At the end of his first year he was one of two students out of a class of seventeen to qualify for admission to study medicine at the universities of Cape Town or the Witwatersrand. Still unable to afford it, he changed to a straight BSc with chemistry as his major subject. His academic performance suffered a setback in his second year when he incurred inflammation of the middle ear and missed several months’ lectures. There were no antibiotics in those days, and the somewhat primitive treatment left a permanent scar behind his ear.
In his final year Rupert met Huberte Goote, a first-year BA student. He had first heard about her when his close friend Colijn van Bergen sang her praises while they were sitting in a car outside the house of Fritz (FS) Steyn, the university’s propaganda secretary and later a member of parliament, diplomat and judge, where Rupert was staying at the time. Student friends told Huberte about the Afrikaans-Nasionale Studentebond (ANS, Afrikaans National Students’ Association), where she met Rupert. She represented the first-year students on the students’ representative council (SRC), of which he was chairman. Huberte would spend the coming decades at the side of the tall, dark-haired student of whom she said in an interview: ‘Anton was shy, but he had charisma. I was already fascinated by him at the first mass meeting.’
Huberte came from a Western Transvaal family, one that had also experienced hardship. She was the daughter of a Dutch immigrant teacher, Hubertus Johannes Goote, who had died five months before her birth during the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic, and Johanna Adina Goote, née Bergh. When her grandfather in the Netherlands received a cablegram announcing her birth, he got the impression that he had a grandson and proposed that the baby be given the family name of Hubertus Gerardus, which was duly done. Understandably, the name gave rise to a lot of teasing, also from a good family friend, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Hubert, as she spelled her name initially, objected to Prince Bernhard calling her ‘Hubertus Gerardus’. He suggested she should be Huberta but she refused – Huberta was a hippopotamus, she said. In the end they agreed on Huberte, the French feminine form, which she prefers.
Like her daughter, Huberte’s mother had also been born after the death of her father. Mrs Johanna Adina Goote was orphaned at the age of six when her mother Mrs Bergh (née Riekert) died. Huberte’s grandfather Bergh was a descendant of the Swedish adventurer Olof Bergh, a member of the Political Council at the Cape, who gained fame through exploits such as leading the journey of exploration to Namaqualand in 1682-’83. He had been married to Anna de Koning. After the loss of her mother, Huberte’s mother was raised by her grandparents, Comdt PJ and Mrs Lenie Riekert, on the farm Derdepoort. It was in the same district, near Pilanesberg, that Huberte’s mother met her Dutch father, who was then head of a farm school with three teachers.
One of Huberte’s clearest memories, one that she has carried with her since childhood is the story of the infamous murders on Derdepoort on 25 November 1899, a few weeks after the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War. Her great-grandfather Comdt Riekert owned the large farm Derdepoort along the Marico River on the border between Marico-Bushveld and the then Bechuanaland. An attack on a Boer settlement of about thirteen families on the farm was the first in which the British forces used black people and in which Boer women and children were victims.2
In later years when Huberte told her grandchildren about the wartime suffering, she also cautioned them to remember the kindness and humanity of those who had helped her ancestors: ‘You should always keep a balanced view, because wars are not caused by people; the cause is greed. Wars are always about greed.’
Huberte was born in 1919 in Pres. Paul Kruger’s official residence in Church Street, Pretoria, at a time when the house was rented by the Moedersbond maternity hospital before it became the Kruger House museum. Until the age of seven, she lived with her mother and older sister Bets at Rustenburg. The widow supported her daughters by sewing dresses for friends. She had inherited the family farm but derived no income from it: ‘just firewood and beetroot,’ Huberte recalls. As her husband had died so soon after starting to teach in South Africa, Mrs Goote only qualified for a tiny pension. ‘That is why I have respect for people who can make the most of their talents and can survive. I detest handouts; you have to retain your independence and honour,’ Huberte relates.
In 1927 Huberte’s mother remarried. Her new husband, Piet Wessels, was also a teacher and eventually became headmaster of Krugersdorp’s Monument High School, which Huberte attended. A clever child, she did her first three standards in one year and matriculated at a young age. Her interest in all forms of the arts dates from the time she first went to school. She acted in plays, sang leading roles in operettas and was a member of the choir, while also playing basketball and hockey. After matriculating she worked as children’s librarian at Krugersdorp for a year. Then, with the aid of three interest-bearing loans, she proceeded to university in Pretoria.
Huberte registered for a BA with Afrikaans-Nederlands and Afrikaans cultural history as major subjects. When her cultural history lecturer Kotie Roodt-Coetzee, who had become a good friend, learned about her library experience, she organised a post for Huberte in the university library and her tuition fees were waived. This lucky break enabled her to register for a diploma course in librarianship concurrently with the BA, which was permitted on condition she worked in the library two nights a week. With all that on her plate, she still found time for the SRC as well as her many other interests, mainly the arts. She was a member of the Castalides art committee and on the editorial board of its journal, Castalia. She belonged to a small group that met regularly to discuss art exhibitions. Intensely musical like the father she had never known, she was part of a group of music lovers that met on Sunday nights to listen to records. On top of that she chaired the ANS drama group and acted in productions at the Volksteater along with well-known actresses like the passionate Anna Neethling-Pohl. (In later years, whenever Huberte became somewhat agitated, Rupert would admonish her: ‘Don’t be like Anna Neethling-Pohl!’) Even with all her extramural interests, however, Huberte completed both her BA and the librarianship diploma successfully.
Rupert, who has often acknowledged his gratitude to Huberte for her support throughout his career, paid tribute to his wife in his chairman’s address at the 1996 AGM of Rembrandt Beherende Beleggings (Rembrandt Controlling Investments): ‘She has been my most loyal and faithful supporter and also my greatest critic. I think that is how it ought to be.’ On the same occasion he called to mind their student years, stressing that they were both children of the Depression, when about a third of Afrikaans-speaking whites were unemployed. ‘I think it leaves a mark on one and maybe makes one look at capital in a different way. Those who had cars – three out of UP’s total of 820 students – did not do well.’ Both of them had to borrow to pay for their studies. They knew money could do a lot of good but it could also be the cause of great evil. ‘It is like a rope: it can be used as a lifeline to save a drowning person, or as a noose to hang someone. That is money. It talks.’
At the end of 1936 Rupert obtained his BSc, majoring in chemistry with second-year courses in physics and mathematics. The next year he registered for an MSc in chemistry. He would be studying part-time, for he had to start earning a living. Jobs were scarce, but he was fortunate to get a post at the Pretoria Technical College lecturing to part-time pharmaceutical students. Their average age was 28. He was twenty.
It dawned on him even then that he was training Afrikaners to work for ‘the English’ − the language divide, reinforced by economic inequality, ran deep. Over the next few years he became increasingly convinced that Afrikaners would have to fight for their own niche in the business world and in public life, a view he shared with other Afrikaner intellectuals. Ever since Lord Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’ − the British team imported from Oxford after the Anglo-Boer War to run the administration − the civil service had been predominantly English speaking. In 1925 nearly a third of all public servants were unilingual; the lingua franca at the office was English. In the business world, too, Afrikaners had to relinquish their ethnic ties and communicate in English if they wanted to become part of the business elite. Many Afrikaners sensed that English speakers condescendingly looked down on them and considered
