Between 1968 and 1975, the leaders of white South Africa reached out to independent African leaders. Scholars have alternately seen these counterintuitive campaigns as driven by a quest for regional economic hegemony, divide-and-lure realpolitik, or a desire to ingratiate the regime with the West. This article instead argues that the South African government’s outreach was intended as a top-down recalibration of the ideology of Afrikaner nationalism, as the regime endeavored to detach its apartheid program from notions of colonialist racial supremacy, and instead reach across the color line and lay an equal claim to the power and protection of African nationalism. These diplomatic maneuverings, therefore, serve as a prism through which to understand important shifts in state identity, ideological renewal, and the adoption of new state-building models.