As a historian I have worked on and have been shaped by two great struggles: the one between whites and blacks for control over South Africa and the Afrikaner-English struggle over which white community was dominant. The former struggle was clear-cut, but the latter was ambiguous and took many forms. It was waged over South Africa's relationship with Britain, the national symbols and languages, and the higher moral ground. The first section of the article provides a brief sketch of the latter struggle which influenced my career strongly.

South Africa and Indonesia are countries whose postcolonial trajectory has been characterised by racial, ethnic and religious tensions: tensions whose roots lie in their shared colonial past. Whether simmering and subdued, or overt and necessitating international intervention, these tensions demand a renewed critical perspective by academics who, until now, have made little attempt to transcend the two, previously discrete, arenas of scholarship. This volume aims to initiate a comparative study of the ‘Greater Netherlands’, which has been widely recognised as long overdue. Our aim in this volume is to delineate the distinctive governmental and cultural processes which currently shape the emergent democratisation of these two states, and to establish how far these owe something to Dutch (and related European) influence.

The Dutch civil servants, missionaries, business people, and others living and working in the Dutch East Indies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries looked homeward to a society in process of being ‘pillarized’ into socio-religious blocks. Some scholars have observed how the new nation that arose from that colony, Indonesia, developed a similar kind of structure called aliran (literally, currents or streams) best known to scholars, perhaps, through Geertz's classic ethnography, Religion of Java. There is surely some ontogenetic relationship between Dutch ‘pillarization’ and Indonesian aliranisation. Drawing on ideals about a public church embedded organically in a particular society and culture, a volkskerk, Protestant missionaries brought a different theological version of Christianity compared to their Catholic competitor, but also like that competitor, church-affiliated schools, hospitals and social services. Modernist Muslim organisations such as Muhammadiya copied these religiously based services and institutions, thus ‘pillarizing’ Islam in response to the Christian presence. It is not surprising, then, that when Indonesians were first able to form political parties, some of these were also defined along sectarian lines – Catholic, Protestant, traditionalist and modernist Muslim.

The debate over modern South Africa has been dominated by the question whether continuities between apartheid and segregation existed. Much of apartheid was a tightening or an elaboration of segregation, but there were also features that made it unique. The one was the systematic classification in statutory groups of the entire population, including people of racially mixed origins, which resembles the rule of the Cape by the VOC or Dutch East Company that distinguished among legal status groups. The other distinctive feature of apartheid was its concern with the rehabilitation of subordinate communities up to the point where they could become nations. Using the terminology of German romantic nationalism and mission doctrine rather than that of British indirect rule, apartheid substituted culture and ultimately nation for race.

Described in travel books as a ‘sleepy church town’, Tentena is unusual in Indonesia, a nation where ninety per cent of the population is Muslim. In Tentena, on the island of Sulawesi, the proportions are reversed. There, as in much of rural Indonesia, religion clearly demarcates distinct ethnic and class boundaries: the majority of ethnic To Pamona, the indigenous peoples of the area, converted to Protestantism under the Netherlands Missionary Society at the turn of the century. Their church synod offices dominate the town. Largely peasant farmers, the To Pamona are culturally, religiously and economically distinguishable from both the Muslim Bugis traders who live around the market quarter, and from the ethnic Chinese Pentecostal merchants whose large shops dominate the local economy. This confluence of religion and ethnic identity among the To Pamona was fostered by Dutch missionaries who sought to create a ‘people's church’ or volkskerk, of the sort they were familiar with in the Netherlands. Driven by a new respect for indigenous cultures, the missions relativised the church's tenets; they argued that different ‘nations’ like the To Pamona could have their cultures preserved within their ‘national’ churches as long as those traditions were evaluated from a Biblical perspective. This discourse on ‘culture’, and missions in the vernacular, created a ‘nationalist’ religious discourse among the To Pamona infused with the ‘emancipatory’ politics of the churches in the Netherlands. The product of these strategies of incorporation was the religious ‘pillarization’ of the peoples of the highlands of Central Sulawesi, and their division into socially autonomous ethno-religious blocks.

