THE LAST WHITE AFRICANS
IT WAS AN IMAGE OUT OF A BYGONE ERA: 150 young white people jammed onto a narrow pathway on the campus of the University of Pretoria (UP), one of South Africa’s premier universities, facing off angrily against hundreds of black students. Tensions had been broiling for months, since at least October 2015. A group of black student activists had organized a series of demonstrations—first against the university’s fee structure, then against its use of outsourced workers, and finally against curricula in Afrikaans, the language of Afrikaners, the white minority who ruled South Africa for four brutal decades in the second half of the 20th century.
That morning in February 2016, black students had entered classrooms to protest instruction in Afrikaans. As they moved across campus and sang anti-Afrikaans songs, white kids who opposed them formed a human chain in the bottleneck of the grassy walkway. According to Jaco Grobbelaar and Henrico Barnard, two white participants, they shouted at the demonstrators, vowing to run blacks off “their” campus.
As the South African summer sun beat down, tempers flared. At least two students exchanged punches. “There were fists flying,” Grobbelaar recalls. Eventually, security guards dispersed the crowd.
The white students had been rallied in part by a group called AfriForum, South Africa’s most established advocacy organization fighting on behalf of white people—specifically Afrikaners. The organization is popular at universities, but its mandate extends well beyond campus politics. Established in the wake of apartheid’s demise, AfriForum represents white interests in a South Africa under black majority rule. With the backing of 200,000 members, the group files court cases alleging unfair discrimination against the Afrikaans language and mounts letter-writing campaigns for the preservation of Afrikaner cultural heritage, such as public statues and Afrikaner town names. It even carries petitions to the United Nations, laying out the case that Afrikaners—until recently the world’s most famous oppressors—now belong on its list of beleaguered ethnic minorities.
The group launched in 2006 and for a while was small. In recent years, though, its growth has been exponential, thanks to a broader trend in South Africa’s troubled identity politics. Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC)—the liberation movement that helped free the country from white minority rule, but also championed forgiveness and racial reconciliation—is suffering a decline in influence. Today, a new, more radical generation of young black people is finding its voice, arguing that whites still maintain far too much power in institutions like the country’s universities and banks. Although Afrikaners account for just 5 percent of the national population of 51 million, streets named “Voortrekker” (“pioneer” in Afrikaans) anchor every small town. More than 20 years after liberation, half of South African blacks still live in poverty, while whites have gotten wealthier. According to the last South African census, taken in 2011, white people earn on average six times the income black South Africans do. Black
