The politics of untruth’: Afrikaner academics for apartheid

Abstract

In South Africa the public invisibility of their intellectual elite in articulating the depredations of apartheid policies and the need for change made it easy for Afrikaners, as a group, to remain at peace with their consciences. There was simply no alternative vision of society on offer from their intellectual establishment. Such visions were, moreover, variously damned by this elite as the work of traitors ('volksverraaiers'), leftists, integrationists and communists. This article adduces empirical evidence to support the proposition that Afrikaner academics were among the most loyal of apartheid's institutional supporters. Of these, many rendered service as ardent ideologues and activists of the apartheid paradigm; the rest (with exceptions) did so by their silent acquiescence.