Whiteness Afrikaans Afrikaners

MISTRA, MISTRA MISTRA

• Publisher: The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MIST
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780639923819
• eBook ISBN: 9780639986647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

ëDo the erstwhile colonial settlers ñ who, unlike in most other parts of the postcolonial world, have decided in large numbers to make the country their permanent home ñ deserve equal recognition as members of the emergent nation?í South Africa has been reeling under the recent blows of an apparent resurgence of crude public manifestations of racism and a hardening of attitudes on both sides of the racial divide. To probe this topic as it relates to white South Africans, Afrikaans and Afrikaners, MISTRA, in partnership with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) and the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS), convened a round-table discussion. The discourse was rigorous. This volume comprises the varied and thought-provoking presentations from that event, including a keynote address by former president Kgalema Motlanthe, inputs from Melissa Steyn, Andries Nel, Mary Burton, Christi van der Westhuizen, Lynette Steenveld, Bobby Godsell, Dirk Hermann (of Solidarity), Ernst Roets (of Afriforum), Xhanti Payi, Mathatha Tsedu, Pieter Duvenage, Hein Willemse and Nico Koopman, and closing remarks by Achille Mbembe and Mathews Phosa. It deals with a range of issues around ëwhitenessí in general and delves into the place of Afrikaners and the Afrikaans language in democratic South Africa, demonstrating that there is no homogeneity of views on these topics among white South Africans overall and Afrikaners in particular. In fact, in these pages, one finds a multifaceted effort to scrub energetically at the boundaries that apartheid imposed on all South Africans in different ways.

The World of Ideas

The Place of Afrikaans

The world of ideas

The place of Afrikaans

MATHATHA TSEDU

This session looks at Afrikaans as a language; and we have three very capable people to talk about this. Suffice for me to say that I’m old enough to have done my primary schooling and high schooling under, not Outcomes Based Education (OBE) or any of those fancy things; it was straightforward Bantu Education. It was designed just for me.

So, it didn’t include things that I didn’t need; and it did exclude things that I really needed to be able to function; and Afrikaans was a very important aspect of the education that I went through. There were a lot of things that we did in Afrikaans like ‘Sosialiste ...’ I remember doing stuff like ‘redes vir die hervorming, die Pope is as onfeilbaar beskou’. All of that was drummed into me and when I got to matric, I realised that even if I passed all the other subjects with flying colours, if I failed Afrikaans I was not going to get my certificate.

So, it was an important language which I had to pass, and it was also, of course, an instrument of oppression. Whether you were going to the post office or anywhere, the police station, that was the language that was used there, and it was used with a lot of arrogance and it’s the kind of arrogance that you still find today, really, among many people who speak Afrikaans who are white.

I get my pay from Media 24. I work at the South African National Editors Forum. I’m seconded by Media 24. So, I must be careful what I say about Media 24 because Adriaan is here. He might want to argue for an increase through me. When I was hired at Media 24 I was to edit City Press, which is an English publication. But one of the questions that I had to deal with was whether I was fluent in Afrikaans. So, I said, ‘well I got a C in matric, you know’. Meetings were generally held in Afrikaans. I remember Khatu Mamaila, who was also working with me, going to one of these meetings and the people kept yap-yapping in Afrikaans and when it was his turn to speak he spoke in Venda and there was a big silence in the room. Khatu said, ‘Well if you are going to continue like that then English is also not my language but I’ve done my 50 per cent. So, if you are not even going to do yours I’ll stand here and you stand there and let’s see how far we get.’

Recently I’ve gone into a bit of farming up in Limpopo and there’s a farmers’ meeting. (You know, I’m a farmer, so if people start singing kill this or that sometimes I say okay.) So, you go to these meetings because they are important. You are discussing the ticks that are now in vogue with the cattle and all sorts of very important stuff and people just continue in Afrikaans. They just assume you understand. I have a guy who works with me on the farm who is from Zimbabwe. But sometimes I send him to the meetings and he comes back and he can’t tell me what happened, but it is just assumed that you must understand. There isn’t even any attempt at moving a bit. So, it’s the arrogance that I’m talking about that one finds around the language as an instrument that is still being used.

When I was at City Press we ran a bursary called the Percy Qoboza Bursary, a portion of which was attainable at Rhodes (which must fall) and another portion was at Stellenbosch (which must open up). We were taking students through the journalism department and they were doing it in English and then a decision was taken within the company that, because somebody much, much higher up within Naspers thinks that Stellenbosch must actually remain an Afrikaans-medium institution it is contradictory for the company to continue to send people who are going to learn in English at an institution that this person who is quite important in the company feels shouldn’t be doing all this English stuff. So, the bursary was cancelled and we took the money and moved it to Tshwane University of Technology. I’m saying all this to try to say that language is very important and Afrikaans, in particular, is still being used to sustain a legacy that shouldn’t be here with us today. And, for me, I was sad to hear Dirk and Ernst here. I was angry, ja. I was angry.

