DAKAR, Senegal — The leader of a neo-Nazi movement hoping to carve out a whites-only republic in South Africa sent Donald Trump an enthusiastic message of support and congratulations, a member of the organization tells BuzzFeed News.

“On behalf of tens of thousands of members of the AWB, as a white resistance movement against suppression of white people in South Africa, we want to congratulate you,” wrote Steyn von Ronge, who leads the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, or AWB. “Thank you for your ... support of the white nation in South Africa. We wish you all the best for the future, and you can rely on our support,” the message ended.

The AWB was founded by white supremacist Eugene Terre'Blanche, who notoriously beat a black worker for eating on the job, and set his dogs on a black gas station worker. Thousands of white South Africans flocked to the AWB when talks began to end apartheid in the 1990s. The group carried out bombings in an attempt to stop talks, but its membership declined once South Africa eased peacefully into a nonracial democracy, and it’s now isolated among the country's roughly 8% white population.

Morale among the movement, which boasts a paramilitary wing and an insignia that resembles a Nazi swastika, had been boosted by Trump’s win, said the division leader who passed BuzzFeed News the message.

Like their global counterparts, South African extreme right-wingers see the tide of nationalism sweeping across the globe as a growing boon for their causes. “I must admit - it took a while for me for the Trump victory to sink in. One is so used to constant setbacks,” one commentator posted on a popular alt-right website.

"Where most people in their own country deride them as atavistic idiots, these groups may now feel that they belong to something bigger — a tide of white rage," Nicky Falkof, a professor at Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand University, told BuzzFeed News. "They are nothing new in South Africa, of course. What is new is the ideological legitimacy that may be conferred on their extreme positions by Trump’s victory.”

They share the same DNA as Trump’s extremist supporters, which range in size and temperament from France’s far right Marine Le Pen to the Ku Klux Klan. On Alternative Right, a website that labels itself “the founding site of the Alt-right,” South Africa crops up reverentially as an example of a nation once successfully under white-rule, while in 2007, a notorious South African white supremacist became a key player in the US’s leading neo-Nazi group.

South Africa’s alt-right movements are headed by white Afrikaners, who held power until apartheid fell in 1994. Like those in the US who idealize a “real” America before the Civil Rights movement, many feel hard done by the fall of apartheid, and fret that “western” civilization is at risk of being swamped by outsiders — a fear that includes South Africa, which they see as a white nation.