A sizeable share of Afrikaners today carry mixed-race ancestry despite apartheid’s denial

Evidence

Simon van der Stel, Dutch Governor of the Cape from 1692 and after whom the town and university of Stellenbosch came to be named, was the offspring of a Dutch father, himself commander of the island of Mauritius, and a mother in part Malay. The later legacy of these relationships included prominent Voortrekker and ultimately Nationalist Party leaders, the ancestors, architects, and sons of apartheid Afrikanerdom, bent on repressively excising memory of the darker side of their family heritage. The number of white Afrikaners with mixed race heritage today no doubt runs in the thousands, and has been estimated by Afrikaans demographers at about 6 or 7 percent of the ethnic group. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1321

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the tension in ‘One Drop’ racial classification debates and works on the erasure of mixed ancestry in white supremacy regimes generally.
• SEED: An essay angle: the architecture of apartheid’s ‘good Afrikaner’ can be read as a massive genealogy project of denial — who got written out of the family tree.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone fascinated by how founding-family mythology in settler states collides with documented ancestry.