tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/afrikaners-25776/articlesAfrikaners – The Conversation2021-05-20T15:07:48Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1332422021-05-20T15:07:48Z2021-05-20T15:07:48ZWhat genetic analysis reveals about the ancestry of South Africa’s Afrikaners<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/401568/original/file-20210519-13-ro1o6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An Afrikaner family from the 1930s. Scientific analyses are unpacking Afrikaners' genetic origins.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jaco Greeff</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The story of human history is one of migrations over the globe and admixture – the exchange of DNA – between populations.</p>
<p>Two of the most dramatic of these migrations were <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/atlantic-slave-trade">slavery</a> and European <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Western-colonialism">colonisation</a>. The subsequent admixture between slaves, Europeans and indigenous populations led to the formation of new populations. One, at the southern tip of Africa, was a group that became known as <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/afrikaner#:%7E:text=The%20modern%20Afrikaner%20is%20descended,into%20contact%20with%20the%20Khoi">Afrikaners</a>. </p>
<p>Afrikaners predominantly stem from Dutch, French and German immigrants who settled in the Cape, in South Africa, during the second half of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th. Although later European immigrants were also absorbed into the population, their genetic contribution was comparatively small. Another small but significant genetic contribution came from slaves and the local, indigenous Khoekhoe and San populations. These groups were, respectively, pastoralists and hunter-gatherers and in this article we refer to them as the Khoe-San.</p>
<p>Ironically, despite Afrikaners’ admixed roots, they rose to notoriety for their draconian laws that aimed to segregate groups of people – <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa">apartheid</a> – to allow discrimination against those not of European descent.</p>
<p>The colonisers required labourers and turned to slavery. In fact, there were more <a href="https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1186%2Fs12915-020-0746-1/MediaObjects/12915_2020_746_MOESM1_ESM.pdf">slaves than colonists</a> at the Cape during the century preceding the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The first 400 of these slaves arrived from West Africa in 1658. An estimated 63,000 slaves followed during the next 149 years. During the 17th and 18th centuries, most slaves came from South Asia. Slaves forcefully relocated to the Cape at the end of the 18th century predominantly came from East Africa. </p>
<p>People are, naturally, fascinated by their history. However, it is often poorly documented, recorded with bias, or not recorded at all. Given the central role that ethnicity played – and still plays – in South African politics, it would be good to have an unbiased estimate of Afrikaners’ genetic history. We <a href="https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-020-0746-1">set out</a> to learn more about admixture in the formation of Afrikaners by looking at the genetic variation in their genomes.</p>
<p><a href="https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-020-0746-1">Our research</a> had six main findings. First, it confirmed the timing of admixture in the Cape. Second, it showed limited genetic contribution from southern Bantu-speakers, African farmers that colonised southern Africa from the north from about 500 AD onwards. It also confirmed the relative popularity of Indian women as wives among early colonists. It showed an unexpectedly frequent genetic contribution from the indigenous Khoekhoe and San populations and a greater West than East African genetic contribution in Afrikaners. Finally, there was a surprising lack of inbreeding.</p>
<h2>Why is the historical information incomplete?</h2>
<p>Admixture during the formation of the Afrikaner population is recorded in genealogical sources. But these genealogies don’t tell the full story, for several reasons. </p>
<p>Firstly, in the 17th and early 18th centuries <a href="https://www.eggsa.org/index.php/en/contents/articles/7-who-was-susanna-claasen">some women</a> used the toponym “van de Kaap” (meaning “born at the Cape”), irrespective of whether their parents were immigrants from Europe or slaves. Second, it has <a href="https://springernature.figshare.com/collections/Patterns_of_African_and_Asian_admixture_in_the_Afrikaner_population_of_South_Africa/4867782/1">been suggested</a>, but not recorded, that European farmers at the Cape had children with Khoe-San women. </p>
<p>Third, many of the children born in the Dutch East India Company’s slave lodge had unknown European fathers. The slave lodge served as a <a href="https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-020-0746-1">brothel</a> for passing sailors and other European men. </p>
<p>Several potentially important genetic source groups – a substantial Muslim community, a small Chinese community and the local Khoe-San – were not recorded because they were not Christian. And admixed couples would have been secretive about their relationships because marriages between slaves and Europeans were <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/indian-slaves-south-africa-little-known-aspect-indian-south-african-relations-e-s-reddy">outlawed from 1685.</a> </p>
<h2>Afrikaner genomics</h2>
<p>By comparing the Afrikaners in our study to 1,670 individuals from 32 populations across the world we found that 4.7% of Afrikaner DNA has a non-European origin. That may seem like a small percentage, but 98.7% of the Afrikaners were admixed. </p>
<p>Children whose parents are from different populations have one set of chromosomes from each population. With each generation the pairs of chromosomes – one from each parent – are snipped and pasted with one another; a process known as <a href="https://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/recombination-226/#:%7E:text=Recombination%20is%20a%20process%20by,DNA%20sequences%20of%20different%20organisms">recombination</a>. Repeated recombination results in shorter and shorter segments of DNA from the original populations. </p>
<p>By studying this effect, the age of the admixture was estimated to around 1681. It’s around this time that colonisers began to settle at the Cape. In 1657, for instance, 142 employees of the Dutch East India Company were released from their employ to settle; 156 French Huguenots settled in 1688, and from 1675 yearly slave imports often exceeded 100 individuals. Therefore, this estimate aligns fairly well with genealogical and historical records of early colonial times at the Cape of Good Hope.</p>
<p>The admixture between European and Khoe-San was more common than church records suggest. In our study, though only 1.3% of Afrikaner genes came from the Khoe-San, most Afrikaners contained some Khoe-San genes. </p>
<p>The highest non-European contribution (1.7%) came from South Asia, or India. This reflects colonial men’s stated preference for marrying freed Indian slaves during the founding years. A little less than 1% of Afrikaner genes have an East Asian (Chinese or Japanese) origin.</p>
<p>The contribution of West and East Africa is the lowest, at 0.8%. This is likely to stem from the almost 18,000 slaves imported from Africa’s west and east coasts. The fraction of genes from West Africa is slightly higher than from East Africa, reflecting the fact that while West African slaves were few, they arrived four generations before slaves from East Africa.</p>
<p>A common perception about Afrikaners is that they stem from very few ancestors, which would have resulted in inbreeding. Inbreeding results in long stretches of the paternal and maternal chromosomes being identical to each other. By looking at the lengths of identical stretches, it is clear that Afrikaners are as variable as the average European. This is in part due to admixture between non-Europeans and Europeans, but also because Europeans came from all over Europe. </p>
<p>The strongest European genetic contribution is from northwestern Europe, with the most similar population being the Swiss German population. This signal could also be interpreted as a mixture between German, Dutch and French populations – as genealogical records indicate. </p>
<p>In conclusion, despite laws prohibiting mixed marriages from as early as 1658, and discrimination that culminated in the apartheid system, these genetic analyses confirm that most Afrikaners have admixed ancestry. Genealogical information has indicated as much, but these genetic findings are irrefutable.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/133242/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jaco Greeff receives funding from the National Research Foundation and the University of Pretoria. Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and therefore UP and the NRF does not accept any liability in regard thereto.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carina Schlebusch receives funding from the European Research council. </span></em></p>Given the central role that ethnicity played and still plays in South African politics, it is good to have an unbiased estimate of Afrikaners’ genetic history.Jaco Greeff, Professor in Genetics, University of PretoriaCarina Schlebusch, Associate Professor in Human Evolution and Genetics, Uppsala UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1079072019-01-08T12:47:01Z2019-01-08T12:47:01ZLanguage and identity: lessons from a unique Afrikaans community in Patagonia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/249209/original/file-20181206-128187-1idic8j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Afrikaner descendants representing Argentina, South Africa today and the country's old flag.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Richard Finn Gregory / GOODWORK</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Patagonian desert in southern Argentina is a harsh environment. Little seems to thrive on its seemingly endless red plains and parched land. Yet in this unlikely place there is a unique bilingual community. It’s made up of the Afrikaans and Spanish-speaking descendants of the about 650 <a href="https://www.history.co.uk/history-of-south-africa/the-boers">South African Boers</a>, who came to Patagonia in the first decade of the twentieth century. </p>
<p>The Boers trace their origins to the Dutch population that settled on the southern tip of Africa in the seventeenth century. They came into conflict with the British Empire as it expanded in the region, culminating in the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/boer_wars_01.shtml#ten">Second Anglo-Boer war</a> of 1899–1902. Many Boers, unwilling to accept British rule, then sought to relocate elsewhere, including Argentina. </p>
<p>The first <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/boerenelcorazondelapatagonia/home">Boer generations</a> in Patagonia eked out an isolated living. But a cultural shift began in the 1950s as the settlers increased contact with nearby communities in Sarmiento and Comodoro Rivadavia. Today, older members of the community – those over 60 – still speak Afrikaans, though their dominant language is Spanish. As the younger generations, which only speak Spanish, become fully integrated into Argentine society, the bilingual community is quickly disappearing. </p>
<p>To many, Patagonian Afrikaans is a relic of the past. Against the odds, however, a renaissance has begun.</p>
<p>As part of this, <a href="http://umich.edu/%7Eaacollab/index.html#home">our project</a> at the University of Michigan, entitled “From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of Displacement”, is conducting innovative research on the Patagonian Boers and their two languages. The value of studying this extraordinary community is hard to overstate. </p>
<p>The Patagonian Afrikaans dialect, spoken nowhere else, preserves elements of Afrikaans from before 1925, when the South African government recognised it as an official language. It thus provides a unique window onto the history of Afrikaans from a period before its dialectal varieties were reduced through standardisation. </p>
<p>Our team is gathering data about a period in the development of Afrikaans for which there is scant oral or written testimony. Our archive of oral interviews allows us to analyse the complex relationships among the community’s language, culture and bilingual identity. It also provides data for future projects by researchers.</p>
<h2>Time capsule?</h2>
<p>Since the community had been living outside of South Africa for over a century, the disappearance of its forefathers’ heritage seemed inevitable. By the late 1980s, observers characterised the community as virtually “extinct”. Yet over the last two decades there has been a resurgence of interest in promoting the Boers’ unique cultural identity. This has included acquiring space to house a cultural centre and museum. Once-dead traditions, such as an annual games festival, have also been revived.</p>
<p>This renewed interest has not been limited to the community. In 1995, anthropologist Brian du Toit published <a href="https://mellenpress.com/book/Colonia-Boer-an-Afrikaner-Settlement-in-Chubut-Argentina/3702/"><em>Colonia Boer</em></a>, the first academic history of the settlement. In 2002, journalists Liliana Peralta and María Morón profiled the community in <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Las-Tierras-Del-Viento-1902-2002/dp/9874346736">En las tierras del viento, última travesía boer</a></em> (In the Lands of Wind: The Last Boer Trek). In 2015, the community was showcased in a <a href="http://boersfilm.com/">documentary</a>, <em>The Boers at the End of the World</em> (dir. Richard Gregory), which won three South African Film and Television Awards and sparked significant international interest.</p>
<p>And the community has continued to attract attention from researchers. But its uniqueness has required an innovative research method. During the filming of <em>Boers</em>, our team was simultaneously collecting data in Argentina. We clearly saw the need to work across academic disciplines to document the community’s variety of Afrikaans and take full account of its dynamic socio-linguistic and cultural context. </p>
