Marion Edmunds gets to grips with how people felt 50 years ago when the National Party came to power
The National Party today is a shadow of its former self, publicly regretting the policy of apartheid which brought it to power in the highly charged national elections of May 26 1948.
Fifty years ago it stood on the threshold of more than four decades of minority rule; today it peers into the abyss of oblivion.
The 1948 elections confirmed the political ambitions of the Afrikaner community, shocking liberals, communists and English-speakers.
The NP’s unexpected victory over the United Party leader, prime minister Jan Smuts, in his constituency of Standerton, which he had held for 24 years, became a symbol of the UP’s defeat.
“We will not hide our joy at the defeat of Field Marshall Smuts in Standerton,” crowed Die Burger when the election results were announced. “The good folk of Standerton are true South Africans, supporters of the fatherland, whose ancestors suffered and strove to establish and uphold Western civilisation in our realm.”
Freedom Front leader Constand Viljoen, then a schoolboy in Standerton, remembers the excitement of the day: “I felt that this was the Afrikaner volk recapturing the position it had lost in 1902, with the defeat in the Anglo-Boer war. My parents were very disheartened because they had always voted for Smuts, but for me the victory represented a new beginning for the Afrikaner, of the people taking their rightful place,” he said this week.
There was similar jubilation in the Free State, where Sampie Terreblanche had just started high school. Terreblanche was to become a Broederbonder for 20 years, and a leading Afrikaner academic at the University of Stellenbosch, before rejecting apartheid in the late Eighties.
“I can remember the jubilation. When victory was announced, the SABC played a song called The Ball is Over, and they got reprimanded later. I remember on the farm all eight people on the party line picked up their phones at once and started to speak to each other,” he said.
The results of the elections came in over two days, raising the excitement. On May 27 the UP appeared to be in the lead, as all the urban seats were counted first. However, as the day drew on, the Nationalists took over, with their victory confirmed the next day.
Democratic Party MP Colin Eglin remembers walking through Pinelands station that morning and seeing Die Burger’s posters, which proclaimed: “Nekslag vir die regering. Smuts uit [Decapitation for the government. Smuts out).”
“We gathered outside The Argus building to see the results on a large banner,” recalled Eglin this week. “I had been a 19-year-old soldier in the war, and to me the NP was almost an extension of [Adolf] Hitler’s party.
“It may not have been, but they were backing Germany. Most of my associates were ex-servicemen and the election of the NP touched a chord among those who had been fighting fascism and Nazism – there was a profound sense of shock, of unreality. I was very involved in community politics then, but because of the profound shock, the election catapulted me into party politics.”
In Johannesburg, African National Congress veteran Ahmed Kathrada was in his Market Street flat with friends.
“We stayed up the whole night to see the results as they came in. There were mixed emotions,” he said. “Some people left the country because they thought there would be mass arrests. There were others who stayed in the country, but thought it was an unmitigated disaster. Others felt it was the best thing because it would unite people against a white government.
“In spite of the viciousness of the NP policies, I did not think their victory was a bad thing, because it would now sharpen the struggle and contribute to the radicalisation of politics, which it did.”
The NP government later imprisoned Kathrada on Robben Island for life on charges of treason. He is now President Nelson Mandela’s parliamentary counsellor .
In the Transkei, ANC stalwart and father of Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, Govan Mbeki, heard the results on the radio. “They filled me with dismay,” he said.
The election results were badly received by former Progressive Federal Party MP Helen Suzman, who was to become the NP’s fiercest opponent in Parliament during apartheid.
“I was attending a concert at the Great Hall at Wits University when the news came through that General Smuts had lost his seat. The hall emptied, as if by magic, and we went to the City Hall, outside which there was a barometer giving other election results. I knew then that the Nats had won, and my first reaction was, ‘What a disaster – we will never get them out,'” she remembered.
English-speaking newspapers, such as The Cape Times, had punted the UP vigorously in the run-up to the election, warning the electorate against voting for the NP .
In an editorial the week before, The Cape Times had described the Afrikaner nationalism advocated by the NP as “the pathological perversion of patriotism. By their fruits shall ye know them,” it warned.
The NP won 11 all-white elections and three referendums before ceding power through negotiations and accepting defeat in all-race elections in 1994.