Ah But Your Land Is Beautiful

by Alan Paton

  But Dr. Malan did not do it. Was the step too radical for him? Was he getting too old? Perhaps both. It is almost certain that he will resign at the end of the year, and make way — this is almost certain too — for Mr. Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom, the Lion of the North, who is determined to get rid of the coloured vote altogether.

  I can tell you in confidence that my Minister is developing a kind of hatred of the Appellate Court. I watch him with fascination because he has great difficulty in not spitting when the court is mentioned. He purses up his lips in preparation for spitting, then he restrains himself, and unpurses them. I have watched him carefully, and do not think he is merely play-acting. I think he wants to spit, but restrains himself because he does not think it would be proper for the Minister of Justice to spit in his office.

  The name of Judge Olivier is particularly offensive to him, because he suspects that it was the judge who influenced the court to strike down the two previous Acts. I am prepared to prophesy that Judge Olivier will never become Chief Justice, a post for which he is clearly in line. Olivier is a revered name in South Africa, and the Minister says that the judge is dragging it through the mud.

  I have a little game and this is the most confidential thing I have ever told you. When the work is getting too much for me, and when the Minister is perhaps making unreasonable demands on me, I slip in some innocent remark about Judge Olivier just for the pleasure of watching the Minister control his desire to spit. He has no suspicions of me, because he thinks I am the perfect subordinate.

  As for my immediate boss, Dr. Jan Woltemade Fischer, B.A., B.Ed., LL.B., Ph.D., I must confess to you that I dislike him more and more. He treats me arrogantly and does not hide the fact that he thinks I am a person of no consequence. As I told you before, if you are not a Broederbonder you have little hope of promotion to a responsible post. It is a terrible thing to have doubts of the Broederbond. It is the brain of the National Party, it is the brain of Afrikanerdom. The question is often asked, Who controls the country, the Cabinet or the Broederbond? But it isn’t a real question. Nearly every member of the Cabinet is a Broederbonder. Where does his first loyalty lie, to the Cabinet, or the party, or the Broederbond, or the volk? It is a question almost impossible to answer. I can only answer for myself. My first loyalty is to the party and the volk. My other first loyalty — of a different order altogether — is to God and Church. It is only this intense feeling of loyalty to God and nation that helps me to avoid bitterness and jealousy.

  You ask me about the Liberal Party. My Minister and his colleague Dr. Hendrik, and our future Prime Minister as well, have two quite incompatible attitudes towards it. The one is of contempt, for a party of woolly-minded, liberalistic, sentimental do-gooders, who have no idea of the fire they are playing with. The other is an attitude of intense anger, that while the great restructuring of our society is taking shape, the great plan of which Dr. de Villiers has written, there should actually be people who are trying to obstruct it. There is considerable demand in the National Party that the Liberal Party should be banned under the Suppression of Communism Act, and that open political opposition to the policy of separate coexistence should be made a criminal offence. The great objection to such steps is of course the Prime Minister himself, whose authority while he remains in office is unchallengeable. He is still a democrat at heart, and does not favour the silencing of opposition, except of course that of the communists.

  I must tell you finally that my Minister has had a traumatic experience. One of his boyhood friends was Cornelius Berg, and their friendship was strengthened when in the thirties they both supported Dr. Malan’s tiny party against the United Party giant led by General Hertzog and General Smuts. Cornelius Berg died before he could witness the eventual triumph of Dr. Malan, and it was my Minister, who was then a practising lawyer, who took over the education of his friend’s three sons, and saw them all through the university. The Minister and his wife had to change their style of living to do this, but they did it cheerfully for the sake of Afrikanerdom. These three sons, Jan, Frederik, and Izak, all young men in their twenties, have just announced publicly that they have joined the Liberal Party.

  I shall write again soon, my dearest aunt.

  It must not be thought that people are flocking to join the Liberal Party. The three young men of the Berg family are not a portent that Afrikanerdom is flocking to the party. The action of these three young men is an inexplicable phenomenon. They are not Anglicised, although they speak English well. They have the support of their mother in their decision.

  Their action must be regarded as courageous. It is not an easy thing to proclaim yourself a liberal in Pretoria, the seat of Government, the home of Cabinet Ministers and the Civil Service, the stronghold of the Army and the Air Force, the seat of the intensely Nationalist University of Pretoria, and of course, the capital of the old Transvaal Republic and its famous president, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, whose top-hatted statue dominates the Kerkplein, the Church Square.

  It is hard to describe the detestation in which the words liberal, liberalism, and liberalist are held in white Pretoria. Liberalism denotes moral looseness and degeneracy. White liberals are people who will hop into bed with blacks at the drop of a hat. Language, culture, pride, the sense of personal identity, mean nothing to them. Mongrelisation and bastardisation are not for them national calamities but triumphs of love and justice. They are anti-Afrikaner, and this has made the action of the Berg brothers more incomprehensible and more reprehensible than ever. Surely only the lowest types of humanity associate with people who look down upon them. It goes without saying that these liberals condemn utterly the policies of separate coexistence. They say that the policies are cruel and heartless, and that the policy-makers are indifferent to the sufferings of the people for whom they were devised. Furthermore, the Liberal Party has no Christian foundation. It does not open its congresses with prayer, nor does its constitution acknowledge the sovereignty of Almighty God. It has no firm faith or belief, and welcomes Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, agnostics, and atheists into its ranks. Its very formlessness and shapelessness and degeneracy are in total contrast to the discipline and order of the National Party.

