SINISTER PACT OP-ED: A not-so-odd couple: AfriForum and March and March’s dangerous alliance

The two political opposites have joined in a marriage of convenience where AfriForum is looking for a domestic image upgrade while March and March gets to learn valuable lessons in how to legitimise and normalise anti-black discrimination.

Last week, two organisations that look like political opposites sat down together for a photoshoot and announced a strategic alliance. AfriForum, South Africa’s premier Afrikaner rights lobby, and the anti-immigrant movement March and March officially resolved to work together on border control, crime, “illegal migration” and the rule of law. After the latter’s Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma “suspended” ubuntu earlier this year, it’s now supposedly back on as the two organisations join forces.

As a white minority rights group and a black-led xenophobic group, they know they look like an odd couple. Both organisations are at pains to counter this perception, emphasising how much “common ground” they have beyond “differences on specific matters”. This is technically correct, but not in the way that Afriforum’s Kallie Kriel and Ngobese-Zuma present it to the South African public. Their supposed commitment to South Africa and joint condemnation of “illegal immigration” obscures what both of their efforts essentially amount to: preserving the racial order built by apartheid to serve only the people at the top of it. In doing so, both organisations deliberately weaponise nationalism with all the inherent dangers that this presents to a constitutional democracy.

To understand this better, let’s look beyond the current rhetoric. Who do these organisations each speak for – or claim to speak for – and what do they work towards?

AfriForum organises around Afrikaner resistance and “self-determination”, farm murders and staunchly opposes affirmative action and land reform . Right-wing networks in the US and Europe have eagerly jumped on their bandwagon to support the narrative that Afrikaner communities are targets of racially motivated hate crime. March and March, a much younger black nationalist group, has a significantly less-diverse portfolio. With a virtually singular focus on “irregular migration”, they frame a lack of border policing as the government’s most egregious and harmful failing. To spread this message they rely heavily on coordinated disinformation campaigns and paid bots on social media to exploit real grievances among South Africa’s poor working class.

Yet, when we look at what kind of future each organisation helps to shape, both campaigns have the same impact: no change for those South Africans who had, and continue to have, the least. Everything these two organisations stand for prevents meaningful social and racial justice. Instead, as they join forces to deflect blame onto those furthest down the ladder, they ossify South Africa as it has always been. In other words, neither movement touches the actual architecture of inequality but directs anger and attention away from addressing it. The organisations’ agendas are, in fact, not separate at all.

Of course, South Africa has seen this mechanism at work before.