Romanticising the “Boer”: Narratives of White Victimhood in South African Popular Culture

Abstract

Summary In this article, I present a critical reading of a purposive sample of popular cultural expressions from various sites as they relate to the emergence of narratives of white victimhood in South Africa. The particular focus falls on the resurgence of nostalgic appropriations of the construct of the Afrikaner Boer imaginary, and the concomitant utopian farm ideal. The argument is that this resurgence, in conjunction with popularised, yet unfounded, claims of “white genocide” as it pertains to the murder of white farmers in South Africa, is employed as a means of restoring white hegemony. I contend, moreover, that the globalisation of the genocide-narrative gives nationalist, Afrikaner whiteness – which has historically been regarded as a “lesser whiteness” (Van der Westhuizen 2018) – access to global, normative whiteness, thereby legitimising its hegemonic ideals. A counterargument, however, is that these narratives result in the hypervisibility of whiteness, negating its normative invisibility and creating the potential to subvert and decolonise whiteness as a dominant ideology. The research is theoretically situated within critical whiteness studies and, following a deep description of the context, presents analysis and interpretation alongside concrete examples of popular cultural expressions.