Eric Louw

Afrikaners have long been portrayed as the villains of South Africa’s apartheid state. Because they were such intensely vilified pariahs, many Americans and Europeans remain intrigued by Afrikaners as a vestige of white nationalism living in Africa who nevertheless peacefully transferred political power to South Africa’s black majority. Afrikaner Identity tells the longer story of the Afrikaners, starting with the emergence of an accidental Dutch colony at Cape Town in the seventeenth century, and explores how these people came to see themselves distinctly as Afrikaners (“Africans”) and why this identity assumed the shape that it did over time. Further, the book unpacks the complex interactions between the emergent identity of “Afrikaner-ness” and the slaves they imported from Asia, Cape-based Khoisan clans, British settlers, and (later) the tribes of the African interior. Eric Louw explains how 150 years of Afrikaner conflict with British imperialism played a pivotal role in shaping Afrikaner identity and also gave rise to the phenomenon of Afrikaner nationalism. Louw also tells how Afrikaner migration modified the community’s identity as it came into contact with black Africans. This encounter not only shaped the future of Southern Africa but also influenced how Afrikaners came to view themselves as they faced the new challenges of British hegemony, the Boer War, and the rise of Afrikaner nationalism over the first half of the twentieth century, a process that eventually replaced British power with Afrikaner hegemony and imposed apartheid, in part to deconstruct the British-made state of South Africa. Afrikaner Identity concludes with the transition to black-majority rule since 1994 and Afrikaners’ new role as a politically disempowered white minority with new challenges to their identity.

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