after the British soldiers sailed home, Sir Alfred Milner, supreme ruler of all the South African colonies, determined to crush the Boer spirit, culture and language, to turn the two old republics into real British colonies. He Anglicised the civil service and decreed that all education be in English. Boer children who used their mother tongue had to wear the label around their necks: ‘I am a Donkey: I spoke Dutch today.’
… and the Boer bitterness grew: not only had he been conquered for his gold, not only had he been brutally vandalised, not only had he lost loved ones in the dreadful concentration camps, but now his very culture was being humiliated. He now belonged to a volk of poor-whites: impoverished by the British scorched-earth policy, many were driven to the towns. There, poorly educated, unable to speak the language of his oppressor, regarded as a country bumpkin, he had to sell his labour in competition with the ubiquitous black man. And so, to his old fear of the black man as a warrior, as the Black Peril, was now added the fear of being swamped by him economically.
But Britain’s greatest injustice was to the black people. In order to woo the Boers into surrender, the peace treaty had agreed that the thorny question of the black man’s vote would be shelved until after responsible government – knowing that there was no likelihood of the Boers granting the franchise to the ‘kaffirs’. And, predictably, they did not. In short, the British purchased peace at the expense of the black man, and opened the door to legalised racial prejudice.
I have no doubt that this dereliction of British duty will plague South Africa for years to come … I hear that the natives are deeply hurt that they have been treated so badly. An organization has been formed, called the ‘African National Congress’, to work for their political rights and a fairer distribution of land …
And so the Boers lost the war but won the peace. When the first elections were held and the new Union of South Africa came into being in 1910, the Boer War hero, General Louis Botha, was the first prime minister, and he was a segregationist. His successor was General Jan Smuts, also a Boer War hero, also a segregationist, but Britain was rewarded for her duplicity by having a South African government who believed its best interests lay in being a member of the Empire. But vast numbers of Afrikaners believed they were being sacrificed in favour of English-speakers, and the Black Peril remained. The National Party was formed to pursue Afrikaner interests vigorously. Then along came World War I, and rebellion.
William Mahoney’s grandson George did not join Harker-Mahoney – he had the gift of the gab rather than the commercial instinct, and he became a lawyer and, in due course, a member of parliament. He kept up the tradition of the family journals, even when he was fighting in World War I. His journal continues:
Many Afrikaners hated to fight on the side of the hated British against the Germans who had been their allies in the Boer War a scant twelve years ago. A group of army generals tried to mount a coup d’état to recover the independence of their old republics. The battles were fast and furious, Afrikaner fighting Afrikaner. They lasted three months before General Smuts crushed the rebellion. And the scars of the Boer War were split wide open.
In 1918 a secret society called the Broederbond was formed to promote the domination by Afrikaners in all walks of life. When World War II came, and South Africa again went into battle on the side of the hated British against the Germans, Afrikaner nationalists who called themselves the Ossewa Brandwag hatched a plot with Hitler to assassinate General Smuts, mount a coup d’état and harness South Africa’s goldfields to the Third Reich. The plot was foiled but many Afrikaners had to be interned in concentration camps, including three future prime ministers.
And then the war ended in 1945, and the same old troubles resumed that had plagued the land since the Kaffir Wars and the Great Trek: the ‘native problem’, the ‘Black Peril’. The poor-white Afrikaner was still struggling, the English-speakers still dominated the land economically. And then came the fateful elections in 1948 …
General Smuts, the hero of the Boer War, was an old man, worn out by fifty years of bloody fighting for and against his Afrikaner volk. And although he was a segregationist, he was a paternalistic one who believed the problem had to be solved ‘by future generations.’ His weary policies were no emotional match for the strident National Party whose policy was immutable segregation as ordained in the Bible, and as envisioned in the Covenant taken by their forefathers at the Battle of Blood River: the immutable segregation of blacks from whites, territorially and politically. It was a strong, self-righteous policy of ‘South Africa for the White Man’ – which meant, more specifically, ‘South Africa for the Afrikaner’.
It was called Apartheid
And so Apartheid entered political science, and the dictionary. It means ‘apartness’, and it is pronounced ‘apart-hate’. Although it was not the intention to generate hate, that is what happened, and numerous attempts to change the name – to ‘Separate Development’, ‘Plural Democracy’, ‘Self Determination’ – failed to eradicate the original connotation. Nor did the claims by the political architects that it was designed with the laudable motive that one race should not interfere with another’s cultural and political needs hold water.
As George Mahoney thundered in parliament: ‘The roots of this mad science, Mr Speaker, lie not in pious guff the Prime Minister gives us about apartheid being God’s will and a “mighty act of creation”; the roots of apartheid lie in racial prejudice and in the trekboers’ insatiable quest for the Lekker Lewe – the Good Life of Land, Labour and Security …’
Exclamations of Onsin (nonsense) rang out from the government benches, cheers from the opposition benches. Sitting in the stranger’s gallery of the august oak-panelled chamber, young Luke Mahoney looked down on his father with pride. George Mahoney was a stocky, handsome, square-faced man with bristling moustache and eyebrows.
‘The Lekker Lewe, Mr Speaker!’ he continued. ‘That’s why the voortrekkers trekked away from the insecurity of the Kaffir Wars in 1836, trekked away from the British administration’s new regulations about master and servant. And the establishment of the Boer republics achieved this Lekker Lewe, Mr Speaker, until the Boer War –’
Cries of Onsin, and groans.
‘But then came Union, Mr Speaker, and the Boers were on top again and they immediately resumed their pursuit of the Good Life: the land they now had – indeed the whole of South Africa! The security they now had, so it only remained to secure the labour – cheap labour for the farmers, for the industrialists, for those mines! And it is this unsavoury matter of cheap labour that has motivated the government ever since. The motive of filthy lucre, not high-falutin’ notions of God’s will –’
‘Skande!’
‘Oh yes, Mr Speaker, it is scandalous! Let’s first look at the Group Areas Act. This wicked legislation divides South Africa up into white zones and black zones – giving eighty-seven per cent of the land to the whites, and thirteen to the blacks! Can this be God’s will – that a mere four million whites, twenty per cent of the total population, receive eighty-seven per cent of God’s land? No, it is cynically, scandalously unjust! Now, from that unjust, sick starting point let’s review the rest of this rotten apartheid structure.
‘This Group Areas Act has resulted, predictably, in massive overcrowding of black land. This has resulted in blacks drifting onto white
