Talk:Afrikaners

Global Presence

Neither the Netherlands nor Belgium offer working holiday opportunities to South Africans, and with the UK's immigration laws that also changed, none of the Commonwealth nations offer working holiday permits to South Africans any more. Maybe the section on Global presence be changed to reflect this?

"Boer subgroup"?

I am very sceptical that a "Boer subgroup" exists, or has existed. There are Afrikaners of a particular political view and outlook on the world who like to argue that there is difference and who like to identify themselves as "Boere" rather than Afrikaners. "Boere" are considered by them to be better. I'm an Afrikaner myself and like that is what I like to be called.

I think Afrikaners were called "Boers" before 1902 and there is nothing wrong with that. Nowadays if Afrikaners refer to themselves as "Boere" it is generally in jest. Or, rarely, if the modern, conservative, religiously fundamentalist "Boere" refer to one as "Boer" it must be a compliment. However, if anybody who is not an Afrikaner calls one a "Boer" is generally meant in a derogatory sense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.78.199.189 (talk) 20:26, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

The Boers were always a "subgroup" from the so called Afrikaners for the simple reason that the Boers come from the Trekboers that emerged on the Cape frontier starting in the late 17th cent just a few decades after the initial arrival of the VOC. The Cape Dutch population has always outnumbered the Boer population thus the term Afrikaner marginalizes the Boers & makes them an artificial "minority" within the ambiguous Afrikaner designation. The term Afrikaner was always a political term that was first used in a political context by some Cape Dutch intellectuals from the western Cape during the late 19th cent at a time when the Boers were mainly independent within their internationally recognized Boer Republics. It was only after the Boers were conquered after the second Anglo-Boer War that the term Afrikaner was imposed en mass to all White Afrikaans speakers, but that was mainly due to indoctrination as society fell under the control of the semi secret society known as the Afrikaner Broederbond which began to rewrite the history & thereby retroactively turned Boers into Afrikaners as well. The reason for the promotion of the term Afrikaner on the part of the Cape Dutch who also insisted that the Boers be called Afrikaners as well came about in the wake of the gold & diamonds that were found in the Boer Republics. It was simply a convenient tool that the Cape Dutch leadership used to colonize the Boers & their Boer Republics. The Afrikaners were still largely rebuffed by the Presidents of the Boer Republics & President Paul Kruger did not want too may Cape Dutch coming to live in the Transvaal Republic as he knew they were too influenced by the British & pro British. Therefore the large scale Afrikaner colonization of the Boer people / nation did not come into full force until the 1930s when the Afrikaner Broederbond began to take more control over the region.

No one is saying that the "Boers are better". The problem is that in our history is was always imposed on us that "the Afrikaner was better" than the Boer as a way to break Boer identity & to lump then in with the Cape Dutch. The term Boer is so abused that it was / is even used to refer to all local White people as a derogatory term.

The Boer people are smaller than the larger Cape Dutch Afrikaners thus they are a so called "subgroup" though I dispute that they even are a "subgroup" of the Afrikaners at all since the Boers never really shared much history with the Cape Dutch as the Boers emerged hundreds of miles away from the Cape Dutch on the Cape frontier. The Cape Rebels of the second Anglo-Boer War were overwhelmingly from the Boer population of the Cape frontier not from the Cape Dutch population.

Ron7 (talk) 07:17, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

The IP is right. What Ron7, who is a Canadian and not an Afrikaner/Boer, is proclaiming is what a very small fraction of Afrikaners is sucking out of their thumb. This two-nations-theory has no grounds in historic reality. Both Afrikaners in the Cape or Transvaal were referred to as Boers and Afrikaners, sometimes also spelled Afrikaanders. The term Boer became more popular around the war, but even then the Boer leaders like Genl de Wet, identified as Afrikaners. --197.229.144.123 (talk) 09:33, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Whether I am a Canadian or not is irrelevant to the facts concerning the topic. I have studied this topic for decades and I am in fact partly from the Boer people BTW at any rate. The Cape Dutch people of the Western Cape regions were never referred to as Boers ever! Therefore the tricky little lie that the terms Boer & Afrikaners are "interchangeable" does a massive disservice to both the Boers AND the Cape Dutch. The term Boer was derived form the term Trekboer which emerged when the Trekboers emerged on the Cape frontier starting in the late 17th century which took them away from the folks who would be referred to as the Cape Dutch. Not only did the Cape Dutch never adopt the term "Boer" to describe themselves, they also NEVER adopted the independence oriented outlook of the Boers of the frontiers and were ALWAYS loyal to the Colonial powers. The Cape Dutch are well documented as having looked down on the Boers and never expressed any interest in them until gold was discovered within the ZAR / Transvaal Republic. At that point the leadership among some of the Cape Dutch [ with involvement from Holland ] started various groups aimed at dispossessing the Boer people of the republics. The most notable being the Afrikaner Bond. The term Afrikaner was APPROPRIATED from the Oorlam who were using it to describe themselves and from the Boers who loosely referred to themselves as Africans in the sense that they belonged to the African continent.

