Are Afrikaners White or Black?

Race, History, and the Politics of Identity in South Africa.

A Provocative but Necessary Question.

At first glance, the question “Are Afrikaners white or black?” appears nonsensical, even offensive, when measured against conventional racial categories. Afrikaners are typically classified as white Europeans—descendants of Dutch, German, and French settlers in southern Africa. However, the question gains analytical seriousness when examined through the lenses of historical anthropology, colonial race-making, sociology, and political economy. It forces us to interrogate what “white” and “black” actually mean, who defines these categories, and how power determines racial belonging.

As historian Nell Irvin Painter argues, “Race is an idea, not a fact, and its questions demand answers from history, not biology” (Painter, The History of White People). From this standpoint, Afrikaner identity becomes a case study in how whiteness is constructed, negotiated, and sometimes contested rather than a fixed biological condition.

 

Whiteness as a Historical Construction

Modern scholarship overwhelmingly agrees that whiteness is not a biological essence but a socio-political status. In colonial societies, whiteness functioned as a legal and economic passport to land, labor control, and political power.

Theodore W. Allen famously defined whiteness as “a ruling-class social control formation” rather than an ethnic reality (The Invention of the White Race). This insight is crucial for understanding Afrikaners. Early Dutch settlers at the Cape were not initially “white” in the modern racial sense; they were Europeans differentiated by class, religion, and nationality. Whiteness emerged gradually as colonial expansion required a clear boundary between colonizer and colonized.

In South Africa, this boundary hardened earlier and more violently than in many other colonial settings due to demographic realities: Europeans were always a minority ruling over a large African population. As Mahmood Mamdani notes, “Race was the language through which permanent minority rule justified itself” (Citizen and Subject).

 

Afrikaner Origins and the Myth of Racial Purity.

Afrikaners are often portrayed—especially in nationalist narratives—as racially “pure” Europeans. This claim collapses under historical scrutiny. Archival evidence shows extensive genetic, cultural, and social interaction between early settlers and enslaved Africans, Khoisan peoples, and Asians from the Dutch East Indies.

Historian Nigel Worden observes that “the early Cape was a creolized society in which rigid racial boundaries had not yet solidified” (Slavery in Dutch South Africa). Many Afrikaner families have ancestry that includes enslaved women from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, and Indonesia—ancestry later erased through legal and social whitening.

This does not make Afrikaners “black” in a cultural or political sense, but it destabilizes the idea that Afrikaners are unambiguously European by blood. As Ann Laura Stoler writes, “Colonial categories of race were obsessed with purity precisely because purity never existed” (Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power).

 

Afrikaners and the Invention of White Supremacy.

If Afrikaners are not biologically white in any absolute sense, they are historically white by power. Afrikaner nationalism in the twentieth century explicitly embraced whiteness as a civilizational claim. Apartheid was not merely segregation; it was an elaborate system to secure whiteness as privilege.

Hendrik Verwoerd, the chief architect of apartheid, openly defined South Africa as “a white man’s country”. This was not a descriptive statement but a political project. Whiteness here functioned as what sociologist Cheryl Harris calls “property”—a set of enforceable rights to land, movement, education, and political voice (Whiteness as Property).

Under apartheid, Afrikaners were indisputably white—not because of skin color alone, but because the state defined, protected, and reproduced their whiteness through law.

 

Blackness as a Political and Historical Identity.

To ask whether Afrikaners are black also requires clarity about blackness. In African and diasporic thought, blackness is not merely pigmentation; it is a historical condition shaped by dispossession, enslavement, and racialized exploitation.

Frantz Fanon famously wrote, “The black man is not black by nature but by history” (Black Skin, White Masks). In South Africa, blackness emerged as a shared political identity among Africans, Coloureds, and Indians subjected to white domination.

Afrikaners do not share this historical condition. They were not racialized as inferior, denied land rights, or excluded from citizenship on the basis of race. Even poor Afrikaners benefited from racial solidarity and state protection. As Deborah Posel notes, “Whiteness in South Africa cushioned class inequality among Europeans” (The Making of Apartheid).

Thus, Afrikaners cannot meaningfully be described as black in the political or historical sense that blackness has carried in South Africa.

 

The Paradox: Marginal Europeans, Dominant Whites.

A crucial nuance lies in the fact that Afrikaners themselves were once marginal within global whiteness. British elites often viewed them as backward, semi-civilized, and racially suspect. During the Anglo-Boer War, British discourse frequently portrayed Boers as “degenerate whites”.

This aligns with David Roediger’s argument that “whiteness has always had internal hierarchies” (The Wages of Whiteness). Afrikaners had to become white through domination, state-building, and racial policing.

Yet marginal whiteness is still whiteness. The solution Afrikaners chose to their insecurity was not solidarity with Africans but the most rigid racial regime of the twentieth century.

 

Neither Biology nor Ambiguity, but Power.

Afrikaners are not black, either biologically, culturally, or politically. They are white as a historical and political formation, produced through colonial conquest, racial legislation, and economic domination. Their whiteness is not timeless or natural; it was constructed, defended, and institutionalized—often violently.

At the same time, Afrikaners are not “pure Europeans” in any scientific sense, nor were they always fully accepted within global whiteness. This tension exposes the instability of race itself.

As W.E.B. Du Bois famously concluded, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”—not because color is real, but because power insists it is.

The more productive question, therefore, is not whether Afrikaners are white or black, but how racial categories were invented to govern African land, labor, and life—and who benefited from that invention.

 

Select Academic References.

• Allen, T. W. The Invention of the White Race
• Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Masks
• Harris, C. Whiteness as Property
• Mamdani, M. Citizen and Subject
• Painter, N. I. The History of White People
• Posel, D. The Making of Apartheid
• Stoler, A. L. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power
• Worden, N. Slavery in Dutch South Africa