By Thobile Jiwulane

There is nothing more divisive among members of the late icon Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) party than the special treatment offered to the white Afrikaner population in South Africa.

Just over 30 years after Nelson Mandela led South Africa into democracy, the Afrikaners—a privileged minority group making up 7.5% of the country’s population—have yet to fully embrace racial integration or coexist peacefully with the rest of society in this post-democratic era. Their resistance to change is largely driven by a fear that integration might threaten their privileges, culture, language, and the economic power they still maintain in the democratic nation. Some members of this group prefer to live in self-created Afrikaner-only enclaves, where they can practice their culture and language away from the influences of a more integrated society.

Afrikaners primarily descend from Dutch colonists, with influences from German and French settlers who established themselves in South Africa. They developed their own language, Afrikaans, a blend of mainly Dutch and some indigenous African languages. The language has reached 100 years of existence this year.

Afrikaners are well-known as skilled farmers, often referred to as “Boers,” and they own and occupy a significant portion of the fertile farmland in South Africa. Afrikaners displayed unparalleled patriotism towards their white apartheid state, but that patriotism evaporated when the black rule dawned in South Africa after 1994.  They have no strong political home since the demise of the National Party, which dissolved a few years after 1994, leaving Afrikaners scattered all over and picked up by different groupings with no strong political focus, but a strong will to disrupt the multiparty democratic order.

But it’s important to state that not all Afrikaners refused to embrace change, but a small minority of them were remnants of the former ultra-right-wing movement, Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), founded by the late Eugene Terre’Blanche. These groups emerged from the AWB ashes as civil society and trade union movements that carried a political agenda. These groups built a strong relationship with Trump.

However, there were moderate right-wingers who, although they maintained a conservative posture, were not militant. This group supports the Freedom Front Plus, an active parliamentary party that participates in the democratic process and is part of the ten-party government of national unity in South Africa. The party, whose leader, Dr Pieter Groenewald, is Minister of Correctional Services in the unity government, fights for the rights of Afrikaners, including their Afrikaans language and culture, but it cooperates with other parties on an open-minded basis.

Although they are a minority, they are an influential group with significant economic power that has been accumulated during the more than 46 years of political dominance. This political and economic strength was facilitated by the discriminatory apartheid system, which was the cornerstone of the National Party’s rule in South Africa from 1948 to 1994.

The NP passed a series of laws to empower the Afrikaners while it used legislation to force Africans from their fertile land and main cities to the racial reserves known as homelands and blacks only urban townships where they could practice some political power as secondary citizens separately from the mainstream white politics.

But all that was reversed with the dawn of democracy in 1994 that saw Mandela becoming the first black president of South Africa. But Afrikaners remain the most difficult of the minority groups. Even during the black rule, they continued to own the majority of land (at least 70% of it) while the rest of the land is owned by the state, corporates, foreign property investors and some non-Afrikaner whites Africans own a mere 4% of it.

They become emboldened when Donald Trump return to power in the US as he favoured them with false claims that there was genocide against them and their land was being expropriated by the state.

This is false because the current land reform policy is about redressing imbalances of the past where the majority 80 percent of the population, the blacks have no land and the process is done legally and orderly with court review mechanism in place to adjudicate in case of a dispute over land. The process is not a willy nilly affair or indiscriminate land grabbing that Trump portrays it to be otherwise it would have a contravention of the Constitution if that was the case.

In an apparent move to counter Trump’s flimsy claims, the ANC, which is the largest of ten parties comprising the ruling government of national unity (GNU), has made some overtures to the Afrikaners to engage them in talks aimed at reintegrating them into the rest of society.

But the move, as usual, has caused division within the party.

This weeks behind the scenes meeting between the ANC and the Afrikaner groups marked a turning point in the approach towards addressing the problem. The ANC engaged Afrikaner Leadership Network comprising the vociferous civil society grouping Afriforum, Solidarity Movement, and Solidarity union. But as always the meeting with Afrikaner groups was opposed by within the ANC top leadership.

Nelson Mandela was the first to engage Afrikaner when he hold meeting with widows of Apartheid architect, a gesture then meant to make them feel welcomed in the new democratic order. Also, Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki held several meeting in the last few years with Afrikaner business people who were in interest in understanding their role in the current period.

Mbeki’s efforts were not necessarily a mandate from the party but rather his own response to Afrikaners who felt alienated and isolated in the post-Mandela era. He is viewed as the last hope and a remainder of the older ANC generation that valued original party discipline characterised by integrity of leadership, and political tolerance—qualities that are seen as lacking in the current leadership.

 The Afrikaner business community engages with Mbeki on these grounds, hoping he can restore stability amid the political uncertainty caused by political infighting and factionalism within the ANC. However, his efforts had not gained traction within the ANC, and the results of his efforts have yet to materialise, or the outcomes have not been made public.

But he did not expect to enjoy the support of many in the party who regarded any meeting with Afrikaner right-wing groups as a waste of time. The opponents of this week’s meeting argue that the Afrikaner right-wingers had made up their minds to align with Trump, whose objective was to pursue a conservative transactional agenda, to benefit his political goals.

Besides, a general view among the opponents of the engagement with Afrikaners is that the leadership of these groups should be criminally charged, probably with high treason, for deliberately spreading disinformation about South Africa. Their sellout position is said to have put the country’s sovereignty into disrepute.

Some believe it wouldn’t be in their interest to attain peace and harmony among the population as that would diminish their popularity, which thrived on spreading the “swartgevaar” (the danger of the black rule). This is the same strategy that was used by the National Party to keep blacks away from power during apartheid.

“These engagements limit the continued existence of Afriforum and other similar groupings. Therefore, they will never negotiate their way out of existence. They aim to perpetuate fear among white Afrikaners, convincing them that they are being discriminated against in order to grow their support and gain sympathy from figures like Donald Trump,” said a senior ANC member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in response to the Tuesday night meeting between the ANC and the Afrikaner groups.

But one thing is for sure: the right-wing Afrikaners are unlikely to accept racial integration or participation in the black dominated new political dispensation, except the moderates. South Africa had to live with the fact that some of them would always want to stay and shout from outside rather than be compromised and drowned in the noise of democracy in parliamentary politics. Staying outside serves them well.