BaasorKlaas? Afrikaner Working-Class Responses to Transformation in South Africa, ca. 1977–2002

Abstract

White workers and white working-class politics have been neglected in the historiography of South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century. This article seeks to extricate white workers from this historiographical neglect and fracture homogenizing representations of white, specifically Afrikaner, experiences of democratization. It does so by reintroducing class to a debate dominated by race. Employing a discursive analysis sensitive to issues of class, it shows that white workers were confronted with democratizing change and disempowerment more than a decade before the end of apartheid and suggests that class politics continue to inform white responses in post-apartheid South Africa. In this way, it argues for a historical, discursive approach to uncovering the power dynamics of class and the complex intersection of working-class and racial identities in the late twentieth century.

The legacy imprint of apprenticeship trajectories under conditions of segregation and Apartheid in South Africa

“…Employing only race or class as a category of analysis, he argues, leads to insularity and reductionism. In contrast, Van Zyl-Hermann (2014), in commenting specifically on the way in which White working-class politics have been portrayed, identifies a discursive blurring of class-based issues with broader racial interests during times of political uncertainty. Adopting a more sequential approach, Seekings and Nattrass (2005) argue that when statutory racial discrimination started going into gradual decline in the second half of the Apartheid era, class divisions between those who own capital and those who do not, as well as divisions in terms of access to education, training and employment gained renewed prominence.…”