On Afrikaners’ Strategy: How Greater Demographic Concentration Is Key

“No one is going to give you political order. You have to create it, but you can’t do it alone. This hyper-individualistic idea that you can just be completely self-sufficient, live off the grid, and that you are untouchable, isn’t a means of organizing a society. To prosper, you’ve got to organize with other people.”
– Russell Lamberti, Selfbestuur

Last year in IM—1776 I offered an overview of what AfriForum and the wider Solidarity Movement is doing to prepare for South Africa’s future in the form of community-based, decentralized, state-proof solutions. We are pioneering a new political paradigm, which requires a major shift in how Afrikaners, and Westerners at large, think about solution-building and influencing reality in modern times.

Flip Buys, Chairperson of the Solidarity Movement, captures the essence of this shift: “People sometimes ask us why we don’t throw our hat in the ring of party politics. The answer is twofold and simple. Firstly, our impact as a movement weighs much more than our numbers. Secondly, if you are asking that question, you greatly underestimate our ambitions.”

The Union- and later Republic of South Africa has been unstable since birth. Its size and level of complexity are closer to a region like North Africa, Western Europe, or Southeast Asia than a single country (hence why the name “South Africa” itself is more akin to that of a region). The country covers a total surface area equivalent to Germany, the UK, Italy, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, and Denmark combined. On top of that, this vast territory contains dozens of different cultures and eleven official languages. The fragility of the national state was built into its foundations and has defined the position of the communities contained within it. As Seneca noted: “Fate guides the willing, the reluctant it drags.”

How should you react when your communities are situated within the territory of a teetering state doomed to collapse? Emigration is a medium-term, individual-level solution, but it is not a long-term option for most collective identities. Afrikaner emigrants to Western countries tend to almost completely assimilate into their host nation’s culture within just one or two generations. Therefore, the question Afrikaners currently face is: How do you build a future as a large community of people with a Western heritage when they are living as a minority in one of the world’s first post-Western countries?

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