I was angry that you come into a place like this, which is a place of serious pain, and say such things. I passed through here as a detainee. I left a little girl here who was being detained. We were moving to Morningside police station and we were being driven to Groenpunt in the Free State but she was going to remain here. We dropped her here. The next time I heard about her was when one prisoner had smuggled a piece of newspaper into the prison in Groenpunt and I read it and she had died of complications with her headaches. When we were with her at Morningside she had been brought there after a month of torture maybe in Vlakplaas or somewhere. She had been tortured horribly. She was asthmatic. They had taken away all her medication. They brought her here and when she was released she lasted a month and she died. So, this is a place of pain. A pain that was inflicted through this language that we are now going to be dealing with here today.

Afrikaner intellectual history

An interpretation

PIETER DUVENAGE

It is a daunting task to interpret Afrikaner intellectual history.¹ How can one provide a representative picture of a diverse and complex group of people with an equally complicated history? A people that have been heavily criticised and blamed in recent times, but also throughout their history.² This paper must be seen as an interpretation and not the interpretation of Afrikaner intellectual history.³ For this reason, it is presented in the spirit of both dialogue and critical debate – not just among Afrikaners, but also between Afrikaners and other South Africans, and beyond the country’s borders, too.

Who are Afrikaners? Where do they come from? And how have they understood themselves throughout 350 years of South African history? In what follows, these three questions will be answered in a brief and fairly standard manner. In order to do so, however, I offer a historical reconstruction of the main phases of Afrikaner political thought. This begins by looking at its earliest origins and takes the story up to 1795, when the English took over from the Dutch as colonial masters of the Cape. The next phase (1795–1910) is one of reaction against British imperialism. It offers answers in the form of the republican state idea in the north and, in the Cape Colony, multi-party accommodation. Third, there was the era of unitary and exclusionary state building which ran from 1910 to 1994 – that is, the duration of both the Union and the Republic until the ending of formal apartheid. This political-historical reconstruction is interconnected with cultural-intellectual movements in religion, in politics and in education – all of which have shaped Afrikaner intellectual life. Finally, the intellectual position of Afrikaners after the loss of state power in 1994 is considered: here, the focus falls on recent positions taken by Afrikaner intellectuals. These include N.P. van Wyk Louw (1906–1970) on liberal nationalism; Johan Degenaar (born 1926), whose work can be read as a pluralist logic allowing for individual, group and class differences, without losing sight of mutual commitment; Hermann Giliomee (born 1938) on political pluralism; and Danie Goosen (born 1953) on minorities in South Africa. The early choice of the concept interpretation to describe this paper is also not without reason. It is influenced by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of philosophical hermeneutics – being a philosopher of interpretation with a strong historical sense. On this occasion, space does not permit an exhaustive discussion of Gadamer’s work, but his ideas, coupled with Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty, Michael Sandel’s communitarian concepts of the unencumbered and encumbered selves, and the distinction between a unitary or federal form of politics, form the central theoretical underpinnings of the argument.

Gadamer’s major book, Truth and Method, consists of three parts. In the first, aesthetical, part the experience of the artwork is not exclusively determined by the subject because the subject can undergo change in the experience of the artwork. This ontological conception of aesthetics also works through to Gadamer’s conception of history and tradition (part II of Truth and Method) as well as his conception of language as the medium of hermeneutical experience (part III of Truth and Method).⁴ As in the case of the perception of art, language is not grounded exclusively in the consciousness of the individual subject, but mainly in the language that we call dialogue or conversation. In a similar fashion, the consciousness of every person is influenced by history; and that consciousness stands open to the effects or the working of history as play, the so-called working-historical consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) (Gadamer, 1960: 285/2004: 301). In short, one’s understanding (consciousness) of oneself in the world is always historical, linguistic and contingent (Wright, 1998). This brings us to two other historically relevant concepts of Gadamer: the hermeneutical circle – in which the whole is understood through the parts and the parts through the whole – and the fusion of horizons. Such a fusion takes place where the horizon of an artwork, historical text or other culture is brought into critical dialogue with the horizon of the interpreter. In this case the horizon of Afrikaner intellectual history will be brought into a critical dialogue with the horizon of the interpreter speaking here. In the hermeneutical situation, an interpreter is primarily engaged with the tradition he or she is trying to understand.⁵

Given that these concepts of interpretation and understanding will inform this paper, it should be clear that it is written from a specific perspective – or horizon, as Gadamer puts it. It is not, therefore, a neutral academic exercise; it is, instead, an interpretation of the intellectual history of a specific community from the inside-out. The danger, of course, is that this approach can easily be seen as too subjective. Nevertheless, my hope is to share and communicate these issues as universally as possible. Both my own, and recipients’, epistemological challenge can be read in the answers to two questions: How can the intimate-particular be communicated universally? What is the relationship between subjective experience and universal reflective knowledge?

