I was saddened, and more than a little angry, to read at American Renaissance an over-the-top panegyric to the Afrikaner "white tribe" of South Africa. It's titled "The Heroic White Tribe of Africa". It begins:
The Afrikaners are a truly heroic people, with a history of courage, perseverance, and faithfulness unmatched in modern times. In little more than 300 years, they brought forth a distinctive culture, a national church, a rich literature, and a vivid sense of identity. Known as Africa’s White Tribe, the Afrikaners’ worst threats have always been other whites: first the Dutch, then the British, then the combined forces of all white people everywhere – to the point that they are now at the mercy of blacks. This is their tragic story.
The Afrikaners were, indeed, an heroic people in history according to certain measures; but they were also moral monsters who "got theirs" at the expense of almost everyone around them, and in the process adopted racial policies that would have made Adolf Hitler proud. (Indeed, some of the prime movers behind the policies of apartheid were imprisoned during World War II because of their outspoken support for Nazi Germany and its racial-purity Nuremberg Laws.)
I've written at length about the evils of apartheid, and the immense damage it caused to South Africa over the years. I summarized most of the issues in a 2013 article titled "Was apartheid South Africa really that bad?" Yes, it was. I cited my own experience, and that of others, and tried to show how things really were pretty darned evil under that policy. I concluded by asking my American readers:
Finally, to people who try to make excuses for apartheid and the conduct of the then-South African government, I can only say:
- If you were treated like a slave, a sub-human and a pariah in your own country;
- If you were stripped of your citizenship and civil rights in the country of your birth because of the color of your skin;
- If your education depended upon your skin color for its quality (or lack thereof);
- If your choice of what to do with your life, or where to live, or who to love or marry, was restricted by your race;
- If you were denied free travel inside your own country, forced to carry an internal passport and subject to instant arrest if you forgot it at home or lost it;
- If you were forced to accept menial labor as the only work open to you, paid a starvation wage, and denied the right to bring your family to live with you near your place of work;
- If you were savagely beaten and imprisoned if you dared to protest such restrictions and indignities, or even shot out of hand rather than arrested;
would you calmly accept those things? Or would you take up arms to overthrow the system that placed such restrictions upon you?
I know what my answer would have been, in my younger years. It would have been the same as Nelson Mandela's in the 1960's.
There's more at the link.
If you haven't read that earlier article, I'd be grateful if you'd please read it in full, and those linked within it, particularly those by "Titflasher" (they're worth reading). It provides a great deal of material you won't hear from apologists for apartheid. The evils that I listed above were among those inflicted on the vast majority of South Africans by Afrikaners, and that list is not exhaustive.
Some argue that the Afrikaners did no more than the British Empire did before them, and that apartheid was no more than a legal codification of imperial practices. That's not true. A little historical research will soon demonstrate that, while imperial policies were indeed racist to a considerable extent, none of them extended to officially classifying entire tribes and races as sub-human. Don't forget, it was Hendrik Verwoerd, a Prime Minister of South Africa and one of the primary architects of apartheid, who stood up in Parliament and declared, officially and for the record (you'll find it in Hansard), that Blacks were the Biblical "children of Ham"; that they were therefore destined by God to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water", like the Gibeonites; and that therefore he, Verwoerd, was going to ensure that "Bantu education" (the deliberately inferior and underfunded education system provided to Black people) would educate them for that purpose, and nothing better. Charming SOB, wasn't he?
I'm no bleeding-heart liberal, no espouser of fashionably left-wing causes. My record speaks for itself. I've written about the heroes I knew in South Africa, and made no apologies for opposing terrorism just as much as I opposed apartheid - because they were just as bad as each other. "Two wrongs don't make one right", to use a tired old phrase.
