N.B. The purpose of posting older articles is to demonstrate the relationship between the past and now. In order to know what to do today, we must understand what was done and how it was done. Our enemy uses the same tactics day after day, year after year, century after century. We must learn from the past to be able to defeat them.
BIRTH OF AFRIKANER NATION
ARIA VON BOER
The Afrikaners trace the birth of their nation back to 1652, when the Dutch East India Company sent Jan van Riebeeck and their employees to establish an outpost at the Cape. The purpose of the expedition was not to establish a permanent settlement or colony, but a way station, which could service ships passing on the long voyage to and from India. It was five years after Van Riebeeck landed that the company gave to some of its employees the right to stay on as independent colonists.
Right from the outset the development of the colony was marked by problems. The main problem was the hostility between the Dutch and the Hottentots. The second was the conflict between the colonists and the East India Company. Some of the former employees of the Company who were now independent set up businesses which started competing with their former employers for trade with passing ships. The colonists quickly felt themselves threatened by their former employers of the Dutch East India Company which seized the lion’s share of shipping trade and insisted on a monopoly of trade with the Hottentots.
Slowly the colony expanded. The power of the Hottentots was broken. The colonists, had their numbers augmented by natural increase and new non-Dutch immigrants spread over the Cape Flats and crossed the mountains into the interior. For 100 years after landing of Van Riebeeck, the colonists isolated themselves often living on the level of bare existence. They became self-sufficient and had an independent outlook. Their lives were on the whole grim, unending struggle to survive in the face of a multitude of obstacles, The Bible was the foundation of their faith.
Then their erupted a factor which shattered the basis of their society. This was the invasion, seizure and annexation of the Cape by British settlers in 1795.
The resentment and resistance which the Dutch colonists was displayed towards the interference of the Dutch East India Company and British in their affairs when the British became the masters of the Cape, The British did not only bring a foreign presence into the area, they also brought with them Jewish traders and bankers and these Jews had their own ideas about – government, relations with the Africans, and British control of the legal system and language rights. (The famous Great Trek of the 1830’s had many causes, not the least of them was the Dutch settlers’ hatred of British rule and the British/Jewish double standard regarding racial policies.
The Dutch desire to be rid of British rule was not merely the manifestations of a spirit of national independence. It was also prompted by the wish to continue to control their own territories that they themselves had established which were separate from the Black territories. In this regard they followed the Bible command for Whites to be separate from other races, and rule their own territories without Black interference. The new Republics were set up in what was called the Orange Free State and the Transvaal [or Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, ZAR (South African Republic)]. These areas enabled the Dutch to refashion for themselves their own way of life. The British and their Jewish backers wanted to control the port of Durban and the hinterland and they seized control of Natal.
The Boer Republics were seldom free from British harassment and intervention. From the time of their establishment to the end of the nineteenth century there were constant clashed with the British ending in outright annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 by the British lackeys of the Jews in what the Afrikaners today call the First War of Independence in 1880, which resulted in the restoration of the territory to Boer control. But the respite was short lived. With the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1867 and of gold in the Witwatersrand in 1886 the Jews and the non-Jewish parasites who partnered with them were determined to get control of the natural resources of South Africa. With the discovery of gold and diamonds, South Africa was no longer a liability but a paradise for the Jews and their co-conspirators from Britain and Holland. The Jews and the friends of the Jews now found that South Africa was a land of opportunity and profit. These alien “capital”, adventurers and parasites poured into the country from overseas and made their way to the diamond diggings and the goldfields. The Jews built railroads heading north. The Britain strengthened her military and political position so her military could protect the Jews on the flanks of the republics, and the Marrano Jew, Cecil Rhodes, who pretended to be a white Christian, with his partner Rothschild, began his machinations which culminated in the Jameson Raid of 1895.
War was now inevitable. Boer independence was not compatible with imperialist ambitions in Africa.
The overt cause of the War was the status and rights of the Jews and partners of the Jews – in the Transvaal President Kruger steadfastly refused to give hem he vote. But no matter what concessions Kruger might have offered the Jewish parasites knew that they had total unconditional behind the scenes control of the British military forces in South Africa and they were determined to use them to their full advantage if there was a showdown with the Boers. An open clash broke out in 1899 and the Boers of South Africa were forced to fight an army of over 500,000 British soldiers. The Jews knew they could steal from others when they were challenged they could depend on the Jews controlling England to send troops to back up their thievery.