Professor Wallace Mills notes that the Boers of the frontier were significantly different from and viewed themselves as being significantly different from the Dutch settlers of the Western Cape region. To unthinkingly and erroneously assert that the terms Boer and Afrikaner are synonymous unjustly overlooks the important fact that the Cape Dutch population is totally omitted within the academic purview as though they never existed. The Cape Dutch population is MUCH larger than the Boer population therefore whenever the cavalier notion that the term Boer and Afrikaner refer to the "same" people is uttered, one is committing a grave offense of cultural colonialism because the Boer people are rendered a small minority within the amorphous Afrikaner designation.

The term Afrikaner was used by some Boers as they had historically been calling themselves Africans - mainly to point out their distinctiveness from the Cape Dutch! - as they had viewed Africa as their home and not Europe. The Cape Dutch on the other hand had always viewed Europe as their home thus it is ironic that they were the ones who politicized the term Afrikaner in 1875 when they appropriated it in a political context. The Cape Dutch had strong ties to Europe [ The Afrikaners: an historical interpretation. By Godfrey Hugh Lancelot Le May. ] and never supported the Boer people of the frontier. The Boers on the other hand had cut all ties to Europe [ The Great Trek. Oliver Ransford. Chapter one. Also noted within: The Devil's Annex. Sidney Robbins. Page 59. ] and were self sufficient / fiercely independent & anti-colonial. Another reason why some notable Boers were calling themselves Afrikaners during the late 19th cent. was the salient fact that the propaganda of the Afrikaner Bond was spreading into the areas of the Boer Republics. Former Orange Free State President F W Reitz was one of the few Boers who joined up with the Afrikaner Bond. The vast majority of the Boers wanted nothing to do with the Afrikaner Bond. Both President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal Republic & President Marthinus Steyn of the Orange Free State Republics rebuffed the overtures of the Afrikaner Bond and wanted nothing to do with them. Paul Kruger also did not want too many of the Cape Dutch settling into the Transvaal Republic as he felt that they were too pro British & influenced by the British power.

The erroneous notion that the Boers and Afrikaners [ Cape Dutch ] are the same stems entirely from propaganda of the Afrikaner Broederbond [ which ran South Africa from the late 1940s ] which sought to craft a political language based group for the purposes of wresting South Africa from the direct control of the British. Prime Minister JBM Hertzog referred to ALL White citizens of South Africa as "Afrikaners". He referred to Afrikaans Afrikaners and English Afrikaners. The Afrikaans speaking Afrikaners got stuck with the term Afrikaner as the Anglophones drifted into their own political camp leaving the political notion of an Afrikaner being the descendents of the Cape Dutch & Boers by default. But this massively dispossessed and marginalized the smaller Boer people as they were outnumbered by the larger and more affluent Cape Dutch.

The one nation theory has no grounds in historical reality as the Boers were distinct from the Cape Dutch ever since the Boers emerged from the Trekboers on the Cape frontier by circa 1700 and rarely has any interaction with the Cape Dutch. There are a massive amount of books / articles and documentation expressly demonstrating and noting that the Boers and Cape Dutch are distinct groups. There are TWO White / Caucasian Afrikaans speaking groups in Southern Africa in much the same way that there are at least two main long established White / Caucasian French speaking people within Canada with the Quebecois and the Acadians of the Maritime provinces. The folks who deny the evidence that the Boers are distinct from the Cape Dutch Afrikaners are folks with a political agenda to dispossess the Boer people of their own hard won identity and their long running struggle for self determination.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Ron7 (talk • contribs) 08:44, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Another important point demonstrating that the Boers are clearly distinct from the Cape Dutch is the salient fact that the Boers developed their own Afrikaans dialect on the Cape frontier that historians have classified as Eastern Border Afrikaans. This is noted at the Afrikaans Museum as well. If the Boers are somehow truly part of the Cape Dutch then it would have been impossible for them to have developed their own dialect. The Boer people are from the second colony that was established at the Cape not the first colony where the Cape Dutch coalesced. The Trekboers had moved well beyond Cape Town / Stellenbosch / Franschhoek & Paarl by circa 1700. A lot of further German arrivals settled directly to the northeastern Cape frontier during the 1700s where the semi nomadic Trekboers had settled thus helping to further shape a distinct origin from the Cape Dutch. The Boer people overshadow the history simply because their outlook for wanting independence and their vast migration / trekking movements called a lot of attention and focus to them over the quieter actions of the larger Cape Dutch. This is not surprising as subjects that are loyal to the Colonial power [ like the Cape Dutch ] will not be heard about very much while those who are struggling against the Colonial power [ like the Boers ] will be taken notice of much more. This has caused a lot of people to overlook the Cape Dutch people and erroneously presume that the folks that the 20th cent. establishment called Afrikaners are all from the Boers when in reality the Boer people are the smaller segment of the political based Afrikaner coalition.

