The ‘state within a state’
AIM: AFRIFORUM HAS NO INTENTION OF TRYING TO CARVE OUT A DE-FACTO WHITE NATION Fringe white groups have warned that Afrikaners are under threat.
When US President Donald Trump pledged to investigate large scale killings of white farmers in South Africa and violent takeovers of land, Pretoria said he was misinformed. Elsewhere, there was quiet satisfaction.
For a little-known South African activist group, Trump’s intervention, following a Fox News show criticising the land reform plans of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ruling ANC, signalled a job well done.
“The best possible outcome that we hoped for was for a statement by the president of the US, which we got,” said Ernst Roets, deputy CEO of AfriForum.
The office walls display photographs of street protests by AfriForum, stepped up this year against land distribution plans and what it calls the targeted killing of white farmers.
In South Africa, no land has been seized and while violent crime is a huge problem, the vast majority of victims are poor and black. Of 20 000 murders in the last recorded year, 46 were white people killed on farms, according to police data.
AfriForum is an interest group representing Afrikaners – the 5% of the population descended mainly from Dutch, German and French settlers.
It belongs to a wider movement called Solidarity, which has grown from a trade union into a sprawling and well-resourced organisation offering education and training and a range of other services in Afrikaans.
Ramaphosa’s vague pledge this year to pursue land expropriation without compensation to right the wrongs of apartheid has given new impetus to both groups, who have brushed aside his insistence he will protect property rights.
Critics, including some prominent Afrikaners, accuse them of stirring racial fears at a time when Ramaphosa is trying to defuse threats of unrest from a farleft party.
Solidarity says it reflects fears rather than stirring them.
“On expropriation, they can’t threaten that sort of thing and not expect a reaction,” Flip Buys, chairman of the umbrella movement, said by telephone.
We must save the country from what happened in Zimbabwe
“Some battles you must fight. We must save the country from what happened in Zimbabwe,” he said, referring to the widespread violent takeover of white-owned farms in the early 2000s.
More fringe white groups, including the survivalist Suidlanders, have been warning for decades that Afrikaners are under threat.
Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in May where they spoke about what they called targeted killings of white farmers and plans to take land along racial lines.
The government, academics and a wide range of commentators say neither is happening, but right-wing journalists from Canada, Britain and Australia have made programmes on the issue.
“AfriForum has understood this emergence of white chauvinist identities around the world and is manipulating it for its own ends,” said Adam Habib, vice-chancellor at the University of the Witwatersrand.
“The problem with that is it will fracture our communities.”
Roets denies AfriForum preys on white people’s fears and said it was employing the same tactics as the ANC used in the 1980s to build pressure on the apartheid government.
“We learnt from the best. We have found the South African government is very sensitive to international criticism.”
Solidarity contains around 20 organisations, including a media company, a university and an investment fund. Its half-a-million members pay fees and a property portfolio and stock market investments are among other funding sources.
Reuters spoke to AfriForum members who believed the Afrikaner community was under threat and felt Solidarity was the only support network they could rely on.
Some described Solidarity as a “state within a state”.
Roets said AfriForum’s membership was growing but it had no intention of trying to carve out a de-facto white state.
“There are certain buzzwords that we like to use and we encourage among our membership and those are words like ‘self-reliance’, like ‘self-help’, like ‘independence’,” he said.
“If you want to describe that as a ‘state within a state’, that’s fine.”
The Suidlanders, meanwhile, are preparing for battle.
In an isolated outpost town on the Orange River, they expect an “imminent” racial civil war.
Hoarding guns, clothes and food in bunkers hidden in the dry barren landscape, its growing membership has drawn up a detailed plan to carve off a section of the country.
“Some people think we are racists. It’s totally not the case. We are purely and simply a civil defence organisation,” said Suidlanders spokesperson Simon Roche.
“We must tell the world what is coming.
“People can call us conspiracy theorists. Soon we will see who was right.”