meeting, Malan unequivocally stated his opposition – in principle – to English services for the church’s own Dutch-speaking members, and his support for English services for English speakers – in a separate building.[31] Following the deliberations, Malan drafted two letters: one intended for the English-speaking petitioners, the other for their Afrikaner sympathisers. The English letter cordially refused the request in the interests of the town’s poor white community who, on account of their poverty, attended the evening services rather than the morning services, and who did not understand English.[32] The second letter, written in Dutch, was also cordial, but ever so slightly harder, and carried the stamp of its author’s nationalism. It reiterated the argument that the rights and the interests of the poor white Afrikaners were of the highest importance. In addition, Malan asserted that the nation’s language was Dutch, and that its use in the practice of its religion was closely tied to its sense of self-worth and independence as a nation. For the members of Montagu’s Dutch Reformed congregation, there would be no services in English.[33] In the eyes of Montagu’s new minister, language, religion and nationalism were inseparable.
Malan took up residence in the church’s enormous parsonage, which engulfed his newly acquired furniture. His parents, who were present at the auspicious occasion, stayed with him for a while, but as they (and with them, his stepmother’s cooking) were preparing to leave, the young bachelor began to wonder where his meals were going to come from. Cooking was beyond his area of expertise. Thankfully, it was arranged that he could take his meals with a lady who lived close to the parsonage.[34]
The women of Montagu soon discovered that their young minister was a man who possessed phenomenal powers of concentration, accompanied by astonishing absent-mindedness. His meals were prepared for him and sometimes a young girl would be sent to deliver them, neatly packed in a basket. She would usually find him hard at work at his desk, oblivious to her knocks on the door. Eventually she would be forced to tiptoe closer, place the basket on the table next to him, and tiptoe out again, her presence having gone unnoticed.[35] During these years, Malan never ate much. He had simple tastes, and enjoyed nothing more than a hard-boiled egg and some moskonfyt,[36] which his mother used to give to him as a treat when he was a child. His congregants also noticed that he consumed large quantities of coffee when he visited them.[37]
These mandatory house calls nearly overwhelmed him. By August of 1906 he reported to Nettie that his head was spinning from meetings and people, people and meetings. There were always more people for him to be introduced to, and visiting the 230 families in the town consumed all of his time and energy. Once that was done, he had to begin visiting the families scattered across the district. For this purpose, he owned a horse cart and two fine horses – and fortunately the services of a stable attendant to take care of them and the five chickens, as he felt certain that they would all have become emaciated if left only in his care.[38]
To Malan, house calls entailed travelling with his horse cart through the deserted landscape for days on end, sometimes for up to ninety hours.[39] It took him to all corners of the district, where he came into close contact with his human flock as they went about their daily lives. As he described it to Nettie, the area was truly Karoo: if one ever had the inclination to hurl something at a dog, there would always be a stone within reach, and if one had the wish to prick someone, there was never a shortage of thorns.[40]
Malan took his visits to the people of this dry, yet abundant land very seriously. He preferred to invest time and energy in each visit, instead of rushing from house to house like many of his colleagues from the neighbouring parishes. In a small notebook, he recorded details about every member of his congregation. When the various parishes met to report on their work, Malan was the only minister who had not managed to visit all of his congregants during the period of a year – to which he remarked drily that he had done thorough work.[41] Years later, he would write a plea to his fellow ministers not to treat these visits as a routine that satisfied their official consciences, but rather as an opportunity to spend sufficient time with those in doubt in order to lead them to the light. Hurried visits gave the impression of an annual spiritual inspection, with the minister being the spiritual tax collector or policeman from whom his victims hid their sins. Malan felt a true need to bring enlightenment and grace to people who were spiritually ignorant – and the best way, in his view, was to spend time with each person. It gave him a deep sense of fulfilment to provide answers to someone’s difficult questions, or to explain a complicated Bible verse.[42]
His flock regarded him as an intellectual. His sermons were often too difficult and complicated for them to follow, but his listeners were nevertheless in awe of his abilities. Malan continued to buy books, and studied late into the night. He was particularly concerned with equipping himself for his task, and made a point of reading books on psychology. In later years, his insight into human affairs and his ability to handle flammable personalities in difficult situations became legendary, and possibly had much of its grounding in his late-night reading.[43] Yet Malan did not write or publish much during these years – he absorbed and he practised.
To outside observers, Malan was a young man of great potential. At the end of October and for the first half of November 1906, Malan attended his first Synod meeting, which was held in Cape Town. Here he drew attention to himself on account of his nationalist stance on matters of language and religion, which found approval with his audience. His first public appearance was as part of a debate on whether the DRC’s teachers’ training school ought to be moved from Cape Town to Stellenbosch. Malan asserted that a larger matter was at stake – that being nationalist principles – which ought to be the first concern when equipping Afrikaner children for their calling to their church and their state. For this reason, Malan argued, Stellenbosch provided a far more suitable environment for the nurturing of such principles than Cape Town. He also emphasised the importance of mother-tongue education for the sake of the Afrikaners’ national self-respect and continued existence.[44] Responding to Malan’s speech, the church’s actuary told his audience that he felt proud of the Dutch Reformed Church – especially since it had acquired the services of such a learned young man. He also observed that the young ministers who had recently returned from their European studies seemed to be of the opinion that, in the sphere of both education and politics, the Afrikaners had to separate themselves from the English. This, according to the actuary, was a new phenomenon, and deserved the serious consideration of both the church and the nation’s leaders.[45]
While the Dutch Reformed Church’s Synod was taking note of the language issue, the Second Afrikaans Language Movement – which Gustav Preller had established in the Transvaal – reached the Cape Colony. Its foremost campaigners were the young J.H.H. (Jannie) de Waal, who was destined to become an important Afrikaans novelist and playwright,[46] and D.F. Malherbe, who would become a prominent poet and academic.[47] On 3 November 1906, while Malan was in Cape Town for the Synod meeting, the Afrikaanse Taal Vereniging (ATV) was established in the same city, with D.F. Malherbe as its first president and Jannie de Waal as vice-president. Malan also attended the meeting, and was elected to the organisation’s management.[48]
Unlike their colleagues in the Transvaal, the young men who founded the ATV in the Cape had to contend with a powerful pro-Dutch establishment, which manifested itself in the Taalbond. The Taalbond was supported by the older generation, and included powerful Afrikaner leaders and intellectuals such as ‘Onze’ Jan Hofmeyr and Malan’s Stellenbosch professor P.J.G. de Vos.[49] Conscious of the opposition from the older generation, the fledgling organisation took pains to emphasise the advantages of a thorough knowledge of Dutch, and undertook to cooperate with pro-Dutch organisations – in particular the Taalbond. Nevertheless, the new movement’s aim was clear: Afrikaans had to be developed into a written language.[50] Its branches spread across the Cape, in spite of the disapproval of the older generation.[51]
Within this new generation, Malan stood out from the crowd. Just as the Synod took note of his presence, his peers also recognised his potential. For this reason, the ATV appointed him as its chairman at the end of 1907. As D.F. Malherbe later recalled, they ‘desired to have a man of the church who carried much weight among our ranks, in order to give status to our impoverished
