What is the difference between the ANC, which, in the words of its Secretary General Fikile Mbalula, is not a black organisation, being in bed with the DA, and March & March doing the same with Afriforum?
Being already in bed with the DA, what difference does the ANC mayoral candidate suggest they will make to the DA mayoral candidate for the November 04, 2026 local government elections?
Coming to the March & March meeting with Afriforum, what black person of sound mind contemplates learning anything from Afriforum that had set itself, as its raison d’être, to oppose any changes to the black condition?
White privilege was carved out of the bone, flesh and blood of black misery. White privilege was not only blooded by full-spectrum black subjugation. It was conceived, nurtured, grown, and installed to last, propelled by white racism.
Today, racism wears a corporate brand identity that has carved a ‘civil society footing’ into democracy with a view to endure into perpetuity?
What Afriforum is doing is the ongoing manifestation of its extra-parliamentary strategy at home and abroad.
In the US, the South African component of intransigent oppressive white power has not only got the hearing of its president Donald Trump. It also has the backing of billionaires with South African/Namibian roots and now based in the US. Co-founders of the electronic payment system PayPal, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel top the billionaire list that falls in that line.
One would be mistaken to think it is mere big money not talking Afrikaans in the United States. Big money is the mother tongue trained on badmouthing black liberation, criminalised as being behind the falsity of white persecution in South Africa.
It is not Afrikaans that is speaking. It is the mother tongue of racism that is.
A tongue trained not to speak its own language, but to speak against black liberation.
In Washington, the language is fluently spoken in English. In London it speaks of a policy to impress privatisation, hell-bent on taking the government out of its core business of taking care of citizens. In Pretoria it speaks of ‘civil society’ and ‘minority rights’ and ‘the markets’. It is consistently money talking.
The accent changes. The mother tongue remains the same.
Afrikaans is just one of its dialects. The DA is another. March & March ill-advisedly auditioned itself for a photo-op with Afriforum. The picture is bewitching, bothering and bewildering. With that picture, the initial hostility with which March & March was met may be moderated in capitals of the world with the cordiality of rolling out a receptive carpet for a newfound born-again person to love, meriting worldwide listenership. When that happens, forget not to remember the picture that swung the magic wand.
White people are listened to by the government on home soil and overseas. Black people are ignored back home and criminalised.
That is how you know whose mother tongue is being spoken. If one wants to know what the mother tongue of money is, this is it.
Saddening that the optics accompanying this assault on the liberation of black people even outfoxes people who should know better.
It should not be forgotten that Mondli Gungubele, then a minister in the Presidency, taken on a guided tour of Sol-Tech in October 2022, was tearful being exposed to the resource capabilities offerings of that institution. The pop-up poster against which Gungubele shared his experience boldly read: “Eradicate Poverty, Reduce Inequality, Reduce Unemployment”. The optics were a publicity coup for Afriforum.
Inside the government (‘of national unity’) is FF+’s Pieter Groenewald as minister of correctional services. Groenewald, together with party leader Corné Mulder, share an extra-parliamentary programme with Afriforum.
The agenda is clear. It is openly shared in concert with US Ambassador to SA Leo Brent Bozell III. The agenda items to be transacted are a summation of the entrenchment of white privilege in an SA-specific democracy. The application of it is the undermining of the regulatory, policy and legislative sovereignty of a liberated people-centred country.
The transaction of this agenda includes:
- SA is ill-advised to have gone to The Hague on Palestine
- SA should dissociate itself from BRICS, that falls outside the US’s sphere of influence
- SA should stand with Ukraine in its fight with Russia; this was demonstrable in state buildings in the Western Cape draped with Ukrainian colours when the Ukrainian-Russian war broke out in February 2022; special visas mooted for Ukrainians and caring less about the ill-treatment of Africans by authority figures on either side of Ukraine-Polish borders on refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine, and which, then DA leader John Steenhuisen’s fact-finding mission in Ukraine in May 2022 was not perturbed by.
- Resolved opposition to redress legislation including misapplied BEE/BBBEE, expropriation without compensation and affirmative action at workplaces
- Campaigning for SA withdrawal of the ICJ case against Israel from The Hague
- Objecting to SA’s solidarity with the cause of the dispossessed Palestinians.
March & March fortuitously bursting into the scene comes in handy to bolster that agenda in the name of lessons to be learnt from Afriforum.
This is what happens when blackness is used not for itself but for others who are unashamedly racism-driven and anti-black liberation. As vital statistics, it is worth remembering that for blacks to be black is not for themselves but for white people for the entrenchment of intransigent oppressive power.
In case March & March were serious about the dignity of blackness, the organisation would wish to be its star performer for lifting association, the woman singer that represented its quiet fire, Roberta Flack, should be its leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma’s source of inspiration.
