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

140-141; Dubow 1995: 281-283; O’Meara 1983: 172-173.)
The Afrikaners had developed a sense of belonging to the soil: they
had taken it over, and it also belonged to them (Schutte 1989: 222). During
my fieldwork I was often told that originally the country had been
‘empty’, and the Afrikaners had only settled on land that had been either
‘deserted by African tribes’, or had never been claimed by anyone.
But being white stretched further than those advantages enjoyed by the
Afrikaners. In the colonial countries, land seemed as plentiful as it was
scarce in Europe. Every man could be a peer of a realm by virtue of being
white. Terence Ranger points out how “almost everywhere in Africa
white agriculturalists saw themselves not as peasants but as gentlemen
farmers” (1983: 213). Thus, the ambiguities of urban life were perceived
as dangerous and detrimental, whereas the countryside became sacred. A
good example of this is the way in which the Karoo still lives as an archetypal
‘pure’ space in the South African imagination and mythology. 86
Prior to the onset of apartheid, the Afrikaner nationalists, in a manner
similar to the Nazis, had already created multiple national symbols by
inventing traditions (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983: 1-14). These invented
traditions included the veneration of the first Afrikaners to travel northeast
(die Voortrekkers), revival of Afrikaans as the sacred language of the
volk and the worship of Afrikaans woman as the volksmoeder, guardian
of the moral order and racial purity of the Afrikaners (McClintock 1995:
368-369). These traditions were then put on a pedestal where they confirmed
and sealed the social order. They could be presented spatially as
great shows of national unity, celebrations or memorial sites.
An example of a spatial presentation of the process whereby Afrikanerdom
reinvented itself was ‘the second trek’ (‘die Tweede Trek’ or
‘Eeufees’) 87 of 1938. It was a suitably modified re-enactment and commemoration
of the original Voortrekkers’ Great Trek away from the British
influence in 1838. Pomp and circumstance surrounded this process.
The famous Ossewaens (ox-wagons) travelling slowly across the country
was a concrete demonstration of the way in which the Afrikaners had
taken over the space, and the relationship to the land had originally been
formed. The wagons were greeted with big festivities in each town. The
second trek was followed by a wave of enthusiasm, supporting the process
of Afrikaners becoming a unified nation.
86 For more on the meaning of wilderness in the colonial imagination, see e.g. Short
1991: 8-27.
87 Second trek or centenary.
99