This article* studies the issue of democratization of countries within globalization context, it points to the unreasonably high economic and social costs of a rapid transition to democracy as a result of revolutions or of similar large-scale events for the countries unprepared for it. The authors believe that in a number of cases the authoritarian regimes turn out to be more effective in economic and social terms in comparison with emerging democracies especially of the revolutionary type, which are often incapable to insure social order and may have a swing to authoritarianism. Effective authoritarian regimes can also be a suitable form of a transition to efficient and stable democracy. The article investigates various correlations between revolutionary events and possibilities of establishing democracy in a society on the basis of the historical and contemporary examples as well as the recent events in Egypt. The authors demonstrate that one should take into account a country’s degree of sociopolitical and cultural preparedness for democratic institutions. In case of favorable background, revolutions can proceed smoothly (‘velvet revolutions’) with efficient outcomes. On the contrary, democracy is established with much difficulty, throwbacks, return to totalitarianism, and with outbreaks of violence and military takeovers in the countries with high illiteracy rate and rural population share, with low female status, with widespread religious fundamental ideology, where a substantial part of the population hardly ever hears of democracy while the liberal intellectuals idealize this form, where the opposing parties are not willing to respect the rules of democratic game when defeated at elections.

Keywords: globalization, Near East, Egypt, democracy, revolution, reaction, extremists, counterrevolution, Islamists, authoritarianism, excessive expectations, military takeover, economic efficiency.

Sociopolitical destabilization may be produced by rather different causes. However, sociopolitical transformations may be considered as ones of the most powerful among them. This may look paradoxical, but attempts of transition to democratic forms of government may lead to a very substantial destabilization of a society in transition. The present article analyzes the relationships between revolution, democracy and the level of stability in respective sociopolitical systems.

There is a widespread opinion that globalization contributes to the spread of democracy. Besides, there is a conviction, which is more widespread among the politicians and ideologists than among the scholars that democracy contributes to a faster and/or more adequate economic growth. The following quotation passionately expresses this conviction: ‘For the past three decades, globalization, human rights, and democracy have been marching forward together, haltingly, not always and everywhere in step, but in a way that unmistakably shows they are interconnected. By encouraging globalization in less developed countries, we not only help to raise growth rates and incomes, promote higher standards, and feed, clothe, and house the poor; we also spread political and civil freedoms’ (Griswold 2006).

In this context, many supporters of democracy consider extremely disappointing that sometimes democracy does not work properly and the waves of democratization get weaker. Samuel Huntington (1993) called the period of a fast spread of democracy in the 1970s – early 1990s ‘the third wave of democratization’. On the threshold of the twenty-first century, many researchers noted that the number of democratic regimes ceased to grow and that it would be a dangerous intellectual temptation for the democrats to consider that the world is inevitably moving towards some final natural democratic state (see Diamond 1999, 2004, 2008). In this situation, the trend has strengthened which promotes democracy in all countries with non-democratic or partially democratic regimes. This trend, on the one hand, is based on the global geopolitical goals of the USA and the West (see, e.g., Brzezinski 1998), and on the other hand, relies upon an active support of a broad ideological and informal movement. And this justifies the efforts to support democracy and to encourage democratic opposition for the purpose of increasing chances of victory of democracy in case of the crisis of authoritarian regimes (Diamond 2000). The intensive efforts led to a number of interventions and color revolutions.

Undoubtedly, the globalization trend is anyway connected with the growing number of democratic regimes. One can hardly object that in the recent decades the general vector was moving towards the expansion of democracy. However, the connection between democratization and economic success it is not that evident as new democratic regimes failed to advance substantially either in economic or social sphere. That is why the intervention and propagation of democracy arouses much criticism. Besides, an increasing number of people support the idea that people should create their own democratic models which can significantly differ from the Western model (Weinstein 2001: 414).

Thus, we suppose that some delay in the spread of democracy in the 2000s was due to the formation of rather successful economic models of development which do not require democracy and even contradict it.

Thus, in practice it is not all that simple as the political philosophers, political scientists and politicians used to think. First of all, an explicit connection between a democratic regime and economic success is not always present; one would even say that it is present in the minority of cases. There are rather scarce studies which clearly demonstrate such a connection especially with respect to emerging democracies but at the same time there are abundant works that prove the opposite (see Polterovich and Popov 2007).[i] On the contrary, in most cases it is precisely the authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes that achieve much economic success as they can better concentrate resources and invest (Ibid). Of course, the most telling example here is China where the authoritarian rule is the basis for the economic progress. Such countries as Vietnam, Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan are rather illustrative examples, as well as Egypt and Tunisia before the Arab Spring events. There is a peculiar enclave of monarchy regimes of the Gulf region that also achieved a rather salient economic success. [ii]

Daniel Griswold (2006) claims
In the past two decades, a number of economies have followed the path of economic and trade reform leading to political reform. South Korea and Taiwan as recently as the 1980s were governed by authoritarian regimes that did not permit much open dissent. Today, after years of expanding trade and rising incomes, both are multiparty democracies with full political and civil liberties. Other countries that have most aggressively followed those twin tracks of reform include Chile, Ghana, Hungary, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Portugal, and Tanzania.

In fact, such transitions from authoritarianism to democracy did occur. But one can hardly define their way to democracy as a quick and easy one. Besides, it is important to keep in mind that such countries as Taiwan, South Korea and Chile achieved the main economic success right under authoritarian regimes. And it is far from certain that if a political democracy had been immediately established there (or preserved as in case with Chile) these countries would have shown the outstanding results at the onset of their rise (we can even suppose that this would not have come true). Finally, there are many examples when a rapid transition to democracy leads to economic and often social decline, to hard times in countries’ history. Rather tragic events occurred in the development of the former USSR and a number of socialist countries among which Rumania and Bulgaria still remain in difficult situation. The revolutions in Ukraine under the banner of a great enhancement of democracy also have exacerbated economic difficulties. Here we can conclude that ideology aimed at introducing democracy in countries with non-democratic or partly democratic regime can bring drastic consequences for the peoples of those countries; it does not bring prosperity but on the contrary, can cost the country great and useless sacrifices. ‘Democracy above all’ is a dangerous slogan, and the policy supporting the radicals and revolutionaries does not hold true from the point of welfare for those countries to which revolution is exported or where it is introduced.

It was demonstrated quite some time ago that revolutions in general tend to impede rather than to promote the economic growth: ‘One might expect revolutions to unleash great energy for rebuilding economic systems, just as they lead to rebuilding of political institutions. Yet in fact this rarely if ever takes place. For the most part, long-term economic performance in revolutionary regimes lags that of comparable countries that have not experienced revolutions’ (Goldstone 2001: 168; see also Eckstein 1982, 1986; Zimmermann 1990; Haggard and Kaufman 1995; Weede and Muller 1997).

Thus, one may conclude that there is generally a need in quite a long transitional period to democracy; and moreover, it may often turn that an authoritarian or semi authoritarian regime is capable of such a transitional function. So to evaluate a regime positively, one should estimate it not in terms of its concordance with democratic values, but in terms of its economic success and social orientation, as well as the efficiency of its state institutions contributing to order, stability, secure and consistent policy implementation (on the particular importance of a strong order, state institutions efficiency see among others Liew 2001; Barro 2000; Polterovich and Popov 2007). With a country’s advancement toward larger opportunities for people, such regimes are very likely to move toward larger liberalization. Here it is sufficient to encourage the regime’s actions contributing to liberalization but not to rely on the radical forces that can overthrow the regime under the banner of democracy, hurling a country into chaos.

One should note that the globalization context with a general recognition of the people’s rights and condemnation of the violation of justice and law, with a demand for legitimacy (that is electivity) of government can by itself build a positive trend and in certain respects restrain authoritarian rulers. With decreasing illiteracy and with growing population’s self-consciousness necessarily accompanied with enlarging personal political experience, a transition to democracy may proceed much easier, smoother and more effectively than the attempts to establish democracy through revolutionary ways.

The present article makes an attempt to show different variants of a transition to democracy (from time to time using the example of the recent events in Egypt), to show the costs and political, economic and social perils of the striving to establish democracy quickly and by radical means.

*   *   *

The general mood in Egypt in July 2013 was exultant, the revolutionaries were exultant either and their slogans demanded true democracy. They were exultant because the Egyptian military had ousted the legitimately, publicly and democratically elected President.

Paradoxical, but the Muslim Brotherhood’s post-revolutionary political rhetoric sounded incomparably more advanced, than their opponents’ archaic political rhetoric. The secularists (as well as the military, supporting them) in an absolutely archaic manner identified the people with the crowd in Tahrir Square, the Brotherhood, in turn, appealed to formal legitimate democratic procedures.

Why were the revolutionaries excited with the overthrow of the legitimately elected President? What was this? An absurd, a paradox, a peculiarity of Egypt? No, it is just a common and quite expected outcome of revolutionary events. So the major issue to be discussed in the present article is whether the revolution and democracy are always closely related.

‘Every revolution ends in reaction. It is inevitable, it is a law’ wrote the famous Russian thinker Nikolay Berdyaev (1990: 29) who elaborated this profound idea through hard intellectual efforts and personal political experience. Of course, Berdyaev was limited by the historical background of the early twentieth century. The past and the present century have shown that the stability of democratic accomplishments of a revolution to a huge degree depends on the phase of society’s modernization transition, on its cultural traditions, environment and a number of other factors. So successful democratic revolutions (or the reforms of a revolutionary kind) tend to happen in countries with a high level of socio-cultural and economic development, and where a long period of fascination and disappointment in democracy (as well as cycles of democracy and authoritarianism) is already over; after such revolutions a rather stable democratic regime is established. One can set here the examples of ‘the Carnation Revolution’ in Portugal in 1974 or ‘the Velvet Revolution’ in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1989.[iii] Besides, such successful revolutions – ‘glorious’, ‘velvet’ and usually non-violent – would proceed quite quickly.[iv]

The history of such political overthrows starts from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, but the recent decades of human history have witnessed a large number of them. If a society is not properly modernized (also in terms of demography [v]), there are many illiterate people, non-urban population constitute a large share, a strong influence of the traditionalists is present and so on, then ‘Berdayev’s law’ of a revolution’s transformation into reaction has large chances to come true. After some time, the idea of democracy can again start generating a new revolutionary explosion. Still there are historical precedents when democracy and authoritarianism alternated many times. Besides, one should point that in such societies a revolution faces really large-scale challenges, and respectively its intensity can provoke a strong resistance. Extending his idea, Berdyaev wrote: ‘The more violent and radical is a revolution, the stronger is the reaction. The alternation of revolutions and reactions makes a mysterious circle’ (Berdyaev 1990: 29). Rather a typical example here is China which after the first in its history democratic Xinhai Revolution of 1911 yielded to Yuan Shikai’s dictatorship. Many times they tried to restore democratic institutions, but China eventually plunged into a long-lasting anarchy and civil war.

The path to a stable and sustainable democracy is rather long and complicated.[vi] In any case, it requires a certain level of society’s economic, social and cultural development. Let us emphasize again that liberal democracy as a rule (which still has some known exceptions) will not endure long in the countries with large illiterate cohorts, considerable share of rural population, and with low living standards. Modernization in (more or less large) countries always proceeds unevenly. As a result in modernizing countries a rather modernized ‘core’ is formed while periphery remains rather weakly modernized and prone to conservatism with the majority of population (the people) living here. In this context, it turns out that revolutionaries (who claim to care for the people), regularly get disappointed in the people and the people’s conservatism, and in that at some point the people start voting in a way different from the liberals and radicals’ expectations (see, e.g., Korotayev, Issaev, and Zinkina 2015) and would prefer order and stability, and also familiar and clear forms to some unfamiliar political and ideological appeals; moreover, the people would prefer something material to superficially ethereal freedoms. One should go a long way, to gain own political experience of several generations, to gradually emancipate the consciousness, to support cultural-humanitarian development, so that freedoms and democracy would get the status of the values that are precious to the majority.[vii] One should also realize that the stability of democracy does not depend on to what extent a constitution is democratic but on how political institutions and actors fit each other and are ready to play the game. An outstanding French sociologist Raymond Aron fairly notes in his profound study Democracy and Totalitarianism that ‘the stability and efficiency are supported not by the constitutional rules as such, but by their harmony with the party system, with the nature of parties, their programs, and political conceptions’ (Aron 1993: 125). This naturally takes much time to achieve. The similar ideas on high requirements to the society, its leaders and bureaucracy, were also pronounced by Joseph Schumpeter (1995: 378–385). In particular, he argues that for a successful functioning of the democratic system ‘the human material of politics’ (that is people who operate the party machines, work in the executive branch, and take part in broader political life) ‘should be of sufficiently high quality’; it is necessary that the bureaucracy should also be of high quality and have a developed sense of duty and esprit (this notion will naturally exclude corruption and nepotism). There is also needed a ‘democratic self-control’ (Ibid.).

Thus, the people (or the majority of people) can eventually and unconsciously betray the ideas of revolution and the very notion of democracy. On the other hand, the population’s sensible pragmatism can prove to be wiser than the educated radical and revolutionary minority’s lofty ideals and aspirations. Then people by intuition choose a leader who (with all his drawbacks, vices and egoism) will generally choose for the country a moderate and more appropriate course (diverging in the most important aspects from the previous pre-revolutionary policy but at the same time not longing to implement at all accounts the revolutionary slogans). Napoleon III’s activity serves a quite typical example here. But at the same time (as we witness it today in some Near Eastern countries) it can happen that even the revolutionary minority itself that has previously strived for power under the banner of establishing democracy can give up the democratic principles. Thus, the conservative majority can turn out to be more democratically-oriented. And this is not surprising. As already stated, in the process of modernization a country’s core is modernized quicker and thus, the ‘liberal-revolutionary’ minority in ‘capitals’ turns out to be surrounded by the conservative, not to say ‘counterrevolutionary’, majority of provinces (e.g., Korotayev, Issaev, and Zinkina 2015). Against this background, the increasing adherence to democracy on the side of the conservative (‘reactionary’) majority is quite natural as with fair election they have good chances to come to power through an absolutely democratic procedure. Meanwhile, among the revolutionary (‘progressive’) minority the adherence to democratic ideals can be undermined as for them fair elections are likely to end with defeat.

Even with an election falsification in the societies where democracy appears restricted through the manipulation of the ‘party in power’, quite a large share of society or even its majority is loyal to power (even if they are discontented with something) and consequently, conservative. The rulers can win even fair elections but certainly with less advantage than with the faked vote (with 80–90 per cent of votes). Put another way, in theory they could do without falsification but here the system of ‘controlled democracy’ starts operating in its own way and forces the local authorities to demonstrate their loyalty because an unconvincing majority at the elections is considered as a motion of no confidence to an authoritarian ruler.

Returning to the issue of a correlation between revolution and democracy one can remember that the brilliant politician Vladimir Lenin emphasized that ‘the key question of every revolution is undoubtedly the question of state power’ (Lenin 1958: 145). At the early stages of modernization the revolutionaries who are too devoted to their initial slogans inevitably fail because their appeals although being attractive and inspiring for the masses are still unrealizable under existing conditions. That is why the logics of revolution either makes the revolutionaries in power ignore the democracy and even suppress it (as it happened when the Bolsheviks dismissed the Russian Constituent Assembly), thus continuing escalation of violence; or those who are too devoted to democratic revolutionary ideals are substituted (in a non-democratic and less frequently, in a democratic way) by those who are less democracy-driven but are more prone to radicalism, to the deepening of forced changes and to reinforcing the power and themselves in power. The history of the Great French Revolution of 1789–1794 and Napoleon serves here as a classical example.

Pitirim Sorokin who studied history and typology of multiple revolutions in the ancient world (note that in Greek poleis and Roman civitas intense socio-political struggle between citizens for power and rights was much more frequent than peaceful periods) pointed that famine and/or a war often trigger a revolution (Sorokin 1992a, 1992b, 1994). Lenin also considered the ‘“aggravation of the masses” distresses below usual levels’ as one of the main attributes of revolutionary situation. However, the current researches demonstrate something different: revolutions are often preceded by a rather long period of growth of living standards (see, e.g., Davies 1969; Korotayev 2014; Korotayev, Zinkina et al. 2011; Korotayev, Khodunov et al. 2012; on the Egyptian revolution see Korotayev and Zinkina 2011a, 2011b, 2011c). But such a growth often combines with exactly the same and sometimes with even larger increase of social inequality and stratification. This increases social tensions in society and brings to life the idea that the living standard achieved by a part of population should become the majority’s property. At the same time, the modernization of society brings the formation of a more or less large stratum of intellectuals (and students/ recent graduates as its ‘striking force’) who strive for higher (adequate to their education level) living standards but, naturally, the number of lucrative positions is always limited.

It is of utmost importance that there emerge excessive expectations when the growth of living standards fails to meet the expectations of the majority of population; besides, the increasing inequality and violent breach of common justice on the part of the men in power ‘fuels’ the discontent. Here the most volatile situation occurs when after a period of sustainable growth there happens an interruption (which is often not the country authorities` real fault; after all, who can smoothly pass the modernization transition? Nobody can). In this case, the people’s expectations (as well as those of the elite) continue to grow by inertia, while the real satisfaction level decreases (the so-called Davies’ J-Curve [Davies 1969; see also: Grinin and Korotayev 2012b]). As a result the gap between expectations and their satisfaction reaches a critical level and triggers a social explosion. With respect to Egypt this refers both to Mubarak and to Morsi – it is just after the January 25 Revolution that the metropolitan citizens’ expectations radically grew while their satisfaction drastically declined which brought the ‘difference of potentials’ which in many ways led to the dismissal of the first democratically elected President of Egypt. But the same ‘difference of potentials’ may also turn fatal for new Egyptian regimes.

In what way is the above-discussed related to democracy? First of all, democracy can become the opposition’s key idea, a magic wand that is thought to help to solve social problems (naturally implying that democracy is a system that will inevitably bring ‘right leaders’, that is the oppositionists, to power). And since a rigid regime is in power (principally non-democratic or usurping the power) and naturally resists a quick establishment of democracy, then to overthrow this regime becomes a goal in itself. This regime embodies society’s every evil (which is expected to disappear with the fall of the regime). The regime is claimed to have no positive, valuable, and advanced characteristics (everything positive made by regime is supposed to happen all by itself or it is even spoiled by the regime without which this good would have been even better).

