Political Institutions and Afrikaner Social Structures in the Republic of South Africa

The long-term Afrikaner drive for power has been strongly influenced by the demographic structure of the South African electorate. Within the framework of the primary political system, secondary structures make deviations from the demographic patterns extremely difficult. The purpose of this paper is to trace the relations between the population cleavage and the composition of basic social institutions, and their bearing on the distribution of political power; and to raise the question of the viability of the resulting system. Let us start with demography. Power in South Africa resides in the two White linguistic groups—the Afrikaans-speaking descendants of mainly Dutch settlers—and the English-speaking descendants of mainly British settlers—and parliamentary party affiliations have come to be determined almost entirely by linguistic and cultural ties; that is, by the structure of the society. The demographic composition of the electorate (Table I)—three voters speak Afrikaans to every two who speak English—has tended to influence the direction that the political system has taken. Because Afrikaners were always a majority of the electorate there were, amongst their political leaders, some who saw that if those who spoke the Afrikaans language voted, not as workers, or farmers, or protectionists but as Afrikaners, then political power would be theirs. General Louis Botha, inverting von Clausewitz, had declared after the Boer War: “the battle which was won and lost in the fields of war must be fought again upon the political platform.” The history of party politics in South Africa is little more than an account of the various attempts, and the ultimate success, of Afrikaner leaders to attain this objective.