Yesterday, this newspaper published a long-form assessment by Kallie Kriel on the Afrikaner rights group AfriForum, which he played a key role in building.

At a very early meeting of Afrikaners to discuss the future of Afrikaners in South Africa’s then still-young democracy, the Steve Biko quote was cited: “There is nothing more powerful in the hands of the oppressor than the mind of the oppressed.” The best Afrikaner thinkers understood from the start that the threat facing their people would not be any single policy or even the ideology of the state, but rather a state of mind that fed a loss of internal confidence in their legitimacy and culture.

If that confidence is lost among any people, then their future is lost. The pattern is always the same when people begin to blame all manner of third parties for anything that goes wrong. It’s too unfair... the deck is stacked against us... it’s their fault, etc.

It is irrelevant whether the complaints have merit or not. Successful peoples have an internal locus of control that says, “We will take responsibility for what happens to us, regardless of what any third party gets up to.” Where the locus of control is externalised, the people in question always fail.

That is what Steve Biko understood when he taught black South Africans to stop worrying about the whites doing this or the whites doing that and to realise that liberation must not occur via the whites doing it for the blacks but that it was up to black people, the first step of which was to liberate their minds. Serious black nationalists and related thinkers are deeply pained that the process fizzled out.

They will also appreciate the irony that the Afrikaners, via AfriForum, have done a better job of living out that thesis in South Africa than most black South Africans have.

At the same time that Biko was championing black consciousness Vamık Volkan was growing up in war-torn Cyprus. Volkan became a famous psychoanalyst who showed that all peoples have suffered oppression, slavery, and victimisation over time – what differed in the outcomes they ultimately achieved was how they dealt with it. High-achieving peoples demonstrated the principle of what he called "chosen glory”, anchoring their identity to past triumphs and resilience to build a psychological buffer that fuels forward momentum and high self-worth. Conversely, those who remained trapped in chronic failure picked a path of “chosen trauma”, anchoring their identity to past betrayals or losses, which fosters a victim mindset. This fixation causes them to react to minor modern setbacks with the same paralysing helplessness as their original wounds, effectively allowing unresolved history to stall their future.

The ANC’s entire national policy offering and election campaign platforms could be summed up as a case study of the latter approach, instilling paralysing helplessness in what it still calls “our people”. And remember that while it was the whites who beat Biko to death to stop his idea, it was the ANC that ultimately killed it in the warfare it launched against the black consciousness parties that grew from that idea.

Standing before a magistrate who quizzed him on black consciousness, Biko is reported to have said, “What is the matter, my lord, are you afraid of an idea?”

A proper understanding of AfriForum is therefore that its most important influence on South Africa is not how many burglars its neighbourhood watches have caught or how many roads its volunteers have repaired. Those were simply some of the trappings through which its work on Afrikaner psychology succeeded, a psychology that has, in the main, evolved to champion one big idea: “No one is going to be doing us any favours here, so we better become very resilient.” Biko worded that same sentiment as “Black man, you’re on your own.”

Trump’s refugee offer is unpopular with Afrikanerdom because it undermines that idea and the internal locus of control, works against “chosen glory” and feeds a victimhood mentality among Afrikaners, which, if it takes hold, would be the end.

It will be very interesting to see what happens next to Kriel’s organisation. It appears to be under attack from within and without. The attacks from within arise from the fact that it commands considerable resources, and it is in the natural order of things that disputes would arise over how these might best be applied and that allegations arising from within the tent may be leaked to advance those battles. The attacks from without are either stupid and ignorant or, occasionally, strategic and geared towards damaging the organisation in order to break its ability to instil an internal locus of control in Afrikaners, which, it is understood, must be done if they are to be broken as a people.

What does this newspaper make of it all?

Well, first, immense regard for the professional success that went into building AfriForum. Even the most biased critic must concede that it has been a vastly impressive project for the scale and reach it achieved. Secondly, it is a very sophisticated and clever project insofar as it understands its objective to be shoring up the internal sense of self of its members. Were it not for that, then BEE, EWC, NHI, and the like would have turned the Afrikaners into a weak and spiteful people, blaming everything but themselves for what would have been their collapsing living standards and diluted culture. But they’re tough now and strong and successful, because they have the confidence to believe in themselves, and therefore what the government does to mess with them, or mess with the South African economy broadly, is something they’re insulated and immunised against to a very significant degree. Thirdly, there is the irony that black South Africans who fought the apartheid system so bravely, and against such odds, would have surrendered much of that sense of self to the state after 1994, while the Afrikaners, who had been so confident in the state, would develop such independent self-belief.

So, great respect, but not an unambiguous endorsement?

That probably sums it up.

The sense of this newspaper is that conservative values are universal and that black and white South Africans, and Afrikaners particularly among the whites, have a great deal more in common than the great bulk of people understand. On questions of property rights, empowerment, and freedom of speech and trade, black and white South Africans offer the same answers most of the time. The culture of a society is the collection of its dominant common values, in which respect South Africa is, in the main therefore, not a multicultural society. Securing that conservative common ground and building the necessary bridges is the way to secure the future. That is how this newspaper would argue it. In other words, a fully integrated melting pot of a conservative society.

What would that mean for the Afrikaners as a people? There is probably a way that a somewhat narrow definition of the Afrikaner survives within that pot, but in time the assumption must be that it would become diluted. It would likely Anglify to a great degree, and internationalise, and so on. And how does the integrated melting pot square with the enclave future? (There is an answer but that can wait for another day…) South Africa’s Afrikaner leadership would be very cautious about such thinking for those and other reasons, and would even perhaps be downright damning of it as dangerous and naïve – the “liberaliste” of old with their seductive promises of a united South Africa that will lure Afrikaners in just to betray them later.

Or is that leadership getting it wrong and, by leading the Afrikaners into too much of a laager, cutting them off from the option of building the integrated conservative future? Why if a chap is black or white but believes in God and thinks EWC, NHI, and BEE are nuts and that gun rights matter should it matter at all whether he brings an Afrikaans or Zulu or Indian or Jewish or Muslim girl home to meet his parents? It shouldn't.

(These kinds of questions, those throughout this column, mark the level at which the debate about things in the country should be cast, not at the mind-numbingly stupid level of who at AfriForum earns what salary.)

Maybe some of the Afrikaner leadership will be damning of what we have written here on common values and an integrated melting-pot future. If they are we’d listen and think very carefully, because they might be right and this newspaper might be wrong. That is such good advice – that you could always be the one who is wrong.