Nevertheless, I'm not going to stand idly by and watch the "whitewashing" (you should pardon the expression) of the Afrikaner "tribe" as poor, misunderstood heroes who don't deserve what's happened to them. They sowed the wind by deliberately depriving more than 80% of the country, Black, Indian or "colored' (mixed-race), of almost every opportunity to live as they did. Now they're suffering under the inevitable reaction to what they did. If Afrikaners had been willing to create a genuine black middle class, and open the economy to allow everyone to aspire to their fair share of it, earning their way to prosperity by the sweat of their brows, South Africa would be a very different country today. It's because they would not allow that, and instead tried to glom on to all the goodies for themselves at the expense of everyone else, that the nation is in the state it is today. Action begets reaction. What was sauce for the goose is now sauce for the gander. Need I go on?
Yes, there were heroes among the Afrikaners. Sadly, their heroism did not extend to allowing others the things they demanded for their own people. Instead, they took them for themselves, and took up arms and passed laws to stop others sharing them. The result is what's happening in South Africa today.
Peter
(EDITED TO ADD: In response to many reader comments and a few on other blogs, I've written a follow-up article to this one, providing more information. You'll find it here.)
29 comments:
The first and most major sin of the Afrikaaners was to admit the blacks into the country, instead of driving them all out and protecting the border. All else followed from that single, poor decision. Now, here in the USA, we have a third of our population that isn't "us", and has demonstrated no intention to integrate.
"The Afrikaners were, indeed, an heroic people in history according to certain measures; but they were also moral monsters who "got theirs" at the expense of almost everyone around them,"
This is the history of every successful people. The very concept of the nation-state enshrines this principle. As an example, China cares not one whit for others, because they aren't Chinese.
Peter as you and I are also CURRENTLY being picked out for the skin we were born with as Raycesst WE too will "Enjoy" the fruits of those who are "Woke".
Or as I first thought to Reply
COMING SOON TO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU.
No tribe has clean hands.
I am always amazed at our ability, no, predeliction for, judging people from the past with 20/20 hindsight and finely-tuned modernized morality sensors.
Your 7-bullet list reads like a manual for how 99+% of all people were treated historically, and no doubt prehistorically.
Oh look, the flip side of the woke coin is here, complete with "who/whom" thinking. A few points.
1. No, this is not, in fact, how 99% of historical people were treated. While it IS fair to say that most historical people were barely literate and barely educated, this was not the result of deliberate policy on the part of their overlords, but the result of the lack of a surplus to support education.
2. The Afrikaners had no intention of driving out the black population, mostly because they were, in fact, massive jerks who wanted to make other people do their work for them. Kind of like leftists that way--"you work, labor, and earn bread, and I'll eat it." It's also worth noting that apartheid was an attempt to return to a past that never existed except in its proponents' heads, and was based on modern racial nonsense more than any sort of "tradition."
3. That's not to say that the early Afrikaners didn't pull off some pretty impressive victories against long odds. In that regard, certainly, they were "heroic."
4. I find it hilarious that people who complain about cancel culture are simping for a regime that had censorship boards and a secret police. Makes it obvious that what ticks them off is that they're not the ones holding the whip.
Importing Africans is fatal to any society; so is invading lands occupied by Africans. The Boers should have stayed among their own people in The Netherlands. American settlers should have picked their own cotton. I believe it was another South African who remarked ruefully that, "Africa always wins." It's not the soil or the climate; it's the people. I wish them all the best and hope that eventually the peoples of Africa can attain civilization. But that time seems not to be on the horizon, whether on the African continent or anywhere else where native Africans congregate. I accept that they are also children of God, but some children are incorrigible.
Somewhat tangentially, it has come to my attention - months after the fact, admittedly - that here where I live, at the Korean War memorial downtown with its little circle of flags and eternal flame and so on, there is one of the old South African union flags hoisted; and this has been the subject of an irate petition from The Usual Suspects. (The petition also did cover other "racist symbols" in town, including the city flag, which fact caused me to lose a bit of sleep last night.)
I happen to think that the SA Union flag is one of the prettier flags I've ever seen. I wouldn't fly it by choice since it does have the apartheid association in a sense built into it, and anyway SA is not my native country. However, it is making me wonder whether I might get some kind of adverse reaction when I put up the city flag as I plan to on certain anniversaries relevant to local history. The city flag is similar in color scheme to the SA union, a fact which played a role in the petition to which I referred. I happen to think that it's reasonable to have the SA Union flying at the war memorial as that was the flag under which the South African troops would have fought at that time.