Ron7 (talk) 05:36, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

NB: The sentence above which I marked in bold cannot be upheld.. Linguists have found innumerable exambles (in all parts of the world) of parts of ethno-linguistic groups which have developed their own dialiects. -- Aflis (talk) 16:50, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Dialects often arise from groups that have moved away from an original group. Often going on to form their own ethnic identity or group. Further: most of those examples are in fact "subgroups" ie: Northern American English / Southern American English / Canadian English. European examples from France include: Occitan / Langue D'Oc & Provencal. The fact of the matter is that the Boer dialect was the result of the group that settled on the Cape frontier from a particular group of impoverished people that was cut off from the Western Cape population by circa 1700. It is not very likely that those people [ the proto Boers ] would have developed their own distinctive dialect had they remained in the Western Cape region.

Ron7 (talk) 05:31, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Oliver Ransford noted in his book The Great Trek within Chapter One that the Trekboers "formed the nucleus of a new nation". Which was a poetic way of pointing out that the Boers are distinct from the Cape Dutch & are their own nation. Studies on the concentration camps used during the second Anglo-Boer War note that the British almost wiped out an entire nation - which would have been an inaccurate claim if the Boers were part of the Cape Dutch who were not put into any concentration camps seeing as they were often HELPING the British & rounding up Boers into the concentration camps. The fact that the Cape Dutch were pro-British & that many helped the British in their atrocities against the Boers should further demonstrate that the Boers & the Cape Dutch are not the same people / nation.

Ron7 (talk) 05:31, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

This link at: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/boers.html notes that the British war against the Boers "uprooted a whole nation" thus giving explicit recognition that the Boers were a distinct nation. Otherwise if the one nation theorists were right then it would have been the uprooting of just part of a nation.

Ron7 (talk) 05:55, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

I may be wrong in this but a Boer and a Afrikaner are two different thing. A Afrikaner stayed behind in the cape when the Boere moved (after they had enough of British occupation). Culturally Afrikaners and Boere are as different as black and white, to the point where if you call a person of Boere decent a Afrikaner it would be the equivalent of calling a black person a the n word (wont use the word for obvious reasons). As a person that actually lives in South Africa I may not be 100% incline to accept the fact that the rest of the world would think that the Boer is a branch of the Afrikaner tree when its clear that the Boer and the Afrikaner are two different branches that just happened to come from the same trunk. Think it would be more correct if the page said that both Afrikaners and Boere are sub groups of the Dutch rather then saying the Boere is a sub group of Afrikaners

Sorry if I am typing this incorrectly have no idea how this page work lol — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.168.3.6 (talk • contribs) 07:04, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

That is fairly accurate but it is even more detailed than that. The Cape Dutch did not just stay behind during the Great Trek: they stayed behind during the earlier migrations of the Trekoers during the 1700s. The Trekboers were tired of the oppression they experienced under the rule of the Dutch East India Co. The Trekboers trekked up to hundreds of miles away from the Cape Dutch. Long before the arrival of the British. By the time the British arrived the Trekboers - then known as Boers - had been stopped from their natural migration trekking pattern after coming up against the Xhosa tribe of the far eastern Cape frontier. Further: the Cape Dutch were not calling themselves Afrikaners yet during the era of the Great Trek. It was not a term they started to appropriate for themselves until 1875 when a few intellectuals started a language rights group. Actually the Boers are not even from the Dutch as it was discovered that the vast majority of the so called Dutch that the VOC took to the Cape were in fact from the German minority seeking refuge in Holland [ who were originally from the north west portion of the area that comprises the modern era German state & bordering Holland. ] & also from the Frisian minority the VOC employed throughout Northern Europe. A considerable number were also from the French Huguenots who initially sought refuge in Holland. People tend to forget that the term Afrikaner is simply a political term referring to a political outlook representing a loose coalition of up to 3 different Caucasian groups established in Southern Africa that only caught on during the mid 20th cent. The term Afrikaner was aimed at consolidating at a political level the Cape Dutch with the Boers & the Anglophones. The Anglophones largely - but not entirely - opted out mainly over the stark language difference while the Boers were often susceptible to the Afrikaner Broederbond propaganda [ found within the schools / press & churches ] & distracted by the Afrikaans language they shared with the Cape Dutch albeit having different dialects. Not all the Boers were swayed though as there were always a number who insisted that they were not part of the Afrikaner & often campaigned for Boer self determination.

