puritans in africa? afrikaner "calvinism" and kuyperian neo-calvinism in late...

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Puritans in Africa? Afrikaner "Calvinism" and Kuyperian Neo-Calvinism in Late Nineteenth-Century South AfricaAuthor(s): Andre du ToitSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), pp. 209-240Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178492 .

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Puritans in Africa? Afrikaner "Calvinism" and Kuyperian Neo- Calvinism in Late Nineteenth- Century South Africa ANDRE DU TOIT

University of Stellenbosch

I

Accounts of South African history and politics have been much influenced by what might be termed the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history.1 As a model for the historical understanding of modem Afrikaner nationalism and of the ideology of apartheid it has proved persuasive to historians and social scientists alike. In outline, it amounts to the view that the "seventeenth- century Calvinism" which the Afrikaner founding fathers derived from their countries of origin became fixed in the isolated frontier conditions of trekboer society and survived for generations in the form of a kind of "primitive Calvinism"; that in the first part of the nineteenth century, this gave rise to a nascent chosen people ideology among early Afrikaners, which provided much of the motivation for, as well as the self-understanding of, that central event in Afrikaner history, the Great Trek, while simultaneously serving to legitimate the conquest and subordination of indigenous peoples; and that, mediated in this way, an authentic tradition of Afrikaner Calvinism thus constitutes the root source of modem Afrikaner nationalism and the ideology of apartheid. In fact, very little of this purported historical explanation will stand up to rigorous critical scrutiny: in vain will one look for hard evidence, either in the primary sources of early Afrikaner political thinking or in the

This article is based on a longer and more comprehensive paper written during 1981 while I was a Fellow of the Southern African Research Program at Yale University. Thanks are due to the National Endowment for the Humanities and to the Ford Foundation, which funded this program. I also wish to thank the following friends and colleagues for helpful comments, criticisms, and references: Gerrit Schutte, Richard Elphick, Leonard Thompson, Harry Brinkman, Bob Goudz- waard, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Jaap Durand, David Bosch, and Hermann Giliomee.

1 The Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history figures prominently both in Afrikaner historiography and in South African liberal historiography, and is often assumed by social scientists writing on race and politics in South Africa. The Bibliographical Comment included at the end of this article sets out the principal examples of this literature.

0010-4175/85/2148-2326 $2.50 ? 1985 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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210 ANDRE DU TOIT

contemporary secondary literature, of a set of popular beliefs that might be recognised as "primitive Calvinism" or as an ideology of a chosen people with a national mission.2

Only from the last decades of the nineteenth century do we find Calvinistic views articulated and appropriated by Afrikaners themselves, and then they occur in the context of the reception, from the Netherlands, of the neo- Calvinistic notions there being urged as a religious world view and a program of principles underlying the policy of the Anti-Revolutionary Party by the Dutch theologian and politician, Abraham Kuyper.3 This state of affairs makes the Calvinist paradigm obviously untenable as an historical explanation of contemporary Afrikaner ideologies and political practices. It also raises some other and more general questions about Calvinist traditions in a comparative perspective: In what sense, if any, may Afrikaner political and religious thinking be said to belong to a Calvinist tradition? What are the similarities and differences, both as regards the social preconditions and the historical experiences, between the early Afrikaners at the Cape of Good Hope and, for example, the Puritans in New England? What significance should be given to the linkages between the Kuyperian revival of Calvinism in the Netherlands and the emergence of "Christian-National" ideas of calling and mission among Afrikaners from the end of the nineteenth century? This article will attempt to explore some of these questions, mainly by way of a case study of the respective Calvinist notions in the Paardekraal speeches of President Paul Kruger and in the writings of S. J. du Toit from the 1880s.

II

By way of preliminaries, some reflection is in order on the sense of Calvinism that is involved in the prevailing accounts of Afrikaner history, as well as on the appropriately qualified sense in which it may be historically or theologically warranted to speak of Afrikaner Calvinism. A striking feature of the literature subscribing to the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history is the absence of a distinctive theological framework or context. Calvinism, in this literature, is virtually a vacuous term. This is the more striking since no one would think of giving an account of seventeenth-century Calvinism in the Netherlands or in England without due regard to the highly developed set of

2 See my "No Chosen People: "The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology," American Historical Review, 88:4 (1983), 20-52; idem, "Captive to the Nationalist Paradigm: Prof. F. A. van Jaarsveld and the Historical Evidence for the Afrikaner's Ideas on his Calling and Mission," South African Historical Journal, 16 (1984), 48-79.

3 It is, however, extraordinary that the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history had already made its appearance in the secondary literature some decades earlier. This can be traced to the influential writings of David Livingstone in the 1850s, and it derived from Livingstone's own assumptions of a divine calling and mission and his polemical concerns at the time, rather than being based on any firsthand knowledge of early Afrikaner views; see my "No Chosen People," 939ff.



PURITANS IN AFRICA? THE PARADIGM EXAMINED 211

religious doctrines that provided the mainspring for political and social action

by Calvinists and Puritans. If we reflect on the very different social and intellectual environments

involved, however, this contrast becomes readily understandable. In northern Europe, Calvinism was an integral part of the flowering of social and intellectual activity which accompanied the structural transformation of the economy and society of an advanced civilisation.4 As a religious movement, it issued from the complex struggles which had convulsed and invigorated the mighty church during the sixteenth century, while its theological roots lay deep in the

disputations of the schools and early Christian traditions. It is only natural, then, that understanding Calvinism at all involves mastery of a great deal of

theology. It requires not merely that one be versed in Calvin's own Institutes

of the Christian Religion, but also demands some degree of familiarity with the development of doctrine in the Synods of Westminster and Dordt; the elaborate theological treatises of Theodor de Beze, William Perkins, and William Ames; the crucial dogmatic disputes between Arminians, Erastians, Antinomians, and Contraremonstrants; the respective theological positions of such as Voetius and Coccejus, etcetera. Nor is the Calvinist doctrine confined to theological treatises. Its theological content and social implications can be traced, for example, in the sermons preached by Stephen Marshall and other Puritan clergymen before Cromwell's Long Parliament or in the election-day sermons of Puritan New England. For in those new Puritan settlements, too, the preconditions existed to sustain a vigorous theological tradition. Among the Puritans arriving in New England before 1640 were no fewer than 130 university graduates, 92 of them ministers.5 From John Winthrop down, these Puritan divines were prepared and willing to deal with intellectual issues, theological, moral, and social. In this context the Puritan idea of a national covenant was far from a free-floating and undifferentiated popular belief in their somehow being a chosen people. On the contrary, the theory of the social covenant was embedded in an elaborate theology of the covenant, a systematic federal theology. In Perry Miller's words, "No political writing of seventeenth-century Massachusetts and Connecticut can be fully understood without reference to the whole system,"6 a subtle and dialectical body of theory specifically devised to deal with the basic theological issues.

At the Cape of Good Hope, by contrast, preconditions for a theological tradition of this kind were wholly absent. The nature of the settlement at the

4 See, e.g., Michael Walzer, "Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology," History and Theory, 3:1 (1963), 118-54. Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1968); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 1958); Andre Bieler, La pensee economique et social de Calvin (Geneva. 1959).

5 W. S. Hudson, ed., Nationalism and Religion in America (New York, 1970), 3. 6 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1954),

414; see also chs. 13, 14.



212 ANDRE DU TOIT

Cape was largely determined by the overriding mercantile objectives of the Dutch East India Company, which was not interested in maintenance of much more than a refreshment post. Early settlers, both officials and freeburghers, were very few in number and their intellectual qualifications or resources were limited; the rudimentary ministrations of the few early clergymen left no recognisable theological impact; and, in any case, once colonists began to carve out extensive cattle farms beyond the coastal mountain ranges early in the eighteenth century, these migratory frontier farmers-the trekboers- were soon removed to or beyond the limits of the church's effective influence. Linked only tenously with the market and the cash economy based on the Cape, without regular schools, for the most part outside the reach of the few functioning congregations and subject to only the flimsiest of administrative controls, the trekboers outside of the western Cape were in fact for generations without most of the institutional constraints or socializing agencies which could have been instrumental in retaining and transmitting intellectual and social traditions.7 In such circumstances it becomes questionable in what sense one could expect to find any theological tradition at all, let alone such a systematic and sophisticated doctrine as that of Calvinism. Accordingly, the literature tends to refer to the "primitive Calvinism" of these early Af- rikaners. Still, there must surely be some theological kernel to justify the use of the term Calvinism. However, it is characteristic-and significant-that we find little or no attempt to give any such theological content to this supposed tradition of Afrikaner Calvinism at all.

One of the few attempts to specify the meaning of Calvinism in this context is provided by J. J. Loubser. The characteristic tenets of orthodox Calvinist faith, he says, comprise the following: first, "a belief in the sovereign God, sole creator and ruler through his Providence of the universe"; second, "the inborn sinfulness of both man and world as a result of the Fall"; third, "the election by predestination of the few through grace to glorify God . . . and the damnation of the rest of mankind, also to the glory of God"; and fourth, "the central place [given] to the Bible [meaning in practice], a thoroughgoing fundamentalism, a literal interpretation of the Bible, not only as the revealed Word but also as the final source of all knowledge."8

As to these tenets, evidence purporting to show the presence among early Afrikaners of a Calvinist belief in the sovereignty of God is occasionally put

7 See Andre du Toit and Hermann Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought: Documents and Analyses. Vol. 1: 1780-1850 (Cape Town and Berkeley, 1983), ch. 1: "The Historical Context." See also Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, eds., The Shaping of South African Society: 1652-1820 (Cape Town, 1979).

8 Loubser, "Calvinism, Equality, and Inclusion," 371. Cf. Daniel Walker Howe's use of the five points of Dordt as a framework for his comparative survey of Calvinism, "The Decline of Calvinism: An Approach to Its Study," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14:3 (1972), 307.




forward.9 However, at the unsophisticated level of popular religious belief it is very difficult to discriminate specifically Calvinist concepts of divine sov-

ereignty from more general pious acknowledgements of divine rule or Pro- vidential guidance. Much the same applies to the doctrine of original sin and to fundamentalism. 0 Theologically, almost the whole case for the existence of a primitive Calvinism among early Afrikaners thus becomes dependent upon their profession of the doctrine of predestination. Moreover, it is pre- cisely this idea of divine election and predestination which is claimed to provide the link with the later Afrikaner social ideology of a chosen people, as legitimation for racial conquest and subordination. This being the case, it is most surprising that no one has attempted to marshall evidence for the presence of serious belief in predestination as a theological doctrine among early Afrikaners. I Nor does there appear to be much evidence to support this

proposition in the better known descriptions of religious life at the Cape in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, compared to the extensive documentation of the impact of evangelical theology beginning with the activities of the Reverends M. C. Vos and Helperus Ritzema Van Lier from the 1790s.12 In short, in the prevailing accounts the specifically theological component of Afrikaner Calvinism has, ironically enough, been largely elided, and the notion of a primitive Calvinism serves primarily as a disclaimer obviating the need to fill in any such theological framework or content.

