Neither Architect Nor Refugee: Frame Persistence, Frame Competition, and the Representation of Afrikaners in International Media, 1976-2026

This paper develops and operationalises the concept of narrative fossilisation, the persistence of an established media frame about a group as interpretive default after the conditions that produced it have changed. The candidate case is the representation of Afrikaners in international news. The record after 1994 does not show a single frozen frame. It shows two reductive frames in succession and now in open competition: the older apartheid-architect frame, and a newer, externally promoted persecuted-minority frame organised around claims of a white or farmer genocide that the evidence does not support. Neither frame extends the ordinary internal plurality that mature coverage grants most national communities. The argument is situated in framing theory and media-template theory (Entman 1993; Kitzinger 2000) and in the international-relations literature on stigma management (Adler-Nissen 2014), and is tested comparatively against three communities tied in global memory to state or wartime crimes: Germans, Japanese, and Serbs. The German case supplies the strongest objection to any Afrikaner-specific grievance reading, because perpetual contextualisation with a foundational crime is the norm for a community associated with such a crime, not an anomaly. A systematic content analysis is specified as the confirmatory instrument; no measured frame prevalence is asserted in advance of it. Part of the series: Narratives, Evidence, and Reconciliation in Southern Africa.