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Talk:Afrikaners/Archive 4

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Afrikaners and Dutch

Latest comment: 8 years ago16 comments5 people in discussion

I don't really understand this discussion, or rather: the need for this discussion. It would seem like someone (Ron7) wants to push an ideological POV to separate Afrikaners from Dutch people as much as at all possible, for a narrative painting them as an oppressed people of the latter. Then there's a lot of talk of how much of the settlers were actually "Frisian", "Flemish", "(Low) German", "Danish" and whatnot, as to prove they were not "really" Dutch after all? This is wholly nonsensical to me, and to anyone who understands the historical composition of the Dutch people or any people in general. Who is to be called "Dutch" anyways? Those living within Dutch borders? Those with a Dutch nationality or even passport, which is a recent convention? Frisians are then Dutch too according to those definitions. Or you could say just 1600s "South Holland Dutch" is "originally Dutch", but many of those are descended from Flemish refugees after the Spanish took hold of the Southern Netherlands. Many North-Hollanders are in some sense naturalized Frisians, who had colonized the area earlier. Are Low Germans not Dutch in some sense? Many people in the North and East of the Netherlands traditionally speak dialects that are Low Saxon just like those across the border. Actually the word "Dutch" and "Deutsch" are cognates meaning "(of the) common people". Do we really need to go into these complexities when just giving a general impression in the introduction? Is there any reason for not saying "predominantly Dutch" other than essentially ideological ones? I mean, as soon as the Huguenots, (Low) Germans or any other immigrants adopted Dutch language and general culture, then surely they are to be regarded as Dutch in a socio-cultural, when not genetic, sense? Just like the Flemish and other refugees shortly after the creation of the Dutch Republic? Fedor (talk) 11:54, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

