had been replaced by the names of mountains, rivers, lakes and towns that could only intimidate the schoolboy who had to memorise them. Nevertheless, Malan felt that he was heading into a dark continent where uncivilised millions could not tell their right hand from their left – and these people were now the responsibility of the European nations who had painted their colours on the map. To Malan, the map resembled a cake from which the various colonial powers had each taken a bite. They carried the salvation of Africa’s inhabitants on their shoulders, and would have to account to God on Judgment Day about what they had done for the land and the people for whom Christ had given his blood.[136]
These musings revealed Malan as a child of his time – a product of a Social Darwinist mind-set – who saw the world in terms of a hierarchy of civilisations. To Malan, racial differences were God’s creation, they were inherent, the natural order – and they were unquestioned. Racial conflict was the result of the natural order being disturbed, and could be avoided by maintaining the status quo. By virtue of their skin colour and European heritage, white Afrikaners belonged to Western civilisation and were therefore inherently superior to black Africans, whom Malan regarded as primitive. To him, Africans belonged to the heathen nations, who were only now fortunate enough to hear Christ’s message for the first time. But Malan also believed that Africans had a natural and deep-rooted respect for the bearers of civilisation, which was why they addressed white men as ‘baas’ or even ‘Inkosi’ – the same name they used to refer to God. Malan was convinced that Africans had even more reverence for the Afrikaners than for the English; for example, they recognised that Paul Kruger was a greater man than Cecil John Rhodes.[137] Within this context, the Afrikaners had a special, God-given calling. ‘The Afrikaner has power over the Kaffir [sic]. But truly, we would not have possessed this power if it had not been given to us from above. Has God not embedded it with a high and holy calling for our nation?’ Malan asked.[138]
Malan’s idealism about racial relations revealed a deep naïveté about the nature and dynamics of interracial relations. Up to that point in his life, the demographics of the era dictated that his interaction with people of other races was limited to the coloured community of the western Cape. It was a paternalistic relationship in which he was always in a position of power – first as a farmer’s son who knew coloureds only as servants, and later as the man who addressed alcoholism in the coloured community by appealing to his white congregation’s position of power. His knowledge of African people, in contrast, had to come from books and the tales told by his sister and friends who lived in the north. In a world far removed from the racial conflict of the interior Malan had been able to build his ideal. This ideal was confirmed as he travelled through the north, as the traveller is always insulated from the realities of Utopia’s everyday life.
So it happened that he became enamoured with the places he visited and the people he met. Everything and everyone was so unlike the city with its uniform people, who held uniform opinions and had uniform habits, who practised uniform occupations, wore uniform clothes and lived in uniform houses. Here, in the wilderness, there were diverse and unique personalities and unspoilt character. He was overwhelmed by the hospitality and generosity of the people who stood ready to welcome this man of the church with open arms. On his first night in Rhodesia, he slept in an old Voortrekker house, complete with antelope horns mounted on the walls and animal skins on the floor. He held a service outside under the trees and as the hymns rose into the African heaven, he felt as if he had been transported back to the days of the Voortrekker leaders Piet Retief and Andries Pretorius – a time when simplicity, hospitality and sincerity were still the foundation of the Afrikaners’ national character, or so he believed.[139]
As he travelled further into Rhodesia, Malan discovered some more worldly challenges to his elevated ideal of the Afrikaners. The communities in Rhodesia were thinly scattered and well out of reach of the church and its sanctifying community. Many had fallen prey to the ‘worldliness’ around them and stopped attending church altogether, while others attended the services of other denominations simply because it was too difficult to reach the nearest Dutch Reformed congregation, thereby becoming estranged from their own denomination. Malan was disconcerted by the amount of ‘mixed marriages’ between Afrikaans-speaking members of the Dutch Reformed Church and members of the English-speaking churches. He believed that this weakened the bond between congregant and church, and that children born to such a marriage had no bond to the church at all.[140]
It was the first time that Malan used the term ‘mixed marriages’ – and in a religious context. Interracial marriages, which later were to become known as ‘mixed marriages’ in apartheid jargon, between whites and coloureds also took place in Rhodesia – and Malan found it abhorrent. He was convinced that Afrikaners were not party to such unions – only English speakers ‘debased’ themselves in this way. Malan ascribed this to the Afrikaners’ inherent aversion to such a shameful lifestyle, but the few exceptions to the rule concerned him deeply, and constituted an omen that the Afrikaners were also threatened by the spectre of racial mixing which, up to that point, had been kept at bay by the church.[141]
Upon his arrival in Bulawayo, Malan was astonished by the city’s intricate racial hierarchy. It had a large Afrikaans-speaking coloured community who refused to mix with the Africans or to share a church with them. To this end, a separate coloured church was being constructed – which meant that their joining the ‘white’ church was not considered either. Coloured employers insisted that their African servants address them as ‘baas’ and ‘nooi’, or Mr and Mrs. ‘What an indescribably complicated social state of affairs we have!’[142] Malan exclaimed. To this was added the problem of white poverty, which also had an impact on interracial relations. Malan was shocked to discover that the DRC’s orphanage in Bulawayo was filled beyond capacity, and had got to the point where it had to refuse entry to about twenty children. As a result, three of these children were taken in by a coloured family. When the news of this situation reached the Dutch Reformed minister, ‘compassion moved the good minister’s heart to take them into his own cramped dwelling. They are now accommodated in the parsonage’s bathroom, which is a small corrugated-iron structure in the backyard.’[143] These words were written without any reflection – the undesirability of white children living with a coloured family was so overwhelmingly self-evident as to blur the squalor of their new living conditions. To Malan, raising funds to alleviate such a desperate situation was the most important issue at hand, and the image of the three orphans cramped into a corrugated-iron bathroom in the heat of the African sun was sure to move the more privileged Dutch Reformed congregants in the Cape to action.
The appeal for funds was to become a prominent part of his letters to the Cape Province, as Malan found the Dutch Reformed congregations in a desperate situation. Not only were they widely dispersed, they were also too poor to maintain full-time ministers of their own and received only the most sporadic of spiritual nourishment. Malan saw another threat looming over their heads. Their environment not only posed the danger of these people being lost to their church, it also posed the danger of their children being lost to their nation. In Southern Rhodesian schools, Dutch was barely tolerated, while in Northern Rhodesia no state funding was given to a school that taught any Dutch. Afrikaans-speaking children had to attend English schools where, according to Malan, they never heard the gospel in their own language and, to make matters worse, were taught to despise the language of their church and by implication their church itself.[144] For Malan, language, church and nation were so indistinguishable that disregard for one was disregard for all. Even worse, many of these schools were Catholic, which meant that Afrikaner children were falling prey to the menace of the ever-encroaching ‘Roomsche Gevaar’ (Roman Catholic Peril) as it made its way southwards from the Catholic colonial powers in Central Africa. Malan was convinced that the only way to withstand this threat was by establishing a buffer in the form of a strong, Protestant Afrikaner community in Rhodesia – and only the concerted efforts of a well-funded Dutch Reformed Church in Rhodesia could bring this about.[145] Malan’s appeals to his readers’ purses not only spoke to their spiritual conscience, but to their nationalist conscience as well.
Malan travelled further north and deeper into the Catholic heartland. He visited congregations in Northern Rhodesia and
