Whites Split Over Apartheid : Afrikaners Mark Historic Day in 2 Feuding Camps

Neels and Emmarencia Hamman and their five children parked the camper on a rocky slope here Friday to join thousands of other renegade right-wing South African whites celebrating the 150th anniversary of Afrikanerdom’s most sacred holiday.

“These are true Afrikaners, people who have not sold out their covenant with God,” said Hamman, a 38-year-old farmer, his black beard grown long in the style of the 19th Century for the occasion. “God created black people and white people. Who are we to force those people together?”

At the same time, about 20 miles away, thousands of the Afrikaners whom Hamman considers sellouts celebrated the same historic day and lamented a bitter feud splitting the flock.

“Throughout our (early) history, Afrikaners manifested one great weakness,” President Pieter W. Botha told that group of his supporters. “Our individualism sometimes took the form of stubbornness that led to division and weakness.

“If we cannot stand together and work together, our enemies will break us--if we do not do it for them ourselves,” he added.

In one of the most unusual days in the history of South Africa’s dominant white group, the Dutch-descended Afrikaners stood openly, solemnly and widely split on the rich veld conquered by their ancestors.

On this holiday, known as the Day of the Vow, Afrikaners give thanks to God for the day in 1838 when a band of frightened white farmers, heavily outnumbered by black Zulu warriors, circled their 64 wagons on a grassy plain. The farmers made a promise to God--if he granted them victory, they would set aside that day each year to praise him. So much Zulu blood was spilled in the battle that the place was named Blood River.

A Crucial Victory

The victory was one of the most crucial on the Great Trek, the mass journey of Afrikaner rebels away from the Cape Colony and British rule. The survivors of that trek settled in what later became the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, practicing fundamentalist religion and justifying their racism with Bible passages.

That history of survival in a world full of their enemies makes many of South Africa’s 3.5 million Afrikaners feel that God is on their side, no matter how strong their foe. Right-wing whites also believe that God promised them a land of their own--a separate white state.

“It is the right of the Afrikaner nation to be ruled by its own people,” Andries Treurnicht, leader of the Conservative Party told the rebel Afrikaners here Friday. Treurnicht, who holds a doctorate in theology, said it was God who “placed boundaries between different nations and different races.”

The separate Afrikaans-language ceremonies were the culmination of rival re-creations of the Great Trek that began several months ago.

The government supporters’ wagons, pulled by oxen, left Cape Town in August and ended up at the Voortrekker Monument, a square granite edifice on a hill south of Pretoria, the capital.

The right-wing Afrikaner wagons, pulled by women and children, traveled 300 miles from Blood River to this farm east of Pretoria.

“It made me think about history and what we must do for our people,” said Quinton Smit, 7, who with his mother helped pull a wagon for 10 miles.

Back in 1938, on the 100th anniversary of the Great Trek, the celebrations of the Great Trek and the Day of the Vow had a unifying effect on the Afrikaner people and, only 10 years later, the Afrikaners’ National Party came to power. It was the National Party that launched apartheid, the legal system of racial separation under which the black majority has no say in national affairs.

Conservatives Oppose Reform

But today, the ruling Nationalists are trying to gradually reform apartheid, and it is the Conservative Party, gaining strength in Parliamentary elections last year and local elections this year, that favors a return to old-style apartheid.

In recent weeks, several Conservative Party-controlled town councils have reintroduced apartheid at public lakes, libraries, toilets and other facilities, touching off sharp criticism from the Nationalist government, among others.

“We don’t hate anybody. But everyone has the right to his own culture and his own history, and we believe it must be separate,” said Hamman, surrounded by men in long beards and women in kappies , traditional bonnets Boer women once used to keep the African sun off their faces.

Hamman had brought his family from their farm near Lichtenburg, about a three-hour drive. His children were dressed in 1830s-style Afrikaner garb sewn by his wife especially for the trip.

“The people over at the Voortrekker Monument,” Hamman said, referring to the other ceremony, “are throwing away what is sacred to us.”

But Johan Koekemoer, sitting with his wife and two daughters on lawn chairs outside the monument, saw it differently.

“Creating a white state, where only white people will live, is not practical,” Koekemoer said. “Our government is doing the right thing.”

Then Koekemoer took his children into the monument where, at precisely noon, as it does each year only on the Day of the Vow, sunlight streamed through an opening in the ceiling to illuminate a symbolic ancestral grave and the words: “We for you, South Africa.”

Johannesburg bureau assistant Michael Cadman helped in the preparation of this story.