Ron7 (talk) 05:31, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Political

There are no scientific grounds for the believe that Afrikaners vote 82% or 85% for the Democratic Alliance (DA). The sources given are one opinion of a writers with no research referenced and the other source does not mention Afrikaners. 85% is also more then usual total participation in elections. From result it may be guessed that the DA is the strongest political party among Whites, but that is were it ends. There is some good reasons to believe that most Afrikaners don't participate in elections at all. --197.229.144.123 (talk) 09:26, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

This issue concerns me greatly, especially if there are grounds that the information is inaccurate. As far as I know we can trust Die Beeld for the purposes of this article, because otherwise most polls undertaken in SA would only calculate the political alignment of white South Africans in general. --Katangais (talk) 18:49, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Draft article about Afrikaner identity politics

I have moved my draft article about identity politics to Draft:Afrikaner identity politics, I don't have the time to really do a good job by myself so please feel free to participate in writing it. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 13:08, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Germanic or Southern African?

This is a community project, and I believe major changes to the article should be made by WP:consensus. It has been proposed that the lead be altered as such..."Afrikaners are a Southern African ethnic group..." to "Afrikaners are a Germanic ethnic group..." by an anonymous contributor. Bear in mind that in the previous revision, it was already noted that Afrikaners were a Germanic people under the first section, paragraph 1, entitled "Nomenclature". The new revision simply edits this information out of this section and moves it to the lead. I have objected on several grounds, namely:

1) The Germanic peoples article to which this links barely mentions Afrikaners, and has no information pertaining to this ethnic group whatsoever. Linking to Southern Africa firstly would be more constructive.

2) The same link is disruptive to the continuity of the paragraph. "Afrikaners are a Southern African ethnic group...descended from predominantly Dutch settlers first arriving in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries..." Take out all references to Southern Africa, and where would they be arriving?

3) This doesn't boil down to excluding one or the other, simply that only one description belongs in the lead. How do Afrikaners firstly identify? As a Germanic people, or as Africans? I think we can safely argue that it's constructive to begin the lead by introducing them to the reader as an African ethnic group. I'm sure it's what most would appreciate.

--Katangais (talk) 18:07, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

I have reverted it because it's ridiculous and an insult to Afrikaans people. NO Afrikaans person would ever call themselves "Germanic". Afrikaans is an AFRICAN language, it has European origins but that does not mean it's European. Bezuidenhout (talk) 20:38, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

The term "Germanic" is relevant to language, not ethnicity. Afrikaans (and Dutch, English, German, Flemish, etc.) is without a shadow of a doubt a Germanic language - to deny it is simply to deny obvious reality. The roots of the Afrikaner ethnicity is however more complex, non-Germanic-speaking peoples had a significant role in the formation of the Afrikaner ethnicity. Linguistics and ethnicity are separate issues, conflating them is not helpful. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 21:19, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

That's a fair point as Wallonians are ethnically Germanic but linguistically French (Romance). But my point still stands Afrikaans people are not "Germanic" people the same way those English-speaking (a Germanic language) Americans would most definitely not simply be 'Germanic'. Bezuidenhout (talk) 21:34, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

If Germanic is only relevant to language rather than ethnicity, I'm genuinely curious as to why we even have a "Germanic peoples" article on the wiki. --Katangais (talk) 21:38, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

I see the disruptive edits are continuing. The same IP I referenced earlier claims that it's improper to introduce Afrikaners as "an African ethnic group" rather than "an ethnic group in Africa", implying that they're of foreign origin. They seem to have a problem accepting that Afrikaners are Africans, and have obviously been trying to push this POV that the people are ethnic Germans from the start.

We have already agreed that Afrikaners should be introduced as an African ethnic group per above: I think we can safely argue that it's constructive to begin the lead by introducing them to the reader as an African ethnic group. I'm sure it's what most would appreciate...

I stand by that statement and hope the rest of you can concur. --Katangais (talk) 22:49, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

not simply "Africans"

we do not need the article introduce that they are african twice! they are a white european africans not "native africans" 120.50.35.122 (talk) 20:49, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

They are most definitely African. I think 400 years is long enough to be considered "native". Ask any Afrikaans person, right or left wing, and when you find one that calls themself "European" then we can have this conversation again.. Bezuidenhout (talk) 21:55, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

I don't have a problem with the African label at all, but what is a hatnote for? Wikipedia has policies, so please base your edits on that. Hatnotes should be concise, the only information in them should be to distinguish between other articles with a similar name, so that the reader knows whether or not they are in the right place. Are there non-African ethnic groups labelled Afrikaner? No, there are not. HelenOnline 06:42, 6 May 2014 (UTC)