As an interesting side-note: I am Dutch and my paternal Grandmother is of French Huguenot origins. Many French refugees went to the Netherlands and stayed there. So this artificial differentiation between the Dutch and Afrikaner nations at that early stage is really quite absurd. Again: Much more than one's genetic heritage, it is one's adoption of and assimilation into Dutch culture and language that that makes one 'Dutch'. Fedor (talk) 13:30, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
From the latest archive to be created by the bot. I thought I would add a footnote to this discussion after being contacted by Ron again this week: it is abundantly clear that the obsession with identifying Afrikaners with one particular ethnic group or another may have gone too far, but it's hardly a phenomenon limited to Wikipedia. It's a product of Afrikaans people themselves, and South African academics at large, trying to polarise an ethnic history into neat little packages - when in fact the formation of any ethnic group is always a complicated process.
As I review the notes I have made over the course of researching this article, indeed, researching Afrikaans surnames and compiling lists of their progenitors, I suddenly made an interesting realisation. A large proportion of the Dutch population whose names came up in official records shared a common ancestral origin with the Afrikaners outside the modern Netherlands - a roughly equal percentage of Afrikaans and Dutch surnames, for example, originated from the same areas of Lower Saxony, Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig, and in the late 1600s especially France (Huguenot exiles). Yet here we are talking about Afrikaners or groups of Afrikaners being "Danish", "German", or whatnot in origin, while nobody questions that Dutch are Dutch. Before there was a unified Germany or Denmark or even a clearly demarcated Netherlands, nationality was more a means of self-identification and this is obviously representative of that. I no longer understand how or why Afrikaners are somehow paraded as an important French or German diaspora - they're no more that than today's Netherlanders.
Took me a while, but I finally understand what User:Fedor was going on about. He's 100% right. --Katangais (talk) 20:48, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
I think there is a general misunderstanding here because you have to remember that the term Dutch was originally used to describe a number of different ethnic groups within continental Europe of Germanic origin like those of German / Frisian & Netherlandic ethnic origin. This is why the Amish in the USA who are German descendents are also often called & or are said to speak Pennsylvanian Dutch. Thus in this archaic use of the term Dutch one can be technically correct in asserting that many of the various ethnic groups which were the ancestors of the Afrikaans speakers were Dutch, but in today's world the dominant understanding & interpretation of the term Dutch is reserved generally to those who are from the dominant Netherlandic ethnic group. Thus, seeing as how a lot of Germans & Frisians & French Huguenots were sent to the Cape & not just ethnic Netherlander Dutch - it would be incorrect by today's definition of the term Dutch to assert that those groups were all Dutch as we have come to understand the term Dutch. I find it disingenuous to assert that theses distinctions "make no difference" when the whole point as to why the VOC ever sent them to the Cape in the first place was due overwhelmingly to their minority ethnic status or general low social & economic status within the Netherlands. The French Huguenot refugees fled to Holland [ & elsewhere ] in order to escape Catholic persecution in France before some of them were sent to the Cape. The VOC had flooded the Frisian ancestors out of their homes in order to force them into long contracts which caused them to end up at the Cape. Those of authentic Netherlander Dutch roots were no doubt low on the social / economic ladder. The German Protestants who were sent out to the Cape were often those who had been long since seeking refuge in Holland from Catholic persecution.
The diary of Jan van Riebeeck clearly outlines how he viewed the folks he sent to the Cape therefore to assert that they were not being oppressed because they were "all Dutch" rather misses the point. Because it looks like you are confusing or are conflating Dutch sociology with Dutch ethnicity. It's a bit like saying the slaves [ whether they were White or Black ] in historical America were not oppressed because "they were all Americans". Indeed many of the German & Huguenot refugees living in Holland could in a sociological sense & certainly in a civil sense have been referred to or seen as "Dutch", having learned to speak Dutch [ often as a second language ] or adopting Dutch customs, but they would have still been of non Netherlands Dutch ethnic roots. Which is what the VOC noticed all too well because they sent those people the Cape whom they wanted to expel from the Netherlands. The people the VOC sent to the Cape were seen as ethnic minorities in the Netherlands. In today's world people would have called what the VOC had done with their deliberate targeting as a form of "ethnic cleansing" coupled with discrimination against the indigent class. So to just cavalierly assert that all these groups were "all Dutch" does not match up with how the actual Dutch ruling elite saw them despite the ironic fact that they were often listed as "Dutch" on documents... probably owing to the two tier definition of the term Dutch.
The other important thing to remember is that the Boer people in particular appear [ based on the available genealogy of the folks who lived on the Cape frontier ] to actually be mostly of [ or at certainly have a plurality of ] German origin as none other than resident Wikipedian Katangais obtained an interesting book which outlines a list of the names of the Voortrekkers - who were descended from the Trekboers of the 1700s who started the Boer people - which were [ mostly ] traced back to 3 main areas of the north western modern day German State. Thus whenever one speaks of the general Afrikaner [ which is a political term that was first used by the Oorlam before it was politicized & appropriated in 1875 at Paarl by Cape Dutch intellectuals for the purpose of promoting a pan Afrikaans language union movement ] being of Dutch descent they are generally correct as the Cape Dutch outnumber the smaller Boer people under this designation [ the term Afrikaner was also applied to the Anglophones as well by politicians from the late 19th cent up to the 1930s ]... but the actual Boer people [ the folks of Trekboer descent ] themselves are in fact not "mostly" of Dutch origin. This makes perfect sense since the Trekboers got started from the poorest members of the fledgling Cape Colonial society who were often from the various ethnic groups who were not of Netherlands Dutch origin. Therefore the modern day use of the term Dutch would not be a sufficient term to describe the true ancestors of the Boer people in particular.
Ron7 (talk) 16:15, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
While I cannot question what my own research has told me regarding the respective origins of the Boer/Cape Dutch subgroups, I will point out that I tracked a lot of the surnames mentioned in Dutch civil courts at the time (1652-1691) from Amsterdam to the same three areas of modern Germany where most of the Boer progenitors came from. It proves that either people who immigrated from these areas at some point, or their descendants, were well represented in the Netherlands' population and presumably still are today. After all, even if the assertions about the Dutch trying to get rid of as many of them as possible were true only a minority ended up in South Africa with the VOC. Isn't it logical that most of them remained in Holland and are still there today (in which case, they would be indistinguishable from other Dutch)?
I only object to referring to Afrikaners as a significant German or French diaspora in any meaningful sense of the word. They adopted Holland's language, religion and culture, and became assimilated: just as they did in Europe.
@Fedor: the research Ron and I have mentioned above was an extensive study of Afrikaner families to locate where their ancestors originated. A book of Voortrekker names and an index of European families at the Cape was used to calculate roughly which percentage of the progenitors came from where. Initially the figures look to be about equal from several areas but if you combine all the states which now equate to modern Germany most of the Voortrekkers seem to have ancestors from Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig, and Lower Saxony. A lot of them were speaking Frisian dialects.
But as I just mentioned it's hardly a phenomenon unique to Afrikaners. If the names on Amsterdam's court registers (several of which are freely available on Google Books) is anything to go by, many Dutch also had ancestors who came from these places. --Katangais (talk) 23:20, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
There is no disputing at all that many of the German Protestants / Frisians & French Huguenots who fled to Holland have descendents who are still there today & are fully assimilated into the Dutch people & culture. I have never disputed this. The various surnames still there is evidence of this. But it is important to remember that the time frame that we are talking about here was back when they were still fairly new to the region & were thus not as assimilated nor considered as integral to the Dutch culture as they are today. I would have thought that this would have been most obvious. For example: There are a lot of Americans with German surnames who are fully integrated as Americans today but who were originally part of a German speaking group at first. Just because the VOC did not manage to get rid of all of their ethnic minorities it does not negate nor dispel the original intent of shipping them out. A lot of other countries around the world have tried to get rid of their ethnic minorities under various schemes yet much of those ethnic minorities still exist within the various regions or have been somewhat assimilated into the dominant cultural group so your argument that the VOC did not get rid of all of them does not dispel the original intent. Remember that most of the people sent to the Cape actually went back to Holland if they could after their contracts were up so the numbers they initially sent were a lot larger than the numbers of those who remained. Do not forget also that they did not just send their minorities to the Cape as many were also sent to Indonesia or India & elsewhere. The point is that during the time frame when the various ethnic groups were expelled from Holland they were still discernibly distinct from the majority Dutch ethnic group.
I have no idea where this diaspora assertion is coming from as I have never said that the various White Afrikaans speakers were a diaspora of any group. In fact the whole point to why I ever chimed in concerning this topic in the first place was over the one dimensional assertion that they were allegedly "mostly" of Dutch origin. The whole point as to why I ever mentioned the other significant ethnic roots was specifically to point out that they are not a Dutch diaspora. I personally have always noted that the various White Afrikaans speakers were the result of an amalgamation of the various ethnicities that the VOC dropped off at the Cape during the mid to late 17th cent. So I have never promoted the "diaspora" theory at all since the White Afrikaans people are the result of an amalgamation process among many different ethnicities which all took place on African soil. So I am not sure why this particular / peculiar & erroneous notion is being directed towards myself. Even if the hypothesis that the Cape Dutch are "mostly of Dutch origin" or that the Boer people are "mostly of German origin" I would still not call either of them a diaspora of the Dutch or German people[s] simply because both Cape Dutch & Boer groups amalgamated with significant numbers of French Huguenot & other groups & the fact that they strayed from the culture of their ancestors after creating their own homegrown culture & customs on African soil.
No. The ancestors of the White Afrikaans speakers did not even adopt Holland's language. This appears to be a common misunderstanding due to the fact that the official - re: imposed - language of the Cape was Dutch at a nominal level. The various Dutch dialects that the first arrivals spoke was lost as it lost out to the emerging vernacular which was developing at the Cape. What we today now call Afrikaans but was often just called the "taal" in the past. Numerous Afrikaans dialects flourished in the past but today only a few remain. IE: West Cape Afrikaans / Orange River Afrikaans [ the dialect of the San & Griquas ] / Eastern Border Afrikaans [ the dialect of the Boers ] / & Kaaps [ the dialect of the Cape Coloureds. ] The language that the ancestors of the White Afrikaans speakers adopted was the vernacular that developed on African soil from the various peoples that developed there under the aegis of the VOC. Professor Wallace Mills noted this explicitly also noting that the official Dutch that was used in the Church & for State purposes had to be learned later. Though many never even bothered to learn very much of the official Dutch. [ Note: This is why Afrikaans was made an official language in 1925 formally replacing the Dutch that was largely ignored by the masses. Also: Afrikaans was promoted to official status to offset the growing predominance of English in official spheres as it was feared the Afrikaans speakers would abandon Afrikaans & become Anglophones ] Thereby demonstrating that the local White Afrikaans speakers had never adopted Dutch. Authors have routinely noted that there is very little about the Boers' culture & language that can be attributed to Dutch roots. The emerging Cape Dutch & Boer peoples preferred speaking the vernacular of the Cape simply because this was the language that was transmitted to them since childhood via the nannies / educators & caretakers that looked after them. It proved to be very hard to try to get the Afrikaans speakers to adopt Dutch much to the chagrin of the Cape administration. No. The White Afrikaans speakers at the Cape never adopted Holland's religion nor culture. The religion they adopted was often from the French Huguenots - as their Calvinist faith that they fled France over had the largest impact on the new settlement - as well as an indigenous homegrown belief system of Malay origin [ Professor André Du Toit noted this ] that was largely lost after the second Anglo-Boer War.
Ron7 (talk) 16:04, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
I wasn't directing the French and German diaspora thing specifically at you, Ron. But what ticked me was the fact that until a few months ago somebody kept adding those two templates to the article and including them as related ethnic groups, which is what I was addressing. There is a line we have to draw between describing Afrikaners as "French", "German", "Dutch" or whatever and simply elaborating on their roots. There can be no question that the various groups in SA have developed unique identities of their own.
I understand there wasn't a completed Afrikaans Bible until the twentieth century. So it's logical that even most of the Boers learned to read and write by Holland Dutch, even if they weren't speaking it. In fact, one of the main reasons the Afrikaans Bible was proposed in 1872 was because the gulf between spoken Afrikaans and written Dutch had simply become too wide for understanding their Scripture. Furthermore, it is a little known fact that Dutch was still taught in Cape schools until 1914, and upper-crust whites could speak it fluently in high society. Some of the Cape Dutch apparently regarded Afrikaans as much a "crude patois" as many of the English.
I'm from Malaysia and have been raised among Malays of every imaginable religious background, including many Christians. Forgive me if I fail to note the resemblance between their faith and anything I encountered in South Africa. I'm not even going to address your assertion that the majority of white Afrikaans speakers adopted the beliefs of the Huguenots without seeing multiple sources to back it up. If you can give me those in written form, I'll gladly revise the article to reflect it. I have a feeling that's news to most of us here on Wikipedia! --Katangais (talk) 16:45, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
There seems to be a complex debate going on as to what constitutes a related ethnic group. I can see how the Dutch / French & German peoples can be seen as related ethnic groups in the aggregate to the Afrikaans speakers - seeing as how the Boer & Cape Dutch ethnic groups are based on & related to those groups. It appears that you are promoting a very strict criteria because I have no problem with the notion that the above mentioned are related ethnic groups. As I noted: the Afrikaans speakers are not a Dutch / French or German people[s] as they developed into distinct peoples, but the Dutch / French & German people could certainly be seen as related.
As I noted Professor Wallace Mills pointed out that Dutch had to be learned later in order to perform Church & State duties, but not everyone did learn Dutch. Consequently many Boers prior to the 20th cent never learned to read or write much outside of those who studied the Bible. The Malays that Professor André Du Toit was referring to would have been the Malays from Indonesia - not Malaysia & the Cape Malays in particular. Furthermore I pointed out that that particular old faith has largely disappeared & has long since been supplanted by the Christian faith. You were erroneously asserting that they adopted Holland's religion when in reality the original Afrikaans speaking inhabitants had adopted a homegrown faith system that was based in part on the religion of the Cape Malays but was often hidden by the Church establishment & had since largely disappeared after the second Anglo-Boer War. Remember not all Boers were practicing Christians, some were practicing this alternative Cape Malay derived faith, & some were not religious at all.
Now it is obvious that among the Christian segment that the belief of the Huguenots played a very strong & dominant role in the Calvinist faith espoused by many Boers & Cape Dutch since the Huguenots were the strongest adherents of the Calvinist faith that was brought to the Cape & was compatible with the Calvinist & Protestant [ milquetoast by comparison to the hard core Huguenots ] faith that many of the other inhabitants [ who would later amalgamate with the Huguenots ] of the region were practicing. The following from the paper: Christianity in Central Southern Africa Prior to 1910 from Professor Irving Hexham is what he had discovered on the topic.
Quote: [ TRADITIONAL BOER RELIGION AND SOCIETY. ]
[ The argument that Calvinism played a central role in Boer society, from the earliest settlement at the Cape to the present has an initial plausibility, but a growing number of scholars believe this interpretation lacks evidence.[47] To date, the best discussion of an alternate interpretation is found in the works of André du Toit who argues that before the late nineteenth-century frontier Boers were not noted for their religiosity.[48] I myself also have developed this view, suggesting that identification of Afrikaners with Calvinism did not take firm hold until after the horrors of the Second-Anglo Boer war.[49] ]
