Afrikaner identity crystallized from the perceived twin threats of British and black

Evidence

Membership in the Dutch Reformed Church in the closing decade of the century, perhaps not unrelated to this surge in millenarian resistance, increased notably, and became overwhelmingly if not exclusively white. Loss of formal power and easy access prompted a cross-class coherence among Dutch descendants threatened otherwise with dispersal. Afrikaners were born of the double threat of ethnoracial evaporation to boer identity. Conjured as interactively British and black, this threat was to become, with the arrival of the surging British as the old century closed and the new one opened, the troubling catalyst of Afrikaner self-conception, but also its distinction, its rupture, from its classically Dutch origins. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1382

Categorization

• XREF: Plausibly parallels the wider claim from the connected race-reading: group identities in South Africa (as elsewhere) emerged primarily from threat-perception against Others rather than from positive self-definition. — connects to: British concessions deliberately consolidated Afrikaner national identity with ruling aspirations — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1482; Threatened privilege drove Dutch colonists into a homogenizing white Afrikaner identity — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1382