ABSTRACT
In January 1984, the centuryold library of the nzav housed on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam was stormed by antiapartheid activists. They broke into the premises and threw part of the library, which includes an important collection of historical Africana and the archives of the society, into the water of the canal and sprayed the reading rooms with paint. This was one of the most radical actions undertaken by the Dutch antiapartheid movement, which tried to break off all ties – including cultural – between the Netherlands and South Africa, where white supremacy rule continued. At the time, the nzav was one of the few organisations that tried to maintain contact with the Afrikaners out of a feeling of kinship. Dutch society, however, had largely abandoned its sympathy for the ideal of stamverwantschap and in general supported the fight against apartheid, although the attack on the nzav library was widely criticised as an act of vandalism. 1 This raises the question of how historically significant the pro-Boer movement was in the Netherlands and what its longterm effects were on Dutch society. The prominence of the antiapartheid movement in the 1980s would suggest that these were quite limited and that, in the course of the twentieth century, the ties between the Netherlands and South Africa had steadily declined.
