Afrikaner Survival Under Black Rule (Part II)

In Part I, Dan Roodt explained that Afrikaners are a white nation held together by language, history, tradition, and respect for their ancestors. The black rulers of South Africa are trying to suppress Afrikaner nationalism, which they see as a threat to black dominance and national unity. Dr. Roodt describes the Afrikaner battle for survival as a microcosm of the entire West, which also faces a rising alien tide.

Understanding Africans

Centuries in Africa have given the Boer a racial perspective unlike that of other whites. In a passage that would today be considered scandalous, the Afrikaner historian Gustav Preller wrote in 1937 (Daglemier in Suid-Afrika ) that, “although science would be sluggish in pointing out a remarkable physiological difference between the Bantu and the white man of European descent, it is certainly curious that the Afrikaners of a hundred years ago were aware of this natural difference . . . In this respect [refusing miscegenation] the Afrikaner has always been alone among all the European peoples that have come into contact somewhere in the world with natural [indigenous] man.”

Another historian, Hermann Giliomee, author of a recent mammoth volume called The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, has sought to explain Afrikaner race feeling by evoking the role of the Boer woman who, in the early days of the Cape, discouraged the liaisons between white men and slave women that were tolerated in other slave societies. Dutch women jointly owned their husbands’ estates and were often better informed and educated than the men. They saw to it that competition from slaves and natives for white men did not arise. If a man fathered a child with a slave woman it was grounds for divorce, and served as a further deterrent against miscegenation.

Some mixed marriages did take place in the first decades of the new Dutch colony because of the acute shortage of white women, but they soon came to an end. As Mr. Giliomee has written elsewhere, “Taking a black wife evidently entailed such a loss of status that it was considered better to remain a bachelor. European men unable to find a European wife tended not to marry. A study of the 1731 census showed that 59 percent of Cape Town’s European men and 51 percent in the rural western Cape never married.”

During the apartheid years, English-speaking liberals used to joke that Afrikaners had fathered the mixed-race Colored population. Why else would they speak Afrikaans? As noted above, some miscegenation did take place during the early years of Dutch rule. However, most Coloreds are not descendants of black-white mixes, but of intermarriage between Oriental slaves from Indonesia and Madagascar with the local hunter-gatherers known as Khoi-khoi or Bushmen. Although classed as a single population group under the apartheid system, the Coloreds are extremely heterogeneous, running from pure Khoi stock to Cape Malays who practice Islam. During the first 150 years of European settlement, the hunter-gatherers lost their own Khoi languages and assimilated to the early Afrikaner culture, as did the Oriental slaves.

According to statistics published in the 1930s before the legal prohibition of mixed marriages under apartheid, there were fewer than 10 black-white marriages per year in the entire country. Of these, almost all were white men — usually English — marrying black women. In quite a few years, marriages between white women and black men were officially recorded as zero, or one or two per year. Even now in South Africa, it is so unusual for an Afrikaner to marry a black that it usually makes the front page of the newspapers. At once or twice a year, it would be close to the historical norm, despite enormous governmental and media pressure for Afrikaners to “fuse” with Africans. Afrikaner-Colored marriages are only slightly more common, and occur only in the Cape, never in the north.

A columnist from the liberal Sunday Times visiting Stellenbosch University complained recently that she saw no mixed couples, whereas at the English-language University of Cape Town a few miles away, race-mixing is fashionable. The Beeld newspaper in Johannesburg runs a “bride of the month” competition, with many photographs of Afrikaner brides published every month, and I have yet to see one of these brides marrying a black or Colored man.

Television soap operas are, of course, a mixed-race utopia where all races are represented in all social situations. The effect of this government propaganda has been to alienate many viewers from television, or at least for them to see it for what it is: a highly artificial representation of South African life.

According to one retired newspaper editor, blacks fear Afrikaners more than any other whites because we know and understand them so intimately. In previous times, most Afrikaners spoke African languages, giving them insight into a magical, irrational world — a domain of spirits, witchcraft and superstition. Even the most liberal Afrikaners have a sense of black differences in mentality and physical characteristics, and although they would not make too much of them, they admit such differences exist.

