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Bok van Blerk's hit song ‘De la Rey’ invokes the name of a general who led Boer forces against those of the British Empire during the Anglo-Boer or South African War (1899–1902). The ‘Lion of the West Transvaal’ was renowned for his use of guerrilla tactics against the conventional methods of the heavily encumbered British and colonial troops. The performance of the song seems to strike a strong emotional chord with white Afrikaner audiences at a juncture when they appear to be undergoing something of an identity crisis in the throes of the country's transition. Van Blerk's song resonates with those imagining an Afrikaner community as victims of British imperialism, as well as those concerned about the future of their culture and language under an African National Congress government. For many white Afrikaners, nostalgia is not so much a hankering for a bygone era but a projection of a sanitised vision of the past into the future. This paper suggests that performative nostalgia is a useful concept to explain the appeal of the song in the context of the workings of Afrikaner identity politics in post-apartheid South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on race in South Africa reveals that post‐1994 performances of whiteness are plagued by considerable anxiety. Shifts in identification that have been taking place under the sign of whiteness since the end of minority rule can be ascribed, in part, to the fact that previously sanctioned stagings of whiteness are increasingly registered as untenable in the everyday post‐apartheid inter‐racial encounter. In the shadow of these changing pressures, white South African cultural workers have been working hard to revise available categories of identification and to offer new vocabularies for thinking through inter‐subjective relations and racial embodiment in a democratic South Africa. This paper reads one of the cultural texts engaged in this project, namely Antjie Krog's A Change of Tongue, in an effort to consider some of the terms that are emerging to make the white South African body compatible with the ideological projects of the post‐apartheid order. Krog uses translation – as a trope and as a practice of inter‐lingual, subjective and somatic transfer and transformation – to mediate some of the ideological challenges faced by the post‐apartheid white Afrikaner. I argue that what Krog's theorisation of translation attempts to offer the white Afrikaans subject is premised on an ultimately idealistic and individualistic conception of personal fulfilment through the fraught process of ’Africanisation‚. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]