page_title: Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr (1894–1948)
section_title: Administratorship of the Transvaal
hierarchical_section_title: Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr (1894–1948) / Administratorship of the Transvaal
caption_attribution_description: Jan Hofmeyr with his mother Deborah. She would live with her son all of his life. He never married. J.H. Hofmeyr (left) died 8 months after this photograph was published, and his mother Mrs D.C. Hofmeyr (right) died ten years after this photograph was published, in 1958.
context_page_description: Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr was a South African politician and intellectual in the years preceding apartheid. In his lifetime he was regarded as one of the cleverest men in the country, and it was widely expected that he would eventually become Prime Minister of South Africa. He came from a well-known Afrikaner family; his uncle, also Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr but known affectionately as "Onze Jan" among fellow Afrikaners, was a famous figure in the Afrikaans language movement.
context_section_description: Hofmeyr had flirted with the possibility of pursuing politics as a career for some time. Already in January 1919 the acting Prime Minister F.S. Malan had approached the young Hofmeyr, trying to sway him to join the South African Party as its Chief Organising Secretary. Hofmeyr declined. The offer was repeated the following year, but this time by the party's leader, General Jan Smuts. Again Hofmeyr declined. His hesitation was apparently due to an unwillingness of committing himself to party politics; he wanted to be of service to his country but did not want to "give up for party what was meant for mankind". It was thus that he became administrator of the Transvaal province. Hofmeyr did not have to campaign in an election to get this job, the position of provincial administrator was strictly acquired through appointment by a sitting Prime Minister, who at that time was Jan Smuts. Still reluctant to join a party on either side of the political spectrum, Hofmeyr felt rather that the position of administrator did not entail loyalty to the agenda of a specific party, but an unbiased loyalty to the entire province.
  He began working as Transvaal administrator on 1 March 1924 yet, due to contractual obligations, remained on as principal of the University of the Witwatersand for another five months. Hofmeyr stayed on in the University Council after relinquishing the principalship.
  There were efforts to unseat Hofmeyr during his five-year-long tenure as provincial administrator; these came from members inside the Nationalist caucus of the provincial council who doubted Hofmeyr's professed impartiality. Soon after occupying his seat he was faced with a curious situation – the South African Party was defeated in a national election by the Nationalist Party, which meant that a new Prime Minister replaced the man who had appointed Hofmeyr. Constitutionally Hofmeyr was under no obligation to resign and he conveyed his willingness of staying on to the country's new leader, General J.B.M. Hertzog, citing that he did not view his job as party-political in its nature. Hertzog allowed him to stay on, even when Hofmeyr appointed an Englishman as Director of Education in the Transvaal while Nationalists were urging him in the strongest terms to appoint an Afrikaner.
  It was a time when language policy was shaping the political landscape in South Africa. The Nationalist platform was to elevate Afrikaans and Afrikaners as a political force, with the eventual desire of creating a South African republic; while the South African Party wanted to create a fusion government, which meant unifying English speaking South Africans with Afrikaners who were willing to remain loyal to the British Crown. This was nothing new to Hofmeyr; his uncle Onze Jan had been active in this sphere throughout his career and had always had sympathy with English as language medium, and with the British Empire. On 31 May 1928 – the 18th celebration of Union Day and the first hoisting of a newly designed South African flag – Hofmeyr addressed the nation by radio broadcast, urging for "the coming together of the two larger parties in South Africa, and the formation of a great new party of all those who have the same general outlook". He was choosing sides and would soon enter the arena of party-politics.
caption: Jan Hofmeyr with his mother Deborah. She lived with and took care of her son throughout his life and even outlived him. Deborah was a widow and Jan remained a bachelor.
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