Pockets of Excellence: The Builder’s Inheritance

South Africa is often spoken of as a singular project, a shared identity stitched together by slogans of unity and lip service. For three decades, the pseudo-doctrine of assimilation has hung over the South African populace like a sword.

As a landmass of multiple nations, we have been conditioned, through slogans, syllabi, and the rhetoric of the kleptocracy, to believe that these many nations are interchangeable, even indistinguishable. We have been taught to see sameness where difference exists, and to mistake proximity for unity. For thirty years, we have been told we are a rainbow nation. Yet the meaning of this image has been bent and emptied by master propagandists and compliant educational systems. What was expected as a metaphor for coexistence has been repurposed into a mandate of dilution.

Today, we are urged to repeat the catechism of global assimilation, started in 1994: that diversity is our strength, that unity is found within diversity, without ever being allowed to count the cost of accepting such an oxymoron. The uncomfortable truth is this: from its inception, the ruling vision of the ANC, articulated even in Mandela’s reconciliatory language, has relied upon exploiting South Africa’s distinct national groups beneath the banner of sameness. The assimilation fallacy insists that differences, of some nations more than others, must be dissolved in order for peace to prevail, while quietly ignoring a basic reality reflected in the very symbol it invokes. A rainbow does not bleed its colours into one another to create one entity. It is not a singular hue stretched across the sky. The rainbow’s strength lies precisely in the fact that each colour remains bounded, ordered, isolated, and distinct. Remove the boundaries, and the structure collapses into grey.

We are not a melting pot, with one language, one culture, and one unique history. True peace has never required sameness. It requires order. It will require nations to be willing to live alongside and share borders, trading freely and pursuing opportunity, but most importantly, to return home to their people to repair, govern, and cultivate their own communities. Prosperity is not born from erasure but from responsibility, which the current South Africa has failed to implement. A people who cannot tend their own house and culture will never be trusted to build a shared future. Liberty, therefore, cannot exist for all without self-determination for all. A nation that cannot rule itself cannot preserve its culture, transmit its values, or secure its future. What South Africa requires is not further assimilation, but the courage to allow pockets of excellence: cultural communities rooted deeply enough to grow strong, disciplined enough to flourish, and distant enough from ideological and physical interference to develop according to their own inheritance.

Anyone who looks at the country knows it is not one civilisation moving in lockstep, but nations sharing a geographical space while pulling toward different futures. Among these, the Afrikaner stands out, not because of privilege or nostalgia, but because of perseverance and the willingness to build in isolation.

In a visit by politician and trade unionist Mondli Gungubele to the Solidarity Movement’s new Sol-Tech campus, which represents a privately funded, skills-driven expansion developed in response to increasing Afrikaner poverty, skills shortages, and the need for youth educational empowerment, Gungubele refers to Sol-Tech as a place that represents rare “pockets of excellence.” In the video of his visit, he uses this phrase to describe a space where order, skill, discipline, and continuity still exist despite national decay. This phrase not only acknowledges the broad reality that South Africans observe every day, namely national ruin, but also affirms that even under great oppression from the government and economic burdens, Afrikaners are unwilling to surrender under the weight of broader collapse.

To the Afrikaner, this is not accidental, but a choice. A habit. An inheritance.

The book of Nehemiah offers an ancient and striking parallel. Jerusalem’s walls lay in ruin, not because the people lacked identity, but because they lacked protection and order. Nehemiah does not begin with poetry or protest. He begins with assessment, labour, and structure. Families rebuild the walls section by section, sword in one hand and trowel in the other (Nehemiah 4:17). The work is practical, defensive, and communal. Identity is restored not through slogans or myths, but through construction.

So when Gungubele asks, “Why is that [excellence, initiative, efficiency] not spread to the rest of the country?”, the question is not hard to answer.

