In November 2015, MISTRA, in partnership with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) South Africa and the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) convened a roundtable on ‘whiteness’ titled Whites, Afrikaans, Afrikaners: Addressing Post-Apartheid Legacies, Privileges and Burdens at Constitution Hill.
That roundtable was convened as a continuation of MISTRA’s work on nation formation and social cohesion, which had resulted in a report released in August 2014 titled Nation Formation and Social Cohesion: An Enquiry into the Hopes and Aspirations of South Africans. The voice of white South Africans was one of the gaps identified in that report.
The November 2015 roundtable aimed to plug that gap. The papers presented there have now been compiled into a book, to be launched on 30 August 2018, which aims to;
- interrogate Afrikaans as part of the discourse on whiteness;
- explore the different identities associated with Afrikaans;
- explore current thinking on the construction of whiteness; and
- highlight developments within the Afrikaans-speaking community.