Yet Afrikanerdom itself was torn by new divisions. In 1932, as South Africa struggled to cope with the consequences of the Great Depression, Hertzog agreed to take his ruling National Party into a coalition with Smuts’s opposition South Africa Party in what became known as Fusion government. The following year, the two leaders went a stage further, deciding to merge their two parties as the United Party.
The split that occurred over fusion represented a fundamental turning point for the Afrikaner people. Hertzog’s purpose was to forge a new kind of unity in South Africa. He no longer feared the menace of British imperialism and sought to establish Suid Afrikaanse volkseenheid – a unity between all South Africa’s whites. His new ally, Smuts, was fully in agreement with this objective. But to Afrikaner nationalists, fusion threatened both their republican aspirations and their hopes for eventual Afrikaner control. Instead of Hertzog’s Suid Afrikaanse volkseenheid, they wanted Afrikaner volkseenheid. Hertzog, they insisted, no longer stood for their interests and thereby had forfeited any claim to leadership of Afrikanerdom.
The nationalist mantle now passed to Malan. Repudiating Hertzog’s ‘betrayal’ over fusion, he launched the Gesuiwerde National Party (GNP) – a ‘purified’ National Party claiming to stand for the aims and objectives of ‘true’ Afrikaners. Gesuiwerde nationalism differed markedly from any of its predecessors. It was not simply a return to the ‘pure’ nationalism of the past, of the kind once espoused by Hertzog. It was a new nationalism brought forth from the depths of deprivation, hardened by new ideology and driven by a ruthless determination to dominate.
The GNP made little impact when it was launched in 1933. When the split occurred, only eighteen members of parliament followed Malan into the GNP, a small minority. For the next few years, Malan’s Nationalists remained in the wilderness. Hertzog dismissed them as a group of fanatics intent merely on stirring up hatred and discord. Yet during that time the foundations were laid for a dramatic revival of Nationalist fortunes.
At the centre of this revival lay the Broederbond. By the mid-1930s its influence extended to every level of Afrikaner society and to every area of the country. Its elite membership had risen to 1,400 in eighty separate cells, mostly professional men, teachers, academics, clergymen and civil servants. Its efforts now were directed to infiltrating members into ‘key positions’ in all leading institutions. With the formation of the GNP, it had also gained what was in effect a political wing. Malan and other Nationalist MPs joined in 1933.
It was under the Broederbond’s auspices that Afrikaner academics and intellectuals began to shape the new nationalist ideology. Christian-Nationalism, as it was called, was essentially a blend of the Old Testament and modern politics, influenced in part by the rise of European fascism. At its core was the notion once expounded by Paul Kruger that Afrikaners were members of an exclusive volk created by the hand of God to fulfil a special mission in South Africa. Their history, their language, their culture, being divinely ordained, were unique. They were an organic unity from which ‘foreign elements’ like English-speakers were excluded.
Afrikaner history was portrayed as an epic struggle against two powerful enemies, the British and the blacks, both intent on their annihilation and only prevented from succeeding by divine intervention. ‘The last hundred years,’ asserted Malan, ‘have witnessed a miracle behind which must lie a divine plan.’ In the context of the 1930s, the greatest threat to Afrikanerdom was seen to come not from the blacks, as it was at a later stage, but from British imperialism and its allies in the English-speaking population. Every effort was made to explain the present plight of the Afrikaner people by attributing it to the evil designs of British policy.
In a bid to gain popular support for the nationalist cause, members of the Broederbond conceived the idea of re-enacting the Great Trek of the nineteenth century at centenary celebrations in 1938. The Ossewatrek, as it was called, soon caught the public imagination and enabled Malan and the GNP to spread the message that Afrikaners as a people could rely only on themselves to fight their battles for survival.
In August, two wagons, named Piet Retief and Andries Pretorius after two famous voortrekkers, started out on the long journey from Cape Town for two destinations: one, a high ridge outside Pretoria; the other, the banks of the Ncome River in Natal, where a Boer commando had defeated a Zulu army at the battle of Blood River in 1838. Other similar treks were organised.
