The covenant, p.140
The Covenant, page 140
In the military prison at Chrissie Meer, Detleef van Doorn had begun his education in restrictive puritanism; in the political prison on Robben Island, Daniel Nxumalo would undergo his apprenticeship in the strategies of freedom.
When Philip Saltwood landed his job with Amalgamated Mines he promised his favorite professor, Gideon Vandenberg of the University of Michigan, that he would not form any hard conclusions about South Africa until he had worked there a full year, but that when he had done so, he would report to Vandenberg. The professor was a member of that distinguished family which produced Senator Arthur Vandenberg and General Hoyt Vandenberg; he spent his summers in Holland, Michigan, tulip capital of America, and was a kind of professional Dutchman. Just as the senator had presented himself to the electorate as an incorruptible Dutchman, conservative but prudent, so Gideon yearly offered a course in 'The Golden Age of Holland, 1560-1690,' in which he extolled those creative pressures which had made this minute country one of the masters of the world, possessors of Java and Cape Town. He needed to know what was happening in the latter and had commissioned Saltwood to tell him:
Dear Professor Vandenberg,
One of the best bits of advice you ever gave me was to wait a year before reaching any conclusions about South Africa. Ten years would be a better study period. But I've worked diligently with Afrikaners, Englishmen and lots of blacks. I've also been in all parts of the nation. And I've reestablished contact with the local Salt-woods, whom our branch last knew in 1810. I offer you these tentative speculations.
South Africa must be one of the most beautiful lands on earth, surpassed in my experience only by New Zealand. All thinking must start from this. It's a land worth keeping. For whites it also has one of the highest standards of living in the world, and if people in Europe and America knew how grand the daily existence was, they'd all emigrate. Compared to the upper South African white, rich people in Texas and Oregon live like serfs. If you taught here, at your salary, you'd have four servants, a life of ease, and all the amenities. The South African way of life is worth preserving (for whites) and even worth fighting for. I have never lived so well.
For urban blacks the standard of living is also higher than I have seen in Nigeria, Zambia and Vwarda, and much higher, I'm told, than in any of the surrounding black countries, which is why hundreds of thousands of blacks in those countries would like to emigrate to South Africa. Personal freedoms, of course, are another matter, and much of what you hear in a liberal university like Michigan is true.
The people of South Africa perplex me. Even cursory investigation proves that what we call an Afrikaner is rarely of pure Dutch descent. The mix seems to be Dutch ancestry thirty-five percent, German a hefty thirty, Huguenot twenty, English five, other European five, and a submerged and denied five percent due to early miscegenation with slaves from Madagascar, Angola, Java, Ceylon and lots of Malays, with a liberal salting of brown Hottentots. But apparently one drop of Dutch blood supersedes all'other European strains and can even mask black infusions, if they occurred long enough ago. A man who is demonstrably seven-eighths German, Huguenot and English will say proudly, 'My ancestors were Dutch.'
But in recent times the process seems to have been reversed, for now one drop of black blood contaminates ninety-nine percent of white blood, which accounts for the steady rise of the Coloured population. You could live here a thousand years, Dr. Vandenberg, and never understand this problem. The Coloureds, who should be the natural allies of the pure-white manif ever there were a pure anythingare kept in limbo without any fixed place in society. The Afrikaner language evolved in large part because of contributions from the various languages spoken by the Coloureds, as did many of the social customs and habits, like the Afrikaner's love of spicy foods. Anyone with training in history, like you, would have to conclude that one of the saddest mistakes the Afrikaners made was to divorce themselves from people of great ability who are in effect their half brothersthese Coloureds.
Such argument would infuriate the Afrikaner, who is absolutely convinced by his historians,, his teachers and his predikants that the white-slave mixture was the consequence exclusively of sailors and soldiers roistering into Cape Town on shore leave, and that no self-respecting Dutchman ever touched a slave girl. A naughty lad at Witwatersrand University has calculated that to achieve the amount of infusion that obviously occurred, every soldier and sailor would have had to come ashore with his trousers half down, go to work immediately, and not stop till the bo's'n blew his whistle to summon them back to the ship.
A phenomenon that you with your Dutch background might anticipate, but which I certainly didn't, is the Afrikaner's unshakable belief that God personally has ordained his state and its traditions. I cannot tell you how shocked I was in discussing a management problem the other day with two university graduates and hearing them tell me, 'But God wants us to do it that way. He entered into a covenant with us for that purpose.' Any prime minister taking office assures the people that he will keep the nation on the course outlined by God. Students in school are taught that God devised apartheid, and I even heard a rugby enthusiast say that God engineered South Africa's victories, because He wanted His chosen people to triumph. Any outsider who minimizes the influence of this belief in South African politics misses the core of the problem.
Of the four dozen Afrikaners I know well, forty-seven honestly believe that God has directed them to stay on this land, run it exactly as they are now running it, and defend it against blacks and Communism. I have never known an American to be so sure that God personally looked after American interests, which of course He does.