  The Berg brothers accept none of this. How they became emancipated — if that is the word — from the rigidity of their father’s beliefs is beyond understanding. All three brothers attended a meeting of the Liberal Party in the Coetzee Hall in Pretoria, and were in danger, if not of their lives, then of bodily injury. Students of the University of Pretoria were there in force to see the three outstanding renegades of their own institution. They were in an ugly mood. All of them were the sons and daughters of upright citizens, upholders of law and order, obedient to authority, industrious in their studies. But the sight of the renegades transformed them. Their faces were contorted by hatred, their voices were uncontrolled and raucous, they brandished knobthorn sticks, they cried out in outraged protest against the supreme apostasy, and who could wonder at it, for were they not witnessing the abomination of abominations, the sight of Afrikaners who conspire with men and women of other races and colours to challenge all those things that are held most dear in Afrikanerdom, who in the words of Holy Writ have committed whoredom with the daughters of Moab? Many of these students were well versed in Holy Writ, some indeed were theologicals who would devote their lives to the service of the Lord of Peace and his Church. The very fact that they could come here with heavy sticks and contorted faces was a measure of their abhorrence of those who flouted the holy laws of separation.

  Jan Berg tried to speak, but no one could hear what he was saying. The chanting and the shouting went on without ceasing. Then suddenly all was silent. A commanding figure had risen and the students fell silent. He spoke in Afrikaans, and gave his name, Paulus Malan Pretorius, Paulus for the great President of the Transvaal, Malan for the great Malan the Prime Minister, and Pretorius for the great Pretorius, the founder of the city. He was loudly cheered.

&n
bsp; – Mr. Berg, I have some questions for you.

  Here the chairwoman stood up and said in Afrikaans,

  – The time for questions will come later.

  Mr. Pretorius replied,

  – The time for questions will come now, or it will never come at all.

  The chairwoman conferred for a moment with Jan Berg, and announced that the time for questions would come now.

  – Mr. Berg, are you an Afrikaner?

  – Yes.

  – And are you proud of it?

  – I am not ashamed of it, but I am not proud of it, for in fact I had nothing to do with it.

  Here a few students sniggered, to the annoyance of Mr. Pretorius, for one does not make or approve pornographic jokes about Afrikaner birth. However, the students, seeing the displeasure of their leader, sniggered no more.

  – So you are not proud of being an Afrikaner?

  – No.

  – And you have the impudence to say that in Pretoria?

  – I say it, yes. But it is an honest statement.

  – Mr. Berg, you have children.

  – Yes.

  – A daughter?

  – Yes.

  – When she grows up, will you allow her to marry a kaffir?

  – If the law is then what it is now, she will not be able to marry any person who is not white.

  – Let me ask the question in another way. If the law permitted it, would you approve of her marrying a kaffir — I beg your pardon — a person who is not white?

  – If that were her choice, yes.

  Mr. Pretorius addressed his students.

  – You hear that, Afrikaners. He would allow his daughter to marry a kaffir. You are listening to the scum of the Afrikaner nation, the liberalistic scum that we have allowed to breed, the liberalistic scum that we have allowed into our own university. Look at the three of them, sons of a proud Afrikaner, Cornelius Berg, who followed Dr. Malan into the wilderness in 1934. What do you do with such scum?

  The ban on silence was over. The shouting was deafening, and student marshals had to hold back those who wanted to rush the stage. People tried to leave the hall but the students would not allow them to do so. Members of the Liberal Party, with their distinctive green, black, and white rosettes, tried to look brave, but many of them were frightened, never having encountered the threat of violence before. Now and then amidst the shouting they could distinguish the word moor, to kill.

  – Audrey, have you sent for the police?

  – Fifteen minutes ago.

  – Well, close the meeting.

  The chairwoman stood up, but Mr. Pretorius held up his hand for silence and addressed her in English.

  – Sit down, lady. When this meeting is to be closed, we will close it. Ladies and gentlemen, and people of other races, no one is to leave this hall until we allow it. Mr. Berg!

  – Yes.

  – Who gave you this hall?

  – The trustees.

  – What are their names?

  – I don’t know their names.

  – Whom did you deal with?

  – A Mr. van Deventer.

  – Then Mr. van Deventer must learn that this hall must never be given again to scum like yourselves.

  Mr. Pretorius raised his hand, and two of the large imposing windows of the Coetzee Hall were shattered by missiles thrown from outside the building.

  – Two is enough. But if ever this hall is let out again to liberalistic filth like yourselves, the whole place will be destroyed. Mr. Berg!

  – Yes.

  – You were intending to have a kaffir speaker tonight:

  – You mean an African speaker?

  – Oh, I beg your pardon. Yes, I do.

