Make Afrikaners great again! National populism, democracy and the new white minority politics in post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article on national populism in South Africa brings a view from the South to scholarship overwhelmingly concentrated on the north Atlantic and European world. While in white majority contexts, national populism seeks to capture formal political power, the white minority’s lack of political leverage in post-apartheid South Africa sees an assertion of white autonomy emerge in the civil society arena. The article examines the discursive strategies of the Solidarity Movement, a broad-based social movement which claims to represent the white minority, particularly white Afrikaans-speakers, amid black majority rule. It shows how through a reinvention of the past, recasting of race, and reformulation of nationalist narratives by neoliberal logics the Movement discursively undermines black majority rule, and seeks to create spaces in which white privilege, power and identities are maintained. These findings provide new insights into the relation between populism and democracy, and hold important lessons for the increasingly multicultural global North.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• nationalism
• democracy
• Afrikaners
• South Africa
• post-apartheid

Acknowledgements

My warm thanks to Jacob Boersema for his helpful engagement with earlier drafts of this article, and to Ian Phimister for his advice regarding the text. I also benefitted from conversations with Lindie Koorts, Rory Pilossof and Schalk van der Merwe, and suggestions from audiences at the 2016 African Studies Association (UK) conference. I am grateful for the two anonymous reviewers’ insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Populism in Central and Eastern Europe, Turkey, India and Japan has also received attention, albeit to a much lesser degree (Brubaker 2017; Pandowski 2010; Mudde 2007; Panitch and Albo 2015).

2. See theoretical discussion in Laclau (2005) and case studies in Panizza (2005) and Albertazzi and McDonnell (2008).

3. On whiteness as victimhood in Southern Africa more broadly, see Van Zyl-Hermann and Boersema (2017).

4. This is not to discount the ANC’s achievements since 1994. For both sides of the coin, see Meyiwa et al. (2014).

5. The intersection of race (“white”) and mother language (“Afrikaans”) sees 2.7 million South Africans classified as Afrikaners in 2011 (Statistics South Africa 2012).

6. Scholars now refer to the 1899–1902 conflict as the South African War, thereby acknowledging the participation of black South Africans. The Solidarity Movement eschews this inclusive term.

7. I was told that “Solidariteitkunde” (literally “the study of Solidarity”) was also presented to union members in the workplace.

8. No relation to the author.

9. On selective representations of the past in the broader African context, see Gewald, Hinfelaar, and Macola (2008), Dorman, Hammet, and Nugent (2007) and Cooper (2008).

10. Rutherford (2001) and Pilossof (2009) note similar narratives emphasizing “sweat-of-our-brow” hard work while negating structural privilege among whites in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe.

11. On responsibilization and neoliberal governmentality in post-apartheid South Africa see Chipkin (2003), Colvin, Robins, and Leavens (2010), James (2013) and Von Schnitzler (2008).