Verloren zonen van het vaderland

English summary Lost sons of the Fatherland The Boer Wars in Dutch history textbooks, 1907-2012 Evy van Ast Keywords History textbooks, history education, the Boer Wars, national identity, myths, narrative analysis The first Boer War (1880-1881) aroused much enthusiasm amongst the public in the Netherlands for the white Dutch speaking population of South Africa, particularly those living in Orange Free State and the South African Republic, also known as Transvaal. This was in sharp contrast to the years before when there was hardly any attention for the Boers. However, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, with a climax during the Second Boer War, the ties between the Boers and the Dutch were actually celebrated.1 Many people compared the successful fight of the Boers, who wanted to regain their independence from the British Empire after the annexation in 1877, with the conflict between the Dutch and the Spaniards in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Consequently, the Boers were seen as worthy descendants of their ancestors, the pioneers of the Dutch East India Company who had settled in the Cape Colony in 1652.2 Even Abraham Kuyper, who was prime minister of The Netherlands at the time, felt that the Boers resembled the freedom-loving, wholesome, devoutly Christian Dutch of the past, precisely because ‘they have managed to preserve the old spirit of our nation more truly than we’, while ‘we have become more cosmopolitan’.3 Textbooks, especially history and geography textbooks, are some of the most important educational inputs: textbooks reflect basic ideas about a national culture and they contain the knowledge a society wants to transmit to its children.4 They are means by which the political and social norms of a society can be anchored.5 Over the last few decades we have seen a so-called ‘boom’ of historical research on the impact of the Boer Wars in the Netherlands. Some scholars have researched the representations of the Boer Wars in media, children’s books and other sources. However, there hasn’t been an analysis of these representations in history textbooks. Consequently, the main question I have attempted to answer during my Master Thesis research is the following: ‘How are the Boer Wars 1 Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, War of Words. Dutch Pro-Boer Propaganda and the South African War, 1988-1902 (Amsterdam 2012) 18-20. 2 Kuitenbrouwer, War of Words, 19-21. 3 Reference in: Keith Wilson, The International Impact of the Boer War (Chesham 2001) 126-127. 4 Falk Pingel, UNESCO Guidebook on Textbook Research and Textbook Revision (Parijs en Braunschweig 2010) 7-8. 5 Hanna Schissler, ‘Limitations and Priorities for International Social Studies Textbook Research’, The International Journal of Social Education 4 (1989) 81. represented in Dutch history textbooks between 1907 and 2012, and what do these representations tell us about the national identity of the Netherlands in that period?’ To answer this question, I analysed Dutch history textbooks (used in secondary education). Additionally, I conducted a small pilot study on the representations of the Boer Wars in South-African history textbooks.6 The quantitative analysis showed that it was not until the 1950’s that the Boer Wars became a less popular topic in the Dutch history textbooks. By looking at the total amount of pages that were dedicated to the Boer Wars, one can see that the space devoted to the Boer Wars, between 1907 and 1950, varied from ca. 3% to 4,5%. After the 1950’s the findings show that the total amount of pages dedicated to the Boer’s was reduced to a percentage of 1.0% to 0.5%. Further quantitative research showed that Cecil Rhodes, Horatio Kitchener, Louis Botha, Christiaan de Wet and Paul Kruger were dominant actors in the narratives. Especially Paul Kruger, quite often nicknamed ‘Uncle Paul’, was referred to often. However, after the 1990’s we can see a shift in terms of which people are mentioned in the narratives. The English actors, as well as some Boer-actors, are replaced by Nelson Mandela and Willem de Klerk. These shifts, as my research shows, reflect changing public opinions and developments in the field of history education. Although the quantitative analysis can tell us a great deal about where the emphasis lies and about the popularity of the narrative, it does not tell us anything about values and interpretation. What does a text tell us, what message does it transmit? The empirical heart of this research, the narrative analysis, is based on three concepts: emplotment, patterns of reasoning and mythologization. All three concepts have been analysed in the textbooks of the following three periods: 1907-1940, 1946-1968 and 1969-2012. Narrative analysis shows that the plot of the narratives about the Boers during the first period (1907-1940) centred on the ‘good guys’ versus the ‘bad guys’. Through narrating about myths of kinship and descendancy, the narratives confirmed a shared community, being the community of the Boers and the Dutch. Surprisingly, the South-African textbook did not narrate about feelings of kinship. Moreover, the English are not portrayed as the ‘bad guys’ or ‘villains’. This indicates that the kinship was being highlighted or maybe even exaggerated in the Dutch history textbooks. The plot of the narratives used during the second period (1946-1968) still centred on the conflict between the Boers and Britain. However, even though the Boers were still represented as heroes in Dutch textbooks, Britain was no longer portrayed as the ultimate ‘bad guy’. Even though some textbooks still narrated about the kinship and the shared past, in most narratives one could also find critical notes on racial distinctions and nationalism in South-Africa. Consequently, we could see the first signs of ‘exclusion’: the Boers were no longer a part of the Dutch ‘we-group’. As a result myths about origins 6 In total 45 Dutch history textbooks and three South-African history textbooks have been analysed. Most of the textbooks can be found in the Historisch- Didactische Collectie (Rotterdam) and the textbook collection of the George Eckert Institute (Braunschweig). and ancestry more or less disappeared. In the South-African textbook the opposite was happening: the English were now the ultimate ‘bad guys’. The narratives in the last period (1969-2012) clearly reflected the changing society and public opinion. The plot centred on the racist, obstinate and immoral Boers who fought Britain with hideous war tactics and established the system of apartheid. The story of the Boer Wars is nowadays no longer a narrative in itself, but a part of the narrative about the apartheid. The Boers are the bad guys and as a consequence we no longer see anything that could indicate a shared past or relationship between the Boers and the Netherlands. All this shows how the dichotomic structure of good guys and bad guys can fill an important function in both myth and narrative, confirming ‘our’ community as something good and defining the enemy as not only evil but also as a threat to humanity. This study does not only touch upon areas such as history education and the changing cultural and political relationship between South-Africa and the Netherlands. It also shows how national identities and myths are part of cultural and historical circumstances. This analysis of the representation of the Boer Wars in Dutch (and South-African) textbooks gives us an insight into how narratives and national identities can transform through time. But most of all it contributes to the historical knowledge about the representations of the Boer Wars in the Netherlands.