What Democratisation Does to Minorities Displaced from Power: The ...

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Eghosa E. Osaghae
henceforth to be used to counterbalance black political power. 16 In
line with the ideology of non-racialism which the new NP increasingly
embraced, there was also an attempt to de-racialise and deethnicise
collective rights by making gender and class important
bases for ensuring representation and balance. This was in addition
to making language and cultural rights a matter of personal
choice and neutralising the ethnicisation of cultural, linguistic and
religious associations by designating them organs of civil society
(section 31 (2)).
The closest thing to an explicit group right, which kept hopes for
a watered-down volkstaat alive, was the provision on the right to
self-determination in section 235, which deserves to be fully cited:
The right of the South African people as a whole to self-determination...does
not preclude...recognition of the notion of the right
of self-determination of any community sharing a common cultural
and language heritage, within a territorial entity in the Republic
or in any other way determined by national legislation.
This once again fell short of the group rights demanded by Afrikaners.
How far the other notions of group rights implied in the provisions
on language, culture and religion can go in giving the Afrikaner
nationalists the status they demand remains to be seen. The unyielding
attitudes of the far right suggest that they would not go far,
but the same cannot be said for the vast majority of moderate
Afrikaners who seem to have opted for conservative liberalism as
a political strategy. This led many of them to support the liberalcentrist
DP, which as we pointed out earlier was in alliance with
the NNP until 2001. A significant number of NNP members subsequently
joined the ANC, suggesting that Afrikaners may have finally
elected to join the political mainstream rather than remain
marginals and outsiders. The decline of the right wing, especially
since the 1999 elections, reinforces the possibility of this being the
case.
16 However, not to be completely outdone as the acclaimed representative and
leader of the Afrikaners, the NP joined the FF to demand protection for
Afrikaners through creation of constitutionally sanctioned cultural councils at
the local, provincial and national levels. Amongst other functions, the councils
were to have a say in mother-tongue education, language issues, monuments,
museums and cultural assets (Mail & Guardian, 29 March 1996).
NUPI DECEMBER 02