However, in spite of the frustration widespread in society, the ideas of democracy actually penetrate the minds only of its some part which often represents neither the society’s majority nor even its significant minority. For most people who have a limited cultural intelligence and relatively narrow vital problems, democracy is a mere word (or something established by someone but not necessary for the population to take part in).[viii] Under certain circumstances, the ideology-driven minority attracts the majority which is indifferent to democracy (to democracy but not to personal problems) and in this case a revolutionary situation can arise there. But from here it is a long way to a strong democracy. Here it is appropriate to reflect on the correlation between the revolutionary minority and the majority within different contexts. The revolutionary minority is strong in its activity, persistence, ability to self-organize for joint actions etc. That is what brings it to the fore of the political scene of revolution; it is ahead and at first seems to represent the whole society. Besides, the radicals/liberals genuinely believe that they are the society, their aspirations are necessary for the society (here works the logics that anyone who is against ‘us’ is the enemy of revolution; who is not with us is against us). If the revolutions are ‘superficial’ and do not establish universal democracy (as it used to be in Latin America or Spain) then the most part of population stays out of politics. The revolutions are made by rather numerous but still a minority. Here, by the way, originates one of the most important causes of instability of the revolutionary governments since the masses would quite indifferently witness their overthrow. But if a fair (without falsifications) suffrage is immediately introduced then the relation between the revolutionary minority and the majority can significantly change. In such new situation, the latter actually becomes democratic but paradoxically it may still continue to be not convinced in the value of democracy. The example of Egypt proved this rather well. Against the background of meetings and exultation one can really think that all people expect radical changes in the spirit of Western democratic and liberal ideology, but it turns out that the major part of population has rather different values. But in a certain situation the democratic system can actually turn profitable to the conservative (‘reactionary’) majority and thus it becomes more popular amidst them; meanwhile it loses supporters among the revolutionary (‘progressive’) minority who strived for power under democratic slogans.

There can be no doubt that the revolutionaries’ activity, their good organization, propaganda and persistence also play a great part at elections, but still it is less than it used to be when organizing meetings and actions. Outcries will not lead to an easy victory. The defeat of revolutionaries to a great extent is caused by their internal disagreements (which could seem quite unimportant for an external observer but crucial for the parties themselves).

As a result of such a turn, the democratic elections, for whose sake the revolution is actually undertaken, seem to bring victory to conservative forces and here comes the moment of truth. What is more important for revolutionaries: the democratic ideals or the revolution proper, that is, a constant overthrow and escalation of changes in society? The challenge is solved in different ways by different parties in different countries and situations. Some political forces are unable to reconsider situation and diverge from their absolutes. Thus, the Mensheviks during the Civil War in Russia hesitated to join either the Whites or the Bolsheviks, and disappeared as a political force by 1922. But quite frequently it is just the revolutionism (for the sake of rather vague revolutionary principles but with an ultimate urge for power) becomes of utmost importance. In recent decades, one considers as faked votes any defeat at elections where radicals who previously overthrew the government (or forced it to conduct free elections) failed to win elections (when the hated government actually gives them such an opportunity). The examples of ‘color revolutions’ in post-Soviet states, in Serbia and other countries prove this rather well. Thereafter, the revolutionaries insist on the solution by force. The logic is that it is not democracy proper that is of utmost importance but the opponent defeated at any cost.[ix] This logic is quite clear and explicable. But this is the point where revolution and democracy diverge.

In short, in a society with uncertain democratic values the following principle works: ‘We will support democracy if our candidate wins elections. If he does not, we do not need such a democracy’.[x] The ability to lose elections, to acknowledge the value of rules of democratic game irrespective of who comes to power, to wait for next elections and work hard to win – these are actually essential signs of social readiness for democracy.

Since revolutions often occur in societies unprepared for democracy, it often happens that at early and intermediate stages of modernization the pathways of democracy and revolution eventually diverge. Their conjunction at relatively early stages is an exception rather than a rule. Of course, as we said above, we remember ‘velvet revolutions’ in Czechoslovakia and some other Eastern European countries, the Glorious Revolution in England, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal etc. Of course, it is highly desirable that all revolutions follow the same scenario. However, at initial stages of modernization it can be hardly realized, as ‘velvet’ revolutions are already the end of a long-lasting social and political development.

Political opponents can make more or less active attempts to turn the revolution to their advantage through reduction, renunciation or abolition of democratic procedures and institutions established during the revolution. Sometimes they succeed; in any case attempts produce some effect. It often provokes a dramatic aggravation of the conflict.

Let us dwell on the question why the pathways of revolution and democracy in countries with unstable democracy should inevitably diverge? In addition to the above mentioned reasons (the unpreparedness of society, idealization of democracy etc.) there is a variety of causes.

Firstly, it appears that democracy by itself is insufficient to accomplish the purposes of revolution; you cannot do with democracy alone. Theoretically, democracy is a mean to replace a bad government by a good one which is supposed to automatically assure the county’s prosperity. In reality it is certainly impossible. The arrangement of particular matters requires a specific and effective management. But revolutionaries as a rule do not possess such skills. They should either retain old functionaries and managers (who are anyway professional), but then the situation to a large extent remains the same with same abuses; or substitute them, and thus worsen the situation as revolutionary reforms usually aggravate economic situation (see, e.g., Eckstein 1982, 1986; Zimmermann 1990; Haggard and Kaufman 1995; Weede and Muller 1997; Goldstone 2001: 168).

Secondly, since a rapid miracle and general improvement do not happen, and revolutionary actions and ample promises aggravate the situation, it is absolutely essential to find someone to blame and thus, to draw attention away. But then does the respect for democracy really count for? Will the revolutionaries (or radicals, if the moderate revolutionaries come to power) wait for several years to win the next election? Certainly, they will not. The revolutionary epoch is not the time for a quiet life. Everyone wants to obtain the targeted results immediately and without any compromises. If the radicals wait, they will lose their influence, their common followers will start asking hard questions and so on. In this case the democratically elected or a transitional (provisional) government finds itself between the hammer and the anvil (i.e. between the radicals, discontent with the worsening situation, and the conservatives displeased with changes and disorders).

Thirdly, the masses, whose main concerns are their concrete and immediate problems (e.g., food for their children etc.) become disenchanted with democracy. In general, people gradually cease to connect the solution of acute social problems with an abstract idea of democracy, and instead they associate it with the struggle against enemies of the revolution, of the president, of the party, Islam, Socialism etc. It is clearer and more concrete. As a result conditions for radicalization and broadening of revolution emerge. However, as we remember, the more radical is a revolution, the more probably it will transform into reaction.[xi] Among other important terms of stability of liberal regimes, Raymond Aron points out the necessity to limit people’s demands in the initial period of development of a constitutional regime (Aron 1993: 141). He writes: ‘Let us study the situation in France in 1848. The substitution of monarchy by a republic did not increase the society’s resources and economic production. For the masses’ income to grow it is insufficient to call the regime republican or democratic. The revolutionary changes naturally evoke hopes and demands. And the regime falls victim to discontent’. However, it is obvious that the revolutionary masses support revolution not to level down their demands and to wait for something. They think that they have already been waiting for too long. But since the rapid and excessive demands are difficult to satisfy, the country can slide into economic disaster while the democratic regime risks of being overthrown.

Fourthly, in this context it turns out that the number of the genuinely democracy-oriented people is very small in comparison with those who strive for power or welfare. In a modernizing, rather poor, narrow-minded and suffering from drawbacks society it cannot be otherwise. In corrupt undemocratic societies everybody abuses the law (although, perhaps, a bad law that often complicates life) and accuses of this everyone except for oneself. Everyone thinks in an undemocratic way, even those who struggle for democracy. Only a few people can stick to their principles, but they have little influence. However, one should realize that globalization can really strengthen the people’s strive to change the political regime, but nothing can make up for the people’s peculiar political experience which helps to transform political mistakes into political wisdom. This refers not only to insufficiently politically aware masses but also to intellectuals who need much time to strip away their illusions. Thus, globalization increases the gap between the rate of getting information and ideological attitudes from outside, on the one hand, and the accumulation of experience and creation of a necessary economic basis for a transition to stable democracy.

Fifthly, democracy as a political system, when people accept their defeat and work peacefully in opposition, has a generally limited social base. It can persist in one form or another, but reduced and misrepresented, though for a society such a substitution proceeds unnoticeable for some time.

Sixthly, genuine democratic institutions do not meet the purposes of revolution. Quite frequently radical revolutionary changes are realized through constituent assemblies, parliament etc. It works well in the beginning and with respect to the most urgent or consensual changes. But revolution often involves radical, drastic, grave, impetuous destruction. Common parliamentary procedures with their long discussions, procrastination and respect for minorities do not satisfy the society. That is why assemblies, parliaments, councils, majlises can issue laws and decrees to launch radical changes, but it is the dictatorial authority (a party, central committee, executive committee, leader etc.), relying on revolutionary source of power and, therefore, independent from the parliament, that should run the state. It is those authorities that solve the major problems and then submit the decision for approval. The democratic and pseudo-democratic decision-making process is quite often used to approve determining and fundamental documents and to consolidate the winning party’s power. That is what Morsi did with the Constitution. In January 2014 Morsi’s opponents did the same. In fact, the decree on the preparation of a new Constitution was almost the first step of Egypt’s Interim President Adly Mansour in July 2013.

It is not surprising that dictators so like referenda which consolidate their power. In fact, the democratic institutions turn out to be subsidiary.

Thus, a genuine and full-scale democracy, that revolution strives to formalize, soon enough starts to contradict both the real purposes of revolution and other political (party, group and private) goals and conditions.

One should also keep in mind that the key issue of revolution is always the one of power, so democracy is acceptable as long as it supports the domination of the most powerful group, party, social stratum etc.

Since large-scale and omnipotent democracy does not fit the revolutionary transformations, and due to the lack of necessary institutions and ability to live according to democratic laws (as well as to the fact that revolution is always a struggle – sometimes illegal – between opposing forces, involving huge masses of people), in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period a pure democracy is reduced and transformed to a degree and in different ways depending on society’s peculiarities, results of political struggle and other factors. In societies which are ready for democracy and where modernization has been completed, this can be an insignificant reduction (similar to the prohibition to propose a candidate from among the former members of communist parties etc.). It is worth noting that universal suffrage, taken as a model today, was not legalized in a day, there often were applied voting qualifications. Even in the USA, whose comprehensive democracy fascinated Alexis de Tocqueville (1830), democracy was not perfect. The Amerindians, Afro-Americans, women and a considerable part of men (who acquired the right during Jackson’s presidency) were deprived of electoral right. Moreover, the presidential elections were a staged procedure (quite real at that time). In the cradle of modern democracy, Great Britain, in 1830 only a small percentage of population had the voting right. In 1789, in France the part of the Estates-General, which at first declared themselves the National Assembly and then the National Constituent Assembly, passed many well-known laws. But one should remember that the election rules there had little, if anything, to do with the current notion of democracy.

Just as embryo passes certain development stages, the non-democratic societies, striving for democracy, go through stages of evolution of democracy associated with its limitation. But in many cases democracy is limited because it fails to function to the full just due to the above-mentioned reasons.

In the course of revolution, the restrictions can be associated with attempts to secure political advantages, and also with revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence (we can observe both in Egypt), with activity of a powerful ideological or any other center (as for example, in Iran), with a dictatorial body, with an introduction of property or political qualifications, with assassination or arrests of the opposition’s leaders (what has happened in Egypt recently), with curtailment of free speech and associations, formation of unconstitutional repressive bodies etc.

The post-revolutionary regime also restricts democracy or just imitates it. In contemporary world the most widespread forms of limitation of universal democracy (without which only a few governments perceive themselves legitimate) are different kinds of falsification of election results which often combine with repressions of political opponents (the recent example is Ukraine where one of the opposition political leaders was imprisoned), and constitutional and legal tricks (Russia shows remarkable examples). There are some peculiar cases when there is an unconstitutional or constitutional, but non-democratic, force which enjoys supreme authority (Iran). Other forms are possible as well. The most widespread one is still the military coup or attempts to conduct a revolutionary overthrow (Georgia and Kyrgyzstan provide numerous examples). The military forces step in when a democratic government decays or degrades or when a state reaches an impasse. Anyway, the course of democracy development is corrected. On the other hand, the military also cannot remain in power endlessly or even for too long without legalizing the regime, so they have to hand over authority to the civilian community and hold elections.

Thus, the general political course of modernizing societies follows the democratic trend (increasingly approaching the ideal), but the fluctuation along this trend can be severe and painful. The development can remain incomplete, oscillating within the controlled democratic system.

In Egypt, the last presidential elections (May, 26–28, 2014) were much less democratic (even in comparison with the previous ones) because the Muslim Brotherhood was proclaimed a terrorist organization. The path to genuine democracy is very long (it is necessary to eliminate illiteracy along with solving other problems), but the chance is rather good that there will be established a new dictatorship in the form of controlled democracy and military power, supporting the authorities.

Another important point explains why democracy cannot be established in a post-revolutionary society or quickly degrades there. ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others’, said Winston Churchill. For the societies that just enter this path, the first part of the phrase is of utmost importance. Democracy (just as free market and private property) has numerous drawbacks. Mature democratic societies, among other things, have found some means to mitigate them. But in young democracies these drawbacks get excessive forms. And acquiring immunity against such ‘infantile diseases’ of democracy is a long and painful process. As a result, a society can turn out to be abnormal (as in the case with lack of immunity against private property and free market – actually, rather egoistic institutes if they are not restricted). It is clear that an introduction of formally democratic institutions is absolutely insufficient, since although including multi-party elections, they often conceal and even legitimate an actual dominance of authoritarian rule (Diamond, Linz, Lipset 1995: 8; see also Diamond 1999).

In conclusion, we should note that the transition from an authoritarian regime to democracy can occur in three main ways: through a revolution (quickly from below), a military takeover or coup d’etat, and a reformation (gradually from above). In previous epochs the reformative way was almost impossible, so the path to democracy was paved by revolutions and counterrevolutions. Still some rather successful examples of reformative transition to democracy (or just a step in this direction) can be observed as early as in the nineteenth century. For example, in Japan there the parliament was established from above (1889). In Germany Otto Bismarck introduced full male suffrage (1867), while in Prussia the election system proper was established by the Revolution of 1848. Some Latin American states experienced transitions from military dictatorship to democracy, but the latter could not be firmly established in this region, with a few exceptions. However, in the twentieth century, especially in its last decades, due largely to globalization, we can find numerous examples of voluntary dismantling of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes by the very military or other dictatorship (in Spain, Chile and other Latin American countries, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, lastly the USSR). Some significant steps towards democratization were also made by the Arab monarchic states. Paradoxical at first sight, but on the eve of the Arab Spring most Arab monarchies appeared much more democratic, than the majority of the Arab republics (see, e.g., Truevtsev 2011).

Such a non-revolutionary transition to democracy, ceteris paribus, can turn out to be more direct and secure. This is especially important against the background of the absence of any significant positive correlation between the democratic government and the GDP growth rates – what is more in authoritarian states higher GDP growth rates are more likely than in young democracies – let alone post-revolution systems (Eckstein 1982, 1986; Zimmermann 1990; Haggard and Kaufman 1995; Weede, Muller 1997; Goldstone 2001: 168; Polterovich and Popov 2007). And in the modernization context economic growth rates are of crucial importance.

Democracy, Revolution, and Counterrevolution in Egypt: An Analysis of Conflicting Forces
Our young Egyptian friends (a sort of ‘leftist liberal revolutionaries’) consider the post July 3 events in their country as ‘counterrevolution’. And we would tend to agree with them – though with some important difference. Almost by definition, revolutionaries regard the ‘counterrevolution’ as something unequivocally negative; whereas we believe that the present-day political regime has serious positive respects (though, no doubt, its formation has led in the recent two years to a significant growth of the authoritarian tendencies). Yes, it may well be denoted as ‘counterrevolution’, as it returned to power that very block of military, economic, and bureaucratic elites that had ruled the country before the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. However, as we have already demonstrated this before (see, e.g., Grinin 2012b; Grinin, Korotayev 2012a, 2012b: 251–289; Korotayev, Zinkina 2011a, 2011b, 2011c; Korotayev, Khodunov et al. 2012), it ruled Egypt in a rather effective way, securing in the years preceding the Revolution a rather successful (especially, against the global background) economic and social development of this great country.

However, it would be rather wrong to say that Egypt has returned now precisely to that very state where it was before the revolution. And some newly emerging features contribute evidently to the regime destabilization. This is first of all the radicalization of the Muslim Brothers coupled with the emergence of their very strong media support in the form of al-Jazeerah’s satellite channel ‘Mubasher Misr’.[xii]

On the other hand, there are much more of those features that have emerged during the Egyptian Revolution and the Egyptian Counterrevolution that contribute to the regime stabilization.

The Egyptian 2011 Revolution was able to achieve a rather easy victory due to the following two points:
First of all, this was a very strong elite conflict (that is so important for the success of revolutions in general [e.g., Goldstone 2001] and that was especially important for the success of the Arab Revolutions in 2011 [see, e.g., Nepstad 2011; Malkov et al. 2013; Issaev et al. 2013]). This was mostly the conflict between the military (‘the old guard’) and the economic elite (‘the young guard’) – a group of the leading Egyptian businessmen headed by Gamal Mubarak. The military group controlled (and controls) not only the Egyptian Armed Forces, but also a major part of the Egyptian economy. And these are not only military factories, but also large pieces of land, various real estate, fuel stations, construction and transportation enterprises, as well as various factories that produce not only military production, but also things like TV sets, refrigerators, spaghettis, olive oil, shoe cream and so on.[xiii] Estimates of the share of the Egyptian economy controlled by the military range between 10 and 40 per cent [xiv] (Roy 1992; Nepstad 2011: 489; Tadros 2012; Marshall, Stacher 2012). This group of the Egyptian elite was frightened by the ascent of the ‘young guard’ of the leading Egyptian businessmen (under the leadership of Gamal Mubarak) who controlled the economy block of the Egyptian government. Since 2004 this government had been implementing rather effective economic reforms that led to a significant acceleration of economic growth rates in Egypt (e.g., Korotayev, Zinkina 2011a, 2011b, 2011c).

Over the past decades, the Egyptian military has not limited its focus to security matters; it has also acquired valuable real estate and numerous industries. By one estimate, the military commands up to 40 per cent of the Egyptian economy. Before the events of 2011, Egyptian officers expressed concern about President Mubarak’s plan to appoint his son Gamal as his successor. If Gamal took office, many believed that he would implement privatization policies that would dismantle the military’s business holdings (Nepstad 2011: 489; see also Roy 1992; Tadros 2012; Marshall, Stacher 2012).