This does not mean, however, that there have been no investigations relevant to the existence of a Calvinist tradition in South African church history or religious life at all. Some interesting work has indeed been done in this connection. Thus, for example, B. Spoelstra has traced the history of the Doppers, an identifiable subcommunity among the trekboers of the north-

9 See, e.g., Moodie, Rise of Afrikanerdom, 22-23. 10 For some perceptive critical comments on the pervasive confusions in the literature regard-

ing Afrikaner fundamentalism, see Irving Hexham, "Dutch Calvinism and the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism," African Affairs, 79: (1980), 200.

1 i Given the meagre and fragmentary evidence regarding the popular religious beliefs or theological traditions of early Afrikaners, this is unlikely to be forthcoming. In general there is a serious lack of a critical and comprehensive social history of early South African religious and theological traditions. In the circumstances perhaps the most useful source, though limited to the clergy, is H. D. A. du Toit, "Predikers en hul Prediking in die N. G. Kerk in Suid-Afrika" (D. Th. diss., Pretoria University, 1947). It is significant that there is only incidental mention of the doctrinal theme of predestination in this exhaustive survey of sermons and preachers. For some references to predestination in the preaching of Dutch Reformed Church ministers by the middle of the nineteenth century, see M. C. Kitshoff, Gottlieb Wilhelm Antony van der Lingen: Kaapse Predikant uit die Negentiende Eeu (Groningen, 1972), 46.

12 See, e.g., T. N. Hanekom, Helperus Ritzema van Lier: Lewensbeeld van 'n Kaapse predikant van die Agtiende Eeu (Cape Town, 1959); "M. C. Vos,'" Dictionary of South African Biography, W. J. de Kock, ed. (Cape Town, 1972), II, 822-24. See also the references to the impact of Vos's work on the Tulbagh congregation in H. Lichtenstein, Travels in Southern Africa in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806 (Cape Town, 1928).



214 ANDRE DU TOIT

eastern Cape Colony, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the time of their prominent role in founding the separatist Gereformeerde Kerk in the late nineteenth century.13 With their hostility to religious innovation such as

hymn-singing, their characteristic political attitudes, and divergent cultural traits, the Doppers provide evidence of a distinctive tradition that might seem to resemble the vaunted primitive Calvinism ascribed to early Afrikaners. But on closer investigation, the history of the Doppers hardly fits the main theses of the Calvinist paradigm. To start with, the Doppers were clearly a minority group within the Afrikaner community as a whole; all accounts stress their

divergent traits and attitudes. With the important exceptions of President

Kruger and, to a lesser extent, Andries Potgieter, neither individual members nor the Doppers as a group played a prominent part in early Afrikaner history. Next, the Doppers were not of specifically Calvinist extraction. They did not derive from the French Huguenots or even from Dutch ancestors; a large majority of the characteristically Dopper families are of German origin, and

may well have initially been Lutherans.14 Moreover, the Doppers of the northeastern Cape Colony did not in any substantial numbers take part in the Great Trek, even though they were among the trekboers who had begun to move into the Southern Free State as early as the 1820s. Nor was this a coincidence: the Doppers did not share the political motivation of those who made the Great Trek, the Voortrekkers, who came from the more turbulent southern sections of the eastern Cape frontier. Then, as later, Doppers tended rather to be loyalist in their attitudes towards the state even where this meant the British colonial administration.15 The Doppers may indeed have been the closest thing to an authentic Afrikaner Calvinist tradition16-and we will

shortly turn to a closer investigation of this tradition in the person and thought of Paul Kruger himself-but if they are to be taken as the model, then the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history will have to be thoroughly recast. In

short, Spoelstra's effort to make the history of the Doppers fit into the standard paradigm of Afrikaner history tends to skew this otherwise laudable

pioneering investigation of the religious and intellectual history of Afrikaner Calvinism.

There are other possible perspectives for a genuine history of Calvinism in South Africa. Thus the German sociologist Gerhard Beckers has provided a

suggestive analysis of the sense in which Afrikaner church history might be

'3 Spoelstra, Die Doppers in Suid-Afrika, 1760-1899 (Johannesburg, 1963). '4 Ibid., 20. 15 Ibid., 27-29. 16 It must, however, remain a moot point what the actual nature and content of early Dopper

religious beliefs really were. Spoelstra, like other writers, simply assumes that the Gereformeerde or Dopper tradition from the second half of the nineteenth century can be equated with its predecessor in all essentials. But this is to assimilate a tradition of organised religious belief largely fashioned by trained theologians from the Netherlands. such as the Reverend Postma, with an inchoate set of popular beliefs.




placed in a Calvinist framework. He points to the crucial significance in Calvinism of a "pathos for order" as constituting the social expression of the Calvinist faith in God's sovereignty and as underlying the Calvinist understanding of Christian mission, not primarily as one of spreading the Gospel among the heathen, but rather in terms of the establishment and maintenance of a Christian social and political order.17 In the South African case the significance of this central idea of order was reinforced by the relative absence of the tension, usual to Calvinist movements, between individual or local appeals to Biblical revelation and the juridical authority of the organised church-an organised church, moreover, which was closely integrated with, and for all practical purposes subordinate to, the political authorities. For close on two centuries the Dutch Reformed Church at the Cape met with little sectarian activity, and the authority of the prevailing (politico-religious) order went largely unquestioned. 18 From the outset therefore Afrikaner church history tended to be characterised by a particular kind of legalism in which questions of quasi-juristic competence received precedence-as witness the eighteenth-century objections to missionary activities or to special religious meetings (oefenhouerij) as being contrary to the good order. 19 In this perspective it becomes intelligible why the later church conflicts in the Transvaal from the 1850s were not so much about doctrinal differences or inspired by religious movements, but were largely concerned with the implications of the close connection between church and state (in this case, the Cape Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church and the British colonial authorities), as well as with controversies about juristic competencies such as the right to ordination or even the entitlement to the correct name of the church. To the extent that all of this can be related to an underlying and specifically Calvinist idea of order- an order which Beckers suggests was in practice also assumed to be identical with the social and racial hierarchy of patriarchal trekboer society20-it may still prove possible to bring Afrikaner social and religious history within the compass of a general Calvinist tradition. Beckers himself has done little more than to sketch the outline of a possible interpretation. Whether or not this analysis will prove historically plausible, it will be noticed that it has very little in common with standard accounts of Calvinist doctrines of predestination and the elect or of the nature and place of primitive Calvinism in Af- rikaner history in the prevailing literature.

17 Gerhard Beckers, Religiise Faktoren in der Entwicklung der Sud-afrikanischen Rassen- frage: Ein Beitrag zur Rolle des Kalvinismus in Kolonialen Situationen (Mtinchen, 1969), 89ff. See also Michael Walzer's analysis of Calvin's basic understanding of politics as aimed at establishing a repressive order, The Revolution of the Saints (New York, 1972), 31-57, 199- 204, 306-20.

18 Beckers, Religiose Faktoren, 110-14. 19 Ibid., 114-16. 20 Ibid., 117-19.



216 ANDRE DU TOIT

III

Before we turn to the case studies of the "Calvinist" notions of different kinds appearing in speeches and writings of leading Afrikaners in the 1880s and 1890s, we will do well to reflect briefly on the great changes which had occurred in the social conditions of the Afrikaner community. The fact is that the social and intellectual contexts of Afrikaner political and religious thinking after about 1870 (and in the Cape from some twenty or thirty years earlier) became fundamentally different from what had gone before. In the course of the eighteenth century, trekboer society had been spawned in conditions of virtual isolation as these migrating cattle farmers continually extended the open and pioneering frontiers in the interior of the Cape Colony. In the early nineteenth century, first the northeastern frontier (against the San) and then the eastern frontier (against the Xhosa) began to close as British rule was more firmly imposed, but from 1836 the Voortrekkers embarked on the epic Great Trek and reopened the pioneering frontier on the Highveld and in Natal. The new Voortrekker settlements and the emerging republican communities of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, as much as the pioneering life of the trekboers on the earlier frontiers, were characterised by a thoroughgoing cultural insularity. Lacking regular schools, largely beyond the orbit of the organised church, denied easy access to newspapers or literature of any description, and with only the most fragmentary ties to the Cape economy, both trekboers and Voortrekkers could indeed be said to have been effectively cut off from much of the development of social thought and intellectual currents sweeping the rest of the moder world. It is in fact a matter of considerable difficulty to ascertain just what the patterns of political thinking and religious belief were that formed under these conditions. But whatever they may have been, they cannot be summarily equated with the views that obtained in the very different set of conditions that existed after the various frontiers had finally closed.21

The more settled communities on the closing frontier, beginning in the Cape interior in the 1840s and in the republics during the 1860s and 1870s, were becoming culturally and socially much less insulated. With the building of roads linking the interior to the main ports, the establishment of organised education, the spread of functioning congregations to villages throughout the interior, the increasing effectiveness of central and local governments, the growth in circulation and influence of regional and local newspapers, and,

21 For an illuminating analysis of the different structural processes involved on the open pioneering frontier and on the closing frontier, see Hermann Giliomee, "Processes of Develop- ment of the South African Frontier," in The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, L. M. Thompson and H. Lamar, eds. (New Haven, 1981). For a general discussion of cultural conditions in trekboer society on the pioneering frontier prior to the Great Trek, see C. F. J. Muller, Die Oorsprong van die Groot Trek (Cape Town, 1974), 146-69; and G. D. Scholtz, Die Ontwikkeling van die Politieke Denke van die Afrikaner. Vol. II: 1854-1881 (Johannesburg, 1974), 63-78.




finally, the advent of railways connecting the whole of South Africa in the 1870s and 1880s, a transformed social and intellectual context had been created. Even the rural communities of the 1890s were living in a totally different world from the trekboer and Voortrekker societies of two generations before.

The changes in South African life were particularly striking as they affected church practices and religious traditions.22 Up to the 1830s it could still be said that the religious practices of the frontier farmers were centred on Bible readings within the patriarchal family unit and on the quarterly gatherings for Holy Communion, or Nachtmaal, in much the same way as it had been for their fathers and grandfathers-and for the Voortrekkers this continued for a generation more. But subsequent Afrikaner church history was transformed by a series of powerful impulses from the organised religions of the outside world. Activities of missionary societies, and especially their influential criticisms of colonial conquest and labour practices, had occasioned intense political and religious controverises from the early nineteenth century, and the influx of Scottish ministers from the 1820s (in lieu of the clergy from the Netherlands during the period before British rule) had a powerful impact on the Cape Dutch Reformed Church. These ministers quickly came to play a dominant role in the Cape Synod and were largely responsible for fashioning its specific tradition of orthodox evangelical piety. The first generations of locally born and educated clergy were profoundly influenced by liberal theological traditions, as were their successors by the neo-Calvinist traditions prevailing in the seminaries in Holland from which Afrikaner clergy gradu- ated in more substantial numbers from the 1840s. A variety of Dutch clergymen, such as the Reverends Dirk van der Hoff, Dirk Postma, Jan and Frans Lion Cachet, D. P. M. Huet, and J. Beyer, put their respective stamps on the various Afrikaans churches that sprung up in the Transvaal. The 1850s and 1860s were a time of intense church struggle and theological controversy: even as it was transformed by the great evangelical revival, the Dutch Re- formed Church in the Cape was wrenched by the bitter struggle following the hierarchy's clampdown on the liberal tendencies of J. J. Kotze, Thomas F. Burgers, and S. P. Naude, a conflict which spilled over from the synod to the civil courts and local congregations. In the north the conflicts and complex controversies attendant on the founding of separatist churches, which had been presaged by intense disputes in local congregations, made themselves felt in every aspect of social life. Although traditional religious belief derived

22 There is no satisfactory general treatment of Afrikaner religious and church history during the nineteenth century. The biographies of the main church leaders, like Andrew Murray, the Reverends van der Hoff, Postma, etcetera, contain much relevant material, but these, like the various church histories in general, are rather narrowly focussed and overly concerned with the apologetics and polemics of the various Afrikaans churches. Especially informative and suggestive is the study of Kitshoff, Gottlieb Wilhelm Antony van der Lingen.



