Published by: News24.com - 2 May 2026
The Bell Pottinger agency's attempts to capture public opinion to support Jacob Zuma's state capture were, in the end, exposed and largely neutralised. Not so the even bolder, and ongoing, manipulation of public opinion by Solidarity and AfriForum.
AfriSol, as the movement has become known, boasts that it has about 600 000 paying members, and few would contest its claims that most white Afrikaners are sympathetic to it. It styles itself as the only bull in the Boere kraal.
In 1992, more than two-thirds (68.7%) of white South Africans (voter turnout 85%) voted in a referendum in support of "the reform process which the state president began on 2 February 1990 and which is aimed at a new Constitution through negotiation".
After the 1994 election, most Afrikaners affectionately called the first president of a united democratic South Africa "Madiba", even more so after he donned the Number 6 Springbok jersey at the 1995 Rugby World Cup victory ceremony and visited Tannie Betsie Verwoerd in whites-only Orania.
Afrikaners rejoiced at the end of all sports (especially rugby) boycotts, sanctions and the prospect of travelling, also to once forbidden countries. The Afrikaans language blossomed with the huge new cultural festivals in Outshoorn, Potchefstroom and elsewhere, the emergence of many Afrikaans radio and later television channels and vibrant book publishing, magazine and music industries. Released from their dependence on the state during decades of apartheid, many became successful entrepreneurs. (Five of the seven richest people in South Africa, all dollar billionaires, are Afrikaners.)
Fast forward to 2026. Now most Afrikaners view themselves as hapless victims of ethnic persecution. Many say there is an Afrikaner genocide. Their farms are being confiscated, and many farmers are attacked, murdered and cruelly tortured to drive them off the land.
Their children can't get jobs, promotions, or even admission to universities. Afrikaans schools are systematically closed down.
These claims have been made so repeatedly and forcefully that it doesn't matter that they are all completely baseless. Some 5 000 Afrikaners have been accepted as "refugees" in the United States and some 70 000 more are reported to have expressed interest in such refugee status.
How on earth did this happen?
The extraordinary story starts in 1992. Flip Buys, a right-wing student leader at Potchefstroom University, joined the fundamentalist apartheid trade union Mynwerkersunie, and five years later, he was appointed its head.
As a hard-core Afrikaner Christian nationalist, he opposed all negotiations between the National Party and the ANC and campaigned hard for a "No" vote in the 1992 referendum.
He was part of the Conservative Party and later General Constand Viljoen's Afrikaner Volksfront, from where a military rebellion was planned (and then abandoned) to sink the negotiations process. In 1994, Buys was a member of the Volkstaat Council that recommended Afrikaner "self-determination" in certain areas of the country.
But the cerebral Buys was frustrated with the crudeness, weak strategies and poverty of ideas of the right-wing politicians. He studied the history of the Jewish labour movement, Histadrut, formed in 1920 to establish a self-sustaining Jewish economy and promote Hebrew: Jewish nation-building. Histradut established many institutions and business enterprises and got involved with social, medical and educationa services.
So, in 2002, Buys borrowed the name from the Polish trade union that launched a revolution in the 1980s, Solidarność, and turned the Mynwerkersunie into the Solidarity movement, with Histradut as his blueprint. In 2006, Solidarity established a "civil rights" branch, AfriForm, with another former Conservative Party and Volksfront activist, Kallie Kriel, as its head. The unbending ideologue Dirk Hermann was appointed as head of the trade union at the heart of the movement, with Buys as the chair of the whole organisation.
Not even the ambitious Buys could have dreamed then that he would be so successful in building an empire. AfriSol now has about 50 affiliates, including a university, a technical college, a private prosecution service, a property development arm, extensive financial and insurance services, a radio station, online newspaper and AfriForum TV, a charity organisation, an agricultural union, and neighbourhood and farm watches. It receives around R500 million a year from members and does business with most of them, so the annual turnover could be more than a billion rand. The campus of its Afrikaans-only university, Akademia, will cost R3.2 billion.
A brilliant metamorphosis
AfriSol is today the world's foremost exponent of what is referred to as the "identity economy", or "ethnic entrepreneurship". And not a cent comes from the state. In a country where the state struggles to build anything meaningful or even provide basic services, this earns AfriSol a lot of praise, even from the black communities. "Ons sal self," AfriSol proclaims.
