Long Walk to Freedom

Africanism is an ideology that posits all African peoples share a common interest. European imperial powers divided Africans between themselves in the late 19th century, often employing a strategy of divide-and-conquer by encouraging preexisting tribal rivalries. Africanism recognized that Africa’s colonial status was facilitated by these rivalries and sought to overcome them by bringing Africans together in a common anticolonial struggle.

Africanism is also marked by a sense that Africans must liberate themselves, and its adherents are often suspicious of seemingly sympathetic white people. Many Africanists are also hostile to communism, seeing the Soviet Union’s attempts to “export the revolution” as nothing more than foreign domination in different dress.

An Afrikaner is a South African who speaks Afrikaans, a form of Dutch. Most Afrikaners descend from Dutch colonists who arrived in the 17th and 18th centuries, although there is also a small population of black Afrikaners who descend from these Dutch colonists’ slaves. Once South Africa came under British control in the early 19th century, many of these Dutch South Africans migrated inland. The migration of these voortrekkers, or pioneers, became an important aspect of Afrikaner identity.