Afrikaners seek new pact with government
● On the eve of the 30th anniversary of democracy, a group of Afrikaner organisations and individuals has called for a formal engagement with the government in a “cultural accord to address issues of concern to Afrikaners.
The Afrikaner Leadership Network including groups such as Solidarity, the Afrikanerbond and AfriForum, said in a statement at the weekend it had been prompted to speak out by “the serious crisis the country and the Afrikaner community are facing”.
Decrying “accelerating state failure in the country”, the network was critical of the ANC’s engagement with the Afrikaner community since 1994.
It accused the party of “violating important sections of the 1994 settlement, and the intention of Afrikaners across a wide spectrum to work together constructively to find solutions for our own community and for the country”.
Conceding that its “Joint Afrikaner Declaration” was not on behalf of all Afrikaners, it spoke for “the nearly 2-million people” represented by signatory organisations.
The declaration was a culmination of regular meetings since 2021 to “reflect on Afrikaners’ future role and place in the country”.
“While for the past 30 years Afrikaners have campaigned through various organisations for the protection of Afrikaners’ rights and freedom, and contributed to the welfare of the country as a whole, one drawback was that there was no collective approach. We could not state our points of view with one voice against an increasingly distant and even hostile government,” it said in the statement.
As a consequence, “several organisations in our ranks began walking the path of getting things done themselves, and continuing to be self-sufficient and independent of the state and government because we had no other choice”.
Self-reliance
“This pursuit of self-reliance included forms of self-determination, promoting Afrikaans, socioeconomic projects, cultural development, food security and physical safety.”
The statement highlighted the following aims:
To ensure that South Africans took note of “the disposition and good faith” of Afrikaners;
To urge “as many other Afrikaner organisations, networks, leaders and individuals as possible to sign the declaration”; and
To “convince the government of the necessity to conclude a cultural accord with Afrikaners, for the sake of stability and for the benefit of the country and all its people”.
The formation’s declaration said Afrikaners supported a “republican ideal”, which meant a desire “to make and implement our own decisions about our community”.
Afrikaners, it said, were “a self-defined cultural community a people and not simply a language group or a racial grouping”. Without cultural freedom, Afrikaners would be “dominated by the demographic majority in every sphere our lives”.
Despite differences that may exist among South Africans, the network believed they shared “core interests such as a functioning country and a healthy society in which everyone has the opportunity to build a better future”.
The group was critical of post-1994 corrective action. “We endorse measures to promote equal opportunities for all, but we reject the perpetuation of racial laws that reduce Afrikaners to second-class citizens, leading to unequal citizenship.
“In many instances,” it said, “the manipulation of these racial measures has also led to the weakening of the public sector and public enterprises [even] promoting corruption.”
It added that “the abolition of these measures will help release the brakes that stymie economic growth”.
“Our children cannot be blamed for what
happened before they were born, while government leaders are not being held accountable for what they are doing today,” the network said.
The network, whose members have previously engaged with the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and the ANC’s Veterans’ League, added that “cultural freedom without territory is without substance”, and called for “a political solution to address this”, suggesting the possible establishment of “special cultural zones with a geographic base”.
“In view of our position as a permanent minority, Afrikaners are excluded from and without access to government. No channels to engage with government are available to us other than through the courts, the media and public confrontation,” the declaration said.
This is the first time since 1994 that Afrikaner groups have banded together to make a public statement critical of the ANC government. The group is facilitated by Theuns Eloff, the former vice-chancellor of North-West University. He is also chair of Astral Foods and the Dagbreek Trust, which promotes Afrikaans and Afrikaner culture. He was part of a predominantly Afrikaner group that met the then-banned ANC in Dakar in 1987.
Speaking to the Sunday Times on the sidelines of the group’s media briefing, Eloff said the declaration’s reference to Afrikaner territory was not about secession, or a volkstaat. He and many other Afrikaners would not want to live in an Orania. Instead, Afrikaners wanted “cultural zones where there is a density of Afrikaners”.
He said the network wanted ongoing access and engagement with the government, even between elections. “If government wants to talk to the Jewish community, they talk to the Jewish Board of Deputies, for example. We don’t have that.”
Solidarity’s Flip Buys said Afrikaners wanted to help address the country’s crises and create conditions under which they would want to stay in SA. While the May elections were important, the problems in the country would not disappear “the following day”. Recently, Deputy President Paul Mashatile confirmed the government’s intention to engage Solidarity, AfriForum and farmers to help find a solution to the water crisis.
While believing governance was too centralised, they did not believe in the Cape independence “nonsense”, Eloff said. Pointing to Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi’s push for provincial control of policing, Buys called for the devolution of more powers to provinces.
Eloff said the Afrikaner community was committed to making a difference. “We are very worried that South Africans are losing out, not just Afrikaners. We think there is hope in the Afrikaner community. That said, there is frustration. The same frustration that other South Africans have about water and sewerage and governance. But we are not going anywhere.
“The point is that Afrikaners say, if we have a good government, we have space for Afrikaner schools and cultural organisations, we’ll vote for the ANC. We just want normality. I’m very positive about this.”