Like most Americans, I know little about religion, but here one cannot ignore it, it dominates government and gives sanction to whatever the ruling political party decides. Aren't Presbyterians Calvinists, too? I don't remember them behaving like this at home. The Dutch Calvinists, you know, have rejected the South African church, and recently a famous theologian from Holland came out here to try to mend fences. I attended a thoughtful lecture he gave in which he said that John Calvin was firm on this matter of government, and he quoted from Calvin himself, something to the effect that all men are certainly subject to the magistrates that rule over them, but only insofar as the magistrates obey the basic rules of God. If they do otherwise, the citizens should not pay them any regard, nor be overawed by the dignity they possess as governors. The visitor didn't go so far as to call for revolution, but he sure did call for new evaluations of government policy.
As a matter of fact, every sensible Afrikaner, Englishman and black I have met knows that great changes must be made, and they know what changes. But some eighty-five percent of the rural Afrikaner population would rather die than accept even one of those changes, and they are assured by their reactionary leaders, lay and cleric, that they are right. The tragedy is that the philosophers of all sides are prepared to make those changes now, but they will not be made, and ten years from now, when they are grudgingly conceded at the point of a gun, they won't be enough. In every conversation I have I hear comparisons made with Rhodesia. Ten years ago the whites there should have made certain concessions, but they refused. When they became more than willing to make them, the time for accepting that modest change was past.
Seems to me there are four alternatives. First, peaceful, gradual change to a modern multi-racial state. The die-hard whites say they will never accept this. Second, black revolution sweeping the whites from power and perhaps from Africa altogether. The blacks don't appear to be capable of this, yet. Third, continued white domination, with more and more repressive measures as surrounding black nations achieve the power to support infiltration guerrilla forces. The present nation becomes a white laager defending itself from black Africa. Most of my workmen, white and black, think this is what will happen, and that the whites can get away with it for the remainder of this century. But if they persist in rejecting the Coloureds, forcing them into alliance with the blacks, the whites will endanger what chance they have.
In the short run, at least, events will be strongly affected by what the Coloureds do.
The fourth alternative shocked me, but since it was proposed by the finest mind I've met here, black or white, Afrikaner or English, I must take it seriously. He suspects that things are moving so swiftly that the Afrikaner will not be able to hold his country against a combination of outside pressure and inside urban warfare, and that if he tries, the land will go down in terrible revolution. He advocates that white men, all of them, retreat voluntarily into the old Cape Province, there to establish a real republic in which Afrikaner, Englishman and Coloured work together as full partners. I was really jolted when he drew the outlines for me on a map. Pretoria and Johannesburg would be surrendered, as would Durban. Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown would be retained, as would Kimberley and Bloemfontein. This beautiful, rational area would be as big as Texas. It would be ruled by those whites who refused to cooperate with the black government of the north, plus the many Coloureds. Safe on the southern tip of Africa, they would become a new Hong Kong. When I asked if the triumphant blacks would permit such a withdrawal and consolidation, he said something profound, which I want you to discuss with your students and all who are interested in Africa. I'll try to give it in his words:
'If the black men in Africa refuse, as they seem to have done elsewhere, to allow any reasonable partnership for indigenous whites, the result would be harmful to Africa but disastrous to the United States, because your country is in the throes of accepting and defining justice for its black minority. If it sees a black majority in Africa denying comparable justice to whites in countries that they dominate and slaughtering them on television, the backlash could be frightening.'
I said that he was asking blacks to define their behavior as a majority before they attained an equality, and he said, 'That's when the definitions should be made.'
Which of these four scenarios do I subscribe to? I've had pretty good luck as an engineer working on the principle that if I'm smart enough to see something, the people intimately involved must have seen it too. If every sensible man knows what concessions ought to be made right now, my constant hope is that they'll be made. Therefore, I incline toward the first solution: peaceful, accelerated change leading to a nation in which all men and women vote and in which the black majority safeguards a place for white participantswhom they might not likebecause they are needed, just as today the Afrikaner accepts as a partner the English-speaker whose ancestors he opposed so bitterly.
I'm going to ignore the die-hard machine-gun type of Afrikaner who shouts, 'Over my dead body.' The Afrikaner leaders I've met are at least as prudent as the American politicians I know, and more so. I'm going to put my faith in them. And I want to make one point clear, which is never ventilated in the South African press. The blacks of South Africa are as capable as any people with whom I've worked. Wherever I've supervised a mine, I was relieved to find some South African black to take charge, because he was sure to be clever and hard-working and informed. If blacks inferior to him can run Zambia and Tanzania and Vwarda, however awkwardly they may do so at the moment, he can surely run South Africa. As a matter of fact, a grand coalition of black capacity, Coloured adaptability, English skill and Afrikaner force could forge a nation that would be one of the most powerful on earth, situated in one of the best settings, and with a way of life that most other people would envy. This is what I hope for.
