Afrikaner nationalism
[5] Kuyper also rejected the Enlightenment with its emphasis on human rationality and individuality and thought that it had led to the ideals of equality, fraternity and freedom of the French Revolution.
[6] Afrikaner theologians worked from this foundation and defined a number of political, economic and cultural spheres that had their separate, independent destinies.
Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal from 1883 to 1902 and a founding member of the Gereformeerde Kerke van Zuid-Afrika or "Dopper Church", referred to a "sacred history" with the volk as the chosen people, where the Great Trek of the 1830s was seen as the Exodus from British rule in the Cape to the Promised Land of the Boer Republics.
Nicolaas Johannes Diederichs, who later (1975-1978) became South Africa's president, formulated Afrikaner nationalistic ideology in his 1936 book "Nationalism as a Worldview and Its Relationship to Internationalism" through Kuyperian theology.
They proposed as a solution the drastic reordering of the South African demographic map with a dominant Afrikaner Republic not influenced by British imperialism.
[5] By 1939 racial segregation had become a church dogma: The Afrikaner state as a Christian civilisation thus had an alleged divine right to stay separate and to rule the surrounding "heathen" nations.
[7][8] Afrikaner nationalism and Nazism had common roots in religio-nationalism and in Pan-Germanism, and therefore the racist elements of both movements could assimilate.
Just before and during World War II (1939–1945), these sentiments led to the appearance of a number of pro-Nazi Afrikaner nationalistic organisations, such as the Ossewabrandwag (founded in February 1939) and its paramilitary wing Stormjaers.
[19] During the 1930s a group of Broederbond members shaped Afrikaner nationalistic ideology, by trying to create a common "Christian-republican" identity for white, Afrikaans speaking South Africans as well as introducing the idea of Volkskapitalisme (people's capitalism) that tried to take control from the allegedly "British" or "Jewish" Capitalism and adapt it to Afrikaner culture.
[20] Volkskapitalisme strived to improve the economic conditions of the Afrikaners who in general at the time were less well-off than the English-speaking whites in South Africa.
[20] Despite the efforts of Broederbond activists to "Afrikanerise" South Africa, the uptake of this new Christian republican identity was slow and unenthusiastic.
According to electoral studies the majority of the target group (white, Afrikaans speaking South Africans) did not vote for the National Party until the early 1960s.
[22][23] South African opposition to the country's involvement in both wars against Imperial and Nazi Germany led directly to the National Party's rise to power in the 1948 elections, the implementation of apartheid, and culminating finally in Afrikaner mobilisation in 1961; when South Africa voted to leave the British Commonwealth and become a republic.
In the 1990s the National Party acknowledged the failure of its ethnic project and under the leadership of F. W. De Klerk dismantled the political system set up from 1948.
[28] Although it has mostly disappeared from publicity, Afrikaner nationalism is kept alive through such political initiatives as the Cyber Republic of the Boer Nation, [citation needed] which claims to be "the only white indigenous tribe in Southern Africa" and has tried to appeal to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations for the protection of cultural, linguistic and religious rights of people around the world.
