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 and were banished to a life of widespread squalor in the years following the war; Afrikaner men had been killed in the war, the women and children were imprisoned in concentration camps and thereafter lived in extreme poverty. It’s important that you understand the context of this period in South Africa; British influence was powerful compared to the Afrikaners (Dutch descendants in a foreign country), who were a disgruntled minority against an empire that was famous for colonising 65+ countries; resistance from the oppressed is something the Brits were all too familiar with, and quelling that resistance was like a pastime for them. The Afrikaners were determined that they did not deserve to be ruled by another nation (rather, they were the ones who deserved to rule, if you know what I mean), and they fought bitterly for their independence from the British Empire. Eventually, the war ended, but the damage was already done, and the vast majority of Afrikaners would live in poverty as they had lost the war.
Afrikaner nationalists, people who loved the Afrikaans culture and ideology deeply, felt that the living conditions of their fellow countrymen were unacceptable. Farmers had lost their land during the war and, as a result, had to move to the towns and compete with Black people for manual labour jobs. You can imagine how being comparable in any way to a Black person made Afrikaners feel. And so it was decided: Afrikaner people were struggling, and something had to be done.
It started small, a couple of lawyers, doctors, and teachers got together to create Jong Suid-Afrika, which was soon renamed to the Afrikaner Broederbond. Their mission was simple: Elevate the Afrikaner in society. Though it started as an organisation representing the layman, the Broederbond soon became a legion of highly influential Afrikaner men who used their positions in society to further the agenda of the Broederbond.
Becoming a part of this secret society was not as simple as uploading an audition video and tagging the Bond; as a matter of fact, you would not even know they existed and if you did, you did not know the scope of their operations until you become a part of them as all their meetings were held in secret and their existence often denied by alleged members. To become a "Broeder", you would have to be identified; “noticed”. Individuals (exclusively men) in different sectors who conducted themselves in ways that pleased the Broderbond would have their names circulated across all cells countrywide and would subsequently be monitored and researched rigorously before being approached to join the organisation. As little as one valid objection from any corner of the country would disqualify a potential member.
To be a part of the organisation, you had to have gone to an Afrikaans school, be married to an Afrikaner woman, attend an Afrikaans church regularly, and just happen to be a supporter of the NP With that said, here’s a brief list of notable figures who were members of the organisation:
1. Daniel Malan (4th prime minister/first prime minister of Apartheid South Africa)
2. Hendrik Verwoerd (6th Prime Minister of South Africa, the father of Apartheid)
3. Pik Botha ( Minister of Foreign Affairs in Apartheid South Africa)
4. Jon Vorster ( Minister of Police in Apartheid South Africa, Pro Nazi)
5. Anton Rupert (Business Mogul)
6. Frederik De Klerk (Final president of Apartheid South Africa)
7. Gerard Moerdijk (Architect of Voortrekker Monument and 80+ NG churches)
8. Pieter Meyer (Chairperson of SABC)
The list might read like a list of members of a political party, but you must understand that this was essentially a club for superfans of the Afrikaner ethnicity, but unlike any regular club, these men actively worked to discreetly infiltrate and influence civil society.
The first order of business these men got to was defining what Afrikaner culture was, and then promoting it. The establishment of cultural organisations encompassed by the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniging (FAK) was responsible for this very task.
The principles of Afrikaner nationalism needed to be well taught, as indeed a people that does not know itself cannot know their direction. The issue with the Afrikaner ideology is that it was built on racist, supremacist and Darwinist ideals, which I can over-summarise into: "God brought Afrikaners from the Netherlands to steward and grow South Africa and lead its indigenous inhabitants out of the dark and show them the right way to live. Different races living and procreating together is unholy, and it is the heavenly duty of the Afrikaner to stop this from happening, and most of all, never let a Black person rule because they are an inferior race. Afrikaners are the most morally and intellectually fit group in South Africa."
This may strongly remind you of Nazism and you would be correct to draw parallels between Afrikaner nationalists and the Nazis, as a matter of fact Verwoerd studied in Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig during the late 1920s and while there is no official evidence that Verwoerd was influenced by Nazi ideology, it’s hard not to imagine that the National Party got the blueprint for Apartheid from the Holocaust considering the elaborate racial segregation on both institutional and civil levels but that’s an article for another day.