Indeed, there were all grounds to expect that in case of Gamal Mubarak’s coming to power the leading Egyptian businessmen from his circle will establish an effective control over the generals’ economic empire – and it would be rather easy to justify this indicating to (quite real) ineffectiveness of exploitation of the respective economic assets and the necessity to optimize it.

The Egyptian elite conflict allows understanding some events of the Egyptian Revolution that may look mysterious at the first glance. For example, throughout the revolution the army guarded quite rigorously all the official buildings, effectively blocking all the attempts by the protesters to seize them. However, already on the first days of the Revolution (on the 28^th and 29^th of January, 2011) the army let protestors seize, crash, and burn the headquarters of the ruling party of Mubarak’s Egypt – the National Democratic Party. However, at a closer inspection one will not find here anything strange – as the real head of this party was just Gamal Mubarak; thus, the military elite delivered a very strong blow upon its archenemy with the hands of the protestors (see, e.g., Issaev, Shishkina 2012).

Within the context of the still rather fashionable interpretation of the Egyptian events of January and February 2011 as a sort of ‘confrontation between revolutionary people masses and the repressive authoritarian regime’ one could hardly understand the apparently enigmatic (but extremely famous) ‘Battle of the Camel’, when there was an attempt to disperse the Tahrir protesters on the part of a motley crew of cameleers – workers of tourist services operating in the Pyramids area and engaged in renting horses and camels to tourists; the cameleers attacked the protesters while riding camels and horses (which, incidentally, rendered a specific exotic color to events of February 2 – and to the Egyptian 2011 Revolution, in general). However, if this was indeed ‘the confrontation of popular masses and the repressive authoritarian regime’, why was it necessary for the “authoritarian regime” to employ such strange amateurish figures, and not to use such a simple thing as the professional repressive apparatus? The point is just that already on the 2^nd of February Tahrir protesters confronted not the professional repressive apparatus controlled by the ‘old guard’ (that took the position of friendly neutrality toward the protesters), but the economic elite clique that in order to counteract the protesters (who demanded the removal of the businessmen’s leader) had to employ semi-criminal elements rather than professional repressive apparatus (see Essam El-Din 2011; Issaev, Shishkina 2012: 70–73; Issaev, Korotayev 2014 for more detail). Thus, already in early February 2011 the protesters in Tahrir were countered not by the repressive apparatus of the authoritarian state, but by a clique of the businessmen who were very rich indeed, but who did not control the repressive apparatus – which accounts for a very easy ‘victory of the revolutionary masses’ up to a very considerable extent.

The second point that secured an unexpectedly fast success of the protestors was the formation of an unexpectedly wide opposition alliance, which united in a single rather coordinated front very diverse forces including not only all the possible secular opposition groups (liberals, leftists, nationalists and so on), but also Islamists in general, and the Muslim Brothers in particular.

The situation that we observe now is exactly the opposite.
Firstly, the Egyptian Revolution made the Egyptian economic elite reconcile with the military, and in June 2013 they acted together in a well-coordinated front that allowed such a swift overthrow of President Morsi (see Issaev, Korotayev 2014 for more detail); whereas no serious cracks in the new coalition of the Egyptian military and economic elites (that was formed in the first half of 2013) appear to be visible yet. The economic elites have understood that for them it turns out to be extremely counterproductive to continue any serious attempts to get hold of any economic assets controlled by the military, that it is much better for them to recognize the dominant position of the military in the ruling block, as well as the immunity and inviolability of the generals’ economic empire (among other things – through direct constitutional amendments). The economic elites have understood that any serious attempts on their part to get dominant positions in the ruling block may result in their losing incomparably more than gaining. [xv] 

Secondly, the Revolution with the subsequent Counterrevolution led to an extremely deep split in the January (2011) opposition ‘macroalliance’. What is very important is that this split took place along many lines. Within this macroalliance even the Islamist alliance was split – as the July 3 coup was supported by the second strong Islamist party – the party of Islamist fundamentalists/salafis Hizb al-Noor (as well as a number of prominent Islamic figures outside this party). Of course, the support of secularist-military regime by the Egyptian Salafi Islamists needs a special commentary (a special commentary is also naturally needed for the fact that in July 2013 the archconservative Islamist Saudi Arabian regime acted as a faithful ally of the anti-Islamist alliance that included an exceptionally wide range of forces – liberals, nationalists, leftists, ultraleftists – up to Trotskyists [Abdel Kouddous 2013; Baer 2013; Nasr 2013; al-Alawi, Schwartz 2013; al-Rasheed 2013]). The main point here appears to be connected with the fact that Saudi Arabia acts as the main financial sponsor of Hizb al-Noor (Daou 2012; Lavizzari 2013). And as regards Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brothers pose a real threat to the respective country’s regime. In 1937 in the USSR it was much less dangerous to proclaim oneself a Slavophil rather than a Trotskyist (in 1937 the latter [but in no way the former] would have led to an almost immediate execution) – whereas for non-Marxists the difference between Stalinists and Trotskyists could look entirely insignificant. Similarly, for the Saudis Trotskyists are a sort of unreal exotics, whereas the Muslim Brothers for them are almost the same as the Trotskyists were for Stalin – they are precisely those leftist Islamists who question effectively the very basics the regime legitimacy and may even take concrete steps to overthrow it (Baer 2013; Nasr 2013; al-Alawi, Schwartz 2013; al-Rasheed 2013]). And against such a background one can easily understand the readiness of Saudi Arabia (+ the UAE and Kuwait that have similar problems) to ally with anybody (including anti-Islamist minded liberals and Communists, let alone Egyptian military and economic elites) in order to weaken in its own homeland the enemy that threatens the very survival of the Arabian monarchical (with the natural exception of the Qatar monarchy). On the other hand, for the Egyptian Salafis the removal of the Muslim Brothers from the legal political arena was somewhat advantageous objectively (irrespective of any connections with the Saudi interests), as it allows to strengthen significantly their own positions, including the potential further widening of its presence in the Egyptian parliament – as the present-day main legal Islamist party of the country.

The secular leftist-liberal alliance has been also split, as the majority of its members were so frightened by one year of the rule of Muslim Brothers, that continue to support the present regime. However, the forces that continue to oppose the regime remain deeply split – as the anti-regime leftist liberal-revolutionary youth still refuses any idea of a new alliance with the Muslim Brothers; suffice to say that one of its main slogans Yasqut, yasqut illi khan, in kana `askar aw ikhwan is translated as follows: “Down, down with all those who betrayed – be they military, or Muslim Brothers!” We believe that new revolutionary paradoxes in Egypt will not keep us waiting.

Thus, the revolutionary events often assume a paradoxical character. For example, one may sometimes get across such revolutions which the revolutionaries do not expect. The revolutionary repressions may often turn against those who were actually meant to benefit revolution. And those whose names were on the banners when overthrowing the old power join on a mass-scale the counter-revolutionary camp. The zealous monarchists or the henchmen of authoritarianism suddenly turn into democrats, while those who considered democracy as the highest value get ready to establish a dictatorship.

Previously published in: Globalistics and Globalization Studies – Big history & global history

Bibliography: Volgograd: ‘Uchitel’ Publishing House, 2015. – 400 pp. Edited by: Leonid E. Grinin, Ilya V. Ilyin, Peter Herrmann, and Andrey V. Korotayev ISBN 978-5-7057-4579-1

Полное или частичное копирование материалов сайта www.sociostudies.org разрешено только при обязательном указании автора и прямой гиперссылки http://www.sociostudies.org/almanac/globalistics/globalistics_and_globalization_studies_4/

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NOTES
* The study was implemented in the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2015 with support of the Russian Science Foundation (Project # 14–18–03615).
[i] Even the UN Report stated that there is no direct relationship between democracy and economic growth (UNDP 2002). It is also noted that the total effect of democracy on the economic growth can be characterized as weakly negative (see Barro 1996).
[iii] In addition, scholars also tend to characterize as such some other revolutions/revolutionary reforms in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the 1986 Revolution in the Philippines, as well as the revolutionary reforms in South Africa in the early 1990s: ‘Until very recently, revolutions have invariably failed to produce democracy. The need to consolidate a new regime in the face of struggles with domestic and foreign foes has instead produced authoritarian regimes, often in the guise of populist dictatorships such as those of Napoleon, Castro, and Mao, or of one party states such as the PRI state in Mexico or the Communist Party-led states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Indeed, the struggle required to take and hold power in revolutions generally leaves its mark in the militarized and coercive character of new revolutionary regimes (Gurr 1988). It is therefore striking that in several recent revolutions – in the Philippines in 1986, in South Africa in 1990, in Eastern European nations in 1989–1991 – the sudden collapse of the old regime has led directly to new democracies, often against strong expectations of reversion to dictatorship’ (Goldstone 2001: 168; see also Foran and Goodwin 1993; Weitman 1992; Pastor 2001).
[iv] In a certain sense even the French Revolution of 1870–1871 fits this model if to exclude the episode with the Paris Commune. At the same time, the experience of a number of successful countries, in particular of South Korea and Indonesia (to the degree it can be considered successful at present) show that at a certain stage of modernization the authoritarianism may contribute to its expansion. However, just in this case it objectively paves the way for its own limitation and consequent political democratization (for details see Prosorovsky 2009). Still one should note the authoritarian stage often becomes an extremely important and necessary.
[v] The structural-demographic factors regularly generating social explosions in the modernization process are thoroughly investigated in our previous publications (see, e.g., Korotayev, Malkov, and Khaltourina 2006; Korotayev and Khaltourina 2006; Turchin and Korotayev 2006; Korotayev and Zinkina 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2014; Korotayev, Grinin et al. 2011; Korotayev, Zinkina et al. 2011; Korotayev, Khodunov et al. 2012; Grinin 2011, Grinin 2012a, 2012b; Grinin and Korotayev 2012a; Korotayev, Issaev, and Shishkina 2013, 2015; Korotayev, Issaev, and Zinkina 2015; Zinkina and Korotayev 2014a, 2014b; Korotayev, Malkov, and Grinin 2014); hence, we will not describe them here.
[vi] Both in a particular country and in the world in general. It may seem paradoxical but in 1990, democratic regimes were established in approximately 45.4 per cent of independent countries of the world, that is almost the same rate as it was seventy years earlier in 1922 (Huntington 1993). On some factors affecting the genesis of democratic institutions see also, e.g., Korotayev, Bondarenko 2000; Korotayev 2003.
[vii] This means that one should first achieve the cultural-humanitarian level allowing a true democratic transformation, namely, there should be present an intellectual stratum, a certain level of borrowings from the world culture, and certain political forms. But to establish democracy an even higher cultural-humanitarian level is needed as well as a dramatic change in social situation. Besides, democracy is not just an idea but a mode of life; and to take the root it should become a really important part of everyday life. But since in newly democratic states the idea of democracy is quickly discredited, thus it fails to become a really important constituent of everyday life. Here we observe a vicious circle which can be broken only after several attempts and under certain social-economic conditions.
[viii] The voting abstention in Russia even when the mass voter turnout could be decisive is quite a typical example. Moreover, a large number of voters (especially among the young) almost simultaneously with the right of voting get a steady ideological skepticism. Why voting? What is the use of it? Nothing will ever change. My vote means nothing. However, it seems easy to go and vote. But probably it is difficult as one should make a choice. On the other hand, there is some truth in this skepticism. The other part of the Russian population is accustomed to voting ‘they say we should, then we will vote’ but also not for the sake of a reasonable voting. In any case, it is out of question that the skepticism of one part of population and the promptness of the other part have been to the advantage of the party in power and of different kind of political chancers. This example explains how a political apathy may in a democratic way support certain forces in power. Karl Kautski called such masses involved in voting ‘the political flock of sheep’.
[ix] Revolution (as any kind of politics) is hardly a fair contest, in this or that way one uses provocations, disinformation, deceit, and backstage dealings. The provocations often imply stirring up enmity towards government and opponents through direct or indirect murders (shooting from within crowd or something of this kind; with respect to the Revolutions of 1848 and some other revolutionary events see Nefedov [2008]; recent examples can be found in Brazil or Ukraine) which evoke the escalation of violence, formation of military guards etc. Thus, violence and other rather precarious means become normal. Consequently, the violation of democracy is not considered as something terrible.
[x] The elections in such Caucasian territories as Karachay-Cherkessia and South Ossetia, when the opponents renounce the win of the other party and thus trigger the political crisis, is a very illustrative example.
[xi] The ‘reaction’/‘counterrevolution’ is usually considered to be a definitely negative phenomenon (while revolution is associated, though not so unambiguously, with something positive – among other things just because it is supposed to lead to democracy). But such an interpretation is not always reasonable. The reaction often plays a rather positive role preventing the aggravation of revolutionary upheavals and thus establishing more balanced and viable political institutions. Sometimes positive aspects of political reaction’s processes are more pronounced, than the negative ones. For example, the Thermidorian reaction of 1794 can be considered just as an attempt of the French political leaders to mitigate rampage of the Jacobin Terror which caused the fierce civil war in many provinces and to form a new more viable social and political system. One can also point to a positive component in the Bonapartist reaction to the French revolution in 1848. History gives numerous examples.
[xii] http://mubasher-misr.aljazeera.net/livestream/.
[xiii] Note that military factories (virtually possessed by Egyptian generals) have a clear competitive advantage, as they can exploit virtually free labor of the conscripts (see, e.g., Tadros 2012).
[xiv] However, the latter estimate appears to be clearly exaggerated.
[xv] Emergent cracks in the ruling coalition (see, e.g., Gulf News 2014) are rather connected with the participation in this coalition of some leftist secularists (first of all, Hamdeen Sabahi and his Egyptian Popular Current [al-Tayyar al-Sha`biyy al-Misriyy]), whereas the continuation of the cooperation of this part of the ruling alliance with both military and (especially) economic elites can in no way be guaranteed – one would rather expect to see eventually the final split between the left-wing and right-wing secularists in Egypt.

Albert Grundlingh & Siegfried Huigen (Eds.) – Reshaping Remembrance. Critical Essays on Afrikaans Places of Memory – Rozenberg Publishers 2011 – Savusa Series 3 – ISBN 978 90 3610 230 8 – Editing: Sabine Plantevin.

In any society in the throes of transition, there is a particularly acute need to reflect upon aspects of the past that used to represent firm beacons enlighting the way ahead. This inevitably involves a broader re-appraisal of the processes which contributed to the formation of a specific historical memory in the first place.
Reshaping Remembrance includes a number of critical essays on dimensions of collective Afrikaans historical memory in South Africa. In the light of radical changes in the country, scholars from various disciplines reflect on the dynamics of historical consciousness symbolically present in various areas: the ‘volksmoeder’ image, historical events and monuments, language and music, rugby and architecture.
This work hopes to resound with a well-established intellectual tradition in Europe dealing with ‘places of memory’ or ‘lieux de mémoire’.

Contents
1. Siegfried Huigen & Albert Grundlingh – Koos Kombuis and Collective Memory
2. Elsabé Brink – The ‘Volksmoeder’ – A Figurine as Figurehead
3. Gerrit Olivier – The Location
4. Hein Willemse – A Coloured Expert’s Coloured
5. Kees van der Waal – Bantu: From Abantu to Ubuntu
6. Ena Jansen – Thandi, Katrina, Meisie, Maria, ou-Johanna, Christina, ou-Lina,Jane and Cecilia
7. Albert Grundlingh – Rugby
8. Marlene van Niekerk – The Eating Afrikaner: Notes for a Concise Typology
9. Lizette Grobler – The Windpump
10. Hans Fransen – Glorious Gables
11. Lou-Marié Kruger – Memories of Heroines: Bitter Cups and Sourdough
12. Lize van Robbroeck – The Voortrekker in Search of New Horizons
13. Christine Antonissen – English
14. Siegfried Huigen – Language Monuments
15. Rufus Gouws – The Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal
16. Luc Renders – And the Greatest is … N.P.van Wyk Louw
17. Albert Grundlingh – Why have a Ghost as a Leader? The ‘De la Rey’ Phenomenon and the Re-Invention of Memories, 2006-2007
18. Stephanus Muller – Boeremusiek
19. Stephanus Muller – Die Stem
20. Annie Klopper – ‘In ferocious anger I bit the hand that controls’: The Rise of Afrikaans Punk Rock Music

Contributors
Christine Anthonissen is an associate professor and chairperson of the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Stellenbosch. Her research falls largely within the specializations of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, with specific attention to social phenomena associated with bi- and multilingualism.

Elsabé Brink is a historian specializing in the history of Johannesburg and the role of Afrikaans women in the formation of the South African society. She has published a number of books, articles and booklets on aspects of the city’s history. She is also active in the field of heritage conservation and was long involved in heritage conservation in Gauteng. She was a member of the city council of Johannesburg in the 1990’s.

Hans Fransen was born in Amsterdam and established himself in South Africa in 1955. Here he devoted his career to the local arts, cultural and architectural history: as a writer, as a museum curator and as a lecturer. He has a doctorate from the University of Kwazulu Natal and is also a ‘Knight in the order of Orange-Nassau’.

Rufus Gouws is affiliated with the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of Stellenbosch. His primary chosen research field is theoretical lexicography – a field where he isa nationally and internationally widely published. Besides his work in theoretical lexicography, he is also involved in various dictionary projects, including being editor of the HAT.

Lizette Grobler is a lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch and is currently involved in the Extended Degree Program in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her Masters degree focused on the Afrikaans-Portuguese travel stories by Elsa Joubert. She is co-author of Historiese keur van die Afrikaanse poësie: Pulvermacher tot Breytenbach (2000).

Albert Grund Lingh is chairman of the Department of History at the University of Stellenbosch. His publications include monographs on Boer collaborators during the Anglo-Boer war, and black South Africans and the First World War. He is also co-author of a book about rugby and South African society, and has published a wide range of articles on social and cultural history.

Siegfried Huigen is an associate professor of Dutch and Afrikaans literature at the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of Stellenbosch. His research deals with early modern European representations of Africa and Asia, including De Weg naar Monomotapa (1996), Verkenningen van Zuid-Afrika (2007), Knowledge and Colonialism (2009) and The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks (2010).

Ena Jansen is a lecturer at the ‘Vrije Universiteit’ in Amsterdam, where she has also been living since 2001. She published the book Afstand en verbintenis. Elizabeth Eybers in Amsterdam (1996) and is currently working on a book about the representation of domestic servants in South African urban novels.

