We Are Not All Like That
On David Goldblatt’s distant photographs of white Afrikaners
Zoé Samudzi
Some Afrikaners Photographed, David Goldblatt, Steidl
© The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust
The ending of de jure apartheid has dramatically reshuffled South Africa’s racial-social order. Now that uncontested white minority rule has ended, new considerations and recitations of white identity both past and present (and future) have emerged, although little has changed for the country’s Black majority, and deep material inequities persist. For many whites, there is a sense of being under attack: that there is allegedly no place for whiteness in a Black majority–ruled South Africa, which, at its most extreme, foments conspiratorial fabrications of farm killings, “white genocides,” and racial replacement theorizations. The jostling of identity has occurred within a political landscape whose primary de facto charter of a naturalized white Christian domination has been displaced by the constitutional rule of the majoritarian swart gevaar (Afrikaans for “Black danger”) since the 1994 general election. For others, still, there is some ambiguity in reckoning with how whiteness as a global racial project has and will always necessitate anti-Black inequities.
But as with any European settler colony, South Africa’s history of whiteness is immersed in its own mythos. “Afrikanerdom” is a social and cultural lifeworld inextricably linked to ethnoracial power and the political systems that enforced white empowerment. This formation is part and parcel of grand apartheid’s legal constraints on Black access to land and political rights vs. petty apartheid’s quotidian public practices of racial segregation, but it has evolved in meaning since 1994. With majority rule has come a candor with which Black South Africans assert the ongoingness of their economic dispossession. But these lingering resentments about the foundational violence of South Africa’s colonial encounter allegedly unhelpfully “other” white people who are supposed to be fellow citizens of the multicultural Rainbow Nation. Emphatic pronouncements about the colonial nature of apartheid effectively “reinforce perceptions of white moral inferiority and black entitlement,” to quote a 2013 comment from Dave Steward, executive director of the FW de Klerk Foundation. The organization bears the name of the late Nobel Prize winner who, until his death in 2021, offered only qualified apologies for apartheid.
With Dirk Coetzee’s 1989 revelation of the Vlakplaas death squads and his amnesty-granted confession at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997, there was a widespread sense of a loss of Afrikaner innocence: responsibility for apartheid transcended its leadership and was affixed to all of its beneficiaries, whether “knowingly” complicit or not. The post-apartheid configurations of identity have also inevitably led to scrutinizations of Africanness and indigeneity, particularly in the context of the still-unresolved land question. Afrikaners assert the legitimacy of their claims as native-adjacent peoples. They are children of the African soil, not Europeans like the British uitlanders (foreigners) who colonized and brutally interned them in concentration camps during the three-year war fought between the British Empire and the independent Boer republics—the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State. “Ik wil niet loopen, ik ben een Afrikaander!” (“I will not leave, I am an African!”) cried Hendrik Biebouw when ordered to disperse while participating in drunken chaos in Stellenbosch in 1707—the first recorded notation of a Dutch colonist identifying in this manner typically reserved for Black natives.
Afrikaner identity is constituted of, and through, a triumvirate racial psychopolitics of God, land, and family.
It’s, nevertheless, impossible to assert a singularity of Afrikaner identity as it exists and has existed in multiple registers across its history. Historian Fransjohan Pretorius roughly periodizes Afrikaner history as the Dutch “founding” and settlement of the Cape (1652–1806); British rule (1806–1835), the formative Groot Trek that led settlers from the Cape Colony into the South African interior (1836 through the 1840s); the formation of Afrikaner nations and the stabilization of Afrikaner nationalism (1850–1900); nationalist statecraft through apartheid governance (1948–1994); and the post-apartheid period from universal suffrage enacted in the 1994 general election into the present. An ethnoracial Christendom, specifically a Calvinist doctrine affirming their self-conception as a people chosen by God, had united Afrikaners ideologically and politically against Black natives and British colonialists alike, but there are different registers of Afrikanerness—cultural, ethnic, and linguistic. For example, mixed-raced peoples, classified by the apartheid regime as neither Black nor white, exist within the realm of Afrikaanses because of their linguistic identity as, often, native Afrikaans speakers. Language is a part of a paradoxical purity politic, because although Afrikaans is associated with the white African volk, it is a creolization of the Dutch spoken by settlers and the pidgin Dutch spoken by the peoples from southern Africa and the former Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) they enslaved.
