By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Thabo Mbeki Foundation released a monograph examining the historical and political questions shaping debates about the United States, Afrikaners and South Africa’s future.
In the monograph, the foundation examines the deteriorating relationship between Pretoria and Washington through the prism of South Africa’s unresolved racial and economic inequalities.
The publication approaches these debates through the “national question”: how a society divided by conquest, racial domination and economic exclusion can become a nation founded on common citizenship and meaningful equality.
Drawing on the histories of both countries, it traces struggles against slavery, segregation, colonialism and apartheid. It considers why the achievement of legal and political rights must be accompanied by sustained efforts to overcome inherited economic disadvantage.
The foundation argues that the US experience demonstrates how long the economic consequences of racial discrimination can persist after discriminatory laws have been abolished.
It points, among other examples, to Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign “Platinum Plan” aimed at black Americans, which included proposals to increase access to capital and create jobs.
The foundation uses that history to challenge US criticism of South Africa’s transformation policies, arguing that 32 years after the end of apartheid, the country cannot reasonably be expected to have eliminated the economic consequences of centuries of racial discrimination.
It then turns to the relationship between the Trump administration and Afrikaner organisations that have taken their complaints about the South African government to Washington.
It examines the February 2025 visit by representatives of the Solidarity Movement, AfriForum and Solidarity and the “Washington Memorandum” prepared during their engagement with the US.
According to the memorandum, Afrikaners were seeking recognition and institutionalisation of cultural autonomy in South Africa and assistance, including from the US, for an Afrikaner Development Fund.
The foundation argues that the proposals go beyond the protection of Afrikaans language and culture and could amount to an attempt to establish increasingly separate Afrikaner-controlled communities.
It goes further, describing the project as an aspiration for “separate development” and alleging that its proponents ultimately envisage an Afrikaner enclave or volkstaat.
While acknowledging South Africa’s high levels of crime, unemployment, poverty, inequality and failures of governance, it argues that the conditions have disproportionately affected the black majority and that significant racial disparities in wealth and living standards remain.
It contends that ending BEE and other measures intended to address the disparities would risk preserving what former president Thabo Mbeki famously described as South Africa’s “two nations” — one relatively prosperous and largely white and the other poor and overwhelmingly black.
The foundation warns that if South Africa abandons a determined programme to eradicate the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, the country risks a “social explosion”.
The monograph ends with a story about General Constand Viljoen and a lesson he was taught as a boy: do not start a fire unless you are sure you can put it out.