Fear and Loathing on the Margins of Empire: Socio-religious perspectives connecting the Netherlands and South Africa before and into the South African War

Abstract

Focusing especially on writings by the theologian Abraham Kuyper and the impact of two Dutch born clergymen with substantial careers in South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church in the late 19th century, this article develops a perspective on the intertwined relationship between groups and cultural factors involving the Netherlands and South Africa during this period. This intertwined relationship went far beyond Reformed theology, but the literature produced by Reformed theologians and pastors is one area or lens through which one might perceive this relationship quite clearly. The article's thesis is that both the Netherlands and parts of South Africa during much of the colonial period experienced themselves as on the margins of a British Empire perceived with varying degrees of apprehension and hostility and that both the first and the second Anglo Boer Wars of the late 19th and early 20th century catapulted such shared sentiments into overdrive. Yet Dutch sympathisers often had to counterbalance their identification of shared culture and religion that they had with the Boers with their more general, perhaps growing, sensibilities regarding racial equalization and democracy, which created tensions in this complex relationship, as this essay will show.