Dr Vera Bührmann (1910–1998): From Volksmoeder to Igqira? A Popular Myth Re-examined

ABSTRACT

In 1975, at the age of 65, Dr Maatje Vera Bührmann began a decade-long cross-cultural psychiatry research project in the former Ciskei in which she used a Jungian framework to explicate the methods of a Xhosa igqira (healer). From this work, for which she continues to be widely lauded in some circles, a mythology arose which portrays her as an exemplar of someone who transcended the racial politics of the radical Afrikaner nationalism she had embraced in the 1940s. In this article I present evidence from her writings and associated archival sources that challenges this view.

KEYWORDS:

• Maatje Vera Bührmann
• Afrikaner nationalism
• Ossewabrandwag
• Dietse Kinderfonds
• Jungianism
• cross-cultural psychiatry
• racial prejudice

Notes

1 The event that triggered Fischer’s personal transformation was his first handshake as an adult with a Black man that left him ‘overcome by an instinctive feeling of revulsion’. This prompted a period of profound introspection, the results of which are now a matter of historical record (Clingman 1998, 456–57).

2 Vera’s father was a veteran of the South African War. Her mother and several of her older siblings were interned for a period in a British concentration camp (https://www2.lib.uct.ac.za/mss/bccd/Person/146134/Johanna_Maghrita_Buurman/). Vera grew up at a time when Afrikaner cultural entrepreneurs – her father among them – were forging a new identity for the Afrikaner volk, weaving together tales of Boer bravery and British brutality from the South African War with the efforts of a new breed of taalstryders (language activists) intent on creating a distinctive Afrikaans literature and language (see Hofmeyr 1987).

3 On the varied uses of the volksmoeder image by Afrikaner cultural entrepreneurs, see Elsabe Brink (1990, 273–92; 2008, 7–16); Vincent (1999a, 1–17; 1999b, 51–73; 2000, 61–78; 2012, 132–46); Marijke du Toit (2003, 155–76); Ria van der Merwe (2011, 77–100).

4 MV Bührmann to Rudolph Bührmann, 20 February 1949. My thanks to Mr Johann Bührmann for making this letter available to me.

5 At the time, she was employed by the Pretoria City Council as medical officer in charge of maternity and welfare services. She was granted a three-month leave of absence to undertake the trip to Germany as the DKF’s medical selector.

6 University of Cape Town Libraries, Special Collections, BC1164 Vera Bührmann Papers. C2. ‘Fred and the Jung Course’. Ca. 1976. In his autobiography, Plaut mentions Vera as one of the notable Jungians he had met in his lifetime but provides no details of their relationship (Plaut 2004, 91–92, 113).

7 On HT Bührmann’s (Vera’s grandfather) acquisition of land and child labourers, see Diderick Erasmus (1995); Peter Delius (1984); Fred Morton (1994); Johannes van der Walt (2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

André Landman

André Landman is a retired archivist. He was a student in the history department at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa, when the research for this article was undertaken.