book Diegeskiendenisvanons landindietaalvanons volk (The history of
our country in the language of our people). Afrikaners, according to du
Toit, were a distinct people, occupying a distinct fatherland and endowed
by God with the destiny to rule South Africa and civilize its heathen
inhabitants. This was the first time that an Afrikaner intellectual had
adopted the concept of a chosen people. Du Toit's writings were accessible
to his public because he wrote in simple Afrikaans, the language of com-
mon speech, as distinct from the stilted High Dutch of the Reformed
churches and previous publications in South Africa.32
The pan-Afrikaner nationalist ideology initiated by du Toit would ulti-
mately triumph in a fateful general election in 1948, but it did not domi-
nate Afrikaner political institutions in the nineteenth century. Although du
Toit launched a political organization, the Afrikaner Bond, to giveeffectto
his principles, Presidents Brand and Kruger snuffed it out from the re-
publics, where they were concentrating on consolidating their separate
state identities, and the Bond was captured by advocates of a different
paradigm in the Cape Colony, led byJan Hofmeyr. Hofmeyr, a Cape Town
journalist, was a pragmatic man. He operated within the colonial system to