Invictus - Carlin [46]
No two people better encapsulated the rift between South African whites than the Viljoen twins. The story of Braam and Constand Viljoen is not quite Cain and Abel, nor the Prodigal Son, but it has elements of both. Indistinguishable physically, the brothers set off on radically divergent paths, in their late teens and then barely communicated with one another for forty years. When they did eventually reconnect, destiny played a hand. If the brothers hadn’t made peace, South Africa would have made war.
Born in 1933 into an upper class rural Afrikaner family that traced its roots back to the seventeenth-century settlers, among the first to arrive from Europe in Africa’s southern tip, the Viljoens (pronounced “Fill-yewn”) had a reason other than politics to live their lives apart. Together they ran the risk of being seen as the identical twins of stage farce, but separately each was imposing. They were both grave men, who took themselves and their roles in society seriously, and were taken seriously by others. The only other things they had in common were their religious devotion and their love of farming, to which Constand dedicated himself on and off in the family farm in the Eastern Transvaal, and Braam—more on than off—on another farm 250 miles away in the Northern Transvaal.
In terms of temperament and worldview they could not have been more different. Braam, the reflective type, embarked on a career in the church. Constand, the man of action, joined the army. But whereas one course might have seemed more placid than the other, it was Braam who struggled and, in strict career terms, failed, while Constand rose, with admirable smoothness, to the pinnacle of his profession. While Braam took on the system and lost, Constand not only joined the system, he became it. He made it not just to the rank of general, not just to head of the army, but to overall commander of the South African Defence Force—navy and air force included. P. W Botha appointed him to the job after he became prime minister in 1980. Viljoen remained there, apartheid’s last line of defense, until his retirement in 1985. He commanded the force in whose absence apartheid would have crumbled overnight. He risked his own life and he took the lives of others in support of a political system based on and defined by three of the most perverse laws ever devised: the Separate Amenities Act, the Group Areas Act, and the Population Registration Act, all of them passed in parliament when he and his brother were seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old—when each was deciding which course to take in life.
The Separate Amenities Act was the one that banned black people from stepping onto the better beaches and parks, and black nannies from traveling in white train compartments with the white babies of the “madams” they served. The other two laws Constand Viljoen enforced were equally unjust and absurd.
The Population Registration Act compartmentalized the racial groups. There were four main categories. In descending order of privilege they were: Whites, Coloureds, Indians, Blacks. Once each South African had been placed into the corresponding racial box, all the other apartheid laws could follow. Without the Population Registration Act it would have been impossible to enforce, for example, the Immorality Act, whereby it was illegal not only for people to marry across the race barriers, but to engage in anything resembling sexual contact. It was in part to accommodate the amorous incontinence of a small minority of morally weak souls—in part to satisfy people’s desire for material improvement—that the government included a clause in the Population Registration Act allowing individuals the biologically perplexing right to try to change their race.
What one had to do was apply to a body in Pretoria called the Race Classification Board and stipulate from which race to which race one wished