'Ons sal self' - The Afrikaner philosophy for fixing your own problems

Speech delivered at the NatCon 4 conference in Washington DC on 10 July 2024

After the destruction suffered during the Anglo-Boer War – when farms were burned to ashes as a result of the scorched earth policy, women and children were sent to concentration camps and captured Boers were sent to the prison islands of St. Helena and Ceylon – the women who were fortunate enough to survive the camps were sent back home. In many cases they had lost their children, and their husbands were either killed in action or still in captivity. It was during these times that a Boer woman wrote the following words:

There is now peace in the country, but not as we expected. The two small republics no longer exist. All of us surrendered our weapons. We had to sign a letter acknowledging King Edward as our rightful Sovereign. But we must not mourn as one who has no hope. We must believe and hope and trust. We currently own four horses, two mules and a few sheep. Yesterday I sowed a bucket of wheat. As soon as I can, I will sow and plant some more. If Dad comes back from Ceylon, we will soon be able to set up a farm again.

After the war, the Boers – or the Afrikaners as we are generally known today – tried to get back up on their feet by demanding compensation from England, but we soon learned that compensation or reparations are no sustainable solution, as it tends to dampen internal solutions instead of releasing them, because it increases dependence. This is why General Jan Smuts remarked that the few years after the war were in many ways worse than the war itself.

The impoverished state of the Afrikaner people was soon worsened, when Afrikaners rebelled against the instructions of the British Empire to take up arms and invade South West Africa (today Namibia), only for the rebellion to be crushed. Jopie Fourie, a prominent rebel leader and still an Afrikaner hero, was executed, and heavy fines were imposed on the rebels. To make things even worse, we were then struck by the Great Depression. It was at this time, in the 1920s and 1930s, that the Afrikaners got together to start the Helpmekaar Beweging (Help-each-other Movement). The philosophy of the Helpmekaar Beweging was summarised by the words of Father Kestell, ’n Volk red homself (a nation saves itself). The movement implied a deliberate communal effort of the Afrikaner people to modernise, to develop our language and culture, and to take care of our people through our own institutions. It was as a result of this that Afrikaans became one of only three languages to be developed into a fully-fledged academic language during the 20th century. It was also as a result of this, that we were able to develop from a nation on the precipice into the most successful nation on the African continent. We built multiple universities that were soon recognised as on a par with the best in the world, not through grants or government funding, but through women and children baking and selling pastries, and people going door to door to collect pennies to fund these massive projects. As a nation, we took ownership of what was rightfully ours, and it worked …

Then the project got derailed. In the second half of the 20th century, we went from being community builders to state builders. We gradually abdicated our responsibilities toward each other to the government and the state, which we kept strengthening as fast and as much as we could. We then tried to use the state to solve complicated societal problems, such as education of native tribes, race relations and what we called separate development. We even abdicated our responsibilities to our children by assuming that the government would teach them about culture and history and all the things important to us.

It worked for a short while, and then it failed. And if failed spectacularly. After the Nazis, we became the great moral target of the 20th century. We were villainised and rejected by our ancestor nations in the West. We became pariahs, and we were on our own.

But not only that, we lost the state, this massive project that we had been working on for so long. We had taken our eggs from their community institutions and put them all in one big basket called the state, only to have that basket taken and the eggs destroyed one by one, under great applause of the international community.

The state turned against us, almost overnight, and belligerently so! We couldn’t even call ourselves Afrikaners. To use the word that defines our nation was not just politically incorrect, it was inappropriate and unacceptable. This was the status quo for about two decades after the political transition.

Then we returned to the philosophy and the strategy that had made us a great nation in the first place. Today, we call this ons sal self – we will do it ourselves. Like our ancestors, we went back to the community, and to community solutions, both because of and despite adverse circumstances – and a government hellbent on treating us like second class citizens while blaming us for all their failures.

As a result – and to make a long story short – we were able to build a network of more than 50 institutions, called the Solidarity Movement. The Afrikaner Foundation that I represent is one of these, with the goal of garnering international support. Others include the community organising institution AfriForum, the Christian labour institution Solidarity, the community upliftment institution Solidarity Helping Hand, the media institution Maroela Media, a network of cultural and educational institutions and the list goes on. All of this funded by members making small monthly donations to support their community. Our work has been labelled a state within a state, and a parallel state. We don’t really mind, but that is not how we think of it. We merely think of ons sal self as the best and the only sustainable solution to ensuring a future for our community to exist freely, safely and prosperously in the southern tip of the African continent.

And as a result, unlike most of our friends in the West, and despite dire circumstances, we are optimistic. The furnace of destruction in South Africa has led our community to rediscover what it takes, not only to survive, but to flourish.

We don’t believe in quick fixes or silver bullets, but we’re happy to find that we don't have to reinvent the wheel to solve complicated problems. And there is one solution that is applicable to almost every major societal problem of our age: revitalising our communities and rediscovering a sense of who we are.

Equally, we ought to recognise that most of the things that we regard as problems facing our communities today are not actually problems, but rather a variety of symptoms pointing to the same problem: the breakdown of our communities and our sense of who we are.

If we are not able to answer the question: who are we? we cannot begin to work on real solutions.

And if we say the problem is the breakdown of our communities, and the solution lies in reinvigorating them, we ought to realise that using the state as primary vehicle to achieve these things is misguided. Afrikaners have learned that realities are not created by demanding it or legislating it into existence. They're built – from the ground up, through communal effort in the real world.

And so, we went from state building to state proofing – to building our institutions to be robust enough to serve our community while withstanding an antagonistic state.

And so, people on the right are quick to point to the threat of the woke mind virus. This is true, wokeness is a serious threat to the sustained future of our communities and nations. The optimist in me would like to believe though that wokeness has gone so off the rails, and has become so unlikeable, such an easy target, that wokeness has become a greater threat to liberalism than to conservatism.

There is another mind virus that we conservatives ought to be more concerned about than wokeness – and I say this fully aware of the fact that what I’m about to say is controversial, especially in a city like this. This is the vote mind virus.

The vote mind virus would like us to believe that the most important thing we can do to bring about change is to vote in the next election. This is because the vote mind virus tells us that the world will end if our party loses the next election, but that we will flourish if our party wins the next election. And so the vote mind virus proclaims that every upcoming election is the most important election we have ever had. This is because the vote mind virus is built on the idea that the government is always the source and the solution to our problems.

Don’t get me wrong, voting is important. But what we do between elections is much more important. I’m referring to the extent to which we can build, maintain and utilise our community institutions to preserve the true, the good and the beautiful that we have inherited from our grandparents who have already passed away, for our children who have not yet been born.

Returning to our communities and promoting these things within the context of our communities is not a new idea. It’s not a reinvention of the wheel. It’s the rediscovery of an ancient truth – the fundamental idea on which Western civilisation was built.

And so, when things go bad for us, as it did for the women returning to the farms after the Anglo-Boer War, and as it did when the ANC took power in South Africa and implemented 116 race laws under the banner of “progress”, and as it will if the current trajectory in the West is not stalled, we can find consolation in the philosophy and the strategy of ons sal self – of recognising who we truly are and where we come from, of returning to our communities, of building our institutions and working in the real world for real solutions, of achieving solutions not by voting for them, demanding them or trying to legislate them into existence, but by building them.