Africana Library

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Author: search.filters.author.Dubow, Saul

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    The idea of race in early 20th Century South Africa: Some preliminary thoughts
    (1989-04) Dubow, Saul
    In the first half of the twentieth century racist ideology - whether explicit or implicit - was a vital part of the ideological repetoire by which white supremacy legitimated itself to itself. At one level this contention should not surprise for South Africa is manifestly structured on racist principles. But, whereas noone could deny the existence of racism in South Africa, the extent to which racist ideology fashioned patterns of thought and the ways in which racist ideas articulated with similar trends overseas, is barely understood. I would suggest that this gap in our knowledge is not entirely an accident. In Europe and America the reality of Nazism alerted people in a terrifying way to the consequences of explicit racism. As a result there now exists a sort of collective amnesia about pre-war intellectual and political traditions of racist thought outside of Nazi Germany - traditions which were not only widely pervasive, but also attained a significant degree of respectability. So fundamental has the shift in intellectual attitudes to race been over the past three or four decades, we almost lack the categories by which to understand the pre-war racial mind-set. In recent years this problem has begun to be addressed in a number of important works dealing with the general topic of Social Darwinism. Yet, even heret a comforting and comfortable attempt to distance approved intellectual traditions from tainted ones is evident. For example, racist science is often referred to dismissively as 'pseudo science'. The difficulty with such an approach is that it begs fundamental questions about the very nature of science for, by implication, the suggestion is that pseudo science can be easily separated from true or objective science. Moreover, to dismiss racial science as bogus seems to suggest that it was peripheral to mainstream scientific investigation, thereby ignoring the extent to which respected scientists participated in its development. Many of the writers who devoted considerable research to the investigation of racial differences were prominent intellectuals who conformed to recognised standards of academic rigour; their arguments are logically constructed and copiously footnoted so that on formal grounds at least there is not always reason to dismiss them as charlatans - however wrong their premises or conclusions may be.
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    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.