The Afrikaners, Capitalism and Max Weber's Ghost

The white Afrikaners of South Africa €" descended from a variety of European nationalities, including French, Dutch, German and Scandinavian, as well as local Khoisan people and slaves of the Dutch colonies brought to the Cape by the VOC €" trace their roots to this period. Despite other influences, including slave and indigenous cultures, they have retained an overwhelmingly Dutch cultural heritage. Part of this cultural commitment is because their language, Afrikaans, borrowed a high percentage of its vocabulary from Dutch, and is essentially a patois form of this language. However, it is the Calvinist religious ties with the churches of the Netherlands that connect Afrikaner culture most intimately with Dutch culture. It was my fascination with this religious nexus, including the intellectual ideas of John Calvin, which would eventually inspire me to investigate Weber€s famous thesis in the South African context for my doctoral research.

The purpose of this book is to use Weber€s thesis to provide an explanation of the Afrikaner version of Protestantism between 1652 and 1948. Weber€s thesis is taken largely as a given with important explanatory power which offers a different way of understanding developments in South Africa from, for example, Marxist revisionism. My intention is to show how Weber can be used in the South African context to explain Afrikaner Calvinism and its meeting with modern industrial capitalism in the 20th century. In other words, I am drawing on Weber, both theoretically and methodologically, to investigate the extent to which the people who would later come to be identified as Afrikaners embraced the Protestant ethic €" initially as European settlers from the second half of the seventeenth century, then later as a self-identified Afrikaner volk (nation) from the early twentieth century. Having established the salience of this ethic, at least for significant segments of this group, I then aim to show the relevance of Weber for understanding how, still later, when Afrikaners were confronted with modern industrial capitalism in its particular South African incarnation, some entrenched religious attitudes of the group were able to find affinity with the underlying spirit of capitalism. To state my thesis in another way, in terms of its underlying research questions: did the early European settlers of the seventeenth century display Calvinist values like hard work, honesty and frugality? Were these values able to take root and survive, despite countervailing and divergent forces, until a time when a significant segment of Afrikaners as a self-identified volk were confronted with modern industrial capitalism? If the answer to these questions is, broadly, yes, does Weber€s famous thesis have significant explanatory power when applied to this South African case? I argue that it does, and that the use of a Weberian analysis is particularly relevant since white Afrikaners were able to dominate not only politically but, increasingly, economically after 1948. In answering these research questions, my intention, then, is to determine with some precision the significance of Calvinist religious ideas for Afrikaner economic attitudes throughout the post 1652 period.