In every town and village through which they passed, ever larger crowds turned out to greet them. Men grew beards and wore broad hats, women donned long voortrekker dresses and traditional bonnets; babies were brought to the side of the wagons to be baptised, and couples stood there to be married; old men and women wept at the touch of the wooden frames and wheels; countless streets were named after voortrekker heroes. In speech after speech, Afrikaners were exhorted to remember their heroic past and their chosen destiny. Together they sang ‘Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’ – The Voice of South Africa – an Afrikaans anthem based on a poem by C.J. Langenhoven, which now became familiar to thousands of Afrikaners. At every meeting the theme was volkseenheid, the need for unity, for a new national effort.
The Ossewatrek generated a torrent of nationalist fervour. At the climax of the celebrations in Pretoria in December, a crowd of 100,000 Afrikaners – perhaps a tenth of the entire Afrikaner community – gathered to witness the arrival of the wagons and to attend the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone of a monument to the voortrekkers.
Less than a year later, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Afrikanerdom was rent apart. The Fusion government led by Hertzog and Smuts split over whether South Africa should join in. Hertzog wanted South Africa to remain neutral; Smuts argued for an immediate declaration of war against Germany. By a vote of eighty to sixty-seven in parliament, Smuts took South Africa into the war. A large majority of Afrikaners were outraged that South Africa had been dragged into another of ‘England’s wars’. Overnight, Afrikaner republicanism became a potent political force.
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THE TURN OF THE TIDE
By 1939, the colonial states of Africa were firmly entrenched. Most indigenous peoples had accepted them as part of a new reality. No longer was the colonial order challenged by revolts and rebellions. Colonial officials were preoccupied above all else with ensuring effective administrative control. Their numbers were few. In the late 1930s, French West Africa, comprising eight territories with a population of 15 million, was run by 385 colonial administrators. The British controlled Nigeria, with a population of 20 million, with fewer than 400. The whole of British tropical Africa, where 43 million people lived, was governed by 1,200 administrators. Belgium ran the Congo with 728 administrators. Colonial rule was held in place in collaboration with a range of African authorities. But what administrators wanted was recognisable units that they could control.
African societies of the pre-colonial era – a mosaic of lineage groups, clans, villages, chiefdoms, kingdoms and empires – had often been formed with shifting and indeterminate frontiers and loose allegiances. Identities and languages had shaded into one another. From the outset of colonial rule, administrators and ethnographers endeavoured to classify the peoples of Africa, sorting them out into what they called tribes, producing a whole new ethnic map to show the frontiers of each one. ‘Tribal areas’ became the main basis of rural administration. ‘Each tribe must be considered as a distinct unit,’ a provincial commissioner in Tanganyika told his staff in 1926. ‘Each tribe must be under a chief.’ In many cases, tribal labels were imposed on hitherto undifferentiated groups. The chief of a little known group in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) recalled: ‘My people were not Soli until 1937 when the Bwana D.C. [District Commissioner] told us we were.’
In the two ancient kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi, administered first by the Germans and then the Belgians as a single colony called Ruanda-Urundi, the process of tribal identification was taken a stage further. Both kingdoms were occupied by a Hutu majority and a
Tutsi minority, speaking the same language, sharing the same customs and living intermingled on the same hillsides. In the pre-colonial era, the royal elite, chiefs and aristocracy of the Tutsi, a cattle-owning people, had established themselves as a feudal ruling class over the Hutu who were predominantly agriculturists. But Hutu and Tutsi alike moved from one group to the other. Some Hutu were wealthy in cattle; some Tutsi farmed. Generations of intermarriage, migration and occupational change had blurred the distinction. German officials in the early 1900s, however, identified Hutu and Tutsi as discrete ethnic groups. With few staff of their own on the ground, they relied on the Tutsi as the ruling aristocracy to enforce control, enabling them to extend their hegemony over the Hutu. The Belgians went further. In the 1920s, they introduced a system of identity cards specifying the tribe to which a holder belonged. The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis. Belgian authorities also established a Tutsi bureaucracy, used Tutsi chiefs to keep order and gave preference to Tutsi education. Primary schools were segregated. By the late 1930s, the Belgians had made tribal identity the defining feature of ordinary life in both Rwanda and Burundi.
