What Democratisation Does to Minorities Displaced from Power: The Case of White Afrikaners in South Africa

Abstract

One of the greatest obstacles to change in South Africa was the fear of what would happen to the former white masters, especially the Afrikaners, who had ruled since 1948, in the event of the independence of the country and the inevitable take-over of state power by the black majority. This article examines the nature of these fears and the attempts that were made to allay and address them in the context of the democratisation process that took place in the 1990s. It is argued that the decline in the counter-revolutionary mobilisation of the right wing, which represented the most vociferous and militant strand of Afrikaner reactions to the changing political order, and the corresponding ascendancy of moderate-to-conservative liberalism, suggests that more and more Afrikaners are finally adjusting to the transmutation from ‘masters’ to ‘minorities’.

Keywords:

• democratisation
• minorities
• right wing
• nationalism
• Afrikaner
• human rights