<p>Our project involves a team of more than 40 professors, post-doctoral researchers and students at all levels. They come from a wide range of fields, including linguistics, history, anthropology, literature and religious studies. Over the course of two research trips, we conducted nearly 100 interviews with community members in Afrikaans and Spanish.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/249225/original/file-20181206-128190-7uisuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/249225/original/file-20181206-128190-7uisuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/249225/original/file-20181206-128190-7uisuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/249225/original/file-20181206-128190-7uisuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/249225/original/file-20181206-128190-7uisuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/249225/original/file-20181206-128190-7uisuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/249225/original/file-20181206-128190-7uisuv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Members of the project recording Patagonian Boers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Richard Finn Gregory / GOODWORK</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The interviews provide a rich corpus of linguistic data as well as new evidence about the determinative role of language, identity, religion and racial ideologies in the integration of the Boer settlers in Argentina.</p>
<p>The community is, in a way, like a time capsule, reflecting pronunciation and syntax from an earlier era. For example, the Afrikaans word for nine – “nege” – is pronounced <em>niəxə</em> in modern South Africa, but with a hard “g”, as <em>niəgə</em>, in Patagonia. </p>
<p>At the same time, some elements are superbly modern, including vocabulary adapted for the 21st century. For example, an airport is not, as in modern South Africa, a “lughawe”, which is a word that did not exist when the community first disembarked in Argentina. It is a “vliegtuigstasie” (literally “aeroplane station”), a compound word coined by the community. </p>
<h2>Future growth</h2>
<p>Our work has sparked interest among linguists in Europe and South Africa, and also led to deep personal connections in Patagonia – especially with the younger generations. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/249218/original/file-20181206-128199-1ckyagc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/249218/original/file-20181206-128199-1ckyagc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/249218/original/file-20181206-128199-1ckyagc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/249218/original/file-20181206-128199-1ckyagc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/249218/original/file-20181206-128199-1ckyagc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/249218/original/file-20181206-128199-1ckyagc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/249218/original/file-20181206-128199-1ckyagc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Members of the Patagonian Boers baking traditional Afrikaner delicacies.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Richard Finn Gregory / GOODWORK</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The children and grandchildren of the older community members responded to our 2014 visit by seeking out a teacher to offer online classes in Afrikaans. We have since made it our goal that a broader public come to view this community as its members do: not as a faded relic of the past, but as a group that continues to thrive in spite of a transformed socio-cultural landscape.</p>
<p>The relevance of this project became clear to us earlier this year during our second research trip. At one point, we invited three cousins to converse solely in Afrikaans, including Rebecka Dickason, who spoke only Afrikaans until the age of 10. During the conversation, her Spanish-speaking daughter, Tecky, witnessed a change in her mother’s demeanour. Rebecka was smiling and gesturing as she conversed comfortably in her original native tongue. </p>
<p>It was a powerful moment for Tecky, who thanked us afterwards with tears in her eyes, giving a new sense of vitality and hope:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ustedes no saben lo que han hecho por mi madre. Le han insuflado vida (You don’t know what you have done for my mother. You have breathed life into her).</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p><em>Ellie Johandes and Myrna Cintrón-Valentín contributed to the article.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107907/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A small community of Afrikaners has been living in Argentina since the early 1900s. Linguistic research has found they’re like a time capsule, reflecting pronunciation and syntax from an earlier era.Ryan Szpiech, Associate Professor, Departments of Romance Languages & Literatures and Judaic Studies, University of MichiganAndries W. Coetzee, Director, African Studies Center/Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of MichiganLorenzo García-Amaya, Assistant Professor, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures, University of MichiganNicholas Henriksen, Associate Professor, Departments of Romance Languages & Literatures, and Linguistics, University of MichiganPaulina L. Alberto, Associate Professor, Departments of History and of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, University of MichiganVictoria Langland, Associate Professor, Departments of History and of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of MichiganLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1023552018-10-24T15:08:23Z2018-10-24T15:08:23ZHow the apartheid regime burnt books – in their tens of thousands<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241252/original/file-20181018-67179-1l3q6ep.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Railway Depot furnace at Kaserne, Johannesburg in 1971. Banned and confiscated books and magazines were burnt weekly.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits Student</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the advice of the State Librarian one fine day in the 1970s, a truck transported thousands of books and magazines from Pretoria’s Central Police Station to a dark hall at the Iscor state steel company, just outside the South African capital. A large mechanical shovel scooped up and dropped them into a 20 metre high oven, causing it to spew flames and smoke. This was another truckload of material that had been banned for political reasons and was routinely burned in furnaces across South Africa from the 1950s to the 1970s.</p>
<p>Historical examples show that books are banned and destroyed because they offend the politics, morals, or religion of the day. Information science academic <a href="https://rebeccaknuth.com/">Rebecca Knuth</a>, wrote in <em><a href="http://rebeccaknuth.com/cultural-destruction">Burning Books and Leveling Libraries</a></em> that if a regime is racist, it destroys the books of groups deemed inferior; if nationalistic, the books of competing nations and cultures; and if religiously extremist, all texts contradicting sacred doctrines.</p>
<p>Sometimes these forces combine. Recent examples include the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23061201?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">destruction</a> of Muslim books and libraries in Bosnia in the 1990s by
Serbian nationalist forces. In 2013 there was the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/28/mali-timbuktu-library-ancient-manuscripts">burning</a> by Islamist insurgents of the Timbuktu library and the next year the <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/05/tripoli-library-burned_n_4543928.html">same happened</a> in Lebanon to Tripoli’s historic Al Sa'eh Library. </p>
<p>The apartheid era – from the middle of the 20th century – had its own variation on the theme. Thousands of books were banned, ranging from Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s <em><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/329803.The_Insulted_and_Humiliated">The Insulted and Humiliated</a></em> to popular Westerns writer Louis L'Amour’s <em><a href="http://www.louislamour.com/novels/hopalong4byLouis.htm">Hopalong Cassidy</a></em> series. </p>
<p>The fact that books were burnt underscored the state’s desire to make sure the printed word was utterly destroyed. The practice also revealed a darker side of the library profession which connived in the book burning. Between 1955 and 1971 most librarians didn’t protest when thousands of books and other reading material were taken from libraries, and burned at municipal incinerators and furnaces. Some even joined in.</p>
<h2>The rise of authoritarianism</h2>
<p>State sanctioned book burnings were common as authoritarianism accompanied a growing Afrikanerisation of South African society as the dominant, ruling Afrikaner elite started to impose its culture on all spheres of society. Members of the elite did this first by unifying Afrikaner cultural and church organisations. This took the form of a declaration on behalf of “Volksorganisasies” (Afrikaner people’s organisations) that was signed in 1941 and pledged support for conservative <a href="https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_UTNhTscJ9m4C">Christian national ideology</a>. </p>
<p>This sometimes involved the burning of books as a symbol of purification. One of the more worrying aspects was the solid support from ordinary South African librarians for these treacherous acts.</p>
<p>Even when books were burned by public libraries, the profession meekly accepted the situation. This signified support and agreement with what was happening, and reflected the dominant authoritarian mood and spirit in South Africa and the library community at that time.</p>
<p>In October 1955, the city librarian of Johannesburg, <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=whrZCcG8e6IC&pg=PT269&lpg=PT269&dq=The+burning+question:+what+happens+to+all+those+banned+books?+Rand+Daily+Mail,+Thursday+13+October+1955&source=bl&ots=IYbVzXHtFS&sig=l_CxnlHkwI_E6TsBhhnQAn-qUeU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjV6anl35neAhUUQMAKHTlIDfAQ6AEwAXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=The%20burning%20question%3A%20what%20happens%20to%20all%20those%20banned%20books%3F%20Rand%20Daily%20Mail%2C%20Thursday%2013%20October%201955&f=false">exclaimed</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All copies are brought in to me and I destroy them personally.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the same month, a Cape Town newspaper reported that a couple of hundred books had been burned. Two years later, the deputy city librarian of Cape Town <a href="https://www.westerncape.gov.za/text/2005/11/mj_2005_book_burning.pdf">announced</a> the fate of banned books returned from branch libraries to his Central Library:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We will have a big bonfire and burn them. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>All-out attack on free speech</h2>
<p>What started as the burning largely of imported pornographic books, became an all-out attack on free speech after the findings of a <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=WtgUDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA392&lpg=PA392&dq=Report+of+the+Commission+of+Enquiry+in+regard+to+Undesirable+Publications+(1957)&source=bl&ots=E0EXRgbBnX&sig=YJ4jLzlQ5M0-ux6EscFhNjhIZJA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi52tOr55neAhWIIsAKHWecB4MQ6AEwAnoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=Report%20of%20the%20Commission%20of%20Enquiry%20in%20regard%20to%20Undesirable%20Publications%20(1957)&f=false">commission of inquiry </a> into “undesirable publications” were made public in October 1957. The inquiry gave the Nationalist government the excuse to destroy books and pamphlets critical of its policies, and of dramatic developments in the country. </p>
<p>Each new issue of the Government Gazette included the latest additions to the list of banned books. Books on communism and those that criticised apartheid dogma were targeted. In 1954 banned titles <a href="https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/717755">included</a> the <em>Pravda</em> and <em>Daily Worker</em> newspapers, and Vladimir Lenin’s Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. <a href="https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/717755">Books</a> on innocuous topics about communist countries, like China’s “Railways and Labour Insurance Regulations of the People’s Republic of China”, were also deemed subversive and added to the list.</p>
<p>Even Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel <a href="http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fahrenheit-451/Ray-Bradbury/9781451673265"><em>Fahrenheit 451</em></a> (which, ironically, is the temperature at which book paper starts burning) was burned. From the town of Brakpan in the North to Durban in the East and Cape Town in the South, several thousands of books were removed from library shelves and burned. In July 1964 Cape Town City library services announced that more than 800 books had been <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=whrZCcG8e6IC&pg=PT269&lpg=PT269&dq=No+one+has+surrendered+forbidden+books.+Sunday+times,+Sunday+19+July+1964&source=bl&ots=IYbVzXIoDR&sig=Wv5n4JPEr4Ei8gvDy5eRkqlX3ho&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwix5MPJ4ZneAhVlAsAKHSmUCNUQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=No%20one%20has%20surrendered%20forbidden%20books.%20Sunday%20times%2C%20Sunday%2019%20July%201964&f=false">burned</a>. </p>
<p>By this time the list of banned publications had swelled to a total of 12 000 titles. In June 1968, a newspaper reported that 5 375 books of the Natal Provincial libraries had been withdrawn from circulation and burned. By April 1971 books were still steadily <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=whrZCcG8e6IC&pg=PT269&lpg=PT269&dq=Books+Go+Up+in+Flames+in+Cape+Town+%E2%80%A6+,%E2%80%99+Argus,+Friday,+2+April+1971&source=bl&ots=IYbVzXIpyV&sig=qaltj7qMLMO2Dwxl6pLOBh-sAsw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiNnsbj4ZneAhVJF8AKHeDlBUEQ6AEwAXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Books%20Go%20Up%20in%20Flames%20in%20Cape%20Town%20%E2%80%A6%20%2C%E2%80%99%20Argus%2C%20Friday%2C%202%20April%201971&f=false">being burned</a> in Cape Town – at the rate of two per day.</p>
<p>It was only in the late 1980s that successful appeals from a few brave librarians to the state censors saw restricted books unbanned, and saved from apartheid’s furnaces. </p>
<p>In the early-1990s as South Africa moved towards becoming a democracy hundreds of archival documents and public records were <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=1VfYDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=Verne+Harris+(2002)+burning+of+secret+documents&source=bl&ots=RLHjefyKxR&sig=OfcSm4SpnXX2mzgfsDw8Zz4gBFY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjm0-rV5JneAhXiBsAKHTcZAUQQ6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Verne%20Harris%20(2002)%20burning%20of%20secret%20documents&f=false">shredded and burned</a> by the apartheid state’s security establishment – once again in the furnaces of Iscor. </p>
<p>Could book burning happen again in contemporary South Africa? Given a similar set of circumstances, there is every reason to believe that it can. South Africans should remain diligent and alert to threats to freedom of expression.
