A Perfect Storm E-Book

Milton Shain

• Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The interwar years were a tumultuous time in South Africa. The effects of the worldwide economic slump gave rise to a huge number of 'poor whites' and fed the growth of a militant and aggressive Afrikaner nationalism that often took its lead from Nazi Germany. For a great number of whites, both English- and Afrikaans-speakers, the Jew was an unwelcome and disturbing addition to society. A Perfect Storm explores the growth of antisemitism in South Africa between 1930 and 1948 within the broader context of South African politics and culture. A Perfect Storm reveals how the radical right's malevolent message moved from the margins to the centre of political life; how demagoguery was able to gain traction in society; and how vulgar antisemitism seeped into mainstream politics, with real and lasting consequences. Milton Shain, South Africa's leading scholar of modern Jewish history, carefully documents the rise of the 'Jewish Question' in this period, detailing the growth of overtly fascistic organisations such as the Greyshirts, the New Order and the Ossewa-Brandwag. Central to his analysis is the National Party's use of antisemitism to win electoral advantage and mobilise Afrikaners behind the nationalist project. The party contributed to the climate of hostility that resulted in the United Party government drastically curtailing the numbers of Jews admitted as immigrants. Indeed, some of its most virulent antisemites were accorded high office after 1948 when the National Party came to power.

Leseprobe

Milton Shain

A Perfect Storm

Antisemitism in South Africa, 1930–1948

Jonathan Ball Publishers

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

In Memory of Manya, Minya, Abe and Rita

INTRODUCTION

‘South Africa has a Jewish problem, and we cannot deal with it effectively, unless we name it specifically, and face it squarely.’

– DF Malan, House of Assembly, 12 January 1937

‘If the Jew in South Africa gets more power than he now has and becomes more powerful economically then I ask, what future is there for the rest of the people of South Africa.’

– DF Malan, Sunday Times, 31 October 1937

The ‘Jewish Question’ in South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s has attracted relatively little scholarly attention.1 When addressed, it correctly identifies specific factors invariably associated with the radical right. These include the Afrikaner’s existential condition, neo-Calvinism, herrenvolkism, the influx of German-Jewish refugees, attitudes towards capitalism and the structural position of Jews in the economy.2 It has been especially associated with the upward mobility of Jews, as well as with the fear of radical Jewish activism in alliance with the swart gevaar (black peril).3 Patrick Furlong ties the emergence of the ‘Jewish Question’ specifically to the brief interregnum between the moribund ‘Pact’ government (an alliance between the National and Labour parties that governed after 1924) and the birth of the United South African Party, better known as the United Party, in June 1934.4 During these years of political uncertainty and pessimism, complicated by a pervasive ‘poor white’ problem, the effects of the Wall Street crash and a devastating drought, Louis Weichardt – a rabble-rouser who had spent his youth in Germany – launched the ‘South African Gentile National Socialist Movement’, commonly known as the Greyshirts, in October 1933. Inspired by European fascism and Nazism, Weichardt opposed what he called ‘corrupt and rotted democracy’ and confidently proclaimed that the Westminster parliamentary system ‘was outmoded and unsuited to South Africa’s needs’.5

Other radical right movements subsequently mushroomed across the country, flourishing especially in the southwestern and eastern Cape Province, northern Natal and on the Witwatersrand. Doing their best to appeal to dislocated and unskilled whites, these movements consistently blamed the Jew for the country’s woes. By mid-1936 six independently branded ‘Shirtist’ groups were in existence, some operating as breakaways, others newly created. Led for the most part by disillusioned and angry young men, these fascist clones traversed the country aping the politics of their European mentors. Filled with conspiratorial bluster, they crudely alerted South African whites to the exploitative, menacing and evil Jew.6 Propagating fantasies, flirting with notions of ‘Aryanism’ and ‘Nordicism’, and peddling international Jewish conspiracies and other outrageous fabrications, they took advantage of enhanced rail and road communications and improved literacy to spread their toxic message. In an attempt to harness discontent, a plethora of pamphlets, broadsheets and newspapers littered the landscape with hate.

