Population:

According to the last South African census (2001) there were 937 000 Afrikaners living in the Afrikaner area. Together with another 1,5 million Afrikaners spread over the rest of South Africa, they constitute 5% of the total population of South Africa. Although there are also many Afrikaners in the Western Cape (800 000), it is only in this area that they constitute a majority.

Language:

Afrikaans. The Afrikaans language is the most highly developed indigenous language of South Africa, and one of only four languages worldwide that were standardized during the twentieth century, the other three being Hindi, Hebrew and Malaysian. Although of West-Germanic origin, Afrikaans has evolved in Southern Africa since the mid-seventeenth century to become one of the world's major cultural languages in the twentieth century and one of only three such languages of Germanic origin, the other two being German (Deutsch) and Dutch (Nederlands). Afrikaans has 5,5 million mother-tongue speakers with an additional 9 million speaking it as a lingua franca in South Africa and Namibia.

Culture and religion:

The majority (more than 90%) of the Afrikaner nation is Calvinist Christian with a few Catholics, as well as some agnostics and atheists. Most belong to the three Afrikaans "sister churches", the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk, Hevormde Kerk and Gereformeerde Kerk.

The Afrikaners also have their own music, dances and food. The most famous Afrikaans dishes are Biltong, Boerewors, Bobotie, Melktert and Koeksisters. Afrikaans folk songs have been brought together in the FAK-sangbundel with over 600 pages of such songs. There is also Boeremusiek (Boer music) and Boeredanse (Boer dances) widely performed all over South Africa and Namibia. More recently, Afrikaans pop and rock music has produced many bestsellers in the South African music industry.

The corpus of Afrikaans novels, poetry, drama, history and philosophy  written by Afrikaners represents the most highly developed literary tradition in Africa, summarised in at least five multi-volume literary histories. Afrikaans Calvinist theology, incorporating many aspects of Western thought and philosophy, represents one of the primary Protestant traditions in the world.

Until the recent era of Xhosa domination, Afrikaners used to have their own schools and universities, exemplified by their academic discipline, sporting prowess, wide range of cultural activities such as concerts, operettas, Eistedfods and patriotic ethos with regular singing of the Afrikaner anthem, Die Stem, written by poet C.J. Langenhoven and composed by M.L. de Villiers. Until their schools were placed under Xhosa control after the surrender of 1994, the pass rate achieved for the matric or school-leaving certificate among Afrikaner children was 98%, arguably the highest in the world.

Political Organization:

For most of the twentieth century, Afrikaner republican aspirations were represented by the National Party, founded by J.B.M. Hertzog in 1914. As a result of the surrender by FW de Klerk and Roelf Meyer to the Xhosa-dominated ANC in the early 1990s, the National Party subsequently collapsed and lost all legitimacy with Afrikaners, becoming absorbed into the ANC. Due to the De Klerk-Meyer surrender which was done on behalf of the business class and to ensure jobs and pensions for the remaining National Party politicians, most Afrikaners have become disillusioned with politics and more than half do not participate in formal politics in South Africa, seeing it as a useless exercise.

From 2000 onwards, there has been a growing extra-parliamentary movement of authors, intellectuals, trade unionists, farmers and language activists who have formed various political and cultural movements or who have continued to act within traditional Afrikaans organisations. During 2005, four organisations tried to set up Afrikaner Councils that would represent the Afrikaner nation in its dealings with the dominant Xhosa group and its allies currently ruling South Africa. They were: the FAK, Afrikaner-Alliansie, Volksekretariaat and the Tussentydse Afrikaneraad. Talks on mergers and mutual cooperation have been going on and most probably in the near future there will be  only one Afrikanerraad or Council that will represent all Afrikaners.

Those Afrikaners still participating in formal South African politics do so by voting for the DA, Freedom Front Plus, ACDP and other opposition parties.

Economy:

The Afrikaner region forms part of the current Gauteng Province which is the most economically developed area in South Africa and in Africa. Previously founded as a mining economy under Boer President Paul Kruger in the late nineteenth century prior to the Anglo-Boer war, this area represents the industrial, service and training hub of South Africa and even of the continent. It also contains some agriculture and car manufacturing. The estimated annual GDP of the Afrikaner region is $75 billion (PPP) which, if an independent state, would make it Africa's sixth biggest economy, after South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Nigeria. However, in terms of its per capita GDP of around $50 000 a future Afrikaans republic in this region would rank as by far the richest country in Africa and the second richest in the world, after Luxemburg ($58 900) but before the United States ($40 100) and Norway ($40 000).

