The Making of a Good White - E-thesis - Helsinki.fi

acks on the idea of Afrikanerdom. The 1980s saw Afrikaner political
and spiritual unity shake in its foundations and fall (O’ Meara 1996: 368-
371).
In the 1980s the ambiguous position of the coloured people created
additional ideological inconsistency. While at the onset of apartheid,
National Party leaders had emphasised the separateness of the ’Coloured
nation’, suggesting the establishment of coloured homelands; they were
now interested in their cultural similarity with the Afrikaners, calling
them ’Brown Afrikaners’. This increased the ambiguity regarding the
location of racial boundaries, causing what Hyslop (2000) named a “conceptual
confusion”.
CONCLUSION
In spite of the economic success that they had achieved, the Afrikaner
ideologists became increasingly disheartened after the 1960s. The nationbuilding
project had become stagnant. Racial purity was no longer a concern
for the social scientists, and the sounds of internal disarray became
audible. The number of the verligte 172 Afrikaners was growing (O’ Meara
1996: 150-167).
For the poor white project this escalating ideological crisis meant, particularly
from the 1960s onwards, middle-class disillusionment with the
project and stigmatisation of those seen as poor whites. This was a part of
a larger process in which the apartheid racial categories and boundaries
were losing their credibility for many of the whites, and the system was
losing its integrity.
In the 1970s the Afrikanerdom began to disperse politically and spiritually.
When the practices concerning the racial boundaries were tightened
to the extreme, the already leaky ideological system of apartheid could
no longer maintain its consistency and credibility. The contradicting middle-class
discourses and reactions to the position of the poor whites, their
families and their embodiment indicated a larger social conflict, and the
split of the Afrikaner nation. The ideology of the Afrikaners was in a state
of disarray.
In the 1980s it was clear that there would be no return to the volk’s previous
unity (Adam 1979: 129). This disillusionment with apartheid also
172 Liberal Afrikaners. The opposite of a verligte (lit. enlightened) Afrikaner is a verkrampte,
conservative, (lit. ‘cramped’) Afrikaner.
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