Afrikaans at 100: CEO doubts EWC hits white farmers, urges afrikaner-black alliances

As the Afrikaans language turns 100 today amid great turbulence in Afrikaner politics, Leon Louw, CEO of the Freedom Foundation, expresses doubt that any real Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC) will ever happen in South Africa against white commercial Afrikaans farmers. “I think that probably nothing will come of it. I would bet on it that there will be little or zero Expropriation Without Compensation of a true asset, commercial investment; maybe some abandoned land, maybe some derelict land somewhere that might be some sort of token. They will try a few and they will be so tied up in the Constitutional Court for years and years and years, that'll be the end of it.” He points out that Expropriation Without Compensation of black-owned properties “takes place constantly all the time and has done for a long time”. “It's black people… who don't have land title…” and can’t afford to fight it in court. Louw, who is currently working on new research with statisticians, also urges people to get the “actual” statistics on the "real" distribution of wealth and income and land in South Africa. “And it's looking much different from what the popular rhetoric is.” Meanwhile, he advises Afrikaners what to be working and lobbying for that will make black South Africans “become their best friends”..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..Watch here.Listen here.Edited transcript of the interview .Chris Steyn (00:01.614)The Afrikaans language turns 100 today amid great turbulence in Afrikaner politics. We speak to Leon Louw, CEO of The Freedom Foundation. Welcome, Mr. Louw.Leon Louw (00:14.274)Welcome, Chris, and to the viewers and listeners.Chris Steyn (00:18.36)Take us back to Die Taalstryd victory, please.Leon Louw (00:24.366)Yes, well, a hundred years ago was the end, or the end as a sort of a big point in the language struggle, Die Taalstryd, which started in the 1800s and finished in the sense that it was finally recognised as a language in 1925, a hundred years ago. And basically, cut short, Dutch was the compulsory language. People had to speak Dutch, Dutch had to be taught in schools, Afrikaners were called Dutch, and my father, for example, was a young boy in the early 1900s and spoke about how they were forced, spoke Afrikaans and were Afrikaners forced to learn and speak Dutch and call themselves Dutch. So, Die Taalstryd fought by Langenhoven and Arnoldus Pannevis and others culminated in Afrikaans being finally recognised as a language and that was the end of the Taalstryd 100 years ago when it became officially not banned. It had literally been banned in places like education and in other contexts and it was then unbanned and freed as a language and became officially a language and the famous first publication was Die Patriot, The Patriot, which was the first significant publication in the Afrikaans written and printed language. There were of course also great poets, enormous and fabulous literature was produced in those early days. I don't think it's ever been equaled, rivaled since.Chris Steyn (02:05.378)Today, many South Africans remain very proud of their mother tongue, but for many more, it will always be the language of the oppressors. Can that stigma ever be reversed?Leon Louw (02:19.776)I shouldn't think so. I hope so. Unfortunately, it did become associated with and was in fact the language of the Apartheid party, the regime, and calling it the language of the oppressor was very good politics and effective politics. And it has been very difficult for Afrikaners to deal with that. I can't imagine that stigma going away for a very long time, if ever, and it's very sad that the Apartheid regime was Afrikaans speaking overwhelmingly and therefore it became tainted as the Apartheid oppressor language which it was it was, the language of the oppressor - and that's most unfortunate because it is a beautiful language, it's a patriotic language, it's a South African language, a truly South African language , one of the few actually; the others are all migrant, immigrant languages - even the people who migrated on foot from Northern Africa, people who came in from the South, British and French and so on, then Guinea and others, are all immigrant languages. Afrikaans is a truly South African language like Khoisan.Chris Steyn (03:34.978)Many prominent Afrikaans speaking business people have been associated with the Broederbond and are still associated with the Broederbond when in fact many of them were never members.Leon Louw (03:50.764)Yes, I was very close to Anton Rupert, who was one of the top Afrikaans business people, Andreas Wassenaar and others. Wassenaar, I think, might have been, I don't know, but I think most of them were quite emphatic that they were not members of the Broederbond, Anton Rupert in particular, and I think his son Johann followed suit, and that he was not even a member of or supporter of the National Party. Certainly in all my working with him, which was a lot, and he was along with Harry Oppenheimer, my earliest funder in the then Free Market Foundation, now Freedom Foundation, and he was very clear. We were anti-Apartheid. I was in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Struggle. I was associated with all the ANC leaders, Winnie Mandela and Nthato Motlana and others. And that was always a welcome to him and he was always happy for me to do that work and support me in that work of being an active anti-Apartheid fighter and networking with all the leaders in all the parties, not just the ANC but the others, the PAC, Azapo and others. And he was very supportive and accommodating of that.I never got to know what his personal views were except that he was like me, interested in having good policies regardless of who governed. You just wanted the policies to be right. Free market, economic growth, job creation, capital formation, etc. And that was what Johann Rupert and Anton Rupert before…Anton was really one of my great mentors, at times a tormentor, but