Do most Dutch people except the racist Boers as being true Dutch?

Or are they ashamed?

I've always wondered.

I would guess that the Boers were as Dutch as Canadians are English.

The Dutch regard Afrikaners as a different species. Which they are.

interesting either/or 'false dilemma' you got there.

Boers are about as Dutch as Americans are European.

We'r not ashamed of the Boers since we don't really consider them to be Dutch.

Are they South Africans? I only ask b/c I'm a 1/4 Boer, and carry the last name to go with it. What do I tell people? I've never quite had a good answer for it. I usually just cringe, b/c I hate being associated in any way with that evil that was apartheid.

why isn't that good enough?

On many levels. The short answer is that the Dutch really have no connection with Afrikaners (there are few genuine Boers left...they are mostly generic Afrikaners now). The split occurred 400 years ago when the Cape Colony was settled, so other than a language and religious connection, they have very little in common with the cosmopolitan, modern Dutch. Even the language has diverged to a degree that a Dutch person can barely understand Afrikaans, and vice versa. And the modern Dutch have dropped the more extreme tenets of the reformed Christianity that continues to characterize the modern-day Afrikaner.

Afrikaners are farmers, and developed an agrarian system much like the antebellum southern U.S. Unfortunately, this way of life was harnessed to a particularly uncompromising brand of Calvinism, that led, ultimately, to the creation of the apartheid state. (I lived in South Africa for 10 years, so I can speak of this with some authority.) It would be as if Puritanism had taken hold in the South, and the South had won the Civil War.

Like most extreme forms of religion, the Afrikaners truly believed they were doing what God wanted (wants). Now they believe they are a martyred people, with nowhere to go. Most would find the idea of emigrating to the Netherlands incomprehensible.

If you want more on SA, PM me.

Sorry,

I'm American.... could you explain?

Dutch Protestants colonize southern Africa in early 17th century to escape (what else?) religious persecution. They settle throughout the region, along with less zealous English settlers, and make war on the native African population more or less continuously for the next 400 years. Occasionally they fight the English, too, because they resist the imposition of English laws and colonial administration, preferring their peculiar theocratic agrarianism. They craft the apartheid state during the first half of the twentieth century--part feudal society, part fascim. Overthrown in early 1990s after a long struggle by the ANC and much international pressure.

Thus, many Afrikaners feel bereft of cultural identity, probably like some Germans after the war.

around 1900, when the English perfected the art of starving women and children to death in what is considered the first use of the "concentration camp".

Although they like the Netherlands, they feel no more Dutch than we feel English. They have a cultural heritage from there, but as my friend Karyn says, "I am African."