In an article that appeared on Politicsweb on 7 January 2022 the Democratic Alliance’s Head of Policy, Gwen Ngwenya, argued that the ANC leadership today is as determined to pursue ethnic hegemony as the Afrikaner nationalists were after the 1948 election when it embarked on overcoming Afrikaner economic exclusion.

Citing the Super Afrikaners by Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom, she considers the ANC’s policy of ‘cadre deployment’ as similar to the putative preferment of Broeders under the NP government in appointments to posts in civil service, armed forces and the universities. She writes too about the ‘vast network’ of AB lecturers that moulded successive generations into zealous and faithful supporters of NP philosophy.

It is true that at the time that the ANC was putting in place its formal policy of cadre deployment between 1997 and 1998 it was conscious of the Broederbond ‘model’. In an August 1997 interview Kgalema Motlanthe told Padraig O’Malley that he had been reading the Super Afrikaners. This contained he said a description of "what political power means, and how it must be utilised to advance the cause of the Afrikaner. They were very meticulous, they understood that they were now in power and that these levers of power must be utilised to advance their cause."

Motlanthe would be elected as ANC Secretary General in December that year, and in that role be heavily responsible for the formulation and implementation of the cadre deployment policy, with its stated goal of bringing all “levers of power” into the hands of the liberation movement.

Other commentators have also recently argued that the ANC’s policy of ‘cadre deployment’ is not fundamentally different from occurred between 1948 and 1994 under the National Party (NP) government. Justice Malala has described the policy as “similar to what the National Party and its Broederbond did between 1948 and 1994”.

The general assumption is that the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) members were appointed over the heads of those more qualified for key positions in government, public corporations and universities. No evidence is offered for this assertion, and obvious differences have tended to go unremarked.

I

The AB disbanded itself in 1994 and established the Afrikanerbond for people wishing to help build South Africa’s new democracy while also promoting Afrikaner interests. One of its first steps was to commission an experienced historian to write a balanced, properly documented history of the AB from its founding in 1918 to its disbandment.

For this major task it appointed Prof. Ernst Stals, who before his retirement was head of the History department at the Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg). His work, running to 700 pages, has just been published as Die Broederbond: Die Geskiedenis van die Afrikaner-Broederbond,1918-1994 (Johannesburg: Afrikanerbond , 2021).

Stals and I were once colleagues in the History department of the University of Stellenbosch and I knew from the start that one could expect an outstanding study. I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of his manuscript in the late 1990s while working on the final chapters of my book The Afrikaner: Biography of a People (Tafelberg 2003). Stals’s work opened so many fresh perspectives and new insights to me that I gladly complied with the Afrikanerbond’s request to write a preface for the book. His book is indeed one of the most important recent contributions to South African historiography and deserves a wide readership.

One of the many fascinating parts of Stals’s book is an account of the somewhat strange pre-occupation South Africa’s Military Intelligence (MI) developed during the final years of the Second World War with the AB as a major security risk to the country and to its war effort.

On 15 December 1944, with the world war all but over, the South African government under the leadership of Gen. Jan Smuts, used emergency measures to prohibit all civil servants and teachers from AB membership. The main reason given was the secret nature of the organisation. In Parliament Dr. D.F. Malan, the NP leader of the opposition, countered that if the real issue was indeed secrecy the government should have acted as well against the Freemasons, which was also a secret organisation.

Smuts’s United Party had triumphed in the 1943 election by winning 89 seats to the NP’s 43 but the tide was turning against it. Some of the war measures, particularly the detentions of many Afrikaners and perceived discrimination in the civil service against Afrikaners, had become a serious drain on the UP’s Afrikaner support. Overconfident, the UP leadership failed to address the issue.  

Trying to come to grips with its stunning defeat it in the 1948 election the UP leadership seized on the AB as the secret agent that had engineered this setback which it viewed not merely as a defeat but a catastrophe.

In the 1948 elections and subsequent elections the UP tried hard to plant the idea that the AB constituted a malignant force that acted as a major influence on the NP as ruling party. W.K.Hancock, who wrote the best biography of Gen. Jan Smuts, tells the story of the 78 years old statesman exclaiming after the 1948 election: ‘To think that I have been beaten by the Broederbond.’

