Afrikaner, noun and & adjective

/ˌafrɪˈkɑːnə(r)/, /ˌæfrɪˈkɑːnə(r)/
Forms:
α. Africaner, AfricanorShow more Africaner, Africanor, Afrikaaner, Afrikaner;
β. Africaander, AfricanderShow more Africaander, Africander, Afrikaander, Afrikander.
Origin:
Afrikaans, South African Dutch, DutchShow more Afrikaans, from South African Dutch Africander, from Dutch Afrikaan African + suffix -der, -er signifying ‘belonging to’.
A. noun
1. Any of several species of indigenous flowering plants of the Iridaceae, especially of the genus Gladiolus, but also of Homoglossum and Antholyza. Also attributive, and with distinguishing epithets designating different species, as mauve Afrikaner, pink Afrikaner, small brown Afrikaner, etc. See also gladiolus.
α.
1801 J. Barrow Trav. I. 25The Gladiolus, which is here called Africaner, is uncommonly beautiful with its tall waving spike of striped flowers.
1810 G. Barrington Acct of Voy. 341The Africaner, is uncommonly beautiful with its tall waving spike of striped flowers, and has also a fragrant smell. That species of a deep crimson is still more elegant.
1970 M.R. Levyns in Std Encycl. of Sn Afr. I. 185Large brown afrikaner, Aandpypie. Ribbokblom. Kaneelblom. (Gladiolus grandis)...This afrikaner is sweetly scented at night...Small brown afrikaner, (Gladiolus maculatus). This is a more common plant, with smaller flowers than the large brown afrikaner...Mauve afrikaner, Sandpypie. (Gladiolus carinatus).
1985 A. Tredgold Bay between Mountains 161There were afrikaners, painted ladies, proteas and many other flowers on the hills.
β.
1861 ‘A Lady’ Life at Cape (1963) 36The smell of the sugar and buchu bushes, and the pungent odour of the bulbs and Africander lilies peeping out under their skirts, are the best cures I know for a nervous headache.
1904 Argus Christmas Annual (Cape Colony Sect.) 19The thin red line of ‘Afrikanders,’ far flung among the stones.
1912 Cape Times 14 Sept. 9 (Pettman)Called by some people the Mauve Afrikander, this beautiful flower may be found here growing from 3 to 4 feet high, with as many as ten or twelve flowers on a stem.
1913 H. Tucker Our Beautiful Peninsula 70It becomes garden-gay with..the pale blue and delicate rose of afrikanders and pypjes.
1917 R. Marloth Dict. of Common Names of Plants 4Africander, (Afrikaander). Various species of Gladiolus and Antholyza, especially in the South West.
1933 J. Juta Look Out for Ostriches 20Sometimes we found the rarer, cocoa coloured Afrikanders, a delicate member of the large gladiolus family.
1937 M. Alston Wanderings 38The largest and most beautiful Afrikander lilies she had ever seen.
1954 M. Kuttel Quadrilles & Konfyt 86Lettie Duckitt..remembers seeing Miss North painting the scarlet Africanders at Groote Post.
2.
a. A Dutch-speaking (or later Afrikaans-speaking) white inhabitant of South Africa, usually of Dutch, German, or Huguenot descent; African noun2; Dutchman sense 1 a. Also attributive. See also Boer sense 2, South African Dutch noun phrase sense 2.
α.
1820 T. Philipps Philipps, 1820 Settler (1960) 57I could not help reflecting on the characters of the Africaners (as they call themselves, distinguishing those who come from even any part of Europe as Vaderlandvolk or Fatherland People).
1824 W.J. Burchell Trav. II. 619Africaanders, or Afrikaaners.
1834 Makanna (anon.) I. 188That inseparable companion of a Dutch Boer, his ‘roer’, (or gun — and by the by, the weapon of that sort used by an ‘Africanor’ is no plaything, being of a make between a blunderbuss and a musket).
