Paper short abstract:

This paper examines race and gender in the culture of voluntarism in late colonial Kenya as part of an imperial politics of whiteness, and asks questions about continuities and ruptures for notions of citizenship and the participation of white women in civil society after independence.

Paper long abstract:

In 1957, a Convention of Women's Societies held in Nairobi, Kenya, brought together delegates from women's organizations across lines dividing European, Asian and African communities in the colony. Held towards the end of the Mau Mau Emergency, the convention promoted a vision of a co-operative multiracial future based on mutual public service by women outside of politics. Resulting in an annual women's conference—formalized on independence as the National Council of Women in Kenya—the convention was initially organized by the dominant European women's voluntary organization in Kenya, the East Africa Women's League (EAWL). As such, it formed part of a broader promotion of multiracialism by Kenya's European community in a bid to remain relevant within a changing political climate.

Historians have identified voluntary social service activities by white women across the British Empire as integral to the construction of imperial racial binaries. This paper will explore this culture of women's voluntary work at the end of formal empire in Kenya, addressing questions concerning the gendered dimensions of the politics of whiteness at the critical moment of decolonization. How was this vision of female citizenship through voluntary activity challenged by the first generation of African women in leadership? What remained for publicly active European women in independent Kenya? How have links between race and voluntary activity been both reconfigured and maintained in postcolonial daily life and collective memories of empire? Sources used for this study include the private archive of the EAWL, as well as official archives in Kenya and Britain.

Paper short abstract:

This paper provides a historiography of whiteness studies in Zimbabwe. It focuses on the many improvements made in this field recently, but also reveals some of the major shortcomings and ways to address these in future research.

Paper long abstract:

With Zimbabwean independence coming in 1980, the space opened up to study those peoples disenfranchised by the colonial administration. The radical political shifts resulted in many academics of the time being caught in popular nationalist euphoria and much of the work produced at this time reflects this. The white population as a whole was largely absent from the growing scholarship on pre-and post-colonial Zimbabwe.

However, recent events have resulted in the rapid expansion of whiteness studies in the country, which have sought to explore the various aspects of the white experience in Zimbabwe with a particular focus on white farmers. The histories of colonial land alienation, the grievances fuelling the liberation war, and post-independence land reforms have all been aspects of this new scholarship.

This paper looks at the recent development of whiteness studies in Zimbabwe and traces the shift in academic focus. It looks at factors behind the current wave of literature on whites and discusses the many challenges posed by this new research. It also addresses the problematic issue that there is a desperate need to understand more of the urban white experience and move away from the rural focus. Urban white communities, which have been influential in shaping Zimbabwe, have often been overlooked as the events on the farms attracted so much attention. This paper hopes to illustrate the importance of more nuanced understandings of white communities in Zimbabwe and presents arguments for why such studies are significant and necessary, both for Zimbabwe and the region.

Paper short abstract:

What happens when the material and symbolic privileges provided by whiteness are threatened? This paper takes a historical approach to this question by focusing on white working class discourses responding to democratisation in South Africa, and how these are reinvented post-apartheid.

Paper long abstract:

This paper turns whiteness on itself by investigating intra-race class tensions within the white population of South Africa against the backdrop of economic and political transformation. Starting in the late 1970s, when the ethnic labour-business-government alliance which underpinned the economic prosperity of the 1960s started to break down under pressure from black labour unrest, this paper follows the response of an all-white blue-collar union in the mining industry to the withdrawal of state support of working class privilege based on whiteness.

This response includes discourses of exploitation, disempowerment and resistance expressed in class terms and directed against fellow whites. As democratisation spreads from the industrial arena to South African politics and society at large, a discursive shift towards a more race- and ethnicity-based discourse occurs. The union's antagonism switches seamlessly from the white NP government to the black ANC government, while its originally working class discourses of disempowerment and discrimination are recast to appeal to all whites.

