Afrikaner political mobilization in the western Transvaal: Popular consciousness and the State, 1920-1930

Afrikaner rural communities in the 1920's were gripped by profound social and material pressures driven by long-cycle currency deflation, steadily weaker world markets for staple agricultural commodities, and declining terms of trade with the burgeoning local urban industrial economic sector. Materially weakened and commercially vulnerable, these small rural households, the Union's "poor white class," constituted the dominant but most embattled sector of the platteland (countryside) "master class." In Lichtenburg and surrounding western highveld districts of the Transvaal, popular politics reflected this vulnerability. Through the projected defence of the "small man's" countryside, a vibrant "little tradition" of radical dissent evolved, articulating the populist ideals of Afrikaner men in the face of their declining social status both as household heads and as marginalised and impoverished members of a pre-capitalist stand in the grip of rapid and fundamental transformation. This distinctive populist groundswell constituted a comprehensive challenge to the state, centralised political institutions, urban economic and post-Great War political elites, and the trajectory of capitalist development under their aegis. Platteland politicians stitched together elements of an "old" agrarian Republican ideal in which all Boere were valued citizens and voters, with a "new" awareness of their precarious social and economic standing in an "alien" imperial and industrial capitalist order. The resulting ideology of "radical Republicanism" was a response to material decline and the harsh struggle for rural livelihoods. Equally, it was a popular response by male Afrikaner producers to their declining social status within an emergent modern capitalist state driven by powerful urban and industrial interests.;Focussing on the many producer spokesmen, the thesis notes the development of a political vocabulary combining nostalgia for Republican social harmony with sharper rhetoric reflecting concern at contemporary realities congruent with Afrikaner community disintegration and rural class divisions. This platteland populist political culture constituted a fundamental rural challenge to mainstream Afrikaner politics in the 1920's and to its leaders. The impact of this populism on nationalist politics, state, and society, are explored in a variety of rural "spaces"--on isolated platteland farms, in temporary digging camps, tin-and-sacking rural slums, and a model irrigation settlement. These widespread occupational and residential locales--some located on the very margins of the region--represent the necessary spatial mobility of small households trapped in the vicious drive to sustain rural commodity production. They are an accurate measure of the profound changes wrought upon work and residence of the small Afrikaner rural household by commercial pressures in this watershed decade. The resultant social and political consciousness was thus wrought from the matrix of Afrikaner culture and history together with day-to-day experience of social and economic transformation. The substance of the regions politics is thus located in its distinctive political economy.