Fools, philologists and philosophers: Afrikaans and the politics of cultural nationalism

Abstract

This article attempts to develop a general theoretical framework within which the hypothesis can be tested that the contemporary social movement for the promotion of Afrikaans in South Africa is essentially an Afrikaner nationalist movement. It defines nationalism as an ideology, a movement and a sentiment, and explores the role of language in each of these dimensions of nationalism (the philosophical, the social and the psychological).

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally submitted, in somewhat different form, as the draft theoretical chapter of a PhD thesis, provisionally entitled Language, the New Land: Afrikaner Nationalism after Apartheid. I wish to thank my supervisor at the LSE, John Breuilly, for his detailed criticism and comments—not all of which have, as yet, received due attention here—as well as John Hutchinson and John Sidel, also from the Government Department at the LSE, for the suggestions they made at the first year MPhil/PhD review meeting. In August 2005 these theoretical reflections were also presented as a paper in the University of Pretoria Interdisciplinary Seminar Series. A special word of thanks is due to Charles van Onselen who hosted the seminar and to Vic Webb who acted as discussant. Vic put me on this research track more than a decade ago and I remain indebted to him and to Richard Haines who believed it was an avenue worth pursuing and who has subsequently given valuable advice and much appreciated encouragement. Needless to say, none of these scholars bears responsibility for derailments of any kind. It is, finally, with sincere gratitude that I acknowledge the financial assistance of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission towards the PhD project within which this research was conducted. Obviously, the opinions expressed here and conclusions arrived at are not to be attributed to the Commission.

Notes

1. Earlier in the final chapter of this highly regarded historic work Giliomee reiterates the point he has made in the 2001 article, namely that the Afrikaans language remains for most of its white speakers ‘the symbol of their sense of place and community’. He discusses, among other issues, current attempts to promote the language, referring specifically (and empathetically) to The Group of 63—a post-1994 organisation that, as he interprets its mission, encourages ‘a search for new myths in the campaign to secure the future of Afrikaans as a public tongue’ (Giliomee, 2003, p. 664).

2. Rossouw was on the editorial board of the Afrikaans philosophy journal Fragmente which in May 2000 organised the (by-invitation-only) founders meeting of Group 63. He was elected as the first chairman.

3. ‘O moenie huil nie, o moenie treur nie, die jollie bobbejaan kom weer’: oor Marlene van Niekerk se Agaat' [‘Oh do not cry, oh do not grieve, the jolly baboon comes again’: on Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat'] – Die Vrye Afrikaan, 2005-01-21 <www.vryeafrikaan.co.za>. Accessed March 2005. All quotations in the next few paragraphs are from this source, and all translations are my own.

4. Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge [Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Societies], founded in 1929 on the initiative on the Afrikaner Broederbond [Afrikaner League of Brothers].

5. It is interesting, though, that ‘the new Afrikaners’ do not seem to be uneasy in the company of ‘the nationalists’. They apparently have no qualms with long-established agents of Afrikaner nationalism such as the FAK. Whether they cooperate with and even join such organisations with the aim to transform them into non-nationalist institutions is open to debate, and a topic for a different paper.

6. Die Vrye Afrikaan (2005), op. cit.

7. Die Vrye Afrikaan (2005), op. cit.

8. This tendency among some white mother-tongue speakers of Afrikaans to dissociate themselves from the ethnonym Afrikaner has been criticised by Giliomee in at least one polemic piece (Beeld, 19 July 2005, p. 10): is it not ironic, he asks, that people who have served cosily in the Broederbond until recently now regard the term Afrikaner as stuffy? (Clearly, this is not meant to imply that everybody who rejects the term in this spirit was a member of the Broederbond – MK.) What seems to concern Giliomee is the fact (?) that these no-longer-Afrikaners occupy important strategic positions: ‘it is they who will eventually determine the future of Afrikaans’ (own translation). As Giliomee sees it, they are driven by guilt and constitute one of three categories of post-apartheid Afrikaners. Just like Rossouw, he distinguishes two further types, and their typologies are remarkably compatible, as are their respective individual positions. Rossouw's portrayal of self-abolishers matches the way in which Giliomee depicts guilt-driven Afrikaners: they supported the Truth and Reconciliation Commission all too enthusiastically, and would have subsequently sacrificed almost anything to be assimilated into the new South African nation, including ‘any protection of Afrikaans, the term Afrikaner, historical roots of an university as well as academic and professional integrity’ (own translation of Giliomee.) In direct opposition to the guilt-driven Afrikaners, according to Giliomee's classification, stand the grievance-driven ones. Like those Afrikaners whom Rossouw classifies as nationalists, they will never accept a predominantly black government. Giliomee labels his third category principle-driven Afrikaners, and this is clearly where his sympathy lies. What is striking about this group, he argues, is the degree to which they actually respect the South African Constitution: ‘they pay their taxes, they lodge complaints with the Pan South African Language Board about the neglect of Afrikaans [and] they pay for expensive court cases about Afrikaans as medium of instruction in schools’ (own translation)—exactly what Rossouw's new Afrikaners would do. They are good democrats who demand that their party stands up to the governing party when it blunders.

