Why the Volkstaat movement needs to stop looking for recognition, and start building
In my last piece, I discussed how America can benefit from the breakup of South Africa.
But secessionist options don’t paint the whole picture. There is a third group who has extremely high rebel potential, and which could change the face of the country forever.
Back in 2018, Solidariteit published a policy paper of something called Ankerdorpe. The notion was there were fixed settlements that were set to grow and form concentration points for the sparsely settled Afrikaner population.
But no stable migration trend has emerged that can be relied on. If we want Anchor Towns to emerge, they must be created, by actively establishing meaningful autonomy at the local level.
Last year, I produced plans for this, offering three broad strategies for establishing autonomous communities and rescuing existing historical settlements from black majoritarianism.
The end game of this strategy is a chain of autonomous cities stretching from the west coast to Nelspruit, creating the capacity to protect the agricultural hinterland, control and promote trade and development across the country, and bargain for power with the cental state as equals, not as rejected second-class citizens.
As we head for the inevitable fiscal cliff, and the state gears up for Zimbabwean style land expropriation, it will not be good enough to see disorganised groups of panicking locals face off against the police, or worse, mobs of civilian land invaders. This will be a massive disaster.
To effectively defend oneself, one cannot stand alone, and must be able to project power from defensible territory with meaningful economic capacity. This means achieving control over enough nodes in the internal trade network to feed and supply those who would defend the land.
I imagine the first thought of any staunch Boer reading this would probably be “what is this Ingelsman doing weighing on our affairs?” Well, I want you guys to win, that’s what.
Do not wait for recognition
When the leaders of the Volstaatsbeweging met with Thabo Mbeki in the 1990s looking for a slice of South Africa to call their own, they were met with a rather rigid response. He quoted the old African proverb in the heading of this article, which refers to the procedure on a hunt - if a hunter wishes to claim a cut of the kill, he must first produce the animal for carving.
In this sense, there was no de facto settlement pattern that could justify a de jure Volkstaat, and there still isn’t.
The most practical options so far have been Orania and the Ankerdorp Project of Solidariteit (the latter of which has not been operationalised). Orania has been going from strength to strength, and nobody reading this site needs to be told what those successes are.
But it cannot survive forever on its own, isolated in the dead centre of the country, connected only by crumbling roads. Other towns must be rescued and strengthened, and prepared for surviving the chaos that will come - because the chaos will be slow and incremental, not an explosive war, and that means building forts, not lagers.
Solidariteit outlines several sustainability benchmarks in their original 2018 study:
· 10 000 people as the critical threshold for a concentration point
· Emphasis on youth (large elderly pop = negative)
· Municipal governance must be sustainable – IRR 80-20 report as the standard framework
· One of the legs on which this plan stands is private hospital services, with emergency service capacity
· Afrikaans-language education institutions with >600 students and a graduation rate over 90%
· Demands for a local economy that is independent of single-source industries (mining or manufacturing)
I found two problems with this. First, it looks at quantitative, not qulitative features. Second, it assumes linear trajectories of growth and settlement which, under examination, do not hold at the local level. If you want a steady trend, you will have to create one.
The semigration wave bringing Gautengers back to the Cape has reversed the trend of the previous decade (up to 2011), which saw many concentrating in the Gauteng metropoles. The last census in 2022 revealed a major drain from Gauteng, as well as from the neighbouring provinces, but a consolidation of Cape numbers.
And as ever, Limpopo remains unchanged by the flow of time.
Other things that leap out from the data include something that has long been obvious - that the constituencies have been drawn with the explicit purpose of disenfranchising Afrikaners in their entirety. There are no districts where Afrikaners constitute more than 22%, let alone a majority.
This is not the end of the world for minoritarian voters however, as some districts outside of the Cape, like uMngeni, have managed to carry a slim DA majority despite only 23% of their population being white, aided by the generally low black voter turnout.
Creating trends is possible, and what I found is that there is a fair amount of low-hanging fruit in this regard, some expensive projects, and some highly profitable long-shot options. But in short, there is an emergent plan which if implemented, could create a chain of autonomous citadels capable of defending a broad agricultural hinterland and sustaining trade across the subcontinent.
To get to this future, Afrikaners will need to shed 19th century conceptions of the nation state, and embrace a more dynamic and 21st century conception of territorial power. If they can do this, it will produce one of the most revolutionary and unique political movements in history.