Still, Afrikaner identity is constituted of, and through, a triadic racial psychopolitics of God, land, and family. This remains a powerful mythos, one rooted firmly in the country’s origin story of Afrikaner nationalism, but the establishment of South Africa as a republic in 1961 further unsettled an embattled white identity. Whereas Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (the architect of apartheid) sought to unify pro-republic Afrikaner conservatives and anti-republic Anglo liberals, many of the latter were reluctant to accept political severance from the United Kingdom—per the government’s begrudging support for the process of decolonization sweeping across the African continent. These competing nationalisms set the stage for an intense contestation of intraracial and sociocultural South African identities.
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Against this political backdrop, Jewish photographer David Goldblatt rose to prominence through his images of apartheid South Africa. In his introduction to the first edition of his 1975 monograph Some Afrikaners Photographed, he found himself “strangely affected by some of them,” even though he grew up mostly away from Afrikaners. “They seemed to be imbued in great concentration with potent and often contradictory qualities,” he writes as though describing a collectivity of illusory creatures. Among the subjects he photographed, he encountered an “austerity of spirit and lifestyle,” a “directness and uprightness,” a “floridity and lustiness,” and a “confidence and a sense of belonging.” The collection of photographs seems governed by Goldblatt’s admiring observations of Afrikaners’ “almost visceral bond with the soil and the bush,” and in his interest in “a few minutiae of Afrikaner life,” he trains his camera on the quiet intimacies of domestic life and the grandiose spectacle of ethnic might.
The book contains tableaus of front rooms modestly ornamented with knickknacks and simple furniture; attentive mothers and demure women posed as smiling brides; contemplative elders at the end of their lives; tenuous interracial intimacies with Black people, whether domestic workers, farmhands, or strangers; proud and serious and enervated countrymen in their trademark (and often caricatured) khaki workwear; and Afrikaners participating in various cultural ceremonies. Even as his photographs create a panorama of the various quietudes of quotidian Afrikaner life, he returns, always, to the land. Goldblatt is steadfast in depicting land—its untamed veld explored by children, or thoroughly cultivated farmland—as a centerpiece to Afrikaner sociality. In his journey to grasp “what a man is and is becoming in all the particularity of himself,” the images express a confidence that he is his relation to the land. The collection is humbly titled Some Afrikaners because of the impossibility and conceit of attempting to convey the totality of Afrikanerness. But this work still subscribes to a visual-as-social overdetermination of what and who the Afrikaner is.
Elite Afrikaners’ reactionary hysteria demonstrates their willingness to rewrite history by refusing acknowledgment of their own ideological genesis, but what underlies their resistance to Goldblatt’s work?
Following the 1969 publication of some of Goldblatt’s photographs in the Swiss photography journal Camera, the now-defunct Afrikaans-language newspaper Dagbreek en Sondagnuss bellowed “Bloed sal kook!” (“Blood will boil!”) in response to what was interpreted as a sweeping and humiliating mischaracterization of Afrikaner people. Firing back, critic Ivor Powell decried this “political dissembling under the guise of art criticism,” arguing the newspaper had conflated its own ethnosocial anxieties with the actual politic that Goldblatt sought to convey. The insult of Goldblatt allegedly posing, for example, an unshaven pensioner to look like a “staring idiot” or a farmer dressed in his soil-stained uniform was far more reflective of the photographs’ potential to destabilize the mythologies of the then-ruling National Party. This was punctuated even more by Goldblatt’s description of Afrikaners as “descendants of the Dutch and Huguenots and of Hottentots, Malays, Germans, Africans, Scots and English” in his introduction to the portfolio that would become the monograph. That simple clause dealt a rhetorical blow to the fabled purism—and the apartheid policy—of the Afrikaner volk.
Situating the ethnographic images aesthetically and historically, the photographs bear an uneasy resemblance to the Great Depression–era images of impoverished tenant farmers taken by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration or Walker Evans in his 1941 book (with James Agee) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Considering a domestic contemporary, they also evoke the 1929–1932 Carnegie Commission of Investigation on the Poor White Question in South Africa, the study of white poverty (notably Afrikaners dispossessed of their land and resources during the Anglo-Boer War) whose recommendations of racial segregation to safeguard white uplift and superiority anticipated apartheid. But these affective similarities and temporal distance gesture toward an unease beyond prominent Afrikaners’ complaints that the photographs were, per Powell’s recollection, “sociologically backward-looking, focusing on … farming communities and so-called poor whites rather than the brave new world” of Afrikaner cosmopolitanism. Elite Afrikaners’ reactionary hysteria demonstrates their willingness to rewrite history by refusing acknowledgment of their own ideological genesis, but what underlies their resistance to Goldblatt’s work?
