D.F. Malan’s public persona was one of austerity. Historians have made numerous comments about his unimpressive appearance and his humourless facade. That such a man was able to defeat the legendary General Jan Smuts in South Africa’s 1948 election, which has become one of the greatest turning points in South Africa’s history, left the international community gasping in shock and disbelief. Explanations of the 1948 election have ranged from an upwelling of white paranoia and racism to disenchantment with war measures which were still in place, to Smuts’ preoccupation with international affairs instead of local problems. However, a Weberian analysis of D.F. Malan’s person and his leadership of the Afrikaner Nationalist movement shed a new and plausible light on the event that heralded the age of apartheid.

Little has been written about the personal life of D.F. Malan, South Africa’s first apartheid prime minister. He has been stereotyped as the grim ex-dominee who guided his flock with a rigid hand – the archetypical Afrikaner alpha-male. However, a scrutiny of his private documents reveals a rich tapestry of independent-minded women who dominated his personal life. They include his gifted sister Cinie who became a missionary in the erstwhile Rhodesia; his long-time friend Nettie, who raised his children for him after he was widowed; his step-mother who played the role of pastoriemoeder for the unmarried young Dutch Reformed minister; his young wife who died when pregnant with their third child and his second wife who did not hesitate to tease Churchill about his claims to have swum across the ‘mighty Apies river’. The article dismantles the stereotype by offering an enriching glimpse of D.F. Malan the private man, from the shy youth to the scatter-brained politician who needed women to ensure that he was properly dressed. His views on women are examined: they baffled him on the one hand, but he supported their enfranchisement on the other. Thus, another facet will be added to a man who has been portrayed as intensely one-dimensional.

The study of international intellectual networks has the potential of making an important contribution to South African historiography, in particular the study of Afrikaner nationalism. Afrikaner nationalism itself is shrouded in mythology and has, rightly or wrongly, been equated with white racism and apartheid. For a large part of the twentieth century, an influential theory held that Afrikaner nationalism and racism was the result of an isolationist frontier mentality. According to this theory, Dutch frontier farmers moved deep into the South African interior where they led an isolated existence, maintaining a “primitive” 17th century Dutch Calvinism, far removed from intellectual developments in Europe. This theory was challenged by Marxist scholars in the 1970’s, but the basic isolationist myth was never addressed – and therefore never questioned. However, when the number of prominent Afrikaners, who studied in Europe, and especially in the Netherlands, is taken into account, the perception that Afrikaner nationalism was an isolated phenomenon becomes problematic. Three successive 20th century South African prime ministers studied in Europe – and two of them in the Netherlands. Of these, Dr. D.F. Malan is of particular interest. He studied theology at the Stellenbosch Seminary, which was established by Utrecht alumni, and followed the example of his professors by pursuing further studies at the University of Utrecht, where he obtained a Doctorate in Divinity in 1905. His arrival in Utrecht in October 1900 coincided with the Dutch public’s passionate displays of sympathy for their stamverwanten in South Africa who were fighting in the Anglo-Boer War. Being in the Netherlands enabled Malan to observe and grasp the realities of European power politics, which prevented the Dutch government from providing any substantial support to the Boers. He travelled the European continent at a time when nationalism was as yet untested by the horrors of the First World War and his contacts with international students at a students’ conference in Denmark confirmed his belief in the virtues of cultural diversity, much in the spirit of the German philosopher, Herder. The influence exerted by Malan’s Dutch mentor, Prof. J.J.P. Valeton Jr. was also significant: at a time when Abraham Kuyper was prime minister, Valeton taught Malan that politics and religion were irreconcilable. Malan made Valeton’s views his own, and refrained from politics for ten years after completing his studies, but after great internal struggle, his career eventually followed the same pattern as Kuyper’s. The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of D.F. Malan’s studies at the University of Utrecht on his formulation of Afrikaner nationalism, and through this, to place Afrikaner nationalism within a broader, international context. This will challenge the myth that Afrikaner nationalism was formulated by people who were isolated from intellectual movements in Europe.

