The Impact of Apartheid on African and Afrikaner Nationalisms, 1948–1994

Abstract

In this chapter, we examine how apartheid made distinct and specific contributions to the exclusive character of the National Party’s (NP) racial policies. We will also discuss how apartheid provoked different African nationalist debates within the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), and the African National Congress (ANC) dominating that debate. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section provides a characterization of apartheid and its evolution, goals and definition of the imagined community: it also examines how this characterization influenced apartheid’s conception of nationalism. Section two looks at how apartheid elicited different nationalist reactions from the ANC, the PAC, and the BC. Although the Inkatha Freedom Party resorted to ANC symbols, it did not constitute a threat to the NP, nor did it provide a counter-nationalist debate because it officially operated openly within the framework of the apartheid regime. From this perspective, only the ANC, PAC, and BC are viewed as genuine and legitimate “liberation” organizations. Section three discusses conception and definition of the South African community, and its political economy of the ANC and the NP. Section four examines broader inter-racial and inter-class relations in South Africa up to 1994.KeywordsAfrican WomanAfrican National CongressNational PartyMiddle Class WomanApartheid RegimeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.