Eric Louw

He was born in Jacobsdal in the Orange Free State on 21 November 1890 to a Boer family. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree at the then Victoria College, Stellenbosch. He went on to qualify as an advocate at Rhodes University College; Grahamstown, where he also practised. In 1915, when his father died at Beaufort West, he took over the business interests.

In 1924 he was elected to the House of Assembly as MP for Beaufort West, and the following year became South Africa's first Trade Commissioner in the USA and Canada. In 1929 he became High Commissioner in London and a year later South Africa's first envoy to the United States. Louw, a republican Afrikaner nationalist had stormy relations with the British during his time as high commissioner, accounting for his short term as he was appointed high commissioner in March 1929 and had resigned by November 1929, stating it was simply impossible for him to work with British officials.[1] Louw's resignation was a great relief not only to himself, but also to the British officials who were glad to see him gone.[1] Louw was replaced as high commissioner by Charles te Water, a diplomat of similar views, but considerably more suave and sophisticated than Louw as well more patient as te Water was willing to wait for the right time to proclaim South Africa a republic.[1]

After he had represented his country in Italy, France and Portugal and had been South Africa's first representative to the League of Nations, he returned to South Africa for political reasons. In 1938 he was again elected Member of Parliament for Beaufort West. During the Second World War he was, like most of his party, pro-Nazi. In 1945, when a Johannesburg Jewish group stated it was willing to pay the costs to send a delegation of South African MPs to inspect the newly liberated concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau, Louw was vehemently opposed to such a tour.[2] Louw suggested that the newsreels and photographs of staving concentration camp survivors were "fake" propaganda designed to discredit Nazi Germany, making such a tour unnecessary in his viewpoint. Louw also argued that the money offered by the Jewish group be better spent republishing Emily Hobhouse's 1927 book War Without Glamour, which he argued documented the horror of the concentration camps that the British created during the Boer War to hold Boer civilians, which he argued was the "real" genocide.[3]

When the National Party won the general election in 1948, he was an obvious choice for the cabinet, firstly as Minister of Economic Affairs, then, from 1955, as Minister of Finance and from 1957 as Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was best known as South Africa's representative at UNO, Commonwealth and other overseas conferences. Between 1948 and 1962 he represented South Africa at UNO on eight occasions. Previously, South African prime ministers had acted as their own foreign ministers, and Louw was the first South African foreign minister in his own right.[4] Through Louw could be charming when he wanted to be, he was well known as a combative man with an explosive temper who was widely disliked within the South African diplomatic corps.[5] Louw was told by the prime minister J. G. Strijdom to "breathe fire and enthusiasm" into the foreign ministry, which he proceeded to do.[5] The historians' James Barber and John Barratt wrote: "For the first time, there was a foreign minister and a forceful one, responsible for foreign affairs, who was backed by an expanding department staffed by able men".[5]

Louw attached an especial importance to relations with the United States.[5] By the time he became foreign minister, American investment was growing at the expense of British investment as the principle source of foreign capital, which was welcomed by the Afrikaner nationalists as a way to reduce British influence in South Africa.[6] Louw was very concerned by criticism of South Africa within the United States and one of his first acts was to increase the budget for the foreign ministry's information service, which was responsible for South Africa's image abroad.[5] Louw also hired six Madison Avenue advertising agencies to run ad campaigns depicting South Africa as a benevolent society whose apartheid system worked for the mutual benefit of both blacks and whites.[7] Louw also hired the Films of the Nation Inc, a maker of short educational films to make a series of documentaries that portrayed South Africa as a happy nation.[7] To apply pressure on Capital Hill, Louw hired the lobbying firms of Dow, Lohnes & Albertson and Krock-Erwin Associates to lobby both houses of Congress for South Africa.[7]

Noboth Mokgatle, a black South African anti-apartheid activist described Louw as having a "fascist frame of mind" as he was one of the leaders of the extreme right-wing National Party committed to upholding white supremacy in South Africa.[8] Mokgate recalled that Louw was utterly against black South Africans being recruited into the South African Army, ostensibly because Louw claimed that blacks were uncapable of being soldiers, but in reality because he did not want black men to have access to guns.[8] Louw paid a visit to the Belgian Congo (the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo) and at the airport in Leopoldville (modern Kinshasa) was greeted by an all-black honor guard of the Force Publique.[8] Mokgate used the photograph of Louw inspecting the honor guard in Leopoldville in one of his speeches, saying "Look at the cheat and hypocritic Eric Louw".[8] Mokgate added: "You Europeans have allowed yourselves to be misled by him...This picture in the newspapers is an admission he has been telling you lies".[8] Mokgate argued that if blacks were competent to serve in the Force Publique, then there was no reason why black men should be excluded from the South African Army.[9] Louw's anti-Semitism made his elevation to the cabinet a matter of much concern to the South African Jewish community who unsuccessfully lobbied to have Louw kept out of the cabinet.[10]