D.F. Malan is known as the prime minister who instituted apartheid in 1948. His racial prejudice goes without saying. Yet, Malan's perception of race was relatively fluid and was directly related to his development as a politician and his concern about the poor white problem, particularly his notions of poor white agency. During his early career, Malan regarded the poor whites as makers of their own fate and was concerned that their depravity threatened the racial hierarchy of the day. His views of Africans reflected the paternalism of his time, but were relatively tolerant and supportive of African education. However, by the 1920s, Malan joined in a growing tendency to link poor whiteism to cheap African labour and to plead for segregation. Poor whites were now regarded as victims of circumstance. By the 1930s, Malan, who had since become leader of the National Party, tapped into a widespread fear of miscegenation in the wake of the Carnegie Commission and 1938 Centenary to depict Africans as a direct threat to the survival of the white race. The segregationist measures his party advocated during this time would be reflected in the first apartheid laws to be instituted in 1949 and 1950.

The Dutch Reformed Church has been regarded as an apartheid collaborator due to its close relationship with the National Party, earning it the label “The National Party at prayer”. This perception is strengthened by the fact that a number of prominent Afrikaner Nationalist politicians were former clergymen. One of the most prominent, was D.F. Malan, the first of the apartheid prime ministers and the only former Dutch Reformed minister to occupy the position of head of government. The assumption is easily made that Malan exchanged the pulpit for the podium in order to preach to the entire volk, thus drawing party and church closer together. This article examines Malan’s views on church and state, as well as his relationship with the church after his entry into politics in 1915. It finds that he supported the separation of the institutions of church and state, but believed that both institutions were accountable to God and hence, had to adhere to the same belief-system: God-given Afrikaner Nationalism. Malan never explained this distinction in his thinking to his followers. In his political dealings, he refrained from interfering in church affairs, but vaguely referred to cooperation between the institutions, although that never took any concrete form.

This work is not a conventional autobiography or memoir. Even after more than 500 pages, General Magnus Malan’s private life remains a closed book. His childhood, marriage and fatherhood appear almost incidental to what is essentially the story of a professional career. It reads like an institutional history of the South African Defence Force (SADF), wherein the subject inserts his own life story. As the author himself puts it, “42 years of my life were inextricably entwined with the Defence Force” (p 432). Malan’s very identity is bound up in the SADF; it is the SADF that defines who Malan is and gives his life story meaning. This much is implied in the book’s Afrikaans title: “My lewe saam met die SA Weermag”. The English title, however, does not suggest quite the same degree of intimacy. Still, this close association means that Malan embodied the SADF’s ethos during the 1970s and 1980s, and that the technocrat turned securocrat left an indelible imprint on the institution.

When D.F. Malan retired from politics in 1954, after leading his party to victory in 1948, he had been at the forefront of the Afrikaner nationalist movement for nearly forty years. His retirement signified a changing of the guard, with the baton being passed, albeit grudgingly, to a new generation of nationalists, and power shifting from the Cape to the Transvaal. Malan’s successor, J.G. Strijdom, suffered from ill health and merely presided over the interlude before the more infamous Verwoerdian era. This reflects an important reality: both Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid went through several stages, which often coincided with the leader and his powerbase. It is therefore crucial to distinguish between the different phases in order to achieve a more nuanced and differentiated understanding of both apartheid and the apartheid economy. In this instance, D.F. Malan himself is a useful starting point for characterising the Nationalists’ ambivalence towards political and economic ideology, as well as the more prosaic reality of contemporary party politics. As a student in The Netherlands at the turn of the century, Malan witnessed the rise of European socialism and an assertive, unionised working class. He was well versed in Karl Marx’s theory and even published a lecture entitled ‘Socialism’ in 1913. Yet, he rejected socialism on both religious and nationalist grounds, as a subversive force with no respect for authority or cultural diversity. However, he also blamed the rise of unbridled capitalism for the rise of destructive class distinctions and regarded it as a peril to poor white Afrikaners, who were being priced out of the market by cheap black labour. He characterised the mining magnates as ‘parasites’ and ‘monopolistic bloodsuckers’ and called for the ‘appropriation’ of South Africa’s riches – or at least for tight state regulation of the mines and other key industries, and a share of the profits. On the eve of apartheid, Malan listed capitalism and communism – the two lackeys of British imperialism – as the greatest threats to Afrikanerdom. The question could therefore be asked: if not either of these ‘isms’, then what? At the same time, this capitalist-communist dichotomy belies the convoluted nature of the Afrikaner nationalist worldview. It is impossible to separate economic priorities from persistent anxieties over the poor white problem, which was in turn inextricably linked to black labour and segregation. Regional and generation distinctions within the broader movement, the political concerns of the day, as well as personal and political alliances all served to shape a policy that was at once continuous and ad hoc. This paper aims to tease out some of these contradictions, in order to provide a basis for reflection on the complexities of the early apartheid state and its economic policies.