Annie Klopper is a music journalist, a photographer and an editor. She is affiliated with the University of Stellenbosch’s Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, where she has completed her MA thesis. Her research deals with the rise of Afrikaans rock and the lyrics of Fokofpolisiekar. She was co-researcher for the MK documentary Johnny en die Maaiers, and co-compiler of the 2007 re-edition of Eugène Marais’s Die siel van die mier (Protea).

Lou-Marie Kruger is an associate professor at the Department Psychology at the University of Stellenbosch. Her research focuses on the mental health of women. She also practices part time as a clinical psychologist.

Stephanus Muller is a senior lecturer in Musicology at the University of Stellenbosch. In 2005 he founded the Centre for Musical Documentation (DOMUS) which has developed into one of the most important archives of art music in Africa.

Gerrit Olivier has been a professor of Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of the Witwatersrand since 1989. He was dean of the Faculty of Arts for ten years and is currently head of the Wits School of Arts. His publications include N.P. van Wyk Louw: Literatuur, filosofie, politiek (1992) en Aantekeninge by Koos Prinsloo (2008).

Luc Renders is affiliated with the Department of Languages at the University of Hasselt, Belgium. He has a great interest in the Afrikaans literature and regularly publishes on contemporary Afrikaans literature. He organizes a seminar on Afrikaans at the University of Hasselt annually.

Kees van der Waal is a social anthropologist at the University of Stellenbosch. His research focuses on the cultural and social life of rural communities. He is currently working on manifestations of Afrikaans identity politics in music and language, the impact of cross-border parks on the Makuleke in Limpopo and the complexity of interaction processes during local developmental interventions in the Dwars-rivier Valley, Stellenbosch.

Marlene van Niekerk is the author of three acclaimed and translated novels, Triomf (Tafelberg, 1994), Agaat (Tafelberg 2004) and Memorandum (2006, in collaboration with Adriaan van Zyl). In addition, a volume of short stories, Die vrou wat haar verkykers vergeet het and two poetry books, Sprokkelster and Groenstaar were published. She is affiliated with the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of Stellenbosch as a lecturer in creative writing skills.

Lize van Robbroeck is a senior lecturer at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Stellenbosch, where she teaches Visual Studies. Her field of research is discourse analysis, with focus on a deconstruction of artistic historical writing in South Africa. She is currently involved in a project to rewrite the history of South African arts.

Hein Willemse is head of the Department of Afrikaans at the University of Pretoria. His latest book is called Aan die ander kant: Swart Afrikaanse Skrywers in die Afrikaanse letterkunde (2007).

As the year 2006 gave way to 2007, a song and an accompanying music video about the Boer general Koos de la Rey caused quite a stir in South Africa. When this song was played in bars and at barbecues, young white Afrikaners would stand with their fists clenched against their chests and sing along: ’De la Rey, De la Rey…’ And tears would flow. According to news reports, the ‘De la Rey thing’ had made many of them ‘proud’  of their roots. Worried ANC politicians expressed concern because they saw this as the start of an ethnic revival that could disrupt South Africa. The phenomenon even made it to the world press.

One of the more balanced reactions to the De la Rey song is an article by the Afrikaans beat poet Koos Kombuis on Litnet, ‘Bok van Blerk en die bagasie van veertig jaar’ (Bok van Blerk and the baggage of forty years).[i] In this article Kombuis confesses his conflicting reactions to the song. Rationally, he rejects the song and the Boer War elements in the music video. He sees it as ‘a call to war, a sort of musical closing of the ranks’. Some months before Kombuis had distanced himself publicly from his Afrikaner identity in a Sunday newspaper, from the ‘baggage that has been forced on me by people who have now been trying to prescribe for forty years who and what an Afrikaner is. What an Afrikaner is supposed to believe in. Whom he should vote for, which shit clothes he should wear and how he should spend his public holidays’.[ii] This notwithstanding, Kombuis is unable to offer any resistance to the emotional appeal of the song: ‘Why, if I experienced my resignation from Afrikanerdom as such a gloriously liberating step, do I feel so inexplicably profoundly touched by the De la Rey song? It is embarrassing’.

In reply to Kombuis’s question ‘why’, it can be surmised that both the song and the video, with their images of the leadership, a concentration camp and Boer fighters, draw on the collective memory of white Afrikaners, on something they learned within the family and, especially for the older ones, at school and in church. Kombuis’s reaction already points in this direction when he says that when he hears the song, he longs to be back at Sunday school and ‘feels like rejoining the army on the spot and shooting the hell out of the Kakies and other K stuff’.[iii]

The role of collective memories was first investigated seriously by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in his ground-breaking works Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (The social frameworks of memory) and La mémoire collective (The collective memory). These publications from 1925 and 1950 were rediscovered in recent years by historians doing research on memory. According to Halbwachs, every one of us obviously has his own memories, but at the same time we also share group memories.

One remembers as an individual, but in this one is not alone. The environment in which one grew up and in which one lives forms a framework which determines the shape and content of memories and helps to codetermine identities. Groups can even produce memories in individuals which they never ‘experienced’ in a direct sense.

Collective memories are fluid as regards past events. The interests and requirements of the present determine collective memory. As generations pass, memories fade away. The period of collective memory is generally estimated as going back one hundred years from the present. Within the confines of three or four generations, the past still remains ‘warm’ – it maintains a link with the living. The past predating this period cools down and becomes part of the domain of historical memory, the terrain that is kept alive artificially by specialist historians. Here, too, the influence of the present is not absent, because only certain aspects of the vast area encompassed by the past are researched by historians.[iv]

Halbwachs argues that social groupings form the memories and identities of individuals. Kombuis’s compulsive thoughts of Sunday school and the South African Defence Force also indicate the direction in which his reactions to the De la Rey song are determined. It was Sunday school and the Defence Force, among others, that shaped his memories and that cause him to be touched by the De la Rey song.

The book Reshaping Remembrance contains a series of critical essays about a number of collective Afrikaans memories – memories which have already almost gone cold as well as the more recent ones, such as the De la Rey song. The original Afrikaans version of the book sought to encourage Afrikaans readers to reflect on their memories. It may be gratifying to get high and forget about things that bother you and feel proud of your origins, but it would be unwise to suppress the problematic aspects of the past. It is, for one thing, not conducive to dialogue with other citizens of South Africa. Given the burden of apartheid guilt, the memories of Afrikaans-speaking whites cannot unfold in the present without reservations or nuances. ‘They’ will still hold you responsible, no matter how hard you try to forget. After all, at present it is ‘they’ who set the debate, who put whites more or less in the position of the ‘other’. Censured, sanitised memory is not healthy either. It is better to come to grips with the past, not to push it away behind a barrier of protective wishful thinking. Freud showed that the latter could cause nightmares.

The approach followed in this book differs from the way in which the collective memories of Afrikaners were dealt with twenty years ago. In the publication of the Federation of Afrikaner Cultural Bodies (FAK), Afrikanerbakens (Afrikaner beacons) of 1989, a series of historical monuments, resorts, church buildings and statues were described. ‘Together they want to express the story of the Afrikaner’, as the editor put it.[v] The style in which the ‘beacons’ were described was not detached from the spirit of the time prevailing in the late 1980s, when the National Party was coming under increased domestic and foreign pressure because of apartheid. With white domination tottering and the future uncertain, a need was felt to leave a tangible record of what could be regarded as ‘Afrikaner beacons’ for posterity. But at the present juncture even the concept of ‘Afrikaner beacons’, with its associations of immutability and prescriptiveness, is an anomaly.

In this book on collective memory among Afrikaners, the contributors have examined so-called memory sites. This term does not necessarily refer to physical, topographic sites. Following in the footsteps of Pierre Nora and Jan Assmann, the term memory site is used in a metaphorical sense in this book. According to Assmann and Nora the collective memory ‘crystallizes’ around certain points of attachment to the past that develop into symbolic figures. In this way the past develops into a reality that has a persistent formative force. Such sites of memory can be both material and immaterial: buildings, places, events, acts, books, people. In media theory terms, one could call them icons. Such places are memory sites not because of their materiality, but because of the symbolic function that they fulfil. ‘Site’ is therefore also understood here in the metaphoric, heuristic sense, much in the same way as a topos in classical rhetoric. At a memory site, memories are found. The memories can be consoling, but often painful as well. Take examples of German memory sites: there are the fairytales of Grimm and the poet Goethe, but also Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, the Berlin Wall and Auschwitz.[vi]

Although this book links up with similar books such as the French Les lieux de mémoire (The Realms of Memory, 1981-1992), the German Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (German Places of Memory, 2001) and the Dutch Plaatsen van Herinnering (Places of Memory, 2005-2006), it differs from these in that we have restricted ourselves to the past century. Afrikaners as an ‘imagined community’, a group of individuals who view themselves as a nation, have not been in existence for much more than a century, according to the Afrikaans historians Floris van Jaarsveld and Hermann Giliomee. Moreover there is a trend, even among Afrikaans-specialist historians, to restrict historical interest to the preceding century. At the time when the Great Trek as commemorated, historical interest still went back as far as 1838, but at present the Anglo-Boer War increasingly seems to be the limit. European historical consciousness goes back further and is more strongly established, because until recently the French, for example, were still taught that the Gauls were their ancestors. The shorter time frame is another reason why this book covers a smaller scope than the multivolume European works.

The book ignores more potential topics than it includes. The limited pool of Afrikaans researchers available and their particular research interests more or less dictated the choice of topics for this book. For example, we as editors would also have liked to include essays on the Dutch Reformed Church, the Pickup Truck and the Ox Wagon, the secret Afrikaner Broederbond and the National Party, the poets Breyten Breytenbach and Ingrid Jonker, the Border of the Republic and the Army, the Afrikaans publishing giant Naspers and the South African Broadcasting Corporation, the Farm and the Small Town, the General Dealer, the South African Railways, the Mine and the Kruger National Park, Verwoerd and Mandela, Mandela’s Afrikaans defence lawyer Braam Fischer, the Soweto Uprising in 1976, the university town of Stellenbosch and Pretoria, the capital of South Africa. As it is, the book covers both material and immaterial culture, the sublime and the banal, with a special emphasis on race and language, because these two elements used to dictate who was considered to be an Afrikaner.

The following contributions are essays such as Montaigne understood this genre – writings in which certain problems are examined in a personal way. The essays were expected to contain critical analyses of memory sites. Each contributor was allowed to choose his or her own emphasis within the overarching point of departure of the book. The authors’ brief was also to do this with detachment in order to stimulate the reader to reflect on the subject instead of identifying himself or herself emotionally with it. However, maintaining a critical distance does not of necessity exclude intense involvement with the material.

NOTES
i. Litnet, 28 November 2006.
ii. Rapport, 15 January 2006.
iii. Also compare Grundlingh’s essay on the ‘De la Rey’ song in this book.
iv. classiques/Halbwachs_maurice; P.Nora, ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, in: Representations, Spring 1989, 7-24; P.H. Hutton, ‘Sigmund Freud and Maurice Halbwachs: The problem of memory in historical psychology’, in: The History Teacher, February 1994, 145-158; J. Assman, ‘Collective memory and cultural identity’, in: New German Critique, Spring/Summer 1995, 125-133; S.A. Crane, ‘Writing the individual back into collective memory’, in: The American Historical Review 102(5), 1997, 1372-1385; J.K. Olick & J. Robbins, ‘Social memory studies: From ‘collective memory’ to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices’, in: Annual Review of Sociology 24, 1998, 104-140; J.K. Olick, ‘Collective memory: The two cultures’, in: Sociological theory 17(3), 1999, 333-348; P. Hutton, ‘Recent scholarship on memory and history’, in: The History Teacher, August 2000, 533-548.
v. M.J. Swart et al. (eds), Afrikanerbakens. Auckland Park: FAK 1989.
vi. F. Yates, The art of memory, London 1966; P. Nora, ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, in: Representations, Spring 1989, 7-24; J. Assman, ‘Collective memory and cultural identity’, in: New German Critique, Spring/Summer 1995, 125-133; E. François & H. Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, I. Munich 2001, 9-24; H.L. Wesseling, Plaatsen van herinnering. Een historisch successverhaal. Amsterdam 2005.

References
Assmann, J. ‘Collective memory and cultural identity’, in: New German Critique 65 (1995), 125-133.
Crane, S.A. ‘Writing the individual back into collective memory’, in: The American Historical Review 102 (1997), 1372-1385.
François, E. & Schulze, H. ‘Einleitung’, in: E. François & H. Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. Volume I. Munich: Beck 2005, 9-24.
Halbwachs, Maurice Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: F. Alcan 1925. [Online: http://classiques.uquac.ca/classiques/Halbwachs_maurice.]
Halbwachs, Maurice La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950.
[Online: http://classiques.uquac/classiques/Halbwachs_maurice.]
Hutton, P.H. ‘Sigmund Freud and Maurice Halbwachs: The problem of memory in historical psychology’, in: The History Teacher 27 (1994), 145-158.
Hutton, P. ‘Recent scholarship on memory and history’, in: The History Teacher 33 (2000), 533-548.
Kombuis, K. ‘Bok van Blerk en die bagasie van veertig jaar’. Litnet, 28 November 2006 [Online: www.litnet.co.za/cgi-bin/giga.cgi?cmdcause_dir_news_item&cause_id=1270&news_id=6473&cat_id=163].
Nora, P. ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, in: Representations 26 (1989), 7-24.
Olick, J.K. & Robbins, J. ‘Social memory studies: From ‘collective memory’ to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices’, in: Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998), 104-140.
Olick, J.K. ‘Collective memory: The two cultures’, in: Sociological theory 17 (1999), 333-348. Rapport, 15 January 2006.
Swart, M.J. et al. (eds), Afrikanerbakens. Auckland Park: FAK 1989.
Wesseling, H.L. Plaatsen van herinnering. Een historisch successverhaal. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 2005.
Yates, F. The art of memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1966.

The ‘Volksmoeder’ is the Afrikaans manifestation of the universal Mother of the Nation phenomenon. In South Africa she cuts a fine, statuesque figure; she is a figurehead, a figure of speech, an idealised figure of womanhood as well as a petite bronze figurine. During the course of the twentieth century this figurine became a figurehead which marshalled Afrikaner women and girls to commit themselves in the service of their families and their ‘volk’ – a nation in the making. With this call to arms, the Volksmoeder was appropriated as an evocative and emotionally laden site of memory to which several generations of Afrikaner women readily responded.

As a site of memory, the bronze figurine of the Volksmoeder still carries her years well even now in the early 21st century. One of about twenty copies of the Afrikaans sculptor Anton van Wouw’s 1907 figurine ‘Nointjie van die Onderveld, Transvaal, Rustenburg, sijn distrikt’ (Maiden from the Upcountry, Transvaal, Rustenburg district) has found a home on my bookshelf. This little Volksmoeder – rather a petite girl – has a round face, a fine, sharp little nose, downcast eyes, a tiny mouth and a somewhat cheeky fringe escaping from her bonnet. Her small shoulders are pulled downwards under the weight of her shawl and her hands are neatly clasped in front of her. At barely 40cm she resembles a fourteenth century Virgin Mary, with eyes submissively downcast, waiting pensively, patiently, politely and passively to be dusted. She is the visual shorthand of the ‘nobility and the beauty of the young Afrikaans girl which should inspire many to simplicity and greater spirituality’.[i]

Figure 2.1 A Boervrou. The ‘Noitjie’ as she was used as logo of the Afrikaans women’s magazine Die Boervrou

Between 1919 and 1932, this figurine became the trademark of the first successful and widely read Afrikaans women’s magazine Die Boerevrou, and a symbol of the idealised Afrikaner woman and of national motherhood.[ii] The motto of the magazine, an extract from a poem by the Afrikaans writer Jan F.E. Celliers – which goes, ‘I see her triumph, for her name is – Wife and Mother’, complemented the visual message that the figure was fragile yet strong, and could and would emerge triumphant in the face of adversity.

Seen against the background of the trauma of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), of the great loss of life of women and children, as well as of the material destruction of the rural areas, Celliers’ triumphant woman makes sense. Women needed the encouragement and reassurance that they would be able to overcome the dire post-war conditions.

Like Celliers, his poetic counterpart, Van Wouw was intimately involved in the postwar project of visualising the Volksmoeders as ultimate victors in the struggle for life and survival. In a vein similar to his figurine’s, Van Wouw’s 1913 majestic group of three women in bronze at the Women’s Memorial in Bloemfontein, commemorating the suffering of women and children during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), depicts Afrikaans women as patient and long-suffering Volksmoeders. Larger than life, elevated on a podium at the base of a sandstone obelisk, they transcend the death and suffering commemorated by the Memorial. They survey the landscape and the future, fully conscious of their assigned calling to struggle on behalf of the nation. Rather than remaining victims of war, women’s dignity and worth needed to be restored by portraying them as heroines who made great sacrifices at the altar of the nation. In this manner, an attempt was made to deal with the trauma of war and the huge loss of civilian life, especially that of children.[iii] The Boer woman needed to be reassured that despite the grievous loss of her children she remained a good wife and mother, and that indeed she was the mother of the future nation. The Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings (Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Organisations (FAK)) contended:
‘Despite the humiliation, the wretchedness and suffering, she keeps her head held high as if she sees the unseen – the resurrection of her nation’.[iv] During the first half of the twentieth century the Volksmoeder became an important component in the propaganda arsenal of Afrikaner nationalism. The formal description – her verbal image – appeared just after the Afrikaner Rebellion (1914) and the end of the First World War (1914-1918). In 1918, the women of the Free State Helpmekaar Kultuur Vereniging, (Free State Mutual Aid and Cultural Society) commissioned Dr Willem Postma (aka ‘Dr Okulis’ – Oculis) to write a book Die Boervrou, Moeder van haar Volk (The Boer Woman – Mother of her Nation). His description of the Volksmoeder is closely correlated with the visual representation of both the figurine and the bronze composition at the Women’s Memorial in Bloemfontein. He echoes the need to provide reassurance and positive reinforcement to the Boer woman:

We need not feel shame for the Boer woman. We have every reason to honour and love her. No better, more noble mother than the Mother of the Boer Nation has in a more complete and richer sense ever nurtured a nation. Her history, her life is beauteous, pure, honest and dignified.[v]

Dr Okulis devotes a chapter to the ‘Character of the Boer Woman’ in which he describes in detail her sense of religion and of freedom, her virtue, self-reliance, selflessness, her housewifeliness and her inspirational role. She has noble and enviable qualities. She is brave, friendly, a hard worker, honest, hospitable, frugal, peace-loving and content with her destiny in life.

