by Alan Paton
In my less confident moods I fear that the next attack will be on rugby, cricket, tennis, and golf, in all of which white South Africans have won fame for themselves and their country. Exclusion from these would be bad enough but I fear it will not stop there. The final exclusion would be from any kind of international relations whatsoever, and that, my dear aunt, would ultimately mean what is known as the imposition of sanctions. Our extreme politicians say that, rather than give up our way of life, let us go back to the ox-wagon. Our extreme theologians say that, if this is God’s will for us, why should we resist it?
I have no time for these fanatics. The history of the Afrikaner is one of courage but also of resourcefulness and intelligence. The word kragdadig used to be a noble word, meaning powerful and resolute in deed. But it is gradually acquiring a second meaning, that the doer of the deed has more power than sense. This second meaning has been given to it, by our enemies of course, because of the words and actions of these fanatics.
You might say a prayer for me, my dear aunt. I do not like this state of doubt. In fact I am ashamed of it.
Last night the quiet of Ridge Road was shattered by a bomb explosion at the house of Mr. Robert Mansfield, regional chairman of the Liberal Party. The explosion took place at two o’clock in the morning, and completely destroyed two bedrooms. Fortunately the two rooms were unoccupied. Mr. Mansfield’s son Lawrence was spending the night with friends, and his daughter Felicity, who had been deeply disturbed by the shooting of Miss Prem Bodasingh, had gone to sleep in her parents’ bedroom.
Mr. Mansfield asked his wife and daughter to remain in the bedroom while he investigated the situation. When he was satisfied that there was no other person in the house or grounds, he allowed his wife and daughter to view the damage. It was his daughter Felicity who made the horrifying discovery of a man’s body lying by the demolished wall. The body was headless. The girl ran screaming into her mother’s arms. By this time friends and neighbours were at the scene, and the family doctor immediately put the girl under sedation. The police also arrived promptly, and after they had thoroughly inspected the damage, they removed the body of the man who had presumably set off the bomb.
He was later identified as Mr. Heinrich Rohrs, nurseryman of New Germany, Natal.
Heinrich Rohrs had been interned by the Smuts Government during the years of the Second World War. He was known as a fanatical admirer of Adolf Hitler, and a sympathiser with the Nazi movement. He was a member of the Greyshirts, a virulent anti-Semitic organisation, and had published a booklet in 1937 producing irrefutable proof that General Smuts was a Jew. Dr. Malan in his campaigns against Smuts never asserted or even insinuated that he was a Jew because he knew perfectly well that Smuts was an Afrikaner, even though not a true one and, what is more, Smuts, though not much older than Malan, had taught him in the Sunday school at Riebeek West, seventy years before. But Malan in his anti-Semitic days certainly thought that Smuts was too pro-Jewish, and he uttered the penetrating witticism that went round the nation, ‘General Smuts is on the map of Palestine. Should he be deleted from that map, he would not be on the map of any country.’ Another of Malan’s jokes went round the nation, namely that when Smuts spoke to the Jews he was General Smutsowitz, and when he spoke to the Scots he was General MacSmuts.
In the internment camp Rohrs met Miss Anna von Maltitz, from the Berlin district near East London. She was an aristocrat, fine-boned and haughty, and Rohrs was a commoner. But she was attracted to him because he shared her hatred of the British, the Jews, and the blacks. They fell in love and decided to marry when the war was over. Acceptance by an aristocrat changed Rohrs from a solitary to an active campaigner for South Africa’s secession from the British Commonwealth, the removal of the franchise from Jews, the discontinuation of Jewish immigration, and the unrelenting implementation of the policies of racial separation. During his boyhood he had been secretive and withdrawn. His years at Maritzburg College were a purgatory to him. He was treated as a traitor and an outcast and this made him more anti-British than ever. After the war he devoted his time and his energy, when he was not in the nursery, to proving that Hitler had never ordered the extermination of the Jews, and that places like Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz had never existed except in the imaginations of Jewish-British-American world capitalists. Rohrs strongly approved of Hitler’s view that black people were monkeys and were fit only to be slaves and servants. Rohrs claimed to be a Christian, and he wrote that true Christianity was the militant enemy of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Liberalism, Freemasonry and Communism. He believed firmly that Jesus was not a Jew but a Persian.
