Party Politics in South
By PENRY WILLIAMS WHEN I was in South Africa last year a number of English-speaking South Africans made remarks like this: 'The trouble with this country is all this racialism.' I supposed, as visitors from Europe might well sup- pose, that they were talking about the. Native Question. But they were not: they were talking about the quarrels of the Nationalist and United Party Whites. Even when we have been told that the issues between the parties have, on the face of it, little to do with the Native Question, it comes as a shock to find South Africans themselves regarding the quarrels of English and Afrikaner as the primary racial conflict of their land. Six thousand miles away from the Union the struggle of Black and White seems the dominant problem of all Africa; and no doubt it is. The conflicts of the Nationalist and United Parties seem curiously irrelevant and petty beside the gigantic problem of colour. But they are neither irrelevant nor petty to most South Africans, and it is worth inquiring why politicians there are so concerned with what seem to us secondary issues.
If one asks an English-speaking South African why he dislikes the Nationalists he will probably explain that he has nothing against the Afrikaners as such, but that he objects to those who are not loyal to the British Crown. The concept of `loyalty' to the Crown and Commonwealth is central to the thought of the United Party, although it may not appear very often in the public speeches of its leaders. English-speaking South Africans divide Afrikaners into two groups of 'loyal' and `Nat.' YoU mustn't go to that hairdresser (or grocer, or butcher), he's a Nat. Go to the other one; he's loyal.' One can hear this kind of remark very often in the isolated rural 'communities. It does not mean that the English will entirely boycott the shop of a Nationalist, but they will certainly go to a 'loyal' shopkeeper if they can. The Nationalists.will behave in the same way.
For anyone from Europe, accustomed to the politics of class struggle and economic interest, it is difficult to understand why, for South African politicians, the central conflict should revolve about the Republic. Why should a monarchy that has no political power over South Africa be so passionately defended and so bitterly attacked? Is the republicanism of the Nationalists perhaps a cover for the promotion of economic interests, as republicanism in seventeenth-century England was, according to some authorities, the creed of an economic class? There is no evidence that this is so. Republicanism is too widely spread among all social and economic groups to be the monopoly of one. Economic interests play their part, of course. Probably the United Party draws a large part of its funds from the Chamber of Mines; certainly the Nationalists have in the past appealed successfully to 'poor whites' and the lower-paid European workers. But the distinctiOn between the parties is not a distinction between classes or economic interests. Nor is it a distinction between town and country. There was a time when the Afri- kaners were, broadly speaking, predominant in the countryside and the EngliSh were predominant in the towns. But the influx, over the last . generation, of Afrikaners into the towns has entirely changed the situation; and the recent skilful election- eering of Strydom and de Klerk has given the Nationalists a strong hold on the Rand. Nor is the distinction between the parties entirely a distinc- tion of race, for there are many Afrikaans-speaking men in the United Party, whose candidates in last year's provincial elec- tions bore a strikingly high proportion of Afrikaner and Huguenot names. Fundamentally, the distinction lies between different loyalties. , The attachment of English-speaking South Africans to England, the Crown, and the Commonwealth is more easily understood in South Africa than here. Live for a few months in a South African home and it no longer seems mysterious that these people are passionately hostile to republicanism. Inevitably the Englishman abroad is more conscious of his nationality than the Englishman at home. In England we have been free for hundreds of years from foreign invasions and aliens in our midst. But English-speaking South Africans feel that they must defend their community against attack. Their life is still, in many ways, an English life. If they can, they like to make at least one trip to England in their lives. If they are rich enough they send their sons to Oxford or Cambridge, and many of their daughters go to London. Their sports are tennis, cricket and rugby. Their boarding-schools for boys are clearly modelled on the pattern of the English public school. Of all this complex English social structure the Crown and the Com- monwealth are the symbols and the defences. If these fall, then the entire way of life will, according to its adherents, be in danger.
This loyalty to the Commonwealth does not seem to English- speaking South Africans inconsistent with South African patriotism. But it is precisely this loyalty that the Nationalists dislike. They believe that South Africa can never be a nation while half her people are tied emotionally to a country over- seas. It is difficult for us in England to understand this, since we have never experienced any analogous situation. The Nationalists look on the English rather as American patriots in the nineteenth century might have regarded any Americans who persisted in regarding England as their home. 'How,' the Nationalists ask, 'can South Africa become a nation when many of her people give their loyalty to and derive their, customs from another country?' Only by severing these ties can the English become South African, they argue. It is there- fore against the English Crown and other English institutions that the Nationalists campaign. It is for the 'loyal Dutch' or the 'Anglicised Afrikaner' that they reserve their greatest hatred.
The insistent attack upon English ties and customs seems hateful to Englishmen in South Africa and tiresome to English- men in Britain. 'We treated them pretty well after The Boer War, why can't they settle down now?' is a prevalent British attitude. Some of the actions of the present Government justify this irritation. To take a minor instance, one of the Cape Province Defence Force regiments, Die Middellandse Regi- ment (The Midlands Regiment), has recently been renamed Die Middellandse Regiment Scheepers, after a Boer officer who was shot by the British for treason. At what they regarded as unnecessary provocation, the English-speaking colonel and certain other officers resigned.
But if we are to understand Afrikaner nationalism we must try to put on one side the irritation whicli almost any national- ist movement occasionally arouses. Two things about the white communities of South Africa are worth remembering. First, the leaders of the Afrikaner nationalists are, many of them, highly educated and intelligent men. Second, the extraordinary isolation of South African life has only recently been pene- trated by the wireless and the car. Until they came, those living in country communities had little contact with the outside world. Intellectually, half the population of South Africa was still in the seventeenth century by the 1890s. In essence the party conflicts of South Africa are more like the struggles of Central Europe in the nineteenth century than they are like the politics of Europe today. The number of professors and doctors of philosophy at the head of the Nationalist Party makes it look something like the Frankfort Assembly of 1848. Their ideas are not unlike the ideas of Mazzini, or rather a Calvinist version of Mazzini. In England today we regard such ideas as the monopoly of Blimps and Blackshirts. But this not fair to South African Nationalists: the history and the isolation of their country have brought romantic nationalism to them a century later than it appeared in Europe. There are many unpleasant features of this nation- alism, just as there were unpleasant sides to Mazzini; and romantic nationalism in South Africa has sometimes wel- comed the ideas of European fascists. But we would do well to remember that most European peoples, and most Asian peoples, have followed romantic nationalism at some time or other. The Afrikaners can reasonably claim that they have no obligation to be loyal to the Commonwealth.
(To be continued)
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