Abstract
The National Party (NP) dominated South Africa’s modern Right. Founded in 1914 to defend the interests of Afrikaners (descendants of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch, German, and French colonists), it ruled from 1924 to 1934 and 1948 to 1994. In the years it was not in power, it led the opposition in an all-white parliament. In this period, its embrace of hard Right ideas peaked. From 1948 on, it moderated its stance on, for example, anti-Semitism but increased repression and segregation (“apartheid”). The NP distanced itself from “foreign ideologies,” claiming roots in the nineteenth-century Afrikaner “Boer” republics1 yet had a complex relationship with the international Right.
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Notes
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Most Afrikaners belonged to one of three Reformed denominations, all rooted in Dutch Calvinism and with close ties to the Netherlands. These churches provided religious legitimation for Afrikaner nationalist policies, especially on racial segregation; several nationalist politicians, most notably Daniel Malan, were former Reformed pastors. Afrikaner Calvinists retained close ties with the Netherlands: many studied at Dutch universities, especially the Calvinist Free University of Amsterdam, founded by the conservative theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper. His “neo-Calvinist” model for preserving Reformed political culture within secularizing Dutch society attracted many Afrikaner intellectuals. See Irving Hexham, The Irony of Apartheid: The Struggle for National Independence of Afrikaner Calvinism Against British Imperialism (New York and Toronto: Edwin Meilen, 1981), 1–64, 147–64, and 176–99
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See Richard Lakowski, “The Second World War” in German Imperialism in Africa: From the Beginnings Until the Second World War, ed. Helmuth Stoecker (London: C. Hurst/Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), 403, 407, 410–14.
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Marx, Oxwagon Sentinel, 511–12; P.J.J. Prinsloo, “Kultuuraktiwiteite van die Ossewa-Brandwag,” in Die Ossewabrandwag: Vuurtjie in Droë Gras, ed. P.F. van der Schyff (Potchef stroom: Department of History, Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 1991), 370.
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© 2010 Martin Durham and Margaret Power
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Furlong, P.J. (2010). The National Party of South Africa: A Transnational Perspective. In: New Perspectives on the Transnational Right. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115521_4
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