The ANC hates whites, but hates Afrikaners even more, and the reasons are not hard to find. The black revolutionary Frantz Fanon wrote that the most common sentiment Africans used to feel for their white colonial masters was envy. Millions of black South Africans envy English-speaking whites their wealth and prosperity, but in the case of the Afrikaner, black envy reaches pathological extremes as they gaze upon excellence, not only in economics, but also in sports, in the maintenance of an indigenous Germanic language and culture, academic and scientific prowess, social cohesion and disciplined behavior. One merely has to visit the nearest Afrikaans school, or look at the results of the end-of-year examinations to understand black envy of a people they are intent on destroying once and for all.

Whatever form destruction takes, its vehicle will be demography. Whereas Johannesburg in the 1940s was still a European city whose population was less than a third black, the reverse is now true. Downtown Johannesburg has been completely taken over by blacks, provoking one of the largest recent instances of white flight in the world. Like almost all Westerners, Afrikaners have a declining birthrate of approximately 1.4 children per woman, and a shrinking population is further depleted by emigration. Violence and race preferences serve the black cause: either fearful whites emigrate to escape crime and mayhem, or they send their children abroad to get jobs.

Once the white population falls below a certain critical mass that precludes serious resistance, Mr. Mbeki will make his move just as his friend Robert Mugabe has in Zimbabwe, and drive the remaining whites out or perhaps even commit organised genocide. Either way, there will be no international outcry, let alone intervention. Years of propaganda have seen to it that international opinion will view such action by South African blacks as “getting their own back,” and will conclude that “the whites are receiving their just desserts for apartheid.”

In the meantime, part of the campaign to marginalize whites — specifically the Boers — is the imposition of African symbolism and values. There is even a quest for Afrocentric science, law and medicine. Just as the Soviet Union ignored the laws of science and practised “proletarian science” during the Lysenko era, the South African government is spending millions of mainly white taxpayer money on what it calls the “African Renaissance.” This is a fundamentalist revival whose objective is the replacement of Western precepts of science and law.

The government-funded African Renaissance Institute has branches all over the country. Its offices are lavish and its personnel wear designer clothes and drive luxury cars. The head of the branch at the University of South Africa recently derided South Africa’s Western legal system, based on Roman-Dutch law, as “neo-colonial,” and called for its abolition. African tribal customs were recognised by former white governments when it came to settling dowry disputes or clashes over tribal land, but the idea that a sophisticated economy and society should return to palavering elders under a tree beggars belief.

Traditional ideas and superstitions are definitely in resurgence. Patients going to witchdoctors will soon be able to file insurance claims, and a recent article in the local edition of Sports Illustrated described the use of muti or “medicine” in the National Soccer League, where players and teams routinely cast spells and drink potions before matches. Christianity has had little success in stamping out animal and sometimes even human sacrifice. Police statistics record an average of 400 so-called “muti murders” every year, in which body parts are harvested for magic rituals. Progressive theologians, both black and white, have stopped fighting muti, and are calling for the reconciliation of ancestor worship and Christianity. Some have proposed animal sacrifices in churches.

The subversion of the South African takes many forms, and as we saw in the case of Kleinboer, the Afrikaner is not exempt. People as diverse as Nietzsche and the French-American historian Jacques Barzun (From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 2001) have accused the West of decadence. As Westerners, albeit also white Africans, Afrikaners share this decadence. The loose morals, lawlessness, and free availability of drugs that have accompanied black rule have further weakened them. Many have become prostitutes and drug addicts, others luxuriate in gay or interracial sex, or they have become just as enamored of flashy consumer goods as their black rulers — materialistic, Americanized, deracinated.

Other Afrikaners are collaborationists who will bend to the black man’s will even to the detriment of their own people, language, and culture. Such is Dr. Theuns Eloff, the president of the last remaining Afrikaans university, in Potchefstroom, who recently succumbed to pressure to merge with a third-rate black institution so that his campus may be swamped by blacks demanding instruction in English. “We had no choice,” is their favorite refrain.

Abandoned by the West

The tragic fall of Afrikanerdom from having been almost a ruling aristocracy, with the English-speakers providing the merchant class in Africa’s only industrial power, is in no small part due to the fanatical opposition of most Western governments. South African whites have made many mistakes, but they are today ruled by Africans mainly at the behest of their Western kin, who until recently vilified and ostracized them, even imposing economic boycotts and arms sanctions as if they were Saddam Hussein.

