'Problems of Europe': N.P. van Wyk Louw, the Intellectual and Apartheid

Abstract

A great deal has been written on the genesis of apartheid thinking. Little attention, however, has been paid to how apartheid was developed and justified by South African intellectuals, at home and abroad, as an adaptation of the European political tradition. This essay contributes toward a literary and intellectual history of apartheid by investigating the Afrikaans poet and essayist N.P. van Wyk Louw's advocacy of apartheid as a doctrine consistent with liberal principles. The first part explores the dialogue of ideas he conducted with the philosopher R.F.A Hoernle, and his appropriation of Hoernle's argument that South African conditions called for a rethinking of liberalism as it had developed historically in Europe. The second part of the essay closely analyses Louw's slogan of voortbestaan in geregtigheid (survival in justice), developed in less open dialogue with Geoffrey Cronje in the 1950s, showing how Louw's role as an apartheid apologist can be traced back to his essays of the 1930s. There Louw assigns Afrikaans writers the task of justifying the existence of the Afrikaans volk through works of literature, something he himself did in his 1938 trek-festival play, Die dieper reg (The Deeper Right), which presents the intellectual with a stark choice of parts: Accuser or Advocate of the volk. In lectures he gave as an academic in Amsterdam in the 1950s, Louw presented South Africa's 'Rassevraagstukke' (Racial Questions) as 'problems of Europe'. Exploring the links between Louw, Hoernle and Cronje in the context of Louw's apartheid apology in the Netherlands, I show that latent in calls for geregtigheid, and in a rhetoric of multi-nationalism, lies a deeper racism: an unquestioned assumption, with little attention to black political opposition, of white, 'European', political prerogative. The rhetoric of this assumption, I propose, also makes it impossible for Europe and its intellectuals to absolve themselves of complicity in apartheid.