In January 1984, the century-old library of the NZAV housed on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam was stormed by anti-apartheid activists. They broke into the premises and threw part of the library, which includes an important collection of historical Africana and the archives of the society, into the water of the canal and sprayed the reading rooms with paint. This was one of the most radical actions undertaken by the Dutch anti-apartheid movement, which tried to break off all ties – including cultural – between the Netherlands and South Africa, where white supremacy rule continued. At the time, the NZAV was one of the few organisations that tried to maintain contact with the Afrikaners out of a feeling of kinship. Dutch society, however, had largely abandoned its sympathy for the ideal of stamverwantschap and in general supported the fight against apartheid, although the attack on the NZAV library was widely criticised as an act of vandalism. This raises the question of how historically significant the pro-Boer movement was in the Netherlands and what its long-term effects were on Dutch society. The prominence of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s would suggest that these were quite limited and that, in the course of the twentieth century, the ties between the Netherlands and South Africa had steadily declined.

This view is clearly reflected in the work of those historians who argue that 1902 marked a great discontinuity in the history of the Dutch pro-Boer movement. In general, it is argued that there was a significant drop in Dutch interest in South African affairs. As indicated in the previous chapter, Bart de Graaff identifies a growing gap between the Dutch and the Afrikaners, as both sides became disinterested in the concept of stamverwantschap. Martin Bossenbroek describes a more general trend. He argues that during the first decade of the twentieth century, overall interest of the Dutch public in overseas matters (including South Africa and the Dutch East Indies) declined. He uses the metaphor of the ‘hop-skip-jump’: the take-off took place in the 1870s and 1880s, the jump reached its peak during the 1890s and the in evitable ‘landing’ occurred in the 1900s.