a mentor and...he was never as far as I know along with other leading Afrikaans business people who were into the creation of the Afrikaans business community: Santam,…Sanlam, General Mining and others. These were the early Afrikaans companies and they were benefited I suppose from the Broederbond but not overtly or actively members of or supporters of.Chris Steyn (06:15.106)Now currently there is a great deal of tension between Afrikaners and the African National Congress. They held talks this week. Where do you see this going?Leon Louw (06:28.852)It's very unfortunate. I don't see it going anywhere. I think that unfortunately this thing has required, this business of race, you know, Expropriation Without Compensation, applies to all property, everything, shares, personal belongings, cars, houses, everything. But in reality, everyone thinks of it as being about white Afrikaans farmers. This is really what it's all about. So it has this unfortunate racial and language connotation and undercurrent and it's very ugly and it's very counterproductive and unpleasant. And when the Afrikaner organisations, who are really excellent people with excellent policies, but when they engage in this fight, they seem to me to be acting counter-productively. What you want to say is not, don’t take our land away without compensation. What you want to do is say, this is what land policy you should have: do this, do the following; propose recommendations as opposed to opposing what's wrong, recommend what's right. And that has always been my approach. It was Anton Rupert's approach and that will be the approach that will work. And I hope that this business of racialising it and language, the Afrikaner versus sort of become white Afrikaners versus black South Africans - and white Afrikaners are by the way, a minority of Afrikaners. The majority of Afrikaners are Coloured Afrikaners and people don't seem to understand most Afrikaners are not white. So when we talk about Afrikaners, this idea that it's white people is simply statistically and factually wrong. And it's very unfortunate. I don't see it going away. I see it being ugly. I see it ending up in the Constitutional court in time wasting, money wasting, constitutional challenges.Personally, I doubt that any real Expropriation Without Compensation will ever happen in South Africa against white commercial Afrikaans farmers. I do need to point out that Expropriation Wiithout Compensation takes place constantly all the time and has done for a long time. And the people whose property is expropriated are not whites. It's black people, black people who don't have land title and when… Leon Louw (08:50.636)…a city council wants to widen a road or build a clinic or have park or something, they simply expropriate the land of black people who don't have title deeds. The poorest of the poor. They can't defend themselves in court the way a rich white person could and would, and so their land is taken literally by the thousand without compensation. The victims of this are black people, not white people, and I doubt that it will ever be white people.They will try a few and they will be so tied up in the Constitutional Court for years and years and years, that'll be the end of it. It will just have been some kind of weird, bizarre, perverse memory, and we will have... So what will happen is they'll just carry on expropriating without compensation the land of poor black people by the thousand and nobody ever talks about it, which is, my view, terrible tragedy.Chris Steyn (09:46.316)Now, meanwhile, the Afrikaner issue is at the core, or it seems to be, of tension between the United States and South Africa. Do you think foreign policy changes are required? And domestic policy changes.Leon Louw (10:02.274)Well, are we going to... You know, we had the Great Trek, we had the Dorsland Trek, we had Die Trekkers who went across to Argentina, which is why they play rugby, Afrikaans Trek to Argentina and so on. And now we might have a trek to America, Trump's America. I doubt it though. There are many young Afrikaners who are working there, especially on farms. They go there now and they come back and they remain South Africans.Leon Louw (10:30.878)But I see this again as a kind of rhetoric, a kind of weird debate that's taking place. It's very ugly, it's unpleasant, it's racist, it's linguistic, and it's even ageist. It refers to old, white Afrikaans men, basically. And I think that probably nothing will come of it. I would bet on it that there will be little or zero expropriation without compensation of a true asset, commercial investment; maybe some abandoned land, maybe some derelict land somewhere that might be some sort of token. But that's available at the moment. You don't need expropriation without compensation for that. That's been happening for forever in every country. And so this Afrikaner-American foreign policy thing. No, I don't think there's any change needed in foreign policy. I think it should just be walked away from. And that's what I would do. But of course, I'm not close to the bone and I'm not representing the constituency that is stressed about this, is feeling catastrophic and hectic about it. I think mistakenly and I think they should calm down and just not give oxygen, not fuel to this fire. You know, it takes two to tango: just don't join the tango, walk away is what I would do.Chris Steyn (12:05.602)What is the most important piece of advice you can give to the Afrikaner nation today?Leon Louw (12:12.014)I suppose it would be try to be sensitive. In other words, don't just gooi wal. Don't just criticise and oppose what's wrong. And it is wrong. The racism, anti-Afrikanerdomis wrong, it's bad. By all means criticise it. But try to be sensitive to what really is behind this and what can be done to neutralise this. So for example, how can we, firstly, get the real numbers? How many black people do really have land in South Africa and shares in South Africa? And the numbers are just nonsense that are bandied about. Just rubbish. And when people say 70% of the