White Aspiration in South Africa: The intersectional Nexus of Ordentlikheid and the Making of Afrikaner Whiteness

Abstract

Whiteness presents as stable and homogeneous or even natural, but it is a socially and historically constructed status that is never completely won. Intersectional readings of whiteness in context help show the contingency of this racial formation, dependent like all power formations on historical conditions. The concept “ordentlikheid” is applied in this article to expose the inner and outer ordering and hierarchisation of Afrikaner whiteness in South Africa. Ordentlikheid is variably translatable as respectability, dignity, or politeness. It is here used as an ethno-cultural term referencing a historically generated schema of moral worth that captures the aspirational formation of Afrikaner identity in colonial, apartheid and postcolonial South Africa. Gender looms large as co-determining the terms for inclusion and exclusion in Afrikaner whiteness, particularly through the figure of the volksmoeder. The pursuit of ordentlikheid is explored across three historical moments, characterised by shifting emphases in the intersectional deployment of differences: the rise of Afrikaner nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th  century, the official ending of apartheid and transition to democracy in the 1990s, and the global rise of racial populisms with associated shifts in transnational whiteness in the 2020s. Over these three periods, varying emphases can be discerned on differences in the aspirational pursuit of ordentlikheid as part of the intersectional construction of Afrikaner whiteness. Ordentlikheid as a concept assists in understanding ethnic competition with the British due to their inferiorisation of Afrikaners as “lesser whites.” It helps to explain the rise of “purified” Afrikaner nationalism that constructed a white volk by corralling women into the heteropatriarchal volksmoeder regime of “woman/wife-as-mother”. With the fall of apartheid, Afrikaner enclave neo-nationalism emerges, marked by inward migration, localisation, and ethnic closure. Claiming the moral high ground of ordentlikheid facilitates an unexpected incorporation of white Afrikaners into the Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda of US President Donald Trump.