  – Yes, we did mean to have an African speaker.

  – Is that him on the platform?

  – Yes.

  – We want him.

  – What do you want him for?

  – We want to take him with us. We want to teach him not to come to Pretoria again. We want to teach him not to appear again on the same platform with white speakers.

  – We cannot agree to that.

  This was the signal for the student marshals to rush forward up the two aisles of the hall, followed by their fellows with their weapons and their cries. The people on the platform formed a protective ring round their fellow member, Jo Dube from Durban, and the chairwoman was thrust into the ring too. And indeed it might have gone badly for all those on the platform, had it not been for the dramatic entry of the police through a door at the back of the stage, headed by an imposing-looking officer of great height. The police immediately interposed themselves between the people on the stage and the students advancing up the aisles. The officer held up his hand, Mr. Pretorius held up his hand, and the hall was suddenly silent.

  – Captain van Niekerk of the South African Police. With the powers conferred on me under the Riotous Assemblies Act as amended in 1946, I declare this meeting closed. I propose to close it in this fashion. Students of the university, I order you to leave the hall and I order you not to congregate in small or large groups anywhere in the vicinity of the hall. In fact I advise you to return to the university, or to your lodgings wherever they may be. You will have ten minutes to do this, and any student in the hall or its vicinity after that time will be taken into custody. When that time has expired, I shall order all members of the public who are not members of the organisation to leave the hall and to disperse as quickly as possible. When the operation is completed, I shall supervise the dispersal of members of the organisation. Any members of the organisation who have no transport can wait outside the hall, and transport will be provided for them. They will have to travel in the police vans, but that is better than travelling in an ambulance. I want no violence here tonight. Anyone attempting it will have to bear the full consequences of such action. Students, I order you to leave the hall and not to remain in its vicinity. You have ten minutes to do this.

  It must have been some fifteen minutes later that Captain van Niekerk turned his attention to the members of the Liberal Party.

  – You can think yourselves lucky that the police came when they did. Otherwise some of you might have been dead. Certainly some of you would have been injured. I am not a politician. I do not even belong to any party. But you people are playing with dynamite. Don’t do it again.

  – Do you mean, captain, that we are not entitled to hold a public meeting and put forward the policies of our party?

  – You are fully entitled to do so unless the police are of the opinion that your meeting will lead to public disorder. You can see for yourselves. If you decided to hold a meeting next week in this hall, do you think the police would allow it? I know this city, Mr. Berg, and you ought to know it too. I know the students of this university, and you certainly ought to know them too. You saw how they dispersed quietly when ordered to do so by lawful authority. But when they see a meeting of this kind, and black people on the platform, they lose control of themselves, they become capable of extreme violence. Your meetings may go off peaceably in Durban and Cape Town, but they are like dynamite in Pretoria. Now please disperse. If anyone has no transport, report to the officer in charge outside.

  Obedient also to lawful authority, the members of the Liberal Party dispersed quietly. Some were seething with indignation, and some were determined to have another meeting as soon as possible. But many were subdued. They had not seen hate before.

  Mr. Robert Mansfield

  Member of the Liberal Party

  How are your black dolly girls? Do you like the fuzzy hair, is it very exciting? Does it get left on the pillow? Has your wife by any chance seen it? And how does your wife like to be poked by the same stick that has been poking the black dolly girls? Tell me, are they hotter than the white dollies?

  How low can you sink? I am a white woman and proud of it, and if you were my husband I would shoot you dead and be proud of it. How you can sit on the platform with all that smell, I don’t understand
.

  I read your speech at Mooi River. I knew that place when I was young. Why didn’t the white farmers string you up? Or castrate you, cut out your stick that pokes the black fuzzies?

  At Mooi River you said you were a Christian. Do not let the name of Christ be spoken again by your filthy lips, that kisses those black tits and kisses the black twats.

  You are a disgrace to Christianity.

  Proud White Christian Woman

  There was no address, but it had been posted in Durban. It was to prove the forerunner of many others.

  Mr. Robert Mansfield 6 November 1954

  Natal Regional Office

  Liberal Party

  This is a letter of warning to you. It should be taken very seriously. We note that you have accepted the chairmanship of the Natal region of the Liberal Party. We regard your party as anti-Christian, and anti-White South African, and we have taken the decision that all the regional chairmen of the party, and all those who are foolish enough to become their successors, should be eliminated.

  Do you know the meaning of the word eliminated, Mr. Mansfield? It has the same meaning as it had in Germany under the great Führer Adolf Hitler. He decided to exterminate the Jews and he would have succeeded if the capitalist-Jewish-British-American money power had not ‘won’ the war, and delivered the Christian world into the hands of the communists. That is what you are trying to do, but we are going to stop you.

  We give you fourteen days from the date of this letter to resign the chairmanship of the Natal region of the Liberal Party. You will announce your resignation in one Durban and one Pietermaritzburg newspaper. We have decided that you may give any reason you wish for your resignation. If you do not obey this order, you will be eliminated. We advise you to take this warning seriously. If you do not do so, we have solemnly pledged ourselves to kill you, in the most sacred of all causes, of Christianity itself.