Constructing Afrikaner Nationalism HERMANN GILIOMEE University Of

Constructing

HERMANN GILIOMEE

University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa

Introduction

DURING THE FIRST two centuries of white settlement in South Africa the white Dutch/Afrikaans-speakers developed as a separate group with a high degree of endogamy (Giliomee and Elphick 1979; Giliomee 1983) and a sense of separate identity shaped both by their European heritage (culture and ideas about race and political status) and material forces (economic conditions and demographic ratios). With respect to non-Europeans a specific sense of group position and privileges developed which was tied to race (Adam and Giliomee 1979:93-96), while contact with the British during the nineteenth century emphasised the cultural distinctiveness of the Afrikaners within the white group. By 1850 the Afrikaners' had come to regard themselves, to a con- siderable extent, as a separate group by virtue of intermarriage, language, customs and shared historical memories. However, they could not be con- sidered as a nationality or a people who were clearly aware of the relationship between themselves and their co-nationals and who thought that they did or could constitute a distinct political group. During the second half of the nineteenth century increasing interaction with the English in the Southwestern Cape undermined the cultural integrity of the Afrikaners in this region, while inter-state rivalry between the Cape Colony and the South African Republic (Transvaal) militated against the development of an Afrikanerhood that transcended political boundaries. The development of Afrikaner nationalism was a complex and diffuse process. Resentment against British imperialistic interventions in Basutoland, the Diamond Fields and Transvaal during the period 1868 and 1877, the distrust and bitterness aroused by the Jameson Raid (1895-96) and, in particular, the Anglo-Boer War sharpened Afrikaner/English polarities and stimulated a national consciousness among the Afrikaners (Van Jaarsveld 1961). However, the origins of Afrikaner nationalism in the nineteenth century must be sought within a much wider economic, institutional and generational context. The construction of the modern South African state after the war (Marks and 84

Trapido 1982) and the unification process (Thompson 1960) provided the matrix in which this Afrikaner nationalism could develop. As Seal (1973) has shown in discussing Indian nationalism, the centralisation of power in the modern state where representation is spread very broadly made politicians in the localities and centre dependent on each other. Only leaders claiming to take all the nation's interests into account and having national organisations to back these claims could work at this level. Hence the task of constructing an Afrikaner nationalist movement only properly began after unification in 1910.

Constructing and consolidating a nationalist movement, 1910-1948 Four works have appeared recently which throw light on the construction of the Afrikaner nationalist movement. The studies of Hexham (1981) and Thom (1980) focus on the main cultural and ideological entrepreneurs during the first phase of the movement, while Yudelman (1983) and O'Meara (1983) are concerned with the broad context in which the South African state and Afrikaner nationalism developed. The Reformed Church intellectuals from Potchefstroom, usually called Doppers, and their counterparts from Stellenbosch, of whom D. F. Malan was the main representative, were in the terms of Gramsci organic intellectuals. They challenged the hegemony of British imperialism in the realm of ideas by striving to develop an effective counter-ideology for their people. Hexham in his study of the Doppers makes three arguments in connection with the development of the ideology. Firstly he rejects the conventional wisdom that sixteenth century Calvinism, mediated by the Dutch Reformed Church, made the Afrikaners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see themselves as a Chosen People that should separate themselves from the English and the Africans, and, in modern times, pursue the policy of apartheid. Secondly, he argues that it was the Doppers from Potchefstroom who "created the system of apartheid ... and a mythology for the growing nationalist movement" (Hex- ham, 1981:4). They derived their ideas from the theories of nineteenth century Dutch neo-Calvinists (particularly Abraham Kuyper) and applied them to the South African situation. At the same time the poetry of Totius dignified the suffering of the war. It was chiefly through the intellectual efforts of the Dop- pers that growing numbers of Afrikaners came, after the war, to see themselves as a unique people in Africa whose strength lay in isolation with freedom to practise apartheid with respect to both the English and the Africans. Finally, Hexham argues that the Doppers acquired great influence over Hertzog after he founded the National Party in 1914 and dominated the new party's ideology with their ideas about apartheid (Hexham thinks the word is the Doppers' and not D. F. Malan's invention), Christian trusteeship and Christian nationalism. Hexham's first argument can be accepted without reservation. There is no hard evidence of tangible Calvinist influence upon the Afrikaners before 1870. Statements cited by writers who hold this view (Patterson 1957; De Klerk