ABSTRACT

Criminological ideas have long been imported into South Africa. Both Afrikaner Nationalists in the 1930s and aspiring radical supporters of majority rule in the 1970s and 1980s turned to the grand criminological theories of their time. Thus the overtly racist criminological ideas that were widely available internationally in the 1930s were used to underpin the Afrikaner Nationalist school of criminology. In turn, this school both shaped the core ideology of Afrikaner Nationalism itself, and emerged thereafter as a ‘practical’ criminology in the heyday of apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s (Van Zyl Smit 1990, 1999).