Media Advisory

The African National Congress (ANC) welcomes and salutes the courageous stance taken by the Afrikaans-speaking South Africans who authored and co-signed the article “Not in our Name: Afrikaners Respond to the Misuse of Their Story in US Politics”, published by News24 on Saturday, 25 October 2025.

These freedom-loving South Africans recognise that the unity being forged in our country is essential to building a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, and prosperous South Africa. They affirm that nation-building requires honesty about our painful past and a shared commitment to redress the deep inequalities caused by centuries of oppression.

The ANC notes with appreciation their clear rejection of attempts to distort South Africa’s history and weaponise it to advance far-right agendas abroad. As they powerfully stated:

“ We reject the narrative that casts Afrikaners as victims of racial persecution in post-apartheid South Africa. This framing now being used to support the far-right ‘Great Replacement’ theory in the United States is not only misleading, but also dangerous. It distorts the realities of South Africa, weaponises our history, and reduces a complex social context and necessary levelling of playing fields into a simplistic symbol of white decline. ”

This principled position acknowledges the painful truth that Africans in general, and black people in particular, bore the full weight of dispossession, humiliation, and exclusion under more than three centuries of colonialism and apartheid. Their suffering was structural, systematic, and generational.

The ANC reiterates that the transformation and redress agenda is not an act of charity but a moral, legal, and constitutional obligation to correct those historic wrongs and create a society based on equality, justice, and shared prosperity.

We commend these South Africans for asserting that they are not pawns in the culture wars of other nations but citizens of a free South Africa, one that continues to grapple with its past while striving for a better future for all who live in it.

Their statement affirms that true patriotism lies in facing the truth and building bridges of understanding, not denying the lived unequal realities of our people. This is the spirit of reconciliation that our founding leaders envisioned when they declared that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.”

The ANC calls on all South Africans, including those from communities once privileged by apartheid, to join hands in completing the unfinished business of liberation, to ensure full transformation, equality, and social justice are achieved so that the sacrifices of those who came before us are not in vain.

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