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A TIME TO DIG TRENCHES

By Ernst van Zyl — 4 days ago

W HAT W E S T E R NE R S CA N L E A R N F R O M S O UT H A F R I CA

“Small nations. The concept is not quantitative; it points to a

condition; a fate; small nations lack that felicitous sense of


an eternal past and future; at a given moment in their history,
they all passed through the antechambers of death; in
constant confrontation with the arrogant ignorance of the
L AT E S T
mighty, they see their existence as perpetually threatened or
with a question mark hovering over it; for their very existence  A Time to Dig Trenches

is the question.”
 The Ukraine Grift
— Milan Kundera

 Our Generation’s War: An

The populist wave in the West, which crested in 2016 with the
Interview with Joe Kent
election of Donald Trump in the United States, the successful Brexit
referendum in the United Kingdom, and victories for populist political  The MKUltra Evolutions

parties across Europe in the last few years have lost momentum. What
 Enemies of the Regime
was once a confident, dynamic movement now more closely
resembles a shadow of its former self – a tattered and tainted
flag. Increasing numbers of Western conservatives and people on the
Right are consequently now becoming disillusioned with the party
ARCHIVE
political system and are beginning to look elsewhere for guidance for
the challenging road ahead.  All Posts

What insights can I share on this situation from South Africa? Being
part of a minority community with a Western heritage, living on the
edge of Western civilization, arguably offers a useful perspective to SUPPO R T

see things that Westerners in bigger countries sometimes miss, as

 Donate
Czech writer Milan Kundera eloquently puts it above.

Afrikaners have struggled for centuries with many of the existential

questions that are only now emerging for the West. In South Africa
the future has already happened; political options for decades have
been limited to a choice between center-left, leftist and far-left, and
many Western utopian visions continue to crash, burn and get
stripped for parts. Accordingly, few of us here in South Africa still
labor under the delusion of thinking that political parties will save us.
But this doesn’t mean that we’ve lost hope.

As a ninth-generation Afrikaner, or Boer, one of the main lessons that

communities like mine have learned is summed up by Russell
Lamberti’s phrase: “There is a time to move and a time to dig
trenches. ” Neither of these choices is inherently right. But because
I believe that if Afrikaners do not have a future in Africa, we do not
have a future at all, I’ve chosen to focus my own energy on the
trench-digging industry.

Moving or trekking is deeply engrained in Afrikaners’ historical and

cultural memory. Our ancestors arrived in Africa as immigrants,
refugees, fortune seekers, or by accident through twists of fate. One
of my own ancestors was on his way to New Zealand when he was
thrown off the ship in South Africa for kicking the captain’s dog. I’m
also a direct descendent of the French Huguenots, who fled to South
Africa more than 300 years ago to escape religious persecution. My
French Huguenot ancestor, a man with the surname Roux, arrived in
southern Africa in 1688, almost 100 years before the United States
became a country.

The British occupation of 1806 resulted in the loss of political control

over the Cape Colony. Anglo political and cultural repression drove
many Afrikaners to pack up their belongings in the 1830s and
embark on a great migration into the unknown interior. This exodus
has become known as the Great Trek and was mainly an effort to
escape ruthless anglicization under the boot of imperial
administration. For the Voortrekkers, as those intrepid Afrikaners are
now known, the time had come to move.

This was not a move in pursuit of greater material wealth or safety.

Many of the Afrikaners in the Great Trek abandoned their farms,
businesses and most of their possessions and left, despite the
promise of better infrastructure, schools, security and business
opportunities under British rule. As luck, or rather fate would have it,
the Boers discovered diamonds and gold after establishing the
fledgling South African Republic (the Transvaal Republic) and the
Orange Free State in the Southern African interior. The eyes of the
empire, therefore, became fixed on them once again, resulting in the
First (1880-1881) and Second (1899-1902) Anglo-Boer War.

This time, faced again with a renewed existential threat of

imperialism, the Boers decided it was a time to dig trenches. In fact,
the use of trench warfare by the Boers in the Second Anglo-Boer War
was the first use of this tactic in military history and set the stage for
the century to come.

