Afrikaners indicate the people :

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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) 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2025 Q17 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q17 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer