Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acronyms and Abbreviations
- Preface: Edward Webster and Karin Pampallis
- Introduction: Revisiting the National Question
- PART ONE KEY FOUNDATIONAL TRADITIONS
- PART TWO CONTINUITY AND RUPTURE
- Chapter 6 Vicissitudes of the National Question: Afrikaner Style
- Chapter 7 Neville Alexander and the National Question
- Chapter 8 The Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the African National Congress
- Chapter 9 The National Question confronts the Ethnic Question
- Chapter 10 Variations on a Zulu Theme
- Chapter 11 Black Consciousness as Nationalism of a Special Type
- Chapter 12 Postponing the National Question: Feminism and the Women's Movement
- Chapter 13 Workerists and the National Question
- Chapter 14 Red, Black and Gold: FOSATU, South African ‘Workerism’, Syndicalism and the Nation
- Chapter 15 National Democratic Revolution meets Constitutional Democracy
- Biographical Notes
- Index
Chapter 6 - Vicissitudes of the National Question: Afrikaner Style
from PART TWO - CONTINUITY AND RUPTURE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acronyms and Abbreviations
- Preface: Edward Webster and Karin Pampallis
- Introduction: Revisiting the National Question
- PART ONE KEY FOUNDATIONAL TRADITIONS
- PART TWO CONTINUITY AND RUPTURE
- Chapter 6 Vicissitudes of the National Question: Afrikaner Style
- Chapter 7 Neville Alexander and the National Question
- Chapter 8 The Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the African National Congress
- Chapter 9 The National Question confronts the Ethnic Question
- Chapter 10 Variations on a Zulu Theme
- Chapter 11 Black Consciousness as Nationalism of a Special Type
- Chapter 12 Postponing the National Question: Feminism and the Women's Movement
- Chapter 13 Workerists and the National Question
- Chapter 14 Red, Black and Gold: FOSATU, South African ‘Workerism’, Syndicalism and the Nation
- Chapter 15 National Democratic Revolution meets Constitutional Democracy
- Biographical Notes
- Index
Summary
In One Azania, One Nation, his classic study of the National Question, discussed elsewhere in this volume, Neville Alexander (1979) relies heavily on my early work, The Rise of Afrikanerdom, to argue for the impact of Afrikaner nationalist understandings of the world on what he calls the apartheid ‘bantustan strategy’. My book posits that for Afrikaner intellectuals separate development theory relied greatly on their experience of their own struggle to free themselves from the demeaning and condescending attitudes of English-speaking white South Africans by asserting their own national identity.
Later, Aletta Norval (1996) also picked up on this, arguing, memorably, that Afrikaner discourse around ‘the Afrikaner myth’ fed directly into ideas of ‘the apartheid imaginary’. Debates among Afrikaners about their own cultural calling, then, provided a model to impose their understanding of ‘national identity’ on coloureds, Indians and the various African ‘cultural entities’ – themselves to a large extent creations of colonial imagination about ‘tribal identities’.
Thus, despite the misery wrought by the South African state's pursuit of white racial interests, the origins of apartheid ideology in what I called ‘the Afrikaner civil religion’ meant there were always those who sought to justify apartheid's fundamental precepts in moral terms (Moodie, 1975). However cruel apartheid was in its effects, and however blind its adherents were to the suffering it caused, many Afrikaners (especially Afrikaner intellectuals) saw the policy as tackling a moral dilemma rooted in their own experience of colonial domination. Indeed, some of the very ruthlessness of apartheid's implementation may be attributed to wilful avoidance of the moral predicament it evoked. Much of it, of course, was simply self-interested blindness.
From its inception, the full implications of separate development ideology engendered intense debate among Afrikaner intellectuals. This chapter makes no attempt to argue that debates among Afrikaner intellectuals caused the transition of the 1990s (there were many much more concrete causes), but F.W. de Klerk clearly articulated his direction and marshalled his support along the lines of those debates, both for and against separate development.
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- The Unresolved National Question in South AfricaLeft Thought Under Apartheid, pp. 112 - 129Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2017