Origins

For all its local character, the history of Afrikaners begins in the drama that unfolded between Jerusalem and Athens/Rome: the Judeo-Christian world on the one hand and the worlds of Athens/Rome on the other. But the essential features of the Afrikaner intellectual tradition were forged in Europe in the long march through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation and early modernity, especially the nascent state system of the seventeenth century. In the form of the Dutch they landed as part of European modernising expansion – itself driven by the age of discovery – at the southern tip of Africa as employees of one of the first multinational corporations in world history.

Given these conditions, it is easy to understand why it was that Jan van Riebeeck (and his party) did not bring a library of books with them to the Cape of Good Hope when they landed in 1652. Van Riebeeck’s instructions were more practical than conceptual: he was tasked to establish a commercial settlement, at a place located halfway between the Netherlands and Java, in order to provide fresh produce to East Indiamen plying one of the most profitable sea routes in the world. In these circumstances, there was much to be done and little time to luxuriate in intellectual and philosophical reflection. The Dutch East India Company (VOC), which founded the settlement that would become South Africa, had little interest in the hinterland: reports declared this as barren, inhospitable, and populated by ‘primitive’ peoples. Such interests as there may well have been waned when exploring parties failed to find any workable mineral deposits. For a century and a half, the VOC governed the Cape according to a central idea: profit. This (and the idea that Holland was home) discouraged the spread of settlement much beyond what today we call the Hottentots-Holland Mountains (Coetzee, 1988: 1). Even though some rudimentary institutions normally associated with intellectual life were founded, it was difficult to bring about the life of the mind. O.F. Mentzel, for example, wrote almost a hundred years after Van Riebeeck’s arrival that: ‘[t]here are no high schools or universities in this country. Such institutions are not required, for what use could one make of learning acquired there in a land where life is still primitive and where the Company’s rule is law’ (Mentzel, 1919: 108–109 in Schoeman 1997: 54). Within the closed culture of the VOC, the Dutch at the Cape were initially certainly colonists bounded by a regime of profit and loss. But when they became free burghers (vryburgers) and began to call themselves Afrikaners, a qualitatively different relationship started to develop between them and the land: the colonial company was no longer their beginning and their end.⁶ From that moment, a tension started to develop between their European past and their African future. They became a people caught between Europe and Africa. It is quite understandable that their first encounters with the indigenous population (first the Khoisan and later the black groups on the eastern border and, still later, further inland) would lead to misrecognition and conflict.⁷ Anthony Holiday (1993: 5) puts it aptly: ‘For better or worse, the theoretical reaches of our life-forms have a capacity to shape our attitudes towards ourselves and the inhabitants of other cultural settings, which is every bit as potent as the determinations effected by religio-ethical, poetic or artistic dimensions of the cultural habitat.’

In southern Africa, where so many different social groups encountered each other in a harsh, though beautiful, country, conflict was to be expected: these were not only between white and black, but also between black groups and between black and Khoisan peoples. In such a cauldron of misrecognition, unmediated prejudice and unequal relationships, Afrikaners-in-the-making used technological resources as well as European ideas and political institutions to their considerable advantage.

Despite Mentzel’s reservations, a greater cultural and political self-consciousness developed in the second half of the eighteenth century among Afrikaners and they began to reflect on their lived experience. This deepening self-consciousness was the result of a mix of material and intellectual developments. Important among them were the institutionalisation of Dutch Calvinism, the building of towns in the near interior and the development of a specific – and skewed – system of economic exchange. These were supported by a rudimentary educational system and they gave increasing legitimacy to an emergent government system that drew on administrative principles and political ideas in the public domain. This resulted in a deepening sense of self-reliance – first against the VOC, and, when the British successively occupied the Cape, their colonial authority and institutions. This expanding self-consciousness, though, had a distinct downside: a strong racial consciousness developed among Afrikaners in the Cape by the mid-eighteenth century. They saw themselves as both white and Christian – qualities they considered to be both different and superior to other racial groups living in the Cape. In this habitus (to use Bourdieu’s term), the ideas of race and class became increasingly associated with each othe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Keynote Address Kgalema Motlanthe
• Being White Today
• Whiteness and the South African Economy
• The World of Ideas: The Place of Afrikaans
• Closing Remarks