For the Boers the war was the climax to a century of British expansion, oppression, and meddling which had finally drove them beyond the limits of endurance. The memories of the past rose up before them. They remembered the defeats and the humiliations to which they had been subjected ever since the British/Jewish presence was established in South Africa. For a while they had been able to escape from British rule into the security of their own republics, but now these too were threatened with destruction. Where ever they migrated to, the Jews and the British military forces followed their path looking for plunder. Everything for which the Boers had lived and struggled was endangered – their freedom, language, their possessions, racial pride, and their very existence as an independent people with their God-given right to manage their own affairs. The people of the two republics felt that the cup of their bitterness was too full to be borne. They threw themselves into a struggle with the British/Jewish forces ready to die rather than submit.
H widely considered throughout the civilized world to be amongst the worst – perhaps because aggressors had white skins [but black hearts].
It was never a fair fight. Against the might of the greatest imperial power which backed the anti-Christ Jews and was financed in part by the Jewish controlled East and West India companies the Boers could pit no formal military forces. They had no regular standing army. Their forces consisted of thousands of volunteers hastily rounded up, who were poorly organized and equipped. After a few initial successes, the main Boer forces were defeated by British troops within a few months after the outbreak of war. Thereafter the remaining Boer forces carried on as guerillas under the leadership of General Smuts, Botha, Hertzog, Maritz and De Wet for a two more years before they were compelled to acknowledge defeat at the Peace of Vereeniging.
The Jewish controlled British won the war, but it was an expensive victory, as later history was to prove. In South Africa the Boer War left an indelible scar. The Boers never forgave or forgot what was perpetrated against his people by the British and the Jews during those years.
The occupation of the Free State and the Transvaal was completed at the cost of the almost total destruction of the Boer communities which had formally inhabited them. A scorched earth policy was adopted by the British to flush out the elusive Boer commandos. Farms and homesteads were burned down and crops and cattle impounded. To house the thousands of dispossessed women and children, the British drove them on foot like cattle to the now notorious concentration camps.
At the end of the Boer War these concentration camps housed 200,000 people, 120,000 Boers and 9in separate encampments) 80,000 Africans. When the camps were first opened, conditions were primitive in the extreme, and the inmates were prey to the slightest diseases. It is calculated that as many as 26,000 Boer women and children died in these camps – compared with a total of 6,000 Boers and 22,000 Britons killed on the battlefield. (A further 32,000 Boer soldiers were scattered in prisoner-of-war camps in the Cape and as far afield as the Bermudas, St. Helena, and Ceylon).
It was the camps which constituted the greatest outrage of the war. Ramsay MacDonald wrote at the time: “I simply state the facts that hundreds of women fled before our columns for months and months, preferring hardship of the field to the mercy of the camps. We have to face this fact which no one who knows the country dare to dispute – that the camps were a profound mistake; that families on the veldt or in the caves fared better and suffered a lower mortality rate than those in the camps; that the appalling mortality of the camps lies at our door (one of the saddest things I have ever seen in my life was a camp graveyard with its tine crowded crosses; it looked like a nursery of crosses); that the camps have created a fierce bitterness among the women and the young generation; that when every other memory of the war have faded away, the nightmare shadows of the camps still remain.”
The British insisted that the disaster at the camps was accidental, due to factors beyond their control; and in fact their intention was humane – to provide for those who had been rendered homeless and destitute by the war. The Boers knew that the mass deaths in the camps were deliberate, and amounted to planned genocide, The British imperialists were trying by means of the camps to destroy the will of the Afrikaner people to resist. The British had poisoned water supplies and inserted fishhooks and powdered glass into their food. It had all been part of a great anti-Afrikaner conspiracy.
Many felt sympathy for the Boers in their gallant struggle to maintain their cherished independence. As one author stated: “But one should not lose sight of the facts, and chief amongst these was that the Boer republics constituted and anachronism to the twentieth century. Their mode of government was incapable of adaptation to the requirements of the machine age, their code of conduct incompatible with the (Jewish) liberal philosophy of modern capitalism. In the Transvaal constitution it was written that there could be no equality between Black and White in Church or State. One of the most persuasive factors in Boer resistance was the desire to retain this bar in the face of cosmopolitan pressures from the rootless Jews and their lackeys who dominated the world of mining and finance and in whose interest the British ultimately resorted to force of arms.”