The Usual Suspects aren't likely to see the city flag on my patio, since they don't tend to show themselves in these parts, but it's not impossible. Its similarity to the South African former flag is simply because of the old Dutch element common to both.
"Was apartheid bad" isn't the question in 2021, the real question is: is what replaced apartheid better or worse? South Africa is a shithole and getting worse, just like Rhodesia before it. When you cut past the hand-wringing and virtue signaling you are left with an inescapable conclusion that Africans simply are not cut out for self-governance in a modern society. Not in Africa, not in Haiti, not in Detroit or Baltimore or East St. Louis. That makes modern White people all twitchy because it is hate speech or some other contemporary nonsense but it isn't less true because it upsets some people's delicate sensibilities.
I am reminded of a famous quote of Winston Churchill: "History will look upon me favorably, for I intend to write it." Fair and balanced history is an illusion that will always bear severe examination and multiple questions of historiography.
That said, I hope it is not too off topic to say: Welcome to the USA Peter. We hope that your adopted country can someday return to it's founding principles. I've been saying since 2008 that if the country survives the Obama years intact, it will be the ultimate testament to the wisdom of our founders. That verdict is still out, and at present, it's not looking good. But I will never give up the hope that redemption is possible.
Adolf Hitler did nothing wrong. The fact of the matter that there was a certain group in control of finance, banking, and the legal system in Germany. This country was being crushed by inflation and women and children were prostituting themselves. Hitler also demolished all the tranny nonsense. He also put down the communist, which was a very real threat. There were concentration camps, but the gas chamber stories are total nonsense. Never mind the thousands killed by allied bombing of German civilians.
WWII in many ways was another White European tribal war. The Poles, Czechs, Germans, etc. all had some beef with each other. To be blunt, I don't think giving Stalin Eastern Europe was really that great of a deal.
Let us not forget that the (((Bolsheviks))) killed millions of White Christian Ukrainians, but nothing to see here, right?
As for South Africa, the blacks have taken over everything and it's a disaster. Giving over an entire country to African Communist was not a great idea either.
McChuck is correct. The legitimacy of a nation is that it protects the interests of its people. That's a singular usage of "people". Mixing peoples is just as bad as mixing economies and philosophies.
That's also why "Pick your own damn cotton" is a rule for survival. Importing cheap workers to enhance profits is long term suicide, and anyone that advocates for it is an enemy of the people of a nation. It does not matter what nation.
It seems clear that apartheid may have died out officially, but still has its supporters. My own experience was in multiple business trips to East Africa, but those attitudes were still apparent even there. I'll only quote two examples from my own experience. The most innocuous were in hotels where the waiters actually competed to serve me - because I was the only white man they'd met who bothered to learn their own language and use it. Another was in the local 'Whites Club' that I was taken to, where I did my best to ignore one expat who proudly claimed to have lived in the city for 30 years but never learnt the language. His reason was 'I have a houseboy who speaks English and does all the hopping etc, so I don't need to talk to the locals'.
There are always those who think themselves entitled to rule, simply because of their skin color, their birth, their wealth, or any other random factor. Progress in history is made when these people are nullified. History is full of "great" men whose only skill was piling up corpses to make themselves a throne; we will not survive if we continue to venerate this ideal.
South Africa's folly was continuing their policies back the acceptable time and doing so openly. Had they done like the USA and addicted their black population to drugs (while making drugs illegal), or extended the franchise and simply found excuses to deny it, or promised some token concessions, then rolled them back, perhaps their reign might have lasted longer. But that would have required self-reflection, and white identity politics is a hell of a trip. It's a wonder the place didn't wind up like Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.
I will simply note that the only relatively stable societies I can find in history have been homogeneous. However, this does not guarantee that the society survives for a long term.
You are aware that the White man did essentially the same thing to the native American Indian tribes aren't you? Congratulations for insulting about half of Western civilization.
@Stuart: The difference between white settlers in America, and white settlers in South Africa, is that the former were the overwhelming majority in their country. By democracy or by war or by any other means, their majority was going to dominate, one way or the other. In South Africa, the situation was reversed. White settlers were never more than 10% of the population, and usually less - I think 7-8% is a generally accepted figure in the 1970's, and it grew less after that as demographics took over.
