Sitting pretty

At the opening of South Africa’s first democratic parliament in 1994, newly elected president Nelson Mandela issued a clarion call to an unlikely group: white Afrikaans women, who during apartheid straddled the ambivalent position of being simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. He conjured the memory of poet Ingrid Jonker as `both an Afrikaner and an African’ who `instructs that our endeavours must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child’. More than two decades later, the question is: how have white Afrikaans women responded to the liberating possibilities of constitutional democracy? With Afrikaner nationalism in disrepair, and official apartheid in demise, have they re-imagined themselves in opposition to colonial ideas of race, gender, sexuality and class? This book explores this postapartheid identity through the concepts of ordentlikheid, as an ethnic form of respectability, and the volksmoeder, or mother of the nation, as enduring icon.

Christi van der Westhuizen is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pretoria and a former research associate of the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State. She is the author of White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party (2007) and has published widely in academic books and journals. Her working life started as a journalist at the anti-apartheid weekly Vrye Weekblad and she is a regular political and social commentator in the media.