Why are Afrikaner institutions such as Akademia facing political hostility, and why does March & March want to learn from AfriForum?
Join Dr Martin van Staden, Nicholas Woode-Smith, David Ansara and Ayanda Zulu as they unpack the debate over Akademia, AfriForum, Afrikaner civil society and freedom of association in South Africa.
In this episode, we discuss the attacks on Akademia and the wider pressure on Afrikaners’ right to build and maintain their own institutions. We ask whether opposition to Akademia is really about transformation, or whether it reveals a deeper discomfort with independent civil society, community self-reliance and freedom of association.
We also examine March & March’s overtures to AfriForum and what its interest in the AfriForum model says about the power of voluntary association outside party politics.
What does freedom of association mean in modern South Africa? Should communities be free to build institutions around language, culture and shared interests? And could AfriForum’s model increasingly be copied by civil society organisations far beyond the Afrikaner community?