(Author: Tony Leon, Vol. 71, No. 1, Pesach 2016)
In a recent essay, entitled ‘Fear’, published in The New York Review of Books, the prize-winning US novelist Marilynne Robinson accused certain extremist strands in contemporary American Christianity of being ‘unchristian’ in that they pedal a noxious cocktail of “Ignorance, intolerance, and belligerent nationalism.”1
Had she written her piece, say, last week and despite her literary gifts, she might have found insufficient words in our lexicon to give adequate expression to describe the hate-fuelled festival of violence the Islamic State Jihadists unleashed on over 120 innocent Parisians. And the commensurate fear and loathing it has induced across both sides of the Atlantic and doubtless far beyond.
But her description strikes an apt note on which to launch Professor Milton Shain’s excellent new book A Perfect Storm: Anti-Semitism in South Africa 1930-1948. We meet in the impressive precinct which houses the centre of Cape Town’s vibrant and modern Jewish communal life, including this iconic SA Jewish Museum. As Shain notes toward the end of his 296-pages of impressive scholarship, we do so in broad conditions of peace and amity for this community in today’s South Africa. Despite the background noise generated by the BDS and the occasional political tourism to these shores visited upon us by Hamas, I think Shain is correct to state, “With the celebration of cultural diversity after 1990 in the new post-apartheid democratic South Africa, the threat of crude anti-Semitism receded even further.”
But this book covers two of the most important decades, between world wars, of South Africa’s turbulent twentieth century, from 1930 until the end of the 1940s. During this time, as the author describes it, “The South African Jewish community was under siege domestically and helplessly observing the plight of their co-religionists in Europe…And, for a great number of whites, both English and Afrikaans speakers, the Jew was an unwelcome challenge and a disturbing addition to society.”
If you substitute the word ‘Zimbabwean’ or ‘Somalian’ or ‘Malawian’ for ‘Jew’, you will immediately see how very strong the xenophobic thread remains in contemporary South Africa, on which more reflections further on.
Professor Shain’s gift to us, in the form of this new work, is not simply his meticulous research and careful chronicling of a now almost forgotten era. These are far more important and enduring than the ‘agit-prop’ rhetoric which seems to consume certain of his former colleagues at the University of Cape Town and his book is a timely reminder that proper research is far more persuasive than, for example, angry op-eds in the Cape Times. But what is so striking in A Perfect Storm is the way it dramatically revisits the sturm und drang of the clashes and conflicts and the naked racism and nativist impulses in which such a small, even marginal, fragment of the white community, the Jews, assumed centre-stage in the melodrama of local politics.
Shain has unearthed from multiple archives a treasure trove of documents, speeches and articles which spotlight the dangerous bigotry around events from over seventy years ago. And it illustrates how these were exploited, both from inner conviction and also for reasons of political opportunism, by some of the leading figures of those times. He vividly revives a host of characters, many of them villainous in their race prejudice. This book is also a reminder that not all of 20th Century politics was concerned with anti-black prejudices and practices by the ruling white minority, but the fear of ‘the other’ and ‘the outsider’ also fuelled extreme reactions within the white community itself.
Many of the leading antisemites described in these pages were ‘sincere’ in their Jew-hatred and regarded the resolution of the “Jewish Question” as part of resolving the economic deprivation of the significant ‘poor white’ population; in 1932, both ‘poor’ and ‘very poor’ Whites constituted around 56% of the total White population. Thus, the author notes, “Jew hatred was not a marginal factor in South African public life during those troubled years. Indeed, awesome and nefarious power was conferred on a community that comprised a mere 4.5% of the total white population. Defined by the radical right as an existential danger, the Jewish population in reality posed no challenge to power and made no claim on state resources.”
Many of the leaders of the most virulent anti-Jewish agitation of the day were marginal figures from the Afrikaans speaking community, such as Louis Weichardt, founder of the Greyshirts. Others were extreme far-right figures in the ascending power constituted by the Herenigde Nasionale Party [Reunited National Party] which would win power in May 1948. The utterances of Oswald Pirow, Eric Louw, and Nico Diederichs, for example, are usefully revisited. In their world view, a strident anti-capitalism – assisted by the depiction in the cartoons in Die Burger of “Hoggenheimer”.
However, by far, the most interesting and certainly the most powerful political figure depicted in A Perfect Storm is the leader of Afrikaner nationalism, and of the HNP of the day, Dr D F Malan. He emerges from these pages as both a crafty politician – determined not to be outflanked in anti-Jewish prejudice from the far right – and as a five star opportunist. He cynically noted in an interview in 1931, “It is very easy to rouse a feeling of hate towards the Jew in the country.” As leader of the opposition, Malan assiduously fanned these flames of enmity and yet as soon as he achieved power as Prime Minister, dropped antisemitism from his political repertoire, and went in the opposite direction. Of his malleable antisemitism the author records that, once in power, Malan would switch from depicting the Jews as ‘unassimilable’ to using their example as model for Afrikaans survival in a rapidly decolonising world.
While the United Party of Jan Smuts and J H Hofmeyr emerges from this account as holding the line against the extreme anti-Jewish feelings of the day, even the liberal Hofmeyr, who opposed the Quota Act stoutly, warned in 1930 that South Africa needed to maintain its ‘racial stock’. Smuts, as in most areas barring his crucial inability to apply his generous sense of humanity to the issue of Black advancement in South Africa, saw the danger of prejudice against Jews in larger terms. He told a 1943 election meeting in Cape Town, “Today it is the Jew who is attacked; tomorrow it may be your own rights. You never know when it will stop.”
