AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	68. Exploring new dimensions of religion and entrepreneurship
Paper ID	198
Author(s)	Degelder, Mieke C.
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	As in other urban South African contexts, the ending of apartheid in the early 1990s led to drastic changes in Pretoria’s inner city: what was formerly a predominantly Afrikaner domain has transformed into a largely black area in just a decade’s time. In what I argue is one Afrikaner response to the apartheid past, members of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), the ‘state church’ during apartheid, have been active since the 1990s to “bring Jesus back to the inner city.” Through partnerships with other churches and Christian groups, their organization forms one component of what has grown into an extensive interdenominational network striving to establish “loving communities” in this downtown area through Christian practice. In this paper I explore how the concepts of ‘woundedness’ and ‘trauma’ are utilized and understood among Afrikaner employees of this new religious movement. These terms are regularly invoked in discussing the needs of clients (the homeless, the poor, refugees, AIDS patients, children) and the experiences of staff members, and in representing what is happening in the inner city to the wider public, on whom they depend for financial support. By way of newsletters, presentations, classes and guided tours stories of a wounded inner city and of ‘the trauma’ of working there are shared with such potential donors as business owners, suburban DRC congregations and interested publics in places as far away as Europe and America. Although Afrikaner depictions of Pretoria’s city center are to some extents successful in garnering support for the work of outreach, they are also revealing of tensions in the post-apartheid moment for Afrikaners themselves. The second part of my paper therefore addresses how the notions of woundedness and trauma speak to the ways Afrikaners struggle to deal with the loss of a politically privileged status and with the homecoming of apartheid’s legacies. While the topic of apartheid remains largely silenced, including themselves in the category of ‘the wounded’ allows Afrikaners to position themselves as 'also injured by the past' and to uphold their own social norms. Yet such efforts tend to meet with friction when they attempt to incorporate black staff members into this designation, for whom the inner city is either home or is comparable to their living circumstances elsewhere.

"We Are All Wounded Every Day": Afrikaners and the Work of Outreach in Post-Apartheid Pretoria