Afrikaners

Many books and theses have been written about Afrikaners, a tenaciously nasty bunch of white people in the south of Africa who had the audacity to call themselves 'from Africa' Afrikaner.

The "White Tribe of Africa" as some British jounalist once described us. I forget his name but it made some news here when the book came out in the 80s. I read some parts of it without much interest.

There are about four million white Afrikaners left in South Africa (the other 2 million have emigrated to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and wherever) and another 3 million or so 'coloured' Afrikaners. My definition of an Afrikaner is someone who speaks Afrikaans as mother tongue.

The distinction between white and coloured Afrikaners is an apartheid-based one that should not ever have existed, but it does. Many coloured Afrikaners do not consider themselves as Afrikaners and many white Afrikaners feel the same about the coloureds, that they are not Afrikaners.

The difference between white and coloured Afrikaners is that the former have less 'coloured' blood, but all of us have a percentage of it.

The 'whites' are supposedly a pure mixture (as if something like that is possible) of Dutch, French and German stock, while the 'coloureds' are the result of a bit more adventurous love-making by the supposedly stolid Afrikaans forebears. That means taking liberties with the slaves and the native population alike ... often forcibly.

I am apparently a quarter Dutch, a quarter French and half German with 7% Indian in my genetic make-up. This is according to my father, who made a study of our geneaology. I am French in my heart.


Being an Afrikaner in current day South Africa is to live in interesting times for whatever type of Afrikaner you are (remember the old Chinese curse). The poor coloureds were not 'white enough' for apartheid and now they are 'not black enough' for the post-apartheid South Africa.

One of the pre-eminent coloured poets, Adam Smal, who wrote in Afrikaans, summed their situation up in one line: "God shook the dice and it fell wrongly/badly for us." I am not a translator of poetry, but you get the idea.

Meanwhile white Afrikaners are the 'richest' single ethnic group in the country and the end of apartheid strangely benefited them most. I put richest in parenthesis because it only means they have the most expendable income according to statistics.

But apparently the fastest growing sector of the Joburg Stock Exchange consists of companies owned and run by Afrikaners. I can well believe that.

The end of apartheid meant that we had to get out of our bureaucratic mindset and start living up to our genes. The genes come from European malcontents that came here from 1652 onwards. (My own first Dutch 'South African' forebear whose surname I still have, arrived in 1695 and gained notoriety as a horse thief. It was apparently him who screwed the Indian girl.)

By living up to the genes I mean leaving Europe behind and adventurously, if somewhat brazenly, forging a new life in a 'new' and unknown place.

So I have to conclude that the guys in the bar in Oyster Bay were doing just that ... living up to their genes.