Depsite the decay of the system, we still live under the rule of law (however biased or corrupt), and illegal or violent activity can be easily shut down. This means that any measures taken in preparation for the end of the rule of law need to be taken within the law.
This enclave network can be realised through three methods:
For each, I have prepared a pilot example, though they can be applied elsewhere, and there is more than one workable example falling under each of these, and they can be independently initiated at the local level.
When these are realised, no need for the recognition of a volkstaat will be necessary - it will already exist.
The Western Plan
This sort of project is potentially the most expensive ond time consuming of the three, but that depends on the location and how quickly one wishes to realise it. Orania grew rather slowly, and its competitors have failed for a variety of reasons, leading many to balk at the amount o work and patience required to repeat that success.
But the key feature which settlement programmes such as Kleinfontein and others have neglected is that the community requires the relative isolation to force independent economic development, and robust economic development requires a primary resource base, which in our case will have to be agriculture.
There are one or two locations suitable for a relatively easy build, but establishing a coastal settlement which can be autonomous and homogeneous will require placing it in a rather arid spot.
This leaves a few spots, but only Kamiesberg offers the possibility of settling where the population is small enough to swing the local elections. in Kamiesberg there is a roughly 3 000 vote gap between majoritarian (ANC/PA/EFF etc) and minoritarian (DA/VF+) political blocs. There are eight such municipalities across the northern and western Cape, where the voting margins are between 800 and 4000.
This number of 3 000 can be achieved in a relatively short time period (less than 10 years), but will require the mobilisation of capital, and the employment of technical specialists and specialist infrastructure. This includes a desalination plant, a solar power grid, a small airstrip, housing, and an indoor farming operation.
I asked Grok’s new engine to calculate the development costs and returns for this model over the period, and it is profitable even on this skeletal model. The numbers are obviously crude, but they serve to illustrate the general point, that this is commercially viable.
It would require a loan or grant to bridge the first year, which would require R100 million investment. There are funds available from certain ideologically aligned funds in the country, but this depends on political will. It would have to be a privately-owned venture, effectively a company town.
If you start with a patch of arid coastal scrub in Kamiesberg, 100 hectares bought cheap at 5,000 rand a hectare will cost half a million rand. The idea’s simple: start small with 400 people, grow to 4,000 over a decade. I just used three basic economic inputs - indoor farming, small businesses, and retirees. The backbone is a hydroponics farm, growing veggies indoors, but I suggested 500 remote workers, 30 small outfits like fish shops or craft stalls, and 800 retirees looking for a quiet seaside spot.
The agricultural component is essential, since every durable settlement needs a primary resource base, and Spain has had some success in indoor desalination-fed agriculture, which was initially a concern, since desal irrigation does still have a higher solute content than natural fresh water from higher rainfall areas.
Year one is a R97–100 million investment. You’re building 100 home - 100-m2 jobs at 350,000 rand each, totalling R35 million. Desalination is R26–27 million with solar panels, a hectare’s worth of high-tech indoor farming at R25–26 million, and basics like roads and sewers R13–14 million.
To scale this over ten years, you’ll spend R970–985 million in total. That’s R315 million for 900 extra homes, R214 million to grow the farm to 10 hectare equivalents, R56 million to expand water output, R90 million for roads and pipes, plus R70–80 million for internet, shopfronts, and retiree perks. Running costs (labour, power, upkeep) add another 95–105 million. It’s a hefty bill, quite clearly.
The AI suggested 1 hectare of leafy greens in Year 1, pulling R7.5 million, scaling to R75 million by Year 10 with 10 hectares, totaling 412.5 million over the decade. Selling spare water and solar power to the municipality nets R14.3 million.
But you can’t run this just on farming, it needs to diversify. By Year 10, 500 remote workers, starting at 50, add R100,000 to the economy annually, R500 million total. Thirty small businesses, growing from five, add R60 million at 200,000 rand a pop. The big win’s 800 retirees, trickling in at 80 a year, each spending 100,000 rand locally—440 million by the end. Add it up: 1,426.8 million rand in revenue.
Against R970–985 million total spent over the time period, that’s a profit of R441–456 million—a 45% return. That is simply from indoor farming, remote workers and pensioners.
That is the most difficult and expensive option. Others will be somewhat easier to cover.