1850 J.D. Lewins Diary. 52No appearance yet of Van Staade. Afrikaner like.
1905 R. Fenton Peculiar People p.viAs General Piet Joubert said to me one day: ‘We are Afrikaaners, not Dutchmen.’
1964 N. Nakasa in J. Crwys-Williams S. Afr. Despatches (1989) 345I’m not even sure that I could claim to be African. For if I were, then I should surely share my identity with West Africans and other Africans in Kenya or Tanganyika. Yet it happens to be true that I am more at home with an Afrikaner than with a West African.
1968 W.K. Hancock Smuts II. 239The entire cultural life of Afrikaners was beginning to bear the Broederbond stamp of Afrikanervolkseenheid. Its meaning was that the Afrikaners were by themselves a nation.
1970 Daily Dispatch 20 June 20Mr Terblanche told the audience: ‘The Afrikaner has to defend South Africa at its borders while the Englishman and the Jew sit at home with their millions of rands.’
1980 N. Ferreira Story of Afrikaner 89The young new nation became aware of itself the moment its language was born. Afrikaans, the language, was the birthcry of the Afrikaner. It gave him his name.
1983 A. Sparks in J. Crwys-Williams S. Afr. Despatches (1989) 446They came, many of the ‘ooms’ and ‘tannies’, in Mercedes-Benzes, for the Afrikaner is no longer the underdog in South Africa that he once was.
1988 South 21 July 16‘If any national group in South Africa today could understand the language of the Freedom Charter, it should be the Afrikaner,’ said Malan.
1990 D. Van Heerden in Sunday Times 10 June 8Some talk of Afrikaners; others detest the term and prefer Boere.
1990 R. Stengel January Sun 40Since light-skinned Coloureds were virtually impossible to differentiate from Afrikaners, the Population Registration Act of 1950 emphasized association and ancestry as the principal ways of establishing who was white.
1991 K. Owen in Sunday Times 24 Feb. 21Somewhere in the 60s the Nationalists took the Afrikaners as a people across a moral precipice.
β.
1822 W.J. Burchell Trav. I. 21All those who are born in the colony speak that language (sc. Dutch), and call themselves Africaanders, whether of Dutch, German or French origin.
1829 C. Rose Four Yrs in Sn Afr. 1The elder Africanders keep a sore sullen distance. [Note] The designation by which the Cape-born Dutch are distinguished.
1837 ‘N. Polson’ Subaltern’s Sick Leave 80Most of the ‘Kapenaars,’ as the Dutch and other natives of Cape Town delight to call themselves, in contradistinction to the other native white inhabitants of the colony whom they style ‘Afrikaanders,’ have some sort of business or another to attend to.
1852 A.W. Cole Cape & Kafirs 165The Africanders, blessing on their simple souls, don’t walk through a quadrille, or glide through a polka; but they pound away with feet and arms.
1861 ‘A Lady’ Life at Cape (1963) 34To see women of this stamp..turn up their chiselled noses, at good-natured, and by no means vulgar Africanders,..is one of the saddest proofs of insular pride and power of human conceit.
1902 E. Wallace in J. Crwys-Williams S. Afr. Despatches (1989) 194The dream of the United Afrikander nation is dying hard.
1903 H. Elffers Englishman’s Guide to Cape Dutch 6From Cape Point to the Rhodesian wilds, and wherever the Afrikander roams, it is the same language with but little local idiom.
1913 Times Lit. Suppl. (U.K.) 24 July 309Dutch remains the great influence in the English spoken by Africanders.
1926 R. Campbell in Voorslag Vol.1 No.2, 9In Dutch churches I have collected much evidence..and I understand that the Almighty is Dutch, a real old Afrikander.
1937 C.R. Prance Tante Rebella’s Saga 47A rascally Irish ‘rooinek’ whose real name had been Pat Murphy till he changed it to Piet van der Merwe when he turned Afrikander to fight against Cromwell’s England in Paul Kruger’s ‘Freedom War’.
1949 L.G. Green In Land of Afternoon 212Kaapenaars, the people of the Cape Peninsula called themselves in the seventeenth century and long afterwards. The farmers beyond the Cape Flats were ‘Afrikaanders’.
