In 1967, a man by the name of Wilhelm Olaf Meyer was tasked with designing a building that would transform a largely agricultural population into a class of collegiate and intellectually inclined people. The building was to be grand and austere, and it was to “make a statement about its patrons who had just arrived in the city”. I am, of course, referring to the main campus of the Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit, better known as the University of Johannesburg. At the height of Afrikaner Nationalism, the ruling party in 1955 commissioned the establishment of an Afrikaans medium tertiary institution so as to tap into the intellectual potential of Afrikaners who came from families that historically migrated to the city from the countryside after their decimation from the Anglo-Boer War. These were people who (due to urban absorption that did not accommodate Afrikaans speakers) were anglicised and therefore did not grow the Afrikaner culture substantially, leading to conformity t...
In 1776, a Bavarian law professor by the name of Adam Weishaupt gathered five of his students to become members of his organisation which sought to advocate for secular rule of European states, removing religious and monarchical influence in government and replacing it with logic and rationale. This group would call themselves "the Order of the Illuminati," which means "the illuminated ones." The membership grew to include doctors and lawyers, and the group lasted for 10 years before the Duke of Bavaria, Karl Theodor, made it illegal for organisations like the Illuminati to exist, and they are said to not have achieved much in their 10-year official existence. Over 130 years later, a group of Afrikaner men in a colonised African country would adopt their modus operandi and become an Illuminati of sorts themselves: the Afrikaans Illuminati known as the Afrikaner-Broederbond. After the Anglo-Boer War in 1902, the Afrikaners suffered monumental losses from the British ...