Radical right leaders in the main were marginal figures, invariably at odds with one another, often financially troubled, petty and thin on loyalty.7 Maligned and even ridiculed in the mainstream press, on the few occasions they contested elections they performed poorly. Yet they demanded attention. More importantly, they succeeded in shifting the ‘Jewish Question’ from the political margins of South African public life to its centre. A diverse Jewish community was transformed by them into a uniform and menacing monolith.8 By 1936, the leader of the opposition ‘Purified’ National Party, Daniel François (DF) Malan, was imitating the rhetoric of the radical right. In particular, the influx of German-Jewish refugees seeking to escape Hitler aroused anger and concern across party lines and drove the political agenda.9 Government bureaucrats worked to contain what they feared would be a flood of unassimilable Jewish immigrants who would threaten the status quo: the ‘Jewish Question’ was no longer the concern solely of fringe fascist groups.

The groundswell of anti-Jewish feeling prompted the ruling United Party – led by JBM Hertzog – to introduce stiffer educational and financial immigration requirements during the 1936 parliamentary session, followed by the passing of the Aliens Act of 1937. Widely supported and considered a political necessity, the Act effectively excluded South Africa as a refuge for German Jews, who were deemed unassimilable. Yet hostility did not subside. Nationalists now pushed for Jewish occupational and professional quotas, their propaganda underpinned by an insistence on the threat of Jewish domination in business and the professions. At the same time, they drew attention to radical Jewish activists who undermined völkisch ambitions and threatened to act in alliance with a restive African proletariat. These issues penetrated the debates of the 1938 general election, with the National Party and the radical right utilising the ‘Jewish Question’ as a stick with which to beat the United Party. By the time South Africa joined the Commonwealth war effort against Nazi Germany, the radical right – now bolstered by the Ossewa-Brandwag (Ox-wagon Sentinel) and Nuwe Orde (New Order) – made it quite clear that it envisaged no place in South Africa for the ‘unassimilable’ Jew.10 National Party publications issued in the early 1940s also demonstrated the formative influence of Mussolini and Hitler on the nature of völkisch Afrikaner nationalism.11

Many questions present themselves. Why were radical right fantasists able to exert such influence, and why was a demagogic, simplistic and vulgar message able to gain such traction? Why did the National Party – and especially Malan, a man with only a hint of animus towards Jews prior to 1930 – mimic the discourse of the radical right, and why was the ‘Jewish Question’ such a useful vehicle for political mobilisation? What induced the United Party (strongly supported by Jews) to succumb to pressure from the National Party and the radical right and introduce legislation that halted the influx of German Jews? What was the reason to continue targeting Jews, long after this legislation, with added calls to limit their involvement in commerce and the professions? And finally, why was European fascism, with its exclusivist orientation in which the Jew had no place, so seductive?

This study engages with these questions as it tracks and narrates chronologically the growth of antisemitism in the 1930s and 1940s and seeks to locate this growth within the broader context of South African politics and culture. It will be argued that many Nationalists, including high-ranking bureaucrats, had a visceral dislike of Jews and gave direction to a mood (shared by a not insignificant number of English-speakers) that grew substantially in the years building up to the Second World War. Antisemitism was not, as the historian Dunbar Moodie argues, a ‘muted theme’ during the 1938 general election, and it certainly informed the radical right during the war years. European fascism, and with it antisemitism, had demonstrable appeal.12

Put simply, it will be argued that Jew-hatred was not a marginal factor in South African public life during these troubled years. Indeed, awesome and nefarious power was conferred on a community that comprised a mere 4.5 per cent of the total white population.13 Defined by the radical right as an existential danger, the Jewish community in reality posed no challenge to power and made no claims on state resources. Its modest origins dated back to the early nineteenth century, although it was only by the early twentieth century that the community had established a substantial presence, augmented by immigrants seeking to escape oppression and discrimination in the Russian empire. By the outbreak of the Great War, the Jewish population numbered about 50 000, nearly four per cent of the total white population.14 A range of communal institutions had been founded and Jews were gradually integrating into the wider (white) society. This, however, did not demand the shedding or discarding of ethnic distinctiveness. In a country where English- and Afrikaans-speakers still saw themselves as separate ‘races’, there was ample room for Jewish particularism.15 In the main Jews identified with the more urban and commercially dominant English-speaking population, although in the smaller towns many Jews interacted closely with Afrikaners.