***

We live in a time where unipolar Western domination is waning. This

situation was already predicted by Samuel Huntington in his
prescient 1997 essay “The West and the Rest.” Huntington observes:

“As indigenisation spreads and the appeal of western

culture fades, the central problem in relations between the
west and the rest is the gap between the west’s efforts to
promote western culture as the universal culture and its
declining ability to do so.”

Over the past several decades South Africans have mainly chosen to
emigrate to Western, Anglosphere countries. These emigrants
concluded that the time has come to move, and that movement closer
to the cultural and political power centers of the Western-dominated
global order was their best bet. As Russell Lamberti put it: “[w]e now
live in a world of people on the run.”

But the problem with constantly moving to higher ground to escape

the rising tide is that you eventually run out of higher ground. If you
recently emigrated, or semigrated to what you deem a more
defendable position, you now have a duty to take root and hold your
ground there. The harsh reality is that, at some point, you will have to
make a stand. If not you, it will be your children. And isn’t there
something abhorrent about “outsourcing” the responsibility of solving
the biggest problems and challenges of your time to future
generations?

Our mindset should be to fight for what we want to preserve in our

towns, neighborhoods and communities. In its prime or in its decline,
the crushing boots of advancing empires or the shockwaves of their
collapse will always find you, as my Afrikaner ancestors have learned
repeatedly throughout our volatile history. No wonder, then, that
Southern Africa is also the home of AfriForum, one of the most
developed proverbial trench-digging operations in the world.

The largest civil rights organization in the southern hemisphere,

AfriForum unites 300,000 paying members behind a common cause.
We have established over 150 neighborhood watches and many farm
watches. We’ve developed emergency support services and we have
more than 155 AfriForum branches across the country, which do
everything from cleaning up neighborhoods to planting community
vegetable gardens and trees and repairing potholes. AfriForum also
has its own publishing company, film and documentary production
company, and theatre. The broader Solidarity Movement, of which
AfriForum is a part, established its own private institution of higher
learning, Akademia, and built a world-class technical college
campus, Sol-Tech .

The Solidarity Movement has pursued the ideal of becoming

staatsbestand (state-proof) at every level by embracing a selfdoen (do
it yourself) philosophy which prioritizes autonomy and pragmatism.
This robust approach ensures the reliability of essential services and
the integrity of institutions in an environment where state collapse,
corruption and decay are widespread. It is the large, active and
involved membership base, participating in what Flip Buys,
Chairperson of the Solidarity Movement, describes as “creative
renewal based on proven values,” that gives the Solidarity Movement
its strength.

Paul Kruger, a former President of the South African Republic, said:

“Seek out that which is good and noble from the past and build the
future with it.” This sentiment dovetails with the prescription of
Huntington at the turn of the previous century: “The West should not
attempt to reshape other civilizations in its own image but preserve
and renew the unique qualities of western civilization.” Men like Flip
Buys reached the same conclusion in the 1990s and set out to
achieve renewal as a matter of survival.

The time has come for Western communities to stop running and start
digging trenches. These trenches will have to be dug in the field of
parallel institutions and in the ground of identity and the mountains of
heritage. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said: “To destroy a people, you
must first sever their roots.” Just as a military and economic balance
of powers facilitate world peace, a healthy pride in one’s own cultural
identity is essential for coexistence with other cultures. We should
encourage healthy cultural pride and a sense of identity in our own
community, as well as in neighboring ones. When you remove the
cultural heritage of any human being, you uproot them. Anchorless,
they float with the currents into the boundless ocean, until one day
they are spat out on an unfamiliar beach as driftwood and picked up
by strangers as firewood.

The benefit of living in good times is that you have ample

opportunities to live a comfortable life. The advantage of living in
hard times is that you have plenty of opportunities to live a great life.
As my father once observed: “There is a hefty price to pay to live in
one of the greatest places on earth.” The older I get, and the more
volatile the West becomes, the truer that sentiment rings. Freedom is
only truly possible on the frontier, and a frontier is more often than
not to be found on the periphery of empires or on the edges of
powerful civilizations. So I’ve thrown my lot in with the trench diggers
of Southern Africa. To live dangerously on the margins of human
expansion like a leopard in the Western Cape mountains is better
than growing fat and living safely in a concrete zoo.

Ernst van Zyl is a Campaigns Officer for strategy and content at AfriForum.

Related reading:

As South Africa, So the World, by Robert Duigan

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