AFRIKANER NATIONALISM

The history of South Africa since the Second World War can be told meaningfully in terms of a conflict between two competing nationalisms: the nationalism of the Afrikaners and the nationalism of the African and other non-white communities of the country.

Afrikaner nationalism emerged in the late nineteenth century as a movement of resistance of the descendants of the original mainly Dutch-speaking settlers against encroaching British imperialism. Since the Second World War these former sons of Holland have transformed an anti-British nationalism into a movement for the defence of a whole system of racial stratification and discrimination known as apartheid, or separate development. As late as the 1980s, Afrikaner nationalism continued to be one of the immense political facts about Africa.

Afrikaner nationalism emerged in the late nineteenth century as a movement of resistance of the descendants of the original mainly Dutch-speaking settlers against encroaching British imperialism. Since the Second World War these former sons of Holland have transformed an anti-British nationalism into a movement for the defence of a whole system of racial stratification and discrimination known as apartheid, or separate development. As late as the 1980s, Afrikaner nationalism continued to be one of the immense political facts about Africa.

Before becoming the first black president of South Africa in 1994, Nelson Mandela spent much of his life in prison for leading black opposition to the oppressive rule of the white minority government. During his many years in captivity, Mandela became a worldwide symbol of resistance to white domination in South Africa. Here, he speaks to supporters upon his release from prison on February 11, 1990.

The turning point in the post-war history of South Africa came with the victory of the Nationalist Party, the party supported by the bulk of the Afrikaners, in the general election of 1948. Until that date the Afrikaners did not control all South Africa. Until 1948 South Africa remained within the orbit of the British Empire. South Africa had attained autonomous existence within the British Empire, first with a Pact of Union in 1910 and then with the Statute of Westminster in 1931.

South Africa had, it is true, attained independence without attaining freedom. However, due to British influence, Africans, Coloureds and Asians had not been completely excluded from a say in the affairs of the nation. African interests had formal representation in parliament, and political participation by the non-white population, though modest (limited to certain categories of voters in Cape Province) was nevertheless guaranteed by tradition and law. Racialism was already at the base of South Africa's political system. However, the highly structured policy of apartheid, with rigid segregation as a major imperative, had yet to come into being. The Nationalists, the architects of the most institutionalized form of racism in history, had yet to come to power.

In the 1948 election of Malan's Nationalist Party, advocating a programme of total white supremacy, and supported by the great majority of Afrikaner voters, gained a narrow majority over the governing United Party, led by the pro-British Afrikaner Field Marshal Smuts and supported by the great majority of white voters of British origin and the Coloured voters of the Cape.

Malan succeeded Smuts as Prime Minister and the Nationalist Party held power since that time, generally increasing its majority at each successive general election. The Nationalist victory in 1948 was the response of the majority of the overwhelmingly white electorate to the United Party's programme of liberalizing policy towards non-white South Africans.

The Nationalist Party had originally emerged in the 1930s and expanded its support during the war on a groundswell of anti-British sentiment and the general desire for a Republic among the Afrikaners. But what really swung a majority of white voters behind Malan's party was the efforts of the post-war Smuts government to respond in a positive manner to the growing black African militancy of the wartime and post-war periods. Wartime controls led to three hundred strikes by black workers. In 1946, 76 000 black miners went on strike. Smuts broke the strikes in the traditional manner, using armed police; but he recognized the need to assuage black African discontent. He made unemployment benefits and school-feeding programmes available to non-whites as well as whites.

Smuts also accepted, in the face of wartime industrialization and the rapidly increasing demand for African industrial labour, the fact that urbanization of Africans in 'European' areas was an irreversible trend.
In the election campaign Smut's Minister of Native Affairs, Colonel Denys Reitz, proposed the recognition of African trades unions and an increase in job opportunities for African skilled workers. Smuts even proposed to extend the franchise to South Africans of Indian origin. J.H. Hofmeyr, the Minister of Finance, publicly stated that henceforth black and white should learn to live 'as common citizens of a common country'.

All this was anathema to the broad mass of Afrikaners, who turned to the Nationalist Party which emphasized white survival, and the survival of Afrikanerdom, against the alleged torrent of blackness, liberalism and/or communism. The Nationalists appealed to those whites who wanted to retain South Africa's traditional policy of baaskap (mastership). The Transvaal leader of the Nationalist Party, J.G. Strijdom (later to succeed Malan as Prime Minister), had said:

Our policy is that the Europeans must stand their ground and must remain baas in South Africa. If we reject the herrenvolk (master race) idea . . . if the franchise is to be extended to the non-Europeans, and if the non-Europeans are given representation and the vote and the non-Europeans are developed on the same basis as the Europeans, how can the European remain baas . . . Our view is that in every sphere the European must retain the right to rule the country and to keep it a white man's country.1

This was the authentic voice of Afrikanerdom and enough Afrikaners rallied to the Nationalist Party in 1948 to put the proponents of apartheid and baaskap in power.