Boer identity and British tricks

There’s a British left-liberal journalist called Fraser Nelson, who spent a good chunk of his career manipulating conservatives through his editorial position at The Spectator. In 2017, he was interviewed on Swedish television about Trump’s victory, and had this to say:

Nelson: “The lesson so far from his victory is that if you persuade people that you’re listening to what they have to say—that you don’t dismiss their concerns as bigoted or xenophobic—if you speak in a language that’s more in common with disaffected voters than with the fashionable metropolitan elites, then that goes a very long way. You don’t have to have policies like banning immigrants or anything like that. All you have to do is tell people that you hear their concerns. Take David Cameron—I think he did quite a good job on this too. Nobody expected him to win a majority [in 2015], but he did. And he had a policy of reducing immigration [significantly, aiming for the tens of thousands]. Now, he completely failed to meet that target, but the fact that he had the target counted for a lot, because it meant that people thought, “At least he wants to control immigration.” And there are lots of parties in Europe right now—and governments in Europe—that won’t even say that they want to control it. They think it’s dark territory they don’t want to tread on.

Interviewer: But are you saying that this is just psychology—that as long as you say the right th63ings, people will appreciate it, and the results don’t matter?

Nelson: No, I’m not saying it’s just psychology, but I think a big part of it is empathy rather than psychology. It’s trying to tell voters that you’re on the same wavelength as them—that you understand their concerns, that these are legitimate concerns. The concerns people have about immigration are usually very rational: Where are these people going to live, because housing is pretty constrained? Where are they going to go to school? What impact will it have on the labor market—does it mean my job will be less well-paid? What about my kids—will they be able to get jobs? You need someone to engage in that conversation. And when you engage in that conversation, you go a very long way toward establishing trust with the electorate and removing the idea that nobody’s listening to them except Le Pen and people like that. And this has always been the British way.”

This is something the Afrikaner “left” has recognised, especially the List of 44, known to be part of a state-organised PR campaign. Not all of them are particularly adept at it, and they still slip into high-handed liberal-elite dismissals of “racism”, but they have been learning, and some are more sophisticated than others. One such case is Rian Roux, who is fairly typical of this – in this interview, he advertises pride in all things radically Boers, at least superficially, but uses it to argue for political quietism, even in the face of Mugabeist reforms:

“And after the Boer War, what happened? Everyone was just thrown into one pot and the British gave the Afrikaners the mandate to rule over the Boers. […] The Afrikaners ruled over the Boers for a long time. But it consisted of many languages: French, German, English, Afrikaans, and eventually Afrikaners. And unfortunately, out of that group also was born apartheid. Boers themselves never actually got involved in this whole apartheid fight or the ruling parties’ fight. […] It’s a completely different grouping. […] the Boer is a much more subdued type of person. They sit back and they watch. […] basically a Boer is not language-bound […] you could be German, French or from various countries who became this original core group of Boers who bought the land from various people and settled there in the original by buying land. […] Would a black person who might align with your ideology -might that person be called a Boer then as well? Or a coloured person who might have grown up in an Afrikaner family, and say share your political views or ideology – would that coloured person then also have the right to claim a Boer identity? […] So when people ask me, are you Afrikaner, etc., I say I’m a Boer and that’s it.”

Similarly, you can see the Betereinders (also of the 44) using Christian theology to assert that we must learn to love our enemy. This is all grand from a spiritual perspective, but the practical imperative they draw from this is to never organise, never resist, and never disagree in principle, only in style; always comply and submit, even in the face of calls to genocide. Max du Preez took this to its natural conclusion, and called anyone who disagrees with the South African state a hensopper – that is, if you criticise the state’s position on any Transformation issue, you are a traitor, and a good Afrikaner is proud of the Rainbow Nation first, and his ethnic heritage last.

A double-edged sword 

Celebrated historian Wiets Buys has created a useful tool in this regard, whether he realises it or not. He has taken a hardline stance on Boer identity, and instead of leaning into the cultural continuum which would unite people in common feeling, insists that Boers are a distinct identity group from the Afrikaner, where ethnicity is less important than some nebulous concept of “values”, and regards the Cape, as an inviolable whole, a cowardly and traitorous bunch beyond redemption, and anyone who embraces Afrikaner as an identity a mere purveyor of an imperial psyop.

This is useful to those who wish to deconstruct Afrikaner solidarity, because they consider the Boer identity to be universally inclusive – anyone can call themselves Boer, and theres no need to preserve any element of Afrikaner culture – not the language, nothing tangible whatsoever. Boer then becomes little more than an attachment to rurality, and a cynical handle for those who wish to weaponise it against minority rights.

