Racialised ethnicities and ethnicised races: reflections on the making of South Africanism

Abstract

This article discusses how the politics of South African identity-making continues to be spoiled by racialised and ethnicised identities cascading from colonialism and apartheid. These problematic identities continue to live on, raising sensitive issues of nativity versus settlerism as well as rights versus entitlement to resources. Identity issues cannot be understood without a clear historical analysis of politics of translating a geographical expression into a national identity that dates back to colonial encounters. The article unpacks complex nationalisms, namely Anglicisation, Afrikanerisation, and Africanisation, that operated as ID-ologies, i.e. identitarian quests for a shared identity, albeit mediated by notions of whiteness and blackness. These ID-ologies became sites of struggles mediated by vicissitudes of inclusions and exclusions. The question of who was the subject of liberation, who constitutes the ‘authentic’ subject of the nation, and who is entitled to resources such as land and mines remain contested. Whites use the constitution to claim rights and to maintain the status quo of privilege, whereas Africans try to mobilise notions of both rights and entitlements as part of the redress of past and present exclusions.