1966 T.R.H. Davenport Afrikaner Bond 326To the nineteenth-century reader, Afrikaner and its semi-anglicized form Africander carried a cultural nuance not present in the geographical though not yet politically meaningful term South African.
1990 R. Stengel January Sun 33By the late eighteenth century, the Cape community had formed its own distinctive identity. The people were known as Boers — farmers — and they called themselves Afrikanders, later Afrikaners, the people of Africa.
b. With qualifying word: New Afrikaner, a person of Afrikaans descent who rejects the conservative and insular aspects of white Afrikaans-speaking society (see also alternative); super Afrikaner, see quotation 1991.
α.
1986 Style July 63The hostess..sends a frantic eyebrow signal to the New Afrikaner. Van, a large, jolly dynamo in a navy-and-grey striped suit with matching navy-and-grey striped tie (made in Germany, acquired in Windhoek), instantly comes to the rescue.
1989 C. Du Plessis in Style Dec. 153Stark, easily recognisable Afrikaner symbols and metamorphosised metaphors..reflect..the ‘New’ Afrikaner writer’s attitute towards his heritage:..Kappie-kommando tannies with faces like hogs, regimented AWB-types, a grotesque Anglo-Saxon..swallowing a black man.
1990 Top Forty July 12Republic Day...On a day that is usually noted for its solemnity, pomp and Afrikaner nationalism, a bunch of ‘new’ Afrikaners put together an irreverent gathering of musos in the Woodstock style, calling it ‘Houtstok’, probably because the day’s significance made them feel quite naar.
1990 R. Malan My Traitor’s Heart 127New Afrikaners..were people of the most civilized sort. They holidayed in Europe, collected art, drank fine Cape wines, and appreciated the best in books — especially the works of Breyten Breytenbach.
1991 A. Van Wyk (title)The Birth of a New Afrikaner.
1991 A. Van Wyk Birth of New Afrikaner 27A stereotype ‘super’ Afrikaner..may best be defined as an uncompromising Afrikaans-speaking Christian Nationalist and uncritical apartheid supporter...Most of them were either members or supporters of the secret Afrikaner Broederbond...According to the yardstick of the ‘supers’ I didn’t qualify as a ‘true’ Afrikaner.
3. [Named for the clan founder, Jager Afrikaner (d. 1823).] oorlam noun sense 2. Also attributive.
α.
1840 J. Tindall Jrnl (1959) 19In company with our two friends we set off at 8 p.m. to visit the outpost of the Afrikaners at Jerusalem.
1842 J. Tindall Jrnl (1959) 32The Afrikaners reside 9 days northward of Nosasanabis, and have taken possession of a part of Damaraland.
1856 J. Tindall Jrnl (1959) 35Adjoining the Eastern boundary of the Bundel Zwarts are the Africaners, a part of the tribe of which Jonker is the chief.
1877 Sel. Comm. Report on Mission to Damaraland 54Within the tract of country..two tribes of Namaquas, the Afrikaaners and the Gobabis people, are living.
1905 G.W. Stow Native Races of S. Afr. 327The Africaanders belonged to a large tribe of Hottentots who were at one time called Jagers or the Hunters, and who lived within a hundred miles of Capetown, near the rugged Witsenberg range of mountains.
1930 I. Schapera KhoiSan Peoples 347In the same way, the Afrikaners..an Orlam tribe, are said to be an old branch of the present !Aman or Bethanie Hottentots..who formerly lived between the Berg and the Olifants River in Cape Colony.
1987 D. Haarhoff in Eng. Academy Rev. Vol.4 28His cries at birth were lost in war cries against the Afrikaner Nama.
4. Variant of Afrikander noun sense 3.
5. Variant of Afrikander noun sense 7.
6. Variant of Afrikander noun sense 4.
7. Variant of Afrikander noun sense 2.
8. rare. Any South African, irrespective of colour, language, or descent.
α.