Missionary endeavour aided the process of tribal identification. When transcribing hitherto unwritten languages into written form, missionaries reduced Africa’s innumerable dialects to fewer written languages, each helping to define a tribe. The effect was to establish new frontiers of linguistic groups. Yoruba, Igbo, Ewe, Shona and many others were formed in this way. Missionaries were also active in documenting local customs and traditions and in compiling ‘tribal histories’, which were then incorporated into the curricula of their mission schools, spreading the notion of tribal identity.
By the 1930s, colonial governments had also become involved in education programmes. Needing trained recruits to fill the lower rungs of the administrative service, they began to support missionary efforts to set up schools. With government help, a handful of secondary schools were established: the École Normale William Ponty in Senegal; Achimota in the Gold Coast; Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum; Kaduna in Nigeria and Makerere in Uganda. They became the nurseries of new African elites.
The small elites that colonial rule produced in the 1920s and 1930s were concerned primarily with their own status, seeking to gain for themselves a role in administration in preference to the chiefs whom they regarded as rivals for power. They paid little attention to the welfare of the rural masses. Few espoused nationalist ambitions. In 1936, Ferhat Abbas, a political activist and writer, who had studied pharmacology at Algiers University, summed up his view on Algerian nationalism in a weekly publication he had founded:
If I had discovered an Algerian nation, I would be a nationalist and I would not blush for it as though it were a crime. Men who die for a patriotic ideal are daily honoured and regarded. My life is worth no more than theirs. Yet I will not die for the Algerian homeland, because such a homeland does not exist. I have not found it. I have questioned history. I have asked the living and the dead. I have visited the cemeteries; no one has told me of it . . . One does not build on the wind.
As well as laying the foundations of modern education, colonial rule brought advances in public health. After the discovery in the 1900s that mosquitoes were the infective vector for both malaria and yellow fever, anti-mosquito campaigns and prophylactic drugs led to a steep decline in death rates. As a result of mass vaccination programmes, smallpox ceased to be a major killer. Much attention was paid to the treatment of leprosy. In urban areas, colonial government concentrated on sanitation, clean water-supply and hospital services; in rural areas, clinics were set up. The overall effect was a significant rise in population levels. In 1900, Africa’s population was estimated to be 130 million. By 1939, it had risen to about 170 million.
The Second World War had a dramatic impact on the pace of change. Showing a purpose and vigour never seen on the continent before, colonial governments built airports, expanded harbours, constructed roads and supply depots and demanded ever greater production of copper, tin, groundnuts – any commodity, in fact, useful in the war effort. Bases such as Freetown, Takoradi, Mombasa and Accra became a vital part of the Allied network. Thousands of African troops were recruited for war service. From British territories, some 374,000 Africans served in the British army. African units helped to defeat the Italians in Ethiopia and to restore Emperor Haile Selassie to his throne. African regiments were sent to India and Burma and fought with distinction in Burma. African soldiers learned how Indian and Burmese nationalist movements had forced promises of self-determination from the British government even though their populations were mainly poor and illiterate.
From French Africa some 80,000 African troops were shipped to France to fight the Germans. But for France the war brought the spectacle of a European power not only defeated but divided into opposing camps – Free French and pro-Vichy – which fought each other for the loyalty of the empire. Most of French Africa sided with the Vichy regime. But French Equatorial Africa, responding to General de Gaulle’s appeal for help in exile, rallied to the cause of the Free French. For two and a half years, the small town of Brazzaville, on the northern banks of the Congo, became the temporary capital of what purported to be the government of France. From this base, an army was raised, equipped and sent across the Sahara to take part in the Allied campaign in North Africa. In Africa, in de Gaulle’s own words, France had found ‘her refuge and the starting point for her liberation’.
