As an afrikaner sympathizer (not someone who supports apartheid, but someone who empathizes with the struggles that afrikaners have endured), I am generally outraged when I read any sort of history textbook nowadays. It seems that these texts will not admit the slightest sliver of compassion for the horrible shit afrikaners had to go through. And in SOME cases they were really forced... they weren't colonizing, they had nowhere to go.

And I don't want to say that these afrikaners were heroes and the africans were villains. On the contrary, I think there are uncountably many stories of heroism (as well as stories of villainy) and that each culture in SA deserves a place in the sun. My point is that SA shouldn't deny its history-- both its horror and its glory. But there is a very strong tendency among commentators on the issue to see it as a black history vs. white history battleground scenario, even though they ostensibly claim to maintain neutrality in their commentary (specifically referring to http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/davidsaks/2008/05/09/treasuring-our-heritage-will-bring-us-together-3/). In the aforementioned link he waxes romantic about the value of treasuring SA's collective heritage but in another article he expresses his difficulty in sympathizing with Afrikaners and talks about how after a valiant effort he was finally able to bring himself to acknowledge that they might have some humanity. Since the inception of the truth and reconciliation commission, SA has become polarized in its official view of its history. This has basically accomplished the destruction of the afrikaner psyche. There is no such thing as Afrikanerdom anymore. There's no desire to guard afrikaners' heritage and to balance it with critical examination of the horror of apartheid and where they've forsaken their moral obligations. How can such horrors be prevented in the future? How were (many) afrikaners deceived or brainwashed into feeling comfortable in their positions? These are ESSENTIAL questions.

It's apartheid. Anything that might evoke the slightest sympathy for anyone who might off-handedly be referred to as an afrikaner ... and the only word that needs be said is "apartheid" and then everyone agrees that all this manner of raping and pillaging and horrible oppression and murder committed by each and every afrikaner by his own hand precludes any sort of sympathy being felt for any afrikaner.

The truth is, afrikaners weren't so far off from citizens of the US. My experience with afrikaners has been much closer than that of most of their critics and as a result, I can say about the people that I have specifically encountered (if I may make generalizations... and at least I ask, most people just go ahead and do make terrible generalizations about afrikaners) are maybe a little more clannish than generally found in the US (a little), they take pride in their language, and they're maybe a little more religious. What annoys me too is this willful ignorance that people seem to display about apartheid. Living in apartheid (at least in the late stages of apartheid) you don't get the impression that things are that unequal. This ignorance has 2 consequences: 1. People become cozy in their own self-righteous worlds. 2. they unfairly demonize on anyone who might call himself/herself an afrikaner or who might have associated in any way with any afrikaner. I've actually lived during the later stages of apartheid. Allow me to point out a few things about the experience:

- Black kids went to school with me just as white kids did. There were only a few black kids in the schools, but then again, looking around me I didn't see that many black kids. It made me believe (as a politically unaware 10 year old) that there just weren't that many black kids around.

- There was no slavery. There was a minimum wage for both black and white workers (although the minimum wage was lower for black workers). The following might sound like a patronizing way of treating black people, but I don't know how you would draw a distinction between being patronizing and being truly compassionate: I knew a person who had a (black) house servant. Basically, this house servant couldn't get a job anywhere else because of apartheid policies and she would be in a very bad situation if it weren't for some form of employment. Her employer regularly talked with her servant about what was happening in her life and gave her extra money if she needed it. The employer told her children that they must respect her servant and told the servant, in turn, to discipline the children if they disrespect her. Honestly, how would you expect her to treat her servant if she were being truly compassionate as opposed to patronizing?

- As a kid growing up in apartheid I was at first puzzled by the word "kaffir" because I didn't understand why being called a black person would be an insult... until someone explained to me that it was used by racists and that's why black people don't like being called that word.

- I was told to never use the above word. One person who regularly used that word was viewed as boorish even though he commanded a lot of respect (from people other than me) because he had made wise land buying decisions which had made him rich. Point is, I had no desire to emulate him.

Note that even the following article that takes a more positive view of afrikaners misses a couple of important points, one being that in apartheid there weren't always signs saying "whites only." These were petty apartheid policies which were abandoned in the 1970s. Knowledge of this fact only serves to strengthen certain the analogy that the article discusses (which is only partly accurate... but it is uncanny how many similarities there are if you just look closer and more critically at the histories of SA and Israel): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/07/southafrica.israel