Rohrs was a strong supporter of the racial policies of Dr. Malan and the National Party, but in 1954 he published a bitter attack on the retiring Prime Minister because he had paid a visit to what he called the Holy Land, and had had his name inscribed by South African Jewry in the Golden Book in recognition of his ‘contribution to better racial understanding in South Africa’. Rohrs then transferred his loyalty to the new Prime Minister Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom, the Lion of the North, and his powerful Minister of Bantu Affairs, Dr. Hendrik.
Rohrs was a nurseryman of national repute. His rose-gardens at New Germany attracted thousands of visitors. He perfected a new red rose and called it ‘Beauty of Berlin’. He was financially highly successful, and the proceeds from his nursery enabled him to publish his pamphlets. He and his wife eschewed luxury so that they could set aside money for his campaigning. Their first child was a boy and they called him Adolf Hitler von Maltitz Rohrs. This meant that the boy grew up as secretive and reserved as his father had done before him. With bitter unwillingness they finally agreed to drop the boy’s second name, but the damage had already been done.
The police found an abundance of pamphlets of an anti-Semitic and anti-black nature, and also evidence that Rohrs had directed the Preserve White South Africa League. But they could find no evidence that there had been any other members. In that respect he had continued solitary to the end.
His widow at first continued to run the nursery, but slowly the rose-gardens began to lose their breathtaking beauty. Finally she sold it and returned with her two children to the district of Berlin. The League had come to an end.
It is the kind of news that is very painful for liberal-minded people. They tell it in a low voice, almost as though they hoped that no one would hear it. But it has to come out in the end. The Robert Mansfields are emigrating to Australia. He has got a job there, in a high school in the western city of Perth.
Although the League has come to an end, its consequences have not. The destroyed rooms have been rebuilt, but the girl Felicity Mansfield will not sleep anywhere but in her parents’ bedroom. She wakes up screaming in the night. But worse than that, sometimes in the daytime she runs screaming into her mother’s arms. When a car passes the house, she stays tense and anxious till she is sure it is past.
The first person to hear the news was Philip Drummond himself. It was not pleasant for him to see the laughing confident giant of a man so stricken. He took the firm uncomprising line that Mansfield was right, that his children had to be his first consideration. He rebuked him gently for feeling shame. He assured him that not one member of the Liberal Party would judge him for his decision. It was easy to see that his words brought absolutely no comfort to his friend.
One thing was clearly understood. There were to be no farewell parties. The Mansfields did not wish anyone to see them off at the docks. They wished to be allowed to steal away. It is lucky that Philip Drummond knows most of the big editors well. He will ask them to publish nothing till the Mansfields have gone.
Mr. Robert Mansfield
Deserting Natal Chairman
Liberal Party
So, Robert, I read in the Sunday Times that you’re ratting to Australia, eh? You ratted from the International Club and now you’re ratting from the country.
And what about your black brothers and sisters, whose rights you fought for? You didn’t e
ven want them to have separate cups and saucers, remember? And now you’re going to leave them, eh? Who’s going to protect them now? What are they going to think of the white hero who promised to protect them with his last drop of blood, and now is running away? You always talk as though it is the Government who has betrayed the black man, but now the black nation is saying it is you.
And who got hurt? None of your family. First the coolie dolly who got shot in the face. And then the man who blew his head off. You’ve got no guts, but then I never thought you had. You’re a kaffir-lover and a worm, but now it is clear that you are a worm most of all.
I bet you can’t wait till you get at the abo dollies. Lubras they call them, don’t they? They’ll be a bit small for you, won’t they? You’ll have to try lubracation, ha! ha! A nice juicy time you’ll have. I’m sure. They’ve got no decent laws there.