By the mid-1920s two-thirds of Jewish working males were concentrated in trade and finance, more than three times the proportion of their non-Jewish (white) counterparts.16 Most operated on a modest scale, though their presence on many high streets was conspicuous. In manufacturing, Jews benefited from the disruption of imports during the Great War and continued to benefit thereafter from the protectionist policies of the ‘Pact’ government. In addition to commerce and manufacturing, Jews also entered the professions in significant numbers. The proportion of professional Jewish men equalled that of the general white male population, and was steadily rising.17 Jews were also overrepresented among radical groups, including the budding Communist Party of South Africa, founded in 1921; a Yiddish-speaking branch of the International Socialist League had been a forerunner of that party.18 Jewish visibility in leftist politics indeed added yet another layer to a kit of well-worn anti-Jewish stereotypes that had accompanied the influx of Jews from the late nineteenth century: fortune-seekers, cosmopolitan financiers, rural traders, urban hucksters and wartime shirkers.19 These stereotypes confirmed and even reinforced the widely shared European Jewish stereotype, but they were not simply its reflection. They were intimately bound up with the local stresses and upheavals resulting from the mineral revolution of the late nineteenth century and labour instability in the early 1920s. From the mid-1920s, nativist and eugenicist concerns with race, miscegenation and the ‘Nordic’ character of South African ‘stock’ amplified obsessions with the Jew.20 These obsessions, together with the threat of Jewish economic competition and (to a lesser extent) fears of radical subversion, underpinned the Quota Act of 1930, which effectively curtailed the influx of eastern European Jews – the seedbed of South African Jewry.21 Every nation has the right to ‘maintain its own particular type of civilisation’, Minister of the Interior Malan told an approving parliament in defence of the Act.22 Tellingly, English-speakers supported the legislation, as did the press in general. ‘Jews were the wrong type of immigrant,’ explains Sally Peberdy, a historian of South African immigration, ‘because, although white, they were of the wrong race.’23

Without this notion of the Jews as a race apart and the maturation of widely shared anti-Jewish stereotypes, the Quota Act of 1930 would not have received popular support. Hostility towards Jews in the 1930s and 1940s was not an aberration of South African thought or a moment of irrational deviation; it was premised on these stereotypes.24 But the anger went much further. Whereas prior to the Quota Act, anti-Jewish enmity had been expressed essentially at the level of ideas, in the 1930s and 1940s it mutated into proposed action or public policy – what the historian Todd Endelman has referred to as the transformation of ‘private’ into ‘public’ antisemitism.25 Injected into the bloodstream of South Africa’s body politic, major political parties increasingly took cognisance of mounting anti-Jewish feeling.

To capture the mood and temper of the times, use has frequently been made of direct quotations. Not only does this more accurately convey the discourse about Jews, but it also gives a sense of heightened obsession over time. It should also be noted that the focus of this study is on the white population only. The African majority, as well as Asians and mixed-descent Coloureds, seldom identified Jews specifically in their struggle for political rights during the period covered. For them it was rather an issue of white exploitation and oppression.26 For many whites, however, the Jew was identified in negative terms. Even an upturn in the economy from the mid-1930s failed to dampen a populist discourse that characterised Jews as unassimilable, exploitive and subversive, as well as an additional ‘racial’ challenge to a country grappling with its own sense of identity. For the first time, South Africans confronted a ‘Jewish Question’ in the broadest sense. Although deeply and indelibly linked to earlier ideas and stereotypes about the Jew, the transformation of ‘private’ into ‘public’ antisemitism was not simply a deepening of ideas. It was, to be sure, a product of specific factors, a set of contingencies that ultimately drove South Africa’s ‘Jewish Question’ in the decade before and during the Second World War. It was a perfect storm.

