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"The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner"- Towards a Social History of Humor

In 1902, after a devastating colonial conflict, South Africans faced an apocalyptic post-war world. Farms were burned and the economy shattered. But a strange phenomenon was observable among the defeated Boers/Afrikaners. They were laughing. A visiting English philanthropist observed: "There is getting to be something quite terrible to me in this laugh of the Boers which meets me everywhere." This paper presents an interpretation of this "terrible" laughter of the conquered, and shows how this laughter was interpreted and even marshaled by Afrikaner culture-brokers in the subsequent decades. Evidence of Boer/Afrikaner humor during and in the aftermath of the South African War is discussed, and then the role of humor in identity construction-deployed to fashion a specific ethnic character up until the 1930s. "Laughter" is thus analyed, firstly, as a material dimension of Afrikaner life (in this case, the context of a ruinous war and difficult post-war reconstruction) requiring theoretical elucidation and, secondly, as a rhetorical feature mobilized in building an Afrikaner "national culture". The paper concludes with a look at historiographical and methodological issues social historians might face in using laughter, considering its potential and problems as both a source and subject for historical enquiry. This study thus tries to make the tentative first steps towards a broader social history of laughter in southern Africa.