218 ANDRE DU TOIT

from earlier frontier community life may have been one important factor in the controversies, these traditional views themselves could hardly remain unaffected by the general processes of religious and theological education that were involved in their very articulation and defence. Ironically, it was to become a crucial bone of contention who could lay claim to be the true

exponent of the orthodox tradition of Afrikaner religious tradition, with the Gereformeerde Kerk led by the (Dutch) Reverend Postma, the Hervormde Kerk led by the (Dutch) Reverend van der Hoff, the Cape Dutch Reformed Church dominated by the (Scottish) Murrays, and the separatist church of Reverend S. J. du Toit (inspired by Kuyperian neo-Calvinism) all equally vying for this honour. In truth, the entire intellectual and religious climate had been transformed, and largely by external influences and agents, in the course of the fifty years from 1830 to 1880.

An understanding of the relation between the earlier and later periods is further complicated by the formation of an Afrikaner nationalist consciousness during the last part of the century. Following F. A. van Jaarsveld, it is now generally accepted that the first stirrings of Afrikaner nationalism must be located as late as the 1870s, and that prior to this, Afrikaners, dispersed as they were in the various colonies and republics, tended to have local and regional loyalties, with their views of "nationality" not necessarily excluding English-speaking colonists.23 In the western Cape, the first Af-

rikaans-language movement, led by S. J. du Toit, rapidly made ground after

1875, while the Transvaal War of Independence against the British in 1881

galvanised Afrikaners throughout South Africa into an hitherto unprecen- dented unity of national feeling. As elsewhere, the fashioning of a nationalist consciousness had a specifically historical dimension: with the Afrikaners'

discovery of common adversaries and interests, of common ties of blood and of collective grievances, came also the awareness of a common past. Howev- er, the rediscovery of the past also amounted to a radical reinterpretation of that past, for it is typical of a nationalist consciousness to see all history in nationalist terms as the protohistory of the "nation." Van Jaarsveld has

graphically described this "process of historical image-making" in the case of the emergent Afrikaner nationalist historiography of the late nineteenth

century:

From a preoccupation with the future in store for him the intellectually minded Af- rikaner [of the 1870s and 1880s] turned to an investigation of his past and of his origins. How were the volk dispersed? Who were the Afrikaners? Where did they spring from? These enquiries into their own nature and origin, the sum total of common recollections, became a "national" history; it led to a mutual "discovery"

23 F. A. van Jaarsveld, The Awakening of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1868-1881 (Cape Town 1961). See also "Die onafhanklikheidstryd en die ontstaan van Afrikanernasionalisme," in Die Eerste Vryheidsoorlog, F. A. van Jaarsveld, A. P. J. van Rensburg, W. A. Stals, eds. (Pretoria, 1980), 257-68. and the survey of the literature given there.




and to the creation of an historical image that was "closed" (comprehending all the Afrikaans-speaking) . . . Examples were sought from the past to throw light on present trials. New grievances resulted in the discovery of old ones. Grudges that had been latent at the time of the Great Trek were activated and given their place in a version of history. . . . They rediscovered the contemporary struggle in the past and the conflicts of the past were viewed therefore with contemporary eyes.24

A nationalist consciousness of this kind not only projects current concerns on the past, it also tends to misunderstand its own historical nature and function.

Typically preoccupied with the genesis of an "authentic" national tradition to be differentiated from all outside agencies or foreign influences-and this is

why the myth of an authentic tradition of Afrikaner Calvinism nurtured in the cultural isolation of the frontier would prove so attractive-such a consciousness casts itself in the conservative r6le of protecting this national

heritage. In fact, the early Afrikaners never constituted such a total communi-

ty, a self-contained Afrikaner society articulating autochthonous intellectual traditions through public debates of its internal affairs. A segment of an

evolving plural society, long lacking a native intellectual class, early Af- rikaners more often than not espoused political thinking formulated and mediated by relative outsiders.25 Even the statements by the leaders of the Great Trek cannot simply be taken as an expression of authentic Afrikaner ideas: these public justifications and diplomatic communications of the Voortrekker leaders were addressed to, and influenced by, a much wider and more diverse audience than the Voortrekkers themselves. The same applies even more so to

public debate in the northern republics at the time that the articulations of an Afrikaner nationalist consciousness began to emerge. Immigrants from Hol- land and Germany (where nationalist ideas were increasingly current) such as H. T. Biihrman, Dr. E. J. P. Jorissen, Dr. W. E. Bok, Dr. W. L. Leyds, F.

Engelenburg, Carel Borckenhagen, etcetera, played prominent r6les as political spokesmen, officials, journalists, and educators. Often they had a crucial voice in articulating the republican or Afrikaner cause itself.26 It is a central irony that the fashioning of Afrikaner nationalism with its belief in a unique Afrikaner tradition and history coincided with the breakdown of the cultural and intellectual barriers which had insulated the actual earlier frontier communities. Like nationalist movements elsewhere, Afrikaner nationalism was, in important respects, not only a new but a modernising movement27 in which

24 Van Jaarsveld, "The Afrikaner's Image of His Past," in idein, The Afrikaner's Interpreta- tion of South African History, 55, 59.

25 See du Toit and Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought. Vol. 1. 1780-1850, introduction. 26 See, e.g., G. J. Schutte, De Hollanders in Krugers Republiek, 1884-1899 (Pretoria, 1968);

idem, "Nederland en de eerste Transvaalse Vrijheidsoorlog 1880-1881," Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 94 (1981), 565-94.

27 See, e.g., Robert M. Berdahl, "New Thoughts on German Nationalism," American His- torical Review, 77:1 (1972), 65-80; and the review essay by Geoff Eley, 'Nationalism and Social History," Social History, 6 (1981), 83-107.



220 ANDRE DU TOIT

outside agencies and foreign ideas were powerfully at work. Though its ideology was focussed on the Afrikaner past, its practise transformed traditional Afrikaner views and beliefs beyond recognition. It is in this ambiguous context that the presence of Calvinist notions in Afrikaner thinking at the end of the nineteenth century should be understood.

IV

The relation in the late nineteenth century between the newly fashioned Af- rikaner nationalist consciousness and Calvinism-whether an allegedly authentic Afrikaner tradition of primitive Calvinism anachronistically surviving since the seventeenth or a neo-Calvinist innovation inspired by contemporary developments in the Netherlands-may be charted with respect to the con- trasting figures of President Paul Kruger and the Reverend S. J. du Toit. Of the two, du Toit was the ambitious innovator, the cultural and political en- trepreneur who imparted powerful new impulses to Afrikaner political and intellectual life in the course of his somewhat erratic career. He was a prime mover of the first Afrikaans-language movement from 1875; he did much to stimulate and shape an Afrikaner historical consciousness, writing the first nationalist version of South African history to be published in Afrikaans, Die Geskiedenis van Ons Land in die Taal van Ons Volk (1877); he was the original founder of the Afrikaner Bond, the first major Afrikaner political organisation, in 1880; and as founder and editor of the first Afrikaans newspaper, Die Patriot, he created an influential forum for the propagation of Afrikaner nationalist views. At the same time, du Toit also made specific efforts to develop an explicitly Calvinist ideology and, as we shall see, to get this incorporated in the program of principles of the Afrikaner Bond. The content of this Calvinist political theory he derived directly from the contemporary neo-Calvinist political philosophy of the great Dutch statesman and theologian, Abraham Kuyper.

Paul Kruger, in contrast, was a cautious and profoundly conservative politician, with no formal education and little interest in ideology or political theory. Though he attached supreme importance to the preservation of re-

publican independence, Kruger never was a nationalist committed to the ideal of pan-Afrikaner ethnic unity. Dominating the local political scene of the late nineteenth century, he yet represented a tie to earlier times. As a boy he had participated in the Great Trek; as commandant and then commandant-general he had played a leading role in the frontier campaigns of the early history of the Transvaal; he had participated in the enactment of the Constitution of the South African Republic in 1858; he had been a prominent figure in the period of civil strife lasting into the 1860s; and he was, of course, the major leader in the events following annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 and leading up to the First War of Independence during 1880-81. A deeply religious man who liked to base his political views on scriptural authority, Kruger belonged to




the relatively insular and even archaic Dopper faction, and had indeed been a founding member of the Gereformeerde Kerk in 1859.28 In short, whereas du Toit pioneered the new role of Afrikaner nationalist intellectual and activist, Kruger embodied the political and religious links with the pre-nationalist Afrikaner past.

The contrast between President Kruger and the Reverend du Toit arguably provides something of a test case regarding the historical character of Af- rikaner Calvinism. In accordance with the Calvinist paradigm, which postu- lates the origins of later Afrikaner racial ideologies in the supposed primitive Calvinism of the trekboer and Voortrekker periods, we must look to the Calvinist beliefs of a Kruger for the essential links. On the other hand, if Afrikaner Calvinist ideas, like Afrikaner nationalism itself, were political and intellectual constructs of the late nineteenth century, then it is rather the accomplishments of a S. J. du Toit which should provide the key.

In his influential account of the rise of modem Afrikaner nationalism and the formation of an Afrikaner civil religion, the sociologist Dunbar Moodie specifically-and significantly-singles out the seminal activity of Paul Kruger. Kruger's Paardekraal speeches provide one of the main sources for Moodie's reconstruction of an ideal type of Afrikaner "sacred history," and it is specifically Kruger's Calvinism which is postulated as a prime source of the Afrikaner civil religion.29 S. J. du Toit, on the other hand, is hardly mentioned. This is the more surprising since Moodie actually includes a chapter on nineteenth-century church history in the Netherlands as a back- ground to local developments in Dutch Reformed theology. When he deals with the neo-Calvinism of the Potchefstroom school of thought and with the "infiltration" of Kuyperian ideas into the Dutch Reformed Church, Moodie is clearly-and rightly-concerned with twentieth-century developments.30 However, the historical origins of these modern versions of Afrikaner Cal- vinism are not traced to the attempted importation of neo-Calvinist ideas by an innovating nationalist like S. J. du Toit in the 1880s. Instead we are directed to the traditional figure of Paul Kruger for the "Calvinist origins" of the Afrikaner civil religion.