land belongs to white people, what on earth do they mean? Do they mean by area? Do they mean by value? Do they mean by numbers? The vast majority of properties in South Africa are already in the hands of black people by number. By value, nobody's done that calculation, and by area, it's completely irrelevant because a hectare in the Kalahari is worth, a hectare in Sea Point is worth 20,000 times more than a hectare in the Kalahari. So land by area is a completely irrelevant and stupid number to use. And what happens is the Afrikaners have fallen for the trick. They keep debating. There's more land than people realise that is not held by whites or is held by blacks. And then they keep talking about area which has zero relevance to anything and is of zero value. And so I would say, try to be aware of and sensitive and responsive to what really is behind these feelings that black people are still oppressed and are still disproportionately poor, which they aren't. Get the actual statistics and I'm busy researching it with two statisticians as it happens, is what is the real distribution of wealth and income and land in South Africa. And it's looking much different from what the popular rhetoric is. So that's what they should be doing, is finding out what are the facts and what are the real concerns and what can be done about those concerns. What can be done about 40% of the population, something like 60% of young black women, unemployed.Leon Louw (14:33.154)Not really unemployed, but employed as your regular guest GG Alcock says in the so-called informal sector, which is neither informal nor a sector, by the way. But anyway, that's how it's referred to. They are there working and earning an income, but criminalised by stupid laws. So start by lobbying to get rid of all the laws that make it unlawful for poor people to trade and to build. And if you replace your tin shack with a brick structure, the city council comes and bulldozes it down. Start fighting for the rights of people to improve their own quality of life, start fighting for the rights of nlack people, and then the rights of white people will automatically be intact. The next thing for the Afrikaner to do is to lobby for policies that produce high rates of economic growth. Prosperity. Just to give an example, if we'd grown at 70% since 1994, the GDP would now be eight times bigger than it is because it's 7% compounded; things double every 10 years. And so we would be one of the wealthiest countries in the world if we'd maintained high growth rates like say China or Singapore or Mauritius or whatever. So it's easy. We just have to have good free market policies. Lobby for good policies, lobby for prosperity, and lobby for the law to recognize and protect what black people in fact do, which is to run small informal businesses and try to build their houses. But they have to, they are told they have to have some old white leafy suburb building plan passed and they have to get some trading right and they have to register labour and they have to have zoning laws and all this rubbish inherited from the past. That should all just be scrapped and we should decriminalise the life of the majority of South Africans, which are black people. And if white Afrikaners are seen to be doing that, seen to be working for that and lobbying for that, then black South Africans will become their best friends.Chris Steyn (16:44.706)Just to go back to the language itself, there are so many words in it that are not translatable, that are really hard to translate. Now, I know you're making a list. Will you share some of your favourite words with us - in conclusion, please?Leon Louw (16:59.756)Yes, with pleasure. I'm going to start with probably the most difficult, is toerekeningsvatbaar, which happens to be one of my favourites. And although probably none of the listeners have ever heard the word, but if I say to you die rede waarom daai person nie skuldig is nie aan wat gebeur het, die diefstal of wat ookal is die persoon was nie toerekeningsvatbaar nie. Now everyone in Afrikaans knows what that means, but there's no English word for that. So that in the old Free State and Transvaal Republics, toerekeningsvatbaarheid was a requirement for being guilty of a crime, but not in the English in the Natal and Cape. So that's a good word. There is no English translation, but there many others. I have many, you know, lekker, bakkie, lappie, dof, verkramp, gesneuwel. You know, how do you say, iemand het gesnewel in English. There isn't a word for that. Died in battle. You have to say a sentence. You can't just put it into a word. And then there's moerse. And then, some of my favourites: gatvol, bakgat, slapgat, windgat, papgat, you know. Those are...four common Afrikaans words, five common Afrikaans words that are not translatable and not available in English. And then a thing like middelmannetjie, bromponie, kampkissie, klap, snotklap, skollie, veldskoen. You know, they say it just goes on and on kakkerlak, bemin. You know, take bemin is an interesting word. In English, the word love. You can love your dog and your car and your favourite painting and you can love BizNews, but you can't bemin them. In Afrikaans, jy kan iets liefhê en iemand bemin, which means specifically romantic love. There's no English word for that. Then of course there's Apartheid and things like Ja-nee, snot en trane, bosberaad, draadtrekker and so on and so forth. So there's lots of words that just don't exist. You cannot translate them at all. Or if you try to, like the word lekker, it just doesn’t…quite…Leon Louw (19:08.248)…it’s not as lekkerChris Steyn (19:11.534)Thank you. That was Leon Louw, CEO of the Freedom Foundation, speaking to BizNews as the Afrikaans language turns 100 today amid great turbulence in Afrikaner politics. And thank you, Mr. Louw. And I'm Chris Steyn.Leon Louw (19:27.052)My pleasure, Chris, and thanks to you and the viewers and listeners.

Afrikaans at 100: CEO doubts EWC hits white farmers, urges afrikaner-black alliances

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