‘Swart gevaar’ (black peril) has been in the news a lot recently. But where does the term come from? And how can it still be alive and kicking?
In case you’ve been residing under a rock (for which I wouldn’t blame you), here’s a recap. Earlier this month John Steenhuisen lashed out at four smaller parties (the Patriotic Alliance, Rise Mzansi, Good and the National Coloured Congress) for having the audacity to contest the elections in the Western Cape. He called them “political mercenaries” and accused them of wanting to “line their own pockets.”
“Why are they coming to the Western Cape?” asked Steenhuisen. “If they get that right, it’s gonna be the biggest bank heist you’ve ever seen.”
The leaders of these smaller parties took umbrage at being labelled terrorists for wanting to exercise democracy. Songezo Zibi, the leader of Rise Mzansi, was particularly incensed.
“John asks, why are they COMING to the Western Cape? Coming? From where?” Zibi told the Cape Town Press Club. “This is the worst kind of swart gevaar! It is illiberal, it is divisive, and it further proof that the DA under Zille and Steenhuisen will never reach the black voters it needs if it is to govern South Africa.”
The swart gevaar election of 1929
Swart gevaar has become synonymous with apartheid. But while researching Spoilt Ballots: The Elections that Shaped South Africa, I discovered that it has a longer and uglier history.
On one level, swart gevaar has been around since 1652. In fact, one of the reasons the Dutch took so long to establish a permanent settlement at the Cape was their fear of what the “savages” might do to them.
As an electioneering tactic, however, swart gevaar is more recent. While 19th-century politicians like Cecil John Rhodes loathed the “natives”, they were also aware that alienating people of colour would cost them votes as the Cape had a colour-blind franchise. (Yes, you read that right: men of all races were always able to vote in Cape elections.) There was an unwritten rule that overt mentioning of race during electioneering would not be done. The trick was to refer to black and coloured people by their outsider economic status rather than their racial origins.
Things started to change with the rise of the National Party under JBM Hertzog from 1914 onwards. But even the arch-racist Hertzog was reluctant to embrace swart gevaar fully: he won the 1924 election thanks in part to the coloured vote.
Five years later, some members of his party — notably Tielman Roos and a young DF Malan — convinced him to change tack. So much so that the 1929 election became known as the “Swart Gevaar Election”.
For all its repulsiveness, it was a highly effective piece of electioneering. As Govan Mbeki concedes in his essay “Rise and Growth of Afrikaner Capital”, swart gevaar “skilfully” united English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites: “Thus a common fear and common hatred were generated against a common enemy — the African … [giving] the Nationalist Afrikaner a free hand to carry on with his allotted mission to put die k***** in sy plek.”
Keith Hancock, Jan Smuts’s biographer writes: “The colour issue was dominant. The Nationalists staked their fortunes on a gigantic campaign to convince the constituencies that white civilisation was in danger. It was in danger, they said, because Smuts stood for niksdoen, for ‘letting the situation develop’, which meant letting white civilisation drift onto the rocks. Worse than that the country was in danger because Smuts stood for gelykstelling, the equality of black and white.”
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While addressing voters in Ermelo, Smuts made a massive oepsie when he talked of his dream of a “confederation of African states… a great African Dominion stretching unbroken throughout Africa”.
While Smuts later denied he had used the term “African Dominion”, the Nats didn’t need a second invitation to pile on to Slim Jannie. They disseminated their “Black Manifesto” which implored voters to “Stem vir ’n witmansland” (vote for a white man’s land) and tarred Smuts as “the man who puts himself forward as the apostle of a black K****r state… extending from the Cape to Egypt… And already foretells the day when even the name of South Africa will vanish in smoke upon the altar of the K****r state he so ardently desires”.
“Day after day from January to June”, the pro-Nationalist newspapers owned by Nasionale Pers (most notably Ons Vaderland and Die Burger, which since its founding by none other than DF Malan in 1915 had come under the editorship of Albert “Ysterman” Geyer) claimed that if Smuts got his way, “White South Africa would be drowned in the Black North”.
The newspapers’ cartoonists took to their task with glee. One cartoon depicted South Africa as a tiny white spot on the tail of a black dog, while another showed a Griqua soldier with a white bride on his arm. Arguably the most effective of the bunch was a simple cartoon published in Die Burger a week before the election showing a white farmer staring forlornly at an SAP (South African Party, led by Smuts) election poster that read: “Stem vir die Swart Afrika Party”.
The rise and rise of swart gevaar
Hertzog won the 1929 election easily and swart gevaar was entrenched as a secret sauce that very few white voters could resist. After World War 2, the ex-newspaper editors and apartheid architects DF Malan and Hendrik Verwoerd (check out this charming election poster) took the concept to the next level. For a time in the 1960s and 70s, swart gevaar became so entrenched that the opposition United Party started trying to beat the Nats at their own game.
As Laurence Gandar, editor of the liberal Rand Daily Mail, wrote of the 1966 election, there was something “unreal”, “synthetic and unconvincing” about the debates of the campaign. His paper noted “that the centre of gravity of politics had moved substantially farther to the Right” and made a truly disturbing observation: “The middle ground formerly occupied by the United Party has been largely vacated for there are issues on which the United Party now stands to the Right of the Nationalist.”
Don’t believe me? Try this on for size: De Villiers Graaff, the supposedly liberal leader of the United Party, insisted that the NP, with its Bantustan policy, was the unconscious ally of the communists. He claimed that the Nats were creating “little Cubas” within the sanctity of South Africa’s borders. The UP’s Afrikaans mouthpiece, Ons Land, went as far as claiming that the NP was engaged in “K*****boetie politics”.
Of course, it has always been the trick in times of an election to claim that your opposition is a proxy for a deep and lascivious evil. Steenhuisen’s claim that the other parties are “political mercenaries” who simply want to “line their own pockets” can be filed in the same category as Zibi’s “swart gevaar” jibe. There is some exaggeration at play.
Swart gevaar was effective during apartheid, as only white people could vote. Hertzog, too, could get away with it because voters of colour made up a tiny fraction of the electorate in the 1920s. But the idea that it could still be alive and well in a country where the vast majority of voters stand to be repulsed by it is deeply troubling. DM