South Africa: Is the Sun Setting on Afrikaners?Posted in Africa, Articles, Census/Demographics, History, Media Archive, South Africa on 2011-08-02 02:54Z by Steven |
South Africa: Is the Sun Setting on Afrikaners?
International Business Times
2011-07-27
Palash R. Ghosh
The recent death of Magnus Malan, the feared former general and defense minister of South Africa, might have ended an era in a country once defined by strict racial separation.
Malan, who ferociously fought to maintain racial apartheid until the very end, was removed from his post by then-President F.W. de Klerk in the early 1990s under pressure from recently freed political prisoner Nelson Mandela.
Malan was part of the White Afrikaner community, the people most associated with establishing and rigidly maintaining the apartheid system for many decades.
The Afrikaners are the descendants of mostly Dutch (as well as German and French Huguenots) who arrived in South Africa in the middle of the seventeenth century (English speakers from Britain came in the following century).
Indeed, the Afrikaners have lived in South Africa so long that they regard themselves as “Africans” or “the white tribe of Africa.”
However, today, Afrikaners find themselves in a brand new, and perhaps for them, perilous, South Africa.
For one thing, their numbers are shrinking….
…One of the bittersweet ironies of Afrikaner culture and history is that—despite being intimately associated with the philosophy of white supremacy and white ‘purity’—they are themselves of mixed race.
This has to do with the fact that when the original Dutch settlers arrived in South Africa almost four-hundred years ago, they brought almost no women. Consequently, they had to marry and mate with local women, or with Malays and East Indians.
Thus, some the oldest and most revered Afrikaner families, including the Krugers, Van Riebeecks, Bruyns, Van Rensburgs, and Zaimans are likely the descendants of mixed-race couples.
[Professor A.M.] Grundlingh [of the History Department at Stellenbosch University] said according to estimates, about 6 percent of so-called “white” Afrikaners are actually of mixed blood.
Allegedly, one of the greatest of Afrikaner heroes, Andries Pretorius, the leader of the Great Voortrek, was himself descended from East Indian slave women on both his maternal and paternal sides.
This also helps to explains why many of the current “Coloured” of South Africa speak Afrikaans as their first language…
Read the entire article here.