General Hertzog’s wife was one of the inmates of the camps for the duration of the war.
General Hertzog made it a matter of policy to have Africans drafted into the British army shot whenever they were captured in the belief that it was a cardinal sin for a black man to take up arms against a White. In the American Civil War the Confederate forces never put Black soldiers in a position where they could handle arms which could maim or kill White Union soldiers. The ruthless Union generals armed and used Black troops to fight and used to kill Confederates. Confederate diplomats called on the Union generals not to use Blacks to fight Whites, but the blood thirsty Union officers flooded the Civil War-battlefields with hate filled Blacks, and urged them to kill White Confederates.
The Boer generals wrote numerous letters to the British High Command regarding the use of Blacks in their army, stating it is a Whiteman’s war. All these please fell on deaf ears.
After the Boer War the Afrikaner nation rallied its strength to meet the danger which still faced it – that its language and culture would be submerged by those of the conqueror. Lord Milner who was a partner of the Jewish Rothschilds, assiduously pushed his policy of Anglicization, and many an Afrikaner remember they were punished or humiliated for speaking in their native language. The Treaty of Vereeniging read: “Both the English and the Dutch languages shall be taught in the public schools of the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony of the parents of the children demand it.” But, writes Hertzog’s biographer C.M. van den Heever, “The Afrikaners discovered that ‘parent’s choice’ was a dangerous principle, for ignorant parents were often influenced to make decisions which were not in the interest of their children. Just as a large portion of Afrikaners in the Cape learned during the nineteenth century to despise their own language and to absorb the culture of the Englishman, even the point of having English spoken in their own church, may Afrikaners after the Boer war decided to make peace with the English, and allowed their children to be contaminated in their schools.”
To the true Afrikaner nationalist, however, accommodation with Milnerism was impossible. The weaker ones amongst them might have spiritually surrendered, but the majority were never reconciled. How could the camps and the devastation be forgotten? How could the memory of the lost republics be allowed to fade? How could the policies of the British ever be accepted? “The language of the conqueror in the mouth of the conquered is the language of slave”, President Steyn of the Free State said. Both in the Transvaal and the Cape the Afrikaners established their own schools so that their children could be brought up in the ways of their fathers.
This division in the ranks of the Afrikaners revealed itself at Vereeniging, where Smuts and Botha had signed the peace treaty, but Hertzog was reluctant to sign the peace treaty. Afterwards Smuts and Botha had taken the lead in seeking an accommodation with the British while Hertzog remained true to his people. Hertzog wasn’t an isolated individual. He stood for the majority of his people, as later events were to show.
C.M. van den Heever noted: “The Afrikaner’s feasts, his religious outlook, his family life clashed with this other (Jewish) civilization, and he retired into his shell at the ridicule that was poured upon him. He felt a stranger in his own land, and hatred and a sense of frustration welled within him. “It was not just a question of culture. There was the fundamental difference over the treatment of the non-Whites.” The British who had eagerly worked with the Jews and owned most of the ships carrying slaves worldwide “suddenly” in 1854 the Jews, who owned most of the ships found that that slavery was no longer fashionable, After making huge fortunes out of the slave trade the British passed a constitution that ended the color bar in the Cape, and the attitudes were projected northwards immediately after the war.
General Hertzog was never to forget the scene in the Bloemfontein post office, where he saw his people struggling with a strange language among colored persons. The greatest humiliation of the British/Jewish conquest of the Afrikaners was their enforced helplessness while attempts were made to try to break their racial heritage. In their effort to destroy the pride of the Afrikaners the Jews and the British worked towards breaking down the color bar. A fusion of the races in an integrated society was something that the Hertzogites could not stomach.
Smuts became a political opportunist and a willing lackey for the Jews. He told Lord de Villiers Graaff on one occasion: “We who love South Africa as a whole, who have or ideals for it; who set a united (racially mixed) South Africa in the place of the lost independence, who see in breadth of horizon and in wider and more inclusive statesmanship the healing of many of our wounds and the only escape from our sorry trivialities and our troublesome past, we are prepared to sacrifice much for South Africa.”
