his address into a barely veiled criticism of the Botha government. Ahab’s political alliance with the nations around him was ‘conciliation politics’, and ‘racial hatred’ had to be dissolved by ‘forgiving and forgetting about the past’, glossing over cultural peculiarities and fundamental differences and instead focusing on commonalities. In Israel’s case, the cost of ‘conciliation’ was the destruction of its national religion and the loss of the nation’s moral compass, since conciliation necessarily encompassed the importation of foreign gods. This, according to Malan, was an extremely serious matter, as a nation’s god dictated the nature of its morals and ideals – and therefore its future. Malan believed that the future was determined by ideals – ideals ruled the world and shaped the history of both nations and individuals.[101] His emphasis on the importance of ideals was a powerful reminder of the idealist philosophy he had studied as a student – his words echoed those of Berkeley, Hegel and Fichte. It was to form an essential component of his political career: he would become a powerful transmitter of ideals – ideals that were never to be compromised. In Malan’s opinion, the Israelites under Ahab were a nation who had achieved political independence at the cost of their unique national character and personality, their God, and therefore their conscience. To Malan, such compromise was symptomatic of a weak character. In contrast to the spinelessness of the Israelites and their leader stood the prophet Elijah, whom Malan called the ‘man of steel’.[102] Alone and unarmed, he did not flinch in the face of Ahab’s power and Jezebel’s fury.[103]
To Malan, Elijah was a man who possessed greatness as only a child of the desert could. Malan believed that history preferred men of solitude, men who were taught by the desert’s empty plains and eternal sky to be silent and listen to God’s word, who were filled with a sense of eternity.[104] Thus said the minister of Montagu – who himself had spent countless hours traversing the Karoo, who as a child had spent endless hours in the veld, and who had longed for the ruggedness of this world while the cities of Europe bustled around him. It was inevitable that he identified with Elijah and admired the prophet’s fearlessness. He felt that his world was dominated by the spirit of Ahab: politicians were more concerned about public opinion and grabbing votes than they were about principles; his nation paid lip service to their principles and refused to assert their rights. What was needed was the reawakening of the spirit of Elijah – and, as he addressed his audience, he expressed the hope that it contained young men who were willing to pick up the prophet’s mantle.[105] Malan was not yet ready to take the mantle upon himself, and still clung to Valeton’s idea that politics – especially the politics of his own country – was devoid of principles.
Through these public appearances Malan’s prominence within the Afrikaner community was growing, and there were whispers that, in time, he would become a professor at the Stellenbosch seminary.[106] He was already proving himself to be an ardent patron of Stellenbosch and the ideals that the town represented.
During these years there was considerable restlessness within the ranks of the Victoria College. The Union government had received a considerable sum of money from two Randlords, Julius Wernher and Otto Beit, for the establishment of a teaching university in Cape Town, to be located at Groote Schuur, Cecil John Rhodes’s former estate. This was in keeping with a vision that Rhodes had expressed in the 1890s, but which had to be shelved as a result of his complicity in the Jameson Raid. The possibility of a university being established at Rhodes’s former estate was perceived as a direct threat to the Victoria College, which would be forced to close and hand all its students to the new institution. In order to prevent this, a vigilance committee was established in 1911 to keep an eye on any developments affecting the college, and to voice concern and opposition if these developments threatened the college’s existence.[107] Malan became a member of this committee and participated in deputations that visited the Minister of Education F.S. Malan – whose newspaper, Ons Land, Malan had devoured as a student – as well as the entire Botha cabinet. In 1913, the committee drafted a memorandum concerning the issue that drew a lot of press attention.[108] The memorandum carried Malan’s stamp: it asserted that there was much more than just an educational institution at stake. The true issue was the interests of the Afrikaner nation and the ideals that Stellenbosch represented:
Stellenbosch … has been intimately bound to the spiritual, moral and national life of the Dutch-speaking section of the nation for years. It is the place where the Afrikaner nation can best realise her ideals, and from whence she can exert the greatest influence over South Africa. She is the best fulfilment of a deep-seated need that the nation has found thus far. She represents an idea. Therefore, she has become not merely an educational institution, among other things, to the nation, but the symbol and the guarantee of its own powerful, growing national life, which seeks expression.[109]
This idealisation of Stellenbosch as a breeding ground for the Afrikaners’ nationalist ideals contained another dimension: the separation, even insulation of the Afrikaner youth in order to protect them from English influences. The same memorandum dwelt on the negative implications of forcing the Afrikaner youth to study in Cape Town where, at such a fragile stage in their lives, they would lack the supportive and nurturing environment provided by Stellenbosch and the Dutch Reformed Church, and be left to fend for themselves in an environment dominated by English speakers. This would disturb the balance between the two sections of the population, as the one would inevitably achieve an unfair advantage over the other.[110]
The definition of the broader South African nation, and the position of English and Afrikaans speakers within it, formed an important component of Malan’s thinking. In the context of the Botha government’s conciliation politics, the language movement, and the university issue, he identified two clashing ideals. Both ideals acknowledged that the South African nation consisted of two nationalities (black people were not regarded as members of the nation). One of these ideals advocated the amalgamation of the two nations into one – which would inevitably be English. The other, which Malan regarded as the only true ideal, held that
in South Africa there are two nationalities and so it always ought to be; that both will be entirely free and that each will have an equal opportunity to maintain and develop that which is its own. This is the best manner for the greater South African nation to become one, a moral union, founded on a common love for a common fatherland, but it will be a unity that consists of a duality – a dual-unity. [111]
These words were very different from those uttered by Jan Smuts four years earlier: ‘The great task was to build up a South African nation … In a South African nation alone was the solution … Two such peoples as the Boers and the English must either unite or they must exterminate each other.’[112] Malan’s solution, an order in which the two language groups would be ‘separate but equal’, was based on an assumption that cultural equality did not exist as yet. As far as he was concerned, English was still dominant and was hostile towards the Afrikaners and their language. These years were marked by deep divisions and a general animosity between English and Afrikaans speakers, with the language issue presenting an exceptionally explosive dilemma.[113]
The situation also manifested itself in the press. In the immediate aftermath of the South African War, two distinct interest groups were engaged in buying up press organs in order to propagate their political views. On the one hand the British high commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, used state funds to buy the loyalty of a number of newspapers that would propagate the imperial idea – and exploited martial law and censorship to stunt the growth of an opposition Afrikaner press – while on the other hand, Botha and Smuts were able to utilise funds from the Netherlands to counter Milner’s attempts to silence the Afrikaner press. In spite of these machinations, the press appeared to unite briefly – in the midst of the euphoria brought about by Union and the prospect of conciliation between the two camps – but its partisan nature soon re-emerged as the division within the country manifested itself within the Botha cabinet.[114]
Botha, in an attempt to counter the deep rifts in the country, chose individuals from all four provinces to serve in his cabinet. His and Smuts’s sympathies, however, were closer to the ideals of the English-speaking Unionist Party, which formed the official opposition,[115]
