| Traditionally, the white Afrikaans community has been seen as a European-identity colonizer community. This perception is understandable given the system of racial and economic abuses established by nationalist Afrikaners, who, adopting Western colonial strategies, beliefs, and markers of identity, codified a system of discrimination known as apartheid. Although the discourse of Afrikanerdom, a discourse of superiority and destiny, dominated the public sphere throughout apartheid (1948-1994), a dissident tradition also existed within Afrikaans culture. Politically, this dissident tradition challenged the ethical basis of apartheid; culturally, it sought to create a space for alternative identities that would acknowledge the multiple heritages of white South Africans.; This work examines that dissident tradition as an effort to explore the possibility of a white African consciousness. The introduction presents a set of problems facing Afrikaans writing, including the neglect of literary discourse. The first chapter outlines the historical, geographical, and cultural influences that separated seventeenth and eighteenth century migrant farmers (trekboers), from the European influences of the Cape. Cut off from these influences, trekboers became a new people with increasingly strong African loyalties. Yet at the end of the era of British colonization (1910) a newly-independent Afrikaner regime attempted to re-establish a European-based Afrikaner identity. The second chapter, relying on post-colonial theory, traces the effects of that colonization on the white Afrikaans community, juxtaposing how the fiction and experiences of dissident writers like Andre Brink, Jan Rabie, Elsa Joubert, and Karel Schoeman challenged Afrikaner-apartheid culture that was attempting to Europeanize Afrikaans identity.; The third and fourth chapters trace how the vision of community and identity presented by these dissident writers is compatible with the vision presented by other South African writers of the same era, but of different cultural traditions (Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton, Peter Abrahams). The conclusion returns to the question of how this dissident tradition reflects a vision of a multi-ethnic state that is national without being nationalistic, and which challenges postcolonial theories' simpler vision of how race and modernism correlate in a multi-cultural post-colonial country that is trying to balance multiple histories. |
