The Afrikaans people are a significant white indigenous ethnic and cultural group in South Africa, the descendents of mostly Dutch settlers in the Cape of Good Hope from the 17th century. Throughout their 300-plus-year history, the Afrikaans people have been held together by a love for their language, their culture and their church.
In 1652 a small company of employees of the Dutch East India Company were settled on the southern tip of Africa. This group of Dutch settlers were later joined by French Huguenots and German refugees from 1688 to 1700, their unity galvanised by their devotion to religion (even today the majority of Afrikaans people are members of the Dutch Reformed Church). In time, groups of settlers moved away from the Cape into the hinterland to develop farms, where slavery was common practice.
In the early 1800s Britain claimed sovereignty over the Cape Colony, and tensions soon began to rise between the emerging ‘Boer’ people of the Cape and new British settlers – as well as British law, which abolished slavery in 1834. Boer dissatisfaction with British rule led to the Great Trek beginning in 1835, when many Boers migrated north and east, establishing new independent states. The trek had an enormous impact on the formation of the Afrikaans people’s identity.
But the Boers would not escape Britain’s influence for long – the final insult being the annexation of the independent northern Boer republics. The Transvaal, annexed in 1877, tried and failed to negotiate independence and finally defeated British forces in the first Anglo-Boer War of 1880–1881, winning autonomy but not total independence.
Further British incursions into the Transvaal led to the second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. The British defeated the Boers and finally incorporated their republics into the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Out of the bitterness of defeat, the Afrikaner culture that developed from the Boers experienced a surge of nationalism in the early 20th century, which led to the victory of the National Party in 1948. Many ultra-conservatives among them were sympathetic to Nazi Germany and the fascist movement during the Second World War.
In the face of overwhelming black superiority in the country, the policy of apartheid was developed as an attempt to maintain white supremacy in South Africa. Public segregation and miscegenation were the norm for the next four decades.
But in the face of increasing black resistance – and a recognition among many Afrikaans people that the racist policies had to end – the apartheid regime collapsed at the end of the 1980s, leading to the triumph of the African National Congress in South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.
Today, Afrikaans society has changed considerably from the time that gave birth to apartheid. Even the term ‘Afrikaner’ is going into disuse, due to its connections with the crimes of the apartheid era.
Similarly, the ‘Boer’ appellation is considered to be a pejorative term among the mainstream of Afrikaans society, although it is still held as a badge of honour by a minority of right-wing conservatives, many of which refuse to intermarry in order to maintain their white heritage.