"The roots of the Afrikaner doctrine of election grew out of the Calvinism

28 The traditional Dopper community was, of course, itself transformed in the process of setting up an organised Calvinist church with its own theological seminary and (later) Christian National schools, so that this description needs qualifying. Hexham has argued that though this (neo-) Calvinist community was indeed to prove a consistent foe of modernity in the sense of secular rationalism, its members can in a wider context of religious belief be seen as agents and advocates of modernity where this "includes such things as attitudes toward education, ra- tionality, demystification of the world, rejection of magic, democracy, and the acceptance of industrial civilization" (Irving Hexham, "Modernity or Reaction in South Africa: The Case of Afrikaner Religion," Consultation on Modernity and Religion, University of British Columbia (manuscript, 1981), 20).

29 Moodie, Rise of Afrikanerdom, chs. 1, 2. 30 Ibid., ch. 4, 6-72.



222 ANDRE DU TOIT

of Paul Kruger," writes Moodie.3' He claims that Kruger's concepts of God and the world manifested strong influences of Reformation thought, especially of Calvin's theology, and argues that Kruger's formulation of the Afrikaner civil faith was "more strictly Calvinist" than that provided by other early Afrikaner nationalist historians and spokesmen.32 In support of these claims he refers to Calvin's central doctrine of the sovereignty of God and to his emphasis on the particularity of God's providential rule. More specifically, Moodie gives a brief account of Calvin's doctrine of election, and he argues that-apart from Calvin's doctrine of individual predestination or the special calling of "the covenant of grace" and his doctrine of the social covenant applying to the disciplined community of Christians-Calvin also developed the idea of an ethnic covenant between God and a chosen people. This is the doctrine of the "intermediate election" of an ethnic group, which must be distinguished from the individual's special call to salvation.33 Mood- ie claims that this specific doctrine of Calvin is present in Kruger's thought. "It was in terms of such a notion of 'intermediate election' that President Kruger applied the doctrine of the national covenant to the people of the South African Republic."34 The basis for this assertion is a passage in Kruger's speech at Paardekraal in 1891 where he spoke of the "external calling" (uitwendige roeping) of "God's people" and distinguished this from their "inward call" (inwendige roeping). Kruger thus, according to Moodie, af- firmed "his faith that the People of the Transvaal Republic were 'a people of God in the external calling' or more simply, 'God's People.' "35

Is this construction borne out by the textual evidence of Kruger's speech, seen in its historical context? Any such assessment must start by stressing the extraordinary difficulties of interpretation which Kruger's speeches pose. As pointed out often enough, Kruger had no formal training or literary interests. Though his published speeches embody a highly distinctive mode of thought and articulation, it is extremely difficult to characterise this in conventional terms. Above all, Kruger's rhetoric was marked by an unusual fusion of religious and political idioms. Thus Kruger used the expression "God's peo-

31 Ibid., preface, ix. 32 Ibid., 22. 33 Ibid., 22-26. 34 Ibid., 26. At least one experienced historian has been led by Moodie's formulation to

conclude that Kruger explicitly appealed to this particular doctrine of Calvin's. See Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 193. Of course, there is no evidence that Kruger was acquainted with Calvin's theology in general or with this doctrine in particular, nor that he ever invoked either. In some ways Kruger's Paardekraal speech of 1886 provides a clearer statement of his views. However, since this speech, reported in the Volksstem of 23 December 1886, has not been republished in the various collections of his speeches and writings and has not been utilised by Moodie at all, I have concentrated on the better-known 1891 speech.

35 Moodie. Rise of Afrikanerdom, 26-27.




pie" (Gods volk) to refer equally to both the Christian community of believers and to the citizenry of the South African Republic, and he often seemed not to distinguish between them at all. Yet, in other contexts, Kruger had quite specific and consistent views about the necessary separation of church and state, and he showed a greater preparedness for religious toleration and the observance of the right to freedom of religion than did many of his Afrikaner contemporaries.36 We should therefore be careful not to read too much into Kruger's rhetorical expressions and rather view these within the over-all context of his thought. However, that context itself is by no means clear. The Paardekraal speeches leave no doubt that Kruger's religious commitment was profound, and that he saw this public meeting to commemorate the restoration of republican independence through the war of 1880-81 primarily in religious terms:

This is a religious festival. We must proclaim the deeds of the Lord. ... All human glory must be banished. Let us not meet and use this occasion for anything else, for then this festival will become a worldly matter and God's anger will rest on us. We have not come here to discuss any other matters, but to proclaim the deeds of the Lord; to repay our covenants, and to speak of the Lord's great mercy towards us.37

This is the dominant theme of all of Kruger's Paardekraal speeches: the need to acknowledge God's absolute sovereignty and to proclaim His providental dealings with man in general and the people of the Transvaal in particular. Yet, though these religious concerns were clearly uppermost in Kruger's own mind, it cannot be denied that the Paardekraal meetings were not purely religious gatherings, nor was Kruger himself acting merely as a lay preacher (as he occasionally liked to do). On the other hand, Kruger was by no means expounding a secularized civil faith, drawing on Afrikaner history for purposes of ethnic mobilisation in the way that nationalist speakers of the 1930s and later would do. There was a genuine religious concern in Kruger's speeches which is absent from his modern counterparts who speak at celebra- tions of Dingaan's Day, or Day of the Covenant, as the commemoration of the Voortrekker victory over the Zulu kingdom at Blood River in 1838 later came to be known. Clearly, Kruger's religious language in this public context must also have had some kind of political implications; the problem is to determine how specific and exclusive those political implications were and, more partic-

36 The most important passages bearing on Kruger's views regarding the relation between church and state are discussed by F. P. Smit, Die Staatsopvattinge van Paul Kruger (Pretoria, 1951), 1-2, 189-91; and J. S. du Plessis, President Kruger aan die Woord (Bloemfontein, 1952), 123-25. On religious toleration and freedom of religion, see, e.g., Minutes of the Eerste Volksraad, 29 August 1899, art. 1010; and Smit, Staatsopvattinge van Paul Kruger, 3-5.

37 From Kruger's speech at Paardekraal 1891, as published in van Oordt, Paul Kruger, 559. My translation.



224 ANDRE DU TOIT

ularly, whether they involved the Calvinist doctrine of ethnic and/or exclusive election of the people of the Transvaal, as Moodie claims.38

Kruger's stress on the absolute sovereignty of God and His providential dealings with man is certainly consistent with a Calvinist theology, in a broad sense, though by no means peculiar to it alone. Such views could provide the basis for a chosen people ideology, but only if they are combined with further and exclusivist concepts of national election and mission. The critical question is whether Kruger also was a "Calvinist" in this much stronger sense, that is, whether there are sufficient grounds for attributing such exclusivist connotations to Kruger's use of phrases like "God's people" and their "external calling." As far as Kruger's use of the evocative "God's people" is concerned, it is difficult if not impossible, to pin down his precise sense of this phrase with any certainty. He tended to use it quite loosely as an applica- tion for all Christian believers and for the people of the South African Re- public, in accordance with earlier precedent.39 It should be noticed, however, that Kruger used the term without the kind of emphasis one would expect in an exclusivist conception. Thus he did not talk, for instance, about "God's own people" or of "God's chosen people" (uitverkore volk). When referring to the people of Israel of old, he would talk of the "covenanted people" (verbondsvolk),40 but he did not apply this expression to the Transvaal Af- rikaners. There is thus no suggestion that, in Kruger's usage, the phrase "God's people" implied a doctrine of exclusive election. Instead, Kruger

38 Actually Moodie's precise claim is not altogether clear. He certainly does not claim that Kruger believed in an exclusive and ethnic election of the Afrikaners as an ethnic group, but rather that Kruger applied Calvin's notion of the " 'intermediate election' of an ethnic group" (Rise of Afrikanerdom, p. 26, my italics) to the "people of Transvaal." In effect this a part- juridical and part-racial category (excluding blacks and Cape Afrikaners, but including English- speaking citizens of the Transvaal). Moodie admits that, thus defined, Kruger used "the People" in an inclusive sense (p. 31), but he then goes on to argue that "in practice" Kruger tended towards a more exclusive sense of this term (p. 32). Still, the general thrust of Moodie's argument is to claim that Kruger serves as a crucial link between Calvin's notion of ethnic election and the latter-day Afrikaner nationalist civil religion.

39 See, e.g., the "political testament" by the Voortrekker leader, Andries Pretorius, of July 1853, in which he urged the Military Council to give wise guidance to "the people of the Lord" (het volk des Heeren) and instructed his successor in scriptural terms to "let God's people (het volk Gods) graze" (cited in S. P. Engelbrecht, Geskiedenis van die Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afrika, 90-91). At the time Pretorius was much concerned not merely with the fledgling political institutions of the infant republic but also with the founding of the church in the Transvaal, which was at a critical stage because the recent arrival of the Reverend van der Hoff had opened the possibility of an organised church with no connection to the Cape Synod (and hence, none with the British colonial government). In the circumstances, he hardly distinguished among the military, political, and religious spheres of community organisation-which in any case largely involved the same people-and referred to all generally as "God's people" without, however, implying any doctrine of exclusive election. In the more immediate context of late- nineteenth-century sermons, the expression "God's people" (Gods volk) was in common usage as a way of referring to the Christian congregation at large. See, e.g., the report of a sermon by the Reverend Joubert at Paarl in De Zuid-Afrikaan, 22 August 1899.

40 See, e.g., Minutes of the Eerste Volksraad, 29 August 1899, art. 1010.




was at pains to use the term in the most inclusive sense possible. In his Paardekraal address of 1891, Kruger stressed that this rubric included everyone: ". .. me, you, as people of God, you the ancient settlers [oud volk] of this country, you foreigners, new arrivals, even you, murderers and thieves- . . . I call you all together God's people."4' No less than three times he repeated in the course of this address that no one was excluded, that every one was included "in the same covenant."42

Among the audience at Paardekraal in 1891, as in 1886, were a large number of uitlanders, recent immigrants to the Rand gold fields.43 If we bear in mind Kruger's determination to reserve the effective franchise for the old inhabitants of the South African Republic in order that they should not be swamped by the influx of uitlanders, then the inclusive emphasis-"all together God's people"-is highly significant. Kruger specifically included as part of "God's people" those same uitlanders whom he wished to exclude from the republic's citizenry! It is difficult to see how this position can be reconciled with the exclusive doctrine of God's election of the people of the Transvaal which Moodie attributes to Kruger. Instead, a close reading of Kruger's text suggests that his use of the phrase "God's people" was moti- vated by an evangelical impulse which could not be confined to ethnic or juridical boundaries. Similarly, when he recounted the ways in which God had visibly acted in the history of the Voortrekkers and of the South African Republic, this was intended as an acknowledgement of God's sovereign work in all history, in the present age as much as in Biblical times. Kruger's insistence that it was God who had brought about the restoration of the republic was meant as a rebuke to the godless humanist perspective, which saw that national history in purely secular terms, and to those who wished to put their trust in the collective resources of the nation: "We must be brought back to the acknowledgment that it is God who rules, and no one else."44 On Moodie's interpretation, Kruger's position is just the reverse: the religious rhetoric was supposed to serve a political purpose. Thus he claims that Kruger

41From the text published in Van Oordt, Paul Kruger, 552. My translation, emphasis added. 42Van Oordt, Paul Kruger, 553. As the political crisis deepened and war came, Kruger's

references to the fate of "God's people" took on an increasingly eschatological tone. He not only saw the war as God's chastisement of His people, but became convinced that it was the fullness of time (een punt des tijds) in which God was allowing "the Beast" to persecute His "Church" before coming to the aid of His people in final judgment. Kruger's views were now evidently based more on the book of Revelation than on the Old Testament, but, though he continued to believe that God would intervene specifically on behalf of the Transvaal republic, his reference to "God's people" never became exclusive and included "God's people on the whole earth," "all Christians the world over," etcetera (Cf. Kruger's speeches to the combined Volksraad, 2 October 1899 and 7 May 1900, and telegrams to the military officers of 20 June 1900, and to the Commandant General of 7 July 1900, all reprinted in H. C. Bredell and Piet Grobler, Gedenk- schriften van Paul Kruger (Amsterdam, 1902) 249-51, 260-69.