Identity is not fixed, and you can’t resurrect the Boer republics. Nor can you erase Afrikaner or Boer identity, but you can force northern Afrikaners to fight among themselves and accept a permanent subaltern position. And anyone who tries to unite for leverage against the system can always be construed, however dishonestly, as inauthentic, while you open the backdoor to cultural atomisation and what the British call in their own context “biscuit tin nationalism”

While there is a grain of truth in the Boer-Afrikaner distinction, Buys makes his statement radical and absolute. I am a Cape nationalist, so of course, his hardline distinction could enable my fellow travellers to make a stronger case for our own independence. But I find this would be disingenuous and unethical – Afrikaners exist across this border, even into Namibia, and objectively there is less difference today between northern and southern Afrikaners than between northern and southern Englishmen. The key cultural differences today are between those who are attached to the farming communities and those who are attached to the cities, and within each there are more similarities than differences..

There is a certain streak of those with a military and private security background who hew closest to Wiets’s outlook, but this is an unrooted position. Any territorial imperative or strike for autonomy would necessarily rely on the coordination of capital, media and organisation across the broader national/ethnic identity, and that means embracing the dull and frustrating nature of diplomatic engagement, dealmaking and consensus-building.

Show me the animal

Dreams of a Volkstaat are pipedreams unless, as the fellows in Orania have pointed out, you “show me the animal” – It must be made a reality before it can be recognised. I think Buys would agree with this, but the devil is in the details.

I have done a lot of detailed work (here as a brief and condensed overview for public consumption) – work I have yet to see anyone else do, to my bewilderment, trying to create a model for the facilitation of demographic concentration and the construction of meaningful territorial power – the ability to create tangible and objective autonomy, and to deny the coercive powers of the state. But this requires making legal and nonviolent preparatory maneuvers, not taking symbolic stands or radical strikes.

I do this despite being an Anglo, not just because my wife, children, and much of my own extended family are Afrikaans, but because I believe the Afrikaners are one of only three social entities capable of creating meaningful autonomy against the South African state – the others being the Cape and the Zulu. The South African state is a cynical creation by and for the interests of a narrow club of mineral- and finance-adjacent capital, and serves none of the people who live in its shadow. It is only through asymmetric leveraged pressure, not collaboration, that reform is possible, whether your aim is full secession, or just legal rights.

And so I do understand Buys’s criticisms of Solidariteit and AfriForum – I agree that flight to America is a dead end, not just practically (not everyone can go, and the fewer remain, the worse it is), but also because the identity will die overseas very quickly. I also agree that Solidariteit’s priorities need to be refocused, and I will write at length on this in my upcoming special publication Prism, which I will release at the end of the month.

He walks a strange line – sure, he echoes Solidariteit’s Ankerdorp strategie of concentration (which I designed pilot projects for, and which I gnash my teeth with impatience at the lack of implementation), but he also countersignals this common organisation which, to my mind, is the only real vehicle that could carry them out. Pipedreams of a “recognised” territory to which the volk have a “right” is silly – no court will grant this by fiat. Nor can it be seized by force – one should not be foolish enough to think such a move could be sustained in the present moment, and reckless action is never morally defensible.

I have my own (friendly) criticisms of what is happening inside the movement, but identity is not one of them. Buys’s alternative approach is one that creates enemies where there need be none, and angles for animosities that simply weaken the national body. By countersignalling the common identity, he weakens the ability to organise, by building a divisive purity spiral into it which he aggressively reinforces.

What is the dream Buys is selling with this hardline and hostile distinction? The only people who have so far found a practical use for it as far as I can tell, are people who hate their own people and want to see them undone, and radicals who have neither real plans nor mass appeal.

Nobody denies that he is a diligent and serious historian, even if his stance is a touch more radical than the evidence offers. But beyond his role as a merely descriptive historian, I find his ideas… unsound.

Middle ground?

Quite clearly, Boer identity, and political distinctions between Boer and Afrikaner were real. But they were not rent apart by animosity until it came to questions of implementation – the failure to unite the people before 1900 was not because of a deep organic distinction or popular animosity, but because of a failure of the personal politics between the two great leaders of the Afrikaner people across state lines – Jan Hofmeyr and Paul Kruger.

Their time is a good enough analogy of ours – an interregnum between the primary loss of sovereignty (1805, 1994) and complete imperial/national consolidation (1910, the NDR).

Hofmeyr is of my own family, and I still live in the valley where he and his confederates organised the roots of the Afrikaner national movement. I have perhaps inherited some of his tendency towards pragmatism over ideological purity, but I do not entirely take his side in the dispute.