[ In her classic work, The Story of an African Farm,[56] one gains an impression of the daily life and thought of the Boers as a people living close to nature and far from established religion. A central feature of these beliefs concerned folk medicine and ideas about spiritual healing, from faith healing to herbal remedies and sympathetic magic. Kruger's autobiography told how at a shooting accident in which he amputated his thumb: the wound healed very slowly...gangrene set in...black marks rose as far as the shoulder. Then they killed a goat, took out the stomach, and cut it open. I put my hand into it while it was still warm. This Boer remedy succeeded...[57] He noted that the goats grazed on a river bank where many herbs grew. This he thought explained the success of the cure. ]
[ Probably the most important and widespread traditional religious beliefs was the belief in second sight or the gift of prophecy, usually attributed to individuals born with a caul who were thought to possess extraordinary psychic powers. Such people were said to be able to foresee droughts and disasters as well as weddings and births. Telepathic gifts were also attributed to certain farm people. One prominent professor emeritus told me that, in 1909, he had witnessed a fellow student communicating with his brother by telepathy over several hundred miles. The brothers had an agreement that after lunch every Sunday they would walk out into the veld, sit under a tree and seek to establish telepathic contact. In this way the student said he learned of doings at home far quicker than by letter.[69] Such a gift, the professor maintained, had been common among country people in his youth although few urban Afrikaners he said possessed the gift of telepathy today. ]
[ The best known example of a man born with the caul is Nicholaas van Rensburg, the "prophet" of Lichtenburg. Van Rensburg is said to have had his first "vision" at the age of seven in 1869, when he assured his mother that she need not fear an attack by local Africans during her husband's absence. He gained his reputation as a "seer" during the second Anglo-Boer War, credited with warning commandoes of approaching British troops, and with having a vision in which he saw "The Red Bull wounded and defeated." This vision was held to predict General de la Rey's victory over British troops at the battle of Tweebos on 7 March 1902.[70] ]
[ Sometimes, as in the writings of Herman Charles Bosman Afrikaner ghost stories, have definite religious connotations, their background often African beliefs about the ancestors or beliefs of Malay origin derived from an Islamic culture where the jinn, that is the spirits, are a living reality. Many such stories warn of impending death or the activities of malevolent spirits.[74] ]
[ Although some Afrikaners apparently believed in tree, water, and air spirits, none I talked to said they did. Some did say they had known people who held these beliefs and who took magical precautions to protect themselves from the spirits. ]
[ [57] Paul Kruger, translated by A. Teixeira de Mattos, The Memoirs of Paul Kruger: Four Times President of the South African Republic. Told by Himself, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1902, p. 37. ]
[ [58] I was given a very detailed account of these cures by a medical doctor whom I interviewed in 1971. At that time he was in his early 70's and still practising medicine on a part-time basis. His parents were very prominent Afrikaners as are his children and sons-in-law. Therefore, he asked me to use a pseudonym, Dr. van Coy. His mother had been a traditional healer and he practised homeopathic healing alongside allopathic medicine. In answering my questions about traditional Afrikaner folk beliefs and folk medicine he was very careful to distinguish between beliefs and practices which his mother had used or said were used prior to the Second-Anglo Boer War and the development of medical practices throughout this century. Because of his own interest in the history of medicine and homeopathy he had kept meticulous records of conversations with his mother. ]
[ [62] ibid, p. 117. Frack is deliberately vague when writes about a small town he calls "Helfontein." Dates and anything which might identify people or the community are omitted. Nevertheless he appears to be talking about the Transvaal in the early part of this century. ]
[ [64] Frack, 1942, p. 126. Numerous entries in the archives of the Gereformeerde Kerk prior to 1910 involve Afrikaners who were censured by the local Church Council for consulting "Malay doctors," "Slamaaiers," etc. ]
[ [75] In 1981 I interviewed an Afrikaner woman who was 93 years old and still living alone who clearly held many of these beliefs although she acknowledged that she would never mention them to her predicant. ] End of quoted excerpted text.
I added some of the notes found on Hexham's page as he made further points on the topic.
Ron7 (talk) 19:03, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
Regarding the criteria, Ron, I feel that a certain degree of control needs to be exercised because the fact remains that Afrikaners have progenitors from literally dozens of European nationalities - not even counting their African and Asian ancestors. Off the top of my head I can recall two Danish fiefdoms, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, five German states excluding Austria, two provinces of France, both distinct regions of Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Scotland, Wales, Poland-Lithuania, and England being represented. Instead of denoting all white Afrikaans people as being "that group that developed in Africa from Danish-Swedish-Norwegian-Dutch-German-Austrian-French-Flemish-Walloon-Luxembourgish-Swiss-Italian-Spanish-Portuguese-Scottish-Welsh-Polish-English settlers, plus a number of Indian, Malay, Bantu, and Khoisan slaves" it's so much easier to just state: "descendants of predominantly Dutch settlers who lived in a colony of the Dutch East India Company and adopted Afrikaans as their mother tongue". And we can argue that it is in fact an accurate statement. The contributions by the other groups, especially the Huguenots and Germans, can be noted but Afrikaners by no means represent a French or German diaspora culturally or otherwise. Actually I dislike giving Afrikaners any kind of European label because in my experience that tends to feed the racial divide, ie suggesting they are somehow Germans or Dutch or French and not Africans! However, at least with the Netherlands you can argue that they have been historically associated with that nation and most of their progenitors are in fact Dutch.
Whatever our different perceptions on the ancestry and cultural perceptions of Afrikaans people, it seems we both agree that the article needs to emphasize their presence in Africa as Africans - albeit white Africans - rather than any European ties which have mostly been forgotten. Hence, my growing desire to limit the amount of unneeded ethnic "labeling".
The cites you provided on Malay beliefs were most helpful; I'll add the relevant information to Afrikaner Calvinism. --Katangais (talk) 19:23, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
Well no one is saying that you have to include every single ancestral group in the opening paragraph, but I still think that only mentioning the Dutch roots is rather incomplete considering how strong & notable the German & Huguenot roots are. Most of the time whenever I read something on the White Afrikaans speakers, they very often note that they are of Dutch / French Huguenot & German origin as those 3 groups appear to be their most numerous & significant ancestral origin. I rarely read that they are only of Dutch descent. The preponderance of German & Huguenot surnames are a notable testament to this fact. Even many first names of German & French origin are quite popular among the White Afrikaans speakers. Authors like Oliver Ransford made specific mention of the Huguenot influence which was said to be quite discernible within the comportment among notable personalities like Piet Retief & even the later General Piet Joubert. The White Afrikaans speaking peoples would clearly not have been quite the same if they were only of Dutch descent. That is the reason why I think that the opening paragraph should mention the other two significant ancestral groups because evidence clearly shows they had a significant impact upon the shaping of both the Cape Dutch group as well as the Boer population.
Ron7 (talk) 17:15, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
The first paragraph as well as the front page listing the notable personalities that are claimed to be associated with this macro language based grouping even totally vindicates my valid point on this topic because most of the names listed there are not even of Dutch origin which appears to counter the assertion of the first paragraph. For example: the first paragraph asserts that the names Botha & Pretorius are common surnames of this supposedly "mostly Dutch descended" macro grouping... yet both of those surnames are conclusively proven to be in fact of German origin. Within the notable personalities box [ one of whom was actually a Boer ie: President Paul Kruger of the ZAR who lived in an era before the Afrikaner co-option of the smaller Boer people ] it features the following surnames that are not of Dutch origin: The Kruger surname is of German origin. The Hertzog surname is of German origin. The de Klerk surname is of French Huguenot origin & was originally spelled Le Clerc [ Bernard Lugan noted this in the book he authored on the topic ] The Coetzee surname is of either German or French Huguenot origin [ from Cordier according to Bernard Lugan ] the Theron surname is of French Huguenot origin. Therefore MOST of the surnames featured or highlighted within the article actually NEGATES the initial premise concerning the article thereby demonstrating an inherent dissonance & contradiction.
Ron7 (talk) 19:07, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
My username was recently changed from User:Fedor to User:Amphioxys, so please take note that I am still the same person here. I have not made research to the impressive degree as User:Katangais and User:Ron7 did, so my analysis is limited in scope and more intuitive in nature. However, I do get the distinct impression that Ron7 is using original research to promote a very strong POV. And this is the very same POV that I hear resounding among Afrikaner nationalists who have a desire to distance themselves from their Dutch ancestral past as much as possible. Having said that, there may be reason to mention French Huguenot and German ancestry due to their second and third level prominence after Dutch, but as Katangais already eloquently pointed out, then you run into all kinds of problems, if you want to be consistent. As I already pointed out myself, many nations, even original European ones, have been subject to immigration and redrawing of borders. An enormous component of urban Dutch descend from Flemish, French, German, Jewish and other early immigrants. There are many Dutch surnames of French, German origin. Should all these component peoples also be mentioned in the article on Dutch people? Eastern Dutch people, speaking Low Saxon dialects, have ethnically and linguistically more in common with Germans on the other side of the border, or the other way around. You get into an enormous morass with this line of thinking. I am Dutch living in Denmark. My children are raised in Denmark and speak Danish more fluently than their ancestral Dutch. Up-following generations will be fully assimilated and Danish anyway. Why would this be any different for the immigrants coming to a Dutch administered Cape?
Clearly, you need to keep it a bit simple as to not arrive at hardly tenable positions. Lumping all these immigrant peoples into a predominantly "Dutch" nation on African soil may simply be the most straightforward and true. What's more, for many centuries Afrikaans-speaking whites did collectively identify as "South African Dutch" even long after the Cape Colony was lost to the British. Abhorring British rule and the imposition of English, those that left the Cape retained Dutch as administrative and clerical language in the newly erected Boer states. Now why would a people do that, unless they were effectively assimilated into some notion of being ethnically "Dutch" or "South African Dutch" at the very least? The identification of German and French elements seems to be a phenomenon of the 20th century, where strong local nationalism was being promoted, but I may be wrong about that. Still, it all seems to be spun according to convenience anyway. For example last year the far right group "Front Nasionaal" presented a land claim very clearly presenting themselves as "[...] the natural descendants of the Dutch South African nation, commonly known as the Afrikaner or Boer." Apparently, even extremist ethnic nationalists like this have no qualms of calling themselves "Dutch" if it suits their agenda... Amphioxys (talk) 13:49, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
I am astounded at what lengths some people go to in trying to over complicate such a simple matter. No I am not using so called "original research" because it is a documented fact that the Afrikaans speaking peoples among the White population have significant German & French Huguenot roots & no this was not discovered nor first noted in the 20th century but has been known ever since the German & French Huguenot refugees arrived at the Cape. There is countless documentation noting the German & French Huguenot roots of the Afrikaans speaking population. Just look at the preponderance of German & Huguenot surnames. If you ever read anything I wrote, you would know that I am opposed to & disagree with the ideology espoused under the dispossessing rubric of so called Afrikaner Nationalism which dispossessed & co-opted the smaller Boer people in particular in the decades following the second Anglo-Boer War. Following the war the Boer people were too impoverished & politically marginalized to resist the political ascendancy of the so called Afrikaner: an amorphous term that the politicians & rulers used to describe the macro & heterogeneous local White population which consisted of: the Cape Dutch, the Anglophones & the smaller Boer people whose history the rulers hijacked to rationalize their usurpation to power.
The Afrikaner academics actually do not distance themselves at all from the Dutch roots. Once again you are forgetting that when the German & French Huguenot refugees arrived at the Cape: they were not yet amalgamated with the so called Dutch thus the relevance of the German & French Huguenot roots should be self evident. It is not as though they were fully assimilated into the so called Dutch before they arrived at the Cape. The Cape Dutch [ ie: the folks who coalesced in & around Cape Town ] could certainly be considered "a Dutch nation on African soil" of sorts as they never broke ties to Europe & were always loyal to the Dutch [ then later British ] Colonial power. BUT the Boer people [ ie: the impoverished nomadic folks who arose on the Cape frontier during the 1700s ] on the other hand cannot be legitimately considered a "Dutch nation on African soil" as they broke all ties to Holland in particular & to Europe in general well very early on & were very anti-colonial often resisting any form of Colonial control & are mostly descended from the German arrivals [ though Katangais asserts that the Cape Dutch are also largely descended from the German arrivals ] & in the process created a new dialect [ & culture ] that was based on the lingua franca used at the Cape that was started by the mixed race peoples who were influenced by a Dutch dialect as well as Malay & Portuguese. The Boers resisted Dutch rule on the Cape frontier in 1795 when they declared their first but short lived Boer Republics in the Swellendam & Graaff-Reinet districts. Furthermore Katangais already pointed out that most of the White arrivals at the Cape can actually be traced back to the north western region where the German state exists now.
The term "South African Dutch" was just an intellectually lazy classification used by the rulers who had a political agenda in denying the homegrown nature of the local population & of Boer people in particular. The author James Morris called the Boer people "indigenous" to Africa. A pertinent fact that was a threat to the Colonial power who struggled to control the Boers in particular. Furthermore: the term "Dutch" was used in the archaic sense as a term referring to Germanic peoples. Thus the term "Dutch" was also used to describe German people as well. The Netherlands Dutch people are also part of the Germanic people but today only they are considered Dutch as the term Dutch is no longer applied to German people as it once was in the past. The official language of the Boer Republics was called "Dutch" simply because there was no written form of Boeretaal nor even of macro Afrikaans at all back then. The literate Boers were forced to write in Dutch [ many also opted for English ] but the actual spoken language was not Dutch at all but was what would later be called Afrikaans. During the 19th cent: the Boer people of the Boer Republics were getting back in touch with the Netherlands in their struggle to resist British Colonialism - so there was a POLITICAL reason why the alleged Dutch aspect of their roots was talked up or promoted. To get Dutch support. The Boer Republics were isolated & up against the most powerful Colonial power.
The Transvaal Republic in particular relied on numerous actual Dutch [ folks straight from the Netherlands ] people as part of the official Transvaal Republic / ZAR government. This was done because President Paul Kruger did not want too many folks from the Cape Dutch population in his government as he rightly viewed them as too pro British. The Dutch Reverend Dirk van der Hoff had a strong influence on the fledgling Transvaal Republic leaving a slight Dutch imprint but that does not mean that the actual Boer people were themselves Dutch or even of Dutch origin. The author George Lacy rightly noted in 1900 in print in Some Boer Characteristics that the Boers are not Dutch in descent, language nor manner of life. I put no stock in any claims that extremist organizations have to say about anything particularly when they are deliberately conflating the Boer with the Afrikaner [ a political term that relates to & is dominated by the Cape Dutch ] so their promotion of the so called Dutch roots is obviously designed to obscure the true roots of the smaller & marginalized Boer people who are the actual ones who have a legitimate land claim & right to self determination. The Afrikaners [ the Cape Dutch ] were aiding the British during the second Anglo-Boer War helping to round up the Boer civilians into the concentration camps so they played a massive role in the conquest of the Boer Republics which the Afrikaner establishment prevented from being restored during the 20th cent & to which they still work against being restored.
Ron7 (talk) 22:34, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Getting back to the original meat of this topic: as Ron mentioned, I did do some research on specific genetic roots and found the largest percentage of Afrikaans surnames among the Voortrekkers originated from what is today part of northern "Germany" - I dislike using the term in this context, since there wasn't a Germany back then - in a region called Schleswig. Which incidentally, flew a flag very similar to that of the Netherlands. Ron says many of them were Frisians, too, but on that I have no comment: it was three hundred years ago; I can't confirm their specific ethnic background, just the geographic region they came from.