Goodbye, digger, and good riddance. Australia’s loss is our gain.
Proud White Christian Woman
Robert Mansfield’s decision to emigrate to Australia has cast a damper over the National Conference of the Liberal Party. Mansfield may have passed severe judgment on himself, but the party has certainly not done so. And why should Mansfield have passed such severe judgment on himself? When fanatics fire shots into your house and then blow up a good part of it, and when your daughter screams in the night, why should you stay? It is true of course that Mansfield has made some pretty stirring speeches in his time. Even at recruiting meetings he would tell people that the party could offer them only toil and blood and tears and sweat. Well, lots of people can face the toil and sweat, but the blood and tears are more difficult.
What moral duty has any person to stay in any particular country? Is there such a thing as an ethics of emigration? What ethics of emigration ever existed in countries like Britain, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Pakistan? If there had been a universal ethics of emigration, there would never have been a United States of America, nor any Afrikanerdom, nor any Zulus. No one thought you were a rat if you emigrated from Ireland to America. But many people in South Africa would think you were a rat if you left. And in Israel too.
Albert Einstein left Germany and emigrated to America. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer returned from America to Germany, and to almost certain death. Today these two men are held in veneration, Einstein because he deepened and widened our knowledge of the universe, Bonhoeffer because he believed there were some things for which a man should be ready to die. If Einstein had stayed in Germany, he would have died. If Bonhoeffer had stayed in America, he might still have been alive.
Not many Afrikaners leave the country. Among them the ethics of emigration is very strong. To emigrate is cowardly. It shows lack of faith in Afrikanerdom, of its ability to face adversity as it did in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902. To emigrate is to lose the identity that God and History have given to the Afrikaner. If he goes to Australia or Canada or England, he will cease to be an Afrikaner. If his name is Labuschagne, it will become Labushane.
The ethics of emigration amongst Indian and coloured South Africans hardly exists. What moral obligation have they to stay in a country which has made them suffer under the Group Areas Act, and has taken the coloured people off the common roll, and put them on a roll of their own, so that their sacred racial identity could be preserved? Growing communities of them can be found in Australia and Canada and England.
And as for the English-speaking, except those who think they have a duty to work for a just order of society, why should they stay? But not many have gone yet. When they do go, some of them join the militant anti-apartheid groups abroad and some spend their time longing for the country they have left, and some decide to forget it all and to give their loyalty to the land of their adoption.
Robert Mansfield did not go to the national conference of course. In fact he has already resigned his Natal chairmanship and has been succeeded by Hugh Mainwaring, son of the great Henry Mainwaring, Chairman of the Natal Executive Council, and aristocrat of Natal. He has threatened more than once to disinherit his son, and perhaps he will do it now.
The rift between Molteno and Patrick Duncan is widening, especially over sport and over John Parker’s underground efforts to get all-white South African teams banned from international competition. Duncan wants the Liberal Party to support John Parker openly, but Molteno regards such a course as suicidal. Duncan also wants the party to get rid of Molteno but that is a much more difficult proposition, for Molteno is the spokesman for the Cape liberal-conservative tradition.
But Philip Drummond is able to prevent a split in the party. It is some strange gift that he possesses.
I have been asked the question, ‘It’s all very well for you to talk about toil and blood and tears and sweat, but what about your children?’ My answer has been, ‘We would have two choices: to stay here and to give our children a father and mother who put some things even above their own children’s safety and happiness, or to leave and to give them a father and mother who put their children’s safety and happiness above all else.’ Which would I choose? They are both good courses, are they not? I hope I would choose the first.
— Mr. Robert Mansfield, in a speech at Pietermaritzburg, 1957.
