Here are some of them
The ANC has criminally mismanaged South Africa over the past two decades and enforced skewed black empowerment to the detriment of most people; and: Most Afrikaners and other white people are materially better off today than before 1994, with more personal freedom.
The ANC still follows the socialist dream of the national democratic revolution, and: In practice, the ANC implements a policy of market-friendliness and private entrepreneurship, with strong involvement from the business sector.
AfriForum and Solidarity have remarkably built educational institutions and social infrastructure, and: The movement is a narrow, ethno-nationalist organisation that denies the impact of the era of colonisation and apartheid, and fuels white fears to grow its paying membership and in the process damages race relations.
Afrikaans is under pressure at tertiary educational institutions and even schools, and: Afrikaans is flourishing like never before with a large presence in news and electronic media, arts festivals and the book industry, which cannot be said of other indigenous languages.
What do we have in South Africa?
The Donald Trump image of South Africa as a “nasty” place full of injustice, discrimination, and dysfunction is further inflated by conservative and Afrikaner nationalist circles, but let’s look at what we do have here at the southern tip. That’s besides corruption, shoddy government, and cadre deployment.
We are a constitutional democracy that holds the state to the Constitution; the rule of law applies and there is a functioning and independent judiciary; we are one of the most open societies in the world with a freedom of speech and media that few countries can boast of; corporal punishment for children as well as the death penalty have been abolished; we were one of the very first countries to legalise same-sex marriages; we protect our LGBTQ+ communities and demand equal treatment for the disabled.
Our electoral system of proportional representation ensures that smaller parties and minority interests also have representation in local, provincial, and national legislatures. White people and Afrikaners play a significant role in each of these bodies.
From exclusively or predominantly white sports teams, we have progressed to where black and brown rugby and cricket players have become international icons and are among the most popular sports stars across all population groups, including Siya Kolisi, Cheslin Kolbe, and KG Rabada, while white sports stars like Eben Etzebeth are very popular among black rugby fans. And Rassie Erasmus is everyone’s favourite.
The Afrikaans for “thinking out of the box” is in our case “thinking outside the braai shelter”.
Our catastrophic chapter of State Capture was halted by a Chapter 9 institution of our Constitution, the public protector (Thuli Madonsela) who condemned the president in strong language, followed by a thorough commission of inquiry (Judge Raymond Zondo) that forced those in power to explain and then issued a damning report. This is not something that easily happens in other countries, even the leading democracies.
And this is the democracy against which America now wants to impose sanctions? Not authoritarian countries with contempt for human rights like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and many Asian and African states?
Who are the real victims?
Most Afrikaners’ children go to some of the very best schools on the continent, while most predominantly black schools are dysfunctional. The universities of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, Pretoria, Wits, the Free State, and North-West still stand head and shoulders above the neglected traditionally black universities.
Most Afrikaners have medical aid and enjoy world-class medical care in private hospitals, while the overwhelming majority of black citizens are at the mercy of extremely poor state hospitals.
The unemployment rate for whites is 7%, for black people close to 40%.
Four of the six richest people in South Africa are Afrikaners: Johann Rupert, Michiel le Roux, Christo Wiese and Koos Bekker. (The other two are Nicky Oppenheimer and Patrice Motsepe.)
It is much more dangerous to live in neighbourhoods such as Mitchells Plain, Nyanga, Pietermaritzburg, downtown Johannesburg, or Westbury than on a farm or, obviously, a predominantly white neighborhood.
Read more: Afrikaner group makes a sho’t right to Europe to campaign for more support against ‘SA race laws’
But we Afrikaners are the victims? Are Afrikaners then a special class of people?
Because ALL citizens are the victims of misgovernance and decay, most Afrikaners just don’t feel it as severely as the majority of black people.
It is striking that almost every complaint raised by AfriForum, Solidarity, and the members of the Afrikaans commentariat in their sphere does not deal with the reality of today, but rather with fears of what might lie ahead.
No one’s farms have been taken yet, but that’s where we’re heading. Our Afrikaans schools are still untouched, but for how long? The ATKV and the FAK are still vibrant, but someday we will no longer be allowed to practice our culture. When will they demolish the Voortrekker Monument?
(By the way, when AfriForum complains that the Afrikaners’ “culture” is threatened, what are they talking about? Churches and clubs are untouched and according to the constitution untouchable. Braai is not really culture, and it’s equally popular among other groups. How do you forbid people to braai anyway? The Cape Muslims make better koesisters and milk tart than we do. Volkspele, folk dancing, is not really a thing anymore. Afrikaans music sells better than any other indigenous music. No one can ever forbid you from wearing two-tone shirts. So are we really just talking about the Afrikaans language? The language of which most speakers are not white?)
We are all frogs in this pot
I find it extremely disappointing that so many of the leading Afrikaner opinion-formers merely further fuel the victim syndrome and do not think a little deeper and focus more on the broader South African landscape and history and make their readers and listeners think.
And now I’m not even talking about rigid intellectual fringe figures like the former academic Koos Malan or Dan Roodt, or the brains of Solidarity, AfriForum or Sakeliga. I’m thinking, for example, of my valued old friend of many years, Theuns Eloff, who played a big part in Codesa’s secretariat, went on to become vice-chancellor of Northwest University, and has a powerful voice in Afrikanerdom.