I'm not saying demographics justify atrocity; they don't. However, the outcome of any given national situation is often determined by that factor, whether we like it or not. You're quite right that what white Americans did to native Americans was just as wrong as what white Afrikaners did to native South Africans.
As for "insulting about half of Western civilization", I don't think I have. Those who see a general insult in what I said are welcome to be unhappy about it, but it wasn't intended that way. As the old saying goes, "If the cap fits, wear it."
From the Wikipedia article for "White South Africans": 1904 Census showed the white population as 21.6% of the total, 1911 Census as 22.7% and 1960 as 19.3%. Then a long slow decline in percentage terms and a peak in total white population of 5.2 million in 1995.
@icr: Beware the official census figures. They were all too often racially motivated and manipulated, by the colonial power as much as by an independent South Africa.
Peter: I could take your same arguments and apply them to America so long as I choose the right year. After all, the colonists were largely outnumbered by the natives, even if we include colonists of other nations (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Dutch, just to name a few off my head in the New World). History is a foreign country.
As a former man of the cloth, you should know well that the Mitzvot (what many Christians call the Law of Moses) provided for slavery. The Book of Joshua dealt with slave and servant classes as well. Would you condemn and disavow Joshua for what he did in his service to the L-rd? Would you condemn and disavow the Word for allowing slavery, polygamy, patriarchy, or other modern evils? How dare those horrible Israelites keep slaves and deny rights to the people they conquered, right? How dare they conquer in the name of their god, right? They should have just stayed in the Wilderness and not colonize those lands like bigots and Hebrew supremacists, right? Be careful following your arguments to their natural and logical conclusions, author.
@Mussorgsky112: Sadly, your argument fails, because the New Covenant supplanted and replaced the Old. "In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free..." and so on. The architects of apartheid were very fond of quoting the Old Testament to support their warped, twisted philosophies. That didn't make them right.
The same applies to all devotees of any religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, whatever) who warp and twist its teachings to justify and/or support what they want to do. Human beings are very good at making it sound as if God wants them to do what they want to do anyway. That doesn't mean any of them are right. See my remarks on the Paris terror attacks of November 2015:
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2015/11/paris-and-pain-of-being-human.html
As for New World colonists being outnumbered, only for a very few years, and then only locally. They only encountered a few tribes, and grew to outnumber them very rapidly. Before long, the number of colonists and their descendants far outnumbered the Native Americans in and adjacent to the districts that had been colonized.
"If you were treated like a slave, a sub-human and a pariah in your own country;
If you were stripped of your citizenship and civil rights in the country of your birth because of the color of your skin;
If your education depended upon your skin color for its quality (or lack thereof);
If your choice of what to do with your life, or where to live, or who to love or marry, was restricted by your race;
If you were denied free travel inside your own country, forced to carry an internal passport and subject to instant arrest if you forgot it at home or lost it;
If you were forced to accept menial labor as the only work open to you, paid a starvation wage, and denied the right to bring your family to live with you near your place of work;
If you were savagely beaten and imprisoned if you dared to protest such restrictions and indignities, or even shot out of hand rather than arrested;
would you calmly accept those things? Or would you take up arms to overthrow the system that placed such restrictions upon you?
I know what my answer would have been, in my younger years. It would have been the same as Nelson Mandela's in the 1960's."
Apologies for the only barely on topic question, but I'm interested in your thoughts on how things might soon turn here in the Woke People's Republic of America, now that half of the things on your list are currently being done to whites, Christians, and especially outspoken white Christians (doubly so if they happen to be 'fucking white males').
Peter,
"As for New World colonists being outnumbered, only for a very few years, and then only locally. They only encountered a few tribes, and grew to outnumber them very rapidly. Before long, the number of colonists and their descendants far outnumbered the Native Americans in and adjacent to the districts that had been colonized."