The ashes of burnt books tell of the barbarism to which a society can descend.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102355/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Archie Dick receives funding from the National Research Foundation. </span></em></p>South Africa has a history of burning books. The ashes of burnt books tell of the barbarism to which a society can descend.Archie Dick, Head of Department and Professor of Information Science, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1035442018-10-04T19:31:33Z2018-10-04T19:31:33ZSouth Africa’s white right, the Alt-Right and the alternative<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237914/original/file-20180925-149970-1xkqt59.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South Africa's far right never had a big support base, even under apartheid.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kim Ludbrook/EPA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>There has been a <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/05/right-wing-populism-rising-progressive-politics-fails-it-too-late-save-democracy">global rise</a> in populism, especially of the right wing variety. In South Africa this has manifested in the <a href="https://www.news24.com/Columnists/MelanieVerwoerd/afriforum-is-taking-us-to-the-edge-of-the-abyss-20180912">increasingly strident</a> <a href="https://www.afriforum.co.za/about/about-afriforum/">Afriforum</a>. This pressure group purports to advance the rights of Afrikaners, the ethnic group most closely identified with the former apartheid regime. </p>
<p>The prime ministers and presidents who ran the country from 1948 until 1994 were all Afrikaners. </p>
<p>Afriforum is usually ignored outside of Afrikaner ranks. But it attracted the ire of South Africans more broadly when two of its leaders, CEO Kallie Kriel and his deputy Ernst Roets, undertook a <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/pieter-du-toit/afriforums-u-s-adventure-playing-with-fire-after-setting-australia-alight_a_23426470/?ncid=other_huffpostre_pqylmel2bk8&utm_campaign=related_articles">mission</a> to the US in May this year. Their aim was to convince alt-right figures that white farmers were being targeted for murder. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Afriforum’s Ernst Roets on Fox News.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Roets even secured an <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/2018/05/16/afriforums-roets-tells-fox-news-parliament-has-already-decided-about-expropriation-but-it-hasnt_a_23435931/">interview</a> with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. The interview on the right wing broadcaster apparently inspired US President Donald Trump to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/24/south-africa-condemns-false-claims-as-trump-white-farmers-row-continues">tweet</a> that his administration will investigate the “large scale killing of (white) farmers” in South Africa.</p>
<p>Afriforum calls itself a “civil rights organisation”. Until recently its primary approach was to use the country’s human rights based constitution to launch court cases in defence of white Afrikaans speakers and, at times, of black people amenable to its agenda. </p>
<p>But it has since become the face of white denial about the past, and of defiance of the need for redress in the most unequal country in the world. Afriforum has successfully translated a growing resentment about the loss of Afrikaner control of the state into a political project. </p>
<h2>State capture</h2>
<p>During the last decade of the country’s 24-year-old democracy a form of Schadenfreude has emerged among white rightwingers. <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=State+capture">State capture</a>, in the shape of massive corruption, and factional infighting in the governing African National Congress (ANC) have harmed state capacity. Multiple political, economic and constitutional crises have in the minds of white rightwingers confirmed their racist narrative that “black people can’t govern”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-law-can-help-change-racist-minds-in-south-africa-94646">How the law can help change racist minds in South Africa</a>
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<p>An increase in public expressions and incidents of racism suggests a return to an intransigence that’s unapologetic about continuing white privilege and colonial and apartheid abuses. A more antagonistic Afriforum stepped into this moment rife with political opportunity. </p>
<p>Its politics is a cunning combination of Afrikaner nationalist mobilisation from the past with contemporary <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world">neoliberal</a> elements and alt-right rhetoric from the US, Australia and Europe. Afriforum is part of the Groter Solidariteit-beweging (Greater Solidarity movement) that includes a trade union, a media house and companies selling education and other services. </p>
<p>According to Solidariteit, its movement has <a href="https://solidariteit.co.za/en/greater-solidarity-movement/">350,000 members</a> – sizeable in relation to a white population of <a href="https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/260219/south-africas-white-population-is-still-shrinking/">4.52 million</a>. Solidariteit and Afriforum are the 21st century versions of the cultural entrepreneurs of the <em>volksbeweging</em> (people’s movement) that constructed and advanced the Afrikaner’s identity a century ago. </p>
<p>This movement, which included Soldariteit’s earlier manifestation as the whites-only Mineworkers’ Union (MWU), rose to state power in 1948 on the back of the promise of an expanded form of colonialism named apartheid.</p>
<h2>Class alliance crumbled</h2>
<p>Upward mobility due to apartheid benefits caused the Afrikaner nationalist class alliance to split between the middle class <em>verligtes</em> ( “the progressives”) and the working class <em>verkramptes</em> (“the reactionaries”). <em>Verligte</em> reform of apartheid to suit the changing operation of capitalism was detrimental for remaining Afrikaner workers. </p>
<p>It resulted in the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/conservative-party-formed">formation</a> of the Conservative Party (CP) in 1982. At the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/1992-whites-only-referendum-or-against-negotiated-constitution">referendum</a> 10 years later the <em>verkramptes</em> voted against the continuation of talks for the establishment of a non-racist, non-sexist democracy.</p>
<p>Afriforum hails from this political tradition. Not only is its parent organisation the former Mineworkers’ Union, but the same names appear. For example, Kriel was a youth leader of the Freedom Front Plus, a party that continues the CP legacy with four seats in parliament.</p>
<p>Afriforum is a political expression of what I call <a href="https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/3351">neo-Afrikaner enclave nationalism</a>. This is a post-apartheid phenomenon that combines an “inward migration” to white spaces (suburbs, institutions, media) with connectedness to global whiteness. In their discourses racism is recast as “culture”, and heteropatriarchy as “family values”. </p>
<p>It’s channelled through the consumption of products. Individuals become Afrikaners by being consumers of Afrikaner culture, media products and related services, and spaces.</p>
<p>In a historic irony, democracy has brought together what apartheid rent apart. <em>Verligtes</em> and <em>verkramptes</em> meet each other under the sign of the market. Afrikaner identity becomes enacted through consumption.</p>
<h2>Enclave nationalists</h2>
<p>The tradition that the enclave nationalists draw on has historically only represented about 30% of white people, judging by the CP’s support and the “no” vote of the 1992 referendum. Solidariteit, Afriforum and their <em>verligte</em> media allies are eager to expand their constituencies.</p>
<p>Alt-right rhetorical devices are employed. Prejudice, half-truths and distortions are combined with insults and threats of violence. For example, in a 31-minute late night monologue on YouTube Roets <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/2018/05/06/afriforum-heavyweight-launches-attack-on-academic-over-criticism-about-us-tour_a_23428355/">attacked</a> law professor Elmien du Plessis for criticising Afriforum’s US visit.</p>
<p>He concluded by quoting Jewish writer Victor Klemperer, who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/opinion/editorial-observer-the-noble-ideal-of-rationalism-in-nazi-dresden.html">wrote</a> that if the tables were turned after the Holocaust he,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s relevant to mention that Du Plessis is a white Afrikaans-speaking woman. As other examples also show, the ranks of patriarchal whiteness are again closing in defiance of racial and gender justice. The policing of the boundaries of the Afrikaner identity has been stepped up.</p>
<p>As happened during apartheid, alternative voices are delegitimised. Afriforum and its allies actively seek to suppress positions that contradict theirs. Gauging the extent of dissidence among Afrikaans-speaking whites is difficult. Many no longer identify as Afrikaners. Many are getting on with their contributions to make South Africa’s democracy work. </p>
<p>Most would be loathe to organise as Afrikaners. But, given responses that show that many among their compatriots and in the outside world see the white right as representative of all white Afrikaans-speakers, the time may have come for those in support of justice and equality to be more vocal in keeping the record straight.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103544/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christi van der Westhuizen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The South African pressure group Afriforum and its allies want to be the only voices speaking on behalf of Afrikaners.Christi van der Westhuizen, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/991522018-06-29T13:12:41Z2018-06-29T13:12:41Z‘Ngiyabonga, mkhulu’: farewell to master photographer David Goldblatt<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225487/original/file-20180629-117377-a5vqsg.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">One of David Goldblatt's iconic photographs.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Goldblatt</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2006 I went to South African photographer <a href="https://qz.com/1313759/david-goldblatt-south-african-photographer-of-apartheid-era-has-died/">David Goldblatt’s</a> exhibition <a href="http://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/goldblatt/afrikaners/index.htm">“Some Afrikaners Revisited”</a> at the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town. It was an expanded view of Goldblatt’s body of work, first published in 1975 as <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/some_afrikaaners_photographed.pdf">“Some Afrikaners Photographed”</a>.</p>
<p>Each of the photographs was surprisingly small. But each was powerful, compelling one to walk over and have an intimate conversation. Like the Dutch Masters, Goldblatt knew how to make the ordinary – even the kitchen of a hardscrabble, rural Afrikaner family – luminescent. </p>
<p>Conversing with those photographs revealed the heart of Goldblatt’s work: his instinctive talent for spotting – and pinpointing – the things that make South Africans uneasy, probing the predicaments at the core of contemporary South African existence, and elaborating upon those unspeakable issues using the sharpness of an image.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/david-goldblatt-photographer-who-found-the-human-in-an-inhuman-social-landscape-98984">David Goldblatt: photographer who found the human in an inhuman social landscape</a>
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</em>
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<p>Here, among Goldblatt’s images, were their kitchens and the soot of their country hearths (“In Martjie Marais’s kitchen in Gamkaskloof”, 1967), their marriages (“The bride and her parents-in-law”, near Barkly East, 1966), their love for their priced ewes (“J.G. Loots of the farm Quaggasfontein”, where his family had farmed for more than 200 years, Graaff-Reinet, 1966). </p>
<p>Here, juxtaposed, were the immensity of the landscape they loved, and the fear with which they held it. And here, also, was the terror they wielded over those on whom their lives depended – those they loved, feared, and intimidated into a subordination that removed their humanity (“Johannes van der Linde, farmer and major in the local army reserve, with his head labourer ‘Ou Sam’”, near Bloemfontein, 1965; and “Shiftboss with ‘his piccanin’”, underground at Randfontein Estates Gold Mine, Randfontein, 1965). </p>
<p>I could see that my ambivalence about home, language, landscape and belonging were not their lot; it was, in fact, it was an abundance of belonging with which they grappled. </p>
<p>I took a chance and emailed Goldblatt. It led to over a decade of conversations.</p>
<h2>Home, language, landscape</h2>
<p>Goldblatt himself was an outsider in such belonging, among such situated people. He said during one interview that at a young age he was taunted for being Jewish by the Afrikaner boys around him but <a href="http://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/goldblatt/afrikaners/index.htm">added</a>
it was at English-medium schools that he experienced serious incidents of anti-Semitism and even sadism, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>first at Pretoria Boys High and then at Marist Brothers in Johannesburg.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He found, despite himself, that he liked the company of the Afrikaners who came to get suited at his father’s clothing shop, and was beginning to enjoy the language that he had once disliked so intensely. </p>
<p>When he set out as a photographer, it was to explore what lay at the heart of their power: to explore the contradictory nature that those who are enclosed within protective power structures must, necessarily, cultivate in order to negotiate through ordinary life, while including or excluding those who live outside of the same power structures.</p>
<h2>Working class people</h2>
<p>Goldblatt initially wanted to do an exposition of the Afrikaner people, making it his business to become acquainted with “some leading Afrikaners and upper middle class people, wealthier people, newly rich”.</p>
<p>But as he went along, he realised that he,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>was grossly under-equipped to do something so ambitious, but secondly, in any event, I would not want to do it because I’m not interested in creating encyclopaedias and anyone who ventures to do that is in for a hiding before he starts, because how do you… how do you create an encyclopaedic view of a people? </p>
