A Letter From South Africa

A Letter From South Africa

In July 1987, a group of Afrikaner dissidents met in Dakar, Senegal, with officials of the African National Congress. Among the Afrikaners attending were Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert, former leader of the parliamentary opposition, Beyers Naude, former secretary of the South African Council of Churches, the writers André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach, and the Capetown political scientist, editor of Die Suid-Afrikaan, Hermann Giliomee, who wrote the following report for Dissent.

History cast a long shadow over a recent meeting in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, between a group of 62 internal South Africans, most of whom were Afrikaners, and a delegation of the African National Congress (ANC), the exiled liberation organization. For a century now, Afrikaner and African nationalism have developed alongside each other. The first Afrikaner political organizations were founded in 1880, just a few years before the African ones appeared. Today both nationalisms vie for political control in an ever more lethal struggle.

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