Re-read, re-post (some changes): Survival. Hermann Giliomee looks at the history of a people who dominated twentieth century South Africa and sees how a heritage of marginalization and struggle led to an ever-present concern that their people and their way of life requires defending. By the last decades of the twentieth century the ruling National Party of South Africa was holding on by the only means it knew: doubling-down on separation, exacerbating formal inequality. Any other approach, any compromise, was seen as a threat to the volk. Giliomee contends that ceding power was seen as analogous to authorizing a cultural death.
Telling the story of the Dutch settlers who became Boers and then emerged as Afrikaners Giliomee recounts a people occupying an uncertain middle ground. Never Company people, nor fully accepted as part of imperial British society, nor willing to 'lower' themselves to the status of black Africans, the Boers initially defined themselves by what they were not. As their cultural identity became forged through a shared 19th century mythology the Afrikaner began to emerge as emblematic of a people and a way of life. Slagtersnek, the Great Trek, Dingaan's Day, and the Anglo-Boer War all were the foundation of a fiercely independent people who saw themselves besieged. Once the Union of South Africa was inaugurated the volk sought to ensure that they maintained control over their small corner of the world.
Yet, the prospects of survival change. As the world pressed in upon South Africa, as liberals at home and abroad, and as black South Africans increasingly found their political voice, survival of the government and survival of the volk were once again separated. The government could not stand; the volk had to find a new means of defining themselves in a composite society. The next chapter of the Afrikaners has only begun.
On a re-reading one cannot help but think that Giliomee somewhat talks around the problem. He notes that in the latter-half of the twentieth century, South Africa enjoyed unprecedented economic growth and relatively low rates of unemployment. But he does not examine what this might have looked like if the majority of population had been able to be any more than drawers of water, hewers of wood, and diggers in mines. Though he makes gestures towards the unsavory human costs of apartheid, his history makes it sound as though the end of minority rule was a concession and compromise made primarily within South Africa's white community. He emphasizes that other countries ensure minority rights in a way South Africa's post-1994 political system does not. In so doing, he risks returning to a vision of South Africa society that is primarily racial in character. There is a human cost to majority rule, as there was to apartheid. Reading Mark Mathabane's Kaffir Boy gives one a certain picture of which was worse.
