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rfmcdonaldIf June Goodwin and Ben Schiff hadn't compared Heart of Whiteness to Vincent Crapanzano's 1984 Waiting: The Whites of South Africa, I wouldn't have realized the ways in which they compliment each other. Crapanzano's study was an investigation of a cross-section of whites of a small community in the Cape Province interior, Afrikaners and English both, rooted in a particular place, whereas Goodwin and Schiff's survey (in addition to taking place years later) is a broad survey of prominent Afrikaners (writers, musicians, clerics, businesspeople, politicians) across South Africa.
What does Heart of Whiteness show? Put charitably, it shows that apartheid and all its related artifacts are causally associated with Afrikaners' lack of self-confidence and sense of fragility, of a common fear that in a country where people of different ethnicities could compete freely with them the Afrikaner cultural entity created with such effort--the codification of the language, notably--could fall apart and the constituents (subjects?) of "Afrikanerdom" would be left with nothing, this fear aggravated by the reality that even these things weren't under their control. Writers and linguists, to give a single example, tried to elevate Afrikaans, to make it a normal language of life and work in the fashion of language revivalism worldwide, without, however, taking note of the Afrikaans varieties spoken by the non-whites who make up most of South Africa's Afrikaansophone population, neglecting low-prestige words from the white Afrikaans speech community, and noting only when it was almost too late that the integral association of Afrikaans with the repressive apartheid state structure threatened the language's future. Crapanzano's survey didn't really suggest to me the extent to which Afrikaans identity was plural, politically and religiously and regionally (the rough contrast between the less reactionary Afrikaners who stayed in the Cape Province and the Boers who trekked inland wasn't something I'd considered before). This is critical: the need to fight this fragility is what sparked this most recent--I won't say last--episode in racial totalitarianism.
Goodwin and Schiff's profile of Afrikanerdom as it was falling away from apartheid, different interviewees opening up new vistas--here's a rocker who's moving away from the twee central European folk songs adopted in the 1930s as Afrikaner traditions, here's the missionary's daughter who's politically conservative but nonetheless wrote a marvellous book making her Afrikaner readers realize that they're human, too, there's any number of clerics who come to realize through their own experiences that the Calvinism of apartheid was unjust--actually has to be counted as pretty hopeful. Sometimes their interviewees were horrifically yet humourously blinkered--the example of the church minister who said both that Africans' low moral status was shown by their treatment of their children and advocated that their political demonstrations be countered by live fire--but they were trying to respond creatively. The fact that South Africa and Afrikaners survived long past this book's 1995 printing is proof. Apart from an incredulousness recorded in the writing of the interviewers that's only sometimes justified, the main flaw of Heart of Whiteness might be its relative lack of hope that things might be improving radically. Fortunately, this flaw doesn't interfere with my enjoyment or appreciation of the book.
Go, read.
What does Heart of Whiteness show? Put charitably, it shows that apartheid and all its related artifacts are causally associated with Afrikaners' lack of self-confidence and sense of fragility, of a common fear that in a country where people of different ethnicities could compete freely with them the Afrikaner cultural entity created with such effort--the codification of the language, notably--could fall apart and the constituents (subjects?) of "Afrikanerdom" would be left with nothing, this fear aggravated by the reality that even these things weren't under their control. Writers and linguists, to give a single example, tried to elevate Afrikaans, to make it a normal language of life and work in the fashion of language revivalism worldwide, without, however, taking note of the Afrikaans varieties spoken by the non-whites who make up most of South Africa's Afrikaansophone population, neglecting low-prestige words from the white Afrikaans speech community, and noting only when it was almost too late that the integral association of Afrikaans with the repressive apartheid state structure threatened the language's future. Crapanzano's survey didn't really suggest to me the extent to which Afrikaans identity was plural, politically and religiously and regionally (the rough contrast between the less reactionary Afrikaners who stayed in the Cape Province and the Boers who trekked inland wasn't something I'd considered before). This is critical: the need to fight this fragility is what sparked this most recent--I won't say last--episode in racial totalitarianism.
Goodwin and Schiff's profile of Afrikanerdom as it was falling away from apartheid, different interviewees opening up new vistas--here's a rocker who's moving away from the twee central European folk songs adopted in the 1930s as Afrikaner traditions, here's the missionary's daughter who's politically conservative but nonetheless wrote a marvellous book making her Afrikaner readers realize that they're human, too, there's any number of clerics who come to realize through their own experiences that the Calvinism of apartheid was unjust--actually has to be counted as pretty hopeful. Sometimes their interviewees were horrifically yet humourously blinkered--the example of the church minister who said both that Africans' low moral status was shown by their treatment of their children and advocated that their political demonstrations be countered by live fire--but they were trying to respond creatively. The fact that South Africa and Afrikaners survived long past this book's 1995 printing is proof. Apart from an incredulousness recorded in the writing of the interviewers that's only sometimes justified, the main flaw of Heart of Whiteness might be its relative lack of hope that things might be improving radically. Fortunately, this flaw doesn't interfere with my enjoyment or appreciation of the book.
Go, read.