Smuts and Botha, with their supporters, having accepted the offer of the conqueror, turned their backs on the republics and looked forward to the creation of a mongrelized South Africa. The Jews wanted this.
For Hertzog the outlook was very different. “He knew that a great nation could co-operate with a smaller without any sense of danger, but that the smaller could preserve itself only by vigilance, and if necessary by isolation.” (Van den Heever).
“If necessary, by isolation.” In this phrase lies the key to much of the subsequent history of the Afrikaner nationalists. Fighting domination by the British and the Jews and later by the Africans, the Afrikaner nationalist always sought safety in isolation. Years later they could escape from this conflict by embarking on the Great Trek. In the period following the Boer War, they could retire into themselves and wait for their opportunity. The Afrikaner sought comfort from his church. He founded organizations in which he felt the soul of the Afrikaner nation could best find expression. In 1905 came the founding of the Afrikaanse Taalvereniging (Afrikaans Language Association) in Cape Town, the Afrikaanse Taalgenootskap in Pretoria, and similar organizations in Potchefstroom and Bloemfontein. The S.A. Akademie vir Taal, Lettere en Kuns (S.A. Academy for Language, Literature and Culture) was founded in 1909 to maintain and further both forms of the language – Dutch and Afrikaans – and to draw up spelling rules for Afrikaans. In this way the Second Language Movement which developed at this time can be considered a direct consequence of the Boer War, a form of compensation for defeat.
The Boer patriots never accepted the finality of defeat and looked forward to the time when, through internal schism or external intervention, they would be able to re-establish the Boer republics. A German journalist who interviewed Hertzog for the Tagliche Rundschau wrote, “Hertzog believes that the fruit if the three year struggle by the Boers is that their freedom, in the form of a general South African Republic, will fall into their laps as soon as England is involved in a war with a Continental power.”
This provides the clue to Afrikaner nationalist thinking and action during both the First and Second World Wars. The granting of the type of government the Jews and British wanted the Free State and Transvaal to have did much to persuade a section of the Afrikaner people that some sort of future could be worked out through co-operation with the British. And so the ground was carefully prepared for union, which came about in 1910. However, it was a union without unity. Neither the die-hard north nor the relatively liberal south could be persuaded to drop their respective points of view on the color question. The compromise which was eventually effected – a suffrage restricted to Whites in the Orange Free State and Transvaal, with the entrenchment of a qualified non-racial franchise in the Cape and, at least on paper, in Natal – proved to be a source of friction. The constitution accorded equal rights to the Dutch and English languages.
After the union the Afrikaners found their political home in Die National Suid-Afrikaanse Party (S.A.P.) led by General Louis Botha – an amalgamation of Het Volk in the Transvaal, Die Afrikanerbond (Suid-Afrikaanse Party) in the Cape, the Orangia-unie in the Orange Free State, and the Volksvereniging with a section of the English in Natal. This party was formally established in November 1911 after it had ruled for some time and had won the first election in 1910 with sixty-six seats, to thirty-seven for the Unionist (British/Jewish) opposition, five for the Labor Party, and eleven Independents.
The first South African Cabinet drew its strength from both the Afrikaner and English sections of the population and consisted of Generals Botha and Smuts with H.C. Hull from the Transvaal, J.W. Sauer, H. Burton, F.S. Malan and Sir de Villiers Graaff from the Cape, General Hertzog and Abraham Fischer from the Free State and Sir F.R. Moor and Dr. C.O. Grady Gubbins from Natal, underGeneral Louis Botha as Prime Minister.
Five hundred and fifty delegates attended the inaugural conference of the S.A.P. at Bloemfontein – Het National Kongres – and speeches were delivered by Generals Botha, Smuts, Hertzog, de la Rey and President Steyn. The conference decided to scrap the word Nasionale in the title of the party. One delegate said that the word “nasionalist” was “unpopular with many in the country”. These remarks chilled the hearts of the real nationalists who were present, but for the moment they swallowed their pride went forward with their associates.
There remained a fundamental difference of approach between the two wings of the S.A.P. Generals Botha and Smuts believed that all efforts should now be devoted to eliminating cultural differences between the English and the Dutch and that both White groups should be reconciled in “one stream”. Towards the British, therefore, Botha advocated a policy of co-operation believing that both sides should be ready to compromise in the interests of a united nationhood.