The war also threw up decisive shifts in power. In Asia, the defeat that Britain, France and Holland suffered at the hands of the Japanese dealt European influence a profound blow and provided great stimulus to opposition movements. After the fall of Singapore, the huge naval base that symbolised British might in the Far East, Britain never regained its standing. Though ultimately victorious, Britain emerged from the war with its power and prosperity greatly diminished. In Indo-China, the French were unable fully to restore their control against nationalist opposition. In Indonesia, the Dutch faced similar resistance. Leading the imperial retreat from Asia, Britain within three years granted independence to Burma, India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). As European influence waned, the emerging superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, competed for ascendancy. For different reasons, both were anti-colonial powers.
Moreover, the war that had engulfed the world had been fought in the name of freedom and self-determination. To those who sought a new future in the colonial world, the Atlantic Charter, drawn up by Churchill and President Roosevelt in 1941, supporting the right of all peoples to choose their own government, seemed to constitute some form of official encouragement. Churchill later argued that he had in mind self-determination only for the conquered nations of Europe, not for British territories. But Roosevelt was adamant that post-war objectives should include self-determination for all colonial peoples. Roosevelt’s views about British rule hardened considerably during the war, when, on his way to the 1943 Casablanca conference, he stopped briefly in the Gambia. Appalled by the poverty and disease he witnessed there, he wrote to Churchill describing the territory as a ‘hell-hole’. About the French he was even more scathing. To the indignation of the French, when Roosevelt subsequently reached Casablanca, he made the point of telling Sultan Mohammed V that the Atlantic Charter applied to Morocco as well as to all other colonies, giving impetus to the idea of Moroccan nationalism.
The aftermath of the war brought frustration and restlessness, in Africa as much as in other parts of the world. African elites saw the Atlantic Charter as an opportunity to demand political rights, but faced obstruction. Ex-servicemen returning home with new skills and ideas, wider experience and high expectations about the future, many believing they had earned the right to demand some share in the government of their own countries, found few openings. In the towns there was a groundswell of discontent over unemployment, high prices, poor housing, low wages and consumer shortages. In the wartime boom the towns had swollen. Around cities suc
h as Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Leopoldville and Nairobi, shanty towns, slums and bidonvilles proliferated as a constant flow of migrants arrived from rural areas in search of work. Labour unrest was common. In many African towns, there was an air of tension. Social disciplines were weakening; old religions were losing ground. The spread of primary school education, particularly in west Africa, created new expectations. Newspapers and radio broadcasts, carrying news of a wider world, had an increasing impact. A new generation was emerging, ambitious and disgruntled. In Accra and Lagos, ‘youth’ movements and African newspapers blamed every social ill on the authorities, denounced the whole colonial system and demanded self-government. The colonial authorities dismissed these critics as a handful of urban ‘agitators’ without popular support, confident that local chiefs and hence the bulk of the population remained loyal. Yet a tide of events had begun to flow that would eventually sweep away the African empires that Europe so proudly possessed.
PART XV
Africa in 1954
58
BEFORE THE DELUGE
In 1945 there were four independent states in Africa: Egypt, nominally independent, headed by a corrupt monarch, but subject to British political interference and obliged by treaty to accept the presence of British military forces; Ethiopia, a feudal empire newly restored to Haile Selassie after five years of Italian occupation; the decaying republic of Liberia, little more than a fiefdom of the American Firestone Company which owned its rubber plantations; and the Union of South Africa, the richest state in Africa, holder of the world’s largest deposits of gold, given independence in 1910 under white minority rule. The rest were the preserve of European powers, all confident about the importance of their imperial mission.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 52