From politicised teenager in 1980s Boksburg to journalist to UWC professor whose work rattles authoritarians from Pretoria to Washington, Christi van der Westhuizen continues asking the question that has defined her career: How can we contribute, given our terrible history? Anneliese Burgess interviewed her for a News24 profile.
Prof Christi van der Westhuizen. Image: SuppliedChristi van der Westhuizen is a professor of sociology at the University of the Western Cape. From journalism to academia, she has spent a lifetime interrogating whiteness, privilege, race, and the uncomfortable truths of post-apartheid South Africa.
In a striking example of how critical race scholarship has become a flashpoint, the Trump administration referenced one of her articles, “The Problem with Whiteness”, when it announced it was cutting a $2.7 million USAID grant to the Democracy Works Foundation, saying it was part of an effort to eliminate “woke, weaponised and wasteful spending”.
The sun-drenched quietude of Van der Westhuizen’s Cape Town apartment seems worlds removed from the global culture wars. She describes herself, with some humour, as a “chamomile tea-sipping yoga practitioner – guilty as charged”, and her response to the Trump furore is stripped and measured. Firstly, the article was published before any USAID funding had been received – and the reasons given now, six months after USAID was shut down and funding stopped for projects across the world, are part of the White House’s “razzmatazz PR show approach”.
“They don’t want white people to think critically about their positionality in the world, which is why they are stigmatising critical race work,” she says.
Van der Westhuizen is not unfamiliar with attempts to shut down her work. In 2007, she wrote a book, White Power & the Rise and Fall of the National Party. As the book was about to hit the shelves, a handwritten affidavit spluttered out of the fax machine at the Inter Press Service news agency where she was then working. It was from Eugene de Kock.
She was “gobsmacked” – De Kock was serving two life sentences plus 212 years in C-Max prison.
De Kock claimed the book damaged his reputation. Through an ex parte application before Judge Willie Hartzenberg (brother of Conservative Party leader Ferdie Hartzenberg), De Kock succeeded in having the book withdrawn from all stores.
Van der Westhuizen’s publishers “dropped her”, and she had to fight the ban in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria with the help of Webber Wentzel. Though “Prime Evil” ultimately lost his case, the book remained off shelves for months, although the entire print run of 10 000 copies eventually sold out.
The latest broadside demonstrates how academic work examining whiteness and structural racism has become weaponised in political battles far beyond South Africa’s borders. Van der Westhuizen sees this as part of a broader authoritarian agenda and describes it as “a massive distraction from what’s actually happening, which is that the White House is systematically acting in an anti-democratic way”.
Political awakening
Van der Westhuizen describes her recent appointment at UWC as a homecoming of sorts. She says she feels drawn to UWC because “it’s always been a great space for critical thinking, and you don’t have to convince anybody that it’s necessary”.
Her path to becoming a critical race scholar began in the unlikely setting of 1980s Boksburg, then a Conservative Party stronghold on Johannesburg’s East Rand. Growing up surrounded by children espousing the racist ideologies of the Conservative Party, the AWB, and the National Party, she found herself politicised from her mid-teens. Her mother’s work as a library assistant at Rapport newspaper during the state of emergency provided young Christi with unfiltered accounts of township violence that mainstream media didn’t report.
“My mother was getting it firsthand from journalists coming from the townships, unable to write what they’d seen and completely traumatised by it. That’s the environment I was growing up in – getting information from the horse’s mouth via my mother about what it really took to keep apartheid in place: state violence directed at ordinary black people in the townships,” Van der Westhuizen says.
“By my mid-teens, I was quite politicised. When I left school, I had a strong anti-apartheid position already, and I have always wanted to understand what it means to be a white person in this country, coming from this legacy, being brought up as an Afrikaner and formed through Afrikaner nationalism.
“I wanted to understand better those processes for myself and in relation to my mother and grandmothers who were volksmoeders in their own right – both quite racist but, at the same time, loving figures in my life. How do I make sense of these contradictions? What is there that one can hold onto as an Afrikaner? How do I critically understand myself better and where I come from?”
This early political awakening led her to joining the anti-apartheid newspaper Vrye Weekblad while still a student. The progressive Afrikaans weekly would famously expose the Vlakplaas death squads, and ultimately be driven to bankruptcy while defending itself against apartheid police General Lothar Neethling.
Van der Westhuizen was part of a generation of Afrikaner journalists who refused to toe the apartheid line, choosing instead to use their positions to challenge the system from within.
Her journalism career flourished in the new democracy. She became the first woman to serve as senior correspondent in Parliament for Beeld newspaper and received numerous awards for her environmental reporting and political analysis. She also translated the ANC’s 1994 election manifesto and the interim 1993 constitution into Afrikaans, literally helping to write democracy into her mother tongue.
