You can take Afrikaners out of apartheid, but can you take apartheid out of Afrikaners?

I recently wrote an essay where I explored the question in the heading, one that is equally applicable to English-speaking white people in South Africa.

The racist incident at the University of the Free State makes this question relevant yet again, as do the Skielik killings, following on a range of other examples of white-on-black violence that we have seen in the past decade or so.

In the American South, the end of slavery marked the beginning of a surge in lynching. In other words, the end of a formal system of race-based oppression led white racists in the South of the US to informalise repression through lynching, in this way trying to terrorise African-Americans into submission.

Are we dealing with a similar phenomenon here? The racist state is no longer there to give effect to racist policies, as were supported for so many years by the majority of white South Africans; no signs on buildings any more trumpeting where whites may go and blacks not; and no enforced segregation that, if resisted, would lead to bodily harm and death.

So we have an informalisation of racism and racist practices. Some white people have been acting out the role that the apartheid state had: killing black people indiscriminately; humiliating black people; fighting to keep certain spaces white.

Apply this to the most recent ignominious instance: before 1994, Reitz men’s residence at the Free State university would have been kept white by the state. Now, in lieu of the racist state, some boys have taken it upon themselves to stop “integration”.

The white racists of the American South were resorting to lynching to keep black people “in their place”. Is this why some whites in South Africa are attacking and humiliating black people? Probably.

On another level, such whites are reaffirming their identity of whiteness. Racism involves a lot of “othering” talk: “jokes” and stories to indicate how “inferior” black people are to white people. Racist talk seems compulsive, almost a ritualised event in the private spaces of some white people. The same myths are repeated, the same stereotyping regurgitated over and over again.

Through this constant exercise, white identity is illuminated by the opposites identified in black identity: “black equals stupid, lazy, incompetent, dirty”; so white is “not” those things. The Free State video is these racist fantasies put into effect: white boy lording over old, black women on their knees, drinking a pungent and disgusting concoction at the word of their “master”.

The video reminds one of the morphological obsession that Europeans had with people from other continents in the 19th century. The camera seems hypnotised, spending long lengths of time following the women running and dancing at the behest of the “wit basies” (young white masters).

The boys’ attitude in the video is one of arrogance and openly displayed pleasure. They seem to be enjoying doing what white people have been doing for a long time … ever since the first settler set foot on “virgin earth”.

This compulsive racist “othering” is an integral aspect of whiteness as an identity of supremacism. That is where the question comes in: Can apartheid be taken out of white identity in South Africa? So far, the answer seems mostly “no”. In the past while, some white people have become even more defiant in their denial of the injustices of apartheid and colonialism.

Looking specifically at Afrikaners, with a great clanging of bells the Free State video has been disowned by the largest Afrikaner organisations and the most widely read Afrikaans newspaper, Rapport. But read a bit more closely: the rejections contain two worrying aspects.

First, they are emphasising that the Free State boys are individuals whose actions and values do not represent those of most Afrikaners.

Second, the Afrikaner organisations are worried that the Free State video has undermined a good cause. Similarly, the opinion-making Rapport in its editorial comment is also extremely concerned about how this “handful of students” has besmirched the “legitimate” ambitions of Afrikaners — that is, for Afrikaans to exist as a university language and “Afrikaners’ right to spaces where they can be a community”.

Rapport also lashes out at Jody Kollapen, chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission, for daring to suggest that white people should consider apologising for apartheid.

Thus we have seen a range of defensive responses: “this is not us”; “FW de Klerk’s apology for apartheid was sufficient”; and “what about the attack on our cultural spaces?”

As described above, the video has all the hallmarks of a typical racist regurgitation as heard at present in white discourses in private and not-so-private spaces across the country. To try to pretend that it is a one-off event by a few bad apples is a denial of reality. It happened in a context of widely publicised and expressed white discontent and resentment about the country, its black leadership and black compatriots.

The problem of white denial is sometimes not even the amnesia: it is the denial of white racism that currently exists and the conditions that produce such racism.

A related issue is: Afrikaner identity was to a great extent forged in the fires of apartheid. It has always had the stench of racist exclusivity to it. How does one reconcile this with the call for Afrikaner-only spaces? The statements from the Afrikaner organisations and Rapport were vehement in their claims to Afrikaner rights but refrained from addressing this question.

Is it possible to take apartheid out of whites? Maybe. The first step would be to stop denying that the Free State video boys and the alleged Skielik killer are products of a context of currently existing white racism.