Word.ws English Dictionary

witdoeke

witdoeke noun: members of conservative black vigilante groups in the South African provinces of the Cape and Orange Free State in the 1980s.

Noun

witdoeke pl (plural only)

  1. (historical, plural, plural-only) Members of conservative black vigilante groups in the South African provinces of the Cape and Orange Free State in the 1980s.
    • ‘They were shooting again yesterday. They were giving guns to the witdoeke and the witdoeke were shooting.’1990, J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron, London: Secker & Warburg, Part III, p. 83
    • After the witdoeke attacks of May and June 1986, thousands of refugees were forced to live in schools and churches. Refugees were arrested from these centres and tortured to make them confess to a range of public violence crimes. […] It is notable that few if any witdoeke were arrested or charged.1998, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, Volume 3, Chapter 5, Subsection 29

Origin of witdoeke

From Afrikaans wit (“white”) + doek (“cloth”), referring to the strips of white cloth members wore on their heads or arms.

Questions about witdoeke

What does witdoeke mean?
Witdoeke means members of conservative black vigilante groups in the South African provinces of the Cape and Orange Free State in the 1980s.
What part of speech is witdoeke?
Witdoeke is a noun.

Words near witdoeke in the dictionary

  1. witchwork
  2. witchy
  3. witcraft
  4. Witczak
  5. Witczaks
  6. witdoeke
  7. wite
  8. wited
  9. Witek
  10. Witeks
  11. witeless

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: witdoeke (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “witdoeke.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/witdoeke. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.