White Supremacy Reloaded: How South Africa’s Unfinished Nation-Building Gave New Life to the White Right

In the early 2000s, I helped coordinate a series of unprecedented engagements between the South African Communist Party (SACP) and Solidariteit, formerly known as the white Mineworkers’ Union, which was founded in 1902 and whose members during the 1922 strike marched under the banner: “Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.” At our very first meeting, Solidariteit’s leaders told us that the apartheid government is gone, our members are being hit by globalisation, and there are no better people than communists to help us understand globalisation.

It was a moment of possibility. Their leaders—even Kallie Kriel and Dirk Hermann (and their families), whom I hosted for a braai[i] at my home—appeared open to exploring the possibility of non-racial class solidarity, turning away from their racist past as a junior partner in the white ruling bloc of apartheid’s segregation epoch. The SACP’s General Secretary, Blade Nzimande, addressed their congress. Congress of South African Trade Union (COSATU) President, Willy Madisha, then a member of the SACP Politburo, addressed another. Solidariteit took us into its communities and to a closed government technical college (which they offered to help re-open, their members willing to train black workers) for unemployed and retrenched white workers. For a brief period, one could imagine the white working class beginning to confront its history, loosening itself from the architecture of racial privilege, and joining a broader working-class project of nation-building and transformation. Solidariteit was merely exploring for the future as they grappled with questions facing their members, hard hit hard by the neo-liberal restructuring of the workplace which coincided with the transition from apartheid to a democratic dispensation.

Two decades later, that possibility has fully collapsed. Solidariteit — and its so-called civil rights front, AfriForum — has become the institutional heart of an emboldened, globally networked far-right project. Their leaders did not embrace the democratic era prepared to relinquish racial dominance. Instead, they modernised racism, weaponised it, and ultimately exported it. Today, these organisations stand at the forefront of a reactionary politics that recasts white privilege as persecution and reframes white discomfort as existential threat.

This is how we arrive at the shocking recent development: segments of white Afrikaners being granted refugee status in the United States under the claim of ‘white genocide’—an entirely fabricated narrative, long-suggested by AfriForum and Solidariteit in their global campaign against the killing of white farmers. Their transition from defenders of apartheid-era benefits to global protagonists of white victimhood is not an anomaly. It is a direct consequence of South Africa’s unresolved nation-formation process after the end of formal apartheid, and of the global resurgence of far-right, anti-democratic politics.

The White Working Class Never Broke from Apartheid’s Inheritance

Democratisation in South Africa did not catalyse the ideological transformation that the white working class required. Instead of dismantling apartheid’s cultural and material privileges, white workers retreated into fortified enclaves of identity, fear, and nostalgia. Solidariteit reinvented itself not as a union willing to confront racial capitalism but as a sophisticated vehicle for preserving white advantage. Key planks of its platform have included:

• a parallel university (Akademia)
• legal advocacy units fighting transformation
• ‘community safety’ structures amounting to racialised policing
• bulk-buying cooperatives and insurance schemes insulating white households from economic integration
• aggressive media platforms manufacturing white grievance
• co-option of black Afrikaans speakers as junior partners in a cultural-nationalist project.

This is not ordinary civil-society activism. It is a project of racial secession undertaken under the protective language of ‘community rights’, ‘minority protection’, and ‘cultural autonomy’. It is the reorganisation of white supremacy in democratic form.

The political tragedy is not only that this project exists — but that there is no organised counter-strategy challenging it from within white communities. The result is predictable: the overwhelming majority of white voters continue to support explicitly white or conservative parties. South Africa’s white working class remains ideologically locked in a racialised worldview, unable or unwilling to imagine a shared future.

The ANC’s ‘Rainbow Nation’ Failure Opened the Door

White resurgence did not happen in a vacuum. It grew in soil fertilised by the African National Congress’s (ANC) political miscalculations and failures.  The ‘rainbow nation’ was a seductive story for global audiences, but domestically it was an elite compromise that masks an absence of structural transformation: reconciliation without redistribution; democracy without economic justice; symbolism without class reorganisation.

