Thomas Mabaso, Akademia and the Question Nobody Wants to Ask.

2026-08-21

When Building Your Own Future Becomes a Political Problem.

There is something happening in South Africa that deserves more serious attention than the usual racial shouting match.

A South African commentator, Thomas Mabaso, has asked a deceptively simple question:

Why attack a university you didn’t build?

Mabaso was responding to comments by former Cabinet minister Naledi Pandor concerning the construction of a new Afrikaans-medium university, Akademia, in Pretoria.

His argument is uncomfortable because it cuts across some of the assumptions that dominate South Africa’s racial and political conversation.

Afrikaners are a minority community.

They have built schools, training institutions and other organisations around the preservation and development of Afrikaans culture and education.

And now they are building a university.

But they are not building it with an ordinary government university appropriation.

They are raising the money themselves.

So why is this being portrayed as a threat?

That is where the story becomes considerably more complicated.

The R3.2 Billion Question.

Akademia is an independent Afrikaans-medium higher-education institution associated with the Solidarity Movement.

Its new Pretoria East campus is projected to cost approximately R3.2 billion.

Construction began in January 2026.

The planned campus covers approximately 220 hectares and is intended eventually to accommodate thousands of students, with lecture facilities, laboratories, residences, research facilities, sports infrastructure, an amphitheatre and other university facilities.

Akademia says the development is being undertaken without government funding.

Its development information puts the overall projected cost at R3.2 billion, with the first phase estimated at R1.8 billion.

That fact matters.

Because there is an enormous difference between saying:

“The South African government is spending R3.2 billion on an Afrikaner university.”

and saying:

“A private community-linked organisation is raising billions of rand to construct its own university.”

Those are two completely different propositions.

And the second one raises a much more interesting question.

What Did Naledi Pandor Actually Say?

Pandor’s comments are at the centre of the controversy.

During an interview with the African Renaissance Podcast, the former Minister of Higher Education and Training and former Minister of International Relations and Cooperation expressed concern about the development of an Afrikaans-medium university.

She argued that South Africa was still dealing with the consequences of centuries of racism and colonialism.

Her concern was not simply that a university was being built.

It was the possibility that people and groups who historically possessed power could find new ways of maintaining influence.

She referred to entrepreneurs being recruited to work toward such goals and warned that South Africans could become too complacent about the country’s democratic freedom.

She also referred to AfriForum and what she described as a broader challenge to the transformation of South African society.

Those are serious concerns.

They deserve to be taken seriously.

But they also deserve to be tested.

Because there is a fundamental question sitting underneath them:

Where does legitimate community self-determination end and political resistance begin?

Thomas Mabaso’s Challenge.

This is where Thomas Mabaso enters the story.

Mabaso’s argument, as presented in his discussion of the controversy, is essentially this:

If Afrikaners want to establish educational institutions for their children, and they are willing to raise the money themselves, why should the project automatically be interpreted as an attempt to undermine South Africa’s democracy?

It is an important challenge.

And it becomes even more interesting because Mabaso is himself a black South African commentator.

This isn’t simply another Afrikaner organisation defending itself.

It is a black commentator asking whether South Africa’s political conversation has reached the point where a minority community’s attempt to preserve its language and educational culture is automatically interpreted through the lens of apartheid.

That deserves examination.

Not applause.

Not condemnation.

Examination.

Afrikaans Is Not a Race.

There is another distinction that often gets lost in this debate.

Afrikaans is a language.

It is not a race.

Afrikaans is spoken by South Africans from different racial communities.

Therefore, an Afrikaans-medium institution and a whites-only institution are not automatically the same thing.

That distinction is especially important when discussing the Constitution.

Section 29 of the South African Constitution recognises the right to establish and maintain independent educational institutions at one’s own expense, provided that they do not discriminate on the basis of race, are registered with the state and maintain standards comparable to those of public institutions.

The Constitution also protects cultural, religious and linguistic rights.

That does not mean every private institution is automatically above criticism.

It means the criticism has to be based on something more substantial than the mere fact that the institution exists.

The real questions should therefore be:

Who may attend Akademia?

Does it discriminate racially?

What are its admission policies?

What qualifications does it offer?

Who accredits those qualifications?

How is it governed?

How is it funded?