The Eastern Plan
This plan regards those places where a traditional Afrikaner settlement is surrounded by a supermajority of black residents, and has no hope of securing electoral majority in their municipality. As the maps below show, the typical South African settlement is de facto residentially segregated. Black (green) white (purple) coloured (orange) and Indian (red) residents tend to form separate geographic clusters like this:
This is a fairly complicated plan, but it can also be done by fairly small teams working from consulting teams attached to employers organisations at a local level. The procedure for gaining autonomy involves freeing oneself as much as possible from three elements - public services, BEE, and migrant labour.
Public service substitition has gained some legal ground in recent years, but has yet to be exploited to its greatest capacity.
On the 13th of December 2023, a landmark case, Hillandale Homeowners Association vs Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality, was heard in the Constitutional court. The effect of this case affirmed the right of citizens, in certain circumstances, to take over services not being provided by the municipal government and to refuse rates demanded for these services.
In this judgment, the local government was told it could not charge the residents for those services, and could not prevent them from rendering the service themselves. The court cited Rademan v Moqhaka Local Municipality (a case with a rather different outcome) to the effect that:
“Where a municipality claims payment from a resident or ratepayer for services, it is only entitled to payment of services that it has rendered. By the same token, where a municipality claims from a resident, customer or rate payer payment for services, the resident, customer or ratepayer is only obliged to pay the municipality for services that have been rendered. There is no obligation on a resident, customer or ratepayer to pay the municipality for a service that has not been rendered.”
It should be noted that the judgment does not give an automatic right to replace municipal services, but it opens the way by providing a legal procedure, which appears to be that one make a pro forma application to the local government for a service-level agreement where its services are absent, and approach the court for the right to intervene.
This wouldn’t be the first time a local ratepayers’ or homeowners’ association has boycotted rates or provided its own services in recent years. DA MP Carin Visser started her political career on the back of a successful campaign to replace municipal services in Sannieshof from 2008.
More recently, the SAHRC ruled that Tswaing and Ngaka Modiri Molema municipalities in North West Province had violated their residents’ rights by failing to provide basic services. Consequently, a formal modular legal strategy should be adopted and offered to any local organisation that can meet basic criteria.
But it should be borne foremost in mind that in Rademan v Moqhaka Local Municipality, the judgment explicitly upheld the municipality’s right to withhold services from those who boycott their rates, in this case, electricity. The arbitrary or unsanctioned withholding of rates from the municipality will not be tolerated by the courts, and so caution should be the watchword. This is especially true when one considers the remarks in Kamiesberg Local Municipality v Koingnaas Belastingbetalersvereniging (KBBV):
“Predicated on the Robertson judgment by Moseneke J the court cannot order the Municipality to step back and let KBBV take over all its duties and responsibilities. One of the reliefs sought is to authorise KBBV to take control of and repair and maintain the municipal service infrastructure of Koingnaas until such time as the Municipality is able to show its ability to fulfil and resume its duties in this regard. KBBV will be assuming a supervisory role and imposing itself to perform such functions without having followed any due process or itself being assessed for its competencies or capabilities. It is unclear how it will be shown that KLM has reached a stage of resuming its duties and responsibilities and who KBBV will be accountable to. This, in my view, is a recipe for disaster.”
While it would be too ambitious at this stage to attempt the legal argument that one could pursue the same legal strategy as the Mangaung case on the basis of incompetent, exorbitantly costly or insufficient service delivery (as opposed to utterly absent service delivery), it does open the way for the most distressed communities to displace municipal government services where they have properly collapsed.
Once this has been established as a broader precedent, the possibility of competitive service delivery options between mandatory and voluntary governance bodies (i.e., the state vs NGOs or homeowners associations).
Since this is a long process, it would be best if it started sooner rather than later, and specific rules of thumb obtained to determine when the courts can force a service level agreement upon a municipality.
Dismantling BEE simply requires breaking the chain at the source - government procurement. I say “simply”, but it will take a little legwork.
BEE is not directly enforced. Instead, it relies on a domino effect flowing from state procurement policy. As Piet le Roux of Sakeliga put it:
“The 'scorecard' system introduced by the B-BBEE Act cunningly ensured that a company's BEE points were based not only on itself, but also on the score of its service providers. The result was a toxic chain reaction, in which companies that wanted to obtain state business or that had political risk exposure were incentivized to shift some of the political pressure for BEE onto their suppliers, even though those suppliers themselves did not trade with the state not.”