These reflections build on Christine Lucia’s analysis of Abdullah Ibrahim’s work over the years — the achievements, the sheer technical mastery — in the Sunday Times (April 7). The upcoming Jazz Festival in Cape Town gives it immediate and particular relevance.
In what ways does listening to great music and watching a graceful and elegant dancer enhance our capability to live more fully and render life’s complexities easier to deal with? Certainly, music and dance, at their best, portray life as complex, multifaceted and dynamic, marked by the mediation of differences and distances of all sorts. But do they enhance our ability to deal with poverty, unemployment, socioeconomic inequality and gender-based violence?
Yes, they may not provide direct, practical solutions, but if life is to be more than analysis, description and explanation, it needs enhancement by the evocative and intuitive communicative power one finds in music and dance at their best. After listening to Abdullah Ibrahim, Hugh Masekela, Caiphus Semenya, Letta Mbulu, Miriam Makeba, Jonas Gwangwa, Sibongile Khumalo, Thomas Chauke, Vusi Mahlasela,
Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Philip Tabane, philharmonic orchestras, the national anthem, and watching Mzansi Ballet — that evocative and intuitive power stays within us for a long time, and creates a mood and an urge for social cohesion and solidarity in a violent world.
Given our history, great music and dance contribute a lot to redrawing social and political relations, and make them work together in a more cordial and responsive manner. They manifest a power that is difficult to locate elsewhere in philosophy, mathematics and the sciences.
They may not heal physical and social wounds, but they enhance our capacity to bear the pain as we experience the beauty of harmony, symmetry, proportion and balance.
We can argue that music and dance deepen our capacity for life not through “reason” and “logic” but through sound, voice and movement. There is an immediacy in them, difficult to define, that blends perception, feeling, thinking and behaviour. They do so beneath the surface of things and the daily drama of circumstance. We are moved and persuaded by articulate instruments, voice, and movement to recognise each other in each other, and to acknowledge our common humanity. Without music and dance, what a loss it would have been. Our electoral democracy, with social cohesion as one of its objectives and outcomes, aspires to the condition of music and dance, which dismiss colonial notions of identity as primary difference.
Listening to great music and watching elegant dance movements, we seem to be touched by a magic wand, which makes us stand in synchrony, clap hands, and move together in the open air of aesthetic space. That space is an integral part of democratic politics. Again, listening to Masekela’s Thuma Mina, Mbulu’s Not Yet Uhuru, Zahara’s Nelson Mandela, and Brenda Fassie’s My Black President, to cite only a few, we find within ourselves a new aesthetic: we move from beautyfor-beauty’s-sake and step into aesthetics as politics. Pragmatic or instrumental aesthetics as it were.
Music and dance at their best are thus a liberating force, unbounded by deaf and blind colonial borders. They grant us respite from racism, ethnicity, patriarchy, elitism, xenophobia and fundamentalism. They educate and socialise us on how to define ourselves in relation to others and imagine ourselves in the world.
But we should not be naïve. Perhaps nothing can erase evil in the world, in all its enigmatic and resilient forms; but great music and dance do augment our capacity for happiness and deepen our reverence for life in the midst of all this. Identity is a critical factor in social and political relations, and must be understood as a key actor in the conflict between power and solidarity. Caught between these opposing forces, pragmatic aesthetics help us to negotiate the tension. They advise us to see cultural identity as a historical contingency, a construct.
The project of social cohesion and solidarity would be better served by a vocabulary of synchrony and harmony that avoids categorical distinctions — white, black, male, female, Arab, Asian, coloured, and so on.
Although self and the other are contingent, they are not peripheral. They stand for something deep and fundamental in us. This conviction is brought about by causes and consequences rather than “truth” and “logic”. It is not a passive acceptance of “knowledge”, but an active, living acceptance of experience, perception, sensibility, and consciousness. It is there in great music and dance, and runs counter to reflective procedures that detach self and the other from each other, as rationality, transcendence and metaphysics do.
The mind, the body and the heart are inscribed together as aspects of each other, aspects of the same being.
This is critical wisdom. If the mind loses its link with the body and the heart, schizophrenia occurs. The disconnection has a negative effect on the self. But because evil is so deep, ruptures will continue to occur, but social cohesion and solidarity bring out something fundamental in us. Significantly, music and dance change as they move from place to place in time, revealing complementary differences and equivalences. So they help us function in various fields of experience — local, provincial, national, regional, global. Democracy itself depends on this empathetic power.
It is because of this power that national symbolic days and heritage sites find in great music and dance a force for mobilising political consciousness and sensibility. Freedom Day, Nelson Mandela International Day, June 16, Women’s Month, Human Rights Day, Heritage Month — these are historic events that find their voice and communicate their meaning through music and dance. Even elegies, loss of loved ones, convey our deep sense of loss, consolation and recovery.
So music and dance are much more than sensory experience. Aesthetic value is bound up with moral and social value. This has implications for how music and dance should be understood. They are irreducibly individual and social, bringing aesthetic effect into the interactive loop of perception, feeling, thinking and behaviour. That justifies them.
✼ Prof Nkondo is a member of the Mzansi National Philharmonic Orchestra Board.