“We Afrikaners are once again skunks
By Max Du Preez
11 Feb 2025
Max du Preez is a South African […] columnist […] and was the founding editor of Vrye Weekblad.
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This article [was originally published in Vrye Weekblad and] has been translated into English. Read the original Afrikaans version here [link as published on Daily Maverick’s website].
Howdy, aspiring exiles. Here we are again, back to 16 June 1976, when white Afrikaners were the skunks at the southern tip of Africa.
Thirty years after Afrikaner leaders negotiated a peaceful transition to democracy with the ANC – and as Afrikaners began to flourish materially and culturally once again – we find ourselves back in the doghouse.
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It’s as if decades of reconciliation efforts by Afrikaans figures like the Betereinders, Leon Wessels, Breyten Breytenbach, Beyers Naudé, Roelf Meyer, Antjie Krog, Barend la Grange and many others have been undone overnight.
All South Africans are now paying the price for AfriSol’s (AfriForum and Solidarity’s) yearslong international campaign to paint white Afrikaners as an oppressed and endangered group in their own country – a campaign that has now found fertile ground with Trump, Elon Musk and the Maga brigade.
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Remember, Flip Buys, Kallie Kriel and Dirk Hermann hail from the old Conservative Party/Herstigte Nasionale Party ideological orbit – Buys was once an organiser for the racist white Mineworkers’ Union and later served on the Volkstaat Council. These men always sang the same tune: foreign nations should not interfere in South Africa’s internal affairs. People who supported sanctions against apartheid were labelled traitors.
And now that South Africa is an open democracy – a constitutional democracy with a Government of National Unity spanning ideological and demographic divides – AfriSol is calling for sanctions against our country.
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My colleagues Piet Croucamp and Pieter du Toit have meticulously pointed out in recent days how Trump and Musk are parroting nearly every talking point of AfriSol: Afrikaners’ farms are being summarily confiscated; they are being murdered by the thousands; their children are denied a future because they are white; Afrikaans schools are being taken over; Afrikaners are second-class citizens suffering under racial laws.
The reality, of course, is entirely different: White unemployment is lower than in any other group; not a single farm has been confiscated since 1994; white South Africans remain overwhelmingly wealthier per capita than black and coloured citizens; people are not being attacked on farms because they are white and Afrikaans; Afrikaans is thriving more than any other indigenous language; our Constitution protects fundamental human rights and the rule of law.
[…] Afrikaners are not victims. Along with other white South Africans, we remain privileged and vastly overrepresented in professional and economic spheres.
Yes, we have every right to complain about the inept ANC, the decay, the crime and the corruption – but we suffer far less under these issues than the black working class and the unemployed. Most of us pay for our own healthcare, security and transport while the state fails us.
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AfriSol plays an overwhelming political role, yet it is not a political party, its leaders are unelected and they are not accountable. Their agendas are their own – much like Musk’s.
The fact that hundreds of thousands of Afrikaners are paying members of Solidarity and AfriForum does not give the movement a mandate to negotiate with Trump or anyone else on behalf of ‘the Afrikaner’.
Their strategy is brilliant: They demonstrate how things can be done, trade in fear and grievances, and the more capital they accumulate, the more they dominate Afrikaans discourse. They are the only bull in the Boer kraal.
Especially Rapport, Beeld and RSG have normalised AfriSol’s ethnic Christian nationalism over the past few years by calling it a ‘civil rights organisation’ rather than an Afrikaner rights organisation and giving its executives a platform at every opportunity. This, while AfriSol already has its own media empire – Maroela Media, Pretoria FM and others.
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If you are an Afrikaner reading here, please speak up and let your fellow countrymen and women know in every conceivable way that not everyone is like Flip and Kallie and Ernst and Dirk and Jaco. That we believe that we need to enter into discussions with our own political leaders if we want to solve our problems, we don’t need external bodies.
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- Full opinion piece “We Afrikaners are once again skunks” on the website of the Daily Maverick (last checked in February 2025)