43 See D. W. Kriiger, Paul Kruger (Johannesburg, 1963), II. 90-92. 44 From the text in Van Oordt, Paul Kruger, 554. My translation.



226 ANDRE DU TOIT

saw in the miraculous outcome of the war of 1881 "more than final proof of God's election of the Transvaal people. It also established beyond doubt that God desired His chosen people to remain politically independent."45 Surely this is to go much too far. At most, one could argue that Kruger's words contain a measure of ambiguity as to their political implications, but the explicit and categorical assertion of a chosen people ideology, which Moodie reads into them, runs counter to the major thrust of Kruger's declared thought.

As to Kruger's reference to an "external calling," which Moodie equates with Calvin's doctrine of the "intermediate election" of an ethnic group, the evidence is again far from conclusive. Not only did Kruger himself never invoke Calvin, but it should be noted that in this particular case he used the more general word "calling" (roeping), and not the specific term "election" or "predestination" (uitverkiesing). Presumably Moodie is assuming that, as a Calvinist, Kruger must at least regard the doctrine of (individual) predestination as central to his religious thinking. Such an assumption would be entirely in accordance with the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history.

As we saw, it is a central thesis of this literature that Calvin's doctrine of individual predestination had been transformed in the primitive Calvinism of early Afrikaners to apply to the ethnic collectivity of the Afrikaner people, and in this perspective Kruger's usage must then evidently be regarded as a particular instance of this mutation at work. However, it is not clear that the doctrine of predestination ever was a major concern for Kruger, and I have not been able to discover any clear-cut references bearing on this.46 Kruger was, of course, a Dopper, but the most striking event of his religious biography was a spiritual crisis which occurred around 1857 and which proved a turning point of his life. It is recounted that he left his home in a condition of spiritual

45 Moodie, Rise of Afrikanerdom, 27-28; see also 3. 46 D. W. Kriiger asserts that the doctrine of predestination was of particular significance to

Kruger as a key Calvinist doctrine (Paul Kruger, I, 101). However, he does not on this occasion give any evidence bearing on this assertion at all, and it appears to be a speculative inference from the "fact" that Kruger was a "Calvinist." Elsewhere, in his account of Kruger's Paardekraal speech of 1886, he writes that Kruger "saw the doctrine of predestination in everything" (II, 91, my translation). This is based quite literally on the report of Kruger's speech in the Volksstem of 23 December 1886. However, on examination it appears that this particular passage is not, like the rest of the report in the Volksstemn, a direct transcription of Kruger's words but a summary by the reporter of the more theological part of the speech. "Predestination" is the reporter's term, not Kruger's, who does not use it at all in the more literally rendered parts of his speech. Moreover, the reporter's general statement regarding the central significance of the doctrine of predestination to Kruger's version of soteriological history is clearly erroneous. From the summary itself it is evident that what Kruger had stressed was not so much the specific doctrine of predestination but-as throughout the rest of the speech, and in many others similar statements- the more general belief in the sovereign and providential rule of God in history. Whether, and in what sense, Kruger may also have referred to the doctrine of predestination as well is less clear. (It should be added that in the course of D. W. Krtiger's account of the 1886 Paardekraal speech, the statement that according to Paul Kruger "his people, just like Israel, is also elected for a mission" (II, 91) is not an accurate rendition of the reporter's summary in the Volksstem and reflects the influence of the Calvinist paradigm.)




distress, wandered alone and on foot in the Magaliesberg mountains for some days, perhaps awaiting some divine assurance, until a search party found him close to exhaustion. His biographer comments that Kruger's writings from this period lacked his usual sobriety of tone and bordered on sectarian enthusi- asm.47 A few years later, in 1862, Andrew Murray reported Kruger's account of his conversion in the following terms: "Mr. Kruger says that when God gave him a new heart, it was as if he wanted to tell everyone about Jesus' love, as if he wanted the birds and trees and everything to help him praise his Saviour. . ."48 Kruger's experience anticipated by some years the great evangelical revival which would sweep the Cape Dutch Reformed Church in the 1860s and which would even find some echo in the remote Soutpansberg in the northern Transvaal in the next decade.49 But by all accounts, Kruger's religious crisis seems to fit more into this tradition of evangelical piety, with its stress on the individual's experience of conversion, than to conform to conventional tenets of Calvinist theology centering on the doctrine of predestination.

In short, neither the Dopper Paul Kruger's recorded speeches nor his religious biography show much sign of explicit Calvinist categories in any but the most general sense. And if we read Kruger's reference to the "external calling" in his Paardekraal speech of 1891 without ourselves postulating a Calvinist theological framework, it makes more sense and becomes quite natural to see it as a simple reference to the Christian's calling in public life as opposed to his private and personal duties.50 Moodie's introduction into this context of Calvin's doctrine of the "intermediate election" of an ethnic collectivity is a purely speculative exercise-it is based on dubious assumptions and the flimsiest of textual grounds. To anyone who does not have an overriding need and wish to demonstrate that Kruger was indeed a Calvinist in this strong sense, and as such the source of modern Afrikaner civil religion, the whole construction must soon lose all plausibility.

For a brief period Kruger's path had crossed that of someone who was a passionate Afrikaner nationalist and who also made considerable efforts to elaborate a set of Calvinist principles which might serve as an ideological foundation for that nationalist movement. Following the Transvaal War of Independence of 1880-81, the Reverend S. J. du Toit was appointed as

47 D. W. Kruiger Paul Kruger, I, 47-49. See also P. Bigelow, White Man's Africa (London, 1900), 47-48; Van Oordt, Paul Kruger, 101-2; E. J. P. Jorissen, Transvaalsche Herinneringen (Pretoria, 1897), 17; T. M. Tromp, Herinneringen uit Zuid-Afrika ten tijde der annexatie van de Transvaal (Leiden, 1879), 135. F. V. Engelenburg expressed some scepticism regarding "these stories," in 'n Onbekende Paul Kruger (Pretoria, 1925), 17.

48 J. du Plessis, The Life of Andrew Murray of South Africa (London, 1919), 203. 49 See S. Hofmeyr, Twintig Jaren in Zoutpansberg (Cape Town, 1890), 144-80. 50 In his Paardekraal speech of 1886, where Kruger first used the distinction between the

"internal" and "external" callings, he linked its specifically with the commonly used distinction between the "invisible" and the "visible" church (see Volksstem, 23 December 1886).



228 ANDRE DU TOIT

superintendent of education of the South African Republic. Du Toit's political energies and ambitions were such that he could not and did not restrict himself to the administration of education only. Soon he was playing an active role in Transvaal politics, became a member with Kruger of the deputation to the London Convention and to Europe in 1883 and for some time exerted considerable influence on Kruger's thinking.51 For our purposes a particularly interesting instance of this influence is to be found in a well-known passage of Kruger's reply in August 1882 to popular requests that he make himself available as candidate for the presidential elections of 1883. "On the political terrain as well," read this election manifesto of Kruger, "I confess to the eternal principles of God's Word."52 Starting with his biographer, J. F. van Oordt, Afrikaner writers have often hailed this brief statement as epitomizing Kruger's Calvinist approach to politics.53 The discovery that the words in question were identical with article 3 of the 1879 program of principles of Abraham Kuyper's Antirevolutionaire Party, which sought to base its policy on explicitly Calvinist foundations, caused some confusion, as it seemed improbable that Kruger could have been acquainted with Kuyper's Ons Pro- gram, then only recently published in the Netherlands. One writer concluded that it only went to show what close correspondence there was between the thinking of "these two great Calvinists."54 The solution to this little riddle is to be found in the person of S. J. du Toit, who drafted Kruger's election manifesto of 1882, and who was an ardent student and propagator of Kuyper's program of principles.55 If it remains somewhat obscure what content Kruger gave to this general formula when he adopted it as his own, du Toit's intent is clear; he was very much concerned to adapt Kuyper's neo-Calvinist principles as a systematic framework for Afrikaner nationalist politics. It is of considerable interest to our theme to see what became of this effort to import explicitly Calvinist principles into Afrikaner politics, which historically lacked any such recognisably Calvinist tradition.

As the newly founded Afrikaner Bond quickly became a power in the land, especially in the Cape and to a lesser extent in the republics, a struggle developed for its political leadership as well as for its ideological orienta- tion.56 The two main protagonists were S. J. du Toit and "Onze Jan" Hofmeyr, who was to become the dominant figure in Afrikaner politics in the Cape over the next two decades; each had his own distinctive political plat- form for the Bond. It is significant that Hofmeyr was initially reluctant to formulate a set of principles at all. His eventual brief and general statement of

51 See D. W. Kriiger, Paul Kruger, I, 254ff; II, 13-14. 52 Cited by Van Oordt, Paul Kruger, 379. 53 See Van Oordt, Paul Kruger, 379, n. 1; du Plessis, President Kruger aan die Woord, 118,

n. 2; Smit, Staatsopvattinge van Paul Kruger, 1-2, 189-90. 54 Du Plessis, President Kruger aan die Woord, 118, n. 2. 55 D. W. Kriiger, Paul Kruger, I, 272; see also Schutte, De Hollanders in Krugers Republiek,

30-31, 34-36. 56 See T. R. H. Davenport, The Afrikaner Bond (Oxford, 1966), 38-40, 322-23.




policy goals was pragmatic in spirit, rather muted in its Afrikaner nationalist concerns, and totally lacking in recognisable Calvinist content. It was du Toit who, as might be expected from a Calvinist, from the start pushed questions of principle. The program of principles which he proposed was regarded as a militantly nationalist document with its overt aim of sovereign independence "under our own flag," and it explicitly elaborated a set of Calvinist principles for all the main areas of policy. In fact, du Toit's proposed program, like his phrase for Kruger, was directly derived from the neo-Calvinist program of principles of Kuyper's Antirevolutionaire Party in the Netherlands, adapted only in a few particulars to suit local conditions. In an extended commentary on the different points of the program, published first as a series of articles in Die Patriot and issued as a separate brochure in 1884, du Toit proceeded to articulate and explain the political philosophy inherent in this program of principles. (The commentary again was largely adapted from Kuyper's mas- sive work Ons Program.57) It is noteworthy that he found it necessary to start by justifying the need for such an explicit political confession of faith:

Now we have in our politics, as it were, our own statutes, in the formal constitutions of the Afrikaner Bond .... But where are our political creeds? Where are out political confessional statements of unitary doctrine [Formulieren van Eenigheid]? Where is our common confession of faith? We produce constitutions; we make laws and regula- tions; we build stone on stone, and layer upon layer; but are we not forgetting the foundations in our haste to complete our political construction as quickly as possible?58

This essay is not the place for a full account of du Toit's ensuing attempts to apply the neo-Calvinist principles which he derived from Kuyper to a whole range of policy issues, differentiating it from a humanist ideology of liber- alism on the one hand and the "theocratic" tradition of Catholic political thought on the other. Of more interest, for our present purposes, is the actual impact on Afrikaner politics at large of the neo-Calvinist principles sponsored by du Toit.

