Through political mobilization, Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch colonists, came to realize that they did not have to be members of a racist white national majority—that this was not their natural political identity, but rather an identity they had adopted for historical reasons that need not prevail for all time. Similarly, the various nonwhite groups defined as separate by apartheid’s racial categories came to understand themselves as black, a cohesive identity whose solidarity defied the will of the state. Newly conscious of their blackness, they redefined their foe as white power
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