ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the author's fieldwork in Stellenbosch and the greater Cape Town area over three decades. Background information on the main site of that fieldwork, the university town of Stellenbosch in the Western Cape, is provided, including the intricacies of its social life, class hierarchies, and racial taboos, and what these imply for current South African race relations and the place and role of Afrikaners in them. The author describes her experiences of living with a middle-class Afrikaner family and the challenges she encountered working in this context as an outsider. The association between whiteness and proper, decent, moral behaviour (ordentlikheid) during apartheid led to clear rules about how to perform the white, gendered, and racialized ideas of respectability (e.g. through cleanliness, church attendance, “not going around too much”). These rules played out very differently for the middle classes of Stellenbosch versus the poorer white people of Ruyterwacht, with the “poor white” project during apartheid aiming to raise the position of poor whites by emphasizing their whiteness and racial purity. Such attitudes continue to have an impact on what is considered desirable behaviour today. To understand these phenomena better, the concept of mediation is given a more theoretical grounding.