If, as some fear, any rational solution becomes impossible because the stubborn Afrikaner refuses to yield any of his prerogatives, then I see great pressures along all the borders, encouraged and sometimes engineered by Communist-bloc countries, incipient and real civil war within those borders, with the Afrikaner able to defend himself for the rest of this century, after which other pressures which we cannot now foresee will alter the picture radically. On one thing I have been convinced. The young Afrikaners I know will use their guns. They will go forth fighting, to defend a way of life which God himself has ordained and which, for them, is one of the best on this earth. They will not hesitate to slaughter, because God Himself assured the Israelites, after whom they pattern themselves, 'One man of you shall chase a thousand: for the Lord your God, he it is that fighteth for you, as he hath promised you.' More frighteningly: 'And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.'
The major impediment to rational solution is Afrikaner stubbornness, but a contributory one is the regrettable division within the white community. Smashing Afrikaner triumphs at the polls have meant that they can ignore the other sections of the community and throw them out of all official positions. There are no Englishmen in the cabinet, or at the head of major police units or the armed services. I asked a leading Afrikaner whether the nation he foresaw would have any place for Englishmen, and he said bluntly, 'Not really.' Then he remembered that I had English relatives here and he conceded, 'Well, if they quit running back to England every time there's trouble, we might find a place for them, and even trust them when the crunch comes.'
The key phrase in every serious discussion is When the crunch comes. ' Everyone expects it to come. Super-patriots argue that when it does, the English will somehow chicken out. Everyone is convinced that when it comes, only the Afrikaner will prove reliable.
And what is this mysterious "crunch"! The armed rebellion of the blacks.
You must not conclude from what I've just said that the English-speaking South African is much different from the Afrikaner. In fact, he profits equally from the present situation and might be even more reluctant than the Afrikaner to surrender his servants and his prerogatives. My English foreman confided the other day, 'Sure I talk liberal, and I vote liberal, but on election night, when the tally's announced, I'm damned relieved the Afrikaners have won again. They'll know how to handle affairs when the crunch comes.'
I hate to say this to a professor of history, and a very good one, but South Africa is a land cruelly wounded by its constant recollection of things past. At certain points the English did behave poorly; this is never allowed to be forgotten. At every memorial the same time-worn litany of incidents must be recited. Hatreds become enshrined as the most vital components of the national mythos, and no one is ever permitted to forget, or turn his attention to more creative tasks. I remember that day you told us what Santayana had said: 'Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.' Well, those who remember it obsessively are poisoned by it.
After my third long trip through the country, friends at the mine asked what my most lasting impression had been, and I said, 'Just once I'd like to enter some South African town and see a statue to someone who wrote a book, painted a picture or composed a song.' I was weary of those dreadful monuments to minor generals who had fought battles involving thirty-eight men. It's as if our country were festooned with statues of Francis Marion, Pierre Beauregard and James Van Fleet. I'm sure they were meritorious fellows worthy of remembrance, but they would form a fragile base for constructing a national hagiography.
As for my final guess, if the Gotterdammerung Afrikaners do use their blazing guns to protect themselves for the rest of this century, I think they can get away with it. But any hope of later reconciliation would prove impossible. I would expect them, sometime around 2010, to retreat under pressure to the Cape Province enclave, there to become the Israel of Africa, surrounded not by Arabs but by blacks. I cannot see them leaving Africa, nor should they. They have no other homes. They have lived here much longer than most American families have lived in the United States.
You have probably detected that I write with more fervor than ever I dared exhibit in your class. The reason is simple. I fell in love with an adorable Afrikaner girl, much prettier than those professional models who appear in wooden shoes on your Holland, Michigan, postcards, and through her I saw the best of Afrikanerdom, which I liked much better than I did my own English strain. I saw them as excellent people trying to find their way. Alas, she married the other guy, the one with the machine gun at the ready, and I find myself speculating on what her future will be. I am desolate of spirit.
Philip Saltwood
He was indeed desolate. He had come to South Africa to find diamonds, and had found none. He had tried to marry a beautiful girl, and had failed. Most nagging of all, he had tried to comprehend a land with which his family had many ties, but had finished his tour as ignorant of its real construction as when he started.
He did not know why Frikkie and Jopie were so determined to settle questions with their machine guns, nor could he guess how much longer Nxumalo would be willing to make concessions. Indians, Coloureds, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikanershe was puzzled by them all, and especially by Craig Saltwood, who had accepted exile. Had he been Craig, he would not have fled.
Yet he was leaving. His work was ending on a cascade of falling notes, like a music box that has run down; his only reasonable next step was toward the exit. He packed his gear at the camp, notified Pretoria that all accounts with the workmen would be cleaned up as of Saturday, and made inquiries about flights back to New York, where a group of oil men wished to talk with him about problems in Texas.
By Wednesday he had things in order, with clean-up jobs assigned to all men still on the payroll. He talked with each about plans, about his wife and children. By now the blacks trusted him and were willing to explain their uncertainties: 'Maybe a job here. Maybe we go to Zimbabwe to help get their mines working again.' They were wonderfully resilient men, these Zulu and Xhosa, and he felt that regardless of how badly the black and white leaders messed things up, these technicians would keep their proficiencies ready to serve whatever type of government emerged. They did not seem sorry to see him go, but they did respect the high standard of his work as they had witnessed it. He knew his job.
