Abstract
ABSTRACT The dominance of the National Party (NP) in South African white politics for nearly five decades represents a highly successful example of ethnic political mobilisation. This paper seeks to examine the changing course of mobilisation in the period 1948–1992. It considers the NP victory in 1948 and early consolidation; the peak of ethnic mobilisation between 1958 and 1974; and the NP as an inter-ethnic coalition in the face of growing divisions in Afrikanerdom between 1977 and 1992. With the ending of white minority rule Afrikaners quickly lost what remained of their political unity, and by 1999 constituted one of the most electorally fragmented population groups in South Africa. The paper examines the patterns of this fragmentation in historical context, and comments on the significance or otherwise of ethnicity in the voting of all ethnic groups in the ‘rainbow nation’ since the end of apartheid.
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