Conclusion

This chapter has argued that the construction of an Afrikaner political ethnicity must be sought in broad economic and social processes and not merely in the realm of cultural innovations. At the heart of such economic and social changes lay the attempts first to define the group of Afrikaans-speakers exclusively and then mobilize them for political and economic goals. This process took different courses in the Western Cape and the Transvaal.

In the Stellenbosch-Paarl region of the Western Cape, with its history of a rigid slave system, political mobilization of the Afrikaners excluded coloured Afrikaans-speakers but initially attempted to incorporate non-jingoistic English-speaking whites. Conflicting political and economic interests together with imperialist aggression widened the gulf between Dutch-Afrikaners and English-speakers. For a complex of reasons Dutch-Afrikaner farmers were drawn

to local financial institutions which in time became ethnic institutions. By the turn of the twentieth century an Afrikaner ethnic establishment, comprised of farmers, teachers and professionals, had arisen who had the funds and the motivation to launch specifically ethnic projects such as the Nasionale Pers, the National Party, and the University of Stellenbosch. While Afrikaners and coloureds lived in close proximity to each other and while both spoke what was basically the same language, political and economic forces drove them apart. Indeed, to counter the anglicization of the upper class, the Afrikaans language was appropriated in the first two decades of the twentieth century as the ethnic language of which every Afrikaner should be proud. This stood in stark contrast to the late nineteenth century when in towns like Bloemfontein and Cape Town leading Dutch-Afrikaners shunned Afrikaans, spoke English in public and generally conducted their correspondence with other Dutch-Afrikaners in English, or, in some isolated cases, in High Dutch. J.H.H. de Waal, one of the main protagonists of Afrikaans, later remarked that by the turn of the century only the (coloured) Muslim community was loyal to Afrikaans in the Cape Town area. When Du Toit made an about-turn after the Jameson Raid and became a supporter of Rhodes, Afrikaans suffered a great setback for he had become identified with the language. At the end of the Anglo-Boer War, De Waal noted, 'Our language as a written medium was almost completely dead.'^[113]

In the Transvaal and the Orange Free State the Anglo-Boer War shattered the political institutions on which local Afrikaner political ethnicity had been built. Ethnic entrepreneurs now had to assume the task of what a recent analysis has called 'building a nation from words'. The architects came from a fairly isolated educated stratum and had to invest hard ideological labour to persuade the lower class—workers and poor farmers—and also those of more affluent classes to see their political destiny in common Afrikaner terms. It was a task not yet completed by World War II, and perhaps only in the early 1960s when a republican form of government was in place and apartheid imposed on almost all levels of society was it achieved. Twenty years later, in the early 1980s, Afrikaner political unity was shattered. As happened a century ago, one group emphasizes Afrikaner political and cultural exclusivity while, perhaps, the majority is beginning to move hesitantly towards a self-concept in which ethnic claims are becoming subordinate to class identifications.