New book follows the changes in Afrikaner thinking, writes AMPIE MULLER
THIS book was published in 2016, three years after the death of Nelson Mandela, at a time when his dream of a Rainbow Nation was seemingly fading. Kajsa Norman, a London-based investigative journalist specialising in dictatorships and conflict zones, has focused on those Afrikaners who divorced themselves from the mainstream, fearing that their language, culture and therefore their “entire people” could become extinct.
Norman concentrates to a large extent on those Afrikaners who retreated into the “breakaway republic” of Orania where they endeavoured to construct a Utopia for white Afrikaners, because here, they believe, in the safety of their own homeland, with their own flag and currency, where they can once again dictate the rules.
She explores the origins and the history of Orania in an attempt to understand not only the rationale but also the supporting sentiments of this “breakaway” Afrikaner homeland.
We need to remind ourselves while reading this book that this does not apply to all Afrikaners: a fter World War II, many prominent Afrikaner thinkers engaged the concept of surviving with justice (“oorlewing met geregtigheid”), first publicly raised by Afrikaans poet NP van Wyk Louw.
Norman commences her main narrative with the December 16 “Blood River” commemoration of 2011. In an effort to try and lay bare the origins of these “white fears” within their enclave, she interrogates a series of “December 16” events, including the original one of 1838, the Battle of Blood River at Ncome, in KwaZulu-Natal.
She follows the changes in Afrikaner thinking and consciousness through successive December 16s: 1866, when Afrikaners come to rest in Natal with the building of the Church of the Vow; 1881, the first Boer War of Independence; and the rise of Afrikaner nationalism from 1912 after the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910.
In 1938, a century after the “Blood River” battle, there was widespread Afrikaner