It therefore isn't too much of a stretch to say most Boer family names are "German". That being said, if you consider all Afrikaans surnames, an overwhelming majority of these had at least one Dutch progenitor, usually from the South Holland region where Amsterdam is. Ron and I agreed this was most likely because the greater Cape Dutch segment outnumbered the more specific Boer community from which the Voortrekkers came. Back in the days of the Great Trek, white Afrikaans people were far less monolithic in outlook and political interest than they are today, hence the distinction between Cape Dutch and Boer - see Cecil Rhodes and the Cape Afrikaners for details on how the so-called "Cape Dutch" developed a nationalist movement of their own entirely separate from that of say, the trekkers'.

It all depends on how one wants to look at it: are Boers and Cape Dutch separate ethnic groups? Ron7 thinks so. If that's the case, you're trying to separate the muddled genealogy of what you perceive to be two related but distinct communities. On the flip side if you want to just flat out ask me, "of the three million odd Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans, where did the biggest percentage of male and female progenitors come from?" I'd have to answer "Holland". A separate question might be, "how many Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans have some German/Huguenot ancestry?" I'd have to answer "probably 95%". Because intermarriage. Even if you break them down into Cape Dutch and Boer, both of those groups have a certain degree of Dutch, Huguenot, "German", and other European ancestry. They all intermarried, had children, and forgot about their differences a long time ago - part of the reason being there were only 77 Huguenot and 65 other European women at the Cape between 1657 and 1806, as compared to the female Hollanders who numbered over 300 (see Moritz's Die Deutschen am Kap). First rule of thumb when you're studying modern South African genealogy: everybody's a little bit of something.

