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This article examines how the politics of Apartheid manifested themselves in networks that connected South Africa and the Netherlands. It analyses the transfer of narratives, images, ideas and political practices within a transnational kinship network, as well as through networks of political activists in both countries and worldwide. The footage a Dutch documentary maker shot during the 1980s, especially his focus on his well-established, ‘white’ relatives from South Africa and their encounters with ‘black’ compatriots, is used to trace these transnational dynamics. His material reveals the various narratives and markers of whiteness by which his relatives presented their privileged position in Apartheid South Africa as ‘normal’, while interviews with the filmmaker and some of his relatives in South Africa and the Netherlands some 25 years later give insights in how their performances were reshaped and received as ‘abnormal’ within the Dutch political context at the time. The post-apartheid memory work involved, show how the political and moral dilemmas are still felt to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last decades, the concept ofstamverwantschap, or the special relationship between the Dutch and Afrikaner nation, has become out of vogue. This article tries to revitalise the concept by looking at its persistency over time, even during the apartheid era. TheNederlands Zuid-Afrikaanse Werkgemeenschap(NZAW) played an especially important role in maintaining the old idea ofstamverwantschapas a principle to stand up for each other's nation, even until the present day. Although the organisation lacked influence at the governmental level, they succeeded in keeping the Dutch-Afrikaner relation alive by focusing on exchange programs for journalists, politicians, students and teachers, while propagating a ‘critical dialogue’ to reform apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]