“So we built the wall… for the people had a mind to work.” (Nehemiah 4:6)

The builder’s ethic of the Afrikaner sharply contrasts with the dominant educational and economic strategies advanced by the ANC. In these strategies, present responsibility is overshadowed by fixation on the past, and the demand for reparations, including wealth, maintenance, and efficiency, is placed upon one minority nation within a country of many majority nations. Education within this framework is often treated as a tool for redistribution or ideological alignment rather than formation. The result is a system that expands access numerically while hollowing out standards, skills, and truth. Most of South Africa’s black nations are split into two groups: a minority determined to achieve self-determination, and a majority still living under the irrelevant ideological mantra of “liberation before education.” Consequently, certificates multiply while competence declines.

By contrast, the Afrikaner educational instinct, particularly visible in technical and vocational initiatives, understands education as a mechanism for forming people in what is true, good, and beautiful. This vision is older than modern politics. Plato argued that education shapes the soul toward truth and goodness, while Aristotle insisted that a flourishing society depends on cultivating virtue and practical wisdom (phronesis) alongside skill. Virtues such as hard work.

Since Afrikanerdom is based on Christian foundations, the Afrikaner subscribes to Proverbs 14:23: “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.” The governmental institutions of South Africa have been all talk and no action since the 1994 changeover. The ANC is not the only guilty party. Most other political parties have followed suit, and many South Africans have bought into cheap talk rather than action.

Truth requires competence. Goodness requires responsibility. Beauty requires stability. All three require staving off assimilation by those who contradict one’s civilisational foundation. A nation cannot create beauty when families are hungry, men are idle, and labour is despised. Art, architecture, and culture do not emerge from chaos or economic dependence. They rise from order, self-dependence, and communal upliftment toward those to whom one has a responsibility. Sol-Tech proves what history has already taught us: that Afrikaner upliftment relies on developing a strong working class and a robust, specialised middle class. Specialisation is the soil from which families grow, children are raised, traditions are upheld, and cultures endure. Without this middle class, people delay marriage, avoid children, and live suspended lives tethered to utopia.

While the Afrikaner middle class is gradually shrinking and poverty under BBBEE is increasing, the Afrikaner has not given up and has not allowed the world to define how the future will be built. While Sol-Tech, a Solidarity initiative, is a primary example, Academia is not far behind. Both institutional successes represent why self-determination is not only effective and necessary, but ultimately the only solution for all nations within South Africa’s borders to enter these pockets of success that Gungubele so admires. We, as the Afrikaner people, must like Sol-Tech stop waiting for the state’s permission to survive and instead strive to uplift our own nation, one strategic move at a time.

Other South African nations have increasingly oriented education toward political symbolism and mass credentialism rather than function or formation. This ideocratic fixation has hollowed out the state itself. The result is no longer abstract. This year alone, over 23,000 children nationally, and 5,000 in Gauteng alone, were left without school placement. When questioned, the Gauteng Department of Education spokesperson responded that it is not the department’s responsibility to build schools. Responsibility is passed from office to office like a hot potato, while South Africans as a whole bear the cost. In practice, that cost falls disproportionately on the Afrikaner: higher taxes, heavier regulation and discrimination, and fewer guarantees of institutional continuity. Afrikaners build schools, only to see them absorbed against their will, renamed, and Anglicised. They create order, only to watch it appropriated or diluted.

Many ask what our practical next step should be. It is a difficult question, one that is neither static nor simple, and one that may change depending on variables across time. Yet certain principles remain constant, and these are the breaches in our wall that must be repaired. We must strengthen our marriages and welcome more Afrikaner children into the world. We must educate those children beyond the reach of state indoctrination, forming minds rooted in truth, discipline, and cultural values. We must strengthen the bonds of community, restoring accountability and responsibility where fragmentation has taken hold. We must confront poverty and oppression within our own ranks with seriousness and resolve, for the poor Afrikaner problem has never been a myth and is becoming a blatant reality once again. We must defy assimilation and strive for self-determination. And above all else, we must continue to build, patiently, deliberately, and without surrender.

As Nehemiah said, “We are busy building; we cannot come down.”