Chapter Two:  Mom and Dad

Kim du Toit
February 24, 2007
10:57 AM CDT

Ox-wagons

The Du Toit name is of French origin, and in South African terms a very old one:  two Du Toit brothers had fled France to escape the persecution of the Huguenots, and settled in the Cape Province in 1692.  Others followed later, for more or less the same reasons.  I’m not sure whether my roots can be traced back to the first two brothers or subsequent arrivals (there’s evidence to support either, and I’ve never been sufficiently interested in the genealogy to investigate it too deeply, for reasons which will become obvious).

Cape Town was a Dutch colony, and therefore Protestant, so Huguenots were widely accepted, despite their language difficulty.  Their French atrophied over time, overcome by the dominant Dutch spoken in the Cape, and the only traces of it today are found in the occasional pronunciation of the letter r in the French manner, and in names (for example, Fran�ois and Labuschagne, both now mispronounced as Franch-wah and Labu-Skaghni, the latter spoken with the hard guttural glottal sound which English-speakers find so difficult).

The Du Toits were all farmers, especially wine farmers, and settled mostly in the wineland areas of the Cape, where they married Dutch girls, and gradually became Dutch themselves.

All went well until the Cape became a British colony as a result of the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665-1667.  The new British administration was far more intrusive upon the lives of the colonists, and in a spirit of almost-universal discontent, the Dutch settlers began to move inland, into the vast hinterland of southern Africa, in what became known as the Groot Trek (Great Trek).  They traveled in their ox-wagons, sometimes in wagon trains, sometimes as single families, and fought continuously against African tribes, some of whom were settled, and others who were likewise drifting southwards in a migration of their own.

It is difficult for non-Afrikaners to grasp the hold that the Great Trek has on the psyche of Afrikaners.  It encapsulates a feeling of an escape from persecution, of striving for independence, and of battling against a hostile and savage enemy.

It’s also true that Afrikaners detested, and still detest the British � the “donderse Engelse” � and the later atrocities that occurred during the Second Boer War just solidified that enmity.  When apartheid ended in the 1990s and South Africa changed its flag, my aunt’s only comment was: “At least we finally got rid of that bloody Union Jack,” (a miniature of which had been embedded in the old Union/Republic flag, along with the flags of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State).

Afrikaners of my father’s generation grew up in a home atmosphere that contained three universal characteristics, all interrelated:  the feeling of being treated as second-class citizens in their own country; a feeling of being surrounded by a hostile world; and a deep and clannish attachment to the Afrikaner volk � a word which means literally “people”, but in its Germanic root, as used here also by Afrikaners, means a combination of nation, people and culture.

In no small part, this was made all the more critical because Afrikanerdom, per se, was still being created.  The Afrikaans language was only “legitimized” by the legendary Totius (Jakob Daniel du Toit, no relative) in his efforts to translate the Bible into Afrikaans � for a religious people like the Afrikaners, the sine qua non of language acceptance. Totius had another effect on Afrikaans culture:  his interpretation of Biblical verse became the bedrock of apartheid � that Black people were the “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, ie. servants.

It should be noted that Totius died in 1953, the year before I was born.

As for the hatred of the British, it should also be remembered that the Boer War was then a lot fresher in the collective memory than, for example, the Second World War is for us today.  My Ouma (Dad’s mother) still recalled hiding under the bed when the “Khakis” rode by her family’s farmhouse � even though they themselves had little to fear because the farmhouse was in the Northern Cape Province, which made them, technically, British subjects.  (That was no small thing, by the way, because the British were busy rounding up women and children off the farms in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, and dumping them into their new invention, the concentration camps.)

On a family driving trip, my Dad once took us on a detour through a tiny country town, and in the town square was a memorial to those who had given their lives when they rebelled against the British during the First World War.  (To many Afrikaners, it made more sense to support the Kaiser’s Germany than the British Empire, especially when it had been the Kaiser’s Mausers which had been supplied to the Boers and used with deadly effect on the British Army.)

Anyway, I wondered aloud why Dad had brought us to this particular spot.  He pointed to two names on the cenotaph, and said simply, “They were your Ouma’s cousins.”

The blood of rebels runs deep within my veins.

My father, Pieter Schalk du Toit, was born in 1928 on a farm close to the Vaal River, the border between the Transvaal and Orange Free State (once sovereign nations, then simply provinces of the Union of South Africa).  His Afrikaner heritage was long and impeccable, in both his parents’ families. 