Hertzog, on the other hand, believed in the so-called “twin stream” policy, whereby the English and the Dutch were to develop separately side by side, with the rights of neither subordinated to those of the other. In Hertzog’s view, Botha’s policy could lead only to the destruction of the Afrikaner people. The English culture was dominant. English was the language of the courts and the civil service, the highest posts were held by Englishmen or English-speaking South Africans. The Jews were strongly entrenched in the “English” leadership of industry, commerce and high finance. The Boer war had resulted in the expulsion of no fewer than 10,000 Afrikaners from their land, and these men, demoralized by defeat and completely without training or experience of urban life, were to swell the ranks of the growing army of poor Whites in desperate competition with the non-Whites on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. For the Afrikaner to practice “conciliation”, Hertzog believed, would mean his permanent subordination to the English, and so an end to his dreams of State and nationhood.
The Botha Cabinet plodded along uneasily, outwardly united and was inwardly dived, until 1912. On 12 December at De Wild, Hertzog gave utterance to his secret feelings in a manner which Botha could not overlook.
“Imperialism is only good form in so far as it is useful to South Africa”, he declared, during a bitter attack on Unionist leader Sir Thomas Smartt, whom described as a foreign fortune hunter. “When it comes in conflict with the interests of South Africa, I am a determined opponent of it. I am not one of those who speaks of conciliation and loyalty, for those are idle words that deceive nobody. I have always said I don’t know what this reconciliation means the people who speak most about loyalty know the least about it.” The language question was a weighty issue, he said, “but it was only part of a greater problem, that of South African nationalism.”
This speech, running counter to government policy, provoked a storm and Botha asked Hertzog to resign. Hertzog refused, and so Botha resigned himself and formed a new cabinet without Hertzog. This brought about a breach in the ranks of Afrikanerdom. The basis had been laid for the emergence of Afrikaner nationalism as a fully-fledge political force in the arena of greater South African politics.
While the Botha-Smuts faction was greatly disconcerted by Hertzog’s conduct, most Afrikaner nationalists were wild with enthusiasm in support of Hertzog. A mass meeting was held at Princess Park, Pretoria, on 28 December 1912, and 5,000 people attended. Hertzog was given a hero’s welcome, and General De Wet declared that he would rather stand there with his own people than on a decorated platform than amongst strangers.
When parliament reassembled, Hertzog had six supporters in the House, and though he was now out of the Cabinet, he still remained a member of the S.A.P., hoping that the next conference of the party would declare itself in his favor. When the conference opened at Cape Town in 1913, Botha mad an effort to hold the part together and called for reconciliation, but Hertzog replied that the rift was a matter of principle, not a difference of personalities, and that a superficial peacemaking would serve no purpose. A motion of confidence in Botha was passed by 131 votes to 90, and Hertzog, followed by his supporters left the hall in dramatic fashion.
The logical next step was for Hertzog to gather his own supporters together and from his own party. He did this at Bloemfontein from 7th to 9th of January 1914, in a conference organized by Hertzog with him serving as chairman and General De Wet as vice-chairman. Some 450 delegates from all the Union attended and decided to establish the Nationalist Party. Its program of principles stated that the development of the nationalists should be along Christian-Nationalist lines, a phrase which was to be the domination of the European population in a spirit of Christian trusteeship, with the strictest avoidance of any attempt at race mixture. These have remained the basic tenets of Afrikaner nationalism to this very day.
Despite of occasional flights of opportunism, indeed, there was a remarkable consistency about the Nationalist Party policy, throughout the years of its existence. The Nationalists claim this because their policy has been forged from experience of the volk ever since the days of Van Riebeeck. The two pillars on which the party is based remain – preserving the cultural differences between English and Afrikaans- speaking White South Africans, and apartheid between White and Black South Africans.
There are different sorts of apartheid, admittedly, but the underlying idea is the same. It is that the party of the Afrikaner race could only be preserved by isolation from respecting cultural differences between the White groups, and that the party of the White race could only be preserved by isolation from the non-Whites.
At first the Afrikaner nationalist regarded the greatest threat to its existence as coming from the English-speaking section. The threat from the non-Whites at that time could be contained more easily.
