Arnoldus Pannevis was born at Oudekerk aan de Ijssel, Netherlands on 16th February 1838 and died at Paarl on the 14th August 1884. He was a school-master and champion of Afrikaans and came from a leading burgher family. His father and his grandfather had been doctors, and he, too, studied medicine at Utrecht for some years. On 1.8.1859 he became a medical officer in the Dutch navy, but because of poor health he was honourably discharged on 31.10.1861. He studied literature under the most accomplished men of his time, among them being Dr J. W. G. van Oordt, who subsequently came to Cape Town. P. acquired a sound knowledge of Greek and Latin, mastered French, German and English, and also had some knowledge of Spanish. He sat for his degree on 13.1.1864.
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Political developments in Trans-Orangia from 1848 to 1854, when the Orange Free State was established, had fired Pannevis’s imagination, and as a schoolboy he had been eager to visit South Africa. His wish was fulfilled when he arrived in Cape Town on the mail ship on 11.7.1866. He stayed at Du Toit’s boarding-house in Strand Street and it was here that, dining with Afrikanders, he noticed that in South Africa a language very different from Dutch had developed. Because of his linguistic training, Pannevis realized at once that he had encountered a new language. This discovery was to be of great importance to the history of Afrikaans, for P. was to do much to achieve the recognition of Afrikaans both as a written and as a Biblical language.
He went to Paarl where he met the Rev. G. W. A. van der Lingen. As they had many interests in common, they soon became firm friends, and P. later accepted a post as a classics master at the Paarl Gymnasium, established by Van der Lingen in 1859. On one of his pupils in particular, later the Rev. S. J. du Toit, Pannevis had a profound influence, opening his eyes to the claim Afrikaans had to recognition as a language in its own right. Du Toit later said that his teacher may have been the greatest philologist South Africa had produced (J. D. du Toit, infra).
In private conversation, in public and in the press he strove tirelessly to convince others of the value of Afrikaans as a written language. A profoundly religious man, he was concerned about those (particularly the Coloureds) who could understand neither the Dutch nor the English Bible. The solution he proposed was to translate it into Afrikaans. For this reason he wrote a letter ‘De Bijbel in het Afrikaans’ in De Zuid-Afrikaan of 7.9.1872, advocating an Afrikaans translation for the sake of the Coloureds.
This letter evoked considerable discussion in the press in Dutch, but the idea of a translation was unanimously rejected as rash and unnecessary; Afrikaans was, as yet, no more than kitchen Dutch (plat-Hollands), it was contended, and the sublimity of God’s Word could not be slighted by translation into such a dialect.
P. himself, in an article in De Hollandsche Afrikaan (22.8.1883), called the date on which his letter had appeared in De Zuid-Afrikaan the day on which the Eerste Afrikaanse Taalbeweging (‘First Afrikaans language movement’) was born. ‘The affair,’ he wrote, ‘attracted much interest, and soon there were many champions of Afrikaans … A powerful chord had been struck, and its vibrations slowly filled the country. Gradually the Taalbeweging penetrated the entire nation’.
Meanwhile C. P. Hoogenhout and the Rev. S. J. du Toit also discussed in De Zuid-Afrikaan a translation of the Bible and Afrikaans as a separate language, and gave considerable impetus to the movement in favour of Afrikaans. But Arnoldus was the first to think of an association for the promotion of Afrikaans. Under the pseudonym ‘O.’ he wrote an article in De Zuid-Afrikaan of 4.11.1874: ‘Is die Afferkaans wesenlijk een taal?’ Maintaining that Afrikaans was a language in its own right, he advocated its recognition. The fluidity of its spelling was hardly an obstacle. Once it had been established, a society for the advancement of Afrikaans could immediately publish a grammar and a dictionary. In these two books it would be evident that Afrikaans was an independent language, which anyone, even an Englishman, might speak.
Three days after the appearance of this article, Pannevis wrote to the British and Foreign Bible society, asking it to have the Bible translated into Afrikaans. This letter was to result in the establishment, on 14.8.1875, of the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (G.R.A.). Unfortunately he called Afrikaans ‘a kind of corrupted Dutch’ in his letter, and in its reply the association refused to perpetuate a pidgin language through a translation of the Bible.
Arnoldus was too idealistic to become a great leader of his crusade. His pupil, the Rev. S. J. du Toit, took charge. He suffered from a nervous complaint, and it seems as if his instability and fanaticism led to his being overshadowed by G.R.A. members who were alarmed by his impetuosity.