Shortly after the appearance of Postma’s book, Eric Stockenström’s book Die Vrou in die Geskiedenis van die Hollands Afrikaanse Volk (The Woman in the History of the Dutch-Afrikaans Nation) appeared. It is a concise yet ambitious history of Dutch-Afrikaans women from 1568 to 1918. Stockenström imbues the Volksmoeder with similar character traits as Dr Okulis, such as housewifeliness, virtue and inspiration. According to Stockenström even the Voortrekker women of the 1838 Great Trek fully appreciated their calling as Volksmoeders, and in time they became the mothers of the future Afrikaner nation. Both writers devote much attention to the women’s role in the Great Trek; especially the threat of Susanna Smit, the formidable wife of the Voortrekker pastor, Erasmus Smit, that she would cross the Drakensberg bare-foot rather than submit to British rule. Yet both men avoid discussing the suffering of women during the Anglo-Boer War. The trauma of ‘onse oorlog van onuitwisbare heugenis’ (our war of indelible memory),and the ‘swart gruwelregister’ (dark record of horror) remain too close to the surface for Dr Okulis and his fellow Arikaners to attempt to present and record it in a general history.[vi]

Figure 2.2 A Vierge. A fifteenth century prototype of the ‘Noitjie’

Despite its formal portrayal in the early 20th century, the genesis of the Volksmoeder as figurehead is firmly rooted in the nineteenth century. In the late 1880s the ‘Vrouwen Zending Bond’ (Women’s Missionary League) of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Cape Colony maintained that women, besides their housewifely duties, needed to play a constructive role outside the home in the church and the nation. Especially in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, women nationalists considered it to be their duty to uplift their shattered fellow countrymen and women. In the Cape Province the ‘Afrikaanse Christelike Vroue Vereniging (ACVV)’ (Afrikaans Christian Women’s Society) chose a fitting nationalist slogan: ‘Church, Nation, Language’.[vii] In contrast to this high-minded ACVV slogan, in 1904 – pre-dating the Boervrou – the Transvaal South African Women’s Federation (SAVF) chose the quoted excerpt from Jan F Celliers’ poem. For them the uplifting of especially working class women and young girls represented the immediate challenge which would contribute concretely to the reconstruction of the nation idealised by the ACVV. Women needed constant reminders that they could triumph over adversity, could succeed at motherhood and would be able to resurrect the nation. Membership in the SAVF and service to the nation were considered to be the calling and the purpose of a Boer woman’s life and work. After twenty years of such service women were rewarded with so-called  ‘Volksmoederknopies’ (Mother of the Nation buttons). These buttons were considered to be of such sentimental value that upon the death of the recipient, her button needed to be returned to the SAVF for safekeeping in a commemorative album.[viii]

During the first decades of the twentieth century these hard-working Volksmoeders moved away from their traditional areas of labour – social and welfare work amongst their fellow citizens – into more political playing fields. As a result of the 1914 Afrikaner Rebellion and the imprisonment of the Anglo-Boer War hero, General Christiaan de Wet and other rebel leaders, the ‘Klementiebeweging’ (Movement for Pardon) – later the ‘Nationale Vroue Helpmekaarvereniging’ (National Women’s Mutual Aid Society) – was founded. By means of local fundraising drives, large amounts of money were raised to pay the fines of these leaders so as to secure their release from prison. Petitions were circulated countrywide and were signed by 50 000 women. On 4 August 1915, about 3.000 women marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to present petitions to Governor-general Lord Buxton demanding the release ofGeneral De Wet and 118 other prisoners.[ix]

As a result of this protest action, the ‘Nasionale Vroue Party’ (NVP) (National Women’s Party) was founded in 1914 in the Transvaal and in 1922 in the Orange Free State. NVP chapters were organised in the Cape and Natal shortly thereafter. Members, middle-class NVP women, considered themselves to be the equals of, and not subservient to, their male counterparts in the National Party (NP). From the 1920s onwards the official mouthpiece of the VNP, ‘Die Burgeres’ (The Citizeness) urged its female readers to read and to extend their knowledge so as to be able to develop and express informed views on all political issues.[x] Likewise, in her column in Die Burger called ‘Vrouesake’ (Women’s Matters) the Afrikaans writer M.E. Rothmann known as ‘MER’ urged her readers:
… we women should acquire knowledge in order that we may be able to judge well and wisely, and that we may truly be able to serve our nation as citizenesses as well as (in the first instance!) Mothers.[xi]

In 1930 the NVP reached its zenith, but when white women were enfranchised in the same year, Volksmoeders were presented with a difficult choice. From all sides they were told that the true nationalist goal was not merely the attainment of political power, but the achievement of a higher ideal, that of the creation of a nation. The men of the NP called upon the NVP women to amalgamate with the NP in a spirit of sacrifice and cooperation in order to achieve the higher national goal in which women’s matters would be incorporated. Acquiescence to this request meant the demise of the NVP, whereupon Volksmoeders returned home to ‘save the nation’, individual household by household.[xii] The findings of the Carnegie Commission of Inquiry into the Poor White Problem of South Africa provided these women with a clear job description.[xiii] In essence more than 300.000 fellow Afrikaners, who lived in dire poverty, could not be allowed stray from the Afrikaner fold and needed to be saved.[xiv]

During the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as during the hardships encountered during World War II, the Volksmoeder-figure sustained Afrikaans working-class women as well. During this time, as a result of the large-scale migration from the Transvaal and Free State countryside to the Witwatersrand, thousands of Afrikaans families led a hand-to-mouth existence in urban slums. Here young Afrikaans girls found work in the expanding clothing and tobacco industries as well as in local sweets factories. As their fathers and brothers could not readily find work, many became the breadwinners of the family. As members of the Garment Workers Union (GWU) under the stewardship of its well-known secretary, Solly Sachs, these young women became the storm troopers of a militant trade union. They loyally supported one another and their union, and fought for better working conditions. Their unionised actions caused not only their employers, but the fathers of the nations – the secret Afrikaner Broederbond, in particular – endless sleepless nights.[xv]

During the 1938 commemorative Great Trek celebrations, the Volksmoeder, a portrait in words and a two-dimensional figurine, became a three dimensional
figurehead. The Voortrekker outfit of Van Wouw’s Noitjie became the fashion statement of the time. Throughout the entire county, in villages and towns, women dressed in authentically recreated Voortrekker dresses and bonnets. They were accompanied on the Commemmorative Trek by men with newly-grown beards, waist coasts and leather trousers. Ox wagons such as the Johanna van der Merwe, the Magrieta Prinsloo and the Vrou en Moeder (Woman and Mother) representing and commemorating Great Trek heroines created a central place for women. Prospective young Volksmoeders entered into holy matrimony on many wagon kists, whilst others brought their children to be christened with names such as ‘Eufeesia’ or ‘Kakebeenia’. A decade later, in 1948, this rekindled fervour for a heroic heritage contributed substantially to the election victory of Afrikaner nationalism.

Figure 2.3 A klerewerker. Members of the Garment Workers Union proudly modelled their Voortrekker outfits, whilst marketing their union and its magazine.

In their own Kappiekommando (Bonnet Brigade) the young working Afrikaans women of the GWU shared in these emotion-laden celebrations. They likened their personal struggles for survival in the city with the hardships of life on trek. On the one hand, the factory women identified with the innocence and beauty of the colourful expression of Van Wouw’s ‘Noitjie’. On the other, they strongly identified with the courage and resolve of a generation of forceful, nearly forgotten women. They declared that as workers they would take the lead, and like Susanna Smit, they too would cross the Drakensberg on their bare feet.[xvi] However, unlike their middle-class sisters, their trade union with its goal of improving the lot of their fellow workers provided the context in which they worked. Anna Scheepers, a trade union leader declared in 1940:
‘… like the Voortrekker woman in this country, women workers contribute to the advancement of the trade union movement and the nation as a whole’.[xvii]

After World War II, as happened elsewhere in the world, women withdrew from the labour force. During the 1950s and 1960s fewer young women and daughters of these factory women entered the labour market. As a result of greater material prosperity, as well as the protective labour legislation of the apartheid years, fewer white married women needed to work.[xviii] At the same time, the state also began to play a greater role in addressing social and welfare issues. As a result, middle-class women who had previously found an outlet for their energies in voluntary welfare work, were able to enter the professional labour market. For example, for 17 years Johanna Terburgh worked as an unsalaried social worker for the Rand Armsorgraad (Rand Poor Relief Council) amongst impoverished young Afrikaans girls. During the 1950s she made a dramatic career change to become the director of an Afrikaans tourist bureau in Johannesburg.[xix]

During this globalising period, the Volksmoeder became an obsolete figurehead and forgotten figurine, clad in her long and now very old-fashioned Voortrekker dress gathering dust at the back of the cupboard. Yet, the Volksmoeder spirit survived as the characteristics of the Volksmoeder and of idealised womanhood were reshaped, repackaged and disseminated in a more sophisticated mould. During the early 1960s the Afrikaans translation of a book by an American sex expert, one H. Shryock, Die Ontluikende Vrou: ’n Boek vir Tienderjarige Meisies, (The Emerging Woman: A book for teenaged girls) was reprinted four times. In translation, the sex education section of the book read like a popular motor-mechanics manual, awash with clutches, nuts and bolts. In addition, the Volksmoeder’s idealised characteristics were presented more fashionably and with a distinctly international flavour. As before, the writer argued that it was appropriate for a young woman ‘to nurture a friendly and loveable manner’ and condemned the young woman who read too many novels and, as a result, did not devote herself to charitable works.[xx]

In the new, affluent suburbs, the Volksmoeder had to compete with the imported feminist ideas of a Steinem, Friedan or De Beauvoir. Hence, during the sixties and seventies, the Volksmoeder figurehead came to represent a narrow-minded and inflexible mindset. As a result of the onslaught of the modern, the Volksmoeder lost her traditional substance and power. In 1969 the Afrikaans poet M.M. Walters satirised the former figurehead:

Volksmoeders van V.V.V.-vergaderings
Onwrikbaar by die werk – kompeteer
By the pastorie(s)pens en bazaar – vol, voller, volste.[xxi]

(Volksmoeders at women’s meetings
Steadfast on the job – compete
At the parsonage, pantry, belly and bazaar – full, fuller fullest)

Yet the values which the Volksmoeder symbolised and championed managed to survive. Dr Jan van Elfen, a well-known Afrikaans writer of self-help manuals for a variety of audiences – mothers, daughters and sons – responded to the call to educate a new generation of Afrikaans women. Between 1977 and 1980 his life skills manual for young girls Wat meisies wil weet (What girls want to know) was reprinted five times.[xxii]

In a break with tradition, the blurb declares cheekily that ‘…every girl would like to know more about sex’. In line with these modern trends, Van Elfen discusses matters such as venereal disease, sexual feelings and lesbian relationships, and illustrates his sex education with anatomical diagrams. Yet, in a barely concealed manner, his warnings to his young readers echo the familiar old Volksmoeder message:
But you will not find happiness if you try too hard to break free from the rock from which you were carved … A person who liberates him/herself from what is his/her own, will be engulfed by life. It is most important that you should protect your identity (the person you are) … the religious and cultural values which you know so well; the view on life which you have acquired and life’s lessons which you have taken to heart and should make a permanent part of your personality as a teenager. It is these things that turn you into a good person, a person who will be welcomed into society.[xxiii]

With the outbreak of the clandestine war in Angola and the increasing violence experienced within the country after the 1976 Soweto Uprising, there was no mass movement of Afrikaans women who raised their voices for or against the war. Indeed, the patriarchs remained firmly in the saddle and women were advised that they should limit their involvement to supporting their husbands in the bedroom only:
… You should stand alongside him, even more so than during the times of the Voortrekkers when a woman had to stand next to her man…as a guard here in the bedroom, who with an intuitive ear listens to what is taking place in the deepest recesses of the nation …[xxiv]

Afrikaans women had to strike a balance between the ‘total onslaught’ on Afrikanerdom and the lives of their children. It is almost as if Afrikaans women had forgotten that they were indeed flesh-and-blood mothers of a nation of young men confronting other mothers’ sons on the battlefield. At grassroots level they merely baked rusks, biscuits and sticky-sweet ‘koeksisters’. Every Saturday afternoon on the programme ‘Forces Favourites’, they broadcast syrupy messages to their sons and the troops on the border. How did mothers react when their sons returned from the border dead, wounded or ‘bossies’ – Afrikaans shorthand for post-traumatic stress syndrome?

Today the concept of a narrowly defined Volksmoeder as a site of memory elicits contradictory responses from a random sample of Afrikaans women. Anchen Dreyer, a senior member of the national parliament, is of the opinion that the Volksmoeder should not be seen only as a symbol of narrow-mindedness and regression. Rather, the Volksmoeder also has enviable characteristics: independent views, entrepreneurship, survival skills, and a history of self-help and social uplift.[xxv] Marinda Louw, a 30-year old publisher, maintains that women with strong personalities – real mothers of the nation – can be found everywhere, across racial and cultural divides. She feels that women have a greater capacity for human involvement, for gauging people’s needs and how to fulfil these needs.[xxvi] Dalena van Jaarsveld, a post-graduate student in anthropology and now a journalist who grew up in the new South Africa, agrees:
‘… There is no longer a cultural mother of South Africa, only real mothers who plait hair, who are loving and hospitable and who nurture many children’.[xxvii]

NOTES
i. The figure forms part of Van Wouw’s oeuvre of small statues, which includes depictions of Paul Kruger, black miners and San/Bushmen hunters. M.L. du Toit, Suid-Afrikaanse Kunstenaars, Deel I: Anton van Wouw. Cape Town: Nasionale Pers 1933, 29. In 2009 the original cast of the Volksmoeder was auctioned for almost R1 million. All translations from Afrikaans into English by the author.
ii. It was published by Mabel Malherbe, a formidable woman who became the first female mayor of Preoria and the second female member of the parliament of the Union of South Africa; a veritable Volksmoeder forever engaged in the struggle.
iii. J. Snyman, ‘Die politiek van herinnering: spore van trauma’, in Literator 20(3) November 1999, 15-16.
iv. Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge, Afrikanerbakens, Johannesburg: FAK 1989, 102.
v. Dr Okulis (Postma W.), Die Boervrou: Moeder van haar Volk. Bloemfontein: Nasionale Pers, 1922, ii.
vi. W. Postma, Die Boervrou: Moeder van haar Volk. Bloemfontein: Nasionale Pers, 1922, 141-142. The fact that only 15 pages of a book with 234 pages dealt with the Anglo-Boer War probably indicates just how difficult Postma found it to write about the war.
vii. M. du Toit, ‘The Domesticity of Afrikaner nationalism: volksmoeders and the ACVV, 1904-1929’, in: Journal of Southern African Studies 29(1) March 2003, 163-167.
viii. E. Brink, ‘Man-made Women: Gender, class and the ideology of the volksmoeder’, in C.Walker, (ed.) Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945. Cape Town: David Philip 1990, 286-288.
ix. A. Ehlers., ‘Die Helpmekaarbeweging in Suid Afrika: die Storm- en Drangjare, 1915-1920’, in Argiefjaarboek vir Suid Afrikaanse Geskiedenis, Jaargang 54, Vol I, Pretoria: Government Printer, 1991.
x. L. Vincent, ‘Power behind the Scenes: The Afrikaner Nationalist Women’s Parties, 1915-1931’, South African Historical Journal 40, (May 1999), 56-59.
xi. Die Burger, 29 Desember 1925: M. du Toit, ‘The Domesticity of Afrikaner Nationalism: Volksmoeders and the ACVV, 1904-1929’, in: Journal of Southern African Studies. 29(1) March 2003, 7-69.
xii. Ibid.
xiii. Carnegie Commission, The Poor White Problem in South Africa, Vol.I-V. Stellenbosch: Pro-Ecclesia Publishers, 1932. MER’s report, The Mother and Daughter of the Poor White Family was incorporated separately in Vol. 5.
xiv. D. O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital and Ideology in the development of Afrikaner Nationalism. Johannesburg: Ravan Press 1983, 26.
xv. E. Brink, ‘The Afrikaner women of the Garment Workers Union, 1918-1939’. Unpublished MA, University of the Witwatersrand, 1986.
xvi. E. Brink, ‘Man-made Women: Gender, class and the ideology of the volksmoeder’, in C. Walker, (ed.) Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945. Cape Town: David Philip, 1990.
xvii. E. Brink, ‘Purposeful Plays, Prose and Poems: The writing of the Garment Workers, 1929-1945’ in C. Clayton, Women and Writing in South Africa: A Critical Anthology. Johannesburg: Heineman, 1989, 112.
xviii. As in the past, women who were engaged in wage labour, were studied in depth; on this occasion by one Dr. Mrs D.M. Wessels, Vroue en Moeders wat Werk: Die Invloed van hul Beroepsarbeid op die Huisgesin en die Volk, Kaapstad: NG Kerk-Uitgewers, 1960.
xix. E.L.P. Stals, Afrikaners in die Goudstad, Vol. II. Pretoria: HAUM 1986, 38-40. Also the University of Johannesburg’s Archive on the Afrikaners on the Witwatersrand, A54, Johanna Terburgh Collection. Terburgh was actively involved in the Handhawersbond, a society working for the promotion of the Afrikaans language.
xx. H. Shryock, Die ontluikende Vrou; ʼn Boek vir tienderjarige meisies. Cape Town: Sentinel 1961, 108.
xxi. M.M. Walters, Apochrypha. Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel 1969.
xxii. J. van Elfen, Wat Elke Meisie wil Weet. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1977. In addition to his illustrated guidance manuals for teenagers, he wrote extensively on the care of babies, toddlers and children, along with a medical guide for women and a book on love and sex in marriage.
xxiii. J. van Elfen, Wat Elke Meisie wil Weet. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1977 6.
xxiv. L. Maritz, ‘Vroue, ons stille vegters’, in: Die Burger, 3 February 2007.
xxv. Interview with Ms Anchen Dreyer, 25 July 2007, Johannesburg.
xxvi. Interview with Ms Marinda Louw, 21 August 2007, Johannesburg.
xxvii. Interview with Ms Dalena van Jaarsveld, 11 August 2007, Mtunzini.