1. The ‘Jewish Question’ is the one issue where broader South African historiography intersects with South African Jewish historiography. For the rest, Jews are virtually ignored. When they do emerge in the standard secondary sources, it is invariably as homo economicus. Where Jews came from and how the community lived is hardly addressed. Understandably it is issues of race and class that have dominated historiographical paradigms. Yet for contemporaries the Jew loomed large: the British-journalist and intellectual JA Hobson, for example, blamed Jews and other financiers for the Anglo-Boer War, while a range of vicious antisemites – many of whom appear in this study – characterised the Jews as all-powerful and subversive.

2. See William Henry Vatcher, White Laager: the Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, Frederick Praeger, New York and London, 1965; Brian Bunting, The Rise of the South African Reich, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1969; Michael Cohen, ‘Anti-Jewish Manifestations in the Union of South Africa during the Nineteen Thirties’, unpublished BA (Hons) dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1968; FJ van Heerden, ‘Nasionaal-Sosialisme as faktor in die Suid-Afrikaanse Politiek, 1933–1948’, unpublished DPhil, University of the Orange Free State, 1972; Gideon Shimoni, Jews and Zionism: The South African Experience 1910–1967, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1980; Izak Hattingh, ‘Nasionaal-Sosialisme en die Gryshemp-beweging in Suid-Afrika’, unpublished DPhil, University of the Orange Free State, 1989; Charles Bloomberg, Christian-Nationalism and the Rise of the Afrikaner Broederbond, 1918–48 (edited by Saul Dubow), Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990; Patrick J Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika: The Impact of the Radical Right on the Afrikaner Nationalist Movement in the Fascist Era, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, and Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1991; and Michael Cohen, ‘Anatomy of South African Antisemitism: Afrikaner Nationalism, the Radical Right and South African Jewry between the World Wars’, unpublished PhD, Monash University, 2014.

3. See Dunbar T Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1975; Dan O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme: Class,Capital and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism 1934–1948, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1983; André van Deventer, ‘Afrikaner Nationalist Politics and Anti-Communism, 1937 to 1945’, unpublished MA dissertation, University of Stellenbosch, 1991; and Wessel Visser, ‘The Production of Literature on the “Red Peril” and “Total Onslaught” in Twentieth Century South Africa’, Historia, 49(2), 2004.

4. See Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika, Ch 1, passim.

5. Cape Times, 27 October 1933.

6. From time to time the Asian or Indian trader was also identified in negative terms.

7. Seemingly petty issues divided individuals, resulting in breakaways and the formation of new movements. See chapters one and four, passim. For a sense of infighting and bickering, see Weichardt Collection, PV 29, File14.

8. For similar notions of uniformity underpinning antisemitism elsewhere, see Richard Levy, ‘Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria, 1848–1914’, in Albert S Lindemann and Richard S Levy (eds), Antisemitism: A History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010.

9. See Edna Bradlow, ‘Immigration into the Union 1910–1948: Policies and Attitudes’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1978, and Sally Peberdy, Selecting Immigrants: National Identity and South Africa’s Immigration Policies 1910–2008, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 2009.

10. See Christoph Marx, Oxwagon Sentinel: Radical Afrikaner Nationalism and the History of the Ossewabrandwag, University of South Africa Press, Pretoria, 2008, and P de Klerk, ‘Die Ideologie van die Ossewa-brandwag’, in PF van der Schyff (ed), Die Ossewa-Brandwag: Vuurtjie in droë gras, Potchefstroom, 1991.

