Whiteness Afrikaans Afrikaners

“Do the erstwhile colonial settlers – who,
unlike in most other parts of the postcolonial world, have decided in
large numbers to make the country their permanent home – deserve equal
recognition as members of the emergent nation?”

South Africa
has been reeling under the recent blows of an apparent resurgence of
crude public manifestations of racism and a hardening of attitudes on
both sides of the racial divide. To probe this topic as it relates to
white South Africans, Afrikaans and Afrikaners, MISTRA, in partnership
with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) and the National Institute for
the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS), convened a round-table
discussion. The discourse was rigorous. This volume comprises the varied
and thought-provoking presentations from that event, including a
keynote address by former president Kgalema Motlanthe, inputs from
Melissa Steyn, Andries Nel, Mary Burton, Christi van der Westhuizen,
Lynette Steenveld, Bobby Godsell, Dirk Hermann (of Solidarity), Ernst
Roets (of Afriforum), Xhanti Payi, Mathatha Tsedu, Pieter Duvenage, Hein
Willemse and Nico Koopman, and closing remarks by Achille Mbembe and
Mathews Phosa. It deals with a range of issues around “whiteness” in
general and delves into the place of Afrikaners and the Afrikaans
language in democratic South Africa, demonstrating that there is no
homogeneity of views on these topics among white South Africans overall
and Afrikaners in particular. In fact, in these pages, one finds a
multifaceted effort to scrub energetically at the boundaries that
apartheid imposed on all South Africans in different ways.