ABSTRACT
Afrikaners have famously adhered to cultural boundaries, keeping themselves apart from other ethnic and racial social groups. These external boundaries, described as laer (a defence encampment), provided a symbol for the boundaries drawn between Afrikaners and everyone else during the apartheid era to emphasize their uniqueness. This chapter investigates the mediation of Afrikanerdom's external boundaries: how these boundaries were historically, socially, and politically constructed, yet constantly transgressed in everyday life practices. While the Afrikaners were the architects of apartheid, their relationship to the idea of “race” was ambivalent and complicated, and their experiences and opinions differed. Their fervent religiousness hid many traditional beliefs and understandings considered unsuitable for “white” people, and were therefore not discussed. Regardless of this conflation of religion, culture, and race – or perhaps because of it – behind the veneer of traditional religion and religiousness, and well within the closely guarded outer boundaries of the laer, deep-seated religious and cultural fusions of beliefs and practices were combined with mediation practices in which normative racial, moral, and religious boundaries were ignored, as exemplified by the author's own experiences of these boundaries. These transgressions were hidden with what she calls “loud silences”.