In a revisionist interpretation of the intellectual origins of Afrikaner Cal- vinism, Irving Hexham has recently advanced the view that neither Paul Kruger nor a tradition of primitive Calvinism should be regarded as the mainspring for the modern Afrikaner nationalist ideology of apartheid, but rather the Kuyperian neo-Calvinism introduced by S. J. du Toit.59 Much of

57 S. J. du Toit, Het Program van Beginselen van de Nationale Partij, opgesteld, verklaard en toegelicht (Paarl, 1884). See Abraham Kuyper, Ons Program (Amsterdam, 1878). See also D. A. Scholtz, "Ds. S. J. du Toit, as Kerkman en Kultuurleier" (D. Th. diss., University of Stellenbosch, 1975), 135-39; Davenport, Afrikaner Bond, 38, 51-52.

58 From S. J. du Toit, Program van Beginselen. My translation. The Dutch expression Formulieren van Eenigheid refers to the three basic confessional documents of the Dutch Re- formed Church, viz., the Heidelberg Catechism, the Netherlands Confession, and the Doctrinal Rules of Dordt.

59 Hexham, "Dutch Calvinism and Development of Afrikaner Nationalism," 195-208. See also Moodie, Rise of Afrikanerdom, ch. 4.



230 ANDRE DU TOIT

Hexham's criticism regarding the "received opinion" on the relationship between Calvinism and Afrikaner nationalism is well taken, and his account of the diluted and rather inconsistent Calvinist theology of the nineteenth- century Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, as constrasted with the contemporary Calvinist revival in the Netherlands led by such as Groen van Prinsterer and Abraham Kuyper, offers a valuable comparative perspective. However, as Hexham admits, it cannot be maintained that du Toit himself had much success in getting his views accepted in the mainstream of contemporary Afrikaner politics.60 In fact, it was only with considerable difficulty that du Toit could get the Afrikaner Bond so far as even to debate the issue of a program of principles. The matter was put off from one congress to another because members complained that they had not had the opportunity to study the relevant documents, or did not see the need for such debate, or were simply unclear as to what the whole thing was about.61 Finally, at the congress of 1884 in Graaff-Reinet, du Toit succeeded in getting the debate he wanted. The tenor of the speeches which followed, as well as that of the ensuing editorial comments by De Zuid-Afrikaan, the leading Cape Afrikaans newspaper, are most instructive with regard to the historical relation between Afrikaner politics and (neo-) Calvinism. Most speakers expressed strong re- servations regarding the wisdom of introducing any confessional principles into secular politics, and moreover objected that du Toit's proposed program provided a too exclusivist Afrikaner-nationalist basis for the Afrikaner Bond. The Calvinist principles propagated by du Toit, it was claimed, might perhaps appeal to a minority such as the Doppers, but they would have little meaning, and perhaps even prove offensive, to many more. Certainly du Toit's program of principles would not provide an appropriate foundation for an inclusive political movement such as the Afrikaner Bond, which hoped to attract support from a wide spectrum of voters.62 In short, both du Toit's Calvinism and his too exclusive Afrikaner nationalism were unacceptable to the members of the Afrikaner Bond. For its part, De Zuid-Afrikaan made clear in its editorial comments that the objections to du Toit's proposals amounted to a rejection of an imported and alien political ideology in favour of a more pragmatic approach:

60 Hexham, "Dutch Calvinism and Development of Afrikaner Nationalism," 203. Hexham argues that it was through the Gereformeerde Kerk, and thus via the tradition of Potchefstroom Calvinism, that du Toit had a major impact on the ideological formation of modem Afrikaner nationalist thought in the post Anglo-Boer War period. In his The Irony of Apartheid: The Struggle for National Independence of Afrikaner Calvinism against British Imperialism (New York, 1981), Hexham goes so far as to project this "Dopper" version of neo-Calvinism as the major source of the ideology of apartheid. This gets the contribution of the Potchefstroom tradition of Christian Nationalism, which has always been a distinctive but nevertheless minor subcurrent of Afrikaner political thinking, quite out of proportion. See also T. Dunbar Moodie, "Calvinism and Afrikaner Nationalism-A Comment," African Affairs. 80 (July 1981), 403-4.

61 See J. D. du Toit, Ds. S. J. du Toit, in Weg en Werk (Paarl, 1917), ch. 9; Davenport, Afrikaner Bond, ch. 4; D. A. Scholtz," Ds. S. J. du Toit as Kerkman en Kultuurleier, 135-39.

62 Reports of the debates of the Afrikaner Bond Congress in De Zuid-Afrikaan, March 1884.



PURITANS IN AFRICA'? THE PARADIGM EXAMINED 231

We do not agree with some speakers who merely allege that the expressions used by the author of the program were obscure and stilted. The objections do not so much concern the expressions which were used as the very issues proposed in the program itself. These are philosophical issues, and so they are intelligible only to those who are trained in such matters. This is inevitable, for if one wants to propose principles you must go to the root of the matter and that must involve philosophy. Nor should one be surprised that in spite of this, some branches of the Bond have welcomed the program. It has a certain religious aura, and . . . those of a Reformed persuasion will readily identify themselves with that. But will we now expel someone from the Bond because he is not Reformed? . . . None of the questions facing us in the near future has any connection with the principles proposed in this program. . . . We would rather concern ourselves with the practical questions of the day than with principles which, as far as we are concerned, are being pressed on the Bond rather than arising from within it and fulfilling a deeply felt need.63

The next month De Zuid-Afrikaan came back to the same topic, and, while

arguing that du Toit's abortive attempt to introduce a Calvinist political ide-

ology to the Bond ran counter to the genuine interests of an indigenous Afrikaner nationalist movement, made the following apt comment on the historical character of Afrikaner politics and ideology up to that time:

It has always seemed to us that nothing demonstrates more clearly that a South African nationality has not yet been formed, and that there really is a need for a body like the Bond, than the tendency which still is current always to let the prevailing principles in England serve as the local norm, even though those principles have been appropriated, if at all, by a minority of the colonists only. But what does the Rev. du Toit do now? He juxtaposes to these principles another set of principles derived-as he himself acknowledges-from a certain political party in Holland. And these he wants to press on the Afrikaner public as national principles.64

With these views, De Zuid-Afrikaan was expressing, and supporting, the mainstream position in the Afrikaner politics of the time.

It was the more pragmatic and secular program of principles of Hofmeyr which was eventually adopted in 1889 by the Afrikaner Bond, and it was

Hofmeyr who dominated the Bond for the rest of the century. S. J. du Toit, meanwhile, after first falling from favour in the Transvaal, ended up quite anomalously in the camp of the great mining magnate and imperialist Cecil Rhodes-this after the 1895 Jameson Raid, in its dramatic failure to over- throw the South African Republic on behalf of imperial and capitalist interests, had sharply revived Afrikaner nationalist feelings. Within the Dutch Reformed Church as well, du Toit found only a small following for his more

pronounced Calvinist ideas, and the active hostility of the majority of ministers led eventually to secession by the small, independent Gerebfrmeerde Kerk onder het Kruis in Zuid-Afrika in 1897. At a later stage, this church

merged with the Dopper or Gereformeerde Kerk, and du Toit's version of neo-Calvinism was still to have some impact on the Potchefstroom school of

63 De Zuid-Afrikaan, Editorial, 22 March 1884 (my translation). 64 Ibid.. 19 April 1884.



232 ANDRE DU TOIT

"Christian Nationalism"-but at no time did it have any real success in shaping the mainstream of Afrikaner culture or political thinking.65 The fact is, quite simply, that the historical traditions of Afrikaner political culture, such as they were, proved too alien an environment for a belated Calvinist ideology to flourish.

It remains only to be said that, while S. J. du Toit may have had little success in his efforts to sponsor an explicitly Calvinist ideological framework for the newly aroused Afrikaner nationalist sentiments, he is of significance to our theme in that he is responsible for some of the earliest Afrikaner statements of a chosen people view. In response to the 1880-81 Transvaal War of Independence, du Toit wrote a poem entitled "Dit is Gods Vinger!" ("This Is God's Finger!") expressing the view that the Boer successes had been due to direct intervention of God in history.66 In his earlier history, Die Geskied- enis van Ons Land in die Taal van Ons Volk of 1877, there had been a few brief interpolations of providential sentiment into an essentially secular chron- icle otherwise more interested in harping on real and imagined Afrikaner grievances against the British. But now the providential thesis came to be advanced much more seriously and explicitly. Soon after moving to the Transvaal in 1881, du Toit held a series of sermons, also published in his journal, De Getuige, in which he interpreted the outcome of the recent war as a divine deliverance of the people of the Transvaal. In a sermon also bearing the title "This Is God's Finger," he proclaimed, "With the exception of Israel, as the specially chosen people of the Lord, God's hand has never been more visible in the history of any people on earth than amongst us in connection with the Transvaal events."67 Here at last we find the kind of assertion which had been lacking in the primary documentation of early Afrikaners, that is, an explicit and confident equation between the Afrikaner people and Israel as the chosen people of the Lord with a special mission to reveal God's plan in Southern Africa. With C. P. Bezuidenhout's little booklet, De Geschiedenis van het Afrikaansche Geslacht, van 1688 tot 1882, published in Bloemfontein in 1883,68 these writings of du Toit must be counted as among

65 A further indication of the failure of neo-Calvinist notions to evoke any significant response from Afrikaners in the late nineteenth century (above all in the Cape) may be found in the efforts of S. J. du Toit and others, such as the Reverends W. P. R. de Villiers and M. P. A. Coetzee, to propagate the "voluntary principle," or the disendowment of public education, as the foundation of a policy of Christian National education throughout the 1880s. Again they met with little success, and it was the more secular compromise sponsored by Hofmeyr which became the official policy of the Afrikaner Bond.