<p>So, I then realised that… although I’d photographed a number of the fat cats and the more cultured people, in fact, I was more interested in working class people and farmers.</p>
<p>That was partly because I’d met many of these people in the course of working in my father’s shop, in Randfontein (a small town east of Johannesburg). And I knew, from having spoken to them, and having served them, that many of them were salt-of-the-earth people. </p>
<p>And yet at the same time, there was this almost naked fear of The Black. And yet at the same time, there was an intimacy with blacks that far transcended the intimacy that I knew in my own home, with my parents, or among friends and other people in my middle class life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That is when Goldblatt decided to shelve the idea of focusing on the upper echelons of Afrikanerdom. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wasn’t very interested in them, because in fact, you see, the support base (and that was one of the things I was interested in)… the support base for the National Party and for the church – the Afrikaner churches – was in the farming and working class Afrikaner community. They provided the votes – the mass votes. So I was especially interested in their values.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Extraordinary work</h2>
<p>Omar Badsha – a fellow photographer, friend, and occasional verbal sparring partner on matters of personal politics – remembers that Goldblatt’s work was not particularly admired or successful in the 1970s and 1980s.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My wife Nasima and I were visiting Jo'burg, walking in a shopping centre in Hillbrow. And in a sales bin of a C&A, I spotted a book by Goldblatt. I bought for next to nothing. Nobody was buying the damned thing. But I’d started photography not long before that, and I was taken aback by the work.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was only in the late 1990s, as the world became more interested in South African photographers’ work for their ability to narrate beyond the spectacular news imagery, that Goldblatt’s work was identified as extraordinary. </p>
<p>He was a master at conveying what must be said, using minimal language. It was determination I saw, without the bravado. </p>
<p>From a decade of writing about his work, I learned a great deal about myself, my place in the world, and how to maintain my relationship with those about whom I write, and the landscapes to which I am drawn. And I learned from him an ability to be in places, without necessarily being attached. </p>
<p>I, and countless others, have his generosity to thank for our journeys through photography, and much, much more. It is now time to say, <em>ngiyabonga, mkhulu</em>: thank you, elder. </p>
<p>Goodbye, teacher.</p>
<p><em>Some parts of this were originally published in “Returns: 60 Years of David Goldblatt’s Photography.” The Johannesburg Salon. Volume 3 2010 and in “Saying goodbye to South Africa’s legendary David Goldblatt.” Al Jazeera. Opinion. 26 Jun 2018.</em></p>
<p><em>David Goldblatt, photographer, born 29 November 1930; died 25 June 2018.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99152/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Neelika Jayawardane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It was only in the late 1990s, as the world became more interested in South African photographers’ work, that Goldblatt’s work was identified as extraordinary.Neelika Jayawardane, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York OswegoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/808482017-07-18T14:44:24Z2017-07-18T14:44:24ZThe war that provided the soundtrack for subversive Afrikaans rock<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178437/original/file-20170717-6054-14u5sfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bernoldus Niemand (aka James Phillips) at the Market Theatre Warehouse in Johannesburg, 1989. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Hogg/The Times</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1967, military conscription became <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/military-conscription-all-white-males-south-africa-enforced">compulsory</a> for all white men in South Africa over the age of 16. In the subsequent two decades the country got ever deeper involved in the so-called “Border War” on the Namibian/Angolan border. The war was primarily fought between the South African Defence Force (SADF) and the South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo). Under the hawk-ish <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/nov/02/guardianobituaries.southafrica">President PW Botha</a>, the role of the military was <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/pieter-willem-botha">expanded</a>.</p>
<p>The concurrent militarisation of white South African society, as well as the construction of white militarised masculine identities, were powerful societal forces. However, they grew increasingly unpopular. It elicited some resistance from within South Africa’s white population.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178429/original/file-20170717-23045-wcp4vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178429/original/file-20170717-23045-wcp4vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178429/original/file-20170717-23045-wcp4vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178429/original/file-20170717-23045-wcp4vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178429/original/file-20170717-23045-wcp4vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1078&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178429/original/file-20170717-23045-wcp4vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1078&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178429/original/file-20170717-23045-wcp4vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1078&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">PW Botha.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mike Hutchings/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02533950308628651">resistance</a> was indicative of wider dissent and opposition to apartheid especially in popular culture. English-language rock bands like <a href="http://www.rock.co.za/brightblue/">Bright Blue</a>, the <a href="http://shifty.co.za/artists/kalahari-surfers/">Kalahari Surfers</a> and the <a href="http://www.freshmusic.co.za/cherry_liner.html">Cherry Faced Lurchers</a>, along with solo artists like <a href="http://www.cca.ukzn.ac.za/index.php/pa-past-participants/72-pa-2001/744-roger-lucey-south-africa">Roger Lucey</a>, were openly opposed to apartheid and the conscription of white males into the armed conflicts. </p>
<p>These artists often performed under the banners of the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/end-conscription-campaign-ecc">End Conscription Campaign</a>, a lobby group formed in 1983 to end compulsory military service. These performances were highly politicised and held a considerable element of <a href="http://www.3rdearmusic.com/forum/footsoldier.html">risk</a> for the artists.</p>
<h2>Culture supporting the war</h2>
<p>In contrast, popular culture in support of the war effort (music, film and literature as propaganda) was common. Numerous pro-war music releases in both English and Afrikaans appeared on the market. </p>
<p>Among the Afrikaans releases were albums by two of the most popular South African singers of all time, Gé Korsten’s “Huistoe” (Homewards) and Bles Bridges’s “Onbekende Weermagman” (Unknown Soldier). Notably, while some English bands were openly opposed to the army, the war and apartheid, Afrikaans music remained almost completely compliant. Protest among Afrikaners was still rare, although there are some exceptions.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178438/original/file-20170717-6073-1j6x4i7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178438/original/file-20170717-6073-1j6x4i7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178438/original/file-20170717-6073-1j6x4i7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178438/original/file-20170717-6073-1j6x4i7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178438/original/file-20170717-6073-1j6x4i7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178438/original/file-20170717-6073-1j6x4i7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178438/original/file-20170717-6073-1j6x4i7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The sleeve of the record ‘Hou my vas korporaal’ (Hold me tight corporal).</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1983, two acts released Afrikaans songs that parodied the army experience. Opposition towards conscription and South Africa’s involvement in the Border War was steadily increasing at the time. Bernoldus Niemand (the alternative persona of English-speaking musician James Phillips) released his single “Hou my vas Korporaal” (Hold me tight, Corporal). The rock group Wildebeest released an EP, “Horings op die Stoep” (Horns on the Stoep), containing the song “Bossies” (Bushies).</p>
<p>“Bossies” is a vernacular term referring to post-traumatic stress following military battle. The fact that these are Afrikaans songs, make them a poignant testimony to the unravelling of Afrikaner hegemony. This was a significant change. Afrikaners as a group had arguably more invested in the apartheid system than their white English counterparts.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178442/original/file-20170717-6078-1il7ln8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178442/original/file-20170717-6078-1il7ln8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=590&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178442/original/file-20170717-6078-1il7ln8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=590&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178442/original/file-20170717-6078-1il7ln8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=590&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178442/original/file-20170717-6078-1il7ln8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178442/original/file-20170717-6078-1il7ln8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178442/original/file-20170717-6078-1il7ln8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wildebeest’s EP, ‘Horings op die stoep’ (horns on stoep).</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The two songs were not successful commercially. Nevertheless, they represented the earliest examples of Afrikaans music that echoed the dissent felt among a large group of troops.</p>
<p>Artists like Wildebeest and Bernoldus Niemand represented a non-commercial sub-category that had little to no exposure to the mainstream. This was in contrast to the “Musiek-en-Liriek” (music and lyrics) movement which had the support of mainstream television and state-sanctioned arts organisations.</p>
<h2>Free as a bird</h2>
<p>“Hou my vas Korporaal” was followed by the release of the album, <a href="http://rock.co.za/files/jp_niemand.html">“Wie is Bernoldus Niemand?”</a> (Who is Bernoldus Niemand?), in February 1985. It was the first record of its kind and set a certain tone: observant, satirical and couched in the rebellious language of rock ’n roll.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6aE4-lAq_pE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Hou my vas korporaal’ (hold me tight corporal) was the unofficial anthem of the anti-conscription movement.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Before becoming Niemand, Phillips played in an English band called Corporal Punishment which hailed from his hometown of Springs, a mining town on the East Rand of Johannesburg. It was a hotbed of punk-styled anti-establishment music in the late 1970s. Corporal Punishment’s songs delivered biting political and social commentary.</p>
<p>Although stylistically influenced by 1970s British punk, South African punk bands could not realistically claim the same links to the working class. In the general local context, their race made them privileged. However, not all whites were equally privileged. Phillips wrote into song the characteristics (and in Bernoldus Niemand, into character) of working-class whites who he no doubt had observed in Springs.</p>
<p>Many consider the album to have started the “Afrikaans new wave” which climaxed in the 1989 <a href="http://johanneskerkorrel.com/the-voelvry-tour/">Voëlvry tour</a>. The Voëlvry (“free as a bird”) tour was an anti-apartheid uprising of sorts: disaffected rock artists performing in Afrikaans on campuses countrywide.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, “Wie is Bernoldus Niemand?” was banned by the state broadcaster. The satirising of the army experience – which so many young white South Africans could relate to – would become a regular theme for later Voëlvry artists. “Hou my vas Korporaal” also became the unofficial anthem of the ECC.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178440/original/file-20170717-6075-h0yn66.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178440/original/file-20170717-6075-h0yn66.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178440/original/file-20170717-6075-h0yn66.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178440/original/file-20170717-6075-h0yn66.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178440/original/file-20170717-6075-h0yn66.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178440/original/file-20170717-6075-h0yn66.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178440/original/file-20170717-6075-h0yn66.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The cover of Johannes Kerkorrel & Gereformeerde Blues Band’s album ‘Eet Kreef’.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The music of the other Voëlvry artists Koos Kombuis and Johannes Kerkorrel later mocked the vapidity of middle-class Afrikaner suburbia – from the position of rebellious middle-class Afrikaners. But the white working-class character theme in Phillips’s music represented a different subversion, because in the 1980s working-class Afrikaners tended to support the political right. </p>
<p>Although Niemand’s influence on Voëlvry might have been debatable (as suggested by Pat Hopkins in his book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4922220-vo-lvry">“Voëlvry”</a>), it remains a very poignant comment on white conscription during apartheid.</p>
<h2>Afrikaans psychedelic rock</h2>
