The Volkstaat Policy: Sustainable US Foreign Policy Concerning South Africa

South Africa is, like any other modern multicultural state, in a spiral towards inevitable failure. The power does not stay on, water shortages are becoming a fact of life, and the non-Black minority groups find themselves under increasing pressure to provide resources under a ruling Black (namely ANC) elite which does nothing but squander them. Multiculturalism in South Africa is developing into a mirror of the Apartheid era: a closed system that requires an inhumane level of maintenance. Just like Apartheid South Africa, modern multicultural South Africa requires an aggressive state that ignores human nature and thus spirals toward inevitable failure.

The idea of the Rainbow Nation is that a country with 12 official languages and even more ethnic groups can somehow produce a harmonious, shared nation. This, of course, did not happen. Instead, Nelson Mandela and his Western liberal supporters produced a one-party patronage state, racial preference statutes (for Blacks) that never expire, farm murders that never stop, a failing power grid, and a political class that treats Afrikaners as a residual problem to be expropriated, affirmative-actioned, and lectured. South Africa cannot protect its minority groups and instead viciously persecutes them.

The only durable answer for the Afrikaners of South Africa and for White South Africans in general is a state of their own—a state in which they remain the overwhelming majority. This is the only way to ensure their cultural fabric is not threatened by either the South African ruling party’s aggression or slow dissolution by emigration and subsequent absorption into other Western populations.

That is the Volkstaat policy: the United States and every other nation of the West should treat Afrikaner self-determination as the logical end of the United States’ current explicit, pro-Afrikaner line and use American leverage to force Pretoria to cede a homeland to the Afrikaner and Western populations.

What would this Volkstaat look like?

Let’s consider the situation of White South Africans just before the end of apartheid. When the West used its pressure to help end Apartheid and its many injustices, it also inadvertently removed the protections for White South Africans against the huge Black majority. This must be addressed. For this reason, White Papers advocates that Afrikaners and Westerners in South Africa be given an area of land equivalent in size to the White South Afrikan population share in the last pre-apartheid census. The O’Malley archive hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation holds that White South Afrikaans were roughly 14% of the population in 1991 while the 1991 census puts White South Africans at 13.4% of the country’s population. We will use the 14% figure as it is good enough for the Nelson Mandela Foundation and therefore good enough for White Papers.

South Africa covers 1,221,037 square kilometers (471,445 square miles) and so 14% of that land area would be 170,945 square kilometers, or 66,002 square miles. This is comparable in size to the South American country of Uruguay (176,215 km² / 68,037 sq mi) and the American state of Washington. (about 66,456 square miles of land). This Volkstaat would be larger than most European countries and could be carved out of an area that is low population and currently low production. The Northern Cape alone is 372,889 km² (more our suggested 14% land area) and much of it is the Karoo and Kalahari fringe which consists of areas with thin population, large spacious commercial farms, the Orange River, and the largest extant self-sustaining Afrikaner town in existence: Orania. A Volkstaat drawn from the Northern Cape plus adjoining Karoo districts in the Free State and Western Cape would encompass the largely empty areas of the country and not the suburbs of Johannesburg or Cape Town.

Washington has ample precedent supporting secessionist states based upon an ethnic and cultural identity. For example, United States facilitated the creation of and subsequently recognized the entirely Albanian-dominated Kosovo in 2008 after NATO’s war and years of UN administration. Of course, the United States also heavily armed and offered continual political cover for Iraqi Kurdistan after 1991. Washington was heavily involved in building the Kurdistan Regional Government into a de facto state with its own military, parliament, foreign relations, and economy supported by robust oil sales. Then there are other small states like Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Israel which the United States supported the creation of and later gave official recognition to. These are all highly homogeneous societies or societies governed for a particular people.

Then there is the prime example of Malaysia, a major American regional partner and one of the most ethnicity-obsessed state’s in the world. Article 153 of the Federal Constitution gives Malays and the natives of Sabah and Sarawak a “special position.” The New Economic Policy and its successors reserve university places, civil-service jobs, government contracts, equity targets, and housing for the Bumiputera (native Malaysians). Washington nor any Western capital has signaled serious hostility to these policies and therefore should be continually reminded that if Albanians, Malaysians, Kurds, Jews, and Albanians deserve their own states, it is only morally right and consistent that Afrikaners are given a state of their own to preserve their sovereignty.

A Volkstaat for the Afrikaners and Western population of South Africa would lack the onerous Black Economic Empowerment structures, employment “equity” (which locks out many White South Africans), and the Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 which allows the South African government to expropriate private property and in some cases to do so without compensation. More specifically, the Act allows expropriation “in the public interest” which can include expropriation of land without compensation to the owners. And while no mass seizures have been executed yet, it has been a political football for the ANC and EFF in South Africa for years and is one that threatens the personal and economic safety of White South Africans. These laws would not exist in a Western country, a Volkstaat, which respects private property.

Then there is the crime that Afrikaners and all South Africans must live with, something that simply would not be an issue on the same scale in a Volkstaat. The Rainbow Nation records somewhere between 24,000–28,000 murders a year depending on the reporting window while the rates of murder, approximately 40 people per 100,000 in population is among the highest on Earth. This is nearly twice as high as cartel-ridden countries such as Columbia (24 per 100,000) and Honduras (23.9 per 100,000). And there is specific violence which targets White South Africans and Afrikaner communities. The Afrikaner rights group AfriForum has logged 184 farm attacks and 29 farm murders in just 2025, after 176 attacks and 37 murders in 2024. Official SAPS rural tallies are lower and politically contested. We do not need to use the term genocide to recognize this for what it is: an extreme level of crime that no Western society would tolerate for any serious duration. Afrikaners should not have to tolerate it either.

