BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 17 of 150

Correct — C, The white minority group in South Africa. Afrikaners are the Afrikaans-speaking white ethnic group of South Africa, descended chiefly from the Dutch East India Company's employees and free burghers who settled at the Cape of Good Hope from 1652, joined by French Huguenot refugees who landed from 1688 and by German immigrants, all absorbed into a single community over the following century. Three checkable things fix the identification. Language: their mother tongue is Afrikaans, a Germanic language that grew out of the Dutch spoken at the Cape and that replaced Dutch as an official language of South Africa alongside English in 1925; it is spoken as a first language on any scale nowhere outside southern Africa. Numbers: they are unambiguously a minority — the 2022 South African census counted 2,512,096 Afrikaners in a national population of roughly 62 million, barely four in a hundred South Africans. Race: Afrikaners are classified as white, and that is exactly what separates them from the much larger Afrikaans-speaking Coloured population of the Western and Northern Cape; the same census recorded Afrikaans as the first language of 10.6% of all South Africans, a figure far above the Afrikaner count precisely because most Afrikaans speakers are not Afrikaners. Their history is a settler history throughout: the Great Trek of the 1830s, the two Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the Anglo-Boer Wars, and in the twentieth century the National Party, which converted Afrikaner nationalism into the apartheid state and held power from 1948 to 1994. The reason a Bihar examiner reached for the word at all is recent: a United States executive order of 7 February 2025 named 'ethnic minority Afrikaners' as a group to be prioritised for admission and resettlement through the US Refugee Admissions Program.

• (a)Of Indo-African descent in the U.S. — Afrikaners are neither American nor of Indian descent, and no community in the United States carries the name. This option works purely by news contamination: the story that put the word 'Afrikaner' into Indian headlines in 2025 was an American one — a US executive order offering the group refugee resettlement — so a hurried reader carries the United States across from the news item into the definition. 'Indo-African descent in the U.S.' in fact describes no recognised group at all; the nearest real categories are African-American and the Indian diaspora, and neither has any connection to the Cape.
• (b)Indigenous tribal communities in Africa — This inverts the group's origin. Afrikaners descend from European settlers who arrived at the Cape from 1652; southern Africa's indigenous peoples are the Khoikhoi herders and the San hunter-gatherers, and its long-settled Bantu-speaking peoples include the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and Tswana. The trap is the word itself — 'Afrikaner' is simply Afrikaans for 'African', adopted by the settlers to declare that they belonged to the continent rather than to the Netherlands — so the name sounds indigenous while the community is its opposite. The clearest proof that the two categories are distinct is that Afrikaner history is largely a history of conflict with indigenous and Bantu-speaking peoples, from the frontier wars to the Great Trek and the Battle of Blood River in December 1838.
• (d)More than one of the above — This holds only if at least two of (a), (b) and (c) are true descriptions of Afrikaners, and only (c) is. Option (a) puts the community on the wrong continent and gives it an ancestry it does not have; option (b) turns settler origin into indigenous origin, and settler and indigenous are mutually exclusive, so (a) and (b) cannot even in principle both be right alongside (c). BPSC bolts 'More than one of the above' onto almost every item in this current-affairs block, where it works as a confidence test — the discipline is to disprove each statement against a concrete fact before treating the combined option as a safe hedge.

The Afrikaners are a settler-descended nation defined by ancestry and language rather than by citizenship, and their story begins as a shipping-logistics decision. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company planted a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope to resupply vessels on the run to the East Indies; within a few years some Company servants were released as 'free burghers' to farm, and to them were added French Huguenots fleeing after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, who arrived from 1688, plus German immigrants. Out of that mixture the Dutch of the Cape simplified and diverged into Afrikaans, and the settlers began calling themselves Afrikaners — literally 'Africans' — and Boers, from the Dutch word for farmer. Britain took the Cape permanently during the Napoleonic wars, and British rule, British courts and the abolition of slavery across the empire in the 1830s pushed thousands of Boer families inland in the Great Trek, out of which came two independent republics, the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. Diamonds at Kimberley and gold on the Witwatersrand then made those republics worth conquering, and the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 ended with the Treaty of Vereeniging and British annexation. Defeat, not victory, made modern Afrikaner nationalism: the movement rebuilt itself around the language, won official status for Afrikaans in 1925, organised politically through the National Party founded in 1914, and took power in the whites-only election of 1948, after which it legislated apartheid until the first non-racial election of April 1994.

