South Africas Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) and the Afrikaner people it served had, since the 17th century drawn a distinction between white Christians and the apparently unconvertible heathen peoples around them. The Afrikaners identity as a covenanted people was reinforced by the British conquest of 1899-1902. In the effort to maintain a white-ruled South Africa, some Afrikaners flirted with Nazism, but from 1948 the National Party chose a different path: a doctrine of apartheid or separate development, which drew deeply on the DRCs theology. Theology legitimised apartheid, but was also instrumental in bringing it to a sudden and remarkably peaceful end.

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