{"id":15309,"date":"2011-08-02T02:54:10","date_gmt":"2011-08-02T02:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15309"},"modified":"2012-03-24T18:52:32","modified_gmt":"2012-03-24T18:52:32","slug":"south-africa-is-the-sun-setting-on-afrikaners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15309","title":{"rendered":"South Africa: Is the Sun Setting on Afrikaners?"},"content":{"rendered":"

South Africa: Is the Sun Setting on Afrikaners?<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

International Business Times<\/a>
\n2011-07-27<\/p>\n

Palash R. Ghosh<\/strong><\/p>\n

The recent death of Magnus Malan<\/a>, the feared former general and defense minister of South Africa<\/a>, might have ended an era in a country once defined by strict racial separation.<\/p>\n

Malan, who ferociously fought to maintain racial apartheid<\/a> until the very end, was removed from his post by then-President F.W. de Klerk<\/a> in the early 1990s under pressure from recently freed political prisoner Nelson Mandela<\/a>.
\n\u00a0
\nMalan was part of the White Afrikaner<\/a> community, the people most associated with establishing and rigidly maintaining the apartheid system for many decades.
\n\u00a0
\nThe Afrikaners are the descendants of mostly Dutch (as well as German and French Huguenots<\/a>) who arrived in South Africa in the middle of the seventeenth century (English speakers from Britain came in the following century).<\/p>\n

Indeed, the Afrikaners have lived in South Africa so long that they regard themselves as \u201cAfricans\u201d or \u201cthe white tribe of Africa.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nHowever, today, Afrikaners find themselves in a brand new, and perhaps for them, perilous, South Africa.
\n\u00a0
\nFor one thing, their numbers are shrinking….<\/p>\n

…One of the bittersweet ironies of Afrikaner culture and history is that\u2014despite being intimately associated with the philosophy of white supremacy and white \u2018purity\u2019\u2014they are themselves of mixed race.
\n<\/strong>\u00a0
\nThis 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.<\/strong>
\n\u00a0
\nThus, 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.
\n\u00a0
\n[Professor A.M.] Grundlingh<\/a> [of the History Department at Stellenbosch University] said according to estimates, about 6 percent of so-called \u201cwhite\u201d Afrikaners are actually of mixed blood.
\n\u00a0
\nAllegedly, one of the greatest of Afrikaner heroes, Andries Pretorius<\/a>, the leader of the Great Voortrek<\/a>, was himself descended from East Indian slave women on both his maternal and paternal sides.
\n\u00a0
\nThis also helps to explains why many of the current \u201cColoured<\/a>\u201d of South Africa speak Afrikaans<\/a> as their first language…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,33,459,8,520],"tags":[7087,7084,7086,7085,20756],"class_list":["post-15309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-census","category-history","category-media-archive","category-south-africa","tag-a-m-grundlingh","tag-afrikaners","tag-magnus-malan","tag-palash-r-ghosh","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}