Acclaimed for gifting the black world with the soundtrack of black dignity, Flack was not idling when she wrote the song, ‘Be Real Black For Me’. Twice married to white men, first to musician Steve Novosel and later to Lester Barrett Jr., her liberating black mind was comfortable in real life, business and love. Not once did Flack’s blackness shrink nor stain her cause by looking for lessons in the wrong places. Looking for lessons in Afriforum is one bad note that Ngobese-Zuma has brought to a good song that June 30, 2026 sang. Finding her tune again as sweet again, would not be easy to come by.
Equally out of tune with the beat of black dignity is the DA. The DA has just been as active and vocal in amplifying what Afriforum/Solidarity/FF+ have been up and about in the UK as in the US to accentuate the anti-black liberation agenda. The DA’s democracy is in stark contrast with the material deliverance of the struggling majority.
March & March though, could not have been mistaken to be pumping life into the liberation appeal. March & March appeals were hard to reject wishes for law and order.
The body was hardly concerned about the unfinished business of the liberation project. It was seized with the reinstatement of law and order pertaining to corruption of immigration in an unchanging society.
The nobleness of those wishes seems to be toppling to collapse upon throwing itself in the classroom of an anti-black liberation camp that is unambiguous in its stance:
- No sovereignty,
- No regulatory, legislative and policy change for the restoration of power, land, culture
- No redress to an economy built of black misery, absence and business as usual
- Amplifying false claims of ‘white genocide’ abroad and false alarms of persecution to advance the lie of white victimhood
- Beration of SA ICJ action against Israel in The Hague
The media, in general, and journalists in particular are complicit in dressing this anti-black liberation agenda in ‘civil society organisation’ robes.
The elements behind civil society/human rights ordination include academics, commentators, standing go-to experts, podcasters, think tanks, foundations, universities, dialogue forums and colloquialisms of a variety of interest groups.
The wonder of wonders is hearing black journalists asking questions as though they are strangers to dispossession, faking ignorance of the black experience that whiteness has authored.
What is ‘civil society’ or ‘human rights’ about a group that exists precisely for the subjugation of black people to be permanently fated in those conditions as a guarantee that white privilege is not tampered with?
Vexed with this line of thinking, a collective of prominent Afrikaans-speaking South Africans published an open letter titled “Not in our name” in October 2025.
In the space in which it operates, even for its own sake, March & March cannot plead to have been unaware of how misguided it was to have walked down that straying tête-à-tête route with Afriforum, ostensibly to learn. What on earth had come over it, to allow for its premeditated misuse in the manner the picture painted in the photo opportunity suggests? Afriforum’s savouring of that moment should not surprise.
Not when conscientious Afrikaners did not fail to respond to the misuse of their story in “US politics”. The signatories of that letter rejected U.S. policies prioritising white South Africans for refugee status, criticised claims of “white genocide,” and affirmed commitment to South Africa’s sovereignty.
South Africa’s sovereignty was expected to stand revealed as a common factor between the “Not-in-our-Name” conscientious objectors and March & March.
The valid defence for SA sovereignty that had pushed March & March to embrace, hoist and wear the nation’s flag on the streets is difficult to believe to be holding water still. The organisation’s claims now leak like a sieve separating sorghum seeds in the distilling process of home-brewed beer.
Mind-boggling then is to see an organisation that claims to stand for order and sovereignty, and accusing the government of neglect of black conditions, seeking an audience of groups like Afriforum that exist exactly for the perpetuation of black subjugation from which racism-founded white privilege had arisen. Is March & March unable to see that its grievance of the government’s neglect of the black condition derives from the recurring comforting pampering of white privilege?
White people are listened to by the government and overseas. Black people are ignored back home and criminalised internationally to a point of the Oval Office.
That MK Party has similarly met with Afriforum, adding further feathers to its hat. No wonder Afriforum boasts that it has met Zulu King Misuzulu. Afriforum brags that it has met other kingdoms.
It is about time the black community re-examined factors of its continued powerlessness, not in personalities that come and are soon usurped wittingly or unwittingly. The examination being called for should be alive to the systematic full spectrum of calculated white dominance against liberating black solidarity and the systemic oppression that has been haunting the black liberation struggle generation after generation after generation.
All hopes that March and March had held for the germination of a people-centric mass-based option seem to be gone with the wind. The spectacular operation of June 30, 2026 that shone an undeniable spotlight on illegal migration, undermining society’s fabric, appears to be vapouring into thin air like a dog’s sweat vainly digging for a valued bone in a trackless sand.
By scouting for rescue of black honour among homes vulturing over black dignity, March & March has soiled the anti-illegal immigration bone it was believed legitimate to chew.
Whatever reasons March & March had advanced to locate the lessons for the good of its cause in the classroom of Afriforum, the optics are indefensible.
Oupa Ngwenya is a writer and corporate strategist.
