Barry Streek Obituary
The leader of the right-wing Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP), Jaap Marais, was a determined man. Indeed some would describe him as fanatical, having clung to his faith in white supremacy right until his death this week. It was a determination graphically demonstrated by his passion for breeding budgies and, in particular, attempting to breed a black budgie. He never succeeded in this quest, but then he also never gave up. He also never gave up on the HNP, which he helped form in 1969 after he and three other MPs – including former posts and telegraphs minister Albert Hertzog, who was minister of health at the time and who bitterly opposed the introduction of television because it would indoctrinate South Africans with “liberalistic” propaganda – formed the party after they were expelled from the National Party. Their expulsion followed their opposition to its sports policies, diplomatic relations with Africa and the “Cape liberals” in the Afrikaans press. The HNP fought election after election opposing the government’s “reform” policies, and it lost election after election, often forfeiting deposits. Marais himself fought four unsuccessful elections in the Waterberg constituency against Dr Andries Treurnicht, who he regarded as a sell-out, even after Treurnicht himself broke with the NP in 1982 to form the Conservative Party. Marais also stood in Koedoespoort in Pretoria in August 1979, but he lost that by-election by 1E700 votes. Electoral defeat seemed to matter little to the slightly built politician who always addressed political meetings with a pile of neatly folded newspaper cuttings which formed his notes for his never-ending attack on the alleged reformists in the NP government. The HNP did have a brief period of glory when in 1985 when Louis Stofberg, one of the four breakaway MPs who launched the HNP, captured the Sasolburg seat in a by-election, but it was short-lived. The CP won the support of right-wing voters and even Stofberg later quit the HNP for the CP. But Oom Jaap, who was 77 when he died, still persevered. He even had a letter published in last week’s The Sunday Independent stating that the English, not the NP of 1948, invented apartheid. “Is it asking too much of English-speaking South Africans to acknowledge this evident truth?” he asked.
While he never backed off from his dogged and dogmatic views – essentially, that there should be white supremacy in white South Africa – he was always, as former leader of the opposition Frederik van Zyl Slabbert said this week, “courteous”. He was also refined. He was a lover of poetry, with TS Eliot and John Keats among his favourites. He wrote a number of books, including Stryd is Lewe (Struggle Is Life), a collection of some of his speeches and articles; Waarheid en Werklikheid (Truth and Reality); and a book in which he claimed there was a political conspiracy behind the assassination of Dr Hendrik Verwoerd.
Throughout the appearance of the HNP newspaper, Die Afrikaner, he wrote lengthy columns expressing his far- right views on any issue he felt strongly about. He also translated Julius Caesar into Afrikaans. A connoisseur of fine wines and good food, Jaap Marais had style. He once told a group of English-speaking journalists at an HNP conference – which, incidentally, were always boycotted by the Afrikaans press – that his failure to breed a black budgie showed that it was contrary to nature to mix races.