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Some Afrikaners Photographed, David Goldblatt, Steidl
© The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust
At stake, really, is assimilability into whiteness. Taking seriously the appraisal that Goldblatt is revealing the families and communities relegated to a social periphery, this collection initially reflects an accurate representation of how we’ve come to understand Afrikaners. From their arrival and foundational settlement in 1652 to the bravery of the intrepid voyagers who made the Great Trek inland from the Cape Colony, intimacy with the land has always been present in the Afrikaner cultural imaginary. Ashamed and classed disavowals of Afrikaner elite notwithstanding, the ethnographic cast of Afrikaner life is a subjectivity reflecting British South Africans’ conception of Afrikaners. Rather than simply capturing the quotidian lifestyles of a few, Goldblatt’s work is a visual construction of apparent Afrikaner authenticity that seems to relegate Afrikaners to the sparse ruralisms containing their rapidly disappearing way of life.
Ironically, and probably inadvertently, this cedes to them their script of indigeneity by having them photographed in the very staged tableaus of natural habitat typically reserved for Black natives. But while it may not be malicious, there is an insidious artifice to Goldblatt’s visual scripting of Afrikaner nativism. Goldblatt’s contradictory depiction of Afrikaner identity doesn’t amount to indigeneity as a self-determining nativism of masculinist Afrikaner self-construction, but it is rather almost piteous romanticism. The spirit of “impossible contradiction” with which Goldblatt has characterized Afrikaners is a fetishization, as though they deserve more studied examination in their multidimensionality than any other white ethnicity in South Africa, especially British South Africans.
This presentation of authenticity notably rejects urban comfort and success in favor of weary, hardened, and even virtuous salt-of-the-earth agrarianism. The one photograph removed from the second (2006) edition of the book, as well as the third edition (2020) published after Goldblatt’s death, is that of the Lindeque family assembled in their garden. Goldblatt attributed the omission to the fact that it played into upper-class Afrikaners’ self-conception as transplanted European elites in Africa. This obviously monied family, both those standing and those seated, hold themselves with a composed tension betraying an unease: as Afrikaners, they are imposters for their migration from the scraggly dusty veld to these manicured lawns. This evinces an evolution from the white children of the African soil to the, returning to Powell, “mythologizing self-image … as a transplanted ‘European’ elite.” Goldblatt’s photographs of the Afrikaner elite are culturally specific and immediately recognizable as Afrikaners: horse-mounted jacketed men, political leaders and their wives assembled to commemorate nationalist holidays.
Complimentary recognition of Afrikaner authenticity within the urban space is still tethered to the apartheid or statecrafting project. This is not, however, the chameleonic cosmopolitanism of English-speaking South Africans whose easy presence can be found in any and every geography. The curated artificiality and ill fit of the Afrikaner presence in a multiethnic high society denotes their unbelonging within a civilized project of whiteness, a project degraded by the formation of the Afrikaner project of apartheid.
Goldblatt’s decision to train the camera almost solely on rural life came at a time when the economic affordances of grand apartheid enabled white upward mobility: the 1960s and ’70s saw a growth of the (underrepresented in this monograph) urban Afrikaner middle class as nationalism surged to its zenith in the mid-twentieth century and then began to erode toward its end with the loosening of apartheid governance. It can be presumed, then, that these rural whites would have clung far more steadfastly to an apartheid state that naturalized their racial-cultural superiority than the British South African subscribers and readers of the magazines in which Goldblatt originally published these photographs. In short, we learn far more about the subjectivity quietly compelling and curating the project than of its subjects.
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Goldblatt has repeatedly insisted that he not be labeled as an “artist.” One might conclude, then, that his narrative social documentarianism is an intraracial contestation through which liberal British South Africans could distance themselves from Afrikaners. But as synecdoche for British South Africans in toto, he is able to disavow the apartheid-perpetrating whiteness that has come to be synonymous with not just Afrikaner identity but with the essence of Afrikanerness itself. This, in turn, bolsters the fabrication of a dying pastoral racial nationalism increasingly alienated from and by industrial modernity—a dangerous unifying figure within a populist white internationalism perpetually at odds with multiculturalism. As a strained repudiation, Goldblatt’s documentation duly functions as a mode of affective distancing.