At that time the non-Whites did not have the vote, were residentially segregated – with a large proportion living in their own areas – and at that time there were no Jewish organized, controlled and directed trade union organizations trying to undermine the dominance of the Whites.
The Native National Congress had been in existence for two years before the Nationalist Party was formed, but had not yet developed into a movement of real significance.
Nevertheless, the potential threat of the Black man to the White supremacy was clearly recognized by the Nationalist politicians. In Bothas Cabinet, Hertzog had been Minister of Native Affairs for a short while and had drafted a Bill which contained the essentials of his segregation policy. The government took it over from him and it became the basis of the 1913 Land Act, which made it impossible for Africans to acquire land ownership rights in the White parts of the country.
In a speech reported in The Star on 14 October 1912, General Hertzog advocated a policy which had similarities to the Bantustan policies of the government of the late Dr. H.F. Verwoerd. The Star reported: He was convinced that segregation with the separation of Blacks and Whites was done in the Transkaien territories was the only solution. The natives would not be allowed to have land in the White man’s territory. They would place natives in those parts where there were already masses of their compatriots. He wanted to define the respective spheres of Blacks and Whites.
Natives would be given the right to enter European territory except in order to earn a living there. In a speech on the Land Bill in the assembly on 16 May 1913, General Hertzog filled out on the picture: “The fact was that so far they had always seen to it and would always do so, that in practice, whatever his rights on paper, the native would not have these equal Rights. When they placed the native in a separate territory they gave them the opportunity where he could become stronger and stronger, and he would be able to have a growing measure of self-government within that territory. Of course, if they had certain amount of self-government, they would still stand under the control of the House.
The most striking feature of the Nationalist constitution of this period was the fact that it contained no reference to the desire of the Nationalist to convert South Africa into a republic. This, says, van den Heever “was merely a matter of procedure.” But the opportunity to further the republican aim for the more militant Nationalists came with the outbreak of the First World War on 4 Augusts 1914.
Parliament was summoned on 9 September, and General Botha announced that since South Africa was an integral part of the British Empire, she was automatically at war with the common enemy. The British Government had requested South Africa to undertake military operations against German South West Africa, and Botha informed parliament that the Union government had agreed.
General Hertzog immediately introduced in parliament that all measures should be taken to defend South Africa if attacked, but that any attack on German territory would be in conflict with the interests of the Union and the Empire. He assured the House that the people would not support such a war. Hertzog’s amendment, however, was defeated, and Botha’s motion accepted by the margin of ninety-one votes to twelve.
General De la Rey, who had till then been a supporter of Botha and was nominated Senator and he opposed Botha on this point. He abstained from voting, declaring that he consciously objected, and on the same night he left Cape Town by train for the north.
A section of the Nationalist Afrikanerdom was convinced that the hour had struck to stake their claim for the reconstruction of the Boer republics. General Christiaan Beyers resigned as Commander-in-Chief of the Union Defense Force. He wrote: “It is sad that the war is being waged against the “barbarism” of the Germans. We have forgiven but not forgotten all the barbarities committed in our own country during the South African War.” On the same day Beyers was visited in Pretoria by General De la Rey, and after a discussion the two left by car to Potchefstroom, where General Kemp was in charge of a training camp.
General De la Rey discussed plans with his fellow generals for the simultaneous resignation of leading army officers as a protest against government’s actions.
Treachery struck unexpectedly. On the road through Johannesburg General De la Rey was assassinated while riding in General Beyers’ motor car. The Government lied and claimed that it was an accident, caused by a ricocheting bullet from the gun of a police constable who was taking part in a search for criminals called the Foster gang. However, Nationalist Afrikaners believed that the death of General De la Rey had been was a conspiracy by British agents determined to use South Africans in the Jewish war against Germany. Boers were shocked and outraged. At the funeral General Beyers, De Wet and Kemp had difficulty in restraining the feelings of the crowd, whose emotions had been worked up to fever pitch. Generals Botha and Smuts attended the funeral in an effort to defend the British/Jewish controlled government.
A declaration of war quickly followed the assassination of General De la Rey and provoked a widespread, hostile reaction amongst the Nationalists. Protest meetings were held against the conscription of soldiers, and there were widespread disturbances, culmination in rebellions in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. General Manie Maritz, who was head of a commando of the Union Forces on the border of German South-West Africa, refused to obey an order to move against the Germans and joined them instead of setting up a ‘free republic’.