Two moves settle this even for a candidate who never followed the news. First, take the word apart. 'Afrikaner' is an Afrikaans word, and Afrikaans exists as a first language on any scale in exactly one region of the world — South Africa and Namibia. A term that lives inside a southern African language cannot be the name of a community in the United States, so option (a) is gone. Second, ask what kind of group the word names. Afrikaners are defined by European settler ancestry and by a language that did not exist anywhere before 1652; indigenous is precisely what they are not, so option (b) is gone. That leaves (c) standing alone, and since 'More than one of the above' requires a second true statement, (d) falls with (a) and (b) rather than having to be judged on its own merits. If you want one discriminating line to carry into the hall, it is this: Afrikaans is a Germanic language descended from Dutch. A community whose mother tongue descends from Dutch can be neither indigenous to Africa nor American — everything else in the question is decoration. Two cautions follow. Never equate 'Afrikaner' with 'Afrikaans speaker': the 2022 census put Afrikaans first-language speakers at 10.6% of South Africans, well over twice the Afrikaner population, because a large majority of Coloured South Africans in the Western and Northern Cape also speak it. And anchor the news to the paper — as of the 13 September 2025 exam the live hook was the US executive order of 7 February 2025 prioritising 'ethnic minority Afrikaners' for refugee resettlement. That policy has kept moving since; the definition the question actually asks for has not changed at all.

• Afrikaners descend chiefly from Dutch East India Company settlers at the Cape of Good Hope from 1652, joined by French Huguenot refugees from 1688 and German immigrants; 'Afrikaner' is Afrikaans for 'African' and 'Boer' is the Dutch word for farmer.
• The 2022 South African census counted 2,512,096 Afrikaners, while 10.6% of all South Africans gave Afrikaans as their first language — the gap is mostly the Afrikaans-speaking Coloured population of the Western and Northern Cape, who are not Afrikaners.
• Afrikaans, a Germanic language descended from the Dutch of the Cape, replaced Dutch as an official language of South Africa alongside English in 1925 and remains an official language of the country.
• The Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, fought between Britain and the two Afrikaner republics, ended with the Treaty of Vereeniging; M. K. Gandhi, then a lawyer in Natal, raised an Indian Ambulance Corps during that war, and it was in the Transvaal in 1906 that he launched his first satyagraha.
• A United States executive order titled 'Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa', signed 7 February 2025, used the phrase 'ethnic minority Afrikaners' and directed the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to prioritise their admission and resettlement through the US Refugee Admissions Program.

• Reading 'Afrikaner' as 'African' and therefore as an indigenous or tribal group — the name was chosen by settlers to claim the continent, but the community is European-descended.
• Confusing Afrikaners with Afrikaans speakers — most Afrikaans first-language speakers in South Africa are Coloured, not Afrikaner, which is why 10.6% of the population speaks it while only about 2.5 million people are Afrikaners.
• Letting the country in the recent headline (the United States) replace the country the term actually belongs to (South Africa).
• Treating 'More than one of the above' as a hedge — here (a) and (b) contradict each other as well as (c), so the option is not merely unproven but impossible.

BPSC asks a named human community as a flat one-liner — 'Afrikaners indicate the people :' — with the entire test sitting inside a single definition, and then bolts on 'More than one of the above' so that a half-memory turns into a negative mark under the paper's −1/3 rule. The same block of this paper does the identical thing with a NASA mission, a Delhi stepwell and a Eurovision slogan, so it rewards breadth of current affairs rather than depth. UPSC almost never asks a foreign community outright. Its version is either an Indian community in the same one-line frame — the Agaria in 2009, the Manganiyars in 2014 — or, when it comes to South Africa, it approaches the country through Gandhi's 1893–1914 years, through BRICS and IBSA, or through a statement-based item on apartheid. The UPSC candidate therefore needs the history behind the word; the BPSC candidate needs the word itself.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Afrikaans, the language of the Afrikaners, developed mainly from which of the following?

  • (a)Dutch
  • (b)Portuguese
  • (c)Swahili
  • (d)French

  Answer(a) Dutch — Afrikaans grew out of the Dutch spoken by settlers at the Cape from 1652 and replaced Dutch as an official language of South Africa in 1925. Portuguese survives in Mozambique and Angola, Swahili is a Bantu language of East Africa, and the French Huguenots at the Cape gave up French within a couple of generations.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The National Party, which came to power in South Africa in 1948 and implemented apartheid, was founded chiefly to advance the interests of which group?

  • (a)The Zulu people
  • (b)British settlers in Natal
  • (c)The Afrikaners
  • (d)The Indian community in South Africa

  Answer(c) The Afrikaners — the party was founded in 1914 to advance Afrikaner interests, won the whites-only election of 1948 and ran the apartheid system until 1994.