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

the backbone of the Afrikaners, and they surrendered in 1902. (De Klerk
1975: 82-89.)
Despite the promises of the British, the Africans were given no power
in the new post-war state. Voter franchise was only given to whites. Later,
in order to secure the rebuilding of the country, the British actively sought
partnership with the Afrikaners. However, the position of Afrikaners was
dire after the war. When the Union of South Africa was established on
31 May 1910, most of its poor white people were rural Afrikaners. (De
Klerk 1975: 92-97.)
The Afrikaners, scattered, impoverished and traumatised by the war,
had no common historical purpose or identity to begin with. Their identity
building was undertaken by many areas of society, notably so by the
‘language movement’ of the early twentieth century. Afrikaans, scorned
formerly as a kombuistaal (kitchen language), is a mixture of High Dutch,
local dialects and languages spoken by Indonesian and African slaves.
Through the language movement it was purified and re-invented as the
primordial mother tongue of the Afrikaners, and given the legal status of
a language in 1918 (McClintock 1995: 368-369). Another central driving
force in the identity building was the Dutch Reformed Church, which,
while drawing its inspiration from a form of racialised Calvinism, promoted
the idea of Afrikaners as God’s chosen people.
In addition to the problems caused by the war, drought and the structural
shift to a larger world capitalist system had made smallholdings
unviable. After the war many impoverished Afrikaner farmers and especially
share-croppers, called bywoners, had to leave their farms and look
for their fortunes in cities, where they often shared quarters with Africans
and coloured people with whom they competed for manual employment.
(Kinghorn 1997: 139.) The lowest class of whites were perceived
as losing their ‘civilisation’, degenerating racially and also threatening
the ruling elite as a class – especially in the urban areas where the social
hierarchy and racial separateness of the countryside were loosened.
At the levels of the social body and urban space these concerns began
to manifest themselves in the ideas of social pathologies that seeped
into the mainstream of the society from the gutters of the urban ghettos.
In these fears, the images of deteriorating space and a decaying social
body were combined. At the end of the nineteenth century these anxieties
found their racial expression in the concept of ’poor whiteism’, a
term which became everyday language and a grave social concern for the
South African elite.
28