It would be wrong to infer that the two decades of rousing anti-Jewish prejudice in the inter-war years was confined to Afrikaans leaders, or was simply used as a lever to advance the interests of an impoverished element of white society, pummelled by the Great Depression and bad economic choices, such as clinging for too long to, and then precipitously abandoning, the Gold Standard. It is striking, for example, to read the correspondence of leading UP politician, later Governor-General and founder of a liberal family, Sir Patrick Duncan. He wrote of Muizenberg in 1935, “I have many Jewish friends whom I like and admire. But something in me revolts against our country being peopled by the squat-bodied, furtive-eyed, loud-voiced race which crowds Muizenberg…we have too many of them.”
Since various accusations of racism are currently being levelled against faculty members of the University of Cape Town, one would be hard pressed to find as stellar an example today as the holder back then of the prestigious WP Schreiner Chair of Roman Law and Jurisprudence, Professor Kerr Wylie. His open support for neo-Nazi causes in the 1930s led to an interrogation by the UCT principal and vice chancellor, to which he responded:“Organised Jewry is the leading agent of the devil on earth.”
While A Perfect Storm ends its account in 1948, a great deal of the prejudice and populism it describes has, some sixty-seven years on, direct application to politics both in South Africa today and the wider world. Jihadist terrorism and the push back against migrants are two obvious examples. The politically popular chord which Donald Trump in the US and far right populists in France (for example, Marine Le Pen) strike with voters is another.
In a very significant speech delivered in Mexico City last month, Western Cape Premier Helen Zille – herself the daughter of German refugees who fled the Nazi regime and arrived in South Africa after World War II – joined the dots from the past to the furies of the present debate in the world and in this country.2Noting that the populism of the left and the right has become “increasingly indistinguishable from each other”, she accurately states that “xenophobia sits comfortably with populists of all persuasions”. Populism, as she describes it, is “a political response to a context of widespread public grievance and a pervasive sense of disempowerment. It divides society into ‘victims’ and ‘villains’, ‘saviours’ and ‘scapegoats’”. Populism further “flourishes on conspiracy theories, conjuring up sinister forces seeking to undermine people’s interests.” Zille provides details of the contemporary basis which makes it “easy to mobilise a populist agenda on the agenda of race in South Africa.” Whites – in her view – “…fulfil the criteria for becoming a scapegoat for contemporary South Africa’s problems and policy failures.”
Echoes from the Jew-baiting past of 1930s South Africa and the race-coarsened discourse of today are very apparent. There is little difference between, for example, the ethnic scapegoating of Jews by Weichardt’s Greyshirts in the 1930s and the anti-white rhetoric of Julius Malema’s red overalls, other than a difference in their uniforms and their targets.
The presumed power and wealth of the 1930s Jewish community finds contemporary expression in the attacks, on all fronts these days, on the white community as a whole. Back then there was the issue of Jews being seen as agents for a foreign (“Jewish-British”) and malignant force dragging South Africa into the Second World War. Today it is the ‘CIA’ (for whom a deputy minister suggested the Public Protector was an emissary) or simply “a bloody agent” to borrow Mr Malema’s preferred put down of a foreign journalist. Last week in Business Day, the ruling party chief whip in parliament, for example, mined this trope even further. He accused the Democratic Alliance of supporting foreign interests and external capital in its standpoint on AGOA.
One of the most interesting items Shain unearths is an article written way back in October 1937 by the editor of Die Transvaler, one Dr H F Verwoerd. I will not enter into the political quicksand of suggesting whether or not Dr Verwoerd was a ‘clever politician’. But what his article, entitled ‘’n Botsing van Belange’, reveals is that he provided an intellectually respectable case for the assault on the commercial and professional interests of Jews. This was different in form – though not in essence – from the crude race baiting of the ‘shirt movements’ and later Die Ossewabrandwag.
And, most strikingly from the vantage point of today, it is perhaps the first, although certainly not the last, time in South Africa that the concept of ‘representivity’ and setting quotas to achieve ethnic targets in the professions and the economy as a whole received an airing.
Shain summarises Verwoerd’s argument, in part: “At the root of the conflict between Afrikaners and Jews, maintained Verwoerd, were material interests. The Nationalist did not hate the Jew… (but) Verwoerd accused Jewish businesses of employing only fellow Jews, thereby hindering opportunities for Afrikaners.” In similar vein, areas of conflict had been exacerbated by “Jews moving into the professions, thus further blocking Afrikaner advancement.”
As a solution, Verwoerd advocated a piece of socio-economic engineering “to remove the source of the friction, namely the disproportionate domination of the economy by Jews, by ensuring that Afrikaners received a share of commerce and industry proportionate to its percentage of the white population” (my emphasis). His radical plan was not implemented, formally at least, until eleven years later, when his party achieved political power. But today, with the necessary substitutions, you can trace a direct line between his proposals then and the theory and practise of employment equity targets and the strategy of black economic empowerment. We await the definitive Constitutional Court judgment in the recently argued Correctional Services case, but there is something rather extraordinary in the genesis of ‘representivity’ as a catch-all for economic advancement, and discrimination, in this country.
Perhaps, all ethnic nationalisms, both here and everywhere, have similar outcomes, and perpetuate the marginalisation of a minority to advance the majority interest. Or, to quote the novelist William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”
Tony Leon is a former Member of Parliament who served as leader of the Official Opposition (Democratic Alliance) in the years 1999-2007. From 2009-2012, he was South Africa’s Ambassador to Argentina. This article is adapted from his remarks at the launch of A Perfect Storm: Antisemitism in South Africa 1930-1948 by Milton Shain at the SA Jewish Museum, Cape Town, on 23 November 2015.
NOTES
- Marilynne Robinson: New York Review of Books (September 24-October 7th 2015), p28.
- Helen Zille: Keynote Address on “Populism”: Liberal International Conference. Mexico City, Mexico. 30 October 2015.
