Book review: The Super-Afrikaners

Published Apr 11, 2013

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The Super-Afrikaners: Inside the Afrikaner Broederbond by Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom

(New edition by Jonathan Ball, R230).

The Afrikaner Broederbond was established in 1918 with the laudable aim of uplifting Afrikaners, who were impoverished and demoralised in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War.

Increasingly, however, a political agenda came to the fore and during National Party rule the Broederbond was a highly secret organisation dedicated to advantaging “super Afrikaners” who were staunch adherents of an exclusive political establishment dedicated to a supremacist ideology.

When it became apparent that apartheid was doomed, the Broederbond morphed into an innocuous think-tank for capitalist-Afrikaner survival on the principle that if you do not like my principles, I can always devise new ones.

During my youth and early adulthood, I experienced the Broederbond as a malevolent force and I rejoiced in its exposure to the light of day when Hennie Serfontein published articles on the organisation from 1963 onwards. The malevolence was amply demonstrated by the horrific vengeance exacted on Reverend Beyers Naude and Professor Albert Geyser, the whistle blowers. In 1978, Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom continued the exposure of the Broederbond and its nefarious activities with the publication of The Super-Afrikaners, which included a comprehensive list of some 7 500 members of the organisation.

These developments are recalled in Max du Preez’s introduction to the present edition and Jonathan Ball’s reminiscence of publishing the 1978 version.

While these prefatory essays are of great interest, I am bemused by the re-publication of the book itself.

Copies in libraries would have covered the needs of researchers of this unhappy period of South African history. The relevance for today is not clear to me, unless, of course, I am being terribly naïve and the purpose is to point the parallel with current empowerment and tenderpreneurship shenanigans veiled in equally dire secrecy. – John Boje

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