Former apartheid minister Adriaan Vlok is still seen as a superhero. Marion Edmunds reports
SUTHERLAND is a Karoo town where coloureds and whites still bury their dead on different sides of a fence. This deference to apartheid does not stop at the cemetery gates.
Whites in the Northern Cape town also like to pay quiet homage to one of its more famous sons who is one of the more notorious apartheid ministers: the former minister of law and order, Adriaan Vlok. He even has a room dedicated to him in the local museum, the Louw-huis.
Stationed proudly next to his family tree, a polished bust of Vlok stares out of its corner at his distant cousin, Alida Vlok, as she shows us around the museum. “This is the Vlok room,” she says in Afrikaans a little nervously, gesturing at Adriaan Vlok. “He is also a famous son of Sutherland.”
We stare at a deadpan Vlok. The bust was presented to the museum in 1988 by Brigadier Buks van Staden, as a present to Sutherland from the South African Police Cultural Association. Vlok, as minister of law and order, was the guest of honour, with his wife and mother, at the ceremony to unveil the bust.
On the day, Vlok wrote in the visitors’ book, “This has blown my breath away”, while his mother noted: “Thank God for His mercy.”
There is also a copy of the speech by a local doctor paying tribute to Vlok’s mother for bearing such a son to die volk, to his wife for loving and nurturing him, and to the town’s “brothers” for supporting him and creating an environment in which he could develop.
The walls of the Vlok room are hung with photographs of past Vlok generations, including the “Abraham” of the family, Nicolaas Vlok, a wealthy farmer more than a century ago who went forth and multiplied.
Black-and-white photographs depict Vlok heroes who fought the British in the Anglo- Boer war and who were sent as prisoners to what was then Ceylon.
Along with them are pictures of several great-aunts, and of Vlok’s balding brother, Nico Vlok – mayor of Pretoria in 1988 – and his buxom wife superimposed on to a purply, swirling photograph of the city they once governed at the heart of National Party rule.
Alida Vlok, a genteel, elderly widow, still owns the original Vlok farm, called Snyderspos, a little way out of town. She is reluctant to speak about the revered one, sensing perhaps that this time history is not on her side.
The only time she slips is when we point to a tall staff, wrapped up tightly in a black canvas cover, resting in the other corner of the Vlok room. “Oh, that’s the old South African flag,” she says and then with a little laugh, “It’s in mourning. We had to take it down … No, we don’t have the new flag here … and we don’t want it either.”
She is at her best when she is not talking about her relatives, describing instead the life and times of other sons of Sutherland who remain respected in the new South Africa: award-winning poet and author NP van Wyk Louw and his brother, poet WEG van Wyk Louw; and civil engineer Dr Henry Olivier, who has been honoured by all past governments for his work on projects such as the Cahora Bassa dam and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project.
The rooms are full of commonplace items with sentimental value: a floppy sun-hat Olivier wore on site; WEG Louw’s first dinner service; Van Wyk Louw’s travelling trunk; and of course their collections of certificates and awards which mark their achievement in the wide world beyond Sutherland.
Alida Vlok is tremendously proud of these men, of these sons who have emerged from generations who sweated and toiled and worked the hard earth of the Karoo; the sons who were talented and ambitious enough to draw their inspiration from the common dream of Afrikaner self-realisation, self- government and wealth rooted in the Sutherland ethos.
Olivier and the Van Wyk Louws will be remembered as having contributed greatly to achieving this dream, through words and dam walls.
In history books to come, however, Adriaan Vlok is more likely to be recorded as a symptom of the worst of Afrikaner nationalist rule, the politician who oversaw repression and the destruction of other people’s dreams.
I returned to his bust for a last look before emerging into the bright sunlight and caught, in Vlok’s frozen features, a reflection of Ozymandias – the ancient despot of Shelley’s poem whose memory was preserved by a broken statue with the words “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” emblazoned across its base.
Like the “shattered visage” of Ozymandias, Vlok’s bust stares only on to the level plains of the Karoo, boundless and bare, which stretch far away.