When Hofmeyr first arrived on the scene, Cape Afrikaners were an apathetic lot – local office held few powers or privileges, and voting stations were far from rural voters. So few voted, and the Anglo dominated the candidates list and the ballot box. After the British made their acquisitive designs on the Boer Republics apparent though, the people woke up, and it was Hofmeyr who rang the alarm.

The Afrikaner Bond emerged in the 1880s from the 1887 Boeren Beschermings Vereeniging (led by Hofmeyr, initially as a farmers’ union to protest brandy tax, poetically enough) and more radical organizations founded by Rev. S.J. du Toit. It became the first effective Afrikaner political party, dominating Cape politics and advocating for language rights, economic protections for farmers, and resistance to British encroachment.

The alliance with Kruger developed in correspondence after the First Anglo-Boer War, where Boers defeated the British in an extreme historical rarity – a successful general tax revolt. They gained independence, while ceding “suzerainty” (a nebulous term if ever there was one) to Great Britain. Hofmeyr and the Bond strongly supported the Transvaal cause, viewing British annexation (1877) as an injustice.

Afrikaner Bond branches formed in the republics, and figures like du Toit moved to the Transvaal to work under Kruger (as education superintendent). Hofmeyr used his influence in the Cape Parliament to lobby for Transvaal interests, while Kruger benefited from Cape political and moral support. Cooperation extended to economic and diplomatic matters, such as customs unions and opposition to Lord Carnarvon’s confederation schemes.

The Bond’s vague vision of a “united South Africa” aligned ambiguously, both with Kruger’s need for allies against isolation, and with jingoistic dreams of a united British South Africa. But this entente collapsed by the late 1890s due to irreconcilable differences, not with the people, but with their leaders. Even as tensions scuppered common organisation potential, with the Jameson Raid, Cape Afrikaners rallied to Kruger, with mass visits to Pretoria boosting solidarity.

This alliance could have transformed fragmented regional identities into a cohesive Afrikaner nationalism earlier, potentially avoiding the devastating war that unified Afrikaners retrospectively through shared suffering. The trouble was their readings of the balance of forces. Hofmeyr saw the need for moderate position to avoid any imperial crackdown or division of the polity, Kruger saw confrontation as necessary and inevitable. Both had vital points.

Hofmeyr was extremely antsy about division, as I am myself. He pushed for recognition of Dutch as an official language rather than Afrikaans while at the same time working ardently for the building up of Afrikaans as a serious and modern language. The existence of the Taalbeweging rests in great part on his shoulders, and most of the legwork was done by men and women of the Cape.

And yet, at a material level, it was Kruger who relied on the Dutch more directly:

“Omdat daar nie genoeg opgeleide Afrikaners in Transvaal was nie, het Kruger heelparty amptenare gewerf in Nederland, waar die Eerste Vryheidsoorlog groot geesdrif vir dié republiek gewek het. Sy teenstanders het die mag en invloed van Nederlandse amptenare en onderwysers oordryf. Die staatsekretaris was tydelik ’n Nederlander, naamlik dr. W.J. Leyds, maar die president en op een na al die lede van die uitvoerende raad was Afrikaners. Twee regters van die hooggeregshof was Afrikaners, twee Hollanders en een ’n Skot. Die landdroste was op een na almal Afrikaners. In Mei 1897 het die ZAR 1 958 amptenare gehad, van wie 306 Hollanders was, 682 Transvalers, 478 Kolonialers, 105 Vrystaters, 42 Natallers, 107 Britte en 66 Duitsers”

Kruger was a hardline republican who saw no utility in the Cape population whatsoever. This hardline republicanism directly harmed Cape farmers and industry when he blockaded the Vaal fords and imposed tariffs on Cape rail freight. He preferred to grant monopolies to Hollanders with whom he had personal ties rather than lifting up Afrikaners. Kruger’s government and close allies were all writing in Dutch, while the radical nativism of the Cape-born Eugene Marais heckled him in pure Afrikaans from the pages of Land en Volk – he hated Kruger’s corruption, inefficiency, and lazy refusal to develop Afrikaans and Afrikaners as a people, but he hated the Empire enough to fight for him when push came to shove.

Ultimately it was strategy and tactics leading up to the war which broke it all. Hofmeyr bought into imperial federalism: he saw no possibility for the Cape Afrikaners to rebel, and sought greater Afrikaner rights and autonomy within the British Empire, advocating “composite white nationality” (reconciliation with English-speakers) and loyalty to the Crown. But as flawed as this position is, there was reason behind it, and there was a narrow middle path through all this.

