Afriforum Jeug members’ reaction to the Afrikaans Must Fall movement : an application of Earl Hopper’s theory of the traumatogenic process

Abstract

In 2016, a growing student movement recognised the continued availability of Afrikaans as an optional medium of instruction at the University of Pretoria as an exclusionary practice which diluted educational resources away from non-Afrikaans speaking students. This movement - which became known as the Afrikaans Must Fall Movement (AMF) - ultimately resulted in the removal of Afrikaans medium courses at the University of Pretoria (UP). This removal was heavily opposed by Afriforum and its student branch Afriforum Jeug (Youth), an organisation centred around the promotion of Afrikaans interests, including the promotion of Afrikaans and mother tongue education and the opposition of political interference in educational matters.

In defending against the removal of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, Afriforum Jeug is defending against the loss of white privilege in preventing against the dismantling of an exclusionary white space that enables the disproportional allocation of educational resources. This defence should be understood in the context of the aftermath of the South African War, in which the whiteness of the Afrikaans people - as it is to be conceptualised as a social positioning of power - was challenged in their loss of that positioning post-war. This study seeks to examine the response of Afriforum Jeug to the Afrikaans Must Fall movement - and the dismantling of the white privilege perpetuated through Afrikaans as a language of instruction - as a reactionary response to their historical loss of white privilege post-war. This examination is conducted in line with Earl Hopper’s (2003a) theory of the traumatogenic process, which states that the fear of annihilation - which is the fear of group dissolution or fragmentation - is the natural result of a group trauma. The trauma of the disenfranchisement of the Afrikaans people post-war has been internalised within Afriforum’s social unconscious, and through the process of equivalence the threat to their white privilege posed by the AMF movement has been conflated with this original trauma, motivating Afriforum Jeug’s response to the student movement.

In order to gain access to the traumatogenic process at work within the group’s social unconscious, this study employed the method of Social Dream Drawing, a psychosocial research method designed to access the unconscious mind through the medium of participant drawing and discussion of dreams, centred around a predetermined theme, selected in this study to be “Being Afrikaans during Afrikaans Must Fall”.

The data generated during the session was transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic analysis. Analysis found four core themes centred on the construction of the Afrikaner identity as an expression of whiteness and Afriforum’s protection of this whiteness in response to the Afrikaans Must Fall movement and demonstrated how Afriforum Jeug’s opposition to the movement is a defence against the fear of annihilation triggered by equating the Afrikaans Must Fall movement with the original group trauma of Afrikaans disenfranchisement post the South African War.

The study ultimately demonstrated the means by which Afriforum Jeug’s opposition is an attempt to reassert and perpetuate a neo-nationalist construction of Afrikaner identity based on an exclusionary ‘volk’ narrative, and in doing so legitimising a white space, the continuation of which serves as a maintaining force for white privilege. In uncovering the mechanisms, both conscious and subconscious, by which white spaces are legitimised this study empowers open engagement with - and ultimate dismantling of - these spaces.

Keywords: social unconscious, Social Dream Drawing, Afrikaans Must Fall, Afriforum Jeug, whiteness, traumatogenic process.