In the 1980s and early 1990s right-wing politicians were dour, racist ideologues with shiny suits and grey shoes, corpulent men in khaki or loudmouthed, brandy-swilling caricatures in cheap camo dress. Buys, Kriel and Hermann come from that culture, but now, chameleon-like, entered the national arena as alumni of Potch and Tuks, in jackets and ties, with a cohesive basic philosophy.
It was a brilliant metamorphosis. They will never utter the k-word, but their followers understand the subtext, and many don't have the same restraint.
Key to its success was how AfriSol successfully infiltrated and captured the Afrikaans media. Before 1994, the mainstream Afrikaans newspapers and broadcast media treated the right wing like lepers, demonising them as crude and unsophisticated racists and denying them a voice. But by the time Buys got Solidarity going, the National Party had imploded. Almost seamlessly, AfriSol became the Afrikaans media's new Pied Piper. The dolled-up, sanitised right-wingers soon dominated the Afrikaans media. Abracadabra.
Especially Beeld and Rapport, now only available online, Radiosondergrense and the TV channel kykNet drew AfriSol's leaders into the mainstream and paraded them as esteemed opinion formers and analysts on an almost daily basis. No article or programme was complete without AfriSol's comment.
This was how the head of the Orania Movement (and inhabitant of that enclave) and Solidarity's head of liaison, Jaco Kleynhans, became the foremost Afrikaans analyst on international affairs, despite having no academic background on the subject, and at the expense of many better-qualified Afrikaans-speaking academics and former diplomats.
Kleynhans is a fanatical supporter of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
It is important to note that AfriSol is not a political party. Leaders are not elected, their remuneration is not known, and members have no say in policies or how their contributions are spent. There is no accountability.
It is also notable that, where the EFF and MK Party want to fiddle with the Constitution, AfriSol rejects its very foundation. They want to change the preamble from "We, the people", to "We, the peoples" - they reject the entire notion that South Africa is a unitary state and want some form of racial federation, if an independent white volkstaat or two are not possible.
The other secret to AfriSol's success is intimidation and the peddling of fear and paranoia.
The newspaper Beeld, for example, was harangued after it published a picture of Potch students seemingly giving the Nazi salute, and AfriSol only relented when the editor was removed and replaced by an AfriSol sympathiser. AfriSol's boycotts of the Spur restaurant franchise and Radio Jacaranda, among others, inflicted serious damage on these enterprises.
AfriSol is selling Afrikaners false hope
AfriSol has several news outlets and a massive social media presence. They follow the dictum of the alt-right American Steve Bannon: Flood the zone. I am, inexplicably, on their mailing list, and I get regular messages, like "The ANC wants to close Afrikaans schools" or "The ANC is going to take white people's land", and then the invitation: Join AfriForum and fight back.
It must be said, though, that if successive ANC governments were not so corrupt and inept, the breeding ground for AfriSol would not have been so fertile. And if the ANC is the co-builder of AfriSol, then Julius Malema is its chief marketing guy - AfriSol gets stronger every time he chants Kill the Boer.
AfriSol got a huge injection of energy and, in their book, legitimacy, when Donald Trump became the US president and championed the Afrikaner cause with falsehoods such as the Afrikaner genocide and confiscation of white farms. Manna from heaven.
It didn't matter that Afrikaners are, in fact, thriving and that not a square inch of land had been confiscated. "Afrikaners are back!" rejoiced Buys in an opinion piece on Netwerk24.com. The sudden increase in brazen racism and threats on social media was noticeable. The "leader of the free world" gave them licence. Trump's obsession with farm attacks comes directly from AfriSol's misinformation and propaganda about the real nature and extent of this tragic phenomenon.
I think AfriSol is selling Afrikaners false hope in the process of building an empire, and that can only lead to further alienation and disillusionment. Geographical or even cultural "self-determination" is a pipe dream; similarly, "Afrikaner control" of Afrikaans-language state schools. These would necessitate a new Constitution, accepted by two-thirds of the members of Parliament. There are only 2.5 million white Afrikaners in a nation of 62 million.
As an Afrikaner myself, I hold the AfriSol leadership's ethnic machismo and aggressive foreign lobbying responsible for reviving the old image of my tribe as selfish, racist bullies.
Donald Trump's days are numbered, and his national and international standing is waning fast. The ANC is also a sharply declining party. But the damage that AfriSol has inflicted on South Africa and particularly on the Afrikaner community will be felt for a long time.
- Max duPreez is an author, columnist and documentary film-maker and was the founding editor of Viye Weekblad. This edited extract from his latest book, The End of Normal-Witness to the Unravelling of White Power in South Africa (Jonathan Ball), was prepared exclusively for News24.