At the 1957 Commonwealth conference, Louw met Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, the first of the British colonies in black Africa to become independent.[11] Through Nkrumah was an icon of Pan-African nationalism and of Black pride, he agreed with Louw that the Commonwealth conference was an "inappropriate" venue for discussing apartheid.[11] Despite expectations, Louw and Nkrumah got along well as the two men were both nationalists who struggled against Britain in various ways and both agreed on the "danger of Communism".[11] In 1958, Nkrumah tried to establish diplomatic relations between Accra and Pretoria, only to be rebuffed by Louw who did not want a black high commissioner in Pretoria who would be formally his equal at diplomatic functions.[11] Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd who became the South African prime minister in 1958 felt that South Africa already made concessions by establishing diplomatic relations with Egypt and the Republic of China (Taiwan) and was willing to allow diplomatic relations with India and Pakistan if those nations were willing to establish diplomatic ties, but was adamantly against having diplomatic relations with any black African nation.[12] South Africa's relations with the Republic of China were stained in the 1950s-1960s owning to the blatantly discriminatory policies pursued against the Chinese South African minority who like the Indo-South Africans were classified as belonging to the Asian legal category under apartheid while relations with Egypt were broken off in 1961.[13]

He had a major impact on Canadian relations when he met with the Prime Minister of Canada John Diefenbaker at the 1957 and 1958 Commonwealth conferences. Diefenbaker had asked Louw to give some voting privileges to coloured people (under apartheid, "colored people" were a legal category consisting of people of mixed race descent-the term "coloured people" did not refer to black people). Louw refused as he maintained that Canada did not even allow their Native population the right to vote. Louw was only partially correct; since 1876, non-status Canadian Indians who lived off the reservations had been allowed to vote and hold office, but status Indians who lived on the reservations were disfranchised. In the 1958 federal Canadian election this was an election issue and Diefenbaker passed the Canadian Bill of Right and modified the Citizenship and Indian Act to give full citizenship to status Indians in Canada. These laws were changed in 1959. These changes made it harder for Canada to say no to the forcing the expulsion/withdrawal of South Africa from the Commonwealth.

Louw was at the 1960 Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference on behalf of the then Prime Minister of South Africa, H.F. Verwoerd. As Minister of Foreign Affairs he assisted the Prime Minister, Dr HF Verwoerd, at the historic Commonwealth conference in London in 1961 when South Africa withdrew her membership. At the 1961 session of the United Nations, Louw represented South Africa when he became involved in stormy debates with the Indian delegation who objected to the treatment of the Indo-South African population under apartheid.[14] Louw had a reputation as a "hard man", and in his speeches at the UN were noted for their virulent tone as he aggressively defended apartheid.[15] Louw's speeches before the UN General Assembly claiming that the United Nations did not have the right to discuss apartheid ended in defeat with the 45 nations voting for the Indian motion to discuss apartheid; 8 nations abstained from the vote; and only Australia, Belgium, France, Portugal, and Luxembourg voted with South Africa in maintaining that apartheid was an internal South African matter.[16] At the UN Security Council, an Indian motion calling apartheid a danger to the peace of Africa was passed 9 votes to zero with both Britain and France abstaining from the vote.[15]

In October 1961, while at the United Nations, Louw was involved in a violent debate on the floor of the UN General Assembly with the delegations from a number of black African nations about the merits of apartheid.[10] In a motion to censure Louw issued by the Liberian ambassador Nathan Barnes passed on the floor of the general assembly and Louw took much umbrage over the fact that Israel had voted for the motion to censure him.[17] In a speech on South African radio, Louw implicitly criticized the South African Jewish community, saying that he hoped that those "South Africans who have racial and religious ties to Israel" should "disapprove of the hostile and ungraceful" actions of Israel.[17] Louw's speech with its implication that South African Jews had a duty to criticise Israel and if they did not that they must have dual loyalties threw the South African Jewish community into a state of panic.[17] Simha Pratt, the Israeli ambassador to Pretoria, reported "I saw before me panicky people, gripped by fear and without a backbone" as dozens upon dozens of South African Jews arrived at his office to tell him that Israel's vote at the UN had made life very difficult for them and that Israel must not criticise apartheid as Louw was an anti-Semite who always looking for any chance to lash out at the Jewish community.[17] On 31 December 1963 he relinquished his post as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Pretoria in 1962. He was similarly honoured by the University of the Orange Free State in 1963. In 1965 a bronze bust of him by Hennie Potgieter was unveiled at Beaufort West in a school which bore his name until it was amalgamated with Niko Brummer Primary School in 1994. A high school in the town of Musina in Limpopo also bears his name.[18]

Louw died on June 24, 1968 in Cape Town.[19]

• Wheeler, Tom (2005). History of the South African Department of Foreign Affairs 1927-1993. Johannesburg: South African Institute of International Affairs.
• Grundy, Kenneth (2020). Confrontation and Accommodation in Southern Africa. Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520370579.
• Mokgatle, Noboth (1971). The Autobiography of an Unknown South African. Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520361881.
• Muller, C.F. (1986). Five Hundred Years: A History of South Africa. Washington, D.C: Academica. ISBN 0868742716.
• Nixon, Ron (2016). Selling Apartheid: South Africa's Global Propaganda War. New York: Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0745399140.
• Osada, Masako (2002). Sanctions and Honorary Whites: Diplomatic Policies and Economic Realities in Relations Between Japan and South Africa. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0313318778.
• Shain, Milton (1996). "South Africa". In David Wyman and Charles H. Rosenzveig (ed.). The World Reacts to the Holocaust. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 670–692. ISBN 9780801849695.
• Shimoni, Gideon (2003). Community and Conscience The Jews in Apartheid South Africa. Waltham: Brandeis University Press". ISBN 9781584653295.