118 research outputs found
Afrikaner nationalism, apartheid, and the conceptualisation of "race"
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 23 September, 1991In 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
The idea of race in early 20th Century South Africa: Some preliminary thoughts
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented April, 1989In 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
Race, civilisation and culture: The elaboration of segregationist discourse in the inter-war years
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented March 3, 198
Macmillan, Verwoerd, and the 1960 `wind of change' speech
Just over fifty years ago, Prime Minister Macmillan made an extensive tour of Africa, culminating in his 'wind of change' speech in Cape Town. This article traces Macmillan's progress through Africa with particular emphasis on his intervention in South African politics. It offers a novel reading of the 1960 'wind of change' speech, arguing that the message was far more conciliatory with respect to white South African interests than is usually assumed. Pragmatism rather than principle was always the prime consideration. Far from being cowed by Macmillan's oratory or his message, Verwoerd stood up to Macmillan and, at least in the eyes of his supporters, gave as good as he got. The shock of the 'wind of change' speech was more evident in Britain and in British settler regions of Africa than in South Africa. Macmillan's advisers had an inflated view of the import of the speech and in many ways misread Verwoerd's brand of Afrikaner nationalism. One of the consequences of the speech was to embolden Verwoerd politically, and to prepare him for the declaration of republican status in 1961 and departure from the commonwealth
Rebuffing Royals? Afrikaners and the royal visit to South Africa in 1947’
This article traces the responses of Afrikaners to the symbolism and political purposes of the 1947 royal visit to Southern Africa, the first post-war royal tour and the first visit of a reigning sovereign to the Union of South Africa. Taking place in the aftermath of a war that had caused bitter political divisions within Afrikaner ranks and stimulated radical populist nationalism, a royal tour intended to express the crown's gratitude for South Africa's participation in that war was bound to be contentious. Drawing on press accounts, biographies, autobiographies and archival sources, this article argues that the layered reactions of Afrikaners demonstrate that, even on the eve of the National Party's electoral victory on a republican and apartheid platform, attitudes towards monarchy and the British connection were more fluid and ambiguous than either contemporary propaganda or recent accounts have allowed. The diverse meanings attributed to this iconic royal tour reveal a process of intense contestation and reflection about South Africa's place in an empire that was in the throes of post-war redefinition and transformation, and confirm recent characterisations of the 1940s as one of manifold possibilities such that outcomes, like the electoral victory of the National Party in the following year, was far from pre-determined
Archive of Darkness:William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noire
Situating itself in histories of cinema and installation art, William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005) raises questions about screens, exhibition space, site-specificity and spectatorship. Through his timely intervention in a debate on Germany’s colonial past, Kentridge’s postcolonial art has contributed to the recognition and remembrance of a forgotten, colonial genocide. This article argues that, by transposing his signature technique of drawings for projection onto a new set of media, Kentridge explores how and what we can know through cinematic projection in the white cube. In particular, his metaphor of the illuminated shadow enables him to animate archival fragments as shadows and silhouettes. By creating a multi-directional archive, Black Box enables an affective engagement with the spectres of colonialism and provides a forum for the calibration of moral questions around reparation, reconciliation and forgiveness
Without the blanket of the land: agrarian change and biopolitics in post–Apartheid South Africa
This paper connects Marxist approaches to the agrarian political
economy of South Africa with post-Marshallian and Foucauldian
analyses of distributional regimes and late capitalist
governmentality. Looking at South Africa’s stalled agrarian
transition through the lens of biopolitics as well as class analysis
can make visible otherwise disregarded connections between
processes of agrarian change and broader contests about the
terms of social and economic incorporation into the South African
social and political order before, during and after Apartheid. This
can bring a fresh sense of the broader political implications of the
course of agrarian change in South Africa, and helps contextualise
the enduring salience of land as a flashpoint within South Africa’s
unresolved democratic transition
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