Membership, dismemberment and the boundaries of the nation — Manfred Nathan's Sarie Marais: a romance of the Anglo‐Boer War*

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Notes

South African Jewish Board of Deputies Archive M103A. 8/5/1963, “Dr. Manfred Nathan” Kaplan and Robertson 1991.

South African Jewish Board of Deputies Archive, M 103A. 8/5/1963, “Dr. Manfred Nathan”, p. 2.

It is an interesting commentary on the perceived salience of such interconnectedness, and its social function, that a reviewer of Manfred Nathan's biography of Paul Kruger (Nathan 1944 [1941]), Edgar Bernstein, writing in the official organ of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies Jewish Affairs in 1941, invokes Paul Kruger's friendship with Jews as a defense against anti‐Semitism: “In these days, when attempts are often made by nationalist extremists to provoke anti‐Semitic feeling, it is also interesting to record the many friendships which President Kruger had with Jews in the Transvaal, and his sympathetic interest in Jewry” (1941: 11).

I am indebted to Irma du Plessis and to Stephen Gray, respectively for the references to Grobbelaar and to the National Afrikaans Literary Museum newsletter.

Nathan's assimilation of these constructs is evident in the introduction to his volume on the Voortrekkers: “Indeed, in the annals of pioneering throughout the world, none rank higher for fortitude and endurance, and none are entitled to greater praise as a colonising and civilising influence, than these same Voortrekkers. … [T]he Voortrekkers were the blazers of trails into the wilderness, who, whatever the reasons might be which actuated them, sought new homes in the desert and savage lands, in doing so crossed unbridged rivers, unmapped lands, and untrodden mountains, and ultimately, after much suffering, with constant battle against merciless foes, established permanent homes in the middle lands of South Africa, not for themselves alone, but for their posterity; as well as for whomever would enjoy a quiet life under the Southern Cross” (1937: xiii–xiv).

• Interestingly enough, a prior historical challenge to the vision of reconciliatory white nationhood is also encoded in the folksong. According to Grobbelaar, the stanza containing the lines “Toe vlug ek na die kant van die/Upington se sand/Daar onder langs die Grootrivier” refers to the 1914 Boer rebellion which broke out in opposition to Louis Botha and Jan Smuts' support for the Imperial Government's call to invade German South West Africa:

  • Sarie Marais kry 'n nuwe strofe by onder diegene wat nie opgekommandeer wil word om gaan te veg nie:

  • “Toe vlug ek na die kant/van die Upington se sand.” Ook dien Sarie Marais as model vir 'n lied oor die Rebelle, opgesluit in Kimberley se kamp:

  “November is ons op'kommandeer

  'n maand daarna is ons vasgekeer

  Desember het ons wapens afgelê

  En toe het die Rebelle weer niks te sê. (Grobbelaar 1999: 139)

• For accounts of the Rebellion and its contribution to the consolidation of the Nationalist party in the 1915 parliamentary election, see Davenport 1987: 271–72 and Giliomee 2003: 379–84.

In the classic Freudian model, transference refers to processes of emotional substitution and replacement whereby strong affective or sexual feelings which have their source in childhood relationships are transferred onto the analyst in the course of analysis, and are drawn into consciousness through this constant process of acting out. Counter‐transference refers to the investment of the analyst's own desire in this process. For some psychoanalytic literary theory, the contractual basis of narrative renders it a potential site of transferential and counter‐transferential exchanges, such as those between narrator and narratee (see Peter Brooks, 1984: 284).

Shain, in critical dialogue with Shimoni and Furlong (see 1994: 3–4), argues that anti‐semitism was a significant element in South African society well before the crises of urbanisation and labour instability among Afrikaners, together with the rapidly expanding Shirt movements combined to saturate right‐wing Afrikaner political discourse with more virulent forms of anti‐Jewish feeling — that would eventually, as Furlong so persuasively shows, be incorporated into mainstream Nationalist politics.

I find the statistics instructive. According to Furlong, citing figures compiled by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies:

• In 1932 5 German Jewish immigrants came to South Africa; in 1933, 1934, and 1935, in response to Hitler's persecution, 204, 452, and 421. In 1936, 2,577 Jews fled to South Africa.

