Survival Politics: Afrikanerdom in Search of a New Ideology

IN his thorough sociological study of Afrikaner ideology, Dunbar Moodie has shown that the civil theology most adequate to the exigencies of the 1930s was an interpretation ‘which was tight enough to unite Afrikaners and yet loose enough to allow considerable difference of opinion on practical matters’.2While the same functional needs for a proper ideology remain for the 1970S and 80s, ‘civil theology’ can no longer fulfil this task. This is mainly due to increased secularisation and value changes in an urbanised life, which has diluted traditional culture with the corruptive spoils of affluence. Moodie aptly concludes that the exigencies of Afrikaner power have changed the debate from one between rival metaphysical interpretations of Christian-Nationalism (Kuyperianism, neo-Fichteanism,Volkskerk) to that of ‘the very continuance of ideology itself’.3Such considered findings are confirmed by similar observations of ‘outsiders’ who have returned after a lengthy exile. In the assessment of Ezekiel Mphahlele:

Panel on South African Theater

Dr. Ezekiel Mphahlele spoke at the end of the session yesterday, and since there is considerable misunderstanding about at least one of the points he made, he has offered to make a clarification this morning.Yesterday I got the impression that people left the meeting under the impression that I was trying to be an iconoclast and trying to bust things up. I am always considered to be a bull in a china shop. But far be it from me to want to bust people’s games up. Just before I spoke, my longstanding friend from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Donatus Nwoga, said the same things in so many words, expressing a wish that he could be back home.

Negritude: Some Dissident Voices

Only eight years ago Janheinz Jahn stated in Neo-African Literature that the critics of nigritude were all writing in English—not in French. Jahn was referring to writers like Ezekiel Mphahlele, Gerald Moore and Wole Soyinka, whose criticism he regarded as “based on an inadequate translation.” 2 The most important movement in the literary evolution in French-speaking Africa had, according to Jahn, only been criticized out of ignorance and misunderstanding. Today, criticism of Negritude has become a major issue in those French-speaking countries which were among its strongest supporters originally. It should be mentioned, however, that certain French African writers—among them Ferdinand Oyono and Ousmane Sembene—have opposed Negritude since the 1950s.