The foundation meeting of the G.R.A. decided that a translation of the Bible would be premature. They considered P. too hasty: first the nation had to be brought to realize that it had a language of its own, to respect its language, and then the demand for an Afrikaans Bible would follow naturally.
Arnoldus did not join the G.R.A. until its third meeting, although the Taalbeweging was a direct result of his letter to the British and Foreign Bible society. Not only did he gain supporters for Afrikaans; he also persuaded them to write and, as a society, to pursue their aims and convince Afrikanders that they did, in fact, have a language of their own. In this sense Pannevis can rightly be called the father of the Afrikaanse Taalbeweging.
He also strove for the preservation of Dutch culture. He wrote articles and letters to news-papers and periodicals. Very soon after his arrival he noticed that the country was threatened by British influences. In a letter to Het Volksblad (30.4.1870) he was particularly passionate in his condemnation of English church services in the N.G. Kerk, as this did much to advance anglicization. Pannevis made the hostility of many ministers towards Afrikaans the butt of a humorous article in Die Afrikaanse Patriot (17.12.1880). In an unpublished essay on school education he strongly criticized the way English history was being taught to Afrikaans children. In an article called ‘Mr., Miss, Mrs.’ (Die Afrikaanse Patriot, February 1883) he sharply attacked Afrikanders who spoke English. Condemning the British annexation of the Transvaal, he wrote ‘t Misdadig Engeland: tot troos ver ons landgenote in Transvaal, bij die aanhegting deur die Engelse (Paarl, 1877); only three copies of this book are known to exist. In his ‘Gesprek over het Kaaps-Hollands’ written in 1875 and published in the Patriot in 1882 (cf. J. D. du Toit, infra), he used philological arguments to prove the right to existence of Afrikaans and to refute the contention that Afrikaans was a Hottentot language. This article shows that he had a clear grasp of philological principles and was far ahead of his times in his ideas on the ‘foreign influences’ on Afrikaans and its origin. ‘Close study and correct use of Afrikaans will reveal its peculiar force and extreme beauty, and one day people will be amazed at this much despised language … The future of South Africa depends on the recognition of Afrikaans’.
Although Pannevis was a strong advocate of Afrikaans, he usually wrote in Dutch, as he did in his regular contributions to Het Zuid-Afrikaansche Tijdschrift. Among the items he left are a large number of essays and poems, almost all written in Dutch. These poems follow the nineteenth-century traditions of pious Dutch poetry. Nor are his Afrikaans poems much more than doggerel. Most of them are of a religious nature, acknowledging guilt and repentance. In almost all of his poems P. is strongly didactic. In his poems on Afrikaans he is astringent and bitter, as in ‘Rasende afgodery’. He translated several French poems into Afrikaans, and was also one of the four authors of Die Afrikaanse Volkslied (”n Ider nasie het syn land’), the first work published by the G.R.A.
He compiled a vocabulary of Afrikaans which he gave to Prof. N. Mansvelt for his Proeve van een Kaapsch-Hollandsch idioticon (1884). The Rev. S. J. du Toit also used this list for his Afrikaanse taalskat’ in Ons Taal.
Arnoldus Pannevis was a bachelor and a Freemason, but later condemned this movement and withdrew from it. On 12.9.1877 he resigned his lectureship at the Paarl Gymnasium, explaining that, because of ill-health, he could not satisfactorily perform the duties which had, through a reorganization of the school, devolved on him. Three days later he resigned his membership of the G.R.A. (in a letter which was read to the association) ‘although my attitude to the Afrikaans cause has not changed in the slightest and, I trust, never shall’. Of this period C. P. Hoogenhout wrote: ‘Soon afterwards his sufferings began. Strained, tense and writing incessantly, he had weakened his nervous system, and often became exceedingly depressed. But, periodically, there would be a respite – when he avoided exertion. That rarely happened, however. He was happiest of all on some quiet farm, where in his last years we saw him teach small children the elements of education, as though that were his true vocation’ (Het Zuid-Afrikaansche Tijdschrift, November 1881).
On 14.8.1884 he died of failure of a cardiac artery at Groenberg, Wellington, and was buried the next day in the family tomb of the Rev. G. W. A. van der Lingen, next to the N.G. Kerk in Paarl.
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| Grave G.W.A. van der Lingen |
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