Who Is an African? by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2018-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Nine

Reenacting “Destiny”

Masculinity and Afrikaner Identity in “Religious” Post-Apartheid South Africa

Kennedy Owino

Introduction

The intersection between religion, race, politics, social and economic factors are key in an attempt toward explaining changing perceptions of identities among men in post-Apartheid South Africa. We cannot speak of men as gendered beings unless we engage on issues around masculinity. It is therefore important to state upfront that masculinity as an identity for men must be understood as both relational and personal. In this case, new challenges in South Africa bring to the fore the use of the phrase “masculinity in crisis,” and if crisis does exist, an important question that also arises is how religion is applied to address such crises. Essentially, the history of South Africa is one that bears substantial influence of religion, and more so, religion significantly contributed in establishing, for example, “ideal” perceptions of being male among Afrikaners. At the core of this identity, studies confirm how the history of the Afrikaners focused solely on the God who chose the Boer race and created a divinely planned destiny for them, a belief that established a hegemonic representation of Afrikaner masculinities during the colonial and Apartheid eras. The supposed covenant the Voortrekkers made with God at Bloedrivier (Blood River) on December 16, 1838, led to the establishment of the Afrikaner masculine nation.1 From the historic events that followed, the Afrikaner people held a popular belief that the Voortrekkers and their descendants were “God’s chosen people” to lead and build South Africa—a stereotype, if not “historical myth,” that has been romanticized by the Afrikaner elite since the mid-nineteenth century. However, this misconceived “special destiny” has been challenged by historians and biblical scholars alike.2 In general, “Afrikaner identity is evolving”3 and the “fall of Apartheid, and the failure of Afrikaner nationalism,” represents an extreme crisis for Afrikaner identity.4 Furthermore, in a context where “whites position themselves as victims of a changing racial order,”5 Steyn argues that “in its fiercely reactionary nature, Afrikaner whiteness has long shown characteristics which are being identified in contemporary reactive white identities.”6 In the face of political and economic changes in post-1994 South Africa, this chapter seeks to explore how Afrikaner Christian men are reconfiguring an articulation of previously constructed historical identity.

“Typological Reenactment”: The Construction of Afrikaner Identity

The historical and construction of identities in the Republic of South Africa has a unique religious and theological history, founded as one of the major white Christian settlements in Africa.7 Steyn argues that “the early settlers of mixed European, though primarily Dutch ancestry, unified in a common identification as Afrikaners, people of Africa, and retained little actual or sentimental attachment to their European homelands.”8 Hence, the Dutch Boers (farmers) in previous centuries became the ancestors of the present Afrikaners who, as Templin observer, “developed a strong nationalist spirit in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”9

A distinction between Afrikaner nationalism and Afrikaner identity is therefore not possible. There is a strong consensus among scholars for the close relation between the two notions where Afrikaner

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