5 - An ‘alternative government’

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.