Two civil society organisations, the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and the FW de Klerk Foundation, have clashed over race-based policy in South Africa.

The fracas was kicked off by an article written by the IRR’s head of strategic communications, Hermann Pretorius, who wrote an opinion editorial in the Afrikaans Sunday newspaper, Rapport.

In it, Pretorius argued that while the question of a white genocide in South Africa was a myth, there were three trends that gave the claim oxygen. The first was anti-white rhetoric by some politicians and some in the media, the second was the very high rate of violence in the country, and the third was race-based policy.

On the third point, Pretorius highlighted the IRR’s index of race law, which showed the high number of laws where race is a factor in South Africa, and which has drawn attention from around the world, including from Elon Musk. Pretorius singled out the CEO of the FW de Klerk Foundation, Christo van der Rheede, for criticism, saying that Van der Rheede had called the race-law index “quasi-research”, but had had little to say about the actual content of the research.

Van der Rheede took umbrage at Pretorius’s piece and responded in Rapport, saying that claiming that South Africa had race laws was “insensitive and sensational. […] It ignores not just the constitutional imperative of redress, but is also deeply polarising and misleading.”

He went on to say that it was vital to distinguish between apartheid-era racial discrimination and current race-based laws.

Van der Rheede continued by saying that race-based laws and policies were important to ensure equal opportunities and effectively defended racial quotas as long as they were not too “rigid”.

Pretorius shot back, also in Rapport, asking whether the FW de Klerk Foundation wanted to bring back the “pencil test”. He said Van der Rheede was not opposed to the principle of racial categorisation and quotas, as long as they were not too “extreme” or “rigid”.

Pretorius wrote: “When the head of the FW de Klerk Foundation does not grasp the structural non-racism of the Constitution but argues in favour of a bizarre form of corrective racism (as long as it’s not too ‘rigid’) one must wonder what former President De Klerk would have made of it.”