Hardly anyone, now, has heard of F.S. Malan, which has been the first hurdle in publishing this volume. Very briefly F.S. Malan started life as a farmer’s son from Paarl, who went on to study in Cambridge. He had barely returned to South Africa when he was offered the job of editor of the Afrikaans newspaper, Ons Land. And he had been in the job just over a month when the Jameson Raid occurred, changing the shape of South African politics. It turned Malan into a leading spokesman for Cape Afrikaners. During the SA War he was imprisoned in Tokai jail for a year, really for careless reporting. But it gave him a year of reading and reflection. After the war he went into parliament, where he remained for the rest of his life. Before 1910 he was undoubtedly the most influential Afrikaner in politics and after 1910 he went on to serve in the Botha and Smuts cabinets until 1924.
The first person to realise that the man is historically worth exploring was Peter Kallaway, many years ago, who published a ground-breaking article on him. It was this that inspired Alex Mouton to write Malan’s biography. Alex has a real flair for recognising lost characters in history. He is also the original editor of this volume but, because of illness, was unable to complete it.
When I came to take it over, I realised that, although I had a reasonable knowledge of the earlier period, I didn’t have any of Alex’s knowledge of the subject.
I was also very conscious that, now, in 2024, forgotten Afrikaner politicians have very little appeal. It seemed to me, then, that my task was to explain why it was worth HiPSA publishing these memoirs.
There was an additional problem because Malan wrote the memoirs for Die Huisgenoot. The Huisgenoot of the 1930s was a very different journal from the rag that it is now. The object of the editor, Viljoen, was to contribute to the growth of an Afrikaner consciousness; to provide interesting and educational reading for this nascent society. The material in Viljoen’s Huisgenoot ranged from European culture to accounts of Afrikaner heroes. But it also was determinedly reconciliatory, in the sense that Afrikaners had been bitterly divided by the South African War, by the 1914 rebellion and by the 1922 miner’s strike, and he did not want to stir unhappy memories. Consequently the story that Malan provided was not intended to tarouse angry sentiments. Inevitably, therefore, he did not say much about some of the more interesting aspects of his life and ideas.
So how, then, could I tackle this manuscript?
My thinking were triggered by a sentence in Alex’s biography. He said that ‘He [F.S. Malan] was raised to be a fiery Afrikaner nationalist, to be proud of his cultural identity, and to believe it was his duty to be of service to his people’. I was puzzled by this. Of course I knew that Paarl, where F.S. Malan grew up, was the centre of the Eerste Afrikaanse Taalbeweging, led by SJ du Toit. But I also knew the Du Toit ended up a Rhodes man. And the 1870s is not the 1920s and 1930s. What was a ‘fiery Afrikaner nationalist’ in the 1870s?
In seeking to answer this question I realised that two leading Afrikaners, Jan Smuts and D.F. Malan, were born at almost the same time as F.S. Malan, all within 4 years of one another. They grew up in the same area of the Boland, Smuts and D.F. in Riebeeck West, F.S. Malan in Paarl. All three received a similar education; all three went to similar churches. Their fathers were all prosperous farmers, active members of the Afrikaner Bond and also active in local politics. The three young men all went onto Victoria College, Stellenbosch, and then went on to study overseas. All three could be described, in different ways, as ‘fiery Afrikaner nationalists’. And yet their political careers were so different. It’s true that Smuts and F.S. Malan were friends and colleagues for many years, but their approach to the crucial question of relations with South Africa’s black population was very different; and D.F. Malan, of course, became the first prime minister of the apartheid government.
It seemed to me that 4 factors shaped their worlds – land, language, religion and the political world of the Cape Colony.
