s entry into the Second World War in 1939, Dr HJ van Eck, a brilliant chemical engineer and father of the South African industrial revolution, was refused membership of the prestigious Rand Club. (In 1945 Rupert cited this as his reason for declining nomination for membership, which, given his English name, might well have been granted by the club, considered the canteen of the mining fraternity.)
In 1937, the year Rupert started lecturing, a new Afrikaans morning paper, Die Transvaler, was launched in Johannesburg. He applied for a position at the paper and was interviewed by the editor, Dr HF Verwoerd, who offered him a job on the editorial staff. Since it would have meant furthering his study by correspondence, however, Rupert turned down the offer: he recalls his decision to return to the university and concentrate on his postgraduate studies as one of the most important in his early life. Besides, he had not been favourably impressed by Verwoerd, who came across as ‘restless, rather autocratic and opinionated’ during the interview − impressions that were confirmed in later life, when he and Verwoerd crossed swords on various occasions.
The centenary of the Great Trek took place in 1938. There was a huge upsurge of Afrikaner nationalism throughout the country, also on the UP campus. The Afrikaanse Taal- en Kultuurvereniging (ATKV, Afrikaans Language and Culture Society) organised a symbolic ox-wagon trek to remind the trekkers’ descendants of the arduous journey and many tribulations their forebears had endured on their way into the interior. The symbol was apposite and stirred up great emotion among the vast majority of Afrikaners.
Rupert, in 1938 already a lecturer in chemistry, chaired both the extramural SRC and the extramural students’ branch of the ANS, precursor of the later Afrikaanse Studentebond (ASB). He was also on the national executive of the ANS, at that time chaired by Dr Nic Diederichs, a future minister of finance. By that time Rupert was a supporter of Dr DF Malan’s Purified National Party, the opposition to the ruling United Party of Hertzog and Smuts that had been formed through the fusion of the NP and the SAP in 1934.
Rupert and Huberte were among the ringleaders of the centenary celebrations on the UP campus, where Afrikaner ardour was opposed by members of the National Union of South African Students (Nusas), the dominant organisation on English-language campuses. Huberte was incensed by their snide comments on the Voortrekker costume that was widely worn by Afrikaners in that centenary year. She organised a special day when she and her friends would attend classes en masse wearing long Voortrekker dresses and traditional bonnets. They borrowed costumes from the Volksteater with the aid of Huberte’s actress friend Anna Neethling-Pohl. The appointed day happened to be 14 September, which, someone pointed out, was the anniversary of the day when Afrikaans became the official teaching medium at the university. They decided to celebrate this event and it became the first ‘Spring Day’, as the annual commemoration of the day at the UP came to be called.
Some weeks later on 4 October 1938, Rupert’s birthday, he and Wouter le Roux went to Bloemfontein as SRC delegates to attend a tribute to Ds JD Kestell, a revered Afrikaner church leader known as Father Kestell. Rupert was deeply moved by the venerable old man’s message: ‘A nation saves itself.’ Kestell’s message, reinforced by later experiences that turned him away from a career in politics, played a crucial role in Rupert’s decision to enter the business world. It strengthened his conviction that Afrikaners should be self-sufficient and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps – in his own case, that he should venture into small business. Kestell, who had accompanied the Boer commandos on horseback as field chaplain throughout the Anglo-Boer War, had been a driving force in the Helpmekaar movement and provided the inspiration for the Reddingsdaadbond, an association formed to promote the economic advancement of the Afrikaner people. On the train journey back to Pretoria, Le Roux proposed that they celebrate. Only then, on such a decisive day in his life, Rupert remembered it was his birthday, and they toasted the occasion with a glass of white wine.
Rupert participated actively in the Ox-wagon Trek of 1938. As part of the celebrations a lighted torch had been carried all the way from Jan van Riebeeck’s statue in Cape Town to the uncompleted foundations of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, and it was also kept burning on the university campus. Rupert’s younger brother Jan, a member of the Voortrekker youth movement, was on a visit from Graaff-Reinet at the time. Rupert recalled that Jan had to hold the torch while he drove his open car carefully so the flame would not go out.
On 10 October Rupert and Fritz Steyn, as representatives of the UP community, had travelled to Bulhoek to commemorate Pres. Paul Kruger’s birthday in the company of the Trek party. On this occasion they had requested the leader of the Ox-wagon Trek to donate a wagon that could serve as a lasting inspiration to students at their university. On 14 December − two days before the centenary reached its climax on the Day of the Covenant, the commemoration of the Voortrekker victory over the Zulu at Blood River − it was announced at a mass rally on Monument Hill that the wagon of Louis Trichardt was to be entrusted to the students of the University of Pretoria for safekeeping. On 17 December students pulled it to the university campus.4 It became traditional for every outgoing chairman of the SRC to formally hand over custody of the wagon to his successor, as Rupert duly did to Hans Nel in 1938.
At the peak of the Ox-wagon Trek celebrations Rupert edited and published a newspaper, De Oude Emigrant, with the historian Gustav Preller as honorary editor-in-chief. He consulted the news editor of Die Transvaler, Piet Meiring, also from Graaff-Reinet and later head of the South African Information Service. Rupert worked night and day on the four editions of the jubilee paper that appeared on 13, 14, 15 and 16 December, writing the editorial, collating copy − articles and news about the Ox-wagon Trek and the centenary celebrations of the Great Trek − and getting each edition printed by morning. But he failed to get a distribution network going and after the celebrations thousands of unsold copies had to be burnt. ‘I learnt a valuable lesson there,’ Rupert was to say later. ‘Your product could be good, and still be a failure if your sales organisation and distribution aren’t good.’
Afrikaner nationalism swept the Pretoria campus after the centenary, so much so that the UP was unofficially called the Voortrekker University for a while. Emotions ran high and UP students pelted the screen with eggs filled with ink when ‘God Save the King’ was played in cinemas, as was customary in those years. At a mass rally on 10 April 1939 Rupert proposed that 14 September (the day when, seven years earlier, the university became an Afrikaans-medium institution) be celebrated annually at a student function, its nature to be determined by the SRC. The proposal was adopted unanimously. In fact, the date was one day out: 13 September in due course became Commemoration Day, or Spring Day. Initially it took the form of a morning gathering on the campus, at which the Louis Trichardt wagon, Voortrekker apparel and national flags featured prominently. In the afternoon there were sporting events and in the evening a ball. This continued until 1944 when, on the proposal of the then SRC chairman, it was declared an annual university holiday.
As invited speaker on Spring Day in 1961, Rupert recalled how in 1938, without official permission, they had taken the principal prisoner, carried him to the old club hall in a huge chair and started celebrating. Compared to the world’s great universities − from Salerno, the oldest of all, dating back to the ninth century, to relative latecomers like Leiden and Harvard − South African universities were young, he said. ‘But we have our own tradition, a tradition we should maintain with pride. We have a tradition of youthful vitality and resilience; a tradition of life instead of bricks and concrete. It is a tradition which should govern our actions, thought and attitudes, because in our country and with our challenges we need to be able to think clearly.’
On the 40th Spring Day in 1978 Rupert presented his alma mater with the hand-embroidered sash of office of Pres. Paul Kruger, taken to England as booty by a British soldier after the Anglo-Boer War, that