References
Unpublished
Interview with Anchen Dreyer, 25 July 2007, Johannesburg.
Interview with Dalena van Jaarsveld, 11 August 2007.
Interview with Marinda Louw, 21 August 2007, Johannesburg.
University of Johannesburg, Archive of the Afrikaners at the Witwatersrand, A54 Johanna Terburgh collection.

Published
Brink, E. ‘The Afrikaner women of the Garment Workers Union, 1918-1939’. Unpublished MA-thesis, University of Witwatersrand 1986.
Brink, E. ‘Purposeful plays, prose and poems: The writing of the garment workers, 1929-1945’, in: C. Clayton. Women and writing in South Africa: A critical anthology. Johannesburg: Heineman 1989.
Brink, E. ‘Man-made women: Gender, class and the ideology of the volksmoeder’, in: C. Walker (ed.). Women and gender in Southern Africa to 1945. Cape Town: David Philip 1990, 286-288.
Carnegie-kommissie. Die armblanke-vraagstuk in Suid-Afrika, Vol. I-V. Stellenbosch: Pro-Ecclesia Drukkery 1932.
Du Toit, M.L. Suid-Afrikaanse kunstenaars, Deel I: Anton van Wouw. Cape Town: Nasionale Pers 1933.
Ehlers, A. ‘Die Helpmekaarbeweging in Suid-Afrika: Die storm- en drangjare, 1915-1920’, in: Argiefjaarboek vir Suid-Afrikaanse Geskiedenis, Jaargang 54, Vol. I. Pretoria: Government Printer 1991.
Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereneginge. Afrikanerbakens. Johannesburg: FAK 1989.
Maritz, L. ‘Vroue, ons stille vegters’, in: Die Burger, 3 February 2007.
O’Meara, D. Volkskapitalisme: Class, capital and ideology in the development of Afrikaner nationalism. Johannesburg: Ravan Press 1983.
Postma, W. Die boervrou: Moeder van haar volk. Bloemfontein: Nasionale Pers 1922.
Shryock, H. Die ontluikende vrou: ‘n Boek vir tienderjarige meisies. Cape Town: Sentinel Uitgewers 1961.
Snyman, J. ‘Die politiek van herinnering: Spore van trauma’, in: Literator 20(3), Nov. 1999.
Stals, E.J.P. Afrikaners in die Goudstad, Vol. II. Pretoria: HAUM 1986.
Van Elfen, J. Wat elke meisie wil weet. Cape Town: Tafelberg 1977.
Vincent, L. ‘Power behind the scenes: The Afrikaner nationalist women’s parties, 1915-1931’, in: South African Historical Journal 40, May 1999, 56-59.
Walters, M.M. Apochrypha. Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel 1969.
Wessels, D.M. Vroue en moeders wat werk: Die invloed van hul beroepsarbeid op die huisgesin en die volk. Cape Town: NG Kerk Uitgewers 1960.

1.
I must have been in about standard six when I first heard that the location in our town also had a name: Sandbult. I can’t remember whether I heard this by accident or whether I had asked about it, but I do know that I heard the word for the first time from my father. He was the mayor and could be assumed to know the names of the town’s suburbs: Harmonie, Buytendag and Murrayville, where the white people lived, and, at the edge of the town, the place I could never think of as a ‘suburb’ but which was later to become known to me as Sandbult. And that’s what it was: a sandy hill next to the Stormberg Stream. There was also a location for Coloureds, with a name reflecting higher aspirations or maybe just the name-giver’s mischievousness: Eureka. Names that were not known to many people apart from city planners and municipal officials, names which appeared on town maps in a dusty office, but nowhere else. For the rest of us, white and black, these were simply ‘locations’.

Such places are not supposed to exist anymore. Some circumspection has crept into the definitions provided by dictionaries – and soon the little sloppy research I start doing begins to feel like a rather scandalous undertaking. Boshoff and Nienaber[i] report in their Afrikaanse etimologieë that the word ‘location’ was, according to the New English Dictionary, first used in the United States as a name for the place where one lived. They trace the origin of the term to the Latin locus (‘place’) and locare (‘to appoint a place’). Jean and William Branford[ii] define the historical meaning as ‘the land granted to a party of Settlers’ – a meaning which is recorded in detail with reference to the United States of America in the Oxford English Dictionary. In A Dictionary of South African English the current meaning of the word (‘a segregated area on the outskirts of a town or city set aside for black housing or accommodation’) is marked as ‘obsolescent’.[iii] The Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (HAT) from 1965 is more matter-of-fact and succinct: ‘Residential area for Coloureds or Bantus, usually near a town or village’.[iv]

Thirty years later the Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (WAT) declares that the word ‘is felt to be discriminatory and derogatory, particularly in its application to the policy of apartheid’, and adds a meaning which I haven’t come across in other sources: ‘inhabitants of such a residential area’.[v] The WAT also refers to a meaning which deviates from the standard according to which the location is always situated close to or directly adjacent to a town or city: ‘Administrative area comprising land for Black people that includes, apart from residential areas, farm-lands and pasture, and which as territorial unit also forms a geo-political and administrative unit, usually under a headman.’[vi]

What real help does an Afrikaans-speaking person in his fifties get from these lexicographical sources, in a book on places of memory? The starting-points provided by the dictionaries are scanty, with too little history, too little inspiration, and research in historical and sociological works does not appear to me to be the right place to start. So I decide to go looking for help in the place where one can find the proverbial needle in a haystack: Google.

Location means: place or position. That, at least, we know. According to Wikipedia (not always that expert or reliable, I hear) one can think of it as ‘absolute location’. An example would be the location of Location in the Eastern Cape, which, according to the web site Falling Rain Genomics, on Google, lies at latitude 31o 28’ south and longitude 27o 21’ east, 1 397 meters above sea level.[vii] Alternatively, and again according to Wikipedia, the term may be considered more geographically as ‘relative location’. In terms of this meaning, once again according to Falling Rain, Location is located 0.9 nautical miles east of Indwe – the closest town, 18.3 nautical miles from Rossouw to the south, 4.3 nautical miles from Ventersrust to the east and 4.3 nautical miles from Milan to the south.

For a few days these facts about a place named Location – the only place with this name that I could find on the world-wide web – make me quite restless. How could it be that a place with quite a few inhabitants (around 2 966 in a radius of 7 kilometers, according to Falling Rain) still bears that name today? A further excursion on the net suggests that one should not be too surprised about this, not if Bethlehem, Brandfort, Graaff-Reinet, Heilbron, Klipplaat, Piet Retief, Wepener and Zastron each has a New Location, with its own postal code, which is therefore still officially regarded as a place, 15 years after 1994;[viii] or if the municipality of Knysna continues to fund and administer a White Location Clinic.[ix] The term is clearly not totally or universally as obsolescent or derogatory as dictionaries would have us believe – and the web provides abundant evidence for this truth. ‘The “location” becomes a trendy fashion term,’ the Namibian writes with reference to Katatura, the location at Windhoek.[x] In the seventeenth edition of Minawawe on Track,[xi] a very cool web-based magazine, I read about ‘Kasie style’ and ‘Location culture’ – a term which as Loxion Kulca has become a sexy name for fashionable shoes, clothes, handbags and makeup.[xii]

The Falling Rain web site includes a graphical depiction of the cloud cover above Location and the rainfall chart for the past week. Who collects all this information? I look at the images and print them on my Laserjet, but the thought that the place must be a figment of the imagination, that exists only on the world-wide web, will not go away. Having grown up in the Eastern Cape, I have heard of Rossouw and Indwe, but the other neighbouring towns – Fairview, Milan and Guba (two Italian names?) – are completely unknown to me. Lokasie simply must be in the Eastern Cape, however: the closest airport is indicated as being in Queenstown, 36 nautical miles away. Just to make sure of this, I go back to Falling Rain and click on Ventersrust, then on the Tuscan-sounding Guba, then on Milan. Each of these three places appears with its geographical coordinates and neighbouring towns on three maps of Southern Africa, the Eastern Cape and the immediate surroundings respectively. The incredulous browser can move the mouse in all directions and also click on a satellite photo that can be enlarged for a closer look. But now I notice a worrying little warning at the bottom of each map: ‘not valid for navigation’ (except, of course, on the internet).

During my next Google excursion I suddenly discover a new place on Maplandia.com, a web site with a name evoking all sorts of exotic connotations: Mgwalana, close to Indwe. It has the same coordinates (31o 28’ south, 27o 18’ east) as the above mentioned Lokasie.[xiii] On the same page, there is an advertisement which talks enthusiastically about how one can investigate, plan and pay for a visit to South Africa, and therefore to Mgwalana, by using the services of Expedia.co.uk: ‘Expedia offers airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rental, cruises, and many other Mgwalana or South Africa in-destination services from a broad selection of partners. Feel free to use the Expedia travel services from below, start your Mgwalana holidays today!’ Those who can’t wait are invited to ‘dive’ immediately into Mgwalana by using Google Earth’s unique three-dimensional satellite map.

Is this my Eureka moment, my entry to a place which raises visions of an exotic rural experience in cyber space? The satellite photo makes one suspect a certain aridness. Big erosion marks are clearly visible, and beneath the photograph there is another warning: ‘This map is informational only. No representation is made or warranty given as to its content, user assumes all risk of use.’

When I come across ‘school Uppuygunduru in Ammanabrolu, Prakasm, Andhra Praddesh, India’ and ‘Huelmo, Puerto Montt, Lhanquihue, Chile’ under Maplandia’s ‘Latest placemarks’ my suspicions get the better of me once again – and so I go searching for someone to consult in Indwe. According to a very friendly woman at the Buyani Cooperation Project, an organisation I track down on the internet via Prodder, ‘the NGO and development directory of South Africa’, there are indeed quite a few locations near Indwe, but certainly no Location. She talks about ‘locations’ as if they were nothing to be ashamed of. The nearest location to Indwe is Lupapasi, she says – and indeed, Lupapasi, too, can be found on the web, on Traveljournals.net[xiv] and Geonames,[xv] where it appears with exactly the same coordinates as Lokasie and Mgwalana; Geonames even has an aerial photograph of it.[xvi] A warning similar to those on Falling Rain appears on the Traveljournals web site: ‘Maps and coordinates for Lupapasi are approximative and not valid for navigation.’

I decide that on my next trip to the Eastern Cape I should perhaps pass through Indwe and see for myself whether Lokasie/Mgwalana/Lupapasi does in fact exist, and under which, or how many, of the three names that are associated with a given set of coordinates. Maybe even have a cappuccino in Milan or Guba? In the meantime, my little detective work leads me to speculate that perhaps the uncertainty about the valid name may unintentionally provide a clue to what we as Afrikaners have always imagined ‘the location’ to be: a place that could be named haphazardly, but which always possessed certain geographical and non-geographical coordinates. Always the same place, whatever its name may have been?

2.
The relative position of the location, always thought of in relation to other places, provides one key to its location in both the South African landscape and white memory. The idea of being apart in a place which specifically had to be apart in the Branford definition (‘a segregated area on the outskirts of a town or city set aside for black housing and accommodation’;[xvii] my italics) appears in all the dictionaries and historical guides that I have consulted. Now and then there is mention of a residential area with greater autonomy, a ‘geopolitical or common law unit’,[xviii] or of ‘rural areas where Africans congregated or had exclusive rights of occupation’.[xix] But such places are certainly not locations as dictated by memory; they are reserves or homelands or, as my grandfather would have said, part of ‘kaffir land’. Although Rosenthal[xx] also signals another meaning, the location remains part of a town or city; situated on the outskirts of a town or city; visible from a town or city – or if not visible, then tangible; something one was always aware of somehow.

The hierarchy implied by this adjacent position emerges clearly from Saunders’
statement under the heading ‘Urban segregation’ that ‘many whites saw towns as essentially the creation of the white man’.[xxi] When I think of the towns of my youth I can recall a few instances apart from the already well-known Soweto where the name of the location was known to us: Duncan Village in East London, for example, or the Mdantsane that was built years later. All other locations, however, belonged to a town. We spoke of ‘Aliwal North’s location’, ‘Queenstown’s location’ and so on, without knowing or asking whether these places had their own names. And suddenly I can’t help wondering: what happens to the location in Peter Blum’s ‘Woordafleiding’?[xxii] The location is not mentioned in that poem, even though it is as much part of any town as the Dutch Reformed Church or the post office. A town without smoke coming from the location surely cannot really be a town?[xxiii] Shall we then accept that the location, submissively as its status requires, joins Blum’s village in being uprooted and disappearing into the unknown – or could this be a case where the location remains long after the village has disappeared down the main road? What a pity Blum didn’t write an etymological poem about the location as well.

The characteristic position of the location next to a town is closely related to the fact that, in the course of South African history, there was an increasing insistence on separating locations from white residential areas. In this context, Saunders[xxiv] talks about a cordon sanitaire between the location and places where white people lived, and in blank by Judin and Vladislavic I find the following under ‘buffer zone’:

[The Native Affairs Department laid down as a general rule that locations were to be separated from areas occupied by other population groups by buffer zones 500 yards wide, and from all other external boundaries by buffer zones 200 yards wide, unless such boundaries were main roads, in which case the zones were to be 500 yards for a national road and 300 yards for a provincial road. Rows of trees could be planted in buffer zones, but the land could not be developed.[xxv]

Here we see a glimpse of the statutory consolidation of a South African topography that had started to become the norm under Shepstone in Natal. Did the town planners of my youth think of terms such as cordon sanitaire and ‘buffer zone’ when they decided that the location would be on the other side of the Stormberg Stream? Or were such ideas superfluous as Black people already knew where their place would be? Everyone from Sandbult who wanted to visit the white town had to cross the dry stream bed, and when the stream was in flood, carrying huge amounts of shit that had been deposited into it, they had to take the longer route over the ramshackle bridge at the other side of a big bend in the stream – a detour of almost a kilometer. The few inhabitants of Sandbult who possessed a vehicle also had to travel this route: past the cemetery and the foot of the mountain, and then right over the bridge.

According to Saunders,[xxvi] black people voluntarily settled on the outskirts of Cape Town in the nineteenth century; the first group for whom a location was identified where only they were allowed live was the Indians who arrived as mine labourers in the Transvaal in the late nineteenth century. In Cape Town and Port Elizabeth the outbreak of bubonic plague at the start of the twentieth century provided a handy excuse for the removal of black people from ‘white’ residential areas. Apart from the view that towns were the creation of white people and therefore places where only they should live, the increasing territorial segregation was also driven by the so-called ‘sanitary syndrome’: the fear for the spreading of disease.

When I read this I realise how strong I still have associations even today with filth, infection and disease when I think of the ‘location’. The sanitary cordon or buffer zone would protect us against the stench and germs of the place on the other side of the stream. In his analysis of ‘native space’ in East London, Minkley enumerates a number of metaphors of sickness and tumours that were related to the ‘black spots’ where ‘pondokkie aggregations’ or ‘clottings of pondokkies’ or a ‘lawless conglomeration of

Coloured and Native persons’ could be found.[xxvii] ‘To the casual observer it is an “eyesore”, a “blot on the landscape”, the Britten Commission reported in 1942; ‘to the scientist it is the natural excrescence of a diseased economy’. Around this time, the word ‘pondokkie’ became part of South African English. Minkley writes: Pondokkies were linked to dirt, dirt to excrement, excrement to disease, and disease to the moral degradation of the inhabitants.’[xxviii] In Duncan Village, the raid at 5 a.m. and the facility for disinfection formed part of a set routine. Police agents examined women’s petticoats in search of lice and if one was found, the whole household would be taken to the dip tank. Heads were shaven, bodies sprayed with toxins and clothes thrown into boiling water.

There was considerable disagreement between the planners of apartheid and those who had to implement the policy around the question how permanent the inhabitants of locations were supposed to be. Historically, the location is not so much a place where one could freely choose to live as a place where one was settled and located, or removed to, by someone else. For the settler in America or South Africa the verb locare was activated: someone else would determine where one lived. The later inhabitant of the location, however, was preferably not seen as a settler of any kind.

His or her presence was regarded by the more rigid ideologues of the time as one of complete subservience to the needs of the white inhabitants of the town or city. The most memorable articulation of this view is to be found in the so-called Stallard Doctrine. The Transvaal Commission for Local Government chaired by Colonel Stallard explained this position in its report of 1922 as follows: ‘The Native should only be allowed to enter urban areas, which are essentially the White man’s creation, when he is willing to enter and minister to the needs of the White man and should depart therefrom when he ceases so to minister.[xxix]

These words suddenly remind me of the siren that used to go off in my home town at nine every evening as a warning to all black people to leave the white area. When the Vienna Boys’ Choir performed there one evening, the choir master experienced a panic attack: the sound reminded him of the sirens before a bombardment. What explanation, I wonder, would the mayor have given that night? The location which I remember is the kind of place about which the Britten Commission wrote with morbid lyricism in 1942:

The pondokkie (…), in its design, owes nought to any school of architecture, European or Asian, ancient or modern. Its conception is determined entirely by the scraps of material that go into its structure, pieces of corrugated iron, old tins and drums, rough boughs, sacking. Anything which can possibly offer protection against the weather. Piece by piece, scrap material is bought, begged, or filched and added to make room for a growing family. There are no windows, no ceilings, and very often no door. Sanitation is non-existent. Many of these hovels would do a disservice to animals. The pondokkie is the lowest standard of human habitation.[xxx]

When I think about it carefully, this is the kind of place I remember and not really the kind of place I actually saw the few times my siblings and I drove into Sandbult with Stefaans, whose job it was to deliver groceries for my father’s shop. There were streets and street lights and stop signs and little gardens (although, I remember, no pavements) and people in front of their houses or on stoeps (front verandas) or sitting in chairs. But not one of these visual impressions was strong enough to erase the mental image of the location in its dustiness, chaos and unfamiliarity.

