Those expecting that a DA coalition deal with the ANC (possibly including the IFP) will solve SA’s problems will do well to revisit the dramatic days of 1932 and early 1933. Like now, SA was in crisis. Then it was fuelled by a raging “poor white” problem, made worse by the Wall Street crash of October 1929 and a burgeoning Afrikaner nationalism.
Public attention then was focused on the gold standard debate. Britain’s withdrawal in September 1931 had left SA exports hugely overvalued, but prime minister JBM Hertzog and his fellow Nationalists were reluctant to follow the lead of the “mother country”. They were also wary of kowtowing to the Chamber of Mines, long seen by them as the symbol of geldmag, or money power, and personified in the figure of “Hoggenheimer”. Going off the gold standard, argued some, would also have inflationary implications. Adding fuel to the fire was that subsidies to the farming industry had failed to relieve rural distress, greatly worsened by the worst drought in living memory.
On December 16 1932, the mercurial judge Tielman Roos re-entered the political arena. In a dramatic Dingaan’s Day speech, he called for the formation of a government of national unity and the abandonment of the gold standard. Drawing large and enthusiastic crowds, the former minister of justice moved from town to town, threatening to bring down the government.
Though his message electrified the stock exchange, capital fled the country in anticipation of SA’s withdrawal from the gold standard and the recovery of sterling. Banks were in crisis and pressure on the National Party was enormous.
Less than two weeks after Roos’ initial appeal to abandon the gold standard, finance minister Nicolaas “Klasie” Havenga made the unexpected announcement that SA had indeed done so. The next day, in his New Year’s address, a despondent, humiliated Hertzog lamented that he had been forced to yield to the “money power” and organised finance. It was an accusation built upon a long-standing Afrikaner antipathy towards the conspiratorial financial sector. Die Burger’s well-known cartoonist, DC Boonzaier, reinforced the message in three powerful cartoons, each illustrating the power of Hoggenheimer, the cigar-puffing obese Jew.
Behind the scenes, Roos continued to plot the creation of a new national government under his leadership. Threatening enough dissident support to bring down the National Party and Labour Party Pact government, he did his best to draw Jan Smuts into a proposed new government as his deputy. But Roos’ initiatives backfired.
Recognising growing despair and calls for devolution among his British-orientated (mainly Natalian) South African Party colleagues, Smuts had reluctantly drawn closer to his Anglo-Boer War comrade-in-arms, Hertzog. The National Party leader, in turn, aware of tension within his own republican-orientated ranks and the real prospect of losing the next election, agreed to crisis talks.
Principles were rapidly hammered out by negotiators in February 1933, and one month later Smuts was able to tell a packed public meeting in Cape Town that he and Hertzog had agreed that their parties would form a coalition to fight the forthcoming general election set for May.
Malan was unhappy with his party’s decision and made it clear that he would not serve in the new cabinet. In the May election, easily won by the coalition, he was opposed in his own constituency by Antonetta Steenkamp, wife of his Namaqualand bête noir, Dr Willem Petrus Steenkamp. Though he was successfully returned, Malan was uneasy. Coalition sat heavily with him. His eye was on a surging republican-inclined Afrikaner völkisch sentiment, originally nurtured under the leadership of Hertzog’s breakaway National Party (founded in 1914).
SA’s fault lines are deep: the battle is between constitutionalists and anti-Western populists
The more powerful republican and anti-imperial strains of this nationalism had been dampened during the “Pact” years. But these passions were now reignited and would be harnessed by Malan under more propitious circumstances that followed in the wake of the merger or fusion of the National Party and South African Party into the United Party in 1934. The economic crisis of the early 1930s had subverted the status quo and had prepared the way for a reordering of the SA body politic. Malan came to power in 1948.
Fast forward to 2024. Are we about to see a reluctant President Cyril Ramaphosa lamenting the power of finance and stressing the fear of monetary collapse in announcing a deal with the DA (and IFP)? And will Ramaphosa, like Hertzog, see racial nationalists within the ANC emulating the Malanites of 1934 by leaving the fold? For many, a coalition with die geldmag (even diluted by the inclusion of the IFP) would be a bridge too far. So-called white monopoly capital — the present-day version of Hoggenheimer — remains a bogey. Increasingly there is talk on social media about the Rupert/Oppenheimer nexus manipulating affairs.
The DA might welcome a deal. But it will do well to ensure that it is not ensnared in Ramaphosa’s crisis, sparked by an electoral outcome that has the making of a nightmare. Though not calling — as Tielman Roos did — for a government of national unity, Jacob Zuma has, like Roos, dramatically unsettled the political order. His populist calls, with those of the EFF, resonate in a society riddled with racial inequality.
Should the ANC manage to cobble a coalition with the DA (and the IFP), Ramaphosa will have to demonstrate his independence from die geldmag and find ways to dampen a populist sentiment that is rooted in racial chauvinism and a Marxist critique of our past. He is unlikely to succeed. SA’s fault lines are deep: the battle is between constitutionalists and anti-Western populists.
An ANC coalition with the DA (in whatever form and even including the IFP) is likely to be short-lived. It will not lead to fusion in the near term. But ANC populists, followers of Cosatu and the SACP, will peel off and reunite with their erstwhile EFF and MK comrades, just as far-right Afrikaner “sappers” peeled off from the United Party in the late 1930s and 1940s.
Only once we know the balance of forces within the ANC will we have a hint about how long this will take. A realignment of the body-politic seems inevitable.
• Milton Shain is emeritus professor of historical studies at UCT.
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