In a proclamation issued on behalf of the provisional government, General Maritz announced: that the former South African Republic, the Orange Free State as well as the Cape Province and Natal should be proclaimed free from British (Jewish) control and be independent, and every White inhabitant of the mentioned areas, of whatever nationality, were hereby called upon to take their weapons in their hands and realize the long cherished ideal of a Free and Independent South Africa. General Beyer’s, De Wet, Kemp, Maritz and Bezuidenhout were proclaimed heads of the new provisional government.
General Maritz proclaimed: “It is known that on various occasions the enemy has armed natives and colored to fight against us and since is calculated to arouse contempt among the Black nations for the White Man, therefore the warning is issues that all coloreds and natives who are captured with weapons, as well as their officers, will pay with their lives.”
Hertzog had previously said in the Boer War, “the greatest crime was for a Black man to take up arms against a White.” He believed that the fight for the republic was an exclusively European one. Botha and Smuts joined ranks with the Jewish/British occupiers of South Africa and attacked the rebels. Once a traitor always a traitor.
The fight for total freedom of the Boer nation added more to the stock of Nationalist martyrs.
Kommandant Jopie Fourie, was forced to surrender on 16 December and was immediately court martialed, and sentenced to be shot. Dr. Daniel Francois Malan, leading figure in the Dutch Reformed Church, was in Pretoria at the time. He drew up a petition for reprieve and obtained thousands of signatures, and was one of a deputation which tried to interview General Smuts on his farm at Irene, near Pretoria. Smuts afraid of the anger of the Nationalists kept his distance from the house. The members of the deputation were told that General Smuts was walking on his farm, and they waited in vain at the homestead for his return. He hid out until they left. Finally the deputation departed, leaving the petition in the hands of an aide, Lt. Louis Esselen. Smuts had deliberately avoided meeting the deputation. In any event, Smuts received the petition on the following morning. The sentence was confirmed, and Fourie was shot.
The episode made a deep and lasting impression on Nationalists. Dr. Malan himself regarded it as a turning point in his career.
With the collapse of the rebellion and the gathering momentum of pro-war propaganda, the Nationalist Party came under attack by their Jewish/British enemies. Nationalists meetings were broken up by pro-British mobs and several Nationalist leaders were manhandled. The party considered it expedient to play down its republican aspirations. A statement by the Federal Council of Nationalist Party said: “While the right of every individual to discuss the desirability of the republic form of government is acknowledged the Council is of the opinion that, as a result of the war, public feeling at present running too high for a calm discussion of the matter on its merits, and for the time being it is not desirably that any steps should be taken to make active republican propaganda which would cause ill feeling and embitter social relations and would create a wrong impression in the minds of the population or a section thereof.” The top Nationalist leaders were also careful to disassociate themselves from the rebellion. President Steyn and General Hertzog had been asked to repudiate the rebellion of General Maritz, but had refused to do so.
On 27 January 1915, there was a meeting of the Assembly of Churches in Bloemfontein. An appeal to the government to cease all executions and the Dutch Reformed Churches decided that no church punishment would be imposed on the rebels without the collection of complete evidence. The rebellion served to consolidate all Nationalist Afrikaners round a newly born Nationalist Party and brought it into the forefront of political activity. In July 195, the first Nationalist daily paper, Die Burger, was established in Cape Town and Dr. Malan was persuaded to leave the ministry to become its first editor. Among those who had urged him to accept this post were General Christiaan de Wet and ninety four other rebels in jail.
“In the awakening of our feeling of national unity lies our salvation,” stated the paper’s first editorial. On 4 August, 1915, 6,000 women marched from Church Square to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to plead for the release of De Wet and the other patriots. They carried with them a petition signed by 63,000 women.
At the inaugural conference in Middelburg in September 1915, Dr. Malan became the first Chairman of the Cape Nationalist Party. The manifesto and program of action which were adopted declared that jingoism could no longer be tolerated, as it was creating division amongst the people. The government, the conference proclaimed, was embracing the jingo and alienating the Afrikaner, causing workers’ strikes (1913 and 1914) and rebellion and mismanaging the country’s finances and education, and suppressing free speech. The conference pledged the party to work for national unity, equality of language, the development of independent universities, the segregation of the Africans in their own territories, and the transfer of African education to the Department of Native Affairs.
