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Calvinist divine, a predikant (i.e., pastor) of the Dutch Reformed Church, he has a contagious sense of mission, derived somewhat illogically from Calvin's doctrine of predestination. As Malan sees it, God made unalterable 1) the "superiority" of His chosen race, the Boers; 2) the "inferiority" of all other races.
Malan is convinced that he has been "elected" by God to lead the Boers to a "New Jerusalem," by which he means a Boer republic.
Thou Shalt Not. Malan got religion early. He was born of French Huguenot stock in a farmstead named Allesverloren (Everything Is Lost), which snuggled among the soaring mountains and vine-garlanded valleys of West Cape Province. In his parents' devout household, the rule was "Thou Shalt Not." Each evening "Danie" and his younger brother Fanie were called indoors to hear spade-bearded Papa Malan reading from his family Bible to his black servants.
Papa Malan had intended his elder son to take over the farm. In accordance with Boer tradition, he earmarked for the future master a fine riding horse. Curled up with a book, Danie didn't even go to the stable to see which horse was his. "You'll never be a farmer," sighed Papa Malan.
Rivals. One of Malan's school friends was a long-legged Boer farm boy named Jan Christian Smuts. The Smutses and the Malans were neighbors, and twice each month Jannie Smuts and Danie Malan sat down together to polish off a huge Sunday dinner of pumpkin and mutton. A brilliant scholar and athlete, young Smuts went off to Stellensbosch University to study poetry and philosophy. Four years later, Danie came plodding after. He was barely 20, yet he had already developed a double chin. Smuts met him at the station with a cry of "Dear Danie," tapped him for his own university debating club. But the two boys were as different as fire and clay.
Jannie was a big man on campus; Danie an obscure little swot. While Smuts rose like a rocket to become at the age of 31 a world-famed Boer War general, Malan studied theology under the protection of the Union Jack. His usual explanation of how he missed the fight: "There was martial law, and anyway the front was 500 miles away" (sometimes he makes it 700 miles). Jannie and Danie became lifelong public enemies. Smuts, who had fought the British, lived to become a British field marshal and one of the stout pillars of the British Commonwealth;* Malan, who never heard a shot fired, is a bitter Anglophobe. Smuts, a great internationalist, twice declared war on Germany in the name of democracy; Malan admired both the Kaiser and the Nazis, publicly announced that he hoped Hitler would win. Both men became Prime Ministers of South Africa.
They lived to hate one another and call each other names ("Smuts," said Malan, "is a renegade." "Malan," said Smuts, "is a fanatic"). Yet when Jannie died in 1949, Danie put his head in his hands and wept like a child.
"Stug." When Smuts made peace with the British after the Boer War, the Rev. Daniel Malan, M.A., D.D. (cum laude) was studying theology at Holland's Utrecht University. He wrote a learned 251-page dissertation (The Idealism of Berkeley) and earned on campus a reputation of being "very stug."†