At the end of the rainbow - Stolten's African Studies Resources

1 South Africa: a Divided Country in a Divided World
By Gorm Gunnarsen, Morten Nielsen, Patrick Mac Manus, and Hans Erik Stolten
South African identity is a historical paradox. On the one hand, South African identities have
been transformed time after time. Settlers and natives have been reinvented as Christians and
heathens, who in turn have been recreated as civilized and barbarians, then as Europeans and
Bantu, and later again as whites, coloreds, and blacks, who were recently transformed into
God’s own rainbow people. This just to mention a few of the identities that South Africans
have contracted. 1 At any given point in time, however, these identities were seen by most
people as rather definitive, and until the end of apartheid, the white identity was regarded as a
superior biological heritage and protected by laws that prohibited cross-racial breeding. 2
The new rainbow people identity was different from earlier identities. It is the first identity,
which includes all people living in South Africa. It is an amazing identity that contains the
contentment created by the ending of apartheid.
We, the editors of this book, share the happiness of peace and reconciliation after prolonged
conflicts and struggles. However, there are problems in the horizon that makes it difficult to
focus solely on this uniting identity, the rainbow people, when investigating the new South
Africa.
Poverty and extreme social inequality means that the national commonwealth will probably
not, in the long term, be able to carry a common identity of all South Africans. The unequal
access to the resources of the nation is no longer tied only to ethnic identity; economic
divisions are becoming increasingly more important for social identity, even if ethnic
boundaries are still part of the picture.
With the first democratic elections in 1994, South Africa, in a sense, returned to the world. A
world that laboriously had established a range of universal norms for societal life, which in
the end could not include a state that was based on racial segregation.
And the world remains fascinated and engaged by South Africa. The new South Africa was
born out of the struggle for social improvement and genuine popular democracy. From the
stream of international publications, it can be established that the interest in following the
development of the new nation is undiminished. From Denmark alone, more than 30.000
tourists visit the country every year.
Whether developments have lived up to the proclaimed “miracle”, or to which degree this has
been defective, is something that the articles in this book will help to clarify by critical, deep,
and balanced analyses of the South African government’s political and economic choices. The
rationality in seeing South Africa as an ideal model for peaceful transition to a social
democracy is worthwhile to investigate.
Viewed from a Nordic country, South Africa is also interesting because of its growing middle
class market for sophisticated products - and as an economic as well as a psychological
gateway to the rest of Africa. It’s many skillfully and engaged citizens invite to qualified
discussions on developmental problems.
Since the transformation to majority rule, South Africa has developed the notion of the
rainbow nation into an Africanist vision, which president Mbeki named African renaissance.
It seems like African identity and South African nationalism have had a resurgence, even if
1 Gary Baines, “The rainbow nation? Identity and nation-building in post-apartheid South Africa”, Mots Pluriels, No.
7, 1998, http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP798gb.html (August 2007).
2 Immorality Amendment Act 1949; Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act no. 55 1949.
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