My parents come from South Africa, and we often used to go back on family visits. One Christmas about 30 years ago we left Johannesburg on a bus trip to a safari park. All the other people in the bus were Afrikaners: big healthy white families in shorts. With their handful of surnames, and heavy Dutch faces utterly distinct from their African surroundings, they were a tribe. Their forefathers had been the mostly Dutch-speaking Protestants who had come to South Africa over the centuries. We lived in the Netherlands, so we spoke Dutch to the Afrikaners, and they spoke Afrikaans back.
In those days of apartheid, Afrikaners were rulers of South Africa and pariahs everywhere else. Today the three million Afrikaners are mostly forgotten. In 1994 they handed power to Nelson Mandela and instantly became irrelevant. Fred de Vries, a Dutch writer living in Johannesburg, wondered what had become of them. His answer - a wonderful book of deep reportage - is about to appear as Afrikaners in Dutch, and Rigtingbedonnerd (“Directionless”, roughly) in Afrikaans.
Under apartheid, there was only one accepted way to be an Afrikaner. You belonged to the Dutch Reformed church, you liked rugby, and you voted for apartheid. Renegades were treated as traitors to the tribe. Suddenly, in 1994, everything dissolved. “The once so united Afrikaner people are like a box of night moths after the lid is lifted,” writes de Vries. “They blink their eyes against the bright sun, and flit confusedly in different directions.”