Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-v5vhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T02:40:44.716Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - An ‘alternative government’

The Solidarity Movement’s contemporary strategies

from Part II - White workers and civil society mobilisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2021

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann
Affiliation:
Universität Basel, Switzerland
Get access

Summary

By the 2010s, the Solidarity Movement boasted over 300,000 members and claimed to represent, by extension, a million Afrikaners. In 2015, it overtly positioned itself as an ‘alternative government’ or ‘state’ for Afrikaners amid ANC-led majority ‘domination’. Drawing on media analysis, interviews with executive members, and ethnography, this chapter investigates the discursive and organisational strategies that underlie the Movement’s contemporary campaigns and assertions. Discursively, the Movement proffered a selective historicalnarratives that obscured class, effaced apartheid-era injustices, and naturalised racial differences to present itself as the post-apartheid defender of a marginalised minority. Organisationally, it sought to create institutional, community, and even virtual spaces for Afrikaner autonomy and to perform state-like functions. The analysis reveals how these strategies reflected and inflected opportunities offered by the global hegemony of neoliberal policies, rationalities, and discourse amid the local specificities of majority rule. Placing the Movement’s strategies in conversation with social movement scholarship and theorisation on race and neoliberalism, it argues that Solidarity’s discursive and organisational strategies offer new insight into the opportunities for extra-parliamentary political mobilisation in the context of constitutional democracy and late capitalism, and how race is refashioned in the neoliberal epoch.

Type
Chapter
Information
Privileged Precariat
White Workers and South Africa's Long Transition to Majority Rule
, pp. 198 - 240
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×