He was too young to fight in World War Two, only seventeen on VE-Day, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been prepared. 

Just before WWII, a secret Afrikaner society had been formed, called the Ossewa-Brandwag.  The name means literally, the Ox-Wagon Fire Brigade, but what it really meant was “Guardian of the Ox-Wagon” in the sense of guardianship of the Afrikaner culture (see what I meant about the Great Trek?).  The Ossewa-Brandwag was actually organized more than a little like the German Nazi Party, with block commanders, regimental structure and quasi-military ranks.  The OB, which had a membership of over 300,000 people, reached deep into Afrikaner life � most politicians and community leaders belonged to it � and the organization was only formally disbanded when the Afrikaner Nationalist Party came to power in 1948.

Dad had been a member of the Jeugbond, the OB’s youth organization, formed more or less on the same lines as the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) of Nazi Germany.  He told me that he got his driver’s license at sixteen (instead of the legal age of eighteen), because his driving examiner was also a member of the OB, and he just signed off on Dad’s license as a tiny rebellion against the English-supporting, and therefore much-hated Smuts government of the time.

So Dad was about as Afrikaans as you could get, with ties deep in the community, a respected sportsman (he’d played rugby � another Afrikaner-dominated institution � at provincial level and was a star sprinter at high school), and he was well-liked by all who knew him. 

Then the cracks started to appear.

In common with most Afrikaners of the period, Dad had grown up speaking little English other than the textbook words taught in his high school’s English classes.  This lack of English came back to haunt him later, when he began to study Engineering:  because Afrikaans was still a new language, there were no Afrikaans textbooks, so he perforce had to learn not only a “new” language, but also the technical engineering terms and theory in that unfamiliar language.  It made his studies appallingly difficult, and his graduation as an engineer was all the more noteworthy because of it.  This difficulty caused him to make a decision which was to prove critical to me later on:  he decided that he was not going to inflict that fate on his children, so I and my sister were raised speaking English.

The task was made a little easier for him because earlier he had, to the shock of his family, decided to marry an English-speaking girl.

Time has softened the rift that this action caused, but at the time it must have been cataclysmic.  My mother spoke Afrikaans a little (not much better than Dad’s English), but she spoke it really badly, with Anglicisms scattered all over the place.  To Dad’s family, who prided themselves on their impeccably-spoken Afrikaans, this was as much an insult as the fact that their Pieter had married outside the volk � the only action worse than that would have been to marry a Greek, Italian or Jew.  (Forget about marrying a Black woman � that was not only illegal under apartheid, but it would have been akin to his marrying an alien from outer space, or a dog.)

Speaking of Jews, that was another bone of contention.  Not only was my mother “English”, but she also had Jewish friends (by dint of their neighbors being a Jewish family).  To make things worse, they were close friends � the two Finkelstein girls were about my Mom’s age, and all my life I’ve referred to their mother, Mamie, as Bubbe (Yiddish for grandmother).  My joke has always been that I have three grandmothers, and love all of them equally.

But to Afrikaners, who did not associate with Jews, this was an anathema, and just another example of how different the Engelse were. 

To make matters worse, Mom wore pants, and make-up, and nail polish. She also drank liquor.  The only thing she didn’t do was smoke, which would have been the death-knell.  (Neither of my parents ever smoked, and nor do my sister and I, to this day.)

In many respects, the Afrikanerdom of my youth was little different from Victorian in its social mores.  The “English” society was a little different.

My Mom, Madeline Marie Elizabeth Loxton, was born in Springs, a little mining town about fifty miles east of Johannesburg.  Her father, Charles Frederick Loxton, was a veteran of the First World War (on the British side), and he had been terribly wounded in France at the Battle of Delville Wood, which occurred more or less on his seventeenth birthday. 

Charles was a tiny man, little more than 5’6” tall, and the Loxtons were always derided by the massive Du Toits for their diminutive size.  Almost all the four Loxton children were likewise short, and I’m 5’10” tall, a giant by those standards.

The Loxton kids were brought up in an atmosphere of strict discipline administered by infallibly-loving parents.  My Mom tells the story of how Oupa would get up very early every morning, and before anyone was awake, he would shave and make every member of the family a cup of coffee, which he would leave on their bedstands before going off to work at the mine.  She called it “my father’s good-morning kiss.”