Three consequences followed:

• White privilege remained materially intact: Land, wealth, corporate ownership, educational advantage, and cultural capital were never meaningfully disrupted.
• Neoliberalism and austerity deepened black social misery: Unemployment skyrocketed, inequality widened, and working-class communities became more desperate.
• Corruption hollowed out the moral authority of the state: Nothing strengthened white supremacist narratives more than watching the ANC repeatedly destroy public institutions through mismanagement and patronage.

In this context, Solidariteit and AfriForum repackaged whiteness as competence, efficiency, and safety—while painting black governance as inherently corrupt or incapable. This narrative is not merely insulting; it is strategically designed to reinstall white dominance under democratic cover.

Why No One Saw Them Coming: The Missing Scholarship

One of the most astonishing features of South Africa’s political landscape is how little research exists on the white right wing. There is no comprehensive academic mapping of:

• the afterlife of the Broederbond[ii]
• financial networks behind AfriForum’s international lobbying
• how Solidariteit and AfriForum raised the R3.2 billion used to launch Akademia
• paramilitary training camps for white youth
• Orania’s[iii] growing autonomy efforts
• the ideological pipelines connecting these groups to Europe and the US.

This absence is not innocent. As both Vishwas Satgar and Christi van der Westhuizen argue, whiteness retains the power to define what is ‘neutral’, ‘harmless’, or not ‘urgent’. In South Africa, whiteness retains the power to escape scrutiny.[iv] The resulting vacuum allows the right wing to grow, organise, fundraise, and globalise without being seriously challenged.

Germany — where scholars, activists and educators have developed powerful tools to expose and dismantle far-right politics — will recognise this danger immediately. When extremist networks grow unseen, they grow unchecked. Even with the German experience, and as we see in the emergence of the AfD (Alternative for Germany), far-right politics have fertile grounds to survive and to be emboldened where neo-liberal policies reinforce the economic and social marginalisation of working people. 

Victimhood as Strategy: Exporting a South African Myth to the World

Across the world today, far-right movements are refining a common tactic: reframing power by casting historically privileged groups as endangered minorities. In Europe this appears as anti-immigrant hysteria, in India as Hindu majoritarianism, and in Brazil as reactionary Christian nationalism. In the United States, white supremacy is increasingly wrapped in the language of rights, protection, and humanitarian concern.

This is precisely the discursive terrain on which AfriForum and Solidariteit operate. They have perfected the inversion:

• oppressors appear as victims
• privilege recasts itself as persecution
• redistribution becomes discrimination
• justice is framed as destabilisation.

Their international campaign—culminating in the ‘white genocide’ refugee narrative—is a masterclass in racial mythmaking. It is not confusion; it is cold political strategy in alignment with global far-right currents.

Conclusion: Returning to the Unfinished Conversation

The historic responsibility of nation-building now rests with the black working class. But this must be a new working-class politics—one that directly confronts the ideological and institutional machinery of white supremacy, reclaims nation-building from the ANC’s elite compromises, and organises black working-class communities into a new, powerful and progressive historic bloc. It is on this basis that it can engage white workers with political clarity — inviting them into solidarity while refusing to accommodate supremacist politics. This must be about building a transformative project of redistribution, dignity, and democratic renewal. This is the only path toward a non-racial, democratic, and socially cohesive future.

Looking back, the SACP–Solidariteit engagements of the early 2000s now stand as a painful lesson. White workers had a choice: to join a broad, progressive, anti-racist working-class project—or to rebuild the architecture of racial domination through modern institutions, legal strategies, cultural narratives and global alliances. Solidariteit chose the latter.

But the story does not end there. The black working class still holds the potential to reshape South Africa’s future — if it organises, educates, mobilises and leads with courage. The real question is not whether white supremacist narratives will continue to rise. They already have. The question is whether South Africa will finally build an anti-racist, democratic, redistributive movement capable of defeating them.

For South Africa’s sake — and for the world watching — we cannot afford to fail.

Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara is a former member of the South African Communist Party. He is with the Zabalaza Pathways Institute.