After giving the people a much-needed confidence booster by imbuing them with a god-complex, it was onto the next order of business: making them rich. To alleviate poverty, usher more Afrikaners into entrepreneurship and effectively move them up the class ranks, several financial institutions were established such as the “Cooperative Winegrowers Association of South Africa” that you know as KWV, the “Afrikaans Verbond Burial Enterprise Limited” that you know as AVBOB, “South African National Trust and Insurance Company Limited”, you may know them as SANTAM today and the “South African National Life Insurance Company Limited” which you know as SANLAM. This led to Afrikaner money circulating amongst Afrikaners, and this obviously led to the professionalisation of their racial group as more accountants, lawyers and general white collar jobs would open up to run organisations like this.
Some notable fruits of the Broderbond's economic upliftment initiatives include the Volkskas Bank, now known as ABSA and the Federal People’s Investments, which infamously loaned money to a certain Anton Rupert who started the Voorbrand Tobacco Company. To give you a picture of the gravity of the Broederbond’s work, let’s take a brief look at Rupert’s story.
Rupert was a chemistry lecturer at the University of Pretoria when he bought two cigarette-making machines and subsequently got a loan (presumably from the FDI) to establish the Voorbrand Tobacco Company in Paarl. A few years later, after renaming the company to be Rembrandt Trust, Rupert introduced a king-sized cigarette filter that found worldwide success. Circa 1948, Rupert obtained a loan from SANLAM to the tune of 1.5 million ZAR (the furthest back the average inflation calculator goes is 1957, which saw a million and a half being worth 187.3 million Rands in today’s money). Rupert used this generous cash injection to expand his entrepreneurial pursuits worldwide and to manage his golden geese. Shortly after Remgro Ltd. was established. Rupert was making an enormous fortune manufacturing cigarettes in the 70s, and he used his money to diversify his portfolio via Remgro and thus went from being a local tycoon to a worldwide business mogul. In 1988, he founded Richemont, which went on to own luxury goods companies such as Vacheron Constantin and Cartier (yes, thee Cartier has South African roots), but let’s harken back to his holding company, Remgro; what does their portfolio consist of nowadays? To name a very recognisable few, we have:
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| Unilever (they own Omo, Lux, Knorrox 25.8% shares held) |
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Distell Group (they own 4th Street, Amarula and Savannah 30.6% shares held) |
RCL Foods (they own 5 Star maize meal, Nola, Sunbake 77.5% shares held) |
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| First Rand (they own FNB, Wesbank and DirectAxis 13.5% shares held) |
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| Mediclinic (they own a total of 74 hospitals, 42% shares held) |
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| Total South Africa (they own every Total garage, 24.9% shares held) |
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RMI Holdings (they own OUTsurance, Merchant Capital and AlphaCode 30.3% shares held) |
| Sabido Investments (They own eTV, 32.4% shares held) |
Today Rupert’s fortunes are managed by his son and Julius Malema's arch nemesis, Johann Rupert.
You might be thinking that almost every aspect of daily South African life and a significant part of our wealth belonged to one man, and now his son and you'd be forgiven for thinking so. All because of a loan from the Broederbond.
Though he is reported to have denounced it, Anton Rupert was a member of the Broederbond, and he benefited from their initiatives. Knowing that the Bond was not a club but an agency specialising in secretly commandeering the country, would it be far-fetched for us to imagine that Rupert’s large businesses could have been used to further the Bond's racist agenda of "elevating the Afrikaner?"
Consider this, though Apartheid was legally and constitutionally abolished in ‘94, the ideologies of its beneficiaries have barely changed over the last 30 years meaning that there are many Afrikaners living among us who still believe Black people are scum that do not deserve any kind of rights and the people who had ties with the Bond continue to occupy leadership in significant organisations like Johann Rupert himself. Therefore, is it really shocking that Black people are offered higher interest rates( if we are lucky enough to get a loan) and higher insurance premiums than White people when the banks and insurance companies are owned by companies that owe their existence to White Supremacist ideologies? Is it shocking that we barely hear or see good things about ourselves in the media when the news outlets are owned by companies that are led by people who have a history of believing they are our gods?
