Afrikaners

The research employs a novel approach to interview data collection, using a modified version of Wengraf’s (2017) biographic narrative interview method in conjunction with a dual-participant interview method. This approach allows a multiplicity of subjective viewpoints, exploring Afrikaner perceptions, their experiences, how they see themselves fitting into their Afrikaans community and how this community fits into New Zealand society.

The findings from this study show that Afrikaners refer to a representation akin to a Barthian model of Afrikaner. Through interviews, participants implied this presentation which was then constructed into an analytic model for the study. The model they indicated consists of four key characteristics: heritage, faith as a cultural value, language and a conservative worldview. Participants referred to themselves against this model in order to ascertain how ‘typical’ they are regarding shared community behaviour and perspectives.

The study then discusses this Afrikaner identity in a New Zealand socio-cultural context. It discovers that even though New Zealand and Afrikaner-South African societies are vastly different, New Zealand’s socially liberal worldview allows an easy transition for today’s comparatively diverse Afrikaners. This transitional process and ethnic boundary modification was found to impact Afrikaner identity in varying ways, particularly related to areas of personal security, new relationship formation and hospitality, manner of speech, and how they perceived what members of New Zealand society think about Afrikaners.

ohamed Adhikari’s book The Anatomy of a South African Genocide is a synthesis of the research on the extermination of the San peoples of South Africa and aims to establish that
such extermination must be considered genocide. Unfortunately, the book is based exclusively on published sources, and especially with regard to the nineteenth century, fails to consider archival and other sources that throw much light on the fate of the San, most notably the corpus of documents on the mission that the resident magistrate and civil commissioner of Namaqualand, Louis Anthing, undertook in 1862 to investigate reports of
massacres of San bands in Bushmanland. Adhikari’s book also suffers from the fact that he refers to “the San”, while it is methodologically more correct to distinguish clearly between the different San populations and to address the history of specific groups in specific areas of southern Africa. Another major weakness is his placement of almost exclusive blame for the extermination of the San on “Dutch-speaking pastoralists”, downplaying sources that point to the heavy involvement of Baster, Griqua and Khoi groups in the destruction of the hunter-gatherer bands. The case study of Louis Anthing’s mission to Bushmanland, which proves that there was indeed genocide in Bushmanland in the second half of the nineteenth century, is presented in detail to show that an engagement with archival sources is essential to grasp the tragedy of the San in all its complexity.

This paper examines the state of Afrikaner identity in a New Zealand diasporic context, exploring perceptions, experiences, how Afrikaners see themselves fitting into their community, and how this community fits into New Zealand society. Through biographic narrative interviews, participants described an implied representation of Afrikaner which was then constructed into an analytic model consisting of four key characteristics: heritage; faith as a cultural value; language; and, a conservative worldview. Participants referred to themselves against this model in order to ascertain how ‘typical’ they are regarding shared community behaviour and perspectives. Although New Zealand and Afrikaner-South African societies are vastly different, New Zealand’s socially liberal worldview allows an easy transition for today’s comparatively diverse Afrikaners. This transitional process and ethnic boundary modification was found to impact Afrikaner identity in varying ways, particularly related to areas of personal security, new friendship formation, manner of speech, and how they perceived what New Zealanders think about Afrikaners.

This paper examines the state of Afrikaner identity in a New Zealand diasporic context, exploring perceptions, experiences, how Afrikaners see themselves fitting into their community and how this community fits into New Zealand society. Through biographic narrative interviews, participants described an implied representation of Afrikaner which was then constructed into an analytic model consisting of four key characteristics: heritage, faith as a cultural value, language and a conservative worldview. Participants referred to themselves against this model in order to ascertain how 'typical' they are regarding shared community behaviour and perspectives. Although New Zealand and Afrikaner-South African societies are vastly different, New Zealand's socially liberal worldview allows an easy transition for today's comparatively diverse Afrikaners. This transitional process and ethnic boundary modification was found to impact Afrikaner identity in varying ways, particularly related to areas of personal security, new friendship formation, manner of speech, and how they perceived what New Zealanders think about Afrikaners.

From fresh archival evidence we know that J. M. Coetzee was reading works by Rudolf Bultmann, a German New Testament scholar and theologian, while writing Life & Times of Michael K. In these texts Bultmann had developed a conception of the ‘meaning’ of the Gospel of John, in particular, as inseparable from the reading experience it stages. Notably, he claimed that the Gospel aims to stage a dialectical reading experience: it encourages reliance on mythological language and formal features (thesis), which it then undermines (antithesis), in order to invite potential encounters with the divine, as that which exceeds even the best mythological description (synthesis). Drawing on Coetzee’s archived notes, I show how Michael K diffusely reorients this dialectical strategy. Instead of deploying mythological language to invite encounters with the divine, Coetzee relies upon, but also undermines, biographical conventions to cultivate conditions that might expand readers’ awareness of the limitations of this narrative before the life it purportedly represents. By tracing a religious register, my reading also foregrounds episodes in which characters undergo encounters that exercise a claim over them, which they cannot quite articulate. Indeed, by attending to Coetzee’s readings of Bultmann, I show how this fiction depicts the very phenomenon it stages. For there is good reason to believe that Michael K was specifically crafted with a view toward cultivating attentiveness to ways in which life persistently exceeds representational specificity. Moreover, this was a particularly politically freighted endeavour for an author grappling with life under the apartheid narrative.

The Afrikaner is a transcultural novel set between Johannesburg, the Cape Region, the Kalahari Desert in Namibia and the Island of Zanzibar. Zoe Du Plessis’s story unfolds against the backdrop of 1996 South Africa, caught in the turmoil of the transition from the Apartheid regime to the first democratically elected black government. A paleoanthropologist at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, Zoe’s world collapses when her lover and colleague, Dario Oldani, is killed during a fatal carjacking. Clinging to her late companion’s memory, she sets off to the merciless Kalahari Desert to continue his fieldwork. It’s the beginning of an inner journey during which Zoe comes to terms with her sense of guilt as a privileged white Afrikaner while also confronting a secret that has hung over her family for generations. During a brief visit back home, Zoe meets an unlikely lover in Kurt, a legendary South African writer with a troubled past. The conclusion spirals the reader into a new perspective, where atonement seems to be inextricably linked to an act of creative imagination.
Link: https://blogs.ubc.ca/afrikaner/