Paper short abstract:

Anthropological advice about incorporating black students into the University of Pretoria in the 1940s raises questions about volkekundes’ role in establishing apartheid. Shunning racial integration and domination, the advocated social order bore little relationship to apartheid.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on materials in the archives of the University of Pretoria, the main locus of the discipline of Volkekunde in South Africa in the second half of the 20th century. It focuses on several episodes in the late 1940s in which the then newly appointed anthropologists (or volkekundiges) gave the university professional advice about whether or not to incorporate black students. The character of this advice indicates that like many of their fellow Afrikaner academics, the anthropologists were in triumphant mood, convinced that they could refashion the university in accordance with their own convoluted vision of how to avoid both racial integration and white domination. The fact that the university accepted their advice, which they grounded in a principled - if highly selective - reading of international anthropological literature, encouraged them to think that they could apply the same ideas to the restructuring of the wider society.

This turned out to be a much harder task, however, and apartheid practice in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s bore a distinctly tenuous relationship to the anthropologists' idea of instituting a social order that would be 'anthropologically justifiable' by virtue of the fact that it shunned racial domination as well as integration. For a variety of reasons, white South Africans were too wedded to baasskap (white domination) to buy conclusively into a pedantic vision of a just society based on the notion of placing blacks and whites in parallel universes. Apartheid in practice was a never-ending compromise between the Afrikaner anthropologists' vision and the pragmatics of baasskap. In the 1950s and 1960s these anthropologists clung to the belief that they could reform the practice from within, but they lost faith in the 1970s and withdrew from the system entirely in the 1980s. Rather than compromise either of their ideals, they were willing, by then, to render the discipline of Volkekunde marginal to the political debate in the wider society.

These considerations raise questions about the accuracy of past criticisms of the role of Afrikaner anthropologists in the unfolding of apartheid. Their vision was inane, and would certainly have led to unmitigated disaster if it had ever been implemented. But to what extent can one persist in the accusation that that they were willing to serve the Afrikaner Volk, and the practice of apartheid, at any cost?