<p>Wildebeest, on the other hand, was an enigmatic group in their own way. For one thing, the bassist, Piet Botha, was the son of then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Pik Botha. The band is still remembered for a rather strange appearance on the fogey Afrikaans kids’ television programme “Kraaines” (Crow’s Nest) in 1981. Long-haired and subversively sporting military style khaki outfits, Wildebeest raucously beat traditional African drums and played heavy psychedelic rock.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/42wjjQmKC6Q?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Psychedelic rock came to Afrikaans children’s television courtesy of Wildebeest.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The songs were all composed by drummer Colin Pratley who, like James Phillips, was also not a first-language Afrikaans speaker. Wildebeest was influenced by African genres and rock music, and used a variety of indigenous instruments while sometimes singing in Afrikaans. Their EP “Horings op die Stoep” contained four tracks and tellingly, all were in Afrikaans.</p>
<p>In contrast to Phillips, however, Wildebeest was not associated with formal opposition to conscription.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178439/original/file-20170717-6054-n8b8p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178439/original/file-20170717-6054-n8b8p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178439/original/file-20170717-6054-n8b8p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178439/original/file-20170717-6054-n8b8p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178439/original/file-20170717-6054-n8b8p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178439/original/file-20170717-6054-n8b8p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178439/original/file-20170717-6054-n8b8p0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Afro-rock group Wildebeest in the early 1980s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">From 'On Record: Popular Afrikaans music and society, 1900-2017'.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Considering the socio-political atmosphere of the early 1980s, songs like “Hou my vas Korporaal” and “Bossies” were significant releases. Both songs touched on sensitive and realistic aspects of a shared experience between many white South African males conscripted into military service since 1967. This was in stark contrast to the numerous music releases in support of military service that portrayed conscription as the patriotic duty of young white South African males. </p>
<p>Songs like “Hou my vas Korporaal” and “Bossies” chimed with wider fault lines in Afrikaner society as the apartheid regime’s grip on power started to slip. Their specific significance is that they offered alternative interpretations of the army experience, and by extension white Afrikaner male identity, that resonated with much wider socio-political shifts. </p>
<p><em>Edited extract from ‘On Record: Popular Afrikaans music and society, 1900-2017’, African Sun Media, Stellenbosch, 2017.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80848/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Schalk van der Merwe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Rock music against military conscription during 1980s South Africa resonated with wider fault lines in Afrikaner society - this as the apartheid regime’s grip on power started to slip.Schalk van der Merwe, Lecturer of History, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/659852016-10-16T05:15:08Z2016-10-16T05:15:08ZDangerous echoes of the past as church and state move closer in South Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140907/original/image-20161007-21439-1ewt02a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">South African President Jacob Zuma kneels as a pastor prays for him.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Rogan Ward </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="http://www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_41566-1522-2-30.pdf?150609093459">Global Values Survey</a> shows that religious organisations remain among the most trusted institutions in South African society. They enjoy higher levels of public trust than either the state or the private sector. This trust should not be abused or manipulated. </p>
<p>This is a challenge in most societies in the world. South Africa’s particular circumstances are complicated by a difficult historical relationship between the church and the state. </p>
<p>The state has often abused the church to garner votes and misinform, or to silence, its population. The church, on the other hand, has at times given moral and religious sanction that allowed the state to perpetrate significant injustices.</p>
<p>The issue of church and state relationships remains important for a number of reasons. First, South Africa is a deeply religious society. About <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0318/P03182013.pdf">85% of its citizens</a> are Christian, while a further 3% belong to other faiths.</p>
<p>Second, it has a clear precedent where an inappropriate relationship between the church and the state led to wide scale human rights abuses in the country’s apartheid past.</p>
<p>There appears to be a reemergence of the abuse of the trust that South Africans place in religions. This is a dangerous situation. An example is the governing ANC’s courting of the largest mainline <a href="http://ojs.reformedjournals.co.za/index.php/stj/article/view/1323">denomination</a> - the <a href="http://ojs.reformedjournals.co.za/index.php/stj/article/view/1323/1846">Methodist Church</a> of Southern Africa.</p>
<p>When it does not find favour there, it reaches out to <a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-12-13-ancs-conflict-with-the-south-african-council-of-churches-the-origin/">independent churches</a>, which are the <a href="http://city-press.news24.com/Trending/the-rise-and-rise-of-the-charismatic-church-20160327">fastest growing</a> religious groupings in the country.</p>
<h2>The church and apartheid</h2>
<p>The rise of apartheid politics in South Africa was <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=AKkxAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA213&dq=rise+of+apartheid+and+apartheid+theology&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=rise%20of%20apartheid%20and%20apartheid%20theology&f=false">inextricably linked</a> to apartheid theology. It was the heretical theological views about how society should be structured, and whom God favoured, that gave the moral and religious sanction for a so-called “Christian” nation to perpetrate unimaginable human rights abuses. </p>
<p>At the turn of the 1900s the fledgling Afrikaners nation (Volk) developed a theology in which they viewed themselves as <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=AKkxAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA213&dq=apartheid+theology&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiy6f_BibLPAhWKbRQKHQeoB-8Q6AEIPjAF#v=onepage&q=apartheid%20theology&f=false">chosen by God</a> for a particular task.</p>
<p>When the National Party came to power in 1948 they had the <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=bntLAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA103&dq=apartheid+backing+of+white+afrikaner+church&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjkpJm0o8bPAhVkB8AKHUtlBaEQ6AEIITAB#v=onepage&q=apartheid%20backing%20of%20white%20afrikaner%20church&f=false">firm backing</a> of the white Afrikaans churches. The churches – on the Nationalists’ behalf – used the bible and <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=AKkxAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA213&dq=apartheid+covenant+bible+smit&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiA-qTfo8bPAhXHAsAKHV-GB-EQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&q=apartheid%20covenant%20bible%20smit&f=false">covenantal theology</a> to construct a view that white Afrikaners had special rights at the expense of black South Africans, who according to the policy of apartheid, had none. Particular moral and religious values practised in the church and the home, became the laws of the nation.</p>
<p>Given the close relationship between the church and state, the moderator of the Dutch Reformed Church was jokingly referred to as the “second most powerful man in the country”, while the Dutch Reformed Church was referred to as the <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=nrHRz327yL8C&pg=PA60&dq=national+party+at+prayer&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-qPWbjLLPAhUD1RQKHZyiBEYQ6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&q=national%20party%20at%20prayer&f=false">“National Party at prayer”</a>. </p>
<p>This dangerous relationship detracted from the role of the state to protect the rights of all of its citizens, regardless of their faith. It also eroded the ministry of the church, which should hold the state accountable for its service to the people. The church also needs to be free to exercise its religious and moral mandate without political interference.</p>
<p>These religious and moral convictions separated people according to race and privileged a minority at the <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=PA_yVEQ98DMC&pg=PA240&dq=privileged+minority+majority+south+africa+apartheid&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiL1tyfpMbPAhWNHsAKHVF9B8QQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=privileged%20minority%20majority%20south%20africa%20apartheid&f=false">expense of the majority</a>. We are still facing the consequences of those actions and choices.</p>
<h2>Abusing public trust in religious institutions</h2>
<p>Many gave a sigh of relief when the state and the church were disentangled at the end of the <a href="http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/6093/Bentley-11-07-2012.pdf?sequence=1">apartheid era</a>. Sadly, that form of separation was short lived. Once again a governing party, in this <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/splash/index">ANC</a>, is crossing that line. </p>
<p>Recently, <a href="http://www.methodist.org.za/news/05082013-1033">Reverend Vukile Mehana</a>, the ANC’s former chaplain general, defended President Jacob Zuma’s claim that people who voted for the ANC would go to heaven, while those who voted for other parties would <a href="http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71639?oid=220386&sn=Detail&pid=71639">go to hell</a>. </p>
<p>Just before the 2014 elections Mehana, who is a very senior Methodist minister, <a href="http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/politics/2014/02/06/pastors-will-not-help-anc-win-votes-says-da">encouraged pastors</a> in Cape Town to solicit votes for the ANC, saying:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You cannot have church leaders that speak as if they are in opposition to government … God will liberate the people through this (ANC) government.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He would have done well to heed former Methodist Bishop, Peter Storey’s <a href="http://uir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/6093">warning that</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the years since 1994 have surely persuaded us that democracy is not to be equated with the arrival of the reign of God.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, how did this happen again? Of course there are many complex reasons that lead political parties to want the trust, and moral sanction, of large constituencies such as churches.</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are many church ministers and members who seek the power and opportunity that comes from being connected with political parties and party officials. </p>
<h2>Mandela, the Methodists and unintended consequences</h2>
<p>My 2014 research, showed that the path for the current abuses of church and state relationships came from former President Nelson Mandela’s <a href="http://uir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/14102">relationship with his church</a>.</p>
<p>It was not Mandela’s intention to co-opt the church, or abuse the trust that society places in religious institutions. But in a period in South African history when the narratives of reconciliation, forgiveness, hope and reconstruction were so central, he found a natural partner in the church for the project of rebuilding South Africa. He <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/address-president-nelson-mandela-first-triennial-conference-methodist-church-south-africa">said</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Religious communities have a vital role to play in this regard [nation building]. Just as you took leading roles in the struggle against apartheid, so too you should be at the forefront of helping to deliver a better life to all our people. Among other things you are well placed to assist in building capacity within communities for effective delivery of a better life. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mandela worked with faith leaders and church communities, and because he was viewed as a “good person” and a trusted leader, he won their confidence. Senior church leaders, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, worked alongside President Mandela in nation building initiatives. </p>
<p>The state also became accustomed to working with faith-based organisations, which in many poor and rural communities are important, and necessary, sources of support, development aid, and social identity.</p>
<p>But, as successive political leaders, and their political parties, came to power, their intentions seemed less honourable. Many outspoken activists and church leaders had been co-opted into senior government and party-political posts. And formerly trusted allies, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, started <a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2013-05-13-does-tutu-still-count/">facing a backlash</a> whenever they challenged political corruption or ineptitude.</p>
<p>And so, South Africa once again finds itself in a precarious position where a powerful and important social institution is being co-opted by political power. Political leaders are losing their religious and moral impartiality to serve the interests of particular churches and denominations at the expense of others. Political independence and religious freedom are once again under threat. </p>
