INTRODUCTION

Reflecting upon the significance of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century, Marx warns that

Two of South Africa's ‘revolutions’ of the eighteenth century – the Graaff-Reinet and Swellendam rebellions of 1795–9 – were certainly short-lived, and they have undoubtedly been succeeded by two centuries of regret. This chapter tries to continue the process of learning to ‘assimilate soberly [their] achievements’ by analysing their many historical and literary rewritings. Specifically, I reflect upon the ways in which the rebellions have been refracted through three consecutive myths of Afrikaner national identity: the British imperialist construct of the Afrikaneras-rural-degenerate propagated by the likes of John Barrow at the very end of the eighteenth century; the myth of the Afrikaner-as-God's-chosen-volk initiated by the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners in the 1870s and elaborated by apartheid ideologues in the twentieth century; and finally, the myth of the post-apartheid Afrikaner, designated ‘the Promethean Afrikaner’ by ex-president Thabo Mbeki, and defined by ‘“willingness to cross frontiers – relating the Afrikaner experience of exploitation, poverty and struggle to others who face similar experiences”’.