In his latest piece on Netwerk24, Theuns uses the old parable of frogs in a pot of water that is gradually made warmer. “After 30 years of democracy,” he writes, “the ANC laboratory is still busy cooking minority frogs. A large part of the minority groups does not realise that they are frogs in the warming ANC water. They get used to their circumstances. Race laws must now be accepted, black economic empowerment must now be allowed – even though it costs the country billions and only benefits a small (ANC) minority.
“They also don’t realise that it is in the nature of the ANC to disguise its own selfish and deadly ideology with nice promises and words. Eventually, minorities who are not black can be disposed of. Or they must be incorporated into the great ANC nation, minus language, culture, and possessions.”
Wow, Theuns? Minus language, culture, and possessions? A bit hyperbolic, isn’t it?
Theuns probably had people like me in mind when he wrote that “some minority frogs don’t realise they are being cooked. They blame the state of the country on other minority frogs or the main frog of the USA — and the ANC laboratory gets away scot-free”.
Theuns continued his tirade against the ANC on Radiosondergrense last week. As I listened to him, I wondered if he understands that the MK Party, the EFF, ATM, and other smaller black parties have the same or an even more radical attitude toward transformation and empowerment as the ANC — thus about two-thirds of the voters, the vast majority of black South Africans.
I also wondered if Theuns thinks Cyril Ramaphosa’s decision to skip the MK Party and the EFF and form a government of national unity with the DA and others as partners, including ministers Pieter Groenewald and Leon Schreiber, fits into his Armageddon scenario for minority groups.
Speaking of hatred? Here you get it
I wish I could have taken people like Theuns with me when I visited a series of post-conflict countries in 2007 and 2008, and had intense conversations with people on all sides.
Like Rwanda, where the deep-seated resentment between the Hutus and Tutsis is still shallow beneath the surface — and manifests today as military conflict in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo.
I wish he could feel with me the tension between the Muslims (or Bosniaks, as they are now called) and the Serbian nationalists in Sarajevo. Sit with me in a street cafe in Banja Luka in the Serbian enclave Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and feel how the hatred in the air makes your neck hair rise. The pro-Russian leader of Srpska, Milorad Dodik, has just again denied the jurisdiction of Bosnia’s courts and police and is now threatening a violent secession.
I would have taken Theuns to Kosovo, to the city of Mitrovica. The city is divided into two: the Albanian speakers live in the south, the Serbian speakers in the north, with the Ibër river separating the two parts. The two groups hate each other so much that a UN peacekeeping force must control the bridge between the two parts of the city.
And when we landed back at OR Tambo, Theuns would have felt with me the absence of hate and intolerance right from the customs gates.
Despite the horrors of colonisation and apartheid, and despite the enormous inequality in wealth and lifestyle between white and black, most South Africans are at peace with each other. My lived experience is that the overwhelming majority of black compatriots accept me as an indigenous and fellow first-class citizen, regardless of what a bunch of hotheads say on social media.
Theuns should know this too, after all he has had many personal interactions with ANC and other black leaders, before and after 1994, and has more recently had quite a lot to do with former president Thabo Mbeki through the Afrikaner-Africa Initiative.
I was disappointed that someone like Theuns nowhere questioned the wisdom or actual domestic impact of Solidarity and AfriForum’s aggressive activism in Washington and Europe.
I think the Human Rights Commission and the High Court made an ugly mistake when they decided that Julius Malema’s singing of “Kill the Boer” is not hate speech. But what sense does it make to allow a few populists from a 10% party to define and intimidate you as an Afrikaner? We Boers are not snowflakes, are we?
DEI and the ‘horde of race laws’
Solidarity’s phrase that prompted Trump and company to take action was South Africa’s “horde of race laws”. This connects with Trump’s obsession against DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion.
Just Wednesday evening I received an SMS from Solidarity again (heaven knows how my number ended up in their database): “SA is one of the most racially regulated countries in the world. Solidarity fights for an economy free from racial rules! Fight with us.”
Yes, there are many laws that refer to race. One can easily make a case that they are being abused and have a more negative than positive impact on the community and the economy.
But it is unthinkable with our history that there would be no measures promoting affirmative action and black empowerment. The “markets” alone cannot be trusted to drive social and economic change.
We Afrikaners should be able to understand this: it was preferential treatment for Afrikaners that helped our grandmothers and grandfathers into the middle class around the middle of the previous century when the economy was still mostly in English speakers’ hands.
Rather than wanting to abolish every law that mentions race, Solidarity and its kindred spirits should have conducted a thorough, credible audit of what such laws and regulations have achieved and what not, where they are being abused or are counterproductive, and presented that to the government and the public.
To just shout that we want to be “free from racial rules” is selfish and denies the past and the current gaping inequalities.
Many analysts say the real trigger for Trump’s punitive measures is South Africa’s case against Israel in the international court of justice and our ties with some of America’s enemies.
The ANC’s flirtation with dictators and dictatorships is indeed contrary to the spirit of our Constitution, astonishingly foolish and threatens the national interest, especially the ongoing liaison with Iran.
But the only valid argument, in my humble opinion, against the case against Israel’s genocide in Gaza is that it would irritate Israel and America. With our recent past, we were the most suitable country to hold Israel accountable.
The Afrikaans for “thinking out of the box” is in our case “thinking outside the braai shelter”. That is what we tried to do at Vrye Weekblad. We might as well have farted in a raging South Easter. DM
This column was first published in Afrikaans in Vrye Weekblad. The Afrikaans version can be read here.