<p>Of course there are many honourable religious politicians, independent and prophetic religious leaders. But, South Africans would be wise to heed the caution of motivational speaker <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=4cnwYG2mIUgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Jesus+wants+to+save+Christians&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi1guTzlbLPAhUJShQKHY0qB2MQ6AEILzAA#v=onepage&q=Jesus%20wants%20to%20save%20Christians&f=false">Rob Bell</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A Christian should get very nervous when the flag and the Bible start holding hands. This is not a romance we want to encourage.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65985/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dion Forster receives funding from the National Research Foundation for his research. He is a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University and the Director of the Beyers Naudé Center for Public Theology.</span></em></p>Once again South Africa is facing the challenge of a compromised relationship between the state and the church. Is Nelson Mandela inadvertently responsible?Dion Forster, Head of Department, Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology, Senior Lecturer in Ethics and Public Theology, Director of the Beyers Naudé Centre for Public Theology, Stellenbosch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/631402016-07-31T17:23:26Z2016-07-31T17:23:26ZFamilicides – how apartheid killed its own<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132346/original/image-20160728-12097-1glvd8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Family murder was understood as a sign of larger ills.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In this extract from her <a href="http://jacana.co.za/book-categories/new-releases-65840/end-of-whiteness-detail">book</a>, “The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa”, the University of the Witwatersrand’s Nicky Falkof explores how during the height of apartheid family murders became what was termed a “bloody epidemic”.</em></p>
<p>The terms “family murder”/“<em>gesinsmoord</em>” only came into frequent use in South Africa in the early 1980s. Murders within families had, of course, happened before but had not been defined in this way. Those deaths were reported as individual tragic killings rather than as symptoms of a larger social problem. Family murder as a phenomenon was particular to the late apartheid era and developed when it did because it had meaning outside of itself. </p>
<p>By 1984, amid burgeoning cultural awareness of a national “problem” of family murder, the term was sufficiently entrenched to merit a three-page article in the popular Afrikaans magazine <em>Huisgenoot</em>, often a <a href="http://wits.worldcat.org/title/building-a-nation-from-words-afrikaans-language-literature-and-ethnic-identity-1902-1924/oclc/86008458">social barometer of white Afrikanerdom</a>. This considered three recent murders, of Aurica Costin, Mirian Swanepoel and Talitha Hamman, all killed by estranged spouses who subsequently committed suicide.</p>
<p>These deaths, coming at the start of the panic, did not fit with ideas about family murder that became set as the decade progressed. Family murder was <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02580144.1988.10558384">later characterised</a> as something separate from domestic violence, an act that involved a family structure – always children, sometimes other relatives too – rather than just a couple, and almost always ended in the suicide of the killer. </p>
<p>Nonetheless at this early stage <em>Huisgenoot</em> referred to the Costin, Swanepoel and Hamman killings as “<em>gesinstragedies</em>” (“family tragedies”) and to the killers as “family murderers”. The magazine called the deaths a “<em>bloedige epidemie</em>” (“bloody epidemic”). </p>
<h2>Paranoia at work</h2>
<p><em>Huisgenoot</em>‘s article was part of an emergent repertoire of representation about family murder that included the exhortation for the public to watch out for the “warning signs” listed in the pages of popular publications. There was a certain paranoia at work here. </p>
<p>If the family murderer was always white, male and Afrikaans then it followed that each white, male and Afrikaans person could have the seeds of murder within him. The injunction to watch each other potentially accused all people who fitted into this mould. All white Afrikaans men could be marked with the possibility of this type of evil and it became everyone’s duty to observe them.</p>
<p><em>Huisgenoot</em> also reported, “[Family murder is] a sign of a sick society, say psychologists.” Press responses to family murder turned to psychiatry and medicalisation early on. The notion of expanded blame – that society as a whole rather than just the killer was responsible for these deaths – also came to the forefront early in the coverage of these killings.</p>
<p>Similarly, family murder was understood as a sign of larger ills. In an article on South Africa’s “new brutality”, the right wing <a href="http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/Aida/aida-200.html"><em>Aida Parker Newsletter</em></a>, secretly sponsored by intelligence divisions within the South African Police, classified family murder alongside child abuse and other social ills as the consequence of a “sick society”. </p>
<p>That was a society newly filled with pornography, “enlightened” churches that preached politics instead of religious obedience, high divorce rates, “trendy” sex across the colour line and newly “liberal” attitudes towards abortion, homosexuality and lesbianism. All of these ills were contrary to the rights of the majority who wished to “live in an ordered, humane, civilised society”. </p>
<h2>Death of a daughter</h2>
<p>On November 4 1984 Gert Botha (38) shot and killed his ex-wife Maretha (35), their daughter Madaleen (15) and himself. Although there had been two similar cases the previous month, this one garnered far more press coverage, at least partly because of the idealisation of the murdered daughter.</p>
<p>“Madaleen, 15, was the beauty of the family. She had already won one pageant … Next year she would be a prefect. That night the family was torn apart. Mrs Botha lay dead. Madaleen was shot in the stomach and the eye when she ran into the bedroom after the first bullets were fired. Gert Botha turned the gun on himself,” reported <em>Huisgenoot</em> at the time. </p>
<p>Madaleen’s healthy normality was repeatedly emphasised in the press. Her gender and ethnicity were combined to depict her as a perfect white Afrikaans daughter. She was the model victim of a social plague. This was in contrast to parental dysfunction. Newspapers insisted that Gert and Maretha’s constant fighting should have alerted their community to the looming tragedy. </p>
<h2>Saving families</h2>
<p>Ideas about warning signs were part of the medicalisation of the family murder, the belief that there was a set of symptoms that could be spotted and avoided. This social-psychiatric narrative also implied that the unwary were to blame for disaster.</p>
<p>The <em>Sunday Tribune</em>, an English-language weekly newspaper published in what was then Natal province, went as far as to use the standfirst, “Family ignored danger signs – and paid with their loved ones’ lives”. Complacency and lack of communal care were blamed for the destruction of white South African youth. Society was failing to protect the young from dangers that could have been anticipated.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jacana Books</span></span>
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<p>An editorial in the Afrikaans daily <em>Beeld</em>, titled “<em>Kommerwekkend</em>” (“Worrisome”), speculated that deaths like the Bothas’ were part of a national crime problem, the result of a society that was too violent, with firearms too easily available.</p>
<p><em>The Weekend Argus</em> in Cape Town called the deaths part of a “frightening chronicle” of killings and printed a list of possible causes agreed upon by several unnamed psychologists: “unemployment, stress, sex, the availability of firearms, misplaced religious beliefs, immaturity, alcohol, fears about the future and 'hot weather’”. </p>
<p>This list avoided the most influential, volatile and unsettling factor that affected South African society. Save from fear of the future, apartheid was given no place in a consideration of why family murders happened, although notions of Afrikanerness and gendered cultural identity crept in in the form of religion, immaturity and sexual issues. </p>
<p>Later in the period <a href="http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/program.pl?ID=117878">other experts suggested</a> a different causal model for family murder that implicated the violence of apartheid as a primary factor. The family murder panic was thus part of a cultural shift. It helped to inaugurate a public discussion of the fact that apartheid could be dangerously brutalising for white people, allowing them to be critical of the system without having to acknowledge the far more damaging consequences it had had for black South Africans.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63140/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This book project has received funding from Birkbeck College, the London Consortium, the National Research Foundation of South Africa, the Skye Foundation, the University of London and the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust.</span></em></p>During the 1980s, press coverage of South African family murders suggested that something was ‘wrong’ with white society – and with the white Afrikaans men who were usually seen as perpetrators.Nicky Falkof, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/595462016-05-20T11:42:54Z2016-05-20T11:42:54ZThe time ‘the other Kennedy’ visited apartheid South Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123036/original/image-20160518-6180-1aufxt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">During his 1966 visit to South Africa, US Senator Robert F Kennedy met with ANC leader Chief Albert Luthuli</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shoreline Productions</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>“<a href="http://www.rfksafilm.org/">RFK in the Land of Apartheid: A Ripple of Hope</a>” was recently screened at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) with filmmaker Larry Shore on hand to discuss the film. The documentary chronicles American Senator <a href="http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/The-Kennedy-Family/Robert-F-Kennedy.aspx">Robert Kennedy</a>’s visit to South Africa in 1966, recording many historical moments around his short visit, including the defiant meeting with then African National Congress (ANC) President Chief <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/chief-albert-john-luthuli">Albert Luthuli</a>, then under a banning order. Known by his initials, “RFK” was part of the famous <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/kennedys-politics/">Kennedy political clan</a>. He was assassinated in 1968.</em></p>
<p><em>The speeches Kennedy gave at the universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Wits may have faded from public memory or may no longer seem relevant. However, by recovering these images, the film succeeds not only as a record of the racial segregation of this society and the former “whites-only” universities at the height of apartheid, but acquires an added poignancy with the <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/topics/feesmustfall">recent student protests</a> and ongoing calls for the transformation of the entire education system in South Africa.</em></p>
<p><em>Kenneth Kaplan, who teaches directing and writing in the Film/TV division at Wits University in Johannesburg, interviewed Shore, who is a Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies, Hunter College, New York.</em></p>
<p><strong>Why did you choose to focus on this particular event?</strong></p>
<p>I was a junior high school student in Johannesburg in 1966 when Robert Kennedy visited South Africa. Although I did not attend any of the events, I followed it closely in the liberal Johannesburg English-language newspapers like the <a href="http://global.britannica.com/topic/Rand-Daily-Mail"><em>Rand Daily Mail</em></a> and <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/the-star"><em>The Star</em></a>. The visit really amazed me, as it amazed many others. In high school and then at the University of the Witwatersrand I became really interested in American history and politics, which included an interest in the Kennedys.</p>
<p>I remembered the visit when I left South Africa in 1973 for the US and afterwards. My MA included a good dose of US foreign policy, and policy towards Africa and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/apartheid-and-reactions-it">apartheid</a> South Africa in particular. So I think I was always interested in US-South Africa relations and the connections between the two countries. I also teach about this stuff as a professor at <a href="http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/main/">Hunter College</a> in New York. This carried over when I became interested in documentary films.</p>
<p>I also liked the story because it opened up doors to other interesting stories that deserved to be told, like those of Albert Luthuli and the National Union of South African Students (<a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/national-union-south-african-students-nusas">Nusas</a>), to name just two. I am very grateful and pleased that the film has been well received by South African audiences although my original primary audience was the United States. I always believed that it helps to tell a story about a foreign country to an American audience if it has an American connection. Robert Kennedy was that connection. </p>
<p><strong>What impact did the visit have and how did it shape relations between the US and South Africa?</strong></p>
<p>As a filmmaker you don’t want to overdo it or make more of it than is right. It was only a moment – but it was an important moment. I do think that the visit did have an impact in South Africa. It was the first time anyone important had come to the country from the outside world and said they were on the side of those who opposed apartheid. And it was someone important – a Kennedy and brother of <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/johnfkennedy">President John F Kennedy</a>, who was popular in South Africa. He was not just a famous American.</p>
<p>South Africans were interested in American affairs and they believed Robert Kennedy was going to be the next president. And you had the feeling that this important person was going to do something about it when he went home. Or at least tell the world what was happening in South Africa and maybe something would happen. Like the <a href="http://www.rfksafilm.org/html/speeches/speechrfk.php">famous speech</a> he gave at the University of Cape Town, his visit was a “ripple of hope” and it was felt across the country.</p>
<p>His visit with Chief Luthuli was a big publicity boost for the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/african-national-congress-anc">ANC</a>, which in 1966 was in the depths of the deepest repression with <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/nelson-rolihlahla-mandela">Nelson Mandela</a> on <a href="http://www.robben-island.org.za/">Robben Island</a> and Luthuli banned to <a href="http://www.luthulimuseum.org.za/index.php/about/history-of-groutville-and-stanger-">Groutville</a> (a small town in the province of KwaZulu-Natal). The visit to <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/places/soweto">Soweto</a> and RFK’s meeting with various black South Africans was a lift for black South Africans.</p>
