Abstract
The year 1962 marked a watershed in the associational life of South African psychology. The South African Psychological Association’s (SAPA) much-feared split had come to pass. On June 23, approximately 200 people met at the University of South Africa to establish the Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa (PIRSA) (Louw 1987). The matter of admitting blacks to SAPA ranks had been shelved for 6 years, first with the application of an Indian psychologist, Josephine Naidoo, in 1956, and again in 1960 with another Indian psychologist, Chanderpaul Ramphal. Naidoo had been told by Simon Biesheuvel—then SAPA president—to withdraw her application as he “thought it better to let sleeping dogs lie” (Louw 1987, p. 342).
It is my heartfelt wish that PIRSA, out of the strength of its will to live and serve, will grow into an institution that will earn the recognition and love not only of its own people but also of its other-raced fellow citizens…(Adriaan la Grange—PIRSA president 1962)
[T]he great inventor and creator should not be motivated by the needs of his fellow people but by his search for the truth, by vision, strength and courage that springs from his own spirit.(Bob Schlebusch—SAPA president 1962)
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Notes
- 1.
The words of Ronald Albino. Addendum to the minutes of the SAPA Council Meeting, Durban, July 15, 1960, p. 6, Raubenheimer Archive, Special Collections, J.S. Gericke Library, Stellenbosch University.
- 2.
ibid., p. 7.
- 3.
Minutes of the South African Psychological Association Council Meeting, May 27, 1961, p. 7, Raubenheimer Archive, Stellenbosch University. This passage was translated from the original Afrikaans.
- 4.
ibid., p. 6. This passage was translated from the original Afrikaans.
- 5.
Simon Biesheuvel interview, May 14, 1982, pp. 19–20, Raubenheimer Archive, Stellenbosch University. All interviews cited in this book were drawn from this archive. Naas Raubenheimer, a former PIRSA president, donated a collection of audiocassettes and transcripts of interviews with important figures in South African psychology to Stellenbosch University. I am indebted to Mimi Seyffert (Special Collections) and Desmond Painter (Department of Psychology) for facilitating my access to this material.
- 6.
Dreyer Kruger interview, April 15, 1982, pp. 1–3. Translated from the original Afrikaans.
- 7.
Born, raised, and educated in the Cape—South Africa’s southernmost region—la Grange served as professor of psychology at the University of Pretoria from 1945 to 1953 (van der Merwe 1977). He returned to his alma mater—Stellenbosch University—in 1955 to take up the Chair in Educational Psychology. He then left Stellenbosch in 1962 to head the research planning division of the South African Road Safety Council (SARSC). He returned to the University of Pretoria’s psychology department in 1968 (Matieland 1969).
- 8.
Paul Robbertse interview, May 12, 1982, pp. 14–15. Translated from the original Afrikaans.
- 9.
ibid., p. 14.
- 10.
A.S. Roux interview, May 11, 1982, p. 2. Translated from the original Afrikaans.
- 11.
To the neutral observer, it may seem ironic that PIRSA blamed SAPA for digging up political hot potatoes. Robbertse and Roux, however, were thinking in terms of the time-honored distinction between volkspolitiek (people politics) and partypolitiek (party politics). During the Boer rebellion of 1915, the (Afrikaner) volk was divided over former Boer general and then Prime Minister Louis Botha’s decision to call out an Afrikaner citizen force to crush the insurrection (Moodie 1975). Accounting for 90 % of Afrikaner parishioners, the Dutch Reformed Church was walking a tightrope with some ministers supporting Botha and others opposing him. To hold the flock together, the Church responded by creating a pragmatic division between volkspolitiek and partypolitiek: the idea was that the Church would involve itself in community issues—such as Afrikaans-medium education and Afrikaner poverty—but would not presume to advise its congregation on how to vote. Whether churchmen or party politicians, for Broederbond members in particular, this separation of church and state was to prove crucial: “the political unity of Afrikanerdom required conscious differentiation between the spheres of political activity, church affairs, and the nascent civil religion” (Moodie 1975, p. 98). Hence, for PIRSA and its Broederbonders, the mistake that SAPA made was to involve itself in a “race” question that belonged to the realm of partypolitiek. Apartheid was state policy—and there was no question of psychologists interfering in it.
- 12.
Addendum to the minutes of the SAPA Council Meeting, Durban, July 15, 1960, p. 4, Raubenheimer Archive, Stellenbosch University. Translated from the original Afrikaans.
- 13.
ibid., p. 5.
- 14.
ibid.
- 15.
Paul Robbertse interview, May 12, 1982, pp. 14–16. Translated from the original Afrikaans.
- 16.
The last two battles for the country’s premiership had pitted North against South—the first in 1954 between the “Lion of the North” J.G. Strijdom and the Cape-backed candidate Nicolaas Havenga, and the second in 1958 between Hendrik Verwoerd and Eben Dönges.
- 17.
This moniker was a reference to Verwoerd having been born in the Netherlands.
- 18.
All excerpts from la Grange’s address were translated from the original Afrikaans.
- 19.