What isn't much talked about in US history, is that the various tribes in North America, especially in the North East/original Colonies area, were heavily depleted by various infectious diseases brought over from Europe. I can recall reading stories about explorers and colonists encountering Indian settlements, and returning a couple weeks later for trading purposes and finding corpses spread throughout the settlement. Those who moved on to visit others further into the countryside found similar disasters, due to Indians fleeing the diseases and spreading them to other encampments. Surviving Indians, for the most part, lacked the numbers to counter the colonists to any significant extent.
Is now a bad time to point out that the certain group of people who controlled Germany's economy were mostly German aristocrats, who were, ah, not Jewish?
Never mind the fact that most Bolsheviks weren't Jewish either.
Actually read some history. You might learn something.
A fascinating claim, one that's been made by every imperial power in history when they take over a country, from the Romans in Britain to the English in Ireland to whites in Africa.
I realize it upsets your delicate sensibilities to hear that you're spouting standard propaganda, but that isn't my problem.
"No, this is not, in fact, how 99% of historical people were treated."
Nonsense. Slavery was ubiquitous. The serfs, or peasants, were given no say in how they were governed or treated. Tribes slaughtered tribes and enslaved any survivors thought useful. It's just how human societies operated. And we've got millennia of evolution to hardwire that into our brains.
"There were concentration camps, but the gas chamber stories are total nonsense." - Lab Manager
And the tin-foil hat crazies come out of the woodwork. Whatever else he said is totally lost, accurate or not. Genocidal apologists. People who think like this can't be trusted about anything.
@ruralcounsel: And that's why I generally leave comments up, even if I disagree with them. I let people see for themselves the way others think, and how they express it. It speaks for itself, and people with common sense will understand what's behind it.
The "heroic white tribe" is not a good way to look at it. The tribe part looks accurate to me, though. Didn't the Boers behave pretty much the same way that many African (and other) tribes have behaved towards other tribes throughout history? In southern Africa alone, both the Boers and the various migrating Bantu peoples treated the San peoples appallingly.
Yes, the Torah regulates slavery and polygamy, both of which have been pervasive human practices over most of history and most of the world.
The legal obligations it imposes on slaveholders are much more humane and acceptable to modern sensibilities than those in force even centuries later under Roman law. The same is true for its marital laws. Would it have been better that there should have been no laws and no accountability at all?
Compared to quite a few (black) African tribes' treatment of the defeated, the Boers were quite merciful.
And I notice that a lot of the same people who weep endlessly for the South African blacks seem to think that the Palestinians "had it coming."
I was saddened, and more than a little angry
Of course you are. American Renaissance isn't reflexively anti-White, anti-Christian, and anti-Western. You're mad at anyone who knows that White Christians have been the greatest force for good in this world and that whatever "monsters" existed among them weren't unique to those people. White Christians are unique in that they are the ONLY people to ever build a society where EVERYONE prospers and EVERYONE rises above subsistence. Literally, no one else in all of human history ever did anything like that.
If you were treated like a slave, a sub-human and a pariah in your own country;
There was no nation or country in South Africa before the Afrikaners.
If you were stripped of your citizenship and civil rights in the country of your birth because of the color of your skin
There was no citizenship, nor civil rights, in South Africa before the Afrikaners.
If your education depended upon your skin color for its quality
There was no education in South Africa before the Afrikaners.
If your choice of what to do with your life, or where to live, or who to love or marry, was restricted by your race
This was how it always was in all of Africa. Afrikaners did not create such an idea. And this got worse after the Afrikaners lost power in South Africa.
If you were denied free travel inside your own country, forced to carry an internal passport and subject to instant arrest if you forgot it at home or lost it
Same as above.
If you were forced to accept menial labor as the only work open to you, paid a starvation wage, and denied the right to bring your family to live with you near your place of work
The only work available before Afrikaners were menial and hard labor that produced just enough not to starve and there hasn't been anyone in South Africa on the brink of starvation for nearly a century now. That's 100% due to the civilization Afrikaners built.
f you were savagely beaten and imprisoned if you dared to protest such restrictions and indignities, or even shot out of hand rather than arrested
This is the way of all of Africa. Afrikaners massively reduced this and made life better for everyone.
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