<p>It also was a source of encouragement for white liberal organisations and individuals within Nusas, liberal politician <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/helen-suzman">Helen Suzman</a> and others. I think that the visit to <a href="http://www.sun.ac.za/english/about-us/historical-background">Stellenbosch University</a> helped lay a few seeds for what later became the <a href="http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0018-229X2008000200004"><em>verligte</em></a> (enlightened) movement among Afrikaners. I don’t think the visit changed US policy towards South Africa directly at the time, but it was one of a number of things that began to bring attention to bear on South Africa – what was going on there and what could be done about it.</p>
<p><strong>What might we know about you and your life that you think led you to make this film?</strong></p>
<p>Well, as I said before, I have always been interested in US-South African stories. Certainly a part of that is because I am a South African-American. I have lived most of my adult life in America but I grew up in and have a lot of connections to South Africa. I kept that connection during my years in the <a href="http://www.voanews.com/content/us-anti-apartheid-movement-helps-bring-change-to-south-africa/1900704.html">anti-apartheid movement</a> in the US and after the end of apartheid. When I became convinced that it was a good story, and would make for a good film, I realised that, as someone who understood and had lived in both countries, I was well suited to make the film. </p>
<p><strong>What are some of the creative challenges you faced making the film?</strong></p>
<p>I think one of the most difficult things about making a film about someone as famous as Robert Kennedy is to avoid hagiography – putting him up on a pedestal and making the visit appear more important than it was yet at the same time not denying its significance. How to find the right balance was a major challenge in making the film.</p>
<p>As with any documentary like this, I also faced challenges deciding what interviews not to use. I had lots of terrific interviews with important and interesting people but I had to leave some of them out and make tough selections.</p>
<p><em>The text above has been edited from an interview conducted by Kenneth Kaplan with Larry Shore following the recent screening of “<a href="http://www.rfksafilm.org/html/trailer.php">RFK in the Land of Apartheid: A Ripple of Hope</a>” at Wits University.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59546/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kenneth Kaplan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Fifty years ago US Senator Robert F Kennedy visited South Africa. A new documentary about RFK’s visit puts the spotlight on an important part of the country’s history.Kenneth Kaplan, Lecturer in Directing & Writing in Film/TV, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/593302016-05-15T14:16:03Z2016-05-15T14:16:03ZThe myth of white purity and narratives that fed racism in South Africa<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122487/original/image-20160513-10658-3fqaiy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Apartheid sought to divide blacks and whites in all spheres of life.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In this extract from her book “<a href="http://jacana.co.za/book-categories/new-releases-65840/end-of-whiteness-detail">The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa</a>”, Nicky Falkof explores how ideas about disease, risk and danger that the apartheid government applied to black people were transposed onto fears about Satanism during the 1980s.</em></p>
<p>The grand apartheid regime’s most pressing fear was <em>gelykstelling</em>, an Afrikaans word that means “equalisation”. It believed that this would bring on the “mishmash cohabitation” and eventual <em>bloedvermenging</em> – blood mixing – that threatened the purity of the white race. </p>
<p>During the run-up to the 1938 election, the National Party campaigned on the argument that the ruling United Party’s policy of allowing mixed marriages would cause mass miscegenation. This, in <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=UTNhTscJ9m4C&pg=PA246&lpg=PA246&dq=mixing+of+the+blood+and+the+ruin+of+the+white+race+van+der+merwe&source=bl&ots=0m_-pf0gZh&sig=L-5KK7v5oMZMJnTS4QKuZ0Htz_w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjnk--HqdTMAhUJLMAKHbjDBEEQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=mixing%20of%20the%20blood%20and%20the%20ruin%20of%20the%20white%20race%20van%20der%20merwe&f=false">the words</a> of Afrikaans intellectual NJ van der Merwe, would lead to “mixing of the blood and the ruin of the white race”. </p>
<p>During the 1970s Afrikaans genealogist <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=zXuAAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA11&dq=heese+herkoms&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=heese%20herkoms&f=false">JA Heese</a> uncovered records of more than 1,200 European men in South Africa who married non-white women between 1652 and 1800. Through this he determined that approximately 7.2% of Afrikaner heritage was non-white. This complicated history was not admissible within the apartheid imaginary.</p>
<p>French philosopher Michel Foucault <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=lVJ9lVQV0o8C&redir_esc=y">argued</a> that the existence of other races is essential to safeguard the stainlessness of our own: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other … The death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The idea of purity suggests that there is an unadulterated, genuine, original race that must be protected. The unpolluted population must not be infected or otherwise sullied by contact with lesser races. Evocative terminology like <em>bloedvermenging</em> suggests this abomination. The rhetoric of racial purity is full of suggestive terms like illness, weakening and dilution. These imply the medicalisation of the nation.</p>
<h2>Disease to justify segregation</h2>
<p>White South Africa was not, of course, alone in its belief in racial purity. Homi Bhabha, in his <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=-XGKFJq4eccC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">foreword</a> to Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth”, writes that in the colonial situation “the racialised person is seen as a threat, an infection, a symptom of social decline”. </p>
<p>Disease was a powerful tool in the ideological arsenal of South African segregationists. The day-to-day bureaucratic implementation of apartheid racial classifications owed more to common sense than to appeals to blood and ancestry. But the mythology of racial difference, if not the methods by which it was implemented, depended on ideas about infection, dirt and the possibility of a pure blood. Those who aren’t defined as white have always been <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?hl=en&lr=&id=tmUTCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA364&dq=gilman+nose+job+jews&ots=qoe_PGeq-F&sig=AbRv9MlyguMqK_Aw2lddTnJY9y0#v=onepage&q=gilman%20nose%20job%20jews&f=false">considered “ugly” </a>in the European mindset, which suggests disease and ill health.</p>
<p>Fears of the spread of bubonic and later plagues in the urban slums were a useful justification for the Cape Colony to initiate segregation and forced removals. This was a process of moral, social and economic injustice in the cities of Cape Town and Port Elizabeth that aimed to remove Africans from within the city environs without jeopardising white farmers’ and industrialists’ labour requirements. </p>
<p>When black city dwellers were first ejected from Cape Town at the start of an <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/list-laws-land-dispossession-and-segregation">ongoing project</a> of land dispossession and urban segregation, this was done in response to fears of the “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/180639?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">medical menace</a>” of plague. Health and sanitation became catch-all excuses for segregation. The imperative to separate African slum-dwellers from colonists was stated in extreme terms. </p>
<p>“Infected” urban Africans were demonised as a threat to civilisation in the Cape. The “degenerate poor” were a danger to the health and stability of the “imperial race”. Africans living in urban areas were seen as being only partly modernised, neither true to their tribal roots nor capable of proper civilisation. They were “maladjusted” and susceptible to disease, which could be spread to the colonists. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/122483/original/image-20160513-10679-5lk5z9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jacana Books</span></span>
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<p>These powerful medicalising ideas remained in force after South Africa became a Union in 1910. Later, their classification of the poor black body was a constant refrain in the moral and social justification for apartheid even while the state separated people into racial groups based on hair curl, economic status, language and other <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9124190&fileId=S0002020600029826">common-sense</a> attributes.</p>
<h2>The language of hygiene</h2>
<p>The requirement to maintain racial purity was applied to black people as well as to whites. Colonial engineering during the 19th century had aimed to break the power of the chiefs. By the 20th century these tribal authorities had become an important pole in the state’s management of the black population. The <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/homelands">homelands system</a> attempted to isolate Africans in an imagined pre-industrial tribal past. It kept them away from the cities and the influence of modernity. This retribalisation policy was couched in the language of culture and nation. It was, in fact, a deeply cynical exercise in which hybrid or even invented ethnicities were forced upon people for the purpose of controlling their movement, labour and lives.</p>
<p>Officials “were well aware of the <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=mFiOAAAAMAAJ&q=isbn:1770073051&dq=isbn:1770073051&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y">artificiality of their ethnic engineering</a>”. In some cases, in areas where chieftainships did not exist, government functionaries would simply make them up. They would create a new “traditional” lineage and install a client chief who would keep his subjects in the subdued state that apartheid required of its labour force.</p>
<p>All of these acts of social engineering were expressed in the language of hygiene. Officials cited the need to protect apparently original tribal cultures from polluting contact with modernity – and, of course, all the benefits for social health, life expectancy, political power and the rest that modernity can bring. A particularly hyperbolic statement from then cabinet minister Albert Hertzog, made in 1964, gives a sense of the <a href="http://historysnapshot.blogspot.co.za/2014/04/black-peril-and-its-legacies-in-south.html">corrupting effects</a> that Western culture was thought to have on the “primitive” African and the dangers this presented for white society: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is afternoon and the Bantu [meaning black African] house-boy is in the living room cleaning the carpet. Someone has left the television set on. The house-boy looks up at the screen, sees a chorus line of white girls in scanty costumes. Suddenly, seized by lust, he runs upstairs and rapes the madam.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Discussions surrounding both the importance of Afrikaans as the medium of government and education and the fear of Anglophone influence included suggestions of illness, pollution, dirt, corruption and sickness that characterise the language of racial purity and the quarantined body politic. A rhetoric of contagion and disease became common to white South Africa. As anthropologist <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=QGRUTH8hnQ4C&redir_esc=y">Mary Douglas</a> illustrates, dirt, pollution and taboo are cultural constraints that police boundaries:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Apartheid was nothing if not systematic. It was a bureaucratic behemoth that attempted to classify people into easily managed categories so as to maintain the tenuous margins of whiteness. Black people were superfluous to the white nation, existing only as labour potential, dismissed as dirty and diseased and therefore excluded from the citizenry to protect the health and purity of the state’s primary subjects.</p>
<p>These same medicalising ideas appeared in the public conversation around Satanism and Satanists. The supernatural threat contained accusations of dirt, pollution and illness, of infection and parasitism, of something impure threatening and entering into the realm of the hygienic. The Satanist posed a similar danger to the health of the nation as the black person who was “out of place”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59330/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This book project has received funding from Birkbeck College, the London Consortium, the National Research Foundation of South Africa, the Skye Foundation, the University of London and the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust.</span></em></p>The rhetoric of racial purity is full of suggestive terms like illness, weakening and dilution. These imply the medicalisation of the nation.Nicky Falkof, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/562222016-03-15T12:08:23Z2016-03-15T12:08:23ZHow Afrikaner identity can be re-imagined in a post-apartheid world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/114975/original/image-20160314-11302-1qrbk4a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Birds flock around a statue of Boer War leader Paul Kruger at Pretoria's Church Square.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Mike Hutchings</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is a foundation essay. These are longer than usual and take a wider look at a key issue affecting society.</em></p>
<p>In a post-apartheid context, is a democratic Afrikaner identity possible? Are there other traditions apart from apartheid that can be drawn on in Afrikaner culture that can advance democracy and social justice? These questions are particularly relevant in South Africa, given that in recent years there has been a heightened contestation over Afrikaner identify, driven by a hardening of whiteness.</p>