11. See Vatcher, White Laager. For an extended discussion on the impact of fascism and National Socialism in South Africa, see Van Heerden, ‘Nasionaal-Sosialisme as faktor in die Suid-Afrikaanse Politiek, 1933–1948’; Steven Uran, ‘Afrikaner Fascism and National Socialism in South Africa: 1933–1945’, unpublished MA dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1975; Sipho Mzimela, Apartheid: South African Nazism, Vantage Press, New York, 1983; Hattingh, ‘Nasionaal-Sosialismus en die Gryshemp-beweging in Suid-Africa’; and Jeff Guy, ‘Fascism, Nazism, Nationalism and the Foundation of Apartheid Ideology’, in Stein Ugelvik Larsen (ed), Fascism Outside Europe: The European Impulse Against Domestic Conditions in the Diffusion of Global Fascism, Columbia University Press, New York, 2001. For an overview of Afrikaner nationalism during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, see Coenraad Jacobus Juta, ‘Aspects of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1900–1964: An Analysis’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Natal, 1966; for the radical right and antisemitism during the war years, see Michael Roberts and AEG Trollip, The South African Opposition 1939–1945: An Essay in Contemporary History, Longman, Green and Co, London, 1947; and for a Marxist analysis of Afrikaner fascism, see Howard Simson, The Social Origins of Afrikaner Fascism and its Apartheid Policy, Acta Universitatis, Uppsala Studies in Economic History 21, Armqvist and Wiksell, Stockholm, 1980.

12. Moodie, p. 167.

13. The 1936 census reported 90 645 Jews out of a total white population of 2 003 857. See Office of the Census and Statistics, Sixth Census, 5th May, 1936, Vol VI, Religions of the Europeans, Asiatics and Coloured Population, Government Printer, Pretoria, UG No 28, 1941, p. vii.

14. See Allie A Dubb, The Jewish Population of South Africa: The 1991 Sociodemographic Survey, Jewish Publications – South Africa, Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Cape Town, 1994, p. 7.

15. The absence of a genuine sense of common nationhood is captured in George Calpin, There are no South Africans, Nelson, London, 1941.

16. Of the 14 per cent of Jewish women gainfully employed, seven in ten were engaged in commerce, double the proportion among non-Jewish white women. A mere four per cent of Jews in formal occupations were farmers, though some Jewish traders in the countryside had subsidiary farming interests. See Morris de Saxe (ed), The South African Jewish Year Book, 1929, South African Jewish Historical Society, Johannesburg, nd,p. 41.

17. Nearly 40 per cent of graduands and diplomats at the University of the Witwatersrand at the end of the 1920s were Jewish. At the University of Cape Town, Jews often made up over 20 per cent of the graduating classes in Arts, Law, Medicine and Commerce. See Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History, Jonathan Ball Publishers, Cape Town, 2014, p. 91.

18. See EA Mantzaris, ‘Radical Community: The Yiddish-speaking Branch of the International Socialist League, 1980–1920’, in Belinda Bozzoli (ed), Class, Community and Conflict. South African Perspectives, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1987.

19. Hostility was already evident in the old Cape Colony, where mounting opposition to the influx of ‘undesirable’ eastern European Jews led to the passing of the Cape Immigration Act of 1902, which sought to exclude eastern European Jews (together with Indians) by way of a language provision. See Milton Shain, Jewry and Cape Society: The Origins and Activities of the Jewish Board of Deputies for the Cape Colony, Historical Publications Society, Cape Town, 1983, chapter two.

20. For the emergence of scientific racism, see Saul Dubow, Illicit Union: Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1995.

21. For the history of South African Jewry, see Mendelsohn and Shain, The Jews in South Africa.

22. Hansard, 10 February 1930.

23. Peberdy, p. 76

24. Milton Shain, The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, and Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1994.

25. See Todd M Endelman, ‘Comparative Perspectives on Modern Anti-Semitism in the West’, in David Berger (ed), History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1986, p. 104.

26. The few occasions Jews are mentioned, be it in positive or negative terms, will be examined in a planned new volume examining antisemitism in South Africa after 1948.

CHAPTER ONE

AN UNABSORBABLE MINORITY

‘With the nurturing of the national consciousness of South Africa there has arisen an anti-Jewish feeling that was unknown, or at any rate, unnoticed before.’

– South African Jewish Chronicle, 31 May 1930

‘… it is very easy to rouse a feeling of hate towards the Jews in this country.’

– DF Malan, interview, Die Burger, 2 November 1931

‘I challenge anyone here to accuse me of preaching murder and persecution – the reports you see of the affairs in Germany are lies – but if the Jew does not want to be put in his place, we shall put him there. What objection can the Chosen Race have if I recommend a policy by which they would be happily settled in their own country? What, I ask you, is wrong in that we want to assist them in that direction?’