While Kruger saw concessions as threats to Boer control and divine mission, he was impatient with his southern partners and failed to see their utility. Instead of building bridges, he built a moat, when his enemies had boats. Hofmeyr was right to insist that the Uitlander franchise was too stringent, but his compromises were on the wrong dimension – instead of creating exceptions based on nationality (say, by reducing the residency requirement for continental Europeans and ethnic Afrikaners/Boers over Anglos; deporting political agitators), he just wanted the waiting period shorter to appease the Brits. Economic blockade was a mistake; Kruger should have created a beachhead into the Cape instead – advance and dig in, not retreat.

While Kruger is to blame for cutting off the Cape, Hofmeyr’s alliance with Cecil Rhodes in the 90s was the ultimate unforced error. Rhodes would have pushed economic development anyway through his financial contacts, and there was no need to foster the excessive political proximity which contributed to Rhodes’s electoral successes. It destroyed solidarity, and meant the Bond fell under British influence in the opening of the War.

The split was more about policy than rigid ethnic labels. The terms were fluid enough then as they are now. However, these distinctions highlighted provincialism that prevented true unity, sowing seeds for later 20th-century debates (e.g., Boer as distinct from broader Afrikaner nationalism post-1902). The Hofmeyr-Kruger alliance offered a historic chance for proactive Afrikaner solidarity but failed due to clashing visions of South Africa’s future. The war ultimately unified Afrikaners through defeat and reconstruction, but at immense cost.

Deadlines

Maybe this is all angels dancing on the head of a pin now, but for my money, this analogy all comes to a head with the strike on Natal. As British reinforcements arrived in South Africa (around 10,000 troops by September 1899, with more en route), Kruger and Transvaal hardliners argued for a pre-emptive strike to seize the initiative before Britain could deploy overwhelming numbers (eventually over 400,000 troops). The goal in Natal was to push rapidly southward, potentially capturing the port of Durban to disrupt British supply lines and force a quick negotiated peace.

President Steyn, however, emphasized hollow notions of honor, famously stating that he would “rather lose the independence of the Free State with honour than retain it with dishonour.” But Britain had already made clear their intentions for war, so this argument holds no water. What were his real motives?

I personally believe it was fear, motivated by a lack of economic, organisational, and military preparedness. The inability to build logistical, financial, political and popular ties with the Cape cut off a major source of the momentum that would have removed the fears of the Free State and made their invasion of the Cape a possibility. An effective pre-emptive strike was indeed the right idea, and the peace they would have been able to sue for would have been far more favourable, and would have avoided the catastrophe of scorched earth, denying British troops the ability to land troops. Steyn saw sparking a Cape rebellion as far more viable – but it was already too late – they needed a decade of development and preparation in this regard – deepening trade and logistical links, training troops, exchanging leadership, coordinating the press, and so on.

This is the hard collaborative work that comes out of a common identity. And this is where my convoluted analogy comes full circle.

We are headed for an existential question today as the second phase of the National Democratic Revolution comes to a head. We have maybe a decade to shore up the foundations of local autonomy, which need to be deeper than simply the presence of protospanne – there needs to be a popular consciousness shift, and a massive coordination of legal, financial, economic and human resources. In order for the Ankerdorp strategy to function, we need to see a whole-of-society strategy.

Afrikaners achieved something important in the Groep van 63 – a group which brought together hardliners, progressives, conservatives, verkrampte and verligte under the single question of the state’s overstepping of their mandate. At the same time, the hardliners got caught in a terrorist plot, and provided fuel for the smearing of the more serious efforts to unite against democratic centralism (see a full breakdown here).

Ideological purity is irrelevant – it matters what we are doing. I believe that Solidariteit can afford to spend a lot less time on diplomatic outreach, and a lot more time on focused strategies for coordinating territory and capital. But this will suffer if we cannot avoid silly identitarian disputes – with the Betereinders eating away from the left and the Bittereinders from the right, it is slowness and hesitancy that will hand them momentum, and division that will give both the weapons to undermine solidarity (and Solidariteit).

Sure, neither side is very big at the moment, but demoralisation is a major factor, and loss of support for the centre is a real risk. Should the Solidariteitbeweging lose momentum, those who lose confidence will fall into these two camps, and neither have a solution.

Tactics must change perhaps, but we must face reality – efforts must be coordinated or they will fail. We cannot win by cozying up to the Empire (though maintaining diplomatic contact is never a bad thing), or to the South African state (though a forum for leveraged adversarial negotiation is essential), but we are not in a position to swing for the boundary yet. And if we do not build the capacity to do so, we will find ourselves with our pants down.

And as afar as I can tell, it is the forces of entropy who are moving quicker. By all means, feel your feelings, but when it comes down to brass tacks, it is vital to seek common ground, not to push everyone away to prove an intellectual point.