Seminar: Post-apartheid Afrikaner politics in local and global perspective: The case of the Solidarity Movement

In contemporary South Africa, the Solidarity Movement claims to uphold and defend the interests of the white, Afrikaans-speaking minority in the context of majority rule. In the world’s most unequal country, Solidarity’s representation of Afrikaners – apartheid’s historical beneficiaries – as in need of special protection, is greeted with both enthusiasm and outrage.

This seminar investigates Solidarity’s discursive and organisational strategies as a window into post-apartheid politics and society. The Movement employs powerful yet highly selective historical and ideological narratives to legitimise itself as Afrikaners’ representative in contemporary South Africa, and to challenge and discredit black majority rule. Indeed, Solidarity overtly positions itself as a state-like structure offering protection and services to the ‘disadvantaged’ white minority, and has even ventured into performing this state-likeness internationally. Amid the loss of apartheid-era state patronage, the realities of ANC rule, and the changing relationship between states, capital and civil society in the neoliberal era, a section of South Africa’s white minority is therefore seeking to bolster its interests through civil society actions on a local, national and global front. These findings challenge existing understandings of social movements in South Africa, and reveal the political possibilities borne of the transition to majority rule in a neoliberal context.