Now, I imagine Dutch genealogy looks the same way, and the modern person in the Netherlands is as Amphioxys has pointed out, less monolithic than they were three hundred years ago much like South Africans. If we are debating whether the early whites at the Cape can be considered Dutch because of their cultural and linguistic ties as a group to Holland, I'd say they were certainly Dutch subjects and identified accordingly as "Dutch" by others, including the British and the slaves. Whether they self-identified as Dutch or not probably depends on the semantics: the Boers who lived on the frontier certainly hated VOC rule, were fiercely republican, and had a more independent identity than the Cape burghers.

But as I've mentioned this is all historical semantics, and I have a feeling it belongs on the page about Afrikaner identity politics as opposed to Afrikaners themselves. I'd suggest we take this discussion there in the future. --Katangais (talk) 04:25, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Just on the specific point of the Frisians: the names of most of the "German" ancestors indicate their language were variants of "Lower German" dialects, spoken in what is today Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, and parts of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.. Now, Frisian ist not a German dialect, but classified as a language of its own - although related to German, Dutch, and English. Anyway, the Frisian population (living on the Dutch and German islands and the bordering coastal strip) was never very numerous. Aflis (talk) 09:47, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
Once again I defer to Katangais' wisdom in this matter, but I would like to nitpick on a few things stated by Ron7. No one is denying the significant German and French Huguenot roots of the white Afrikaner people, but disentangling this legacy into a distinct lineages for claiming that one subset (Boers?) is more German/French than the other subset (Cape Dutch) and therefore should be considered separate is arbitrary to say the least. I call "original research" on this one, because we have not been presented with any scientific consensus on this claim.
Ron7 also tries to respond to the fact that the official language of the Boer Republics was Dutch, by stating that "there was no written form of Boeretaal [...] at all back then" and that "The literate Boers were forced to write in Dutch". This is no different at all from the situation in the Netherlands, Belgium or any other country in Europe for that matter, with regards to what are generally considered "dialects". Of course, you could always make that case that such or some linguistic variety is so special that it deserve a separate status, as well as sometimes its people speaking it. But again such a qualification is more than often subjective and arbitrary.
It again depends on how people self-identify and up until the start of the 20th century at least, Afrikaner peoples have identified as South African Dutch as reflected by the chosen official language. If significant amounts of people had objected to this, surely we would have heard of it. But the Boers opted for consolidation and thus for assimilation. Even in the early constitution of the South African Republic, Afrikaans and Dutch were treated as equivalents up until the eighties, where apartheid and cultural boycot definitely cut the ties between the Dutch and the Afrikaners, whereas lexically and linguistically the languages are no more deviant than what are generally considered dialects. Amphioxys (talk) 10:36, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Genetics for ethnic groups RfC

Latest comment: 8 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

For editors interested, there's an RfC currently being held: Should sections on genetics be removed from pages on ethnic groups?. As this will almost certainly result in the removal of the "genealogy" section from this article, I'd encourage any contributors to voice their opinions there. --Katangais (talk) 20:04, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

"Germanics" or "Southern Africans"?

Latest comment: 8 years ago12 comments4 people in discussion

Those of you long term editors of this article are aware that we've broached this topic on more than one occasion in the past -- namely, the erroneous description of white Afrikaans people first and foremost as "a Germanic ethnic group in Southern Africa" rather than a true "Southern African ethnic group". In the past, the former was favoured by Germanphiles who liked deleting all references to Afrikaners as Africans in the article and trying to place an undue emphasis on the fact that most of their ancestors came from somewhere in Northern Europe three hundred years ago.

The fact remains that Afrikaners came to be in Southern Africa and frankly I'm sick and tired of having to explain this every year to editors that want to place an undue emphasis on a strictly European identity and/or ancestry before describing them as Africans. Is it no longer acceptable to simply describe Afrikaners as Africans? We've already compiled a very detailed section on their genealogy below if anybody wants to determine how "Germanic" the pedigree is.

This happens so consistently that I going to propose adding a template to the top of the page specifically requesting that editors refrain from adding terms such as "European", "Eurocentric", or "Germanic" to that first sentence of the lead. It's time something was done to block what I perceive as over-racialist fringe editing. --Katangais (talk) 19:34, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Again, we've had this discussion before. The consensus, especially from South African editors, was clear. --Katangais (talk) 19:37, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
A central problem with this article is . and apparently has been since the beginning - the fact that many editors are carried away by emotions, in one direction or another. This may be understandable, but does not help to arrive at a sober analysis. Example: why on earth doesn't everybody recognize that any sovial group can belong (and generally does belong) to more than one category? In this case: what is the problem in labeling the Afrikaners as a social group of Germanic origin which has become African? With the excption of the Khoisan, the social groups composed of people with black skin are both of Bantu origin and Africans. NB: This reasoning if, og course, about classification on the basis of objective criteria. Reasoning on the level of social identity would be an animal of a different species. Aflis (talk) 18:43, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
The issue is not describing the Afrikaners as also being a group of Germanic origin, but rather the wording of one sentence in the lead. Note that the first paragraph of the article text also describes their "Germanic" origins. However, I take issue with the fact that once every few months somebody describes them in that lead sentence as "Germanic group in Africa" (frankly, fringe and favored by white supremacists among others) as opposed to "African ethnic group" (generally accepted). Certainly, most Afrikaans people would identify first as Africans, including South Africans so we should likewise introduce them to the reader as such. There's nothing wrong with also mentioning the group's Germanic origins but that information is secondary and indeed, already does appear elsewhere in the article. --Katangais (talk) 13:14, 26 April 2016 (UTC)
One major question in all this is how to define "African", and linked to this, whether belonging to this category is more important (or less important) than belonging to a given ethnic/racial/linguistic/cultural group. The latter question can, of course, be answered only in terms of the salience of the respective social identities. In other words, it has to be answered through empirical research. Aflis (talk) 14:36, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

The simple fact is that that Afrikaners are a Germanic tribe. They are a tribe that exists in Africa, but that does not make them any less Germanic. If one looks at the wiki pages for other groups in South Africa, the Xhosa people are referred to as "a Bantu ethnic group in Southern Africa", the Zulu are referred to as "a Bantu ethnic group of Southern Africa", the Sotho are referred to as "a Bantu ethnic group whose ancestors have lived in southern Africa." Not a single on of those pages describe them as a southern African ethnic group, they all refer to them as a Bantu ethnic group in Southern Africa. I believe that it would be wrong to move away from what appears to be a standard and workable way of describing ethnic groups Taking what appears to be the standard, the lead should contain the phrase that "Afrikaners are a Germanic peoples ethnic group in Southern Africa" or "Afrikaners are a Germanic peoples ethnic group of Southern Africa" --DSBennie (talk) 07:03, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Just one remark: international discussions in African Studies, involving historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, have - almost two decades ago - come to the conclusion that the term "tribe", and the underlying image of a given people, do not fit the way societies are in fact organized in Africa. Wikipedia should of course take this into account. Aflis (talk) 15:07, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
@DSBennie ~ As long as we're discussing precedents, Afrikaners, along with other ethnic groups of European, Arab, or Asian ancestry in Africa are not typically described in Wikipedia in terms of tribes, as are the Bantu and Nilotic peoples. See, for instance, British diaspora in Africa, Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa, and Pied-Noir. We don't describe the former as an "Anglo-Saxon ethnic group in Africa", but as "white Africans of British descent who live in or come from sub-Saharan Africa". Similarly, those of Indian descent in Africa are denoted as "people of Indian origin" rather than a "Dravidian ethnic group in Africa", despite their predominant roots in the southern part of that subcontinent. These openings reflect how each community self-identifies and also sets the tone for the rest of the article by clarifying that the readership is being presented with a page on an African ethnic group as opposed to one merely residing there. --Katangais (talk) 17:02, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
This is just to clarify that any use of "tribe" is today olsfashioned, and scientifically inadequate. Aflis (talk) 10:07, 28 April 2016 (UTC)
The term "Germanic" refers to a group of related languages, not tribes or peoples or nations, etc. English is a Germanic language too, so unless the contributors who insist on including "Germanic" in the opening sentence are actually claiming that English-speaking South Africans are also Afrikaners it simply makes no sense to include the term. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:21, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

@Roger (Dodger67), You are factually incorrect, as Germanic can also refer to Germanic peoples who are all ethnic groups who have one of the Germanic languages as their mother tongue. There are multiple Germanic peoples, and referring to the term Afrikaner as referring to a specific Germanic people in the entomology section is indeed correct, and does not preclude the existence of other Germanic peoples in southern Africa. Removing that sentence from the entomology section makes no sense, especially since the main differentiation between the white ethnic groups within southern Africa is based on language. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DSBennie (talk • contribs) 19:33, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Prior discussions

For those that are interested, you can find three relevant discussions on this topic at Talk:Afrikaner/Archive 3. The previous talk page discussion established several precedents:

  • 1. Firstly, it would be incorrect to introduce Afrikaners in any way which suggests an explicit group identification with either Europe or Africa, per NPOV. However, it is acceptable to describe them as a "Southern African ethnic group" due to the statement's general neutrality; it does not imply they are either a) indigenous or b) foreign expatriates, but allows the readership to come to its own conclusion. That region simply happens to be where the community was formed.
  • 2. Use of "Germanic" is inappropriate in the lead due to controversial nature of the Afrikaner identity politics already mentioned above. Bezuidenhout described the term as pejorative in this context. Dodger67 also made the astute observation that Afrikaners are not a strictly Germanic group as a number of non-Germanic people's were instrumental in their formation.
  • 3. HelenOnline stated that "Southern African ethnic group" is more appropriate than "ethnic group in Southern Africa" as the latter overlooks the million or so white Saffies, including many Afrikaners, living in the diaspora abroad.