We know that the work of the Broederbond was clandestine and for most of its official existence, barely anyone outside of the organisation knew what they were up to, who’s to say they have not been replaced by a different organisation that has taken the baton from the Broederbond?
It is not my intention to introduce a conspiracy theory to the reader but rather to ask my fellow Black folk to look for patterns in the media and white collar South Africa that “coincidentally” make White people look better than Black people and ask themselves whether a jaded nation that had their kingdom taken away from them would truly embrace their Black counterparts no matter how little or much objective good they did.
Moving on, the Broederbond understood the power of education and therefore made it their mission to commandeer the education sector to align with their objectives, leading to 24 university and college rectors and 468 school headmasters being Bond members by 1977. It had long been a vision for there to be an independent university that exclusively catered to the “supreme” nation of the Boer in Johannesburg, as the University of Witwatersrand had British roots and would always have English influence.
The Broederbond wanted something for the Afrikaner, by the Afrikaner, and therefore established the Rand Afrikaanse Universiteit/Rand Afrikaanse Universiteit (RAU) in 1966. This initially began many years prior with the Goudstadse Onderwyskollege/Gold City Teacher’s College in 1961, and it became a precursor to RAU, whose first Committee (which happened to consist of FAK members) was required to raise 1 million Rand in funding before receiving the legal greenlight to exist. “Donations” poured in over the following year, and 2 million rand was raised to establish RAU.
I wonder which generous men in 1965 could have donated the equivalent of 210.6 million Rand in today’s money, and could they have possibly been part of a secret club that sought to promote Afrikaners in society…I guess we’ll never know.
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| The newly established RAU campus in Auckland Park, circa 1967 |
It should then come as no surprise that the second rector of RAU would happen to be a would-be chairman of the Broederbond. Is it unreasonable, therefore, to hypothesise that the Broederbond directly funded RAU’s establishment via its network of millionaires like Anton Rupert? Let the reader decide for himself.
RAU was eventually dissolved in December 2004, and from its ashes rose the modern-day University of Johannesburg, whose orange coloured walls and multiracial (but mostly Black) student population is the complete opposite of RAU’s blue-bannered and strictly white- occupied lecture halls.
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| Modern-day RAU, now known as the University of Johannesburg |
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| Admittedly, the architecture of these churces remain tasteful and timeless |
My radical and pacifist selves conferred with each other on whether or not I should write this article as it clearly reveals and discusses some uncomfortable truths about the architecture of Apartheid and how democratic South Africa inherits the stench of that horrific era of our beautiful country; while I love history and sharing my findings with others, it is never my intention to cause dissension or mislead readers of my work and its best that I confess my biases towards praising Black leadership/government (NOT THE ANC).
With that said, there may very well be many inconsistencies and contextual omissions I made in my pursuit to explain the baleful existence of a society that sought to stunt Black growth; these are just my (subjective) views.
I was inspired to write this article after hearing the claim that the University of Witwatersrand intentionally fails many Black students in order to maintain the exclusivity of their degrees. I began to wonder if this could be the work of a clandestine society that is working on a larger mission to ensure Blacks are never socio-economically comparable to Whites, no matter how many affirmative action measures are introduced. I then considered the concentration of our media outlets (a lot of newspapers and news channels are owned by each other) and I noticed biases in their reporting as news about Black misdemeanours is published fast and loud, while positive news is ignored, but White crime is quietly reported (with no names mentioned).
To wrap up my little rant, I will end by saying this: the Black child must never be told his identity by a White person. The Black child must never refer to the white-owned media houses for a reliable account of their history and explanation of Black affairs; they will very well distort the image of those who look like him to keep him from taking himself seriously. They will tell the Black child not to bother studying because there are no jobs, they will tell him that crime rates are high in Black areas but lower in White areas because Whites can “organise” themselves, they will tell him that he is not good at leading and is falling behind compared to other unnamed nations, they will establish “rating agencies” that say the Black child’s home is at “junk status”. The only time the Whites speak well of the Black child is when he is dancing, like a jester frolicking for a king. The Black child is only tolerated if he does not offend the Whites’ supremacist views of themselves, and they will say he is one of the “good ones”.
The Black child should and must never be told right or wrong by those who chained him, but rather by those who know how to appreciate his pigment, interpret his intellect and respect his humanity.
Beautiful
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