History:

Brief History

1836-1838 Great Trek into the interior by Afrikaners from the Eastern Cape, driven away by British colonial policies as well as the warring Xhosa tribe regularly plundering farms and towns. 

1852 The Sand River Convention with the British acknowledged the Transvaal or Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek as an independent Boer republic.   (First Republic.) 

1855 Founding of the capital Pretoria by M.W. Pretorius, named after his father Andries Pretorius.

1877    Annexation of the Transvaal by Great Britain (end of First Republic).

1879   Start of the First Anglo-Boer War (Afrikaans: Eerste Vryheidsoorlog - First Freedom War)

1881 Britain suffers defeat at Majuba in February and signs the Pretoria Convention on 3 August, ending the annexation. (Start of Second Republic.) 

1884 The London Convention of 27 February again acknowledges the independence of the Transvaal, with lack of clarity over the Western borders with Natal.

1886 Discovery of gold in the place that subsequently became known as Johannesburg.

1895 Cecil John Rhodes, the governor of the Cape, grants self-rule to the Xhosas of the Transkei who would convene in a parliament or "Bunga".

1896 Jameson Raid, an attempt by pro-British uitlanders under Leander Starr Jameson to stage a putsch against the legitimate government of the Z.A.R. and its president, Paul Kruger. The rebellion is, however, suppressed.

1899 Lord Milner persuades the British Government to make war against both independent Boer republics, the Z.A.R. (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. Start of the Second Anglo Boer War (Afrikaans: Tweede Vryheidsoorlog).

1902 Boer surrender, brought on by the deaths of 27 000 women and children in British concentration camps, as well as scorched earth policy, systematic rape of Boer women by British and "armed blacks", sex slavery in Irene concentration camp. (End of Second Republic.) 

1902 -1910 Lord Milner imports 250 000 British immigrants in an attempt to swamp the large Afrikaner population in the Transvaal.

1910 Self-rule granted by Britain to the Union of South Africa, consisting of the Transvaal, Orange Free State, Natal and Cape Province, but as part of British Commonwealth.

1948 Republican-oriented Nationalist party wins elections.

1960 South Africa leaves the Commonwealth upon British interference in its domestic policies and Prime Minister Verwoerd calls for a referendum on the issue of a republic.

1961 South Africa becomes a republic again (Third Republic), with Pretoria as its capital, the legislature in Cape Town and the Appeal Court in Bloemfontein. In response, the African National Congress and South African Communist Party declare war and attempt guerilla attacks on civilians.

1976 South Africa grants independence to the Xhosas of the Transkei (the first of the so-called TBVC states) under Kaizer Matanzima and continues with bilateral aid to the Xhosa. The Bunga is established at Umtata, more than one thousand kilometres from Pretoria.

1983 South Africa under PW Botha adopts a tri-cameral Parliamentary system with chambers for whites, coloureds and Indians. Blacks are to exercise their rights in the TBVC states and through a devolution of power to the municipal level in urban black areas.

1990 De Klerk unbans the ANC and South African Communist Party and starts negotiations with the external, armed wing of the movement, previously supported by the ex-Soviet Union and various Third World dictatorships , as well as left-wing groups in Western Europe (e.g. French Communist Party, Militant Tendency of British Labour Party).

1992 Without any mandate from the white or Afrikaner electorate, Roelf Meyer surrenders to the representative of the Xhosa-dominated ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa. De Klerk privately berates Meyer, "My God, Roelf, you have sold us out!" but publicly confirms the surrender.

1994 South Africa adopts a one-man-one-vote-winner-takes-all interim constitution. A former prisoner and Xhosa chief, Rohlihlala Mandela, gets elected as the first "democratic president" and the TBVC states are reincorporated into South Africa.  (End of Third Republic, beginning of Xhosa rule and Xhosa imperialism and expansionism in South Africa.) 

1996 A final constitution is adopted, containing important qualifications affecting the rights of minorities, especially whites and Afrikaners, in practice making them second-class citizens in an Africanist republic where black persons are the only ones enjoying full rights.

2000 Formation of PRAAG and the Group of 63, the latter after a gathering of 63 Afrikaner intellectuals at Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria.

2004 Formation of a Tussentydse Afrikanerraad (Interim Afrikaner Council) that would strive for a Verteenwoordigende Afrikanerraad (Representative Afrikaner Council).