Land: These were all men of the mountains which seem to have entered deeply into their subconscious and provided them with spiritual solace. As a student, studying abroad, part of D.F.’s dislike of Holland was its grey flatness, but he found some relief in the Swiss mountains. Smuts and F.S. Malan found Cambridgeshire equally flat, grey and depressing. As students they escaped to the mountains whenever they could. We all know that Smuts climbed Table Mountain regularly. Vol 1 of Hancock’s biography has 5 entries under ‘love of mountains and climbing’ but none is as moving as F.S. Malan’s account of climbing Table Mountain at the point when he had to make a critical decision in his life – after the SA War, should he follow his heart and advise Cape Afrikaners to support the republicans in trying to regain their independence, or should he follow his head and advise reconciliation with their British conquerors. He wrote:
That afternoon I did not return to my office, but instead spent the rest of the day alone on the slopes of our beloved old Table Mountain. I felt the need for deep contemplation in the bosom of the faithful guardian at the gateway to our country.
Language. All three men were educated in a British colonial world, speaking English fluently from their youths, and reading the classics of English literature. Even D.F. lived in a home where Pilgrim’s Progress lay alongside the Bible. At Sunday School Smuts told D.F.’s class tales of King Arthur and his knights. D.F.’s son described his father as a ‘Victorian gentleman’. As young men they all wrote letters in English, and even later on, F.S. Malan would write in his diary and elsewhere, in English and Afrikaans. Moreover, Afrikaans was not yet a formal language and many Afrikaners, like Lord de Villiers and Onze Jan Hofmeyr still considered it a kombuistaal, lacking proper syntax or a literature. That is not the way either Malan felt. As a student in Holland D.F. wrote to a Dutch newspaper, urging that Afrikaans be respected. F.S. Malan kept urging his fiancée to write in Afrikaans and, from Cambridge he wrote to her:
‘Afrikaans was … mÿn moedertaal, de taal van mÿn volk, de taal waar in ik ben opgevoed in …’; ‘I honestly admit that I look upon the language question as one of the greatest importance – it is one that goes to the very root of our future life as a nation, growing in true African soil and not fed by the extraneous customs and prejudices of other nations. You see I have nothing against English as a language, but I think very little of the man who despises that which is part of his very nature. Self-respect must be the first step, and unless we respect ourselves and what is ours we cannot possibly expect others to think highly of us.’ WCARS, A 583, v. 83, Malan to Johanna Brümmer, 6 September 1892, 27 October, 1893.
I think it’s fair to say that Afrikaans was the bedrock of their nationalism.
Religion. In the 19th century Christianity was faced by two challenges. One was the ‘new theology’ in which Germans and others, studying the Bible more critically, argued that much of the text was myth. And they had to reconcile this new understanding with their faith.
The second challenge, of course, was science, and most particularly Darwinism.
The NGK in which all 3 young men were educated, was conservative, conventional Calvinism. All 3 were deeply religious. As a boy Smuts, for instance, had been swept away by Andrew Murray’s revivalism but it left him with a burdensome sense of his own sinfulness. So all three had to come to terms with these challenges. Smuts found the American poet, Walt Whitman, particularly valuable in relieving him from his sense of sin. In Holland D.F. Malan was greatly influenced by his mentor who was a follower of the new theology. Interestingly, in this sense his theology, then, was relatively enlightened. In England F.S. Malan attended the services of leading progressives and he read Henry Drummond and Thomas Carlyle. Together they convinced him, also, to turn away from conservative Calvinism. But he remained a deeply spiritual man, later becoming a stalwart of the Groote Kerk.
But I think Calvinism contributed something else to their thinking. The revival movement in Geneva in the 1830s and 1840s instigated powerful sense of social activism, giving rise to the Red Cross, for instance. I think this may be why these 3 also shared this deep desire to be of service to their own people.
Cape Afrikaners. But these 3 were also products of the British Empire. They did not come from families that had chosen to trek north. I’ve already mentioned the influence of English. The other outstanding feature of Cape politics is ‘Cape liberalism’. Above all, this meant the race-free franchise. Black men had the vote in the Cape. D.F. Malan gradually turned his back on this. Initially he was inclined to regard coloured people to some extent as part of the volk; they talked Afrikaans, they were churchgoers, the culture was ‘European’ up to a point. But over time, as the poor white question became more prominent, he turned against them, seeing them as a threat to Afrikaner economy and purity.