Following Sakeliga’s 2022 ConCourt victory, municipalities are no longer entitled to prioritise tenders for BEE companies over those that can deliver the best value for money. The opportunity this creates is to replace existing tenders for the municipality as they come up for review. The levels of corruption may make it appear difficult to get in, but the municipality can be credibly threatened with legal action to create conditions in which the town is forced to supply services through non-BEE contracts.
Breaking the municipal dependence on BEE service providers will have a knock-on effect in the region, and open up business opportunities to Afrikaner businesses who do not wish to pursue a BEE score in order to be able to transact with those businesses who do business with the government.
Much of the construction sector, which has stagnated in the interior over the past 10-15 years, is dependent on government contracts, and the effect that BEE has on those who would enter the sector can be steep. By providing legal support, Sakeliga or some small consultancy attached to an employers agency can accelerate repair of local infrastructure and reduce the ceiling imposed on SMEs by BEE requirements.
A successful shattering of the local BEE chain will create room for a local informal Afrikaner business chamber, which can leverage the trust and cooperation formed through this process to invest in development and expansion.
Labour autonomy becomes the next focus. There are two key processes here which unfortunately cannot be priced without a comprehensive business survey. The first is the process of capitalisation: mechanisation and automation. The second is unemployment drainage – drawing away unemployed elements from neighbouring informal settlements.
According to Grok3, averaging across SME sectors, about 25–35% of SME work could be automated with today’s affordable tech (apps, basic machines, solar-powered sensors). This could be 40–50% with better infrastructure - stable power, faster internet, cheaper kit, by 2035 (but that’s very optimistic).
The means for increasing capitalisation will be challenging without increasing access to financing. Financing is of course much easier when there is a common pool of resources to draw from.
But after automation, an equally large challenge consists in combating the encroachment of informal settlements and the pressure the exert on municipal services. The main means of doing so requires locating temporary employment services in areas which have a high demand for labour and can afford to absorb the additional population, preferably in another province.
The potential for relocating populations in this way is quite large – because of the way recruitment works in chains, based on social network effects, recruiters in Clanwilliam have for the past 40 years primarily recruited from the northern Eastern Cape town of Sterkspruit. By the time of the 2011 census, the town was reduced to just over 1000 residents, and the Clanwilliam labour supply chain had to turn to workers form Lesotho and neighbouring towns.
A major expenditure for labourers seeking to leave their homes for better opportunities is transport and living costs – the journey can cost between R350 and R1000, and money down on a shack or backyard rentals cost between R800 and R1 500. Subsidising this travel while coordinating between scouts in Mbombela and recruiters in Johannesburg or seasonal picking recruiters in, say, the Free state, will require establishing relationships with recruiters.
However, whether this is affordable is difficult to calculate. It will depend on the level of demand at either end of the labour supply chain. It may also be entirely unnecessary to subsidise the process, and it may be possible simply by establishing new business relationships. To this end, and the coordination of tender applications mentioned in the above section, it will be necessary to establish a new business chamber, replacing the existing corrupt networks.
Take the area around Nelspruit. The district municipality area of Ehlanzeni has a single chamber, which consolidated all the disparate business fora in the district in 2017: the Kruger Lowveld Chamber of Business and Tourism. The KLCBT is a BEE-friendly entity, which is keen on maximising employment equity among its members and partners, which in a skill-poor region such as eastern Mpumalanga may make the cluster of businesses they represent somewhat less competitive in the long run.
The challenge will be to offer greater common benefits to participants than the KLCBT currently offer their partners. The influence the business chamber currently has extends to their influential position on the Economic Development Forum, the Ehlanzeni Integrated Development Plan Representative Forum, and the Mpumalanga Tourism Think Tank.
This position, coupled with the general incompetence of the local ANC government, has allowed them to effectively dictating the local economic development plan to the municipality (which naturally increases the validity of the investment opportunities suggested by the LED report quoted above).
By replacing these structures, one can dictate the direction of development oneself, while using land trusts and common financial instruments to develop and autonomise the main Afrikaner towns in the province - Nelspruit, Middelburg, Secunda, eMahleni, Bethal and Ermelo, eventually securing trase along the N4, N11 and R32.
The Metropolitan Plan
Pretoria has been the metropolitan centre of the Afrikaner people for more than a century. It has produced more complex and culturally-Afrikaner social structures than any other town.