In the post-apartheid context of increasing intra-racial inequality and the growing visibility and politicisation of white poverty, this seemingly contradictory yet concomitant project of declassing whiteness serves to obscure class cleavages amongst whites. This has allowed this previously right-wing union to generate both the material and symbolic resources needed to reinvent itself as a mainstream "social movement" articulating a post-nationalist white, particularly Afrikaner identity and displaying the characteristics of a state within a state.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a longitudinal case study of former frontline state, Tanzania, this paper explores multiple controversies surrounding the rapid expansion of South African capital, imports and neo-settlers in the post-apartheid period.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, South African corporations have acquired controlling interests in Tanzania's largest bank, the national airline, the national brewery, major hotels, gold and gemstone mines, hunting and photographic safari companies, telecommunications links, agro-processing facilities, retail food and grocery outlets, and countless other smaller businesses offering South African goods and services. This rapid post-apartheid influx of South African capital has brought with it a sizable neo-settler population, which has received a decidedly mixed reception given Tanzania's history as a staunch frontline state opposed to apartheid. This paper explores the cultural, social and political-economic dynamics surrounding the establishment of a number of racialized white enclaves, including South African owned production sites (mines, hunting companies, hotels, etc.) and social settings that cater to a largely white clientele (a rugby club, and certain bars, hotels and restaurants). These developments are analyzed against the backdrop of the history of white settlement on the African continent; the end of apartheid and the memory of related solidarity actions within former frontline states; and the implementation of post-socialist neo-liberal economic reforms.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a key racial project in contemporary Ghana: the interdependent relationship between the trope of whiteness and white positionality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the mutual constitution of the ideology of whiteness and the positionality of those so racialized as white in postcolonial Ghana. By "whiteness," I mean historical, cultural, and social practices, as well as ideas and codes, which practically and discursively structure the power and privilege of those racialized as white. I argue in this paper that though the white population in Ghana is mostly transient, and white positionality is hardly rigid, whiteness has retained its undisputed, if contested, power of position. I present ethnographic data to demonstrate the ways that whiteness continues to have currency in this nominally black postcolonial African nation. The analysis does not necessarily analyze the group recognized in Ghana as "white people" as such. Rather, it is an attempt to show how whiteness (as trope and physical visual regime) operates in everyday Ghana in the construction of local meanings of race. The ultimate effort is to reveal a clear discourse of race in postcolonial Africa that is articulated through practices that both reflect global economic, political, and cultural hierarchies, and that reinforce white privilege on the local level.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks into the contextualized (un)making of expat subjectivities in the labour camps of a multinational timber company in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It particularly deals with racialisation, nostalgia and self-exoticization in contemporary practices of expat home-making.

Paper long abstract:

While Richard Dyer has famously equated "whiteness" with "invisibility" through which it secures its dominance, the field of whiteness studies has shown how whiteness is always a contextualized notion and comprises various forms of racialized ideologies and subjectivities. Long-term fieldwork amongst expats working for a multinational timber company in the Congolese rainforest has enabled me to understand the everyday construction of whiteness in all its complexities and ambiguities. Amongst these "white" loggers - a tiny minority in the midst of "black" workers and villagers - whiteness was a very self-conscious element of shifting subjectivities and not so much an "invisible" aspect of racialized power.

Grounded in an ethnography of everyday expat life in the rainforest, this paper discusses several aspects of the (un)making of white subjectivities in the actual postcolony. A contextualized understanding of memory, nostalgia, melancholy, ecstasis, adventure, work and the creation and maintenance of racial and spatial order allows for a reconsideration of whiteness as a structure of feeling for men who described themselves as "the last specimens of the white man in Africa". Through a dynamics of self-exoticization, whiteness was not so much invisible, as continuously talked about. At the same time, however, the construction of racialized selves was also tightly grafted on a dialectical movement between "whiteness" and "blackness", not as pre-existing ideologies, but as localized notions that both produced and evoked one another.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the tensions and contradictions within sentimental white Kenyan narratives about their entitlements to land ownership and citizenship in Kenya, as they rhetorically embed themselves in Kenyan spaces and bind themselves to its wildlife.

Paper long abstract:

Kenya's three to five thousand white citizens, the descendents of former colonial settlers, may be entitled to carry Kenyan passports, but since imperial dissolution they have been perpetually insecure about their entitlement to belong in Kenya and own its lands (see Hughes 2010 for comparable sentiments among white Zimbabweans). In this paper I focus upon white Kenyan narratives about these entitlements, as they rhetorically embed themselves in Kenyan spaces and bind themselves to its wildlife. I find that white Kenyans tend to be unsentimental when assessing Maasai claims to white Kenyan-owned land, but deeply romantic as they discussion of their own attachment to Kenya's land and wildlife, discussions that often revert nostalgically to early childhood memories and that use sentiment to stake a claim to their essential relationship to the place and its wildlife. A related tension plays out in white Kenyan discussions of mobility and entitlement to land. While white Kenyans represent pastoralists' mobility as a strike against their claims to land rights, they adduce their own mobility repeatedly when discussing their childhoods, a time when moving freely across the land inculcated deep emotional attachments that inspire their present commitments. All in all I find white Kenyans use sentiment to justify their claims to stewardship of Kenyan resources, and ultimately to justify their entitlement to belong to the contemporary nation. While sentiment tends to be solipsistic, I also note that some white Kenyans increasingly make concessions to the alternative viewpoints of the communities bordering their lands and conservation areas.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the lives of a small group of friends of young Afrikaner boys at a high school in Cape Town, whose school experience has become a contradictory site around which their fraught white masculine identities are stitched together.