– Louis T Weichardt, speech in the Koffiehuis, 26 October 1933

‘While we are squabbling, Comrades, Ikey is rubbing his dirty greasy hands, and we are paying the price in blood and tears … Every Jew is a skunk. There is not a good Jew. They are all evil and filthy. Every mother must warn her sons of the fate which is his by the hands of Zion and send her husband and sons out to fight this evil. I urge you, Comrades, forget your animosity, and British, Boer and German, come out together as one man and fight Judaism until we have strangled the snake and it lies dead at our feet. This is a religious fight. The fight for Christianity.’

– Ray (RK) Rudman, Newcastle, 17 June 1934

BETHAL

In summer the daytime temperature in Bethal often rises above 30°C, but evening thunderstorms frequently bring welcome relief to the surrounding potato and mealie (maize) farmers who have for generations interacted with the eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga) town.27 Among these men of the soil in the 1920s were a handful of Jews, most notably the ‘Mealie King’ of the region, Esrael Lazarus.28 He and the other Boerejode (Afrikaans-speaking Jews) were exceptions among a rural community overwhelmingly dominated by Boers, or Afrikaners.29 Nonetheless, they were well integrated with their (white) English-speaking and Afrikaner compatriots, although farming was far removed from the usual trading occupations pursued by the overwhelming majority of their coreligionists in Bethal.30

The community’s origins went back at least to 1906, a time of reconstruction and optimism, driven by British High Commissioner Lord Alfred Milner and his ‘Kindergarten’, in the wake of the devastating Anglo-Boer War.31 Its numbers, though, remained small: the South African Jewish Year Book 1929 reported a mere 60 members of the Bethal Hebrew Congregation.32 Yet the ‘Pact’ government led by the National Party’s revered General James Barry Munnik (JBM) Hertzog, was determined not to alienate Bethal’s Jewish vote in the upcoming by-election scheduled for 22 January 1930.

Seven months earlier, in the general election of 1929, the National Party’s Tielman Roos, a shrewd and enigmatic friend of the Jews, had narrowly defeated his South African Party opponent, Hendrik Grobler, in the Bethal constituency. But Roos was in poor health and subsequently resigned as Minister of Justice in October 1929 to take up a position on the Supreme Court of Appeal. It was by no means certain that his replacement, GE Haupt, would hold the seat for the Nationalists in the by-election. The small Jewish vote was therefore important and could not be taken for granted, particularly in light of the National Party’s stated intention to restrict Jewish immigration from eastern Europe.33

This festering issue had been on the back burner during the June 1929 election, which had been dominated by the swart gevaar and issues of South Africa’s relationship with Britain. However, the issue was resurrected at the National Party’s Orange Free State congress, held in the wake of the election, with delegates resolving ‘that the time has arrived to fix a quota of immigration on the basis operating in the United States’.34 This resolution had obvious implications for the upcoming by-elections in both Bethal and Stellenbosch, where the National Party faced a distinct possibility of losing the Jewish vote in these tightly contested seats.35

To secure the Bethal seat for the Nationalists and to assuage Jewish fears about restricting Jewish immigration, the National Party dispatched one of its rising stars, the forty-year-old Oswald Pirow, to the small town. The ‘young gladiator of the Nationalists’, as the Cape Times described him, was Roos’ replacement as Minister of Justice.36 The grandson of German immigrants, Pirow had been schooled in Potchefstroom, but at the age of fourteen had left for Germany before proceeding to England to read Law. At the age of twenty-three he was elected to the Inner Temple, London. He returned to practise law in Pretoria, and in 1925, one year after being elected to parliament for the Zoutpansberg seat, was appointed a King’s Counsel (KC). Four years later Pirow audaciously, but unsuccessfully, mounted a challenge for General Jan Smuts’ seat in Standerton. He was highly regarded and, despite his defeat at the hands of the South African Party leader, was appointed Minister of Justice as a nominated senator in the ‘Pact’ government. A short while later he won a by-election in Gezina, a Pretoria suburb.