In other words, the political and psychological means by which Goldblatt separates himself from Afrikanerness functionally severs the familial-fraternal bond of whiteness, while maintaining some attachment to whiteness through his measured and objective gaze. This permits the exceptionalizing of the othered Afrikaner by the unprovincial white observer, while taking for granted and leaving unquestioned the photographer’s own commitment to the ideological and material maintenance of whiteness beyond the vagaries of opposing apartheid.
The political and psychological means by which Goldblatt separates himself from Afrikanerness functionally severs the familial-fraternal bond of whiteness, while maintaining some attachment to whiteness
There is a complex political lesson at work here. Liberal denunciations never have to qualify or demonstrate their anti-racist affinities: they must simply demonstrate sufficient distancing of “ultra”-violent movements from their own violence and ideologies. Through the denunciation of apartheid exceptionalism, and through the repeated revelation of the true nature of the Afrikaner, South African whiteness can be redeemed because whiteness itself is never located as the source of the production of violence. Instead, this is simply, we are told, the standalone political savagery of Afrikaner nationalism, as though grand apartheid could have survived without the collusion of the British elite and bourgeoisie. But how does Some Afrikaners Photographed, a simultaneously denunciatory and authoritative project, act as social documentation when its subjects are asked to pose and essentially consent to perform an ethnic character (or caricature)—with their identities commodified and circulated in British South African cultural publications?
A May 2021 article by Alfred Klein in the South African publication Arts24 considers Goldblatt’s moral complicity, noting Goldblatt’s own admission that he “was complicit to [his] eyeballs in all kinds of wrongness.” But in what wrongness is he acknowledging complicity? The article goes on to quote Omar Badsha, cofounder of the anti-apartheid photography collective Afrapix, who states that “David’s work never challenged the state”: it “doesn’t question the system of racism in this country because if you question it there’s no difference between the Afrikaner and English-speaking South Africans,” despite each group’s attempts to differentiate themselves from the other.
Many Afrikaners consider British South Africans as colonizers, and many British South Africans hold Afrikaners quite unequivocally responsibly for apartheid, despite the National Party inheriting policies of diminished native land rights and territorial separation implemented by the British government in the nineteenth century. Although Goldblatt opposed apartheid, he was also opposed to militant action like armed struggle or the cultural boycott, the latter of which he understood as censorship. He went on to reiterate his opposition to this militancy during the Rhodes/Fees Must Fall protests, revoking his archive at the University of Cape Town after students threw feces onto the campus statue of Cecil Rhodes (which was eventually removed). “Differences are settled by talk,” Goldblatt said in 2016, describing his decision to part with the university. Mirroring Achille Mbembe’s comparison of the protestors to Boko Haram, Goldblatt remarked: “You don’t threaten with guns. You don’t threaten with fists. You don’t burn. You don’t destroy. You talk. These actions are the antithesis of democratic action.”
Even in Goldblatt’s supposed repudiation of the crimes of apartheid, his assumed humanist position of revelation as purported insurgency has been demonstrated time and again as insufficient. The advent of technologies permitting the global circulation of images coincides not with the diminution of political and economic violence, but, if anything, with their amplification. Commenting on the insufficiency of this liberal position in assessing images of atrocity, Kimberly Juanita Brown describes how, within each photograph, there is “an instant visual negotiation … that interprets the collective nature of racial exclusion,” enabling the viewer to decide who exists within the realm of humanity and who sits outside of it. Some Afrikaners Photographed maps an intraracial cartography of whiteness in the othered Afrikaner’s adjacency to the rural Black native and far removal from urban Anglo South African cosmopolitanism.
Echoing the ethical questions posed by Klein, what is the debt of liberal complicity to the various social positions with which one claims affinity or relation? Specifically, what does David Goldblatt owe through his willingness to commodify the racial, economic, and ethnic underclass “other”—whether it be a solidarity with non-white victims of apartheid or an abandonment of demanded loyalties to white sociality? Material compensation was a fraught issue that Goldblatt navigated throughout his career, eventually vowing to not photograph a person without their permission, after being asked “Am I an ox?” by a would-be subject in Lesotho in 1963. But beyond the ethics of consent and recompense, what else is exchanged through the transactional moment of photography? If the documentary photographer’s work is extractive by nature—they permanently enclose subjects within time and space through eternalizing them in a photo—what does Goldblatt owe these poor rural Afrikaners? What does he owe his Black and colored and Indian subjects for all of the images he took of their racial humiliation and alienation during apartheid? And what does he owe the so-called born-free generation whose attempts to materially reorganize the historically white university have been met with derision, institutional sanction, and even violence from private and state security forces?