African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/7319

For information on accessing African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers collection content please contact Peter Duncan via email : peter.duncan@wits.ac.za

Browse

Subject: search.filters.subject.Afrikaners

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Sub-imperialism, primitive acculumation, and state formation: The making of a Boer Republic
    (1987-03-23) Keegan, Timothy
    This paper focuses on colonial economy and society in the crucial but recently neglected middle years of the Nineteenth century, on the assumption that only by understanding the dynamic processes of accumulation and dispossession in pre-industrial South Africa can the complex origins of the contemporary racial order be fully understood. Its specific concern is the Transorangian interior in a particularly revealing period of social, economic arid political transition. In attempting to explain the origins and significance of the Boer republic founded in 1854, the paper explores the relationship between imperial expansionism and colonial capitalism; and it examines the emergence of ruling elites, the forms of accumulation they employed and the nascent state structures they relied on to support and legitimate their activities. A skeletal narrative section will follow, and then the issues that are raised there will be discussed and analysed in a concluding section.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Afrikaner nationalism, apartheid, and the conceptualisation of "race"
    (1991-09-23) Dubow, Saul
    In recent years our historical understanding of Afrikaner nationalism has been transformed. No longer is it possible to talk of Afrikaner nationalism in terms of an unchanging, timeless tradition. Nor can we speak of the Afrikaner nationalist movement as a socially undifferentiated entity, pursuing its own primordial ethnic agenda. We now have a much deeper understanding of the ways in which Afrikaner identity was forged from the late nineteenth century, and the means by which Afrikaner ethnicity was mobilised in order to capture state power in the twentieth century. Gaps in our knowledge nevertheless remain. One such silence concerns the relationship between Christian-nationalism and the conceptualisation of racial difference. This omission partly reflects a general state of amnesia about the place of racist ideas in Western thought. In South Africa it has been exacerbated by materialist scholarship's fear of "idealism'. The ideology of race has therefore tended to be discussed in terms of its functional utility: for example, the extent to which racist ideas can be said to express underlying class interests. My intention in this paper is not to dispute the ways in which race, understood as a sociological phenomenon, has been treated in the literature on Afrikaner nationalism. Rather, it is to consider the content and internal logic of racist ideology. The focus of this study is therefore on the conscious elaboration of race in the development of Christian-nationalist thought from around the 1930s to the 1950s. Specifically, it considers the extent to which an explicitly biological concept of race informed apartheid theory, and how this related to theological and cultural explanations of human difference. The argument in this paper is that Christian-nationalism was flexible and eclectic in its use of racist ideas. In constructing an intellectually coherent justification for apartheid, Afrikaner ideologues frequently chose to infer or to suggest biological theories of racial superiority, rather than to assert these openly. Both for pragmatic and doctrinal reasons, the diffuse language of cultural essentialism was preferred to the crude scientific racism drawn from the vocabulary of social Darwinism.