Strümpfer describes the atmosphere at the inaugural congress: “I actually went with the rest of the department, all the psychologists in Potchefstroom went to that meeting and it was really a Blood River kind of climate. A [Reformed Church] minister who was also a psychologist opened the meeting with scripture readings and prayer and he read from somewhere in the New Testament where it says that those that are not for us are against us, that little bit. The way he prayed about all of this, we were at Blood River. It was a Total Onslaught kind of meeting that he opened” (Nell 1993, p. 35). (In 1838, the Voortrekkers defeated the Zulu king, Dingaan, at Blood River. Thousands of Zulu soldiers were killed with no loss of life on the Voortrekker side. The victory was seen as proof of God’s will that the Afrikaners prevail as an independent people.)
- 20.
Metaphors exert a powerful influence not only on the way people think, but also on how they act (Fairclough 1992, pp. 194–195).
- 21.
What makes enthymemes different from syllogisms is that they trade in probabilities rather than certainties, exchanging strict logic for “the province of rhetoric” (Corbett and Connors 1999, p. 63). Moreover, because enthymemes are difficult to spot, those probabilities are taken up frequently as certainties.
- 22.
For example, D.F. Malan opines about how God “[i]n his wisdom… determined that on the southern point of Africa, the dark continent, a People should be born who would be the bearer of Christian culture and civilization” (Die Transvaler, December 16, 1942 quoted in Moodie 1975, p. 248). Elsewhere, Broederbond chairman Joon van Rooy interprets the God-given uniqueness of “the Afrikaner People [as assisting them to] fulfill a particular calling and destiny here in the southern corner of Africa” (Die Burger, October 11, 1944 quoted in Moodie 1975, p. 110). And again, this time in a newspaper editorial: “The Day of the Covenant is indeed the day of inspiration for the People. It is the day upon which the heart-strings of the People are tuned in harmony with the great Divine Plan here on the southern point of Africa” (Die Transvaler, December 15, 1945 quoted in Moodie 1975, p. 21).
- 23.
Jansen cites the immortalization of Afrikaner adaptability in the Afrikaans language through the saying, “’n Boer maak ’n plan”—that is, “An Afrikaner will make a plan.”
- 24.
An anti-Semitic reference to the imperialist-capitalist connection in the South African Party, “Hoggenheimer” was a cartoon character in the Afrikaans-language daily, Die Burger, and was “English-speaking, imperialist, and clearly Jewish” (Moodie 1975, p. 15).
- 25.
Moodie notes in passing James Luther Adams’ observation that “Calvinism encourages the formation of voluntary associations” (1975, p. 106).
- 26.
Translated from the original Afrikaans.
- 27.
As prime minister, Verwoerd was alert to the Black Nationalist sentiment taking hold across the continent: “[We] cannot govern without taking into account the tendencies in the world and in Africa. We must have regard to them. We are… taking steps to ensure that we adopt a policy by which we on the one hand can retain for the white man full control in his areas, but by which we are giving the Bantu as our wards every opportunity in their areas to move along a road of development by which they can progress in accordance with their ability” (Pelzer 1966, p. 243 quoted in Moodie 1975, p. 264).
- 28.
The NP had come to power by reminding the electorate repeatedly of a “sea”—an “inundation” (oorstroming)—of blacks (O’Meara 1996, p. 34). The metaphor of an unstoppable black deluge—not infrequently tinged with sexual anxiety—had animated the South African political landscape for decades. Fanon (2008) and Kamin (1993) have written about the sexualization of black identity in European and American contexts.
- 29.
Although Miller (1993) makes the important point that Verwoerd was not a strident Afrikaner nationalist during his years as an academic, she cannot account conclusively for his later conversion. At the very least, it seems likely that he would have been influenced to some degree by the intellectual milieu in which he studied and taught for almost two decades—and his 1929 address suggests as much.
- 30.
This contradicts Robbertse’s claim regarding the position of Afrikaner psychologists within SAPA (quoted above): “We didn’t count—we were nowhere.”
- 31.
Even SAPA’s archives for the ensuing decade and a half (1963–1977) disappeared mysteriously. Its one-time secretary, Dev Griesel, remarks blandly in a letter to the director of the National Library of South Africa: “We do not publish the proceedings of our annual congresses. Persons who attend the congress and our own members receive a copy of the summaries of papers read at the congress but in no way is this a publication” (February 20, 1979).
- 32.
Schlebusch’s address was delivered in Afrikaans.
- 33.
Quoted in the Newsletter of the Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa, August 1962, Vol. 1, p. 13. The passage—translated from the original Afrikaans—is taken from a statement delivered by la Grange at PIRSA’s founding meeting on June 23, 1962.
- 34.
Paul Robbertse interview, May 12, 1982, p. 13. Translated from the original Afrikaans.
- 35.
In a remarkably similar turn of phrase, Verwoerd’s successor, John Vorster, reminisced at the first cabinet meeting after the prime minister’s assassination: “Dr Verwoerd was an intellectual giant. He did the thinking for each one of us” (Schoeman 1974, p. 14 quoted in O’Meara 1996, p. 112).
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Long, W. (2016). “Relevance” and the SAPA-PIRSA Split. In: A History of “Relevance” in Psychology. Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47489-6_5
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