The devolution of power by the British Prime Minister to regional assemblies in the United Kingdom, including the Northern Ireland Assembly, offers political solace to Afrikaner nationalists in South Africa seeking to establish an Afrikaner volkstaat.
Mr Constand Viljoen, leader of the Freedom Front, which has made establishment of a volkstaat its raison d'etre, has made it his objective to persuade the African National Congress leader, Mr Thabo Mbeki, to emulate Mr Tony Blair.
Several factors have combined to raise awareness of devolution in Britain among Afrikaner nationalists.
One is research by the Volkstaat Council, a statutory institution set up in terms of an accord between the ANC and Afrikaner nationalists and financed with public money to examine the feasibility of establishing an Afrikaner volkstaat. Another is the pending re-establishment in May of a Scottish parliament. A third factor is last year's election of representatives to the Northern Irish Assembly as part of a broader plan for a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland.
But, as Dr Peter Lynch, a visiting academic from the University of Stirling in Scotland, has noted and as Afrikaner nationalists themselves acknowledge, there are important differences between British and South African situations. One is that the Afrikaners do not have a clearly defined territorial base in South Africa, as the Irish and the Scots have in Ireland and Scotland.
Mr Carel Boshoff, a son-in-law of Hendrik Verwoerd, the high priest of apartheid, and a former chairman of the Afrikaner Broederbond, pertinently observes that Afrikaners are dispersed throughout South Africa, not concentrated within the boundaries of any of the nine existing provinces.
For that reason Dr Lynch has advised Afrikaner nationalists not to become obsessed with the notion of a territorially based volkstaat. In a similar vein, the black leaders Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Inkatha Freedom Party and Mr Mathews Phosa of the ANC - who shared the podium with Dr Lynch at a recent conference organised by the Volkstaat Council - have advised Afrikaner nationalists to abandon their quest for an independent nation-state on the European model and to search for a different form of selfdetermination.
Chief Buthelezi, who is seen as a candidate for the deputy presidency when Mr Mbeki takes over from President Mandela after the pending election, describes the Afrikaners as a "truly indigenous African nation". From that premise, he advises: "Our discussion on self-determination must find its own African parameters . . . If we undertake that exercise, we may discover how the notion of self-determination can enrich the unity of South Africa rather than undermine it."
Another important fact is that South Africa's apartheid past is - to use Dr Lynch's phrase - very recent. The racially based inequality which apartheid bequeathed to South Africa means that - to paraphrase Dr Lynch - the major priority of Mr Mbeki's incoming government is likely to be the elimination of inequality rather than the devolution of power.
Afrikaner nationalists will have to come to terms with the ANC's priorities and its fear that Afrikaner self-determination may have a hidden agenda aimed at repartitioning South Africa on racial and ethnic lines.