ABSTRACT
Afrikaner nationalist historical interpretations of South Africa's racial order display a few fundamental features. First, they fall within a crude pluralist framework. Racial difference was deemed to be a basic element of South African society and history. In its most raw form, as expressed in the 1930s and 1940s, this pluralist approach rested on the premise that races were distinct biological categories, and on the primordialist assumption that a strong sense of racial identity was an ingrained human instinct. Thus South Africa's racial order could be taken for granted, assumed to be part of the natural order of things. Such thinking was not at the time some bizarre South African aberration. It was a paradigm that enjoyed broad acceptance and legitimacy. As Saxton has remarked,
Until about the third decade of the present century, most people in the so-called western world, including most social scientists and historians, took for granted the hereditary inferiority of non-white peoples. Differential treatment required no special explanation so long as it could be understood as a rational response to objective reality ... .20
