No Chosen People: The Myth of the Calvinist Origins of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology

Abstract

THE ORIGINS OF AFRIKANER NATIONALISM and its associated racial ideologies and, thus, of the apartheid order imposed by the National party governments on South African society in recent times have often been ascribed to an obdurate strain of Calvinism. According to this view, the Afrikaner founding fathers brought with them to the Cape the basic tenets of seventeenth-century thought, in the isolated frontier conditions of trekboer society this mode of thought became fixated and survived for generations as a kind of primitive Calvinism, and, Rip van Winkle-like, it then emerged to renewed historical prominence in the early nineteenth century and provided much of the rationale for that central event of Afrikaner history, the Great Trek. Thus, the Voortrekkers and the Republican Afrikaners conceived of themselves as a chosen and covenanted people, like the Israelites of the Old Testament, and early Afrikaners presumed a divine mandate to smite heathen peoples and reduce them to their pre-ordained position as perpetual hewers of wood and drawers of water. This cluster of constructs, which has been used to explain and justify racial inequality and repression in latter-day Afrikaner-dominated societies, constitutes a historical myth that I call the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history. ' Despite its pervasive presence in the literature, the content of the