2005 The TAR (Interim Afrikaner Council) formally adopts a resolution calling for the self-determination of the Afrikaner nation and for their historical independence to be restored in their majority area.

Historical background

The Afrikaners are mainly descended from Dutch, French Huguenot, German and Scottish settlers who first arrived in the Cape on 6 April 1652. However, even when still in Europe, they fought for their indepence from Spain (in Holland) and for their religious freedom as Protestants (in France). This spirit of freedom and independence, stimulated by the French Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent "Cape Patriot" movement of the 1790s, inspired the Great Trek and the founding of two independent Boer republics in the interior.

According to some calculations, the Boers constituted an absolute majority in these two republics in the 1890s. There are two main reasons why Afrikaners have become a minority in their native land: firstly, the British genocide of 1899-1902 which severely reduced Afrikaner prospects for population growth during the twentieth century and, secondly, the massive migration of blacks across South Africa's borders for most of the twentieth century, coupled with an inordinately high demographic expansion of the entire black population in the country, both indigenous and immigrant.

During the Anglo-Boer war, Lord Milner vowed to "eradicate the last vestiges of Afrikanerism from South Africa". In fact, British policy at the time was an early form of ethnic cleansing. Some aspects of anti-Afrikaner ethnic cleansing subsist  to this day as since 1994 more than 1800 Afrikaner farmers have been killed or tortured to death in so-called "farm attacks". Slogans such as "kill a Boer, kill a farmer" are regularly chanted by government supporters and many thousands more have been killed in the cities. 

On 11 August 2000, the current Xhosa president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, referred to Afrikaners as "a foreign ruling class who did not depart", implying that the Afrikaner "foreigners" will still have to leave South Africa sometime in the future.

History has a tendency to repeat itself, and whenever Afrikaners have lost political power or found themselves under British or Xhosa domination, violence and hardship have not been long in following. One might very well say that such is the case in contemporary South Africa, for Afrikaners are being discriminated against, both racially and linguistically, as well as suffering violence from marauding criminals over whom the Afrocentric, English-language state cannot or does not want to exercise control. 

Despite being a First World people of Northern European descent with a high level of education and skills, almost one million Afrikaners have slipped into joblessness and poverty since 1994 as a result of government race laws that curb the participation of whites in the South African economy, the so-called "affirmative action" programme whose ultimate purpose is to drive Afrikaners from the land of their birth or to marginalise them absolutely. The only recent example of such pervasive discrimination against a talented and entrepreneurial minority has been Nazi Germany where similar laws prevailed against Jews.

Ever since the time of the Great Trek in the 1830s, Afrikaners in the northern parts of the country have ruled themselves. In most areas, black tribesmen were attracted by the economic activity brought by Afrikaners and were not indigenous to those areas. This is especially true of the remaining majority Arikaner region around Pretoria where most blacks are late arrivals, either because they were gastarbeiter with roots elsewhere in Southern Africa or because they form part of the new government bureaucracy mostly imported from the Transkei following upon the Xhosa diplomatic conquest of 1994. 

800 000 Afrikaners are now living in exile, having fled the discrimination of Xhosa rule, as well as the violence and lawlessness that accompany such rule, exactly like conditions that prevailed during the 1820s and 1830s when the British colonial administration sided with the Xhosas against the Afrikaners of the Eastern Cape or during 1900-1902 when anarchy resulted from the British scorched earth policy; during the latter period "armed blacks" and British soldiers raided Boer farms at will, raping women, killing livestock and burning everything, even churches. In recent decades, only the civil war in Lebanon has led to such a dramatic outflow of people into diaspora as has Xhosa rule in South Africa since 1994. By comparison, only 12 000 radical (mostly communist) blacks left the country during the so-called "apartheid era" whereas millions of blacks voted with their feet by immigrating to South Africa from the rest of Africa.

2010 The Fourth Republic? The majority of Afrikaners either want to emigrate to escape the discrimination and violence of Xhosa rule or they wish their freedom to be restored in a much-reduced Fourth Republic where at least they may speak their language, educate their children according to their own norms and standards, as well as be free of discrimination on the grounds of race and language. An independent Afrikaner nation will attract much-needed skills back to South Africa, as well as contribute to political stability as any future ethnic clash or intra-state war between Afrikaners and South Africa's Xhosa rulers would be ruled out.