Lessons from SA’s 1941 insurrection

In late January 1941, downtown Joburg was the stage for violent insurrection. Police, soldiers and members of the fascist Ossewabrandwag (OB) were at the centre of riots that left one person dead, about 300 hospitalised, shops destroyed and vehicles set alight. This outburst of violence was part of what many in the government and military intelligence believed to be an attempted coup.

To provide some background: when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, a huge factional rift tore through the ruling United Party in SA, and the country as a whole. Though Afrikaner prime minister JBM Hertzog wanted SA to remain neutral, his deputy, Jan Smuts, believed fervently that fighting on the side of the British was the right and proper thing to do.

Hertzog famously lost the parliamentary vote on this question, allowing Smuts to form a pro-war government without going to the polls. But Smuts was well aware of the potential for internal violence that his pro-British stance might cause. The Boer Rebellion of 1914 had, after all, led to the deaths of more than 300 Afrikaners, when then prime minister Louis Botha and Smuts decided to join World War 1 on the side of the British.

Certainly, Smuts as prime minister had been no shrinking violet when it came to the suppression of uprisings, as the 1921 Bulhoek Massacre and 1922 Rand Revolt had proved.

But when World War 2 began, Smuts faced a particular home-grown problem in the form of the OB, a fascist paramilitary organisation that had no interest in democratic parliamentary politics. As OB general and future prime minister BJ Vorster stated: "We stand for Christian Nationalism, which is an ally of National Socialism. You can call such an antidemocratic system a dictatorship if you like."

Membership of the OB is said to have reached about 400,000 at its peak. But the organisation could not simply be pulled out root and stem: the police force and civil service were laced with its members.

In 1941, JH "Hans" van Rensburg — a passionate admirer of Hitler — was made commandant-general of the movement. Van Rensburg was a lawyer, civil servant and soldier who had been dismissed at the beginning of the war for being politically untrustworthy. As historian Charles Bloomberg writes, Van Rensburg "was greeted in some quarters as the new saviour of Afrikanerdom, his advent being reputedly foretold by the famous Afrikaner mystic and seer, NPJJ ‘Siener’ van Rensburg (no relation) who, only just before, had predicted that a man in a brown suit would suddenly emerge and lead his volk to its final salvation".

Smuts — much like President Cyril Ramaphosa today — initially took a cautious approach to the factionalism in the country. He knew that large swathes of the police were card-carrying members of the OB. But he did, in 1940, disarm rural militias and farmers, who surrendered about 8,000 rifles to the government.

This handing over of guns, according to historian Patrick Furlong, was primarily why a larger insurrection didn’t take place during the first years of the war; the loss of those guns made a sustained insurgency against Smuts’s government impossible.

Hampered by the lack of guns, the OB military wing, the Stormjaers, led by Steve Hofmeyr — grandfather of the singer-songwriter of today — organised a campaign of terror. Targeting state infrastructure, its members blew up electricity pylons and communication links; they even went as far as attempting to sabotage the power station at Delmas. The organisation bombed the office of the Bantu World newspaper, as well as the post office in Benoni, killing a bystander.

To finance these activities, the Stormjaers robbed banks and, as military historian Evert Kleynhans tells it, even the offices of DF Malan’s right-wing publisher, Voortrekker Pers.

The Stormjaers were also seemingly behind the attempted assassination of their leader’s cousin, JH Hofmeyr, who was Smuts’s trusted liberal deputy prime minister. A bomb was planted outside his bedroom window in Cape Town, but it failed to detonate. In another incident, OB members attacked and beat Harry Lawrence, minister of the interior and head of the country’s internal security.

But the OB’s organised insurrection went further. In 1940, gangs of its young adherents took to targeting and attacking Jewish people in the cities. This behaviour spread, with OB members singling out and beating volunteers in the Union Defence Force. The volunteers were referred to by the OB as "rooi luisies" (red lice), a play on "rooi lussies" — a reference to the red tabs on their uniform that showed they’d taken the "Africa oath" to defend the continent against the Axis forces.

In 1940, at least 79 cases of assault on soldiers were reported in the Transvaal alone.

