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In 1905, he sailed back home, to deliver his induction sermon at Riebeek West, his home town. It was an hour-long diatribe breathing hellfire and damnation, subtly hinting that the British, the Jews and the Kaffirs were robbing the Boers of their "racial heritage."
Malan lasted only a few weeks in his first pastorate because his wine-growing parishioners failed to understand his urgent demands for prohibition. In his next parish, Graaff Reinet, a wool-growing town, he encountered a group of Boer children playing in the gutter with a gang of colored kids. Forty-two years later, as Prime Minister, he told the House of Assembly: "It was thus that the seeds of apartheid were planted in my mind."
For ten years as a parson, Malan drummed home his favorite theme: Africa for the Afrikaners. At 39 he read Marx, and wrote a 30-page pamphlet extolling socialism and praising Marx. For his assault on the Kaffirs he relied on cropped passages from the Old Testament. Example : ". . . Let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water."
For the Glory of God. The fame of the "Boer Moses," as his critics call him, soon reached the ears of General James Barrie Munnik Hertzog, leader of the Boer opposition party. South Africa had just entered World War I at the side of the
British, and Hertzog needed a hatchetman to denounce this "treachery." Malan quit his pulpit to become editor in chief of Cape Town's Die Buerger, an anti-Semitic daily. The title of his first editorial: "For the Glory of God."
He got into politics, first as M.P. for Calvinia, then as Minister of the Interior. His first important achievement was to insert a new clause in South Africa's constitution: "The people of the Union acknowledge the sovereignty and guidance of Almighty God."
"The Seven." In 1933, a depression-struck world went off the gold standard. Gold-producing South Africa went broke, and so did thousands of Boer farmers. Pastor Malan promptly accused the government of "selling the Boer people to Hoggenheimer."* With seven supporters, Malan formed a "Purified Nationalist Party." "Hitler started with seven," he observed approvingly.
Malan's greatest political asset, aside from his religious zeal, was his ability to provide scapegoats for the Boers' depression troubles. "Rich Jews," he said, "make poor whites." So do poor blacks. "The Negro does not need a house," said Malan. "He can sleep under a tree. So he can work for less pay than the white man. The Negro has a job while the white man walks the streets foodless and workless."
World War II brought the Malanites to prominence. They were openly pro-Nazi. The Rev. Jacobus Daniel Vorster, preaching at Potchefstroom University, told the Afrikaner Student Union: "Hitler's Mein Kampf points the way to greatness. Afrikaners must be fired by the same holy fanaticism that inspires the Nazis . . ."
Vorster went to jail, and the Nazis lost the war, but in 1948 the Malanites had a chance to win South Africa's elections. Malan stumped the veld, urging South Africans to vote for segregation for the Negroes and separation from the British. "God," he announced, "is on our side."