It was an image out of a bygone era: 150 young white people jammed onto a narrow pathway on the campus of the University of Pretoria (UP), one of South Africa’s premier universities, facing off angrily against hundreds of black students. Tensions had been broiling for months, since at least October 2015. A group of black student activists had organized a series of demonstrations — first against the university’s fee structure, then against its use of outsourced workers, and finally against curricula in Afrikaans, the language of Afrikaners, the white minority who ruled South Africa for four brutal decades in the second half of the 20th century. That morning in February 2016, black students had entered classrooms to protest instruction in Afrikaans. As they moved across campus and sang anti-Afrikaans songs, white kids who opposed them formed a human chain in the bottleneck of the grassy walkway. According to Jaco Grobbelaar and Henrico Barnard, two white participants, they shouted at the demonstrators, vowing to run blacks off “their” campus. As the South African summer sun beat down, tempers flared. At least two students exchanged punches. “There were fists flying,” Grobbelaar recalls. Eventually, security guards dispersed the crowd. The white students had been rallied in part by a group called AfriForum, South Africa’s most established advocacy organization fighting on behalf of white people — specifically Afrikaners. The organization is popular at universities, but its mandate extends well beyond campus politics. Established in the wake of apartheid’s demise, AfriForum represents white interests in a South Africa under black majority rule. With the backing of 200,000 members, the group files court cases alleging unfair discrimination against the Afrikaans language and mounts letter-writing campaigns for the preservation of Afrikaner cultural heritage, such as public statues and Afrikaner town names. It even carries petitions to the United Nations, laying out the case that Afrikaners — until recently the world’s most famous oppressors — now belong on its list of beleaguered ethnic minorities. The group launched in 2006 and for a while was small. In recent years, though, its growth has been exponential, thanks to a broader trend in South Africa’s troubled identity politics. Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) — the liberation movement that helped free the country from white minority rule, but also championed forgiveness and racial reconciliation — is suffering a decline in influence. Today, a new, more radical generation of young black people is finding its voice, arguing that whites still maintain far too much power in institutions like the country’s universities and banks. Although Afrikaners account for just 5 percent of the national population of 51 million, streets named “Voortrekker” (“pioneer” in Afrikaans) anchor every small town. More than 20 years after liberation, half of South African blacks still live in poverty, while whites have gotten wealthier. According to the last South African census, taken in 2011, white people earn on average six times the income black South Africans do. Black youth increasingly find this untenable — and they’re agitating for a more substantial reckoning with the country’s past. “There’s a very, very big polarization,” Flip Buys, one of AfriForum’s founders and current advisors, tells me, and whites feel increasingly threatened. With his thinning red hair, dress shirt, and snugly knotted gray tie, Buys, 53, looks more like a middle manager from The Office than a man who has helped shepherd South Africa’s most prominent Afrikaner nationalist movement. One of his eyes is higher than the other, and his glasses skew the other way, amplifying the effect. Yet his staid look reveals a man who considers himself a thought leader of South Africa’s white survival. A former student of political science, he quoted five obscure philosophy professors in an hourlong conversation. When I showed up to our meeting, the day after Americans elected Donald Trump as their next president, he handed me a 2004 Samuel Huntington article on the new rise of ethnocentrism in the contemporary West. AfriForum’s tactics and philosophies are controversial. Is it fair, skeptics ask, for white people to identify themselves as an embattled minority, given their long history of dominance? Where does legitimate cultural preservation end and repugnant white nationalism begin? For many South Africans, both black and white, the fight to retain relics of the old country — including the use of Afrikaans in public universities — is nothing more than a bid to cement white people’s demographically disproportionate influence in public life. To Buys, though, AfriForum speaks to the legitimate anxiety engendered by white people’s vision of the world to come, one that will look very different from the past and the present. “People feel their world change,” he says. “They see their workplace changing. They see their children’s schools changing. They see their small town changing. This is why we have the movement.”

Buys doesn’t come from rarified breeding. Afrikaners began arriving in South Africa in the late 17th century, primarily from the Netherlands, to cultivate wheat and wine grapes. Well into the 20th century, they remained largely poor and semiliterate. The British ran South Africa then as an imperial colony; during the Second Boer War, which the British government started in 1899 to seize territory from the Afrikaners to mine for gold and diamonds, British soldiers incarcerated Afrikaner women and children in concentration camps. Buys’s paternal grandfather was one of these children. “He never talked about it,” Buys tells me, but it left a scar on the family, a sense of embattlement and wounded pride. Buys’s father later had to leave school after the sixth grade to support his family.

