The Afrikaners - Hermann Giliomee

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 has inculcated them with an ever-present concern that their people and their way of life requires defending. Because of their isolation the people are somewhat fragile. Fragile and under attack. Apartheid stands alone in the latter-half of the twentieth century as the last case of overt, formal, racially-motivated national segregation. 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.