Sitting pretty
Van der Westhuizen’s transition from journalism to academia wasn’t a departure, but a deepening of her critical engagement with South African society. Her scholarly work has consistently challenged comfortable narratives about post-apartheid transformation. Her book Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa struck a particular nerve when published in 2017. It examined how white Afrikaner women have been both victims and perpetrators within patriarchal and racial hierarchies.
“It’s about compulsory heterosexuality in the service of whiteness, very much like it was a hundred years ago, where basically to become a viable Afrikaner woman, you must reproduce heterosexually and reproduce white children specifically. Your body must be that racial border that ensures whiteness for Afrikaner identity,” she says.
“I identify as lesbian, so my work comes from an outsider’s perspective looking at heterosexual women and understanding heteronormativity as a disciplinary regime – where heterosexual women are disciplined by this model of the volksmoeder, or mother of the nation. In its neoliberal form, it looks very different from my great-grandmother and grandmother, but it’s also more insidious and difficult to identify, yet still very powerful.”
She tells me of the many white women who reached out to her after reading the book, saying it helped them understand a lifelong sense of uneasiness – caught between the benefits of white privilege and the constraints of Afrikaner patriarchy. The book’s impact extended far beyond its initial publication, being adapted for radio on SAFM and into a play by postgraduate students at the University of Pretoria.
No to white fragility
Van der Westhuizen challenges imported American academic concepts. She explicitly rejects the notion of “white fragility”, calling it “another Americanism that’s been imported into the South African context and creates “dead-end politics” by hyper-individualising structural racism.
“I frequently get accused of jumping onto the ‘woke agenda’, and unthinkingly advancing wokeism. Wokeism for me is a particular American phenomenon that has very little to do with what we’re doing in South Africa, which is this agenda of anti-racism that dovetails strongly with anti-colonialism and the anti-apartheid position.”
Van der Westhuizen advocates for understanding race and racism as structural problems requiring systemic solutions. Her approach is rooted in South Africa’s long tradition of anti-racist struggle, which she traces back to early anti-colonial resistance against the Portuguese even before Jan van Riebeek landed, refusing to see critical race work as merely following American “woke” trends.
She’s faced attacks from Afrikaner neo-nationalists who believe women shouldn’t speak publicly and others who suggest her sexuality invalidates her critique, whether of heteronormativity or even politics generally.
“The fact that I’m a lesbian has been controversial for some people. I get comments like, ‘Clearly that’s your problem – you don’t have a man to keep an eye on you. That’s why you’re wayward.’”
Special duty
At UWC, Van der Westhuizen has found an intellectual home that aligns with her vision of the university as a space for critical thinking in service of the public good. The institution’s history as a site of anti-apartheid struggle provides fertile ground for her work examining how colonial and apartheid legacies persist in contemporary South Africa.
She represents a particular kind of South African intellectual – one who refuses both the comfort of denial and the paralysis of guilt. She acknowledges the ANC’s failures (“a dismal disappointment”), while maintaining that white South Africans have a “special duty because of our historical privileging” to work for transformation.
Her work reminds us that transformation isn’t about individual redemption or collective guilt, but about understanding and dismantling the structures that continue to reproduce inequality.
Her message to white South Africans is neither condemnation nor absolution, but a call to critical engagement: “How can we contribute given our terrible history?” It’s a question she’s been asking for three decades, from the newsrooms to the lecture halls.
In an era of rising populism and anti-intellectual sentiment, her insistence on critical thinking as a public good feels both urgent and embattled. The Trump administration’s targeting of her work only underscores its importance. As she puts it, they’re trying to prevent people from thinking critically about their position in the world, which is precisely why such thinking is necessary.
Loving Cape Town
Van der Westhuizen expresses genuine joy about returning to Cape Town after a decade away and says “It’s amazing” to see how Cape Town has transformed in the past decade. She is an avid hiker and loves walking on the Sea Point promenade. It strikes her every time how much more of an integrated space it is now compared to a decade ago.
“There’s a lot to be very worried about in South Africa, but there are also wonderful things happening in terms of integration. It is an unstoppable motion.” She also loves her work at UWC.
“Let’s face it, we are living in an era of neoliberalism, and universities have been neoliberalised to different degrees in South Africa. Perhaps not as badly as in places like the UK, but it certainly has also been destructive to the academic project and the notion of the university serving the public good,” she says.
“However, we are still in a fortunate position where there’s a contending imaginary – the one our Constitution presents, and that can be productive in insisting that the university must serve the public good through critical thinking and research.”
From that politicised teenager in Boksburg to the professor whose work rattles authoritarians from Pretoria to Washington, Van der Westhuizen continues asking the question that has defined her career: How can we contribute, given our terrible history?
In an era when that question itself is under attack, her insistence on asking it – and helping others find their own answers – feels less like academic exercise and more like an act of hope in humankind.
*This profile first appeared on News24 on 20 September 2025, and is used with permission.
