Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

Afrikaner academics and intellectuals (many of whom had
studied in Germany before the war), was to adapt the romantic
nationalism of Herder and Fichte to the South African
case. At the same time, pro-apartheid theologians
searched the Scriptures for an expression of the divine will
that would sanction South Africa’s race policies in the face
of growing condemnation from much of the rest of Christendom.
Although some early advocates of apartheid followed
the Nazi example of synthesizing völkisch nationalism
and biological racism, the defenders of apartheid who responded
to international criticism between the 1950s and
the 1970s eschewed biological arguments in favor of what
the historian Saul DuBow has aptly described as “cultural
essentialism.” 60
The basic idea, which could have come directly from
Herder, was that each Volk was programmed to develop a
unique and worthy culture. But to do so, it had to be protected
from contamination by other cultures; this required
a significant degree of isolation and “separate development.”
For Afrikaners, “Christian Nationalism” meant
schools and universities, separate from those attended by
the English, in which the language and values of the Afrikaner
Volk could flower. In theory, it meant the same thing
for Zulus and Xhosa, whose homelands would be the cradles
for the growth of their own unique national cultures.
The identification of language, culture, and race that had
been characteristic of early German nationalist thinking
was revivified without the stress on the purely biological
or genetic factor that Nazis had given it. Theologians of
the South African Dutch Reformed Church found their
scriptural warrant, not in the Curse of Ham that had served
135