Africanising Apartheid: Identity, Ideology, and State-Building in Post-Independence Africa

Between 1968 and 1975, the leaders of white South Africa reached out to independent African leaders. Scholars have alternately seen these counterintuitive campaigns as driven by a quest for regional economic hegemony, divide-and-rule realpolitik, or a desire to ingratiate the regime with the West. This article instead argues that the South African government's outreach was intended to energise a top-down recalibration of the ideology of Afrikaner nationalism, as the regime endeavoured to detach its apartheid programme from notions of colonialist racial supremacy, and instead reach across the colour line and lay an equal claim to the power and protection of African nationalism. These diplomatic manoeuvrings, therefore, serve as a prism through which to understand important shifts in state identity, ideological renewal, and the adoption of new state-building models.