Now let us address the South African border. Like every other multicultural society, it appears that South Africa has no serious interest in protecting its sovereignty or the integrity of its passport. In a single mid-2026 window, Pretoria processed 86,596 foreign nationals for deportation and repatriation; 90 percent had entered illegally, 95 percent as border jumpers, concentrated on the Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Lesotho corridors. A Volkstaat with a concrete Afrikaner and more broadly Western identity would have every reason to prevent immigration both illegal AND legal of anyone who was not a Westerner.

Next, we must evaluate public services—services of which White South Africans pay a disproportionate share of the tax burden, but who must also suffer from ANC corruption. Load-shedding (scheduled power outages) peaked at 6,948 hours in 2023. That means power was interrupted for 290 days. While it is true that load shedding fell to 1,656 hours in 2024 and a few hundred hours in early 2025 (mostly thanks to emergency actions and private solar installation), this was primarily due to emergency actions and private solar installation—mini-secessions from the power grid. Multicultural South Africa cannot provide basic services let alone continue to develop a first world economy.

Lastly, we must address the commercial agriculture which still feeds the country and dominates South African exports. The agricultural sector is dominated by White South Africans. The National Agricultural Marketing Council put black farmers’ share of commercial production at 8.1 percent for 2015–2019 and 10.3 percent for 2019–2023 while the rest, so far as we can tell, is dominated by White South Africans and their commercial and family farming concerns. Grain, citrus, potatoes, wheat, and much of the export horticulture is all built and maintained by White South Africans. This is despite the fact that more than 9 million hectares have been transferred into the hands of Black South Africans. Simply giving away land does not mean you are also giving away the ability to grow food, raise animals, and produce a commercially viable product to feed a nation.

None of these things would be a problem in a Volkstaat. We need only look at any Western majority nation (Ireland, France, the United States, Australia, the Netherlands) to see what a Western society produces: stable public services, abundant energy, the safest streets in the world. An Afrikaner Volkstaat would be the most commercially attractive destination on the African continent.

Of course some will worry that a Volkstaat on the Karoo and spreading across what is currently desert is a sentence to perpetual poverty. Yet there are numerous examples, including an Afrikaner example, which show that a modern society can transform the landscape.

Orania runs a water system which turned an area of orange desert into one filled with pecan orchards, wheat, maize, lucerne, olives, vegetables, and even some producing dairy concerns. Trees, fields, grass, greenery and animals now flourish in an area that was once nothing but a sandy river bank.

Israel turned the Negev and Arava deserts, which receive only one to three inches of rain in the driest districts per year into an area filled with fields and forests. Drip irrigation, brackish water use, and now major desalination raised irrigated land area from 30,000 hectares in 1948 to nearly 192,000 by the early 2000s. Water use per hectare fell while yields per cubic meter more than doubled. Today the Arava ships dates, vegetables, and out-of-season (in the West) produce from land that looked like the Karoo still does.

Similarly, China’s Three North Shelterbelt programs planted and reclaimed more than 500,000 km² of land for agricultural and natural uses. Official figures claim desertified land in the north has receded more than 1,000 km² a year since 2000 with forest cover in program areas rising from about 5 percent in 1978 to 14 percent in 2022. The Saihanba area went from sand to a managed forest of tens of thousands of hectares. If the Chinese can do it, the Afrikaners can and have already proven so.

A Volkstaat with the Orange River, groundwater, desalination, robust energy production, and commercial farming would be the breadbasket of Africa in a way that South Africa and Rhodesia were in the not so distant past, except there would not be the diversity and unstable political systems to bring them down.

The United States does not need new tools to bring all of this about. Washington merely needs to deploy foreign policy tools already at its disposal in order to force the hand of the South African government.

Aid is the first lever. USAFacts.org puts U.S. obligations to South Africa at about $581 million in FY2024 with HIV/AIDS being the dominant concern in foreign aid. A February 2025 order already told US government agencies to halt assistance due South Africa’s domestic policies.

Completing that freeze, and making restoration conditional on a negotiated homeland, would be a start. Food aid, health partnerships, and any residual USAID work should also be subject to such a freeze. If the ANC government in South Africa is so desperate for both medicine and to punish its White population for past sins, then it can attempt to use expropriation to do so. The American people should not be funding any anti-White regime.

Elite sanctions are the second and more potent lever. Targeted sanctions: travel bans and asset freezes on ANC and EFF principals, entrepreneurs, and the boards of captured SOEs (Eskom, Transnet, municipalities that do not deliver water) cost little and hit the people who actually make policy in the Rainbow Nation. The United States has used this toolkit on Zimbabwean and Venezuelan elites for years and it has been shown to work.

Immigration is the third. The administration already built a refugee track for Afrikaners at the same time the global cap was cut to near-zero. The special path for South Africans should remain open, but the United States should expand its immigration strictures beyond refugees.

The American government should begin steadily cancelling visas for any and all non-Afrikaner South Africans in the US. Visa categories should be barred from processing South African applications, and the elite of South Africa should be banned from entering the United States at all. Another step would be to bar anyone from entering the United States if they have a stamp/record of having entered South Africa to work with a South African firm or government agency.

Trade and finance are the fourth. AGOA eligibility, IFC and World Bank support and correspondent banking access are discretionary so far as the US is concerned. Condition them. Access to American dominated international financial institutions should be cut off and only restored once recognition of a Volkstaat by the South African government has been made.

The Volkstaat is the only serious remedy to the way the West left White South Africans out in the proverbial cold after the end of Apartheid. The Volkstaat is the only way to assure that Afrikaners maintain their cultural heritage without threat from external powers and the Volkstaat is the only way to assure that Afrikaners remain a prosperous, healthy, and secure people on a poorly governed and perennially troubled continent.