And perhaps most importantly:

Is its purpose educational and cultural, or is it genuinely intended to create a racially exclusive political institution?

Those are questions that can actually be investigated.

The Shadow of History.

None of this means that history should be ignored.

Afrikaans has a complicated history in South Africa.

The language was associated with the apartheid state, and the compulsory imposition of Afrikaans in schools contributed directly to the events surrounding the Soweto uprising in 1976.

For many black South Africans, therefore, an Afrikaans institution carries historical associations that cannot simply be dismissed.

That emotional and historical reality matters.

But history creates context.

It does not automatically determine the character of every institution that uses the Afrikaans language today.

The question facing South Africa is whether Afrikaans can exist as a living language and cultural medium without becoming a vehicle for racial exclusion.

That is a much more difficult question.

And perhaps a much more useful one.

What Is Solidarity Actually Building?

Akademia does not exist in isolation.

It forms part of a much broader institutional strategy associated with the Solidarity Movement.

That strategy includes education, vocational training, community organisations, financial structures and other institutions designed to provide services and opportunities within the Afrikaans community.

The philosophy is straightforward:

If we need something, we will build it ourselves.

There is something profoundly South African about that idea.

Communities across the country have repeatedly created their own institutions when they believed the state was unable, unwilling or too slow to meet their needs.

The uncomfortable question is why self-reliance becomes suspicious when a particular community practises it.

And here Mabaso’s question becomes much larger than Akademia.

What If Everyone Did It?

Imagine an isiZulu-speaking community building a privately funded university offering extensive isiZulu-medium education.

Imagine an isiXhosa-speaking community doing the same.

Imagine Sesotho, Setswana, Xitsonga or Tshivenda communities developing their own educational institutions.

Imagine religious communities, cultural communities and professional groups doing likewise.

Would South Africa regard all of these developments as threats to democracy?

Or would we see them as examples of civil society taking responsibility for its own future?

There is a danger here.

Self-reliance can become exclusion.

Community pride can become nationalism.

Cultural preservation can become racial politics.

But the opposite danger also exists.

A government can become so suspicious of independent community institutions that it begins treating civil society itself as a threat.

Neither extreme is healthy for a democracy.

The Question Behind the Question.

Perhaps the real argument isn’t about whether Afrikaners should have a university.

Perhaps it is about whether South Africans are still capable of distinguishing race from culture, private initiative from political resistance, and historical memory from present-day reality.

Naledi Pandor is entitled to warn South Africans about the persistence of racial inequality and the possibility that old power structures can find new forms.

Thomas Mabaso is equally entitled to ask whether building something with your own resources should automatically be interpreted as an attempt to undermine the state.

Both questions deserve to be heard.

But neither argument should be allowed to substitute for evidence.

If Akademia is racially discriminatory, demonstrate it.

If it is politically designed to undermine democracy, demonstrate it.

If its funding is improper, demonstrate it.

If it is simply an Afrikaans-medium private university funded by people who want to preserve and develop their language and educational culture, then South Africa needs to be mature enough to say so.

And if that model succeeds, perhaps other South African communities should learn from it.

Because education should not be a racial battlefield.

It should be one of the places where South Africans learn how to build a future together.

And Perhaps That Is What Makes Thomas Mabaso Interesting.

The most interesting part of this story may ultimately have very little to do with Akademia.

It may be the fact that Thomas Mabaso looked at the controversy and asked a question that many people apparently weren’t asking:

If they built it themselves, why are we angry that they built it?

That question does not make Mabaso automatically right.

It does, however, make the question worth investigating.

South Africa has spent more than three decades attempting to construct a democratic society from the wreckage of apartheid.

That process was never going to be simple.

But perhaps one measure of how far the country has travelled is whether we can eventually reach a point where an Afrikaner can build an Afrikaans university without that fact alone being treated as a political declaration of war.

And perhaps another measure is whether a black South African can defend that right without being accused of betraying his own people.

That is the conversation I think is worth having.

Not black versus white.

Not ANC versus Afrikaner.

Not government versus Solidarity.

Something much harder.

Can South Africans build their own futures without constantly assuming that somebody else’s success must be an attack on them?

That is the question Thomas Mabaso has put on the table.

And it deserves an answer.

Sources and Further Reading.

📰 Captain Gemini
with ChatGPT