• Ironically, during the first three years of the Nazi regime fewer than half of German immigrants to South Africa were Jewish, 1,044 out of 2,664 arrivals. Despite the big increase in German immigration, there were fewer Jewish immigrants over all than in the pre‐Quota Act days. The anti‐Jewish hysteria that struck South Africa in 1936 was stimulated, in part, by the sudden boost in migration; 3,344 immigrants came, compared to 1,078 in 1935. Yet the proportion of Jews to the total white population of the Union increased only a fraction, from 4.28 percent in 1926 to just under 4.75 percent in 1936, or 95,000 out of more than two million people” (1991: 55–56, emphasis in original).

For an account of the involvement of Cissie Gool, Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman's daughter, leader of the National Liberation League, and first black woman advocate in South Africa, in the protests against the Greyshirts, see Schrire 2003: 82–85.

Jan Smuts, a signatory of the 1917 Balfour Declaration which would make the State of Israel possible, recalls his pro‐Zionist advocacy as a matter of vicarious identification motivated by Afrikaner history. For Smuts, in his self‐description as “a Boer with vivid memories of the recent past,” the “Jewish case” lodged its appeal with “peculiar force” (see Shimoni 1980: 43). J.B.M. Hertzog, sometimes opponent and sometimes ally of Smuts, held the Afrikaners of the National Party to be “like the Jewish people,” a minority who “must do all in their power to keep alive their language and racial characteristics. We have nothing but admiration for that race who have for two thousand years struggled to keep alive their national culture and prevent themselves being swamped by the nations among whom they dwell. We, like most Jews, are Zionists. Our Homeland is South Africa; to us it is sacred soil.” (in Shimoni1980: 49) Hertzog's statement, issued on the eve of the 1929 general election that would give the National Party an overall majority, subordinates its invocation of an ambiguous Zionism (whose object may, or may not be, mandatory Palestine) to the need to reassure local Jewish voters—implicitly positioned as a constituency within the patrimony, the promised land, of white South Africa.

Various critiques have recently been mounted concerning the function of shlilat hagalut as an apparatus for the erasure of memory, whether the memory of the “other” provenance of Diaspora Jews or of Palestinian claims to historical continuity in territory now subordinated to Zionist national sovereignty (Raz‐Karkotzkin 1993, 1994). The exclusionary identity politics of Zionism, and its attendant consequences for the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict, are increasingly seen to be linked with the contradictions attendant on the notion of shlilat hagalut (Raz‐Karkotzkin 1993, 1994; Piterberg 1995; Yiftachel 1999).

My reference to Leon Roth, the Manchester‐born Jewish philosopher and translator, who left England to establish the philosophy department at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is calculated. Like Martin Buber and Judah L. Magnes, fellow members of the organization Brith Shalom (literally, “Covenant of Peace”), Roth was committed to the creation of a bi‐national democratic state in Palestine, based on the equality of rights for Jews and Arabs. This orientation can be seen to inflect his writing on the twelfth‐century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, for instance, where Roth is concerned to point out that Maimonides denies “the conception of an exclusive connection between religion and the Jewish people, or between religion and Palestine, or between such religious phenomena as prophecy and the geographical condition of Palestine. Judaism for him is not a product of ‘race’ or an inheritance of ‘blood,’ nor is it bound up exclusively with any one people or any one soil” (1955: 123). Manfred Nathan's writing implicitly transposes comparable insights into the vernaculars, English and Afrikaans, of the South African Zionist. For more on Roth's fracturing of the hegemonic Zionist project, reflected in his decision to leave Israel just three years after the establishment of the state, see Gordon 2002. The history and ideology of Brith Shalom is treated in Ratzabi 2002. For the contemporary relevance of Martin Buber's involvement with Brith Shalom, see Butler 2004.

The normalisation of “transfer” in contemporary Israeli politics as a de facto “solution” to the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict is evident, inter alia, in government policies towards the Palestinian inhabitants of the South Mount Hebron region (Yiftachel and Gordon 2002), as well as in the spatial and social disruption of Palestinian civil society cloaked by the erection of the so‐called Security Wall. See Algazi 2003; Blecher 2002; Gordon 2003.

The term naqba means “catastrophe” in Arabic and is used by Palestinians to denote the dispossession and exile consequent on the 1948 war that Israeli Jews refer to as “The War of Independence”.