The case was decided on RfC and the conclusions reached resulted in the current lead being retained.

Thanks, --Katangais (talk) 17:37, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

External links modified

Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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United States, Canada and the United Kingdom?

Latest comment: 6 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

The infobox on the current article is missing figures for the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Many South Africans emigrated to Australia and New Zealand, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to suggest that they also emigrated to other countries in the Anglosphere. 2601:8C:4102:1210:651A:285A:DAB:5AD5 (talk) 10:07, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Yes, but the overwhelming majority of the South African emigrants to these countries are English-speaking (incidentally, white English speakers are also very disproportionately represented among South African emigrants in general). Granted, a number are also Afrikaners, but it gets more confusing when you remember that many white Saffies speak both English and Afrikaans, and are likely to list the two languages as languages they speak on census documents. Unless the local census collects specific data on the number of those white Saffie immigrants to the US/Canada/UK that explicitly identify as "Afrikaners", or explicitly state their first language/mother tongue as Afrikaans, there is no way to determine how many Afrikaners are actually residing in these countries. --Katangais (talk) 20:31, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Religion

Latest comment: 6 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

A recent event organised by Angus Buchan had over a million South Africans physically attend a day of prayer in Bloemfontein.[1] The Majority of the attendees were Afrikaners negating the statement that only 30% of Afrikaners are religious. If estimations around church attendance are made the NG Kerk needs to be quoted, or the national census. Anything else might not add to the readers understanding of the topic and dilutes this article with opinions rather than facts, it would be better to not speculate around Afrikaner church attendance at all, and if it must, then the sources need to be able to stand up for themselves Dean

If this is true you must supply a reliable source to alter what is currently there. What you say here does not qualify as a reliable source. Please do not remove cited material without discussing here first. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 11:24, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
I checked the reference noted in the section I removed. Firstly it lies behind a members only wall, secondly it has nothing to do with church attendance or religious convictions among Afrikaners, but is simply a statement around Belhar's popularity. I am reverting back to my section with its references Dean
Dean, how do you know what the article says (or doesn't say) if it's behind a paywall? The title of the article itself is not indicative of everything covered in said article's context. --Katangais (talk) 14:28, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
I had to take a trail membership, the reference was complete rubish and reflected an automated opinion poll on a popular newspaper sight :) I encourage you to check it out yourself, it had no business being used at all Dean
Actually I do not see why the two statements could not coexist. Belhar prayer attendance is not the same as church attendance, and being religious or not is a different thing again. I guess we don't know much about the sampling in that 38% (not 30%) opinion poll, but that might be a subsequent discussion. --Pgallert (talk) 18:48, 16 September 2017 (UTC)
Agree with the sampling point, and it sounds like you are agreeing with my initial statement that if you are going to speak about church attendance the references need to be stellar, and probably only from the Three sister churches - on a different note, Belhar has to do with Protestant catechisms not prayer Dean

Repeated addition of "1867" population figures

Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

There have been two separate revisions now which added an "1867" subsection to the article section dealing with population history. The new revisions cite the ethnic breakdown of Afrikaners as estimated by Heese as an accurate representation of what the Afrikaner population looked like in 1867. This is problematic for several reasons, namely:

  • 1) Heese does not actually claim that the Afrikaner population in 1867 was made up of the following nationalities: "Dutch 34.8%, German 33.7%, French 13.2%, Non-white 6.9%, other nations 2.7%, British 5.2%, and Unknown 3.5%".
  • 2) Heese does state that he believes this is the average composition of the ancestry of modern Afrikaners based on compiled research up until 1867.
  • 3) Discussion of genetics as part of the population history becomes irrelevant by the start of the British era for the simple fact that almost all the community's growth after that date was due to natural increase. The separate nationalities of the colonists were more significant during the Dutch era due to the fact that the population makeup was still changing due to immigration, and a significant percentage (though by no means a majority) of the colonists represented recent, Dutch or German-born immigrants or segments of a distinct French subgroup that retained its own language as late as the 1750s. After 1806, however, Afrikaners could not be described as "Dutch", "German", or "French" in any meaningful sense of the word. To reiterate: discussion of post-1806 Afrikaner ethnic composition is no longer about nationality or national origin but ancestry, and therefore belongs in the "Genealogy" section rather than the section concerning population history.

I have reverted the two disputed revisions which claim an Afrikaner population in 1867 of "34% Dutch, 33% German, etc" for these reasons. Please discuss these concerns here before re-adding the section on 1867 population figures.

Thanks, --Katangais (talk) 07:21, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Should South Africa articles use "continental system" numbers?

Latest comment: 6 years ago3 comments1 person in discussion

A discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject South Africa#Should South Africa articles use "continental system" numbers? might impact this article.

I mention it here because this article has a lot of numbers. Batternut (talk) 09:55, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

The use of gaps for grouping thousands is popular, though using comma as the decimal mark is not. Batternut (talk) 20:29, 22 December 2017 (UTC)


To impose or not to impose gap-separation (1234567.8 in place of 1,234,567.8) upon existing articles is now the question, at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject South Africa#Should existing South Africa articles be changed to use gaps as thousands separators?. Batternut (talk) 20:29, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Genetic studies

Latest comment: 4 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

According to a genetic study in February 2019 Hollfelder et al. 2019, Patterns of African and Asian admixture in the Afrikaner population of South Africa almost all Afrikaners had admixture from non-Europeans:

Abstract : "The Afrikaner population of South Africa are the descendants of European colonists who started to colonize the Cape of Good Hope in the 1600's. In the early days of the colony, mixed unions between European males and non-European females gave rise to admixed children who later became incorporated into either the Afrikaner or the "Coloured" populations of South Africa. Ancestry, social class, culture, sex ratio and geographic structure affected admixture patterns and caused different ancestry and admixture patterns in Afrikaner and Coloured populations. The Afrikaner population has a predominant European composition, whereas the Coloured population has more diverse ancestries. Genealogical records estimated the non-European contributions into the Afrikaners to 5.5%-7.2%. To investigate the genetic ancestry of the Afrikaner population today (11-13 generations after initial colonization) we genotyped ~5 million genome-wide markers in 77 Afrikaner individuals and compared their genotypes to populations across the world to determine parental source populations and admixture proportions. We found that the majority of Afrikaner ancestry (average 95.3%) came from European populations (specifically northwestern European populations), but that almost all Afrikaners had admixture from non-Europeans. The non-European admixture originated mostly from people who were brought to South Africa as slaves and, to a lesser extent, from local Khoe-San groups. Furthermore, despite a potentially small founding population, there is no sign of a recent bottleneck in the Afrikaner compared to other European populations. Admixture among diverse groups during early colonial times might have counterbalanced the effects of a founding population with a small census size."

"...The total amount of non-European ancestry, at the K=6 level, is 4.8% (SD 3.8%) of which 2.1% are African ancestry and 2.7% Asian/Native American ancestry. The individual with most non-European admixture had 24.9% non-European admixture and only a single Afrikaner individual (out of 77) had no evidence of non-European admixture (Table S1). Among the 77 Afrikaners investigated, 6.5% had above 10% non-European admixture, 27.3% between 5 and 10%, 59.7% between 1 and 5% and 6.5% below 1%..... More of the non-European admixture fraction appeared to have come from people who were brought to the Cape as slaves (3.4%) during colonial times than from local Khoe-San people (1.3%) "

Can we put a new section in the article about Genetics?

