Argentine Afrikaners: Interrogating Hybridity in a Unique Diasporic Community

How can we understand the persistence of archaic or conservative socio-cultural practices in hybrid communities in the diaspora? How does the experience of exile and immigration manifest itself in ideological, cultural, and linguistic terms? In this project, we will examine the practices of a unique settlement in Patagonia, Argentina, which presents an exceptional situation of cultural and linguistic contact between Afrikaans and Argentine-Spanish communities. At the end of the second Anglo-Boer War in 1902, approximately 600 Afrikaners who were unwilling to live under British rule left South Africa and settled in Patagonia, bringing with them a traditional Calvinist worldview as part of the conservative Dutch Reformed Church. In Argentina, they lived in relative isolation, resisting integration into the Roman Catholic majority both by preserving their Protestant practices and by maintaining the linguistic structures typical of early twentieth-century Afrikaans. After several decades in which Afrikaans was the only language spoken in this community, Spanish gradually became dominant in the second half of the twentieth century. Currently, Afrikaans is spoken only by the oldest generation, with as few as forty fluent speakers remaining, among whom preservation of traditional Calvinism has been the strongest. Our study examines the only community in the world in which Spanish and Afrikaans have coexisted over multiple generations. Our work is timely as the shifts from Afrikaans to Spanish and from Calvinism to Roman Catholicism are advancing so rapidly that the current oldest generation represents the last group of fluent bilingual speakers and includes the last members of the Dutch Reformed Church in Argentina. As these are disappearing from the community, we consider the vitality of the ideological practices of Afrikaner culture in twenty-first-century Argentina.