At heart Smuts, I think, was a segregationist, certainly in the early years of Union. But he interpreted this differently from D.F. Malan. He saw segregation as a ‘modern’ way of dealing with the black question. In a speech in London in 1917 he had explained:
Instead of mixing up black and white in the old haphazard way, which instead of lifting up the black degraded the white, we are now trying to lay down a policy of keeping them apart as much as possible in our institutions. … The blacks will, of course be free to go and work in the white areas, but as far as possible the administration of white and black areas will be separate, and such that each community will be satisfied and develop according to its own proper lines.
He may have been changing at the end of his life, but by that time segregation was deeply entrenched.
F.S. Malan, then, was the only one of the 3 who fought to retain and extend the Cape franchise. I still don’t quite understand what made him take this fairly unusual stand. There was no road to Damascus moment for him, no reflection on the mountain, as there had been over reconciliation. But even John X. Merriman, the archetypal Cape liberal, was willing to sweep this issue under the carpet when it came to the making of Union.
Malan, on the other hand, from the end of the SA War, urged that black people needed to be part of the body politic. At the National Convention in 1908, in a speech written in English in his diary, he argued that this was the moment all white South Africans needed to grasp this nettle. Malan doesn’t say much about this in his memoir but his speech is reported in full in his own record of the convention, the Konvensie Dagboek, which we published many years ago.
Malan’s published memoir ends with Union. In fact there is an unpublished part, in Afrikaans and in English, in which he writes about his years as a Minister in the Botha and Smuts cabinets. It is these years that were probably the most notable for his position was more prominent that most people realise. Between 1914 and about 1920, particularly, Botha and Smuts were occupied with the war. Botha was increasingly ill, dying in 1919, while Smuts was on the road to becoming an international statesman. Much of legislation that emerged in these early years, although attributed to Smuts, was in fact the work of Malan.
One product of this period, of course, was the notorious 1913 Land Act. Malan was not responsible for this but he says little about it – one of those frustrating silences in his memoirs.
Perhaps his most interesting work was as Minister of Mines and Industry. South Africa went into Union with virtually no modern industrial legislation and it seems to have been Malan, rather than Smuts, who grasped the needs of a modernising society. The legislation that emerged, ranged from the Miners’ Phthisis Compensation Act to the 1924 Industrial Conciliation Act. In 1918 a Factory Bill regulated working hours, and the employment of women and children, along with a Juveniles Act in 1921 and an Apprentices Act in 1922. In the same year provision was made for the appointment of an Electricity Supply Commission. In 1921 the Board of Trade and Industries was
established. Well ahead of his time, Malan even advocated a decimal system when the Pretoria Mint Act was passed in 1919, enabling South Africa to produce its own currency.
But his role is not easy to understand. Partly Smuts’s dominating presence overshadows everyone else. But also Malan’s concern for the position of black workers is muted, especially in his own writings. The volume that we published in 2022 on the ICU is critical of this legislation so I am especially grateful to Peter Kallaway here, for the way in which he who drew attention to Malan’s pioneering thinking on these matters. This was a period of considerable industrial unrest, culminating in the 1922 miners’ strike. Malan’s sympathies were clearly with the workers.
As far back as the 1913 and 1914 riots I had insisted that suppressing disorder was not enough – steps would have to be taken to trace, and remove, causes of unrest. In addition, proper machinery had to be established in order to enable employers and men to discuss and settle their disputes peacefully. For this purpose it was essential to recognise the trade unions. The public, it is true, would first have to be educated up to this point of view.
You can see here some of the themes of Malan’s life – conciliation; and the education of the conservative white voters to the needs of a modern world.
In 1924 Malan left the cabinet, unable to accept a position serving under Hertzog. From then on he played a lonely role, resisting the steady encroachment of segregationist legislation. He ended his days as the President of the Senate but he was politically isolated.
These memoirs serve two purposes, I think. While I would not espouse the ‘great man’ theory of history, they help us to understand the role of individuals, many now forgotten, in the shaping of our past. But secondly, I think that they reinforce a significant strand of South African history of which we ought to be proud, and which we ought to foster. That is reconciliation; the willingness to work with those whose culture and values we may not share, for the good of the country. One the eve of this very unusual election that we are about to face, it’s worth bearing that in mind.