The reasons for this are complex, and range from the worldwide syndrome of white guilt to the sheer incompetence of Afrikaner leadership after the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966. Verwoerd did his utmost to implement a policy that would ultimately have led to the creation of an ethnic federation in South Africa, guaranteeing the Afrikaners’ own future as well as that of other whites in an independent state free of black domination. After his death, however, the most talented Afrikaners preferred medicine, law and business to politics. Perhaps this was understandable in a country where any white politician could be certain of few things, except being misquoted, vilified, caricatured and condemned by most of the world media.

When black activist Steve Biko died in police custody in 1977, this single African death on a continent where millions are routinely slaughtered in genocides, civil wars, organised famine, etc., caused a worldwide outcry. Since 1994, at least 1,500 Afrikaner farmers have been killed in horrible atrocities by marauding black gangs responding to the ANC’s slogan, “kill the Boer, kill the farmer,” yet not a single editorial has been written in the West condemning these killings.

One Afrikaner who understood the intimate relationship between white dominance in South Africa and Western dominance on the global scale, was G.D. Scholtz. He was a personal friend of Hendrik Verwoerd, and wrote an elaborate philosophy of apartheid as well as a multi-volume Afrikaner political history. In his 1964 book with the prophetic title, ‘n Swart Suid-Afrika? (A Black South Africa?), Scholtz warned that white people worldwide were no longer in their previously dominant position, something which would have grave consequences. “One of the greatest tragedies regarding South Africa’s whites,” he wrote, “is precisely the fact that so many of them remain in complete ignorance as to the great change that has occurred in the world and how their own position as a privileged aristocracy has been affected by it . . . In this ignorance — and consequently also negligence — that so many whites display toward the major changes in the world, lies the biggest danger that currently threatens the civilization at the southern tip of Africa.”

In the early sixties when G.D. Scholtz was writing, the notion that South Africa could be governed by blacks was as farfetched as the United States being governed by Nigerians, but he correctly predicted that the threat would not come from anything blacks could do, but from international pressure to give up power. Despite decades of advance warning in this and other publications, South Africa’s whites blundered along until they ultimately surrendered simply to please their Western kin.

Afrikaners must, in turn, take some blame for the collapse of Rhodesia because, as a prelude to selling out their own people, their leader at the time, John Vorster, stabbed the white Rhodesians in the back in an attempt to appease Great Britain. Just a few years later, after having turned over the second most prosperous country in Africa to Mr. Mugabe and his thugs, Britain fixed its sights on South Africa.

After betrayal by the West, demography has been the great weight on Afrikaner shoulders. On the first page of his book, Scholtz cited the South African population census of 1960 that recorded 15,841,128 people, of which 10,807,808 were Bantu as they were then called; 3,067,638 were white, 1,314,392 Colored, and 477,414 Asian, including Indians. Even the most radical demographic projections at the time did not foresee a rise in the black population to its current level of 36 million, nor did it anticipate the Colored demographic explosion to almost four million, while the white figure barely crept up to 4,500,000.

Since the black takeover, South African census figures are no longer accurate. Perhaps deliberately, as many as one million whites were not counted in the 2001 census. Whether whites are five or six million makes little difference, given the total population of 45 million, of which black Africans are just under 80 percent. A hundred years ago the black-white ratio was less than two to one, and now it is six to one and getting worse. For the next few years, AIDS deaths will keep the population from growing, but after that it is projected to double again by the year 2025.

There is also a steady stream of immigration from other African countries, with some estimates putting the number of illegal immigrants at ten million. A Western government would have tightened controls and sealed the borders. The ANC plans to abolish all visa requirements for other Africans, and the ultra-liberal/communist Constitutional Court has just ruled that foreigners qualify for welfare payments and health benefits. Up to a third of blacks may well be foreign-born, and have simply walked across the border from other African countries.