This paper examines Dutch colonial discourse as it was developing at the beginning of the twentieth century. I argue that colonial circumstances were changing at the beginning of the twentieth century in many aspects - economic, political, social - and that these changes required new policy and administrative responses. I take as examples of these changing colonial conditions and responses, two episodes in the history of ‘the late colonial state’, which I argue are both representative of and formative in shaping, colonial policy in the last decades of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia.

In Steinkopf, a former coloured Reserve in the Northern Cape Province, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sendingkerk (NGS; Dutch Reformed Mission Church), a former sub-branch of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK; Dutch Reformed Church) forged a legitimate public space for the expression of Nama identity in the 1960s. The legitimisation of aboriginal identity was not accidental, but very much an expression of apartheid policies of the day. I hope to demonstrate both the content and the consequences of this particular episode in Steinkopf, and thereby contribute to an understanding of the links between a crumbling capitalist infrastructure and the ideological efforts to reinforce that infrastructure through processes of ethnic strengthening. My claim is that the NGK played an ideological role supporting the capitalist interests as it strengthened the super-structural pillars of the segregation and apartheid eras.

The politics of coloured people in twentieth-century South Africa have generally been characterised as marginal from mainstream South African events. Correspondingly, attempts to initiate political developments along cultural or ethnic lines - emphasising Mama or Griqua identity, for example - have been noted primarily for their divisive and factional composition. Such writings focus on overt political action. They highlight either leaders’ involvement with, or opposition to, state structures; or the internal, often petty and frustrated conflicts between leaders, but fail to explain the marginalisation of coloured politics. But this emphasis on ‘the political’ removes from our gaze other, more productive avenues for understanding the identity of mixed-race people in South Africa. Political activity, for the Griqua, cannot be evaluated except through the lens of Christianity. Since religion promises to fulfil people's ambitions through redemption in the afterlife, Griqua-Christian ideas about overt political quests and active campaigning against discrimination - on either an individual or societal level - tended to be deemed unnecessary. As it was God who ultimately meted out punishments or rewards, Griqua people's energies were better used worshipping him. Nonetheless, these same Griqua people lived in the profane world in which - at least during the apartheid era - they were officially classified as ‘coloured’. Their struggles, based primarily on the need for official ethnic recognition as Griqua, were, in effect, political struggles. This partly Griqua, partly coloured identity enabled them considerable political flexibility and produced the complex social patterns explored below. A further distinction underpinning the Griqua-coloured ambiguity was that between inkommers (newcomers) and boorlings (people born to Griqua-town).

In 1983, a year which some might view as the high watermark of apartheid, a strange thing happened in Roodepoort, a town in the West Rand mining area, near Johannesburg. A Mrs van Rensburg, visiting a local, all-white school, realised that some of the children were starving. She gave them food. When she returned the next day, the childrens’ parents were sitting on the pavement in front of the school, waiting for a meal. Van Rensburg's husband, Leon, took on the task of feeding the parents and children on a regular basis. He was a man of extreme right wing sympathies and was to become active on the West Rand as a follower of Eugene Terreblanche's neo-Fascist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). By 1985, the AWB had initiated a nation-wide Volkshulpskema (People's Help Scheme). By 1988 the scheme was providing 14,000 meals a day for white children. On the West Rand, where Leon van Rensburg became organiser for the scheme, 2,000 children a day were being fed. The scheme was explicitly aimed at fostering racial solidarity. Leon van Rensburg told a journalist: These people need not be members of the AWB. They are Afrikaners. We help any white person, in spite of their political beliefs.’

As part of its attempt to understand ‘an apartheid of souls’, this volume is concerned to show how mission activity, particularly that of European-based churches with close links to the expansion of Dutch/Calvinist influence, may have nurtured the local construction of race or ethnic difference in Indonesian and South African society. One well-known account of Christianity in South Africa shows how the interaction between mission and missionised produced a sharply dichotomised sense - experienced by the Tshidi Tswana as the contrast between setsivana and segoa - of difference between indigenous and imported culture. While this shows how processes devoted to undermining it may paradoxically strengthen a sense of cultural identity, what it does not yield is a sense of how Christianity, appropriated within Tswana and other African societies, furnished a means of marking internal distinctions of social class, dovetailing in unexpected ways with ethnic difference. It is such divisions - potently fusing class with ethnicity and having crucial implications for the ownership, reclaiming, and use of land - with which the present paper is concerned.

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.