66 Cited by J. D. du Toit, Ds. S. J. du Toit, in Weg en Werk, 235. 67 De Getuige (Paarl, 1881), I, 49 (my translation). See J. D. du Toit, Ds. S. J. du Toit, in

Weg en Werk, 244-45. 68 C. P. Bezuidenhout, De Geschiedenis van het Afrikaansche Geslacht, van 1688 tot 1882

(Bloemfontein, 1883). This is essentially a home-grown history of Afrikaner grievances against British imperial rule from Slagtersnek in 1815 to the Transvaal War of 1881. The author's theological framework does not extend beyond his evocative use of a text from the Psalms as a metaphor for the providential founding of the Afrikaner people as a nation.




the first explicit articulations by Afrikaners of notions about being a chosen people. As such they evidently represent rhetorical innovation in response to the dramatic changes in Afrikaner political fortunes brought by such improbable military victories as Majuba rather than the product of any specific and deep-rooted Calvinist tradition. In du Toit's case, there was the attempt to combine an exclusive Afrikaner nationalism with a confessional political basis modeled on Abraham Kuyper's Dutch example (though Kuyper's own writings did not contain any chosen people ideology). With regard to both the explicit assertion of the chosen people concept and the link with Calvinism on the Dutch model, du Toit met with considerable scepticism and resistance from contemporary Afrikaners who were otherwise fairly sympathetic with his basic nationalist sentiments. This was well expressed in an editorial of De Zuid-Afrikaan in 1885, published in response to Nehemia, a booklet by du Toit in which he systematically developed the political and religious parallels between the Afrikaner people and Israel. This editorial might, in conclusion, serve as a summary of considered Afrikaner views on the chosen people ideology, once the first flush of nationalist excitement brought to a pitch by the triumph at Majuba had passed: Nehemia . . . in his time had to do with the Chosen People, a people who never entirely lost the conviction that it had a wholly separate mission and whose contribution to the history of man justified that conviction. But can a contemporary Christian people, can the people who has given rise to the Afrikaner movement, consider itself to be a chosen people in the same sense as the Jews in the days of Nehemia? In one sense this question may be answered affirmatively. A people who does not have a profound awareness of its own mission, and of the necessity to preserve the national peculiarities which make it what it is and which it requires to accomplish its national duty, such a people does not deserve to survive as such and its end is near. But in our days a Christian people is also a part of the great community of nations who all participate in Christian civilization, and between whose members fraternal relations exist which could not obtain between Israel and other peoples. . . . While much of the comparisons sought between the conditions of Israel and South Africa may be apt and relevant, the writer goes much too far in his striving to exclude everything alien and all that does not accord with his principles, and to propagate the exclusivist nature of the movement which aims at the resurrection and confirmation of Afrikaner nationality.69

The strategy of an exclusivist ethnic mobilization would, of course, prove more successful from the 1930s than in the 1880s, and, in conjunction with an official policy of Christian National education, something like an Afrikaner chosen people ideology was yet to have its day if only in the era of Dr. H. F. Verwoerd.70 In the complex story of how proponents of modern Afrikaner nationalism came to power in 1948 and set out to restructure South African

69 De Zuid-Afrikaan, Editorial, 13 October 1885 (my translation). 70 See the contemporary references cited in Van Jaarsveld, "Afrikaner's Ideas on Calling and

Mission," in idem, Afrikaner's Interpretation of South African History. A particularly striking example is to be found in the sermons of the Reverend G. J. J. Boshoff, U Volk is my Volk (Johannesburg, 1959). More generally, see Heribert Adam and Hermann Giliomee, Ethnic Power Mobilized (New Haven, 1979).



234 ANDRE DU TOIT

society in terms of the ideology of apartheid, the Potchefstroom variant of neo-Calvinism played a distinctive but minor role. S. J. du Toit's son, the Afrikaans poet Totius, was a seminal figure in the early stages of shaping the Afrikaner nationalist consciousness following the Anglo-Boer War. Other Potchefstroom intellectuals were prominent in the Broederbond, the secret society which gave direction to the Afrikaner cultural and economic movement in the 1930s and 1940s. But neither the National Party nor the main Dutch Reformed Church was ever greatly swayed by the neo-Calvinist strain in modem Afrikaner nationalism, and the ideological and material roots of apartheid as well must be sought elsewhere.71

v

We must conclude, then, that in comparative and historical perspective the reputation of Afrikaner Calvinism is quite overblown: it is meagre in substance and its historical foundation is shallow. The theory of an authentic Calvinist tradition going back to a primitive Calvinism nurtured in the isolated trekboer society on the open frontier, and ultimately derived from the golden age of "seventeenth-century Calvinism" is an historical myth. And to the extent that we do find Calvinist notions among leading Afrikaners at the end of the nineteenth century-whether in the idiosyncratic fusion of religion and politics in the pronouncements of the conservative Dopper Paul Kruger, or in the abortive attempts of the nationalist activist S. J. du Toit to introduce Kuyperian neo-Calvinist principles into the mainstream of Afrikaner politics-this Calvinism was not particularly representative of, or influential on, contemporary political thinking.

This must affect our perspective on modern Afrikaner nationalism and its litany of national destiny and a divinely ordained mission, which began gain- ing prominence during the 1930s, and reached a high point in the Verwoerd era around 1960. It is a superficial view which merely asserts that "all nations, of course, have long agreed that they are chosen peoples; the idea of special destiny is as old as nationalism itself."72 No doubt assorted statements could be gathered in support of this view, but a mere assembling of such declarations would ignore the crucial questions as to the specific content, implications, and underlying rationales of such beliefs in their various historical contexts. Nationalist ideologies, except those with very shallow roots indeed, cannot simply be equated to some vague universal norm in disregard

71 Moodie, Rise of Afrikanerdom, ch. 4, provides a useful survey of the impact of neo- Calvinist influences on Afrikaner political and religious life from the 1930s. Apart from its overdrawn main argument, Iriving Hexham's Irony of Apartheid contains a wealth of material on the origins of Christian Nationalism. For a provocative but suggestive account of the material origins of Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid, see Dan O'Meara, Volkskapitalisme (Cambridge, 1983).

72 Russel B. Nye, "The American Sense of Mission," in This Almost Chosen People (East Lansing, Michigan, 1966), 164.




of their specific historical and cultural contexts: a nationalism embedded in a strong and vigorous Calvinist tradition is a very different proposition from one which does not have this particular provenance. Taken in itself, a statement declaring that one's nation has been specially chosen or favoured by God to fulfill its national mission or destiny, like the view that God is on our side and not on that of the enemy in whatever war is current, may amount to nothing more than a rhetorical expression of national confidence and purpose.

Thus in any comparison of early Afrikaner notions with the ideas of Puritan New England, the almost total contrast between the intellectual and social conditions of the Puritan settlements and the trekboer communities on the South African frontier cannot be discounted without disastrous consequences for our understanding of both. The complex and vigorous theological tradition of the Puritans was largely self-sustaining, with ample resources in terms of educational institutions, relatively autonomous church and civil governments, forums for discussion and publication, etcetera. The New England Puritans were in the vanguard of the development of capitalist enterprise and the work ethic; and in these tightly cohesive communities, which did not recognize the liberal distinction between private and public morality, the laws of God were enforced within the family as in the community at large in a strict collective discipline.73 While the trekboers on the open frontier settled in a widely dispersed pioneering community, hardly subject to institutional controls of any kind, with their educational and religious institutions rudimentary at best and their reversion to extensive and seminomadic farming methods only ten- uously linked to the market economy, nothing of the kind was true of the Puritans in New England. In stark contrast to the "individualism," or fac- tionalist lack of social will, which came to be the hallmark of Afrikaner frontier settlements, is Perry Miller's description of the Puritan frontier community: "The lone horseman, the single trapper, the solitary hunter was not a figure of the Puritan frontier; Puritans moved in groups and towns, settled in whole communities, and maintained firm government over all units."74 In short, it is a facile and misleading analogy which fastens on to some expressions of religious ideology removed from their historical contexts in an attempt to construe early Afrikaners as some variant species of Puritans in Africa.75

73 Walzer, Revolution of Saints, 123-24, 301-3; cf. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family (New York, 1966). As Walzer explains (p. 309), the Calvinist and Puritan ideologies generally appealed to the "sociologically competent," i.e., to the aristocrats, ministers, gentlemen, mer- chants, and lawyers who had "the capacity . . . to participate in the 'exercises' that sainthood required."

74 Perry Miller, "Puritan State and Puritan Society," in idem Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 143.

75 Cf. de Klerk, Puritans in Africa. If it was not so vague and confused as a work of intellectual history, the central proposition of de Klerk's popularization might well have served as a reductio ad absurdum of the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history.



236 ANDRE DU TOIT

The moral force and intellectual substance of the major examples of chosen people ideologies associated with Calvinist origins, those of Britain and of the United States, are due to the cultural resources of powerful historical traditions. English and American claims of being covenanted with God, of having a unique redemptive role in history, or, in its powerful secular version, of being the birthplace of liberty in modern times, did not simply appear in an intellectual vacuum at moments of political crisis or in periods of imperial expansion, but were deeply rooted in specific historical traditions and embedded in quite distinct and elaborate intellectual frameworks. Thus the emergence at the end of the sixteenth century of a widely shared belief in England as God's elect champion-the new Israel-in the struggle against the forces of the Antichrist led by the papist powers did not by any means stand on its own. As expressed above all in the immensely influential Book of Martyrs of John Foxe, it was intimately woven into a summation of English political and religious history, thus drawing on the moral and intellectual resources both of the powerful traditions of civil liberty and of the Protestant faith.76 Within a wider context, these apocalyptic visions of the divinely ordained redemptive mission of the elect nation can also be seen to spring from ancient traditions of Christian millennialism with its distinctive array of evocative symbols and potent myths expressing a particular understanding of universal history.77 When the New England Puritans subsequently developed their own views about being a specially covenanted community, these ideas neither were merely striking metaphors nor were they parochial in intent. On the one hand, the Puritan idea of a social covenant was part and parcel of a complex system of "federal" theology developed to meet the challenges which Arminianism and Antinomianism were perceived to pose to orthodox Calvinist theology. Moreover, the crucial operative concepts of this theology, those of the "Covenants of Grace and of Redemption," were themselves applications of the basic legal notion of a contract as a voluntary engagement between free and equal parties, and were thus deeply influenced by the tradition of the common law as well.78 On the other hand, the New England Puritans did not limit the force of this covenant to the new colonial settlements only; they saw

76 See William Haller, The Elect Nation. The Meaning and Significance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (New York, 1963). See also Winthrop S. Hudson, ed., Nationalism and Religion in America (New York, 1970), viii, 153-55; Savcan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the Ameri- can Self (New Haven, 1975), 72-86.

77 See Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The"Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chi- cago, 1968), esp. 138-42; Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 98-105. See also Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto, 1978); Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 (Oxford, 1979); William M. Camont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution (London, 1979).