80.236.18.232 (talk) 19:32, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

I've only had the briefest of looks, but it looks as if this study is worth including, probably under that Genealogy section. I see that there is a 2007 study cited already, but I don't think anything including genome analysis. Presumably the sample was diverse, but one would have to read carefully and extract with caution. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 06:31, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Did Afrikaners arrive in South 1652 or were they always here?

Latest comment: 4 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

Am I way out of line here?

Afrikaners are a mixed race - South African Indigenous Khoi mixed with European immigrants. In the 16th century sea travel was extremley hazardous and way biased in favor of male travelers. The arriving Settlers were thus drawn to the populations of local women and soon mixed with them.

I therefore dispute your open paragraphs depicting the Afrikaners (although it has recently been the common interpretation)as European immigrants. The gutteral sounds in the language are the vestiges of the Khoi language. This analysis would then make the Afrikaners as a much larger ethnic group - closer to 13% of the population.


Any thoughts?

PhilipDC — Preceding unsigned comment added by Philipdc (talk • contribs) 13:40, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

The term "Afrikaner" has indeed been used in the past to describe those of mixed ancestry, especially between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries, when the term was rather fluid; however, this usage is currently archaic. In the modern context, most South African sources have used "Afrikaner" solely in reference to the white population of wholly or predominantly European descent. Individual Afrikaans-speaking Khoisan and mixed-race groups like the Oorlam people and Cape Coloureds no longer identify, nor are they identified in contemporary anthropological literature, as Afrikaners. --Katangais (talk) 00:03, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
Hi Katangais. Yes, I did read the talk page yesterday (was editing on my phone, too hard to add to it!), and having done a bit of reading both of this article and elswhere before, I do realise the complexities. Thanks for reverting your previous change to mine, because the sentence (before my change) was very misleading. It is significant and should be mentioned that the Afrikaners are/were of mostly European descent, because they were the ones who formalised segregation in the apartheid system. History shows that the early settlers were primarily Dutch, with a wave of French Huguenots in 1688, and there was a sprinkling of other Europeans who worked for the VOC (mainly Germans), but there were children born out of wedlock as well as marriages as time went on because of the shortage of Dutch females. This site has a lot of info about the slaves and indigenous people and the mixing with settlers in the first 50 years - quite interesting! The Cape Coloureds and Cape Malays had similarly mixed ancestries out of the same genetic pool, but with less of the settlers' blood. I'm a bit busy at the moment but will try to come back to this article (which I only arrived at incidentally via JM Coetzee) because the lead at least needs improvement, as per WP:LEAD. The genetic study cited below is also interesting. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 06:24, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
Hey Laterthanyouthink. Thank you for your comment. In the past, we had multiple issues with the sentence "Southern African ethnic group descended from predominantly Dutch settlers" with two recurring themes - first, many contributors objected to "Southern African ethnic group", because they felt "Germanic ethnic group" or "European ethnic group" was more descriptive. This was shot down because Afrikaners are not a wholly Germanic ethnic group and do not, as a population group, currently identify with Europe.
Secondly, there were periodic attempts to replace "predominantly Dutch settlers" with a more detailed description of Afrikaners' genetic heritage, namely references to non-European ancestry, as well as the significant contributions from other European nationalities. The phrase "predominantly Dutch settlers" prevailed because small minorities of Afrikaners have ancestors from just about every European nation in existence in the seventeenth century, and more than a few other regions of the world (as you noted, out of wedlock cohabitation with slaves from Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and various Pacific Islands were common and some prominent Afrikaner families like the Malans even allegedly had progenitors who were slaves). People started tacking on references to Scottish, Belgian, and Danish Afrikaner progenitors to that lede sentence in addition to the more commonly cited French and German admixture, as well as references to non-European (especially African and slave) ancestry as well. Sometimes the tacking on of another ethnic contribution to that lead sentence would be accompanied by citations, but that wasn't the problem.
The problem was that we were making the opening sentence of the lede much, much too crowded, and turning what should've been a brief introduction to the Afrikaners into a detailed discussion on their genealogy. Hence, the relevant details were moved to the "Genealogy" section we currently have and the lead was retained as "predominantly Dutch settlers". Because the Afrikaners were a indeed a veritable melting pot of nationalities, but were descended from Hollanders in the main, and the other groups were generally absorbed into the larger Dutch population, hence the adoption of the Dutch dialect and Dutch Reformed faith. --Katangais (talk) 01:47, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
Yes, @Katangais:, I see some of the problems. I will come back to this another day, but just a few quick comments while I'm here... Whilst the language is classed as Germanic (as is English), the designation as Germanic people is more problematic and clearly not correct. The lead is still too long and needs some stylistic adjustments (including moving most of the citations out of it, making it much shorter and ensuring that it covers just the main points in the article), and the article itself is, I suspect, WP:TOOBIG (and for this reason I can't comment in detail now). I will however just do at least one more tweak in the lead now, because that second sentence is factually incorrect (according to its own source as well as the rest of the article). Thanks for your input and prompt attention - more discussion another day, hopefully! Laterthanyouthink (talk) 08:08, 1 June 2019 (UTC)
P.S. Well, once I started... I ended up doing a greater cleanup than intended, including adding mention of the Great Trek, which seems significant, and a single-sentence update (with citation) - but still think it could be trimmed further. It needs to concentrate on the most important points included in the article, and all citations can be moved out to the relevant spots in the body. It really doesn't need a lot of detail about the language, or about the early history of Dutch settlement, etc. as that is detailed both below and in other articles. That's my tuppence worth, anyway! I'll leave the rest to you and others for a while. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 09:02, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Repeated topics and small gaps

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I'm currently going through and lang tagging throughout the article (it's so long...) which basically requires me to read the entire article SO I've noticed a few things that are repeated a lot.

  • VOC employees being allowed to settle / the meaning of vrijburgers
  • Defining the acronym VOC (i think I got all of them but I may have missed one)
  • The ethnic makeup of Afrikaners - I think I saw the list, "Dutch, German, French Huguenot refugees, Swedish people and Danish people" about 5 times. And also at least 2 tables with that info.
  • Wikilinks. Every time Huguenots were mentioned, it was wikilinked - for reference, they're mentioned about 15 times. This is not the only term that's like this - in face, most of them are like this.

There's also a couple of things missing:

  • Under #Post-apartheid era, stats for the general SA population living in poverty are needed, to give context to the stats about the amount of Afrikaners living in poverty. It's basically meaningless without total populations stats to compare it to.
  • Also under this section, the rebuttals against Genocide Watch's statistics (basically only white nationalist groups have made claims about white genocide in SA which is not what I'd call an unbiased source).
  • During the history section, it'd be good to mention (very briefly, it gets covered properly under language) the approximate point at which Dutch became Afrikaans. Its absence was super obvious to me bc I'm currently actively looking for linguistic cues, but it's not surprising that its not the first thing others jump to. But, given that the government dictating things like language is a big part of Afrikaner history, language in general is a big part of culture, and Afrikaans language is a literally definitional part of the Afrikaner identity it would benefit from being noted.
  • Like most articles about a non-English topic: translations of many of the afrikaans/dutch titles of organisations, titles, references are needed. Individual terms are reliably translated so those aren't much of an issue.

I'm not really the best person to chase down these things - my Afrikaans isn't good enough for statistical language, and I'm really more of a drive-by editor. But they're pretty important holes, and ideally should be fixed. That being said, each separate section is well written, they're just not necessarily 100% integrated into each other. If you want me to see a responses, please ping me. --Xurizuri (talk) 10:26, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Issues with this article

Latest comment: 3 years ago5 comments5 people in discussion

There's a lot of good stuff in this article, but I just want to raise a few issues here which I think need to be addressed:

  • Overlap with Boer - explain relationship and/or overlap between these terms.
  • Lead needs update as per WP:LEAD - remove citations and ensure that all assertions are repeated, expanded if necessary and cited in the body.
  • The intro re mainly Dutch to start with, followed by the sentence about other ethnicities, seems to represent the reality and seems fine to me.
  • Too much regurgitation of early history (already in other articles) - there should be more on Afrikaners becoming Afrikaners and what exactly this term means, who regards/regarded themselves as Afrikaners, etc.
  • Too long (see previous point).
  • The 1933 Encyclopaedia Britannica seems to be quoted multiple times. This source is (a) not accessible to most and (b) hopelessly out of date. It was written 90 years ago, pre-apartheid and lots of research, so I would consider dumping this and looking for other citations for anything where this is cited.

