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Abstract
Defining nationalism as an ideology which holds that the nation should be collectively and freely articulated – both symbolically and institutionally – this article claims (contra Hermann Giliomee and others) that Afrikaner nationalism has outlived apartheid, at least as an elite movement. During the first decade of the 21st century this movement has become consolidated around a few organisations which define their mission, depending on the circumstances, as the defence of multilingualism and minority rights, the defence of Afrikaans, or, unashamedly, the defence of Afrikaner rights and interests. The leaders of the movement, and then specifically the philosophers Danie Goosen and Johann Rossouw, have been identified as a ‘new generation of Gustav Prellers’ (Van Niekerk 2008:84). However, following Breuilly (1993:64), I argue that effective nationalist mobilisation requires (a) for philosophy to be translated into appropriate ideology (which Goosen and Rossouw have managed to do); and (b) for ideology to be simplified and concretised (which they, unlike the Prellers of yore, have failed to do). In putting forward this argument, I revisit the debate about the role of ideology versus that of other factors in the formation and politicisation of an Afrikaner national identity in the first half of the 20th century.
Acknowledgments
As always, I would like to thank my supervisor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, John Breuilly, for his wisdom, guidance and support throughout my (lengthy) doctoral project. It is also with gratitude that I acknowledge the financial assistance of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission towards this project. Finally, a word of special thanks is due to Thomas Blaser and Christi van der Westhuizen for their detailed criticism and comments – not all of which have, as yet, received due attention here. Needless to say, errors of any kind are my own.
Notes
All translations from Afrikaans sources are my own.
Beeld 30 April 2007.
Malan's article claimed that among Afrikaner politicians, Pieter Mulder, leader of the right-wing Freedom Front Plus (FF+), was almost the only one who impressed intellectually.
Afrikaner nationalism's policy of apartheid, as Mahmood Mamdani explains it, enabled a minority to rule over a majority through institutions that ‘unified the minority as rights-bearing citizens and fragmented the majority as so many custom-driven ethnicities’. Thus, he continues, ‘it was said that there were no majorities, only minorities’ (2009:142). In the post-apartheid era, this premise continues to be the point of departure of the Afrikaner movement. Its leaders are, in their own words, committed to South Africa's plurality of historical communities or communities of origin (Fragmente editorial 2005:4), that is, to the country's language communities. However, to claim, as Afrikaner activist-ideologues sometimes do, that each of these communities now constitutes a rights-bearing minority is to overlook the fact that ‘the strength of the identity interest in language is variable within and between groups’ (Patten and Kymlicka Citation2003:48). It is also to misunderstand the nature of African nationalism which was ‘a struggle of natives to be recognised as a transethnic identity, as a race, as “Africans”, and thus – as a race – to gain admission to the world of rights’ (Mamdani Citation2009:127). The discourse of rights, it should be noted here, is eschewed by certain Afrikaner activist-ideologues in accordance with their rejection of the individualism of liberalism. Yet for every non-liberal there is a self-acclaimed liberal who, rather disingenuously, avail himself or herself ‘of the language of minority rights as deployed in European multiculturalist discourses’ (Wasserman Citation2009:68).
Die Vrye Afrikaan 17 March 2006.
Language activists in South Africa's so-called coloured community tend to identify themselves as brown speakers of Afrikaans. In terms of apartheid legislation, every individual was classified at birth or at entry into the country into one of four categories – ‘White’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Indian/Asiatic’ or ‘Native’ (later ‘Bantu’ or ‘African’). Today, needless to say, any analysis of South African society – past or present – in terms of these categories smacks of racism. Particularly controversial, so that some scholars completely ignore it, is the distinction between Africans/blacks and coloured persons/coloureds (Afrikaans: kleurlinge). Jonathan Jansen, for example, states early-on in his book on race and the apartheid past (2009:vi) that ‘[t]he author uses the word “black” to mean every person who is not “white”, since he does not acknowledge apartheid-era classifications of people by colour’. However, despite Jansen's disapproval, many people continue to identify themselves as coloureds even if they signal their discomfort with the term and the apartheid category by using the word ‘so-called’. What is more, recent years have seen prominent Afrikaans-speaking coloured people asserting what they call a ‘brown’ (i.e. neither a black nor a white) identity. In April 2007, Prof Danny Titus of Unisa went so far as to tell his audience at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees: ‘Get it into your heads. We are brown people’ (Die Burger 16 April 2007).
Nationalism can, of course, also assume a civic character.
For an overview of these activist initiatives, see the South African Language Rights Monitor 2002–2007.
Die Vrye Afrikaan 20 January 2006.
For a rebuttal of Gerwel, see Duvenage in Die Vrye Afrikaan 21 April 2006:20.
Rapport 12 August 2007.
12 April 2007.
Rapport 12 August 2007.
23 September 2007.
The council eventually came into being on 24 May 2008.
Die Burger 4 September 2007.
Beeld 6 December 2007.
‘In 1911 Dutch-Afrikaans student bodies formally added their support to Afrikaans and through it they must have glimpsed a partial solution to their clogged careerist mobility’ (Hofmeyr Citation1987:106).
Here, and in the rest of this section, I rely on a model developed by Joep Leerssen (Citation2006:559–78). Elsewhere (Kriel Citation2010), I critique and refine this model of nationalism as ‘the cultivation of culture’.
The term ‘linguistic landscape’, refers to ‘the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region’ (Landry and Bourhis Citation1997:23).
Documented, inter alia, by Giliomee (Citation2003:364–9; 372–6); Hofmeyr (Citation1987:103–8); Kannemeyer (Citation2005:59–110); Pienaar (Citation1920:195–388); Ponelis Citation(1998); and Moodie (Citation1975:39–51).
South African or Afrikaner, for example.
Charles Malan's portrayal of the ‘new’ FAK project as liberal thus constitutes a misinterpretation.
Personal observation by the author who attended the court case.
Fragmente editorial 2005:4.
Mail & Guardian 19–25 May 2000.
Journalist and author Max du Preez suggested that the newspaper should change its name to Die Etniese Afrikaner [The Ethnic Afrikaner], in view of its ‘obsession with Boer matters’ (Beeld 19 May 2007).
Die Burger 3 February 2007.
Die Burger 5 May 2007.
See http://www.akademie.co.za/toespraak_die_postnasionale_afrikaner.htm (accessed March 2006).
Die Burger 3 February 2007.
Die Burger 3 February 2007.
Die Burger 5 May 2007.
Die Burger 10 September 2007.
Nor did the Vrye Afrikane /‘new’ Afrikaner nationalists find an ally in the South African Nobel laureate for literature, JM Coetzee. Compare the interview that was published in Die Vrye Afrikaan, 16 September 2005.
On his return in 2012, shortly after Pieter Duvenage had been appointed as head of philosophy at the University of the Free State, Rossouw joined the department as a lecturer.
Rapport 31 October 2009.