streets all covered with a thick layer of snow, picture to myself the oakshaded [sic] ‘stoep’ of Allesverloren, the green vineyards and orchards laden with the delicious fruit of summer, and the people gasping for breath on account of the heat. To see the trees covered with snow is really one of the finest sights I’ve seen in Europe. This certainly makes up a good deal at any rate for the plain scenery of Holland. Holland certainly is beautiful in summer with its green meadows and shady forests and avenues but in winter it is dull and gloomy. A South African, born and bred in a rugged country cannot but love the wild and romantic Alps, he is almost sure to get poetical, but the tameness of the Dutch scenery soon wearies. I feel that being already naturally rigid, I’m here growing more prosaic every day, living as I do in a prosaic country among a prosaic people.[54]
Malan might have grown accustomed to his surroundings, but he could not identify with the Dutch. Coming from a more undifferentiated society, he believed that it was impossible for their social order – with a monarchy, and a more rigid class structure – to produce prominent personalities. He could not become used to some of their social habits, such as drawing up a list of the gifts that they would like to receive on their birthday. He found the society’s elaborate rules of formal etiquette constricting,[55] and in his letters to Nettie, poked subtle fun at these conventions.[56]
Malan’s friendship with Nettie grew during his years in Utrecht. In her, he discovered a faithful correspondent. Their friendship was cemented when she and her sister Coosie travelled to Europe during the summer of 1902. Coosie was suffering from a throat ailment and needed to seek treatment in Germany.[57] The three of them spent part of the summer in Bavaria, where they stayed at the picturesque resort of Reichenhall.[58]
Much friendly banter seems to have passed between Malan and Nettie. She teased him about his lack of romantic prospects, while he enjoyed extolling the virtues of girls for whom she had shown disdain, and joked about her becoming his housekeeper one day.[59]
One cannot help wondering whether there might have been a serious undertone in Nettie’s teasing. She displayed a particular interest in subjects that interested Malan, and asked him to recommend books to her – and even sent him some money to buy these recommendations for her.[60] Malan responded enthusiastically, teasing her about possible admirers and praising her intellectual endeavours:
And what is this about your two suitors, Netta? I am becoming very afraid that I might have to miss your good services in my house. And that I wouldn’t want, especially since I, now that I have heard that you are studying Calvin, with much profit to myself, can discuss all kinds of things in my own work with you. It has always given me great pleasure to see your interest in all sorts of scholarly subjects, and I must say that talking to you about these things has set me thinking about more than one point.[61]
Yet, at the same time, he dashed any hopes that she might or might not have had. She teased him about his seeming inability to go courting, especially since both his younger brothers were engaged by that time, but he responded that he had given up on romantic prospects.[62] Nettie was a friend, and nothing more.
Back in Utrecht, Malan threw himself into his work, but theology was never the only interest in his life, and his years in Europe were not necessarily defined only by his studies. Malan’s presence in Utrecht afforded him the rare privilege of meeting the Boer leaders when they visited Europe. By this time, Kruger was living in Utrecht, and Malan used the opportunity to visit him. More than fifty years later, he recalled (and maybe even romanticised) the scene that greeted him: an old, bent figure, with the Bible open in front of him.[63] He also witnessed Kruger’s decline. As the war reached its final months, Malan wrote to his parents that ‘Oom Paul’ was very quiet and kept to himself. He only left his house on Sundays to attend the nearby Dopper church. ‘His time has passed,’ Malan concluded.[64] Malan found Kruger’s last public appearances tragic. Within months after the conclusion of the war, the Boer generals Louis Botha, Koos de la Rey and Christiaan de Wet visited Europe. Utrecht held a special meeting for them in the Domkerk, which Malan attended. Here he witnessed the passing of the older generation and the rise of the new generation, whom he himself was to succeed:
At the close the ‘oubaas’ himself ascended the pulpit and addressed the generals and the audience … Though he said nothing particular, yet it was a most imposing and pathetic spectacle to see the oldman [sic], so strong and mighty in his days, now bowed down with age and disaster stand up before an audience perhaps for the last time. In the evening, the generals addressed a meeting in a large hall, and spoke well and made a favourable impression. De Wet especially spoke well … About the reception in Paris and Berlin you would have read. In spite of the Kaiser and his government, it is freely stated that Berlin has not seen the like in the last thirty-two years.[65]
Malan now joined the Dutch in their near hero worship of these men who had stepped forward as the new generation of Boer leaders. Christiaan de Wet, in particular, had been the darling of the Dutch press throughout the war. He was hailed as the architect of the guerrilla campaign, and his ability to outwit his adversaries and escape their ‘drives’ to hunt him down time and again kept the Dutch public enthralled.[66] The Dutch public’s admiration for the generals filled Malan with pride and reinforced his belief in the Afrikaners’ moral superiority to the European nations:
The generals are making a profound impression everywhere, especially because of their faith and their simplicity. In a society that is paralysed by faithlessness and where they are taught since childhood to feign behind a mask of so-called civilised etiquette, the appearance of three men so world-famous – and yet so unpretentious, so natural, so full of faith and so forceful – is a true wonder.[67]
In contrast to his admiration for the Boer generals, Malan had nothing but disdain for the Cape politicians and their tradition of conducting politics in the tolerant and accommodative manner that he had known all his life. In Stellenbosch the younger generation had already demonstrated that it was less tolerant than its elders. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Malan’s words showed that his tolerance was gone, as he rejected the ways of the older generation:
In the Cape Parliament our case seems to be doing excellently thanks to the foolishness of the ultra-jingo party. The only thing that I find very hard to stomach is that there is apparently so much sacrificing of principles, so much trading in principles. Of course it is all for sound political reasons, but that does not take away the immorality of it all. But the struggle between politics and principles is as old as Ahab and Elijah, and no one has ever succeeded in uniting the two.[68]
This condemnation of politics as something that was immoral and irreconcilable with principles was not only Malan speaking. It was a sign of the influence of his new mentor, his landlord Professor J.J.P. Valeton Jr.
Valeton specialised in the history of religion and literature in Israel as well as the Old Testament and was a prominent Dutch theologian, one of the three leading representatives of the ‘later’ Ethical theologians. He published a number of pamphlets on Ethical theology, but these were not his only publications – he also wrote religious tracts, and pamphlets that dealt with mission work and Old Testament history. His most specialised works concentrated on the prophets of the Old Testament.[69] In April 1900, six months before Malan’s arrival in the Netherlands, Valeton delivered a lecture entitled ‘De strijd tusschen Achab en Elia’ (The battle between Ahab and Elijah).[70]
In this lecture, Valeton created a dichotomy between politics and religion. The biblical story of Ahab exposed the difference between worldly and political views and motives on the one hand, and religious, spiritual values on the other.[71] Ahab was a shrewd political strategist – especially in his creation of alliances with his neighbours, be it through marriage or through showing mercy to those whom he had defeated in war.[72] Elijah was Ahab’s antithesis: the man of God whose only concern was service to his Creator. Elijah regarded politics and the interests of state – which were Ahab’s main concerns – as inconsequential.[73] To Valeton, the rivalry between Ahab and Elijah
