Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners

AGTERGRONDARTIKEL

Die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners

Deur Amanda Kreitzer


DIE regstreekse oorsaak van die stigting van die Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners was te danke aan een man, Arnoldus Pannevis -- taalkenner, leermeester, primêre grondlegger van Afrikaans as kultuurtaal. Profeet van buite wat aan die Afrikaner in sy stomheid 'n geestelike tong wou gee.
 
Op 'n onverklaarbare wyse het hy hom diep aangetrokke gevoel tot Suid-Afrika en sy Hollandssprekende bevolking. Hier aangekom, kon hy onmiddellik raaksien wat die Afrikaners in daardie stadium nog net nie te mooi van geweet het nie. Díe taal, so maklik op die oor, besluit hy, het feitlik al die sier van sewentiende-eeuse Nederlands waaruit dit gekom het, afgeskud. Sy siening, gerugsteun deur intelligente geesdrif, het hy gou oorgedra aan individue in 'n gemeenskap waarin hy hom meer as tuis gevoel het: díe van Drakenstein, veral Dal Josafat. Hy het by sy vriend, ds. GWA van der Lingen, tuisgegaan. Daar in die studeerkamer met sy baie boeke moes hierdie twee, albei met hulle eie Nederlandse erfenis, lang ure gesels het oor hierdie vreemdste en verste van die Dietse tale.
 
Dit was tydens Pannevis se onderrigjare aan die Gimnasium dat hy die jong boereseun SJ du Toit uit Dal Josafat as iemand met uitsonderlike begaafdheid herken het. Du Toit se lesse by Pannevis ter voorbereiding vir Teologiese Kweekskool was 'n beslissende oomblik vir sy lewe en sienswyse. En die dag toe hierdie vurige en geniale kop die argumente en gesonde taalinsigte van Pannevis vat en in sy hart opneem, was dit die begin van die Eerste Afrikaanse Taalbeweging. Van Arnoldus Pannevis het SJ du Toit self later getuig: "En hier kan ons nie nalaat om 'n man te noem wat werklik die eerste met erns die gedagte uitgespreek en ons o'ertuig het, dat ons 'n eie taal het, en wel 'n voortreklike taal, wat ons moet erken en beoefen. Die man is oþerlede mnr. Pannevis, molik die grootste taalgeleerde wat ons ooit in ons land hat."
 
Nêrens blyk Pannevis se intelligente, ewewigtige siening van die saak van die Afrikaanse taal so duidelik nie soos in sy ekende bydrae tot Die Patriot in 1882: Gesprek over het Kaaps- Hollands;
 
"Oom" en "Neef" voer 'n debat. "Neef" is gretig maar huiwerig. "Oom" se argumente is egter so rustig oortuigend dat "Neef" gaandeweg sy onsekerheid in vreugde voel verander... vreugde by die ontdekking van 'n bate waarvan hy nie bewus was nie. þNeefþ leer ook van "Oom" (Arnoldus Pannevis) dat Afrikaans sy eintlike beslag gekry het toe die Hollandse gesag in Afrika opgehou het, toe die spreektaal van die Kaapse bevolking, blank en bruin, te staan gekom het voor die oorheersende feit van die wêreldtaal, Engels. Wat die hele saak vir "Neef" beklink, is "Oom" se versekering: "Een naauwgezette studie en beoefening onzer taal zal http://www.roepstem.net/patriot.htmlhaar eigenaardige kracht en biezondere schoonheid aan het daglicht brengen, en men zal zich nog eendag over dat verachte Afrikaans verwonderen..."
 
Waar tevore het ooit so iets plaasgevind? Dat 'n immigrant 'n nuwe land betree, en plotseling iets van oorheersende belang in die kultuurbesit raaksien op 'n wyse wat die inheemse bevolking nog die heeltyd onwyk het? En dit teen die agtergrond van 'n Engelsman, -Lord Charles Somerst, se besieling met die idee van 'n "Empire". Dit was Engels in die howe, Engels in die skole, verkieslik ook Engels in die kerk.
 
Stel jou voor: mense met 'n eie spreektaal wat hulle nie eens kon lees of skryf nie. Want daar is niks om te lees, en hulle het ook nie eens die woorde, die taalmeganiek waarmee hulle kon skryf nie. Hulle staan met 'n stukkie van 'n taal wat swaar dra aan die dooie hand van die VOC-verlede, opnuut verkneg deur 'n nog vreemder idioom -- 'n doofstom volk.
 
Arnoldus Pannevis sien dit raak met die vars blik van 'n fyn, onafhanklike gees van buite. In 'n privaat brief op 7 November 1874 aan die Britse en Buitelandse Bybelgenootskap (BBBG) in London, pleit hy dat hul die Bybel in Afrikaans moet vertaal en uitgee. Dit moes gedoen word met die oog op die Blankes en Kleurlinge wat dit beter sou begryp in Afrikaans as in Hollands of Engels. Hy doen dan ook iemand aan die hand wat volgens hom uitmuntend bevoeg sou wees om so 'n vertaling te onderneem te wete SJ du Toit. Die BBBG verwys die brief na hul plaaslike verteenwoordiger in die Kaap, ds. George Morgan. Ds. Morgan skakel toe met SJ du Toit maar hy wou eers die saak met 'n paar voorstaanders van Afrikaans bespreek alvorens hy antwoord gee. So word 'n byeenkoms gereel vir Saterdag 14 Augustus 1875 in Gideon Malherbe se huis in Pastorielaan Paarl.
 