1973 A. Small in Weekend Post 24 Mar. 1I would want ‘Afrikaner’ now to translate as ‘African’, just as ‘Amerikaner’ translates as ‘American’. In this sense we are all Afrikaners (when we are described in Afrikaans), whether we be black, blue, pink, or what have you.
1980 Het Suid-Western 13 JuneThe Rev Martin Kota, of the Church of Christ, gave a talk on the unity of ‘all Afrikaners, white, black, brown or yellow’.
9. Either of two plant species of the genus Tagetes, family Asteraceae, indigenous to Mexico: T. erecta (also known as African marigold), or T. minuta (also known as kleinafrikaner); see also khaki bush (khaki adjective sense 1 b).
α.
1981 Het Suid-Western 18 Feb. 2Khaki bush and afrikaners..are members of the genus Tagetes.
B. adjective Of, pertaining to, or descriptive of Afrikaans-speaking people; Afrikaans adjective; Afrikander adjective sense 1; cf. boere sense 1 a. See also Dutch adjective sense 1.
α.
1950 H. Gibbs Twilight in S. Afr. 230In every respect, at all times, the children of Afrikaner people are to be kept separate from all others in South Africa, including the children of English-speaking people.
1953 P. Lanham Blanket Boy’s Moon 46I have seen, Moruti, that most of the police and the men who work on the railway, and on the trams, seem to be of the Afrikaner nation.
1969 S. Uys in J. Crwys-Williams S. Afr. Despatches (1989) 396The rousing of the Nationalist rank and file out of its apathy, the whole emotional mobilisation of the Afrikaner nation, is generating political intemperance and intolerance.
1983 A. Sparks in J. Crwys-Williams S. Afr. Despatches (1989) 446He also noted that the Bible is abundant in its approval of the preservation of a people’s heritage — and mampoer, after all, is a piece of Afrikaner culture...A band struck up, featuring a concertina and guitar, playing the bouncy waltzes and quicksteps of traditional boeremusiek, the music of the Voortrekkers.
1988 South 21 July 16Afrikaner history was a parallel of what was happening at present in liberation politics.
1990 R. Malan My Traitor’s Heart 127Five hundred tuxedoed members of the High Afrikaner Establishment.
1991 A.C. LoBaido in Sunday Star 21 July (Review) 5I find it hard to argue with Terreblanche’s dissertation of the Boer claim, via international law, for an Africaner nation.
Any of several species of indigenous flowering plants of the Iridaceae, especially of the genus Gladiolus, but also of Homoglossum and Antholyza. Also attributive, and with distinguishing epithets designating different species, as mauve Afrikaner, pink Afrikaner, small brown Afrikaner, etc.
A Dutch-speaking (or later Afrikaans-speaking) white inhabitant of South Africa, usually of Dutch, German, or Huguenot descent; African noun2; Dutchman sense 1 a. Also attributive.
New Afrikaner, a person of Afrikaans descent who rejects the conservative and insular aspects of white Afrikaans-speaking society (see also alternative); super Afrikaner, see quotation 1991.
oorlam noun sense 2. Also attributive.
Any South African, irrespective of colour, language, or descent.
T. erecta (also known as African marigold), or T. minuta (also known as kleinafrikaner);
Of, pertaining to, or descriptive of Afrikaans-speaking people; Afrikaans adjective; Afrikander adjective sense 1;
Derivatives:
Hence (all nouns, from sense A 2 a) Afrikanerhood, Afrikanerness, Afrikanership, Afrikanerskap  [Afrikaans -skap -ship].
1956 J.C. Van Rooy in M. Rogers Black Sash 148Those who are Afrikaans-speaking, of Protestant faith, of clean character, who are firm in the principle of maintaining their Afrikanerhood.
1971 Sunday Times 14 Nov. 15I have had occasion in the past to draw attention to the increasing Afrikanerness of the Progressive Party.
1972 Daily Dispatch 26 July 14Mr Vorster and his party politicians are busy exploiting the Afrikanerskap of the Afrikaner for their own party’s political purposes.
1973 Weekend Post 30 June 22Although they spoke Afrikaans they had no claim to Afrikanership, he said.
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