The Stormjaers’ "General" DK Theron and a man simply known as "Doors" Erasmus also attempted to blow up a train carrying troops destined for North Africa.

As Ernst Malherbe, military intelligence head at the time, noted: "They went under a bridge and they had their dynamite there to blow up the bridge just before the train came. But — and I wouldn’t say unfortunately — they blew themselves up."

This violence would reach the streets of Joburg in January 1941. The trouble started after an OB "cultural concert" at City Hall, where Van Rensburg had given a speech. As a subsequent commission of inquiry into the unrest found, many of those who attended the "concert" came armed with clubs and knives.

At the same time, a large crowd of red-tabbed servicemen, who had heard of the event, gathered outside. When OB members exited the venue, a free-for-all broke out between soldiers, the police and armed concertgoers.

The police and OB members teamed up in one particularly brutal baton charge against the soldiers. The soldiers scattered, leaving the street strewn with injured servicemen — the start of a two-day street battle. "Mobs of violent men" smashed up shops and a police van was overturned by soldiers and set alight. Servicemen also ransacked and set alight the offices of Die Vaderland newspaper, which they mistakenly believed to be the headquarters of the OB.

The inquiry into the riots found that the police’s baton charge had not been ordered by a senior officer. It also found that the police had repeatedly beaten soldiers who had already been knocked down. In one incident, one Corporal S Gillham was attacked, without provocation, by the police. He later died of his injuries.

During the two days of unrest, about 200 soldiers were admitted to hospital with stab wounds and other injuries. What were termed "civilian" or OB injuries were far less numerous and far less severe.

The soldiers did take some revenge, however. In one incident, soldiers chased an OB supporter up a lamp-post. The man, who had "inexplicably" lost his trousers during an earlier "discussion", was then forced to sing God Save the King.

After the commission of inquiry, Smuts acted to head off the possibility of a coup. First, he dismissed hundreds of policemen for being sympathetic to, or members of, the OB. Then, on March 1, he issued a decree making it illegal for civil servants to belong to the OB.

Using wartime state of emergency regulations, Smuts also created an internment camp at Koffiefontein, in the Free State, where OB members suspected of subversion were held without trial. Among these were two OB generals, "Lang" Hendrik van den Bergh (later head of the Bureau of State Security) and future prime minister Vorster.

In January 1942, more than 400 policemen linked to the OB were detained by fellow officers after a clandestine operation. Bomb-making equipment and explosives were found in several of their houses.

Interestingly, Van Rensburg was never interned, despite his treasonous activities. That’s quite something, when you consider he had gone so far as telling liberal politician Leo Marquard — a high-ranking member of military intelligence — that the OB was part of the Nazis’ war-winning strategy, and had helped German U-boats sink Allied ships.

When the OB congregated to celebrate Allied defeats in the early years of the war, Malherbe, the military intelligence head, said: "Smuts was wise enough to ignore these demonstrations, because if he had in any way tried to stop them there would have been bloodshed and more rebellious feelings would have been aroused."

Smuts also refused to allow the army to raid Van Rensburg’s farm, which was known to be a rendezvous for Nazi agents and was "defended like a fort with armed guards and dogs".

At the end of the war, Malherbe was satisfied that the more tempered approach with the OB had worked, and that the limited imprisonments of some junior members of the organisation were effective. However, he also warned Smuts that while the OB threat had been neutralised, a similar approach was needed with the pro-Nazi Afrikaner Broederbond.

This Smuts simply did not have the stomach for. Though he banned Broederbond members from the civil service, he refused to arrest the organisation’s leaders or act decisively against its networks. According to The Rand Daily Mail, 63 of the 92 National Party candidates who defeated Smuts in the 1948 elections were known members of the Broederbond. Many of these men, including Hendrik Verwoerd, would go on to run the country in the decades that followed.

If there are some lessons here for Ramaphosa they are not necessarily clear. Caution and stealth have their merits. And Smuts had earlier learnt — as Ramaphosa did with Marikana — that bloody hands are never a good political look. But as the philosopher Bernard Williams writes, dirty hands are "a predictable and probable hazard of public life".

Blackman, with Nick Dall, is the author of Rogues’ Gallery: An Irreverent History of Corruption in SA