In 1948, an Afrikaner-led political party took power from the British in an election. The new government consolidated South Africa’s racist laws into an all-encompassing form of racial segregation they termed apartheid, which means “separateness” in Afrikaans. It reserved the best jobs and the best farmland for white people; blacks were confined to overcrowded so-called ethnic homelands and had to carry a pass to enter “white” neighborhoods. Apartheid could be vicious. The regime’s police used guns to mow down black protesters and jailed leaders of the anti-apartheid movement.

Apartheid’s ideology went beyond colonial politics. It was a potent worldview. The system was a cross between Dutch Calvinism doctrine and midcentury pseudo-scientific theories alleging the different capabilities of various races. From these principles, Afrikaners developed a powerful and holistic identity. The group was no longer a subjugated white underclass living under the yoke of the British crown. They were a holy race selected by God to settle South Africa. In the 1930s and ’40s, political leaders even erected an immense monument to honor the day of a battle at which God supposedly empowered Afrikaners to triumph over the Zulus, a black tribe. At the stroke of noon every Dec. 16, the anniversary of the 1838 battle, a hole in the monument’s vaulted ceiling still lets in sunlight, a man-made manifestation of the miracle of Afrikaner chosenness.

Yet Buys’s family in particular knew the fragility of white political rule in Africa. His uncle had become a minister in British-colonized Kenya and witnessed as most whites fled the country in the 1960s during the violent Mau Mau uprising. He told the family stories of whites murdered during the revolt. In 1974, when Buys was 11, two young Portuguese refugees from the independence war in Mozambique, situated to South Africa’s northeast, joined his school. “Their parents were missing,” Buys says. “We were talking on the playground and said, ‘We won’t let our parents be killed!’”

In 1976, Buys saw backlash in his own country when black students in the township of Soweto rebelled against being forced to speak Afrikaans in their schools. Protests quickly spread all over South Africa. “We saw this as the beginning of the revolution,” Buys says. He remembers wondering as a young teen whether he would still have his “house in 20 years.”

He finished his political science degree in December 1989, just before the Afrikaner government set Mandela free from prison. Buys remembers the fear he felt then, and the anger toward South Africa’s political leaders. Since the middle of the century, Afrikaner officials had told whites that black people were existentially dangerous and that privilege was their God-given right. In the space of a few short years, the message to whites from the country’s leaders, both black and white, had changed to “trust your former enemy” — one who had suffered greatly over centuries of white rule and had every imaginable reason to exact retribution.

Even after the apartheid government’s ouster, most Afrikaners stayed in South Africa. More than other colonial groups, they have always insisted they are African, despite their European ancestry. Their identity is deeply enmeshed with South Africa’s landscapes, the quiet deserts and vaunting mountains they believe the Lord chose for them. “I feel more at home in Botswana than in some German town,” Buys tells me.

So he got together with two other young intellectual Afrikaner friends. Their project was ambitious: Rebrand the Afrikaners from oppressors to the oppressed in order to save them from black retribution and secure them a stable place in their new country. The young men set up a reading group to pore over the works of philosophers on ethnicity — The Power of Identity by Manuel Castells, for example. They studied the constitutions of countries like Switzerland and Hungary that include provisions to protect minority cultures. “I began to think of myself as a liberal internationalist, not a white racist,” Buys says, with palpable relief in his voice.

“We’re finding such inspiration from the Catalonians and the Basques,” he notes, hesitantly fingering a copy of The Power of Identity that lay on his desk. “Even Tibet.”

Soon the group began organizing. In the mid-1990s, one of the Afrikaners’ big concerns was affirmative action. The ANC, helmed at the time by then-President Thabo Mbeki, vowed to create a system that reserved jobs for black people in government and at formerly white-dominated companies. Led by Buys, the three men took over an old, nearly moribund labor union and invited Afrikaners to join, intending to redirect its focus toward combating affirmative action. They had some early legal successes; in one, they reinstated an Afrikaner employee with the state energy utility who had lost her job to a black worker.

By the early 2000s, the union, called Solidarity, began to receive letters from Afrikaners who demanded more. Could you help us with crime in our communities, which spiked after apartheid’s end? Could you help us fight the new black-led government’s efforts to change the names of towns from Afrikaner heroes to black ones? Buys and his friends saw there was room for broader organizing around the preservation of Afrikaner identity. “We wanted to change the balance of forces,” Kallie Kriel, a younger member of the trio, tells me.

AfriForum was spun off Solidarity and envisioned as a movement funded by small membership donations from Afrikaners all over South Africa. The founders filed for nonprofit status and drew up a “civil rights charter.” Modeled after the ANC’s 1955 Freedom Charter, which undergirded the party’s case for black liberation, the manifesto articulates a platform for Afrikaners “to feel at home as first-class citizens in the country of their birth.”

“We, the compilers and supporters of this charter, exercise the deliberate choice to lead a meaningful existence as Afrikaners,” it reads, “with our deeply-rooted foundation at the southernmost tip of Africa. We know no other home.”