Why classical liberals should back AfriForum and Solidarity

Dr Martin van Staden, head of policy at the Free Market Foundation, wants classical liberals to drop their suspicion of AfriForum and the Solidarity Movement. In an essay first published by the Daily Friend, he argues that the discomfort these organizations provoke is "vibes-based" rather than principled, and that the movement already meets the classical liberal test for voluntary association. Van Staden also edits the Race Law Project at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

Van Staden's complaint is that the same liberals who warm to other ethnic and cultural institutions tense up when Afrikaners organize. He points to the South African Human Rights Commission under Prof Tshepo Madlingozi and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation as bodies those liberals treat more kindly despite positions further from liberal principle. On immigration, he writes, Solidarity and AfriForum hold views almost indistinguishable from those of their critics.

Liberalism, as Van Staden frames it, turns on freedom of association with a genuine right of exit. The state must remain culturally and ethnically unaligned. Group association is compatible with liberalism when membership is voluntary and the group imposes itself on no one outside the association. He contrasts that with the authoritarian cosmopolitanism that demands everyone assimilate into an English-speaking mainstream, and asks why that position is called liberal while a Zulu who chooses Zulu schools and Zulu businesses is called provincial.

Solidarity, in his telling, fits that model. Membership in the trade union and in AfriForum is voluntary; people pay and work to belong, and no one is subject to pressure comparable to a mandatory tithe. Van Staden rejects the picture of the institutions as gathering places for elderly white conservatives. He says homosexuals, atheists, non-Reformed Christians and people who are not white work at and support the movement. Membership is predominantly white, he concedes, which he attributes to the small number of South Africans outside the Afrikaner community who choose to enter its cultural institutions on those terms. "It is by no means zero," he writes.

The most concrete recent example of the work is the drivers' licence campaign. AfriForum pressed the Department of Transport for years to extend the validity of light motor vehicle drivers' licences from five to ten years.