Puritans in Africa? Afrikaner “Calvinism” and Kuyperian Neo-Calvinism in Late Nineteenth-Century South Africa (original) (raw)

1985, Comparative Studies in Society and History

Accounts of South African history and politics have been much influenced by what might be termed the Calvinist paradigm of Afrikaner history. As a model for the historical understanding of modern Afrikaner nationalism and of the ideology of apartheid it has proved persuasive to historians and social scientists alike. In outline, it amounts to the view that the “seventeenth-century Calvinism” which the Afrikaner founding fathers derived from their countries of origin became fixed in the isolated frontier conditions of trekboer society and survived for generations in the form of a kind of “primitive Calvinism”; that in the first part of the nineteenth century, this gave rise to a nascent chosen people ideology among early Afrikaners, which provided much of the motivation for, as well as the self-understanding of, that central event in Afrikaner history, the Great Trek, while simultaneously serving to legitimate the conquest and subordination of indigenous peoples; and that, mediated i...

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