It is true that since Verwoerd’s assassination in 1966, Afrikaners have been making concessions to black South Africa so consistently that the 1994 vote to give them the country may seem inevitable in retrospect. However, the same trend has been seen in the West since 1920. Every European or North American country has made one concession after another with regard to immigration or race preferences. Here and there the tide has been temporarily halted on minor issues, but the trend continues. The influential Italian postmodernist author Umberto Eco, representing mainstream intellectual opinion in the West, already accepts European decline and the disappearance of the white race, writing in 2001: “Europe will become a multiracial continent — or a ‘colored’ one, if you prefer. That’s how it will be, whether you like it or not.” In this sense, Afrikaners will have to liberate themselves from the West and its pessimism if they are to escape the prevailing trend of white surrender.

In his often brilliant 1975 essay on Afrikaner history, The Puritans in Africa, W.A. de Klerk describes Afrikaner civilization as “a mere fragment” of that vaster edifice known as the West, but it is a fascinating fragment, well worth preserving. The Afrikaner struggle for survival under the domination of vastly more prolific and thus more numerous Third-World peoples, mostly African, but also Indians and mixed-race Coloreds, descendants of slaves and Khoi-Khoi hunter-gatherers, foreshadows the coming survival contest of the West itself.

By a curious historical and demographic twist, the percentage of white people in South Africa — nine percent — corresponds precisely to the portion of whites as a share of the global population. South Africa is a microcosm of the world. The processes of demographic expansion, territorial occupation, and moral and intellectual subversion we have suffered are similar to what the entire West is experiencing. Thabo Mbeki’s vociferous calls for an end to “global apartheid” and a free sharing of world resources among the developed and undeveloped worlds may sound extreme today, but in the context of the dominant values of our time they are by no means outlandish. George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schroeder may also undergo a “conversion” like F.W. de Klerk, throwing open their countries to a global system in which a few hundred million ageing whites will forever be subject to the young and growing populations of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

We Always Had a Choice

“We had no choice,” is the phrase heard over and over again in the recent history of South Africa. Yet we always had a choice. The Goethe of Afrikanerdom, a poet named N.P. van Wyk Louw, published a famous essay entitled “Die ewige trek” (The Eternal Trek) in 1939, in which he wrote that “the entire coming into being of a small nation is a gamble. It must rise up between the major powers like a small plant between the feet of great cattle. At any moment it may be crushed. Let it beware if it thinks that its ‘rights’ alone will protect it in a world of great power moves.” He goes on to discuss major turning points in Afrikaner history, showing that upon every such occasion there were two equally attractive alternatives, the one rational and logical, the other emotional and irrational. At each point the Afrikaner had gambled on the irrational alternative and won.

He wrote that one must sometimes choose the rational course and sometimes the irrational one, not knowing which is which, nor being certain of the outcome. If Louw had been alive in 1994, his theory would have been vindicated, for the Afrikaners chose the rational course of conceding to world opinion, and lost, horribly so. If they had chosen to persevere, to call the black nationalist bluff of revolution or outright war, they would today have had many more choices.

Rationally, the Afrikaners do not stand a chance against South Africa’s 40 million blacks or against the 600 million in sub-Saharan Africa, predicted soon to reach a billion despite AIDS, wars, and famine. However, at the Battle of Blood River the Voortrekkers were also outnumbered at least 30 to one by Zulus. When the Boers took on the British Empire, according to one estimate, they were outnumbered two hundred to one. If the British had not played dirty with their concentration camps for women and children, they would probably have had to abandon the war, and South Africa today would still be an Afrikaner republic. Without English liberals and communists to propagate their cause, blacks would never have gained power.

So Louw’s gamble of the small nation continues. Some Afrikaners are doing the rational thing and emigrating, others are collaborating with the regime in the forlorn hope that they and their families will be spared. More and more, however, I see the most talented Afrikaners opting for the irrational, to challenge the black power ruling over them, to insist on their birthright at the cost of being denigrated as racists and rightists.

Even left-wing and liberal authors who castigated the old apartheid government are starting to criticise the new black one. Hermann Giliomee, for one, was a liberal critic of apartheid ostracized by the old Afrikaner Nationalist establishment, yet he has played a leading role in the current struggle for Afrikaner rights, and, through his book, rekindled international interest in Afrikaner history. Small groups of dedicated activists are rising to the challenge to make our message heard in the world, knowing that the major powers will always support black South Africa, if only to keep their own multicultural societies from exploding under them. The Afrikaner is the scapegoat of the West, and has been put on the altar to die, as the price the West has to pay for its colonial history and resulting sense of guilt.

