The VF Party's Manifesto defines the new 'frontier oorlog'.

 Published on the Sunday Times 10 March 2024

A frontier is a transition zone where explorers and settlers arrive. It is the region at the edge of a settled area. It characterises the relationship between those settling and the indigenous people found in the area you are settling. The contestation for hegemony over the land and its resources, access to 'tradeable commodities', and the growth and expansion ambitions of the 'settling or occupying' non-indigenous has often resulted in frontier wars. Like most wars, the 'winner-determines-peace-treaty-terms' principle applies. Where there is no outright winner, a joint settlement establishes a 'retreat and recover peace' context for the next war to be declared.

Historically, these frontiers were physical, so life-and-death wars were fought. Loss of life, territory, and other moveable assets of value characterised the end-state of frontier wars. Those who won the wars would centre themselves in all privileged positions through the design of laws and systems which entrench their power beyond the generation that fought the actual frontier war. Such centering would prioritise the culture, civilisation, legal system, jurisprudence, and customs of 'recorded' victors over the conquered 'other people and communities'. The resultant context of centering would develop into a supremacist behaviour or tendency whose vector of analysis and existence would follow one chauvinism or another. This explains why relations between warring humans at these frontiers have race, tribal, and ethnicity as defining features of resulting supremacy; the most common and easily identifiable is white supremacy.

At its core, this conqueror philosophy has been the incapacity to halt its chauvinism defined capitalism form, the most common being racial capitalism. Invariably, capitalism, as a system has come across as a racial supremacist endeavour. On the other hand, its adjunct settler colonialism, the occupying colonized land, extracting its resources, committing genocide against Indigenous people and forcing their assimilation, has characterised frontier wars and tensions. Inadvertently supremacists have found a creative way to manufacture claims that unequal circumstances stem from some sort of innate inferiority of the non-victorious, not systemic discrimination and lack of opportunity. Organised hate, as a historical fact, has in such circumstances mutated into a bulwark against the freedom to humanity our present promises at the altar of an imagined future in which chauvinisms would prevail. 

The recordal of frontier wars settlements and treaties have always positioned those whom history records as victors to inherently assume superiority and thus entitled to dominate. Over time, the superiority complex and chauvinism determined supremacy settles as policies, processes, procedures and practices which prioritise the needs and interests of those' history records as victors', including where courtesy and peace prevailed. The algorithmic power of policies not only centres those recognised as victorious but also helps protect the acquired advantage. Through law, vocabulary, and templates, the advantage created unconscious and chauvinism-driven bias at a systemic level. The depth of bias normalises accompanying human vices such as racism, whiteness as a social exclusion phenomenon, tribalism, and, lately, homophobia.

Because of the sophistication of systems as conditions within which new frontier wars are fought and the enemy being separable from what is humanly acceptable, settlements and treaties have angled on crafting principles more than what physically moves or can be annexed. Battle strategies now target the ideological basis of actions by people. Society now declares crimes against humanity, genocide, illegal land dispossession, workplace discrimination, and homophobia as enemies of civilisation. International treaties and instruments, including localisation laws, have been the most potent way to create new 'transition zones where explorers and settlers are arriving'. Humanity-friendly policies and systems define the 'new regions at the edge of settled areas'. In South Africa, the Constitution outlaws any conduct inconsistent with its founding values. It legalises any action that recognises the injustices of the past, heals the divisions of the past, and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice, and fundamental human rights.

The liberation promise in the Constitution, which is now ratifiable with several international treaties and instruments, is the transition zone or frontier, where privileges earned through conquest and dispossession meet with privileges defined in law for the peaceful co-existence of humanity, for humanity's sake. It is no longer humans as adversaries in a war that will be fought, but rather what is good for humanity that might have to be fought. The frontier is not Black people getting policy-based acceleration over white people, but the correctness of doing so in recognition of the injustices of the past. Similarly, the frontier is also the correctness of restitution in relation to the obligation of the state to respect, protect, promote, and fulfil the rights of every citizen in the Bill of Rights.

Therefore, The Constitution is instructive to any political party, civil society organisation, or institution striving to decenter the liberation promise it holds for South Africans to recognise how socio-economic, economic, and jurisprudence templates and systems perpetuate cultures of exclusion, harm and subtle oppression. It is, therefore, politically prudent for political formations not to propagate policies that recreate a culture that circulates relentless messages of the superiority of chauvinism, especially race. The liquidation of racial superiority by the anti-apartheid struggle, which continues to redefine race relations beyond the borders of South Africa, should be curated as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. We should accept as a society that though the fragility of some amongst us is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of the historical superiority and entitlement our Constitution seeks first to constrain and ultimately eradicate.

Having perused the election manifesto of the Vryheid Front and the general posture of civil society movements within the same frontier complex, it is clear that a new frontier, 'oorlog', is either underway or has just been formally declared. The truism that racism, as the predominant supremacist currency for politics, is about the survival strategy of systemic power is confirmed in some of the bizarre voter attraction slogans of the VF. A new round of settlement conversations is indeed necessary. The 'new frontier tensions' are too hot to be ignored. CUT!!