Die vergadering is deur die volgende agt persone bygewoon in volgorde van ouderdom: Gideon Malherbe, CP Hoogenhout, DF du toit (bynaam "Dokter"), DF du Toit (oom Lokomotief), sy broer SJ du Toit, August Ahrbeck en Petrus Malherbe en SG du Toit. JPJ Dempers, 'n godsdiensonderwyser van Wellington is ook verwag, maar hy het nie opgedaag nie. Almal behalwe Hoogenhout en Arbeck was familie. Maar die agt jollie kêrels het nie net vir 'n geselsie bymekaargekom nie; hulle het formeel vergadering gehou. Hulle noem dit "een voorlopige vergadering van Afrikaanders". Bybelvertaling is bespreek, maar die kar kon tog nie voor die donkies ingespan word nie. Die taal moes eers 'n vaste skryfvorm kry. 'n Kommissie word dus benoem en Die Genootskap se konstitusie ("naam en reþels") sou ogestel en by 'n volgende vergadering voorgelê word.
 
Vyf maande nadat hulle die eerste keer vergader het, verskyn Die Patriot waarin "ieder Regte Afrikaander" (met Afrikaanse en nie Hollandse of Engelse harte nie) opgeroep word "om te staan ver ons Taal, ons Nasie en ons Land".
 
Met reg kan gesê word dat die hele heroiese era van die Afrikanervolk deur die enkelvoudige taalaanvoeling van 'n beskeie maar diep sensitiewe mens in sy spesifieke koers en vorm geplaas is: Arnoldus Pannevis. En net so onopgemerk as wat hy gekom het is hy weer weg. Nadat hy by die Gimnasium bedank, gaan bly hy op Dal Josafat en gee daar onderwys aan 'n privaat skooltjie wat die "Gedenkschool der Hugenoten" sou word, opgerig deur die Genootskappers as 'n "lewende monument", om die twee eeue van hulle Hugenoteskap in Suid-Afrika te onthou. Sy gesondheid was altoos swak en ten tye van sy dood op die betreklike jong ouderdom van 46 het hy by WP du Plessis op die plaas Groenrivier, in Wellington gewoon.
 
Vir hierdie taalbesieldes het dit gegaan oor lewenstyl, wat onafhanklikheid van gees is. 'n Bloedlyn wat ver terug loop in die verlede, van 'n lang geskiedenis van verset teen dwingelandy. Na GWA van der Lingen, Estienne Barbier, die Franse vlugtelinge en hul Vryburgergeesgenote, die slag van Majuba wat ses jaar na die stigting van die GRA plaasvind, bereik dit sy hoogtepunt met die uitbreek van die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog. Dit het gegaan oor die 2waarde van 'n vry mens wat op sy eie voete loop en tegelyk sy nederigheid voor sy Skepper en sy eie waarde as skepsel herontdek en daarop aandring.
 
Dis karakter, -idioom van 'n besondere skeppende persoonlikheid. Dit is die betekenis van die kunstenaar of kultuurleier, om die ontwikkeling van die volk te lei deur te bepaal wat waardervol en sterk is en hom te laat lei deur sy geloof in die suiwere, en sy liefde vir die skone.
 
Wanneer ons ons taalhelde eer, eer ons die geestelike dinge wat juis aan die stoflike dieper betekenis en sin gee. 'n Volk se waarde word daarom nie geskat op grond van aardse besittings of magsprestige nie, maar word gemeet aan die waarde van sy letterkunde, musiek, beeldende kunste en sy waardering vir wat goed, mooi en ewig in die alledaagse lewe is. Die aansien wat Afrikaanse taal- en letterkunde in 'n eeu verwerf het, is 'n geringe tydperk in vergeleke met die letterkundige ontwikkeling van groot kultuurvolke.
 
Die Latynse skrywer Seneca het gese: "Die mens word groter na mate hy sy doel hoër stel". Mag daar in 'n tyd waar lewenstyl in die vergetelheid van middelmatigheid verdwyn het, die stryd weer aangesê word deur die volk wat Afrikaans as sy erfenis verkry het, teen die hol, vlak en onbeskaamde woord wat nie meer verhef of inspireer nie, maar soos 'n bril is wat met wasem beslaan is.

http://www.roepstem.net/patriot.html

Ds. S.J du Toit

Gymnasium Primary School

http://www.kontrei.co.za/paarl-walkabout.php

On 5 July 1831 the Rev Gottlieb Wilhelm Antonie van der Lingen was confirmed as minister in Paarl. After it was finally decided in 1857 to establish the Theological Seminary in Stellenbosch, the Reverend decided in 1857 to found a church school where boys could be prepared for the Theological Seminary or for further study in Europe. Instruction was to be in Dutch. On 12 January 1858 the school was opened. The Egyptian-style architecture and decorations were intended to be symbolic. One of the appointed teachers was Arnoldis Pannevis, who arrived in South Africa from Holland in 1866 and played an important part in the First Language Monument. After the founding of the Noorder-Paarl congregation in 1875, with the Rev SJ du Toit as minister, church services of the new congregation were held in the Gymnasium. The left wing of the school was used as parsonage. Gymnasium produced several well-known South Africans, amongst them the first professor of Afrikaans in South Africa, Prof DF Malherbe, who taught at the University College of the OFS, and Prof JJ Smith, the first professor in Afrikaans at the University of Stellenbosch. The Gymnasium was declared a national monument in 1968 and still serves as a school.

Arnoldus Pannevis – Champion of Afrikaans

http://ancestry24.com/arnoldus-pannevis/

Arnoldus Pannevis was born at Oudekerk aan de Ijssel, Netherlands on 16^th February 1838 and died at Paarl on the 14^th 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.

You can also find out more about the Afrikaanse Taalbeweging at Myfundi

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.



Grave G.W.A. van der Lingen