Whites

When one spoke about 'the racial question' in pre-apartheid South Africa, one was not referring to conflicts between blacks and whites, but to frictions between the two white groups, namely the Afrikaners and the English-speaking. This book endeavors to explore how the Boer and the British dealt with their cultural differences and how this was reflected in their identity constructions, to examine how each group carved out their ambiguous identity(ies) as 'white Africans' at the beginning of the twentieth century and to evaluate how they balanced the ambivalence in their European-African heritage and commitments. By examining the portrayal of white identity in the writing of pre-apartheid South African authors, more specifically in the writings of William Charles Scully, Francis Carey Slater, Louis Leipoldt, Pauline Smith, Sarah Gertrude Millin, Roy Campbell, Laurens van der Post and Alan Paton, the goal of this book is to bring to light this negotiation and development of white identity as well as to reveal and analyze the identity constructions of Afrikaners and Anglo South Africans in pre-apartheid English literature.