A left-wing French philosopher visiting South Africa two years ago took one look at the place and told me, “you Afrikaners should call out an independent republic in five years’ time, and do your own thing.” That is the obvious answer, but to make the psychological jump to Afrikaner secession after a century of South Africanism would not be easy. Afrikaner farmers still own 70 percent of the land in South Africa. The Afrikaner attachment to the land acts as an impediment to leaving parts of it to attain freedom in just one corner of the country.

Also, the ANC government is fearful of any Afrikaner attempt to break out of its fatal embrace, for it would lose half of its taxes and most of its intellectual slaves, possibly scuppering the system of institutionalized parasitism known as the South African economy. It has recently passed a new bill defining as “terrorism” any attempt to alter the constitutional order of the country. Without Afrikaners, South Africa in its present condition might collapse and become another Zimbabwe.

There is another theory about Afrikaner history. I would call it the “lessons theory.” Afrikaners are probably as likely as any people to treat blacks as equals, take their utterances at face value, and so on. However, on at least four occasions they have learnt very painfully that being under the power of blacks translates into utter horror. The first period was in the Eastern Cape during the 1820s when the combination of lax British colonial rule and zealous foreign missionaries siding with the Xhosa tribesmen against indigenous whites led to the burning of farmsteads and an insecure existence like that of South Africa today. This triggered the Great Trek into the interior, where Afrikaners encountered the warring Zulu tribe for the first time. Here they experienced the treacherous killing of Piet Retief and his men by King Dingaan in 1838, and the subsequent slaughter of the women and children at Blaauwkrans and Weenen, where the brains of white babies were dashed out on wagon wheels by Zulu warriors. This second lesson is indelibly marked upon the Afrikaner consciousness. Vengeance was taken at Blood River, the quintessential racial confrontation of the 19th century.

The third lesson was during the Anglo-Boer war, when Britain armed up to a hundred thousand black men to terrorize the Boer women and children. This piece of history has been carefully suppressed, but many Boer women were massacred and others were raped by marauding black “soldiers,” resulting in the birth of mixed-race children. In the northern parts of the country, this is often cited as a cause of the revulsion against race-mixing that endured until perhaps 10 or 20 years ago.

Now, for the fourth time in our history, we are experiencing black terror first hand, and despite the ideological brainwashing by the media and the government through the schools and universities, every Afrikaner knows what our most recent Nobel prize winner, J.M. Coetzee, an anglicized Afrikaner, wrote in his 1999 Afro-pessimistic novel Disgrace: “they do rape.” While the newspapers omit the race of perpetrators in their daily reports on South Africa’s constant wave of killings, robberies and sex crimes, and liberal commentators blame the crimes on “patriarchy,” “apartheid,” or “the cult of maleness,” Afrikaners are not hoodwinked. The race of any white who commits a violent crime is always reported so it can be said, “see, whites also do it, sometimes;” therefore all those other crimes must be committed by blacks.

The Afrikaners’ experiment in applying mainstream Western race theory in South Africa by submitting to rule by black Africans is turning out to be the worst mistake in their history, apart from the siege of Ladysmith, which was a waste of troops that enabled the British safely to land their forces in 1900, instead of having to take the country from the sea. According to conservative estimates, 30,000 Afrikaners have already been killed by blacks since 1994, more than the number of women and children who died in the British camps from 1899 to 1902, and 30 times more than the number of soldiers who died in the Angolan war against the joint Russian, Cuban and Angolan forces over more than a decade. For the fourth time, Afrikanerdom is receiving a bloody awakening because it failed to read its own history.

It may be that the anti-Afrikaner season in the West is bottoming out, and that we are on the way up again. But the price in human lives and suffering is as high as it has ever been. In 410 AD the Romans submitted without resistance to barbarian invasion. Was the Western imposition of black rule in South Africa a decade ago a similar sign of effete surrender to the Third World? The drama unfolding in South Africa may determine the future of the West, and 1994 may yet become the date that marked the beginning of the end for Western peoples as they succumbed to the syndrome of white guilt and penance for 500 years of excellence.