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Kallie Kriel, leader of AfriForum, and Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, leader of March and March. Picture: Supplied/AfriForum
The recent meeting between March & March and AfriForum should be read as more than a tactical arrangement between two organisations with different constituencies. It is a revealing moment in the evolution of South Africa’s grievance politics: an anti-immigrant movement claiming to speak in the interests of Black South Africans has found common cause with an organisation rooted in Afrikaner minority politics. The irony is almost too perfect. A movement that has built its political identity around the exclusion of other Africans has now discovered the strategic usefulness of an organisation representing a community historically associated with the political domination of those very Black South Africans it claims to defend.
The meeting between the two organisations was framed in the respectable language of “common interests”, including crime, the rule of law, immigration and community advocacy. March & March has also explicitly announced its ambition to become something like “an AfriForum for black South Africans”, while AfriForum has offered to share its organisational experience. On paper, this might be presented as pragmatic civil-society cooperation. But politics is not only about what organisations say they are doing. It is also about the histories and power relations that make particular alliances possible – something Malaika Mahlatsi reminds us of in her analysis of the matter.
The anti-immigrant movement in South Africa has reached what might be called its most natural, albeit unholy, alliance: an alliance with white grievance politics. The apparent contradiction disappears once we recognise that both movements are organised around a similar political grammar. Both construct a community as threatened. Both identify an outsider as responsible for that threat. Both mobilise fear, insecurity and dispossession. Both claim that an established order has been taken away from the people who supposedly deserve it. And both increasingly understand political power through the language of protection, territory, sovereignty and belonging.
The difference is that the identities of the aggrieved communities are radically different. One movement claims to represent Black South Africans who have historically been dispossessed; the other speaks for a white minority whose community historically exercised state power through apartheid. Yet grievance politics has a remarkable ability to erase this distinction.
Once politics becomes organised around the proposition that “our people” are under threat, historical responsibility can be suspended. The question becomes not who exercised power over whom, but who can successfully present themselves as a victim in the present?
This is where the March & March-AfriForum relationship becomes particularly instructive.
March & March has insisted that its campaign is about immigration enforcement rather than race, arguing that it wants the law applied equally to people of different nationalities. But the alliance with AfriForum exposes something deeper. AfriForum is not simply another civic organisation. It is a major vehicle of Afrikaner minority politics, and scholarship has described it as a right-wing Afrikaner nationalist organisation that has positioned white communities as victims of racial persecution and dispossession while opposing policies such as affirmative action, Black economic empowerment and land reform.
Its politics have also repeatedly generated controversy over the interpretation of apartheid and the meaning of white minority rights. In 2018, AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel argued that apartheid should not be classified as a crime against humanity, a position that produced widespread condemnation.
It is therefore not unreasonable to ask what it means when a movement claiming to defend Black interests chooses AfriForum as an organisational model. A genuinely emancipatory Black politics would begin from the historical reality that Black South Africans were subjected to colonialism and apartheid precisely through systems that defined belonging, citizenship, land, movement, employment and political power according to racial hierarchy. It would therefore be extremely cautious about reproducing those mechanisms against another vulnerable African population.
The danger is not simply that March & March might cooperate with AfriForum on a few campaigns.
The deeper danger is that the alliance normalises the idea that historical antagonisms can be overcome through access to power without confronting the history that produced those antagonisms. In this formulation, apartheid becomes less important. White minority politics becomes acceptable provided it can be converted into organisational knowledge, influence, money, networks and access.
This is precisely how “minority rights” can become a remarkably elastic political language. Minority rights sound inherently democratic. Who could oppose the protection of minorities? But the phrase becomes dangerous when it strips minorities of history. A minority that once governed through racial supremacy is not politically equivalent to a minority historically excluded from power. Numerical minority and political minority are not synonymous. Nor is formal equality necessarily substantive equality.
South Africa’s constitutional order emerged precisely because the country rejected the idea that political power should belong permanently to one racial community. The Constitutional Court has described apartheid as an oppressive system founded on the false premise of white racial superiority and emphasised the Constitution’s decisive break with that past. Yet, as legal scholar Joel Modiri has argued, the colonial-apartheid past continues to structure the present, producing an unresolved relationship between constitutional democracy, racial power and historical injustice.
The March & March-AfriForum relationship sits inside this unresolved terrain. It demonstrates how nationalism can become the bridge across otherwise incompatible histories. Black nationalism and Afrikaner nationalism may disagree about who should possess the nation, but they can converge around the proposition that the nation must belong more fully to “us” and less fully to “them”. Once that logic takes hold, historical solidarity becomes conditional.
African migrants cease to be fellow Africans and become competitors.
A politics that begins by saying it will harm other Black people because they are foreigners will eventually discover that Blackness itself is not the principle at stake. Power is. If access to power requires alliances with those who once monopolised it, then the alliance becomes permissible. If recognition requires accommodation with white political interests, accommodation becomes pragmatism. If a seat at the table requires abandoning inconvenient histories, those histories can be rewritten as irrelevant.
The most troubling possibility is therefore not that March & March will become AfriForum. It is that it will become something politically more revealing: a Black vehicle for reproducing the logic of exclusion that structures white supremacy. That signals a betrayal of our historical cause concealed within the language of “Black interests”.
Black liberation was never simply about putting Black people at the head of the queue.
It was about dismantling the queue as a political structure of domination. It was about building a society in which citizenship did not depend upon racial hierarchy, and in which the injuries of one group could not be repaired by reproducing them against another.
The emerging alliance suggests the opposite possibility: that grievance can become a ladder to power, and that once someone reaches for the ladder, yesterday’s oppressor can suddenly become today’s political partner. That is why this alliance deserves scrutiny. Not because organisations cannot cooperate across ideological lines, but because sometimes the alliance reveals what the politics was really about all along. Not liberation. Not Black interests. Power.
Dr Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.
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