The cluster including Pretoria, Centurion and Eersterust all have either an Afrikaans majority, or have Afrikaans as the largest spoken language. These areas also vote overwhelmingly for the DA and VF+, but cannot achieve stable political representation, as a result of the jerrymandering of the municipal boundaries.
Since 2000, it has been swallowed up by the massive metropolitan municipality known as Tshwane. The consequences of this have been insecure roads and neighbourhoods, and crumbling infrastructure, as the majority refuse to vote for parties capable of fiscal or managerial responsibility.
To be adequately represented, and to resist the effects of increasingly aggressive socialist and racialist reforms, the municipal boundaries must be redrawn, to give them control of their own interests, and control affairs to affect sustainable governance.
Should Pretoria, for example, be declared its own municipality, it will be capable of allowing local communities control over services, coordination with private security and community safety, and the establishment of comprehensive state replacement initiatives. An autonomous Pretoria can be achieved, but requires a coordinated and concerted effort to leverage opportunities in party politics, constitutional law, and civil society.
There are a few paths here, some extremely difficult long-shots, some more simple and direct, but all must go through the Municipal Demarcation Board, a national entity. That should be a deterrent, as they are subject to the law as much as any other body.
The shortest route is through the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act. There are rural cases where demarcation has led to conflicts over ethnicity in multiple occasions.
The most important is Vuwani and Malamulele in Limpopo, where tensions emerged between Tsonga and Venda groups over service delivery and access to jobs. The Tsonga felt excluded from access to resources and jobs, and spent the next 15 years attempting to appeal their demarcation. In 2016, Malamulele was granted its own municipality by combining parts of Thulamela and Makhado municipalities, under the name of Collins Chabane Local Municipality.
Both polling research and the contents of the actual demarcation procedure showed that the process focused exclusively on ethnicity.
While this case does not represent a legal precedent in the traditional sense, since it was not settled through the courts, the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act stipulates that all citizens are entitled to equal treatment, and if Pretoria were denied its own municipal representation, it would constitute unfair treatment, since such provisions were afforded to others.
Sections 6.1.b, 30, and 235 of the Constitution also afford the right to community autonomy in line with existing legislation, and this is a clear legislated mechanism:
S235: The right of the South African people as a whole to self-determination, as manifested in this Constitution, does not preclude, within the framework of this right, recognition of the notion of the right of self-determination of any community sharing a common cultural and language heritage, within a territorial entity in the Republic or in any other way, determined by national legislation.
S30: Everyone has the right to use the language and to participate in the cultural life of their choice, but no one exercising these rights may do so in a manner inconsistent with any provision of the Bill of Rights.
S6.1.b Municipalities must take into account the language usage and preferences of their residents.
Which precise legal strategy to take is a matter for legal professionals – suffice it to say that there are at least three different approaches to achieving a precedent for municipal re-demarcation along ethnic lines.
The other two routes are more complicated and difficult to achieve. The normal procedure for changing municipal boundaries or establishing new municipalities involves six parties:
Sections 12 - 14 of the Municipal Structures Act (MSA) authorises the MEC for Local Government to establish municipalities in the province they represent, and to determine which category the new municipality.
While the national Minister may offer guidelines which must be taken into account in the process of establishing a new municipality, and while the public and the municipal governments affected by this establishment must be consulted, there is no element of the Act which gives veto power to either of these processes.
However, the MDB has the power to refuse to accept the boundaries of the newly established municipality, given that it has the power to draw or redraw any municipal boundaries as it sees fit.
Sections 21, 22 and 85 of MSA mandates the MDB to assess municipal capacity when determining boundaries, which may pose difficulties for this process, as the establishment of a new high-income municipality may render outlying low-income areas fiscally unsound.
Nevertheless, the powers of the MBD may be an obstacle that can theoretically be overcome by appeal to the aforementioned sections of the Constitution.
If one is worried about the difficulty of establishing legal precedent on this front, there is also a trojan horse strategy - Soweto. I have explored this option, and know of a couple of established local groups and individuals who support this idea. They tend to be quite radical, but are not completely shut off to political cooperation, given that they come from a Black Consciousness background rather than a Charterist (ANC) background.
But I will not spend much time on this here.
Since nobody else is trying to do any of this right now, I am going to create the instruments as best I can to implement at least one of these plans, all three if possible. If I am in any way successful, I should be able to begin work by the end of the year.
If in the meantime somebody wishes to try to do any of this, they are welcome to try. I encourage it. But I will be pro-actively seeking out partners in my own efforts.