DOMINEE REFUSES TO CONDUCT
FUNERAL SERVICE
BIG CONGREGATION TORN IN TWO
One of the biggest funeral services ever seen in Bloemfontein came to an end yesterday before it had begun. Dominee van Rooyen announced from the pulpit that he would refuse to take the service for the late Mr. Karel Bosman because black and coloured people were present. It was against the policy of the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk to conduct mixed services and it was also against the policy of the Government. Further, according to the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1957 Bantu were not allowed to worship in a white area without the permission of the Minister of Native Affairs, given with the concurrence of the local authority. No such permission had been obtained and therefore, if he had conducted the service, all Bantu present would have been committing an offence under the Act. He was not prepared to expose them to such penalties. Therefore he regretted that he could not conduct the service. In any event he did not think the time was ripe for such mixed worship. It was very unfortunate that the family of the deceased man had not informed him that a large number of black and coloured people would attend.
The family of the late Mr. Bosman have announced that the funeral service will be held today in the Bloemfontein Presbyterian Church.
Mr. Karel Bosman was the superintendent of the Bochabela township. One could not describe him otherwise than as a greatly loved man. The word paternal has acquired a derogatory meaning in recent years, but Mr. Bosman was invariably addressed in Sotho as Ntate, Father. He was held in especial regard by the old men and women of Bochabela, because of the respect with which he treated them, and because of the pains to which he would go to ensure that such things as pensions and disability grants were given to those who were entitled to them. Many old and infirm men and women never receive these grants, partly because some do not know about them, and partly because old men and women cannot face a struggle with bureaucracy, and give up more easily when there are rebuffs and delays and rudeness. Sometimes the laws governing places like Bochabela can be very harsh, and Mr. Bosman used to soften this harshness whenever he was able.
‘It has come as a great shock to the family,’ said Dr. Michiel Bosman, one of Bloemfontein’s leading surgeons. ‘The people of Bochabela wanted to pay their respects to my father, and it is a scandal that there can be a law to prevent them. My father was a lifelong supporter of the National Party, but he was very critical of the harshness of many of the laws, especially those which control black movement and black housing in a place like Bochabela.’ Mrs. Karel Bosman said she had been deeply shocked by Dominee van Rooyen’s decision. ‘I did not believe that such a thing could happen in a Christian country. It makes me wonder what is happening to us Afrikaner people.’
The congregation of the big Kerk is s
harply divided between those who regard the refusal to hold the funeral service as a Christian scandal, and those who consider that the first duty of the dominee was to uphold the law of the country. There is also a third faction, those who find it intolerable that a black person should sit at any time in a white church, and even more intolerable that a white Christian should have to sit in the same pew in which yesterday or some day before black people had been sitting.
The Reverend Zaccheus Richard Mahabane, twice president-general of the African National Congress, president of the Interdenominational African Ministers’ Federation, and one of the leading ministers of the Methodist Church of South Africa, expressed his grief over the refusal of Dominee van Rooyen to proceed with the funeral service of the late Mr. Karel Bosman.
Mr. Mahabane, seventy-seven years old, white-haired and venerable, who all his long life has cherished the hope that Christian ethics would finally triumph in the shaping of race policy, told of his grave anxiety to interviewing reporters.
‘The people who do this kind of thing, the people who make this kind of law, they do not understand what they are doing to us. This man Karel Bosman was beloved by the people of Bochabela. Now he dies, and they weep for his family, and they want to go to this church to show their sorrow. They bring out their best clothes, they brush their old hats, they polish their old shoes, and they go quietly and reverently to the church. Some of them, even though their bones are old, will go into the church on their hands and knees. What is in their hearts? Only sorrow and love. And then they are told they are not wanted there. Their love is not wanted because there is a law that says that black people cannot show their love in a white church. Gentlemen, my heart is so full that I can hardly speak to you. This thing has dealt a heavy blow to the people of Bochabela. The old ones are grieved, but the young ones say, We told you so; you want to love white people, but white people don’t want your love. These young people are angry with their elders. They say, If white people don’t want black love then they can have black hate. Gentlemen, I have no more to say.’
