The Psychohistorical Roots of Apartheid

When their Afrikaner elders spoke of their own history, “leave the past alone” became a standard response for many of the post-1950 Afrikaner generations. Ours is a wounded past. Only recently has a need arisen to understand why my people, the Afrikaners, created the shameful system of apartheid. This conundrum preyed on my mind during an annual cultural festival in the Karoo town of Oudtshoorn in the mid-1990s. It prompted 13 years of research and culminated in a book.

An embarrassing (for the Afrikaner) perception prevails that pre-apartheid South Africa was a paradise of idyllic indigenous people living happily alongside Englishmen occupied in noble pursuits. Afrikaners have been disreputably marked with being the sole originators of the apartheid epoch.

So first, a little history: In 1652, a few Europeans arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in the Dutch East Indian Company’s trading ships. They were later joined by French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution, some German sailors, and Scotsmen. Soon the Cape had many men and few women, and the inevitable happened—“close friendships” formed between immigrant men and slave and indigenous women. More Europeans arrived in the 18^th and 19th centuries, bringing with them a Western, predominantly Protestant, worldview.

In 1795, the British Navy arrived and took control of The Cape Colony. At the time, the early Afrikaners were called burghers. From the outset, they were humiliated by the British, who considered themselves—in good Social-Darwinist fashion—to be a race superior to both the Afrikaners and the blacks (who were seen as savages useful only as cheap labor), and were degraded in their daily interaction with the British. By the mid-1830s, the early Afrikaner had had enough, packed up and trekked, leaving British rule behind. After much hardship finally settling in two Republics—the Transvaal and Free State—that were officially recognized by Britain in 1852 and 1854. But not for long.

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When diamonds in the Free State, and the world’s richest gold deposits were discovered in the Transvaal, the writing was on the wall: Britain would be back. The Empire coveted the gold and diamonds lying beneath the dusty ground, and a moral imperative became the pretext of colonization and imperialism.

After two failed attempts—in 1887 and 1896—to annex the Transvaal Boer Republic, British military might arrived in full force in 1899, and the fateful second Anglo-Boer War ensued. The war was instigated by a “jingo press” that whipped the British public into a frenzy to wipe out what they came to perceive as the “most backward beast on the face of the earth.”

A scant three months before the start of this devastating war, Britain had signed an agreement at The Hague Convention. This agreement was a call by European nations for civilized war, specifically to prevent the recurrence of violence—including the first implementation of concentration camps—done to civilians by the Spanish during the 1895 and 1898 Cuban uprisings. Close on the heels of this agreement to protect civilians in war, Britain would flagrantly defy it in a desperate attempt to win the war against a surprisingly tenacious minority, the Afrikaners, called Boers, which in Afrikaans means farmer.

In a desperate attempt to win the war—Britain had 448,000 soldiers, not including African troops, in the battlefield; the Boers had 50,000, including old men and boys from age eight—the British forced Afrikaner women and children into concentration (euphemistically called refugee) camps. The women, the “undesirables,” were chased on foot by soldiers on horseback and transported in cattle trucks. This trauma followed after the British had burned down their homesteads and towns and killed and maimed thousands of animals in the service of their scorched earth policy. Boer women and girls were molested and raped by Her Majesty’s Forces, which included both black and white soldiers.

Two out of every three children died from starvation or disease in the camps—95% of those that died were under the age of 16, and accounted for 12% of the Afrikaner Nation of 23,000 in the two republics, mostly women and children. Thousands of black women and children died in camps, as well as outside, from widespread famine, a result of the British scorched earth policy.

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From a psychological perspective, what was worse than the horrors of war was the impact of the deaths of thousands of children—more than fighting men on both sides—on the collective Afrikaner psyche. This was compounded by traumatized mothers grieving the deaths of their children and caught in PTSD and depression. Furthermore, the surviving children had lived through this horror, witnessed the destruction of their homes and family farms, the degradation of their mothers, and the deaths of their siblings. The impact this kind of trauma has on future generations is well documented in recent literature on enactment. The potent combination of loss and humiliation was complete for this group; a stage set for inter-generational trauma. These surviving children and the first subsequent generation became the engineers of apartheid in 1948.

British historian Thomas Pakenham in The Boer War (1998) quotes an utterance by Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain in May 1896, under whose governance this 1899 to 1902 disaster played itself out in South Africa: “A war in South Africa would be one of the most serious wars … a strife which I believe generations would hardly be long enough to extinguish … a course of action as immoral as it would have been unwise” (p. 25). Not even in his imagination could he foresee how much worse things would turn out.

After the first Anglo-Boer War in 1881, the first instance of referring to themselves as Afrikaners with the clear meaning “from Africa” appears. Psychohistorian Bruce Mazlish, in his study of groups, Psychoanalytic Theory and History: Groups and Events (1978), says that groups consolidate as “a nationality, a race, or people” when they share experiences “that have shaped them into a group” (The Annual of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 7, p. 47). A century of humiliation and harassment by the British, in its many forms, was that experience—the cohesive force that shaped this group of disparate individuals into one group, the Afrikaners.

This identity gained greater prominence after the Second Anglo-Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, when the Afrikaner people, a small group by any standard, felt their survival was at stake. After 1902, the surviving Afrikaners were left severely traumatized by the death of many children (and the attendant fear of extinction and

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unprocessed grief), degradation of the survivors, extreme poverty, total destruction of the means to re-establish livelihood and ownership, subjugation in the job market, and continuing daily submission to the rancorous and mocking English press. Their language, which the British mocked and tried to suppress, became the core around which they developed their identity.

So traumatized and destitute was the post-war Afrikaner that in 1915, a despondent Dr. D.F. Malan, an Afrikaner theologian and later the first Prime Minister post-1948, remarked, “Should the Afrikaners collectively commit suicide?”

Determined to survive, the drama would play itself out in a country where whites (including the English), were outnumbered by blacks in a 5:1 ratio (it is currently 11:1). Both Afrikaners and blacks had been ethnically disfranchised, disempowered, impoverished, and had to compete for jobs. Because the British had used blacks as labor as well as active fighters against the Afrikaners during the war, a further wedge had been driven between the groups of victims. This eventually led to apartheid in 1948: a transgenerational re-enactment of trauma that carried within it the seed of Afrikaner destruction.

The Second World War provided the catalyst for Afrikaner enactment. In 1939, South Africa was a British colony. South Africans were expected to fight for Britain. Many Afrikaners, particularly the most traumatized, now young adults, were outraged. Britain was their enemy. They demanded that South Africa, like Ireland, stay neutral. With a small margin of 13 votes, it was decided that South African soldiers, Afrikaners included, should fight for Britain. Mayhem followed: the collective Afrikaner psyche fragmented, and a fear of survival as a group and hatred for the British resurfaced. Enactment within what Vamık Volkan labels a phenomenon called “chosen trauma,” swung into action. Defined by Volkan as a frequent occurrence for groups who have suffered traumatic losses in the past, it is when one trauma of possibly many is chosen from the traumatic history and elevated to a symbol for all the bad things that have befallen the group. The phenomenon of “identification with the aggressor” could also apply in this situation.

By 1948, Afrikaners took charge; the humiliated became the

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humiliator. The rest is history. This psychohistorical perspective explores the unconscious motives and circumstances that compelled the choices that were made after 1902. It is this painful and tragic history of my people that prompted the research that led to a book currently forthcoming: Britain’s Bastard Child: Transgenerational Trauma.

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