(I hope that someone finds these comments useful and may consider doing a review and update of the article - not meant as criticism, but aiming at improvement!) Laterthanyouthink (talk) 02:31, 4 June 2019 (UTC)

Concerning overlap with Boer: the Afrikaner population has historically consisted of two separate socioeconomic segments, the Boers (frontier farmers) and Cape Dutch (predominantly urban settlers who remained at the Cape of Good Hope instead of migrating inwards). These separate groups became even more distinct as a result of the Great Trek, as most of the Cape Dutch did not participate in the Great Trek (only one-fourth of the Cape's total white Afrikaans population did so). The distinction between the two groups has slowly disappeared after the end of the Second Anglo-Boer War.
The early history section looks fine to me as it does not focus specifically on the evolution of the Cape Colony but rather the evolution of Afrikaners as a population group in the Cape Colony, including the development of the separate Boer and Cape Dutch identities. --Katangais (talk) 01:33, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
An article on Afrikaners but the word "racism" doesn't appear even once in the article. What a joke. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.210.252.190 (talk) 05:13, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
How can you not talk about racism when it comes to Afrikaners in South Africa?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Supermodelsonya (talk • contribs) 18:22, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia do not allow hate speech, vilification or scapegoating aimed at specific ethnic groups. Or at least they should not. Please be respectful.197.188.228.197 (talk) 14:51, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Merge proposal

Latest comment: 2 years ago9 comments3 people in discussion
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Not merged. --Spekkios (talk) 23:42, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

I propose merging Boers into Afrikaners. Boers are now called Afrikaners. The Boers article already mentions this in the WP:LEAD. The articles should be merged because the topics completely WP:OVERLAP. Desertambition (talk) 23:12, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

The two are not wholly interchangeable. As noted in this article, Boers were one of two historical socioeconomic subgroups in the Afrikaner population, along with Cape Dutch. To use a common analogy, note that we have a single general article for German Americans, but separate articles for specific historical subgroups of this population, such as Pennsylvania Dutch and German Texan. --Katangais (talk) 00:04, 14 March 2022 (UTC)
That is not accurate. Afrikaners were called Boers until the late 20th century. They are the same people group. The article should say:
Afrikaners, formerly known as Boers
or something similar.
Encyclopedia Brittanica - https://www.britannica.com/topic/Boer-people
Boer, (Dutch: “husbandman,” or “farmer”), a South African of Dutch, German, or Huguenot descent, especially one of the early settlers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Today, descendants of the Boers are commonly referred to as Afrikaners.
The Conversation - https://theconversation.com/afrikaner-identity-in-post-apartheid-south-africa-remains-stuck-in-whiteness-87471
The Afrikaners – as the descendants of the Boer settlers eventually became known – constructed their identity in opposition to, on the one hand, black identities, and on the other to Anglo whiteness..
Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/05/26/the-meaning-of-a-word-in-south-africa/0f28a657-846a-4e54-b544-5d1d17bb7aed/
Afrikaners, previously called Boers, are descendants of mainly Dutch immigrants settled in South Africa in the 17th century.
Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1880-1917
...for the sake of narrative simplicity I have sacrificed the contemporary word "Afrikaner" and have relied on its outdated synonym, "Boer".
Rehabilitating a Whiteness Disgraced: Afrikaner White Talk in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Each proffered name indicates a subject position that is opening up, possibilities that can be (re)inscribed: Afrikaner, Afrikaan, Afrikaanses, SuidAfrikaan, Boer, boer, Wit Suid-Afrikaners, even Angloboere/Pomfrikaners (for those who have emigrated to England). Importantly, each name also fixes a different alignment of the intersectionalities that make up the totality of Afrikaner cultural/social/political/economic gear.
Five Afrikaner Texts and the Rehabilitation of Whiteness
When black South Africans in the 1980s [reinfected] the word Boer to signify something distasteful, they succeeded in making Afrikaners accept that meaning to the extent that the majority now disown the name. In spite of the fact that Boer, in accordance with their power, was a name proudly chosen by themselves to signal their connection with the land, the word had become infected with black distaste which culminated in the Pan African Congress’ s chant of `Kill the farmer, kill the Boer’ so that Afrikaners have abandoned what they now perceive to be a racist term.

The non-standard, urban, spoken variety of Afrikaans previously associated with coloureds or poor-whites is used in much of the new writing, especially by women,2 which deflects the language from the old, discredited Boer identity. Narratives from the late 1980s onwards, whether in standard or non standard dialects, are crucially concerned with a laundered Afrikaner ethnicity, its whiteness effaced through an association with blackness. This phenomenon can now be seen to be institutionalised at least at the University of Cape Town where the Department of Afrikaans, previously linked to Nederlands, is to be merged with African languages.
Evidence overwhelmingly points to these groups being one and the same, any differences are largely a result of Afrikaners trying to distance themselves from "Boer" during the late 20th century and due to the perceived association with apartheid. Boer history is Afrikaner history. Just like how Bombay's history is Mumbai's history and Peking's history is Beijing's history. Desertambition (talk) 15:16, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
Forgot to ping @Katangais: Desertambition (talk) 15:20, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
I agree - the two don't see to be completely interchangeable. Boer seems to refer to a group pre-20th century, while Afrikaner seems to refer to a, possibly larger, modern group. Afrikaners might descend from Boers, but that doesn't mean they are one and the same. Cultural differences and group identity factor in too. Compare Celtic Britons to Welsh. There are much better examples obviously, but that's the only one I can think of right now. --Spekkios (talk) 22:16, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
@Spekkios: You completely ignored the sources I provided. You didn't even engage with them. Evidence overwhelmingly shows that Boers started identifying with the Afrikaner identity to avoid association with apartheid and white nationalism. The comparison to Celtic Britons and Welsh are not accurate either. Afrikaners called themselves Boers until the late 20th century, ie. the 80's. They didn't diverge into various people groups, they just started calling themselves Afrikaners. Desertambition (talk) 22:50, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
I haven't ignored your sources. I read the conversation before submitting my opinion. Regardless of when the group started to adopt different terminology and why, it does appear that the term "Boer" is associated mostly with pre-20th century populations while "Afrikaner" is associated with a modern ethnic group. The term "Boer" also seems to exclude "Cape Dutch", whose decedents are also described as "Afrikaner". --Spekkios (talk) 23:15, 15 March 2022 (UTC)
@Desertambition: The sources cited to defend this proposal seem to be rather broad-brushed - many of them are not especially concerned with Afrikaners or Afrikaner consciousness, but appear to be cherry-picked from a hodgepodge of web articles that focus on other topics but happen to offhandedly make reference to Boer identity (see, for example, the Washington Post and Conversation articles). That does not make them any less reliable for citation, but it does call into question their ability to be cited as the penultimate authority on this topic when other, far more specialized sources are available. Many of these far more specialized sources, drawn from South African history literature, are cited both here and on the Cape Dutch article, explaining the difference between the three partly interchangeable terms "Afrikaner", "Boer", and "Cape Dutch". The one exception to the current lineup is Wicomb's piece from 2010. However, nowhere does Wicomb assert that "Boer" and "Afrikaner" are solely one and the same, she simply asserts that many modern Afrikaners have abandoned their sense of identification with the historical ethnonym "Boer". I don't disagree with that - "Boer" is (largely) an outdated term that has fallen out of general usage, and described a historical segment of the Afrikaner population. Note that Wicomb never claims that all Afrikaners identified as Boers, merely that those who - in the modern period - still may have held that identification have largely abandoned it.
I will reiterate that the history section of this article, as well as the Cape Dutch article, which are both well-cited, explain the difference. In the early 1800s, before the term "Afrikaner" was in common usage among white Afrikaans speakers, that population was divided by geography and socioeconomic status into two distinct groups: the Boers and Cape Dutch. Many of the Boers went on to found the Boer republics after the Great Trek, which the Cape Dutch did not participate in. During the late 1800s, the Cape Dutch actively promoted use of the term "Afrikaner" to describe all white Afrikaans people when they founded the Afrikaner Bond. So DA, you're right in that the terms are partly interchangeable - but the key here is partly. All Boers could correctly be described as Afrikaners (in the sense that we're applying the term to mean all white Afrikaans people), but not all Afrikaners could correctly be described as Boers. --Katangais (talk) 18:55, 18 March 2022 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

History

Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Relevant historical 2A03:2880:31FF:77:0:0:FACE:B00C (talk) 15:16, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 23:52, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Flag

Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The flag which has been added to the top of the page should be removed. There is no evidence that there's a broad consensus among the white Afrikaans population of adopting a single flag to represent their community. Consequently, I think it's misleading to place it at the top of page and make the (unsourced) and rather bold implication that it represents the Afrikaner population. Katangais (talk) 16:12, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

  1. ^ "Oom Angus-saamtrek". Maroela Media.
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