The thing that was most real about the location was the noise it produced. On weekend nights the location became a few lights in the distance and a wall of incoherent sound, which to me as a child evoked a sphere of drunkenness and uncontrolled merriment. They could drink, that was for sure. Only later a small question would arise in me about what else the people could do there on a Saturday night, with no amenities for entertainment. My sources explain that the location as place of residence was qualified by two additional views that became ideologically entangled as time moved on. The first was that there really were no black residents in white areas, only people who came there on a brief sojourn and whose actual place of living was somewhere else. The location was by (white, apartheid, our) definition a place of provisionality, a stopover, a place of transit, an outpost of the homeland. In the course of time the right to live there, or even to be there, became more and more curtailed. The second view, which is also recorded in detail by Minkley, was that black people did not need to be accommodated in the same way as we were. A report from 1954 on technical elements in urban Bantu housing therefore states: ‘In South Africa, the non-European standard for space is about half that allowed in civilized countries.’[xxxi]

3.
The location was in essence a place of paradox: a place that really was no place, a residential area that was in principle deemed to be temporary and inhospitable. The provisional nature of the location was one of our greatest illusions. The above quote on building standards for Bantus forms a prelude to a remarkable development: the movement away from the amorphous, sandy place on the other side of the stream of my youth and towards the orderly grid of KwaThema, Mdantsane and many other places which would occupy a much larger patch on Google than the elusive locations of the Eastern Cape. In the 1950s, the government decided that the filth, infection and disorderliness of the old locations should be replaced by the utopia of new residential areas based on minimum standards, scientifically determined needs, orderly patterns and Western norms (albeit adjusted and halved) for the use and occupation of space. The NE51/9, the basic four-room house of the 1950s, made its appearance. Within a political framework in which the black person was in principle always seen as a guest, this ‘workman’s cottage’ was, incongruously, designed to serve as family home, in a bizarre interplay between the apartheid official’s obsession with control and the modernist architect’s dream of scientific design that could call into being a new human subject.[xxxii]

Towards the end of the 1960s almost all houses in black urban areas were the outcome of an enormous construction plan by the state, with standardized designs and similar building materials,[xxxiii] in a rigorous pattern which embodied the futile hope of creating a new, law-abiding, spotlessly clean and controllable human being out of the mythical chaos and squalor of the location.

I suspect that for most white people of my age anything we may ever actually have seen of the location is archived together with much more compelling images of a place on the other side of a river or railway line or road, a place which could from the beginning, and maybe irretrievably, only be imagined. I look at the satellite images of Lokasie/Mgwalana/Lupapasi and ask myself: are they less real than what I can remember of Sandbult? All this is as near to me and as far away from me as the post-1994 residential areas with four-room houses that I see from the highway.

NOTES
i. 1 S.E. Boshoff & G. Nienaber, Afrikaanse etimologieë. Pretoria: Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns 1967, 393.
ii. J. & W. Branford. A Dictionary of South African English. 4th edition. Cape Town: Oxford University Press 1991, 180.
iii. Ibid.
iv. P.C. Schoonees et al. Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse taal. Klerksdorp: Voortrekkerpers 1965: 513.
v. D.J. van Schalkwyk et al. Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal. Volume 9. Stellenbosch: Buro van die WAT 1994, 352.
vi. D.J. van Schalkwyk et al. Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse taal. Volume 9. Stellenbosch: Buro van die WAT 1994: 352. Here it should be added that the Reverend Pettman distinguishes between an Eastern Cape usage (land next to a village) and a Natal usage (tribal area with a population of 10-12 000) in
his Africanderisms. London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1913: 298-299. A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles, too, refers to ‘rural location’ as a meaning that occurred specifically in Natal, and also mentions the meaning of a piece of land allocated for cultivation by a farmer to his workers (Oxford University Press 1996, 425-426).
vii. http://fallingrain/world/SF/1/Lokasie.html. All Web sources were consulted in August 2007.
viii. http://saweb.co.za/postcodes/n.html.
ix. http://capegateway.gov.za/afr/directories/facilities/6422/20448.
x. http://namibian.com.na/2006/December/national/0666DF84EA.html.
xi. http://minawawe.co.za/news/issue17/17.htm.
xii. http://loxionkulca.com/home.asp.
xiii. http://maplandia.com/south-africa/easter-cape/indwe/mgwalana.
xiv. http://traveljournals.net/explore/south_africa/map/m1829296/lupapasi.html.
xv. http://geonames.org/981340/lupapasi.html.
xvi. On Falling Rain, however, I search in vain for Lupapasi and only find Lupapazi in Limpopo Province.
xvii. J. & W. Branford. A Dictionary of South African English. 4th edition. Cape Town: Oxford University Press 1991, 180.
xviii. D.J. van Schalkwyk et al. Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse taal. Volume 9. Stellenbosch: Buro van die WAT 1994, 352.
xix. C. Saunders, Historical Dictionary of South Africa. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press 1983, 101.
xx. E. Rosenthal, Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa. 7th edition. Cape Town: Juta & Company 1978, 285.
xxi. C. Saunders, Historical Dictionary of South Africa. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press 1983, 183.
xxii. P. Blum, Steenbok tot poolsee. Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel Beperk 1955, 21-23. In ‘Woordafleiding’ (‘Word Derivation’) the word dorp is traced to words such as dreiben in German and to drive in English, in an etymological play that leads to a surprising metamorphosis, freely translated: ‘O you little villagers, guests of Brief Sojourn! / Chosen people of an eternal Exodus / I see you take the open veld on the hoof / following the road – your flimsy ropes get torn – / your walking sticks catch the wind like masts, and you push / always further.’
xxiii. In the second stanza of N.P. van Wyk Louw’s ‘Karoo-dorp: someraand’ (‘Karoo Town: Summer Evening’) we read: ‘en rook uit die lokasie rook / en by die dorpsdam sing / en mense in tennisbroekies loop / die koper skemer in’ (‘and smoke coming out of the location / and some singing at the town’s dam / and people in tennis shorts / walk away into the copper dusk’). N.P. van Wyk Louw, Versamelde gedigte. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau 1981, 253.
xxiv. C. Saunders, Historical Dictionary of South Africa. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press 1983, 101.
xxv. H. Judin & I. Vladislavic, blank. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam: NA Publishers 1998, 11.
xxvi.C. Saunders, Historical Dictionary of South Africa. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press 1983, 183-184.
xxvii. G. Minkley, ‘“Corpses Behind Screens”: Native Space in the City’, in: H. Judin & I. Vladislavic, blank. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam: NA Publishers 1998: 203-206. As late as 1995, Du Pré and Eksteen list as synonyms for ‘lokasie’ ‘agterbuurt, ghetto, gops(e), hol, kroek’ (‘slum, ghetto, low area, den, hovel’), L. Du Pré & L. Eksteen, Groot Afrikaanse sinoniemboek. Pretoria: Van Schaik 1995, 189.
xxviii. G. Minkley, ‘“Corpses Behind Screens”: Native Space in the City’, in: H. Judin & I. Vladislavic, blank. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam: NA Publishers 1998, 203-206.
xxix. C. Saunders, Historical Dictionary of South Africa. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press 1983, 165.
xxx. 30 G. Minkley, ‘“Corpses Behind Screens”: Native Space in the City’, in: H. Judin & I. Vladislavic, blank. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam: NA Publishers 1998, 205.
xxxi. Ibid.
xxxii. D. Japha, ‘The Social Programme of the South African Modern Movement’, in: H. Judin & I. Vladislavic, blank. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam: NA Publishers 1998, 436-437.
xxxiii. O. Crankshaw & S. Parnell, ‘Interpreting the 1994 African Township Landscape’, in: H. Judin & I. Vladislavic, blank. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam: NA Publishers 1998, 439.

References
Blum, P. Steenbok tot poolsee. Cape Town: Nasionale Boekhandel Beperk 1955.
Boshoff, S.P.E. & Nienaber, G.S. Afrikaanse etimologieë. Pretoria: Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns 1967.
Branford, J. & W. A Dictionary of South African English. 4th edition. Cape Town: Oxford University Press 1991.
Crankshaw, O. & Parnell, S. ‘Interpreting the 1994 African township landscape’, in: H. Judin & I. Vladislavic, blank. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam: NA Publishers 1998.
Du Pré, L. & Eksteen, L. Groot Afrikaanse sinoniemboek. Pretoria: Van Shaik 1995.
Japha, D. ‘The social programme of the South African modern development’, in: H. Judin & I. Vladislavic, blank. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam: NA Publishers 1998.
Judin, H. & I. Vladislavic, blank. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Rotterdam: NA Publishers 1998.
Minkley, G. ‘“Corpses behind screens”: Native space in the city’, in: H. Judin & I. Vladislavic, blank.  Rotterdam: NA Publishers 1998.
Pettman, the Rev. C. Africanderisms: A Glossary of South African Colloquial Words and Phrases and of Place and Other Names. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1913.
Rosenthal, E. Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa. 7th edition. Cape Town & Johannesburg: Juta & Company 1978.
Saunders, C. Historical Dictionary of South Africa. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press 1983.
Schoonees, P.C. e.a. Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse taal. Klerksdorp: Voortrekkerpers 1965.
Silva, P. e.a. A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996.
Van Schalkwyk, D.J. e.a. Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse taal. Volume 9. Stellenbosch: Buro van die WAT 1994.

‘I am hoping fervently and in faith that the divine resides in every living being; that  nobody is anybody’s superior or boss […] give us the strength to become South Africans’ – Jan Rabie[i]

‘One may indeed ask: with friends such as Jakes Gerwel, Allan Boesak, Hein Willemse and Neville Alexander, does the Afrikaner really need more enemies?’ – Dan Roodt[ii]

1.
In 1983, a Minister’s wife made the following off-the-record remarks during a campaign speech:
But traditionally the Coloureds have no history of nationhood. They’re a different group, i.e. all different types of people.

Between us and [our] small group when the press aren’t present. You know, they’re a separate group. The definition of a Coloured in the population register is of someone who is not a Black, and not an Indian, in other words a non-person. He is not … not … not. They’re leftovers.

They’re people who were left over after the nations were sorted out. They’re the rest. When Ida [?] had the Cape Corps here in Vereeniging last week or two weeks ago, I looked at them and my heart bled because not one of them had the same facial features.

You know we all at least look European, but they … some looked Indian, some looked Chinese, some looked white, some looked black. And that is their dilemma. They have no binding power.

Their binding power lies in the fact that they speak Afrikaans, that they’re members of the [Dutch Reformed] Church. That is their binding power.

The Indians are a small group, also a splinter group of a nation somewhere in Africa (sic) and, between us, […] they need a bit of supervision. And the supervision [and] our authority (baasskap)[iii] of the white [man] are built in the whole system.[iv]

The person who expressed her self so categorically was Mrs Marike de Klerk (1937–2001) – for what it is worth, a Miss Willemse – the first wife of F.W. de Klerk, former Minister of Internal Affairs and later State President. Her remarks were made during a referendum campaign speech to persuade white women to vote for the National Party’s 1983 policy reform that entailed the creation of a tricameral parliament to accommodate people classified as ‘Coloureds’ or ‘Indians’. Fifteen years later, she described her motivation for the speech as a plea for ‘the acceptance of the Coloureds who, for so many ears, had been marginalised, humiliated and excluded by an unjust system of racial classification’. By the end of the 1980s, and again during 1993 when these marks surfaced again De Klerk endured much public criticism. Her defence was that the version, transcribed from a secret tape recording, contradicted her intentions; that her intended ‘nuances were lost’ and that she ‘was struggling desperately to convince friend and foe that I intended the opposite.’[v]

In 1993, the office of the State President issued a statement in which Marike de Klerk declared that there existed ‘a warm and cordial co-operation between [myself] and the coloured community’; that as a consequence of ‘our close cultural bonds I – as an Afrikaans-speaking South African – have a special appreciation of the contribution by the Coloured community to South African society.’[vi] In a separate declaration, F.W. de Klerk, as the State President, indicated that his wife fought a titanic struggle against the negative and narrow-minded racism of the far right in white politics. From every platform she promotes the concept of reform and renewal.’ About her use of the nonperson’ notion, he said that she used this concept with respect to the Population Registration Act 30 of 1950 in which Coloureds are described in negative terms as nonblacks and non-white and therefore ‘in quotation marks and by definition non-person’. She had, according to the statement, ‘in no way reflected negative opinion, feeling or attitude towards coloureds as a population group. Anybody who so alleges is malicious and attaches an inaccurate interpretation to my wife’s comments.’[vii]

Even if one accepts that Mrs de Klerk’s sympathetic nuance was lost or that the excerpt was taken out of context – and I have no reason to doubt her sincerity – she presented to her intimate gathering – ‘among us and [our] small group’ – a reflection of deep-seated ideological opinions. Views that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, had gained social acceptability in South Africa, and views that still persist in our current discourses on South African identities and social differences. Especially her inelegant and awkward formulation, free from the subterfuge of Party Speak, points to how deeply apartheid patterns of thinking were entrenched in popular thought. Despite the vehement criticism levelled at De Klerk, particularly from the ranks of English language and leftist Afrikaans newspapers, she – clumsily – articulated views that were at the core of social relationships in South Africa.

However, De Klerk was no reflexive thinker. Her remarks were not idiosyncratic or original. These attitudes and views had been circulating for generations in the colonial public debate and broadly within Afrikaner nationalist circles. Her later discomfort may have had much to do with the embarrassment of having been caught out with unrefined racist views in the 1980s, at a time of apartheid euphemisms, or with the fact that she expressed views that were whispered behind closed doors in contemporary polite white society. Indeed, in the decades after 1948, the crude racism of the earlier formulators of apartheid was replaced with the emphasis on the lessening of ‘race conflict’, ‘selfdetermination’ and ‘separate development’.[viii]

In this chapter, it will be demonstrated that De Klerk presented ruling political and social ideas in her speech. The matters she raised – the Coloureds’ reluctance to be ‘an emerging nation’, their lack of cohesion, their somatic and phenotypic diversity, their Afrikaans-ness or their perceived attachment to the Dutch Reformed Protestant tradition and the interests of white dominance – formed the framework of separatism, paternalism and apartheid. I shall point to some connections between De Klerk’s remarks and the ideas of the architects of apartheid.

2.
Frantz Fanon wrote in Les damnés de la terre, translated into English as The wretched of the earth, that the colonist often declared that he knew his native, ‘[f]or it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence.’[ix] It could be said that ‘the Coloured’ to whom De Klerk referred here was a discursive creation formed in social intercourse and established over more than three hundred years.[x] The Coloured was perceived as different, deficient, less than human and in need of guardianship. This is an attitude generations of ‘Coloured experts’ elevated to respectability. In South Africa, the Fanon equivalent was the white individual, the white government official, the white politician, the apartheid ideologue or the SABRA social scientist who had ‘known their Coloureds from childhood’.[xi] Adam Small traced the phenomenon of the Coloured expert back to slavery when slave owners had to appraise and ‘know’ their ‘subjects’.[xii] By extension, De Klerk became in her campaign speech the proverbial ‘Coloured expert’.

However, ‘knowing’ the other always has a dialectical counterpart, namely the revelation of the self. When De Klerk pronounced on the Coloured, she also simultaneously revealed herself. One of the key assumptions of apartheid was the ‘particular racial differences’ of South Africans. Some of the early architects of apartheid argued that, ‘the Boer nation, with their particular European race heritage and composition, […] that apparently adapted biologically in a peculiar manner to South Africa has also for this reason a special calling in this country.’[xiii] In the apartheid context ‘European appearance’ signalled more than biological pedigree; it also represented an index of assumed characteristics and self-imposed moral and religious responsibilities:

Armed with a strong constitution, a browning skin that protected us against the sunrays, adequate sweat glands for cooling in the warm climate, numerous offspring, and an insistent nature with most of the characteristics of the Northern Race, an abhorrence of miscegenation, a people rooted in this country through adaptation and traditions spanning over ten generations – and lo and behold (siedaar), the conditions for self-assertion, lo and behold, the basis for my faith in the Boer and his future in this country entrusted by our fathers as a precious pledge to us in building up a Christian white civilisation with guardianship over people of colour.[xiv]

When De Klerk’s heart bled because ‘not one of [the Coloureds] had the same facial features’ and compared them to herself and her audience (‘we all at least look European’) she spoke with this deeply rooted assumption of ‘European appearance’ of which one of the constitutents was ‘an abhorrence of miscegenation’. When she told the intimate company of her audience that the Coloureds – ‘all different types of people’ – had ‘no history of nationhood’ she accepted that one of the undisputed assumptions of human existence was membership of an apartheid-defined ‘nation’ (volk), and by implication, recognition of the codes of ‘race awareness’ and ‘race pride’. The frame of reference that De Klerk held up for ‘nationhood’, revealed classical apartheid thought, a direct consequence of Afrikaner nationalism: ‘nations [that] have been sorted out’, ‘the population register’, appearance (‘we all look European’), ‘binding power’, ‘Afrikaans’, ‘the [Dutch Reformed] Church’ and above all the ‘authority of the white [man]’. De Klerk (and her intimate audience) accepted unreservedly the fictions of apartheid and the intellectual framework defined by apartheid thought.

These views could be traced to the influence of German Romanticism, people’s nationalism (volksnasionalisme) and Kuyperian interpretations of Calvinism that developed linkages between culture and ‘nationhood’ (volkskap), that individuality could be expressed only within the context of group identity which was supported by the belief that ‘nations’ (volkere) and their cultures were destined. The nation was regarded as ‘a natural, pure and integrated unit’ with demonstrable ‘organic vision’.[xv]

For the architects of apartheid ‘race apartheid’ and the ‘creation’ of ‘separate nation communities’ (aparte volksgemeenskappe) were essential.[xvi] Fundamental to De Klerk’s tacit acceptance of ‘nationhood’ (volkskap) was that imagined community known as ‘the Afrikaners’ or the political discourse known as ‘Afrikaner nationalism’.[xvii] The South African history to which she referred was white mystification, established by both colonial and apartheid historiographers. How deeply these views were embedded could be deduced from a remark by an apartheid apologist when he employed Johann Herder’s early nineteenth-century romantic-nationalist concept of the ‘soul of the nation’ (volksiel = from the German Volksseele). The unidentified minister said among other things that despite their Western cultural heritage Coloureds had no ‘own nation soul’ (eie volksiel): that ‘mixing with the average Coloureds as an unique group was not permissible in terms of Scripture. Although they had adopted the culture of Westerners, it does not necessary follow that an own nation soul was born out of it’.[xviii] One of the intellectual formulators of apartheid, Prof. Dr. Geoffrey Cronje, former Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria stated ‘that the Coloureds for their own wellbeing (and obviously in the interests of the whites) must develop into a separate nation, according to their own potential, so that they can create an own nationhood’ (added emphasis).[xix] That these two opinions may appear to be contradictory is only in appearance. At base of both points of view is the belief that the Coloureds – or the ‘Natives’ or the ‘Indians’ – can merely be secondary participants in a predominantly white history and that their existence can be measured only in terms of apartheid definitions.