The tremendous strides which had been made by the Nationalist Party were registered at the Union’s second general election on 21 October 1915. The Nationalists were returned as the third biggest party with twenty-seven seats, for the S.A.P., thirty-nine for the Unionists, four for the Labor Party, and six Independents. For a party barely twenty months old, this was no small achievement.
The next opportunity which arose for pursuing republican ideals was the peace conference at Versailles after the war. The Nationalists took at face value the famous fourteen points of President Wilson and the pronouncements of Lloyd George, that “no peace is possible until stolen rights and freedoms be restored and the principle of nationalities and the independent existence of small states is recognized.” An independence congress was held at Bloemfontein on 16 January 191, and Hertzog declared: The aim of your coming together is the freedom of South Africa. It was decided to send a deputation to Versailles to request complete independence for South Africa, or at least the restoration of freedom to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, with the Cape and Natal granted the right to self-determination.”
“As a Free Stater I love freedom of the Free State more than the subordination of the Union (to the Empire)” declared Hertzog. He said that “if each of the four provinces could gain their independence, there was nothing to prevent their coining together again in freedom.”
The congress declared: “No true enduring peace and contentment is possible until not only the stolen rights are restored but also the whole Union is completely independent and separated from the British Empire, whereby alone full equality between the English and Dutch sections and a sound and friendly relationship between South Africa and the United Kingdom can be established and fostered.”
Generals De Wet and Hertzog, Dr. Malan, F.W. Beyers, Senator A.D.W. Wolmarans, P.G. Grobler, A.T. Spies, and E.G. Jansen were chosen as delegates to put the Nationalist case to the British government and later to the peace conference. The South African government refused passports to General De Wet and Grobler and in their places were taken by N.C. Havenga and H. Reitz.
The delegation set of in high spirits, but met with a miserable reception everywhere. The crew of an English ship on which they had booked to leave refused to transport “these traitors” to the British Empire, and so on 4 March they were compelled to travel to New York on a Dutch ship then transshipping to London.
Attempts to see Lloyd George in Britain were unsuccessful, and at Versailles conference itself the delegation was regarded as having little more than nuisance value. They tried to challenge the authority of General Smuts, who had made his mark on the world stage during the war fighting on the side of South Africa’s enemies in behalf of the Jewish controlled British Empire. Finally, managing to see Lloyd George on their return from the Continent, the delegation was given a hearing, but were firmly told that the British government was powerless to take any action except on the advice of the legally elected South African government. The homeward journey of the delegation was a Dutch ship via Spain, Egypt, Ceylon, Singapore and Java to Durban. The delegates, themselves were given a hot welcome on their return home, It had first been proposed that their followers should entertain then to dinner at an hotel, but because of menacing British mob the celebration was rescheduled for lunch time. The mob, however, was not to be put off, and eventually the delegates had to be smuggled from the hotel by an unwatched side door and packed off home while the crowd threw rotten eggs and sang “God Save The King”. The high hopes of the independence congress had been drowned.
Despite these wartime setbacks, however, the Nationalist Party continued to gain ground with the electorate, and there is no doubt that it could claim to be rallying the majority of Afrikaners to its banner. At the third election on 10 March 1920, the Nationalist Party was elected with the largest number of seats – forty-four, as against forty-one for the S.A.P., twenty-five for the Unionists, twenty-one for Labor and six Independents – while the Nationalists vote had grown to 100,491, as against 89,843 for the S.A.P. Smuts, who had taken over the leadership of the S.A.P. after Botha’s death, was in a dilemma, as he was unable to obtain a majority unless he contracted an alliance with one of the other parties. He at first proposed an all-party government, but later Labor refused. Hertzog then proposed a Nationalist-S.A.P.- coalition, but on the basis of “South Africa first” Smuts refused. Finally in November 1920 the S.A.P. and the Unionist fused, with the new Cabinet containing three Unionists – Patrick Duncan and J.W. Jagger.
At the fourth general election on 8 February 1921, the S.A.P., now incorporating the Unionists, swept home with seventy-nine seats. But the Nationalist had not lost ground – they won forty-five seats, one more than in the previous election – while Labor had nine and there was no Independent.