78 See Miller, New England Mind, 366-77; idem, "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity" in Errand into Wilderness, 60ff. See also S. Morgan, ed., Puritan Political Ideals (Indianapolis, 1965), xx-xxv.




their role very much as a continuation and culmination of the historical task of the Protestant Reformation on the central stage of European history. To them the founding of new communities on the true principles of civil and eccle- siastical government was not a goal in itself, far less an isolated and provincial exile. Instead, New England was to function as an exemplary model that would yet serve to inspire the ultimate vindication of the most vigorous ideals of the Reformation in England and in Europe itself.79

Later, at the time of the American revolution, many of the leading ideas in the New England Puritan tradition were taken up in an inclusive ideology of national destiny, combining both the religious connotations inherent in the view of "God's American Israel" as well as the well-established political tradition of the defense of civil liberties. In time these were to become the mainstays of the American civil religion.80 It is true, as Albert K. Weinberg has shown in great detail, that these concepts did lend themselves to a variety of easy rationalisations of territorial expansion or imperialist ambitions, as with the Mexican War of the 1840s and the military ventures in Cuba and the Philippines around 1900. But a doctrine such as Manifest Destiny-expressing "a dogma of supreme self-assurance and ambition, that America's incor- poration of all adjacent lands was the virtually inevitable fulfillment of a moral mission delegated to the nation by Providence itself' 81-constituted only a very partial and to some extent a perverted understanding of the moral and religious sense of mission within the tradition of being a chosen people.82 Thus Frederick Merk could argue that Manifest Destiny, as an aggressive ideology of expansion and imperialism, was less important to American history than the self-denying sense of national mission committed to basic moral values of collective responsibility and individual freedom.83 This argument raises major problems about the meaning and function of ideological language; but the point, for our purposes, is that, within such a rich and deeply ingrained historical tradition, expressions of a chosen people ideology need not be merely the immediate reflection of national interests and ambitions of

79 See Miller, Errand into Wilderness, 11-12; idem, New England Mind, 468-70; Savcan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wisc. 1978); Conrad Cherry, God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 27-28.

80 See Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1976), 27-30, 43-46, 89ff; Cherry, God's New Israel, 61-62; Hud- son, Nationalism and Religion, 33-35; Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny (Baltimore, 1935), 39-41; John F. Wilson, Public Religion in American Culture (Philadelphia, 1979), ch. 2: "The Shape of the National Covenant." For the concept of the civil religion, see Robert N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus (Winter 1967); Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones, eds., American Civil Religion (New York, 1974).

81 Weinberg, Manifest Destiny, 1-2. 82 Ibid., 128; Cherry, God's New Israel, 114. Cf. also Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew

(Garden City, N.Y., 1960). 83 Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation

(New York, 1963), ch. 12 et passim.



238 ANDRE DU TOIT

the moment. The tradition and the ideology itself contain the intellectual and moral resources for a critical reflection on those very interests and ambitions.84

The very absence of such a strong and positively formulated tradition of Afrikaner Calvinism may even have consequences for Afrikaner political thinking in its current ideological impasse. If the Afrikaner nationalist ideology had indeed been similarly founded in a Calvinist tradition central to the formative periods of Afrikaner history, then it might likewise have been possible to draw on the resources of that Calvinist tradition for a critical regeneration of Afrikaner political thought. But if, as we have argued, it is true that the Calvinist origin of Afrikaner thought is an historical myth, it is also true that the specific intellectual, moral, and religious resources of the Calvinist tradition are not readily available within the ambit of Afrikaner culture. The limited impact of recent Potchefstroom attempts at a "Calvinist" critique of the apartheid ideology is eloquent testimony to this effect.85 The significance of this lack of a profound and elemental tradition of Afrikaner Calvinism should be seen in terms of the over-all context of Afrikaner political culture at the present critical juncture. Since, as is well known, there is also no strong liberal tradition in Afrikaner history and politics-to say nothing of an Afrikaner socialist tradition-critical or dissident Afrikaners are faced with an urgent problem regarding alternatives to the Nationalist ideology of apartheid. It has become common practice to discuss the rival tendencies and positions within contemporary Afrikaner politics in terms of a contrast between ideological commitment (to apartheid) and pragmatic flexi- bility and compromise.86 However, the meaning and content of this prag- matism, or verligtheid, as it is usually termed, have proved most elusive, particularly since the term remains premised on a commitment to Afrikaner nationalism. Verligtheid may indeed simply indicate a loss of overt ideological confidence without any change in basic political objectives; and the more pragmatic policy adjustments of recent Nationalist governments amount to differences in tactics and strategy only. In fact, the current verligte argument, that change is necessary but that only the National Party can serve as the

84 See, e.g., the case of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose work includes a profoundly religious and moral critique of American political culture, but who could still subscribe to a moder version of the chosen people idea himself. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York, 1936), ch. 4; idem, The Irony of American History (New York, 1952); and selected writings compiled in Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, H. R. Davis and R. C. Good, eds. (New York, 1960), ch. 23, 269-83. See also his essay on "Anglo-Saxon Destiny and Responsibility," reprinted in Cherry, God's New Israel, 303-8. Cf. also H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York, 1935).

85 I have in mind here the various criticisms of official policy which appeared in the journal Woord en Daad in the course of the 1970s, the Koinonia-declaration of 1977, and some recent statements and publications of the Afrikaanse Calvinistiese Beweging.

86 See, e.g., Heribert Adam, "Ideologies of Dedication vs. Blueprints of Expedience," Social Dynamics, 2:2 (1976), 83-91.




instrument for effectively bringing about the necessary reforms, amounts to an implicit chosen people ideology and serves to justify continued Afrikaner Nationalist supremacy. Within a truly Calvinist tradition it might have been possible to subject the uses of Afrikaner power, and the claims made on its behalf, to an effective immanent critique. But since its Calvinist origin is not an historical reality, the commitment of Afrikaner Nationalism to continued supremacy stands largely unchecked and unchallenged within its own political and historical tradition. It is thus an irony that it is the absence of a true historically and theologically entrenched Calvinism, comparable to the Pu- ritan and Dutch Calvinist traditions, which renders these latter-day manifesta- tions of a chosen people ideology the more insidious and dangerous.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL COMMENT

The existence of the Calvinist paradigm has been asserted, or simply assumed, with little specification of its intellectual content or documentation of its provenance, in Afrikaner historiography and nationalist writings since the turn of the century. Early references, elaborations, and pronouncements of the Calvinist paradigm include e.g., J. F. Van Oordt, Paul Kruger en de Opkomst der Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (Cape Town, 1898); C. Spoelstra, Het Ker- kelijk en Godsdienstig Leven der Boeren na den Grooten Trek (Kampen, 1915); W. Postma [Dr. O'Kulis, pseud.], Doppers (Bloemfontein, 1918), ch. 1; C. G. Nepgen, Die Sosiale Gewete van die Afrikaanssprekendes (Stellen- bosch, 1938), chs. 6, 7, 9; J. V. Coetzee, "Die Geskiedenis van die Cal- vinisme in Suid-Afrika," in Koers in die Krisis, H. G. Stoker, et al., eds. (Stellenbosch, 1938), I, 55-56; P. J. Meyer, Die Afrikaner (Bloemfontein, 1940). Crucial components of the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history also appear in the seminal writings of liberal historians from the 1930s as part and parcel of the more comprehensive "frontier" interpretation of South African history, of which it might perhaps be considered to constitute a specific variant (see, e.g., C. W. de Kiewiet, A History of South Africa: Social and Economic (Oxford, 1941); I. D. MacCrone, Race Attitudes in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1937); Eric Walker, The Great Trek (London, 1934), 55-59; and for a critical survey, see Martin Legassick, "The Frontier Tradition in South African Historiography," in Economy and Society in Pre- Industrial South Africa, Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, eds. (London, 1980), 44-79). After World War II a new and more professional generation of historians attempted to provide documentation for specific aspects of the Calvinist account in historical monographs, but without questioning the paradigm as a whole (see, e.g., W. Kistner, The Anti-Slavery Agitation against the Transvaal Republic, 1852-1868. Archives Year Books for South African History (cited hereafter as AYB), 1952/II, ch. 3; M. C. E. van Schoor, Die Nasionale en Politieke Bewuswording van die Afrikaner in Migrasie en sy Ontluiking in Transgarieb tot 1854, AYB, 1963/II, ch. 3; M. Boucher, The



240 ANDRE DU TOIT

Frontier and Religion, AYB, 1968/11, chs. 1-3; J. P. F. Moolman, "Die Boer se Siening van en houding teenoor die Bantoe in Transvaal tot 1860" (M. A. diss., University of Pretoria, 1975), chs. 1, 2; see also the works of G. D. Scholtz). The most explicit and systematic elaborations of the Calvinist paradigm appeared around 1960, at the high point of the Verwoerd era, as a centrepiece of Sheila Patterson's critical account of the historical origins of modern Afrikanerdom and apartheid in The Last Trek: A Study of the Boer

People and the Afrikaner Nation (London, 1957), and in F. A. van Jaars- veld's influential studies on the Afrikaner's historical consciousness, "The Ideas of the Afrikaner on His Calling and Mission", in his The Afrikaner's Interpretation of South African History (Cape Town, 1964), 1-32. With the

growth, particularly since the 1960s, of an international literature on race and politics in South Africa, the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history and politics has found its way, in one form or another, into the writings of a variety of social scientists (see, e.g., P. van den Berghe, South Africa: A Study of Conflict (Middletown, Conn., 1965), 14-15; A. G. J. Crijns, Race Relations and Race Attitudes in South Africa (Nijmegen, 1959), 41-42; Ed- ward A. Tiryakian, "Apartheid and Religion," Theology Today, 14:3 (1957), 385-400; J. J. Loubser, "Calvinism," in The Protestant Ethic and

Modernization, S. N. Einsenstadt, ed. (London, 1969), 367-83; Randall G. Stokes, "Afrikaner Calvinism and Economic Action: The Weberian Thesis in South Africa," American Journal of Sociology, 81:1 (1975), 62-81). It has also been incorporated, as a basic historical premise, in the sociologist T. Dunbar Moodie's influential analysis of the Afrikaner civil religion and the rise of modern Afrikaner nationalism, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power,

Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (Berkeley, 1975). Recently it has been disseminated to a much wider public still by such popularized works as W. A. de Klerk's Puritans in Africa (London, 1975) and, no doubt, James A. Michener's bestselling novel The Covenant (New York, 1980); see also Bar- bara Villet, Blood River: The Passionate Saga of South Africa's Afrikaners and of Life in Their Embattled Land (New York, 1982). Some doubts regarding the historical and, indeed, sociological premises of the Calvinist paradigm have been expressed by scholars as divergent as Martin Legassick, Irving Hexham, Richard Elphick, and Hermann Giliomee. See Legassick, "Frontier Tradition in South African Historiography," 52ff.; Irving Hexham, "Dutch Calvinism and the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism," African Affairs, 79 (April 1980), 195-208; Hermann Giliomee and Richard Elphick, "The Structure of European Domination at the Cape, 1652-1820," in their Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1820 (Cape Town, 1979), 362-64. But this has had little impact, as is evident from the fact that such an experienced and distinguished historian as George M. Fredrickson, in his recent major work in comparative history, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981), 170ff., nevertheless still sub- scribes to a slightly qualified version of it.