But the cultural differences ran deep between English and Afrikaner societies (and they were in truth different societies).  Afrikaners had little exposure to the outside world, imprisoned by their stubborn refusal to speak English.  Their only interactions were amongst themselves, in their churches, in their (Afrikaans-medium) schools and in family and neighborhoods.  There were Afrikaans newspapers and radio stations, and the leaders of the Afrikaans community (politicians and preachers) were thus able to maintain their firm grip on the volk simply by restricting the content of the Afrikaans media � a habit which was to persist during the apartheid years, when the Government controlled the content of all radio, Press and, much later TV.

The English, however, had access to British literature, English-language media, and, of course, Hollywood movies.  Naturally enough, “English” culture was far more open, less religious (relatively speaking), and to Afrikaner eyes, disgracefully permissive.  (Not that permissive: when my Dad was courting my Mom and they went to the movies, Oupa went along as well, and sat in the row behind them.  It should be noted, though, that Afrikaner kids weren’t allowed to go out at all, except as part of a larger family group.)

So despite all the opposition from the Afrikaners, Mom and Dad got married in 1949.  An interesting irony:  Mom’s first two names, Madeline and Marie, were French, while Dad’s first names were Dutch, which makes an interesting juxtaposition with the French last name.  (By the way, “Du Toit”, like most French words, is mispronounced by Afrikaners.  They say it as “doo-toy”, which always grated on me, and I changed it back to the French inflection as soon as I could, but only years later.)

By the time I came along, Dad spoke excellent English:  the combination of university study with English-speaking teachers and having to write his papers in English, coupled with living with Mom, had helped him become fluent in a very short time.  He also spoke German fluently, because many of the better engineering textbooks of the time had been written in German, and he found it easier to read them than the English ones.  So he’d learned to speak two languages fluently in only a couple of years.  (I inherited his language skills:  I speak English, Afrikaans, French, and a little German.)

I mentioned that Dad grew up on a farm, but what I didn’t mention was that it was a poor farm.  My paternal grandfather, had died when Dad was still a teenager.  His three elder siblings had by then left the farm and married, so Dad, at age sixteen, had to do the man’s work on the farm, and look after not only his mother, but his two younger siblings as well.  It was a life of appalling poverty, but eventually they managed to sell the farm and move to a small house in Springs, where Dad went to high school (it was called “Huguenot High School”, by the way).  Dad got a part-time job, and his older siblings chipped in what they could afford to support the family.  After he finished high school and got his first job, the money from the siblings disappeared, and he supported his mother and two younger siblings by himself.

So Dad moved into a small apartment in Springs with his new bride (paying rent and a mortgage on two places).  Mom was a secretary, and he was a welder and boilermaker.  He’d work a full day’s shift at his job in town, and then catch the train for the two-hour trip into Johannesburg for night classes at “Tech” (Johannesburg Technical College). 

For unknown reasons, Mom was unable to conceive (“She’s too small to have a baby” was the Du Toits’ catty judgment) until five years after she was married.  This was probably a blessing in disguise, because by then, Dad had graduated at the top of his class as an engineer, and had been offered a fine job � in Canada.

Emigration has always been a difficult, wrenching decision.  For small-town folks like my parents were, the decision to move to Canada must have been a frightening, and almost insuperable barrier.  But it was a job which paid a great deal for a newly-minted engineer, so they set about going through the paperwork.  It was all speedily approved (emigration then was a lot easier, bureaucratically, than it is now), and my parents got ready for the move.

Then two things happened.  Mom discovered she was pregnant, and Dad got offered another job:  a job which not only paid a lot more than the Canadian one, but one which did not require emigration either.  It was a contract job on a copper mine in Kitwe, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), and they did not have to move up there until after I was born.  The decision on which job to take was, for my Dad, easy:  my parents would not have to emigrate, just spend a year in Northern Rhodesia, and after the contract was over, they could move back to South Africa.  And, the clincher, the Kitwe job paid more than the Canadian one � a lot more.

So I was born in 1954, at the Florence Nightingale Clinic in Hillbrow, an urban suburb of Johannesburg (a relationship similar to the Bronx and New York City � in fact, Hillbrow’s nickname in my youth was “The Bronx”).  Two weeks after I was born, we moved up to Kitwe, where I spent the first year of my life.

Technically speaking, therefore, I could have been born in any of three countries:  South Africa, Zambia and Canada.  It’s an interesting juxtaposition, especially considering what was to follow.