The covenant - James A. Michener [539]
The voting took place on 26 May 1948, and that evening the Van Doorns invited to their Vrymeer home their sister Johanna, Mr. Frykenius and their dominee, Reverend Brongersma. As a cool autumn night descended over the lakes, the five people sensed that this could be a day of majestic change. The king and queen were going to be banished. Slim Jannie Smuts' party would be tossed out. The days of smug Englishmen like the Saltwoods were numbered. And those wavering Afrikaner families, like the Van Doorns of Trianon, half Dutch, half English, would be forced to make up their minds and nail their colors aloft for others to see.
Frykenius spoke: 'I see a tremendous nationalism assuming power in this country tonight. Smuts? Forget him. The king? He'll be gone in ten years. The English language? Now it falls to second place. Tonight we take revenge for Slagter's Nek and the concentration camps. I pray we have the energy to capitalize on the victory we're about to win.'
When the first returns came in they were from strongly English areas, and Smuts' tenure as prime minister seemed to be secure, but as the night wore on, startling upsets were reported, with men who had been in internment camps during the war because of their pro-Hitler stance winning astounding victories. When it became clear that Daniel Malan's National party was winning, Detleef began to cheer, and said to his sister, 'I wish Piet Krause were here to see this night. All he dreamed of we're getting, and without one rifle shot.'
Toward two in the morning, when neighbors dropped by to share sandwiches and coffee, the really glorious news reached them: 'Jan Christian Smuts has lost even his own seat at Standerton. The field marshal leaves the field of battle.'
'Thank God!' Maria Steyn van Doorn cried, and she knelt. Johanna joined her, and the two women prayed in thankfulness that they had seen the fall of this man who, they believed, had hurt them so grievously.
When they rose, Frykenius turned to Brongersma and asked, 'Dominee, would you lead us in prayer? This is a night to be remembered.' And the tall man, who would shortly leave Venloo to occupy the pulpit in the leading Pretoria church, asked his four listeners to pray with him:
'Almagtige God, ons dank U. From 1795 when the Dutch first lost their colony at the Cape, through vicissitudes untold, we have fought to establish a just society in this land. In those troubled years You extended a covenant to us, and we have been faithful. Tonight You bring us great victory, and our only prayer is that we may prove worthy of it. Help us to build here a nation in Your image.'
Fervently the others cried 'Amen,' and that very afternoon Detleef and Maria headed for Cape Town, where with a new majority in Parliament they would begin their arduous work of reorganizing the nation.
The first thing Detleef did was to make life so miserable for his superior, the senior secretary to the Commission on Racial Affairs, that the only sensible thing that Englishman could do was to resign. For several weeks he tried to avoid this drastic step, trusting that the new member of Parliament who was taking over the chairmanship would protect him, but this man was a tough-minded farmer from the Orange Free State, and instead of defending the aggrieved secretary, he treated him even more contemptuously than Detleef had, and in disgust the man quit. He left government altogether, beginning the hemorrhage that would drain every department until the civil service at all levels became almost totally Afrikaner-minded and -managed.
With Detleef in position, the commission was ready to tackle the vast problems of whipping the various elements of society into shape, and it fell to Van Doorn to draft the preliminary directives, then construct the proposed laws that would convert