9. This translated quote, as well as those in the preceding and following paragraph are from Van Niekerk's letters:

• ‘Oor die wegbly van die jollie bobbejaan: wie is dit wat regtig treur?’

• [‘About the jolly baboon not coming: who really grieves?’]

• [www.litnet.co.za/seminaar/agaat_avniekerk.asp. Accessed March 2005]; and

• ‘Gemeenskap, identiteit en verantwoordelikheid: hoe ek en Johann Rossouw verskil’

• [‘Community, identity and responsibility: how Johann Rossouw and I disagree’]

• [www.litnet.co.za/seminaar/avn2.asp accessed March 2005].

10. At the end of the three-day meeting, Rossouw had summarised the outcome of the discussions as follows: ‘Concern was expressed over the current condition of Afrikaans and Afrikaans interests on the whole. Group 63 plans to address these issues and keep its community informed’ (Business Day, 8 May 2000, p. 4).

11. The article in which Hobsbawm made these observations was first published in 1992 when the problem of separatist nationalism in Europe was, of course, more acute than today.

12. Compare Hroch (1996, p. 79) as an example: ‘Many of these ties could be mutually substitutable […] [b]ut among them, three stand out as irreplaceable: (1) a “memory” of some common past, treated as a ‘destiny’ of the group—or at least of its core constituents; (2) a density of linguistic or cultural ties enabling a higher degree of social communication within the group than beyond it; (3) a conception of the equality of all members of the group organised as a civil society.’

13. Though he awards a central role to language, Hobsbawn is reluctant to define ethnicity and to single out other possible ingredients of an ethnic identity. In a contribution on ‘ethnicity and nationalism in Europe today’, he inserts the phrase ‘whatever it may be’ more than once after mentioning the term. All he offers is the rather vague explanation that ‘[e]thnicity, whatever its basis, is a readily definable way of expressing a real sense of group identity which links the members of “us” because it emphasises their differences from “them”’ (emphasis in the original).

14. This allows him to include Arabs and Africans as nations in his typology of nationalism (Breuilly, 1993, p. 9).

15. See also Alter: ‘in almost every historical instance […] nationalisms […] were occasioned by real or perceived crises’ (1990, pp. 80–81).

16. Though it may have an impact on the definition of that identity, language shift does not imply loss of a cultural identity. In reality, it is entirely possible to be a Xman [sic] without Xish: one can be Jewish with neither Hebrew nor Jiddish, Irish without the Irish language, Scottish without Gaelic and Suba without Olusuba (cf. Kembo-Sure, 2004), to name but a few examples. Conversely, as in the case of coloured speakers of Afrikaans, having Xish as a mother tongue does not necessarily makes one a Xman.

17. With reference to the German case, Breuilly (1999, p. 220) makes the point that changes in political practice have, to some extent, determined the idiom of the nationalist argument. It always tended to juxtapose ‘the ‘natural’ to the ‘artificial’, the ‘organic’ to the ‘mechanical’, the ‘pure’ to the ‘polluted’’, but the idiom shifted from language to history to ethnicity to race, and the major intellectual source accordingly from linguistics to historical studies to anthropology to biology. It is possible, I think, to argue that the ideology of Afrikaner nationalism followed a similar route, returning a century after its inception to language/linguistics.

18. Karl Deutsch (1953), in his turn, stresses the causal role of modern communication facilities, while Benedict Anderson attributes the rise of nationalism to print-capitalism which, since the late eighteenth century, ‘made it possible for […] people to think about themselves, and relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways’ (1991, p. 36).

19. Except when learnt in translated form: ‘There were some songs, such as the British national anthem, which he could only sing in Yoruba; books such as Booker T. Washington's Up from slavery and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress that he remembers only in their Yoruba translation’ (Omotoso, 1994, p. 101).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mariana Kriel

PhD candidate: London School of Economics and Political Science