Paper long abstract:

Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the lives of a small group of friends of young Afrikaner boys at a desegregated and recently re-segregated high school in Cape Town. I analyze how they—as the last white Afrikaner students at the school—imagine their ethnic identities and whiteness in South Africa after apartheid. Contrasting their narratives with those of the girls, I analyze how masculinity, whiteness and class intersect in specific ways for this young generation of Afrikaners. During apartheid, white Afrikaner masculinity was constructed within a frame of patriarchy, militarism, and racism. In the post-apartheid era, Afrikaner masculinity is no longer supported by the raw political and military power of Afrikaner Nationalism, and the neoliberal landscape has increased division of class. Engaging the past and the present, I show how the boys juxtapose national media debates onto their personal circumstances to make sense of their tragic circumstances, and to navigate their uncertain place in the world. I highlight how stigma and shame play a prominent role in their masculine performances. As their school experience has become a contradictory site around which their fraught masculine identities are stitched together, their story provides an interesting vantage point to rethink the trajectory of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the development of a new subculture of poverty among the poor Afrikaners, who tend to settle in predominantly white informal settlements, and whose modes of survival differ from the ones known in the African or Coloured townships and informal settlements.

Paper long abstract:

Since 1994 poor Afrikaners are constantly being described as a "new" phenomenon in South Africa. Partly it can be explained by the media-driven thirst for novelty combined with the still present stereotype that South African whites cannot be poor, partly - by the still ambiguous state of this growing group.

White poverty always existed in South Africa and was associated mainly with the Afrikaner community, but the causes and the nature of white poverty under apartheid and in new South Africa seem to be rather different.

Today a new subculture of poverty is being developed among Afrikaners, who tend to settle in predominantly white informal settlements and whose modes of survival differ from the ones employed in the African townships and informal settlements.

The paper is based on the field studies conducted in Gauteng and Western Cape provinces in 2011 and 2013, including in-depth family history interviews with the Afrikaners living in informal settlements. Based on microhistory approach, the paper analyzes the causes of poverty and the modes of survival of the poor Afrikaners and compares them to such of their African and Coloured counterparts.

The paper describes the causes of formation, structure and everyday functioning of the poor Afrikaner communities and attempts to measure the level of support by the state and non-governmental organisations in sustaining of these communities.

The paper also describes the broader psychological implications of the status of the poor and its impact on self-understanding of the poor Afrikaners in contemporary South Africa.

Paper short abstract:

Pressures on Stellenbosch University for transformation has caused a racialised identity resistance. The paper traces the muted politics of whiteness in the 'taaldebat' (language debate) and its relationship to questions of multilingualism, access and campus culture.

Paper long abstract:

Afrikaans has historically become a core symbol of white Afrikaner nationalism. The language was strongly associated with universities for white Afrikaans-speakers, such as Stellenbosch University. The transition of 1994 impacted on its privileges, reducing it to one of 11 official languages. University managements at former Afrikaans universities were caught between contrasting demands made by their conservative traditional base and the expectations of transformation from the side of government. In this context the new politicisation of Afrikaans was unavoidable. The mainly white group that was mobilised for the 'new politics of Afrikaans' sought a future for Afrikaans separated from the racial domination of the past. However, the new activism did not succeed in demonstrating solidarity with the majority of the population.

This paper investigates the impact of pressures on Stellenbosch University for transformation and the resistance this caused. Specifically, the paper traces the muted politics of whiteness in the 'taaldebat' (language debate) and its relationship to questions of multilingualism, access and campus culture. The emphasis on Afrikaner identity and questions around the role of 'coloureds' in the language struggle reveal the underlying persistence of a framework of whiteness among an important section of the actors. In this paper the roles and discourses of alumni, staff, management and students are investigated through critical discourse analysis of recent contestations around Afrikaans and transformation (from an exclusive whiteness to a more inclusive South Africanism).

Paper short abstract:

Are the residents of would-be whites-only 'Volkstate' the most intractable whites in post-apartheid South Africa? We address this question by reference to ethnographic research in Kleinfontein, outside Pretoria, which is billed as a growth point for 'Boere-Afrikaner' self-determination.

Paper long abstract:

One might expect white South Africans living in one or other of the settlements billed as starting points for future whites-only 'Volkstate' to be of one, uncompromising mind when it comes to issues of citizenship and belonging, race and space, and resistance to Africanisation. This is certainly the impression one gets from existing literature associated with these settlements, whether academic analysis or self-advertisement.

In this paper we examine the results of ethnographic research in Kleinfontein, a small settlement on the outskirts of Pretoria ostensibly devoted to achieving self determination for 'Boere-Afrikaners'. While there are certain parameters on which all residents agree, our findings lead us to emphasise the extent to which they differ among themselves on many questions to do with maintaining 'whiteness' in post-apartheid South Africa, as well as the degree to which individual residents' views are internally incoherent.

We try to explain these findings by reference to the history of Kleinfontein and the legal and economic challenges its residents face. Day-by-day contact with residents reveals that they do not simply live out the grand myths some of their number tell themselves and the world. They also have to figure out mundane matters such as how best to protect the money they have invested in the settlement. This opens possibilities for compromise on the part of a self-selected group who would otherwise appear hell bent on open confrontation with post-apartheid realities.