Listen to voices like Van der Rheede on US pressure on SA

It is a pity that more South Africans – and especially whites – don’t listen to what Christo van der Rheede has been saying about the United States’ attempts to pressurise Pretoria into backtracking on laws that Washington, primed by local right-wingers, believes amount to persecution of white Afrikaners.

In recent comments, Van der Rheede – the outgoing CEO of the FW de Klerk Foundation – has attacked the “ethno-nationalism” of the administration of President Donald Trump and how it has been lapped up by local conservative whites.

This, he argues, risks polarising further already deteriorating race relations in the country, but also offers the ANC the heaven-sent opportunity of playing gallant defender of South African sovereignty against white imperialists.

The foundation has been so disturbed by Van der Rheede’s comments that it has gagged him by saying his words do not reflect its views.

In doing so, the foundation reinforces the view that it is lurching further to the right itself, after a barrage of criticism this year from right-of-centre groupings like the Institute of Race Relations and the Free Market Foundation for supposedly not taking a strong enough stand on expropriation of land without compensation.

Because this is South Africa, after all, it is difficult to get away from the race tint behind the foundation’s decision.

A highly educated technocrat, Van der Rheede is a non-white Afrikaner – and therefore eminently able to comment about the exclusion of Coloured and other Afrikaners from Trump’s definition of a persecuted group.

Van der Rheede’s treatment has echoes of what happened to other people of colour in the DA who wouldn’t toe a white-imposed party line and who left, or were squeezed out of that party.

If whites are going to have a future in this country, they should be listening to people like Van der Rheede, instead of ostracising them.