For the Afrikaners – ‘our beautiful white nation’[xx]0 – to be civil, cohesive and ‘white’, their whiteness had to be circumscribed. ‘White’ in this sense became a code for ‘superior intelligence and breeding’, perceived purity (‘European blood purity’), Christianity, ‘civilisation’ but mostly the lionised European phenotype.[xxi] These delimitations had to differentiate the Afrikaners from the greater number of heathens, the ‘pure uncivilised’: ‘the Bantus, the Kaffirs, the Africans, the natives, the aboriginals, the black people – whatever one chooses to call them […]’ whom the novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin described as ‘bold and virile and prolific’.[xxii] That line of division was the Coloured. Apparently Coloureds – the bastards and hybrids – being partly civilised not only merged native ‘non-civilisation’ and European ‘civilisation’, but also served as a buffer against the ‘indigenous native’ even though the ‘race quality of the Coloured’ (rassegehalte van die kleurling) was deficient. [xxiii] The Coloured according to a former secretary general of Native Affairs, Dr. W. W. M. Eiselen, was not like the ‘native’ temperamentally ‘disposed’ to physical labour but also ‘unreliable through lack of temperance in the use of liquor’.[xxiv] The unacceptable phenotype, somatic or social shortcomings that the Afrikaners suppressed in themselves could then exist, but then removed in the Coloured.[xxiv]

Marike de Klerk could only express what was supposed to be a positive step in National Party political thought – the political accommodation of the Coloured – in negative terms. Not to do it would equate the Afrikaner to the Coloured. And that could not be allowed, since this would presumably transgress the limits of whiteness. In this regard, De Klerk resonated a history of representation where the Coloured could merely be a shadow and a ‘mimic of whiteness’ and the Afrikaner.[xxvi] She used the same rhetorical conditionality that General J.B.M. Hertzog used in his oft-quoted Smithfield speech in 1925:
He [the Coloured] has originated and exists among us; knows no other civilisation but that of the white people, however much he is deficient in this; possesses a view of life, which is fundamentally that of the white people and not of the natives, and speaks the language of the whites as mother tongue [added emphasis].[xxvii]

For De Klerk there was no ambivalence regarding the Indians: that ‘small group, […] a splinter group of a nation somewhere in Africa (sic)’ and they needed ‘a bit of supervision’. With the Coloured, this was different. Shortly after having declared emphatically that Coloureds had ‘no binding power’ (added emphasis), she caught herself identifying cohesive characteristics, viz. ‘that they spoke Afrikaans, that they were members of the [Dutch Reformed] Church’. Earlier, for the average Afrikaners Afrikaans and membership of one of the traditional Afrikaans churches were characteristics of a rooted Christian National tradition. For De Klerk, merely mentioning these probably called to mind the Afrikaners for these characteristics were regarded as the cherished sources of their ‘binding power’. At that point in her speech, there was no essential difference between the Coloured and the (undeclared norm of the) Afrikaner. For De Klerk, if these characteristics were sources of the Afrikaner’s ‘binding power’ then it should have the same ‘cohesiveness’ elsewhere. But in fact, a rich variety of Protestant, Catholic, charismatic, Islamic and non-traditional religious denominations characterised the apartheid-defined community she had in mind.[xxviii]

Underlying her slip of tongue was the ambivalence of the Afrikaner towards the Coloured: ‘They spoke the same language as we do and are members of the same church but they are not us’. Hence the differences had to be clearly defined. How fundamental these differences were and how deficient the Coloured’s (inferior and childish) emotional life was – even within a shared religious tradition – were expressed elsewhere by a letter writer in a newspaper polemic on D.J. Opperman’s poem ‘Kersliedjie’ (‘Christmas Carol’): ‘The Coloured’s attitude towards God is definitely not ours. […] Their funerals are also more tragic, because it is as if they cannot comprehend the afterlife fully like we do and hence the loss is greater. Their sense of religion they only know through the small things they see and understand around them’ (added emphasis).[xxix]

This ambivalence also applied to another shared cultural feature, namely the Afrikaans language, which with Afrikaner nationalist appropriation became the
‘language of the Afrikaner’. J.H. Rademeyer in one of the first Afrikaans dialect studies found that ‘these Coloureds [referring to the Griquas and the Basters of Rehoboth] all speak a type of corrupted Afrikaans’ and he found that ‘the Coloured language of our country has always served one purpose: to amuse!’[xxx] It is relevant to indicate that Rademeyer earlier in his argument defined his sample group as ‘pitiable creatures’, thereby linking the ‘corrupted’, deviant language with the deficient Coloureds.[xxxi]

In the development of ‘Standard Afrikaans’ or literally ‘Generally Civilised Afrikaans’ (Algemeen-Beskaafde Afrikaans) other varieties of Afrikaans were often declared lower order forms, deviating from the white standard (‘civilised’) norm.

For the Coloured to exist, he had to be defined in terms of his dependence on the ‘white man’ / ‘the European’, but particularly in terms of his deficiency, his regression, his sinfulness.[xxxii] It could not be otherwise in this framework, because ‘[e]conomically and culturally they represent a lower stratum of European civilization’.[xxxiii] The perceived malformation of the Coloured was apparently innate. This was how D.J. McDonald in his Stellenbosch M.A. thesis (the field of study was not indicated) Die Familie-lewe van die Kleurling (‘The family life of the Coloured’) argued this view: The Coloured was ‘born in shame and in shame he continued his life and this to his own detriment and destruction’.[xxxiv] How unchangeable this malformation was, was probably proven by ‘the poverty and dismal family conditions not exclusively determined by external material shortcomings but by an inner moral corruption and rot that lay at its root’ (added emphasis).[xxxv] In McDonald’s mind this inherent malformation was due to the ‘lack of a national and tribal consciousness’ (volks- en stambewussyn) that manifested itself in ‘frightful forms’ particularly ‘in the sexual area’.

With this history of inherent malformation, ‘the lack of a national and tribal consciousness’ and their low ranking on the European scale of civilisation, De Klerk’s Coloureds became a ‘negative group’. In the apartheid definition of the Population Act that she quoted, human beings could only exist in ‘national and tribal contexts’. In drawing on such a long history of negative imaging she could arrive at the ringing conclusion that the Coloured was a ‘non-person’, ‘leftovers’ and ‘the rest’. Even if De Klerk uttered these observations somewhat critically her reference to ‘non-person’ or ‘non-human’ evoked a number of historical associations. One of these was to the nineteenth century Western European civilisation discourse where ‘non-human’ presented an extreme point on the civilisation continuum: at the one extreme ‘human being’ (civilised) on the other ‘non-human’ (non-civilised). A ‘non-human’ or the not-yet-fully-human being could only develop or progress through appropriate training like christening to evolve into a ‘human being’.[xxxvi] This point of view would have found resonance with some white South African opinion-makers, especially those influenced by Social Darwinism. A race-obsessed Millin let one of her characters express the idea of not-yet-fully human being as follows: ‘[some] Europeans […] could hardly regard these brown and black folk as quite human.’[xxxvii] Allan Boesak in one of the strongest criticisms of the Afrikaans equivalent of Coloured, namely kleurling, stated that the word was connected to ‘non-person’ and apartheid dominance:
[This word kleurling] is something that white people have imposed on me […] that in their eyes, I was always a nothing: a non-person, someone they don’t need to respect […] If I allow my identity to depend on their judgement it not only implies that they may decide my future, my being and my person […] but that I [also] put my future and person in their hands.[xxxviii]

If differentiation and the creation of ‘race consciousness’ and ‘race pride’ were strategies ‘to stabilise and ensure the separate continued existence and identity of our major racial groups’, then guardianship was the self-imposed (Christian) duty of the Afrikaner nationalist.[xxxix] The civilising and christening task of the classical colonial tradition also entailed paternalistic guardianship for Afrikaner whiteness.[lx] McDonald stated this duty as follows:
The prevailing conditions of this generation [of Coloureds] who are living among the whites render the duties and obligations of the white man as guardian of the deprived and less civilised people so much more serious. The white man first has a sacred duty to fulfil towards the Coloureds themselves to assist in placing and elevating them to a higher living standard.[xli]

Later, Dönges, as Minister of Internal Affairs, would defend the policy of influx control as a step to defend the Coloured against undesired influences: ‘Today, the Coloured needs protection; protection against the influx of the natives, against bad influences and firebrands among themselves, protection against himself, for instance against alcohol abuse and miscegenation and other social ills.’[xlii] G.J. Gerwel in Literatuur en Apartheid indicated how, in the older Afrikaans literature, such protection and the ‘good-natured paternalism of the master’ often presupposed the ‘childishness’ of their subjects:
Characteristic of this way of life was a childlike inability to make ethical distinctions and hence a short-sighted carelessness, the abuse of liquor and merry-making, loose and loud cathectic lives, extremely large and poorly nurtured families, rough women abuse, naïve incomprehension of the contents of mimicked religious customs, and a general banality in almost all areas of life.[xliii]

In the year, 1983, in which Gerwel’s study was published, De Klerk proved how abiding paternalism was in South Africa when, she with reference to the ‘Indians’, referred to their ‘supervision’ preferably under the ‘authority of the white [man]’.[xliv]

3.
In conclusion: the construct of the Coloured as a unique but ambivalent, lesser, regressive, and needy creature had a long history in South Africa. This imaging had such an enduring presence that it was manifested in De Klerk’s mediated form in the 1980s. Only aspects that appeared directly and in reference to the quoted text have been discussed here. Therefore abiding stereotypes such as inter alia the ‘characteristic humour of the Coloured’ have been excluded from this discussion. Marike de Klerk described her speech as paving the way for the political inclusion of ‘Coloureds who have been marginalised, humiliated and excluded for so many years by an unjust system of racial classification.’ However, in spite of her sympathetic intentions, she could not escape the long history of what Breyten Breytenbach in his well-known ‘Blik van buite’ (‘View from the outside’) speech referred to as die vuilpraat van die ander (the badmouthing of others), because as has been demonstrated her ideas were not idiosyncratic but bore the palimpsest of a history of colonial and apartheid thought.[xlv]

NOTES
i. J. Rabie, Ons, die afgod, Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1958, 145. All translations from the original are mine.
ii. D. Roodt, ‘Wie sal ons bondgenote wees?’, in: Afrikaner, 12 May 2007, 3
iii. In this context baasskap could also be translated as ‘supremacy’ or ‘dominance’.
iv. E. Wessels, ‘Marike de Klerk in volsinne aangehaal’ in: Vrye Weekblad, 24 February 1989. See also A. Getz, “Startling claims about coloureds by Minster’s wife”, in: Sunday Express, 30 October 1983.
v. M. Maartens, Marike. ’n Reis deur somer en winter. Vanderbijlpark: Carpe Diem Boeke 1998, p. 96.
vi. D. Cruywagen, Marike ‘hurt by unjust accusations’, in: The Argus: 11 March 1993.
vii. Ibid.
viii. See also S. Dubow, Illicit Union. Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press 1995, 276.
ix. F. Fanon, The wretched of the earth, (transl. Constance Farrington) Harmondsworth: Penguin 1967 [1961], 28.
x. The concept of ‘Coloured’, like Afrikaner (in its usage before c.1850), hotnot (Hottentot), bruinmens (brown person) kleurling (coloured) or bruin mens (brown person) takes its place next to those terms originating from colonially structured societies to define the offspring born from sexual relationships between colonists/settlers and indigenous people. For example, in South America, the rest of Africa, Europe or Asia common concepts such as mestis, mestizo and mulato/mulatto were used. This abundance of terminology gives an indication of the sometimes Social Darwinist inspired efforts to describe these people and their degrees of ‘admixture’: bastard, cafuzo, catalo, eurafrican, eurasian, eurindian, fustee/fustie, griffe, griffo, guacho, halfblood, halfcaste, hybrid, cross, quadroon, quateroon, quinteroon, ladino, marabou, mestee, mestis, mestiso/mestisa, mixed race, mulatto, octoroon, sacatra zebrule, terseroon, zambo …
xi. The South African Buro for Racial Affairs was established in 1948, and from the outset ‘it attended energetically and efficiently to the various intricate issues relating to racial affairs […] SABRA laid down a clear, defined policy and stated its viewpoint very clearly’, according to T. E. Dönges, a National Party cabinet member and later State President-designate (Dönges, T.E., ‘Openingsrede.’ In: Die Kleurling in die Suid-Afrikaanse samelewing. Referate gelewer op die sesde jaarvergadering van die Suid-Afrikaanse Buro vir Rasse-Aangeleenthede (SABRA). S.l.: s.n. 1955, 1).
xii.G. J. Gerwel, Literatuur en Apartheid. Kasselsvlei: Kampen-uitgewers 1983, 77.
xiii. G. Cronjé,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag – Die blywende oplossing van Suid-Afrika se Rassevraagstuk. Johannesburg: Publicité Handelsreklamediens 1945, 31.
xiv. G. Eloff quoted in Cronje,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag, 32
xv. See Dubow, Illicit Union. Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa, 261–2.
xvi. Cronjé,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag, 168.
xvii. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London/New York: Verso 1983.
xviii. A. Small, Die eerste steen? Cape Town: H.A.U.M. 1961, 38. In response to this, Small articulated an insight similar to that of Anderson who years later would formulate the theory of an ‘imagined community’: ‘The establishment of Afrikanerhood […] is no born-from an-own-nation-soul matter. […] The Afrikaner’s “identity” is not an original pure natural given, but a consciousness cultivated gradually through historical circumstance’ […] ‘the ‘culture of the Afrikaner’ are […] borrowings appropriated over time’ (Small, Die eerste steen, 40).
xix.Cronjé,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag, 38, 140 ff.
xx. H.R. Abercrombie, Afrika se gevaar. Die Kleurlingprobleem. Cape Town: Die Burger-boekhandel 1938, 18.
xxi. Compare Cronjé,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag, 11. See also G. Cronjé, W. Nicol and E.P. Groenewald, Regverdige Rasse-apartheid (Stellenbosch: Christen-studenteverenigingmaatskappy 1947), for a justification of apartheid on Biblical grounds. Regarding this form of Christianity, Small wrote: ‘He who wants to be a boss can be no Christian, and he who wishes to be a Christian can be no boss. Likewise, he who wishes to be a slave can be no Christian, because Christianity contains the ideal of the highest freedom and the highest responsibility’ (Small, Die eerste steen, 19).
xxii. S.G. Millin, The South Africans. London: Constable 1926, 217, 213. As regards indigenous ‘purity’, refer to one of Millin’s characters in God’s Stepchildren: ‘It was the tradition among the school boys, as it was among their fathers […] that one preferred a real straightforward black man to a half-caste. Whatever else the black man might be, he was, at least pure’ (S.G. Millin, God’s Stepchildren. Johannesburg: Ad Donker 1986 [1924], 247).
xxiii. Cronjé,’n Tuiste vir ’n nageslag, 146–9.
xxiv. W.W.M. Eiselen, ‘Die Kleurling en die Naturel’, in: Die Kleurling in die Suid-Afrikaanse samelewing. Referate gelewer op die sesde jaarvergadering van die Suid-Afrikaanse Buro vir Rasse-Aangeleenthede (SABRA). S.l.: s.n. 1955, 122.
xxv. Robert Young pointed out that disgust is not a value free reaction: ‘Disgust always bears the imprint of desire’ and among racist thinkers such as Gobineau ‘we find an ambivalent driving desire at the heart of racialism: a compulsive libidinal attraction disavowed by an equal insistence on repulsion’ (R.J.C. Young, Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture and race. London: Routledge 1995, 149.
xxvi. Compare Millin when the narrator in God’s Stepchildren said the following about a character’s imitation: ‘she had, as most half-caste children have, a capacity for imitation. She copied the manners and habits – even the gestures and intonations – of [the white mistress]’ (added emphasis). Millin, God’s Stepchildren, 83.
xxvii. Quoted in D. P. Botha, Die opkoms van ons derde stand. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1960, 101.
xxviii. See A. J. Venter, Coloured. A Profile of Two Million South Africans. Cape Town/Pretoria: Human & Rousseau, 1974, 381–96.
xxix. Quoted in A.M. Jordaan, Mites rondom Afrikaans, unpublished D.Litt. dissertation, University of Pretoria 2004, 297.
xxx. J.H. Rademeyer, Kleurling-Afrikaans. Die taal van die Griekwas en die Rehoboth-Basters. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger 1938, 5, 11–2.
xxxi. Ibid, 10.
xxxii. See D.J. McDonald, Die Familie-lewe van die Kleurling: met ’n noukeurige ondersoek na die Stellenbosche Kleurling Familie, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Stellenbosch 1933, 97.
xxxiii. E.H. Brookes quoted in Venter, Coloured. A Profile of Two Million South Africans, 3.
xxxiv. McDonald, Die Familie-lewe van die Kleurling, 98, 94, 96.
xxxv. Also compare Millin, The South Africans, p. 195: ‘The coloured man is the fruit of the vice, the folly, the thoughtlessness of the white man. […] The association was devoid of lyricism. No Hottentot girl ever preened herself before her white lord, declaiming: “I am black, but comely”’.
xxxvi.  A. Mbembe, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing,’ in: Public Culture 14 (2002), 249.
xxxvii. Millin, God’s Stepchildren, 295.
xxxviii. See Gerwel, Literatuur en Apartheid, 182.
xxxix. Dönges, ‘Openingsrede’, 4.
xl. G. Cronjé, Voogdyskap en Apartheid, Pretoria: Van Schaik, 1948, 15–7.
xli. McDonald, Die Familie-lewe van die Kleurling, 131.
xlii. Dönges, ‘Openingsrede’, 5. Also see Eiselen ‘As guardians of the Coloureds we have to bear in mind that influx and continuous residence of natives in the Western Province could very easily lead to moral decline and economic impoverishment of the Coloured community’ (added emphasis; Eiselen, ‘Die Kleurling en die Naturel’, 124).
xliii. Gerwel, Literatuur en Apartheid, 173, 200.
xliv. For the apartheid proponent Cronjé the ‘only real final and abiding solution’ for the ‘Asian question of Africa’ was ‘total repatriation’ to India. See G. Cronjé, Afrika sonder die Asiaat – Die blywende oplossing van Suid-Afrika se Asiatevraagstuk. Johannesburg: Publicité Handelsreklamediens 1946, 205.
xlv. B.B. Lasarus, [ps. B. Breytenbach], ’n Seisoen in die paradys, Johannesburg: Perskor 1976, 127.

References
Abercrombie, H.R., Afrika se gevaar. Die Kleurlingprobleem. Cape Town: Die Burgerboekhandel 1938.
Anderson, B., Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London/New York: Verso 1983.
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