<p>When the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/national-party-np">National Party</a> came to power in 1948 politician <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/johannes-g-strijdom">JG Strijdom</a>, the apartheid prime minister between 1954 and 1958 who was nicknamed the “Lion of the North”, demanded “<em>eendersdenkendheid</em>”. The <a href="http://capetownhistory.com/?page_id=262">Afrikaans</a> word means a condition of thinking the same. It is a collective term as it necessarily requires more than one person to abide by it. </p>
<p>The directive of <em>eendersdenkendheid</em> was founded in <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/apartheid-and-reactions-it">apartheid</a>. Opposition to apartheid was as treasonous as refusing to defend your country during a war, hardliner Strijdom told his white, assumed-to-be male audience.</p>
<p>This demand for conformism to a particular ethnic configuration of <a href="http://www.cpt.org/files/Undoing%20Racism%20-%20Three%20Pillars%20-%20Smith.pdf">heteropatriarchal white supremacism</a> – also known as apartheid – permeated Afrikaner nationalism. State power amplified the authoritarian tendency of conformism in Afrikanerdom. Anyone who did not bend the knee was a “<em>volksverraaier</em>”, or traitor to the <em>volk</em> (Afrikaner people).</p>
<h2>A democratic Afrikaner identity</h2>
<p>In thinking what it means to <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/media/wits-university/news-and-events/Final%20Programme.pdf">re-imagine</a> the formerly hegemonic identity of apartheid, namely “the Afrikaner”, and what 22 years of <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/timeline-20-years-democracy-1994-2014">democracy</a> in South Africa should mean for this identity, I want to advance <em>andersdenkendheid</em> – a condition of thinking differently – as the democratic duty of Afrikaners.</p>
<p><em>Andersdenkendheid</em> refers again to a collective. But it is a countervailing action against conformism in that one adopts a posture of questioning and critical thinking. One then creates a condition of thinking differently to the dominant thinking within a collective, which is literally what <em>andersdenkendheid</em> means.</p>
<p>Certain sections of white Afrikaans-speaking civil society and the media want Afrikaners to think that they all have the same beliefs. They want all Afrikaners to inherently believe that women, black people, lesbians and gays are inferior. They want all Afrikaners to feel so threatened by anyone different to what is regarded as the “norm” that everyone has to suppress their humanity.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dolLuO9hM5s?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Recent clashes over the use of Afrikaans as language of instruction at the University of Pretoria.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But not all Afrikaners are like that. There were those Afrikaners who had the courage to be different, who were the <em>volksverraaiers</em> (traitors to the people) before South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994. Treason in this sense meant rejecting racist and heteropatriarchal oppression and brutalisation.</p>
<p>They are the people who today can show Afrikaners how to once again say “not in my name” when certain organisations pretend to speak on their behalf. Or when certain media corporations pretend to represent “true Afrikaner identity”. The <em>volksverraaiers</em> point the way to full participation in South Africa’s democracy.</p>
<h2>A constructed identity</h2>
<p>Why was there such a strong emphasis on <em>eendersdenkendheid</em> about apartheid, to the extent that diversion amounted to <em>volksverraad</em> (treason)? As with all identities, Afrikanerness is constructed. It was cobbled together using race, gender, class, sexuality and, importantly, ethnicity.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/114976/original/image-20160314-11274-zggqh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/114976/original/image-20160314-11274-zggqh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/114976/original/image-20160314-11274-zggqh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/114976/original/image-20160314-11274-zggqh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/114976/original/image-20160314-11274-zggqh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/114976/original/image-20160314-11274-zggqh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/114976/original/image-20160314-11274-zggqh8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The neo-nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) epitomised the fascist tendency in Afrikaner nationalism especially during the 1980s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Peter Andrews</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Afrikanerness was a particularly precarious identity. It wedged a space where it claimed the privileges of dominant Anglo whiteness but also demanded separateness on the basis of ethnicity. However, it did not want to be lumped with black ethnic others because then it would lose the benefits of whiteness.</p>
<p>Therefore Afrikaner nationalism spent the first several decades of the 20th century <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=LgwWMUbyNVUC&pg=PA100&lpg=PA100&dq=%22purification%22+of+afrikaners&source=bl&ots=1a46Z1cOnt&sig=VrdCmD0a1e7JFRGKX9-VnIoc9Do&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQxd3RgsDLAhUFXRoKHaG2BF0Q6AEILDAG#v=onepage&q=%22purification%22%20of%20afrikaners&f=false">“purifying”</a> its members. </p>
<p>But seismic changes were under way that would have profound changes.</p>
<h2>Militant women, communists and literary dissidents</h2>
<p>After the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/south-african-war-1899-1902">South African War</a> of 1899-1902, Afrikaner nationalist cultural entrepreneurs undertook large-scale political, social and economic work to recruit individuals to their political project. This included emphasising the Afrikaans language over its Dutch predecessor. Class, gender and sexuality were used in the service of whiteness, for example, to “save” thousands of young Dutch/Afrikaans-speaking women under the guise of resolving the <a href="https://ideas.repec.org/p/sza/wpaper/wpapers28.html">“poor white problem”</a>. </p>
<p>These women, who went to work in Johannesburg and Pretoria, were breaking free from the patriarchal Boer family. They were mixing in the diverse communities burgeoning in the multiracial slums of the Witwatersrand. It was an intense scene of ideological battle. Afrikaner nationalism was up against socialism and liberalism. </p>
<p>The troublesome young women organised themselves in the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/garment-workers-union-gwu">Garment Workers’ Union</a>, described as one of the most militant unions in the years between the two world wars. Leading members Hester and Johanna <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/johanna-catharina-jacoba-and-hester-elizabeth-sisters-cornelius">Cornelius</a>, <a href="http://reference.sabinet.co.za/document/EJC28503">Anna Scheepers</a>, Katie Viljoen, <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=eXl9aGN5WGAC&pg=PA108&lpg=PA108&dq=Dulcie+Hartwell&source=bl&ots=TvnffdvZPI&sig=m9VAZLj9jK0oEWm3gzQwbAaFymc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn2tH5hcDLAhULwBQKHVWpCbgQ6AEIQzAI#v=onepage&q=Dulcie%20Hartwell&f=false">Dulcie Hartwell </a>and <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=zhqc7q9oL2EC&pg=PA289&lpg=PA289&dq=Katie+Viljoen+GWU&source=bl&ots=C6RhKcY3V9&sig=GHHLMNSI8CMw2GjBTZUWpg00cgk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjy8-zAhcDLAhUJUBQKHTHcCT4Q6AEIJzAC#v=onepage&q=Katie%20Viljoen%20GWU&f=false">Anna Jacobs</a> created themselves as socialist <em>volksmoeders</em> (mothers of the nation). As Jacobs declared:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We shall take the lead and climb the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/man-made-women">Drakensberg</a> again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These socialist <em>volksmoeders</em> serve as a democratic pointer today. </p>
<p>Jacobs drew on the courage and militancy of the Boer women in the face of British imperialism. But she did so in an expansive mode of advancing equalisation. It was a proposition that was anathema to Afrikaner nationalism.</p>
<p>Advocate <a href="http://zar.co.za/fischer.htm">Bram Fischer</a> similarly serves as a democratic pointer. Fischer, who was part of the legal team that presented the 90-odd accused in the <a href="http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/multimedia.php?id=65-259-D">Treason Trial</a> of 1956-1961 and member of the <a href="http://www.sacp.org.za/">Communist Party</a>, came from “Afrikaner royalty”. He was prosecuted under the <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01828/05lv01829/06lv01840.htm">Suppression of Communism Act</a> in <a href="http://v1.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/fischer,b.htm">1966</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">While despised by the Afrikaner community, Bram Fischer was a hero to many black South Africans.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From the <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/i-did-what-was-right-statement-dock-bram-fischer-after-conclusion-rivonia-trial-1966">dock</a> Fischer quoted <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/paul-kruger-timeline-1825-1904">Paul Kruger</a>, the Boer republic president:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With confidence we lay our case open before the whole world. Whether we conquer or whether we die: Freedom shall rise in Africa like the sun from the morning clouds.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Again, Fischer was expanding Kruger’s notion of freedom from British imperialism to a much more encompassing idea. </p>
<p>Fischer was sentenced to life imprisonment and subjected to daily humiliations and harsh treatment in prison. </p>
<p>The poet <a href="http://www.stellenboschwriters.com/breyten.html">Breyten Breytenbach</a> faced similar treatment. He had become <a href="http://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/44411">radicalised</a> when his Vietnamese partner Yolande was denied entry to South Africa on the basis of being “non-white” in the mid-60s. His militant organisation <a href="http://amykarafin.com/pdfs/breytenbach.pdf">Okhela</a> was short-lived. He was arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/mla-apartheids-blind-spot-the-albino-terrorist/158917.article">“Confessions of an Albino Terrorist”</a>, Breytenbach describes how his Afrikaner male warden singled him out for abuse. The warden was</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a complete marionette, fierce and violent. He opened my door with a brusque gesture… and said ‘Ek is die baas van die plaas [I am the boss around here]. I will make you crawl… You will get to know me yet’. Yes, I did get to know him.</p>
</blockquote>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach was jailed for terrorism by the apartheid state.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These examples make a specific point. Afrikaner nationalism enforced a particularly totalitarian version of identity in which there was little room to manoeuvre for any individuals. Those who dared to transgress were heavily punished.</p>
<p>Writing during apartheid, author <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2015-02-13-00-andre-brink-a-master-of-words-of-form">Andre Brink</a> explained that dissidence provoked a vicious reaction from the Afrikaner establishment because it subverted apartheid. A dissident was regarded as a traitor to everything Afrikanerdom stood for, since apartheid had become everything that Afrikanerdom stood for.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Afrikaans author Andre Brink was an anti-apartheid dissident.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the post-apartheid conditions of a reassertion of white supremacism, the socialist <em>volksmoeders</em>, Fischer and Breytenbach can be used as guides. What sets these so-called traitors or <em>volksverraaiers</em> apart from the <em>volk</em> is their ability to identify with the racialised other through a sense of common humanity.</p>
<h2>Mandela’s Poet</h2>
<p><a href="https://diesestigers.wordpress.com/ingrid-jonker/">Ingrid Jonker</a>, poet and daughter of a National Party politician responsible for censorship, exemplified this. Her poems include “<a href="http://www.mediaclubsouthafrica.com/culture/3988-ingrid-jonker-the-child-is-not-dead">The child who was shot by soldiers at Nyanga</a>”, which was read by Nelson Mandela when he opened the first democratic parliament in 1994. Her poem “<a href="https://skemerlig.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/i-am-with-those-ingrid-jonker/">I am with those</a>” features a line: “I am with those […]/ coloured African deprived.” </p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Nelson Mandela read an Ingrid Jonker poem at the opening of South Africa’s first democratic parliament.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the US philosopher Judith <a href="http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm">Butler</a> reminds us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One seeks to preserve oneself against the injuriousness of the other but if one was successful at walling oneself off from injury one would become inhuman.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The <em>volksverraaiers</em> lived this truth in the face of a system that dehumanised its outsiders and made its insiders inhuman.</p>
<p>There are again attempts to re-enforce <em>eendersdenkendheid</em>, to narrow down and simplify Afrikaner identities, and to corral Afrikaners into a <a href="http://v1.sahistory.org.za/pages/hands-on-classroom/classroom/pages/projects/grade12/lesson13/glossary.htm">laager</a> with a view of the world filled with suspicion, fear and arrogance. The <em>volksverraaiers</em> point the way out of this inhumanity. They have done so by claiming the tradition of <em>andersdenkendheid</em>. With that they have provided Afrikaners with a place to build the vibrant democracy that is South Africa.</p>
<p><em>A version of this paper was first delivered at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies’ Re-imagining Afrikaner Identities Dialogue, Johannesburg, March 10 2016.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56222/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christi van der Westhuizen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>How do Afrikaners find a place in post-apartheid South Africa? A look back at the dissidents who took on the apartheid state over decades offers some examples.Christi van der Westhuizen, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.