Stals’s study of the AB offers a much sounder perspective on the whole issue of the AB’s role in the NP’s momentous victory in 1948 and subsequent elections. He writes: ‘Fighting the 1948 election for which it was poorly prepared the UP’s propaganda machine tried to create the bogey of the AB as an octopus-like organisation and soon proceeded to swallowed its own myth.’^[1]

For many years the UP would continue to claim that the AB played a dominant role in Afrikaner life especially in the civil service, churches and universities.

But, as Stals points out, a large degree of unanimity soon developed between the leadership of the NP and that of the AB. They were joined together in a nationalist movement. There is no evidence that the AB had engineered it or was the senior partner.

II

The NP too never had a formal policy to transform the civil service in such a way that it immediately became demographically representative in its upper levels of the white population.

Although there was a influx of Afrikaners in the civil service, particularly from the 1930s on, it was only in 1960 that the senior levels of the service started to resemble the white population composition.

In 1960, 58 per cent of the white population were Afrikaners, 37 per cent were English-speakers and the rest gave both languages as their home language. An analysis of the 1960 census found that in the upper levels of the public administration 57, 2 per cent were Afrikaners against 37,5 English-speakers. (The position was reversed in the private sector. Here only 25 per cent of Afrikaners were in the upper echelon of the job market as directors, managers and self-employed owners against 66 per cent of English-speakers.^[2])

By 1977 one-quarter of English-speakers worked in the public sector, but they occupied less than 10 per cent of the top positions in the central civil service.^[3]

The Afrikanerisation of the civil service was thus a gradual process that began well before 1948 and only culminated in the 1960s and 1970s. It also occurred within the institutions inherited from the British, with the Civil Service Commission remaining in charge of promotions and appointments, with the ‘merit-system’ being applied.

Did a large-scale purge of English-speakers occur in the top levels of the public sector in first 10 years of NP rule? The three major studies on the white oligarchy published in the 1950s make no mention of anything of the sort. Leo Marquard stated: “Appointment and particularly promotion of civil servants goes on without regard for party political affiliations,” except when there was a fundamental policy difference. ^[4]          

Ivan Evans, the only scholar who so far has recently done serious research in this field make this point:

“A perusal of the Public Service List from 1954-1954, which provides complete lists of all civil servants in the various departments of the state, provides no help in tracing the Afrikanerization of the [Native Affairs] Department. Although the list does break down the department’s personnel on the basis of grade and rank, Afrikaner names already heavily dominated the lists for 1947 and 1948, making it difficult to see any marked changes.”^[5]

The change of government in 1948 did not represent any great rupture in the professional quality of the civil service. There were in all likelihood some cases of discrimination against English-speakers when promotion was considered, but senior officials in the public service were normally people who had come up through the ranks.

As far as one can judge from the present state of research there was no loss in economic or administrative efficiency--or at least as far as the white oligarchy in a racially structured system was concerned.

At the Afrikaans churches and universities from the early 1960s the great majority supported the government while a few dissidents expressed mainly moderate criticism and were side-lined because of that.

III

The Broederbond-cadre deployment analogy creates a misleading impression that the composition of the civil service and other organs of government were radically and abruptly transformed after 1948. This is in fact quite wrong.

The replacement of the UP aligned civil servants in the various organs of government occurred gradually without any abrupt loss of expertise in the civil service.

Under the National Party civil servants, whether belonging to the Broederbond or not, still had to work their way up through the ranks, acquire the necessary expertise and experience to do the work, and compete with each other for promotion.

The transformation of the white-dominated central state bureaucracy after 1994 has been of a radically different nature compared to developments after the 1948 election.

In 1994 there was a genuine regime change, not merely the defeat of a ruling party, as was the case in 1948. There was a deliberate effort by the ANC government to remove white South Africans from state employment, at all levels of government, with tens of thousands taking severance packages.

The Public Service Commission meanwhile was stripped of its powers over the career incidents of public servants, the merit-system dismantled, all of which allowed the ANC fill vacated positions with patronage appointees.

Hermann Giliomee is the author of Maverick Africans Tafelberg (2020)