A modern Great Trek. Wikus De Wet/AFP via Getty Images.
“Our path to America is wide open!” That was my cousin’s joking response to the news that she could claim refugee status in the United States. She lives on a farm in Gauteng, South Africa, where her husband grows vegetables for restaurants and supermarkets. They are Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers who arrived in the 17th century. This is my background, too, though I grew up in Britain. Last month, the Trump administration made a dramatic intervention in South African politics by claiming that the government had “blatantly discriminated against ethnic minority Afrikaners,” and promised families like my cousin’s the chance to resettle in America.
The White House was responding, most obviously, to the passage through South Africa’s parliament of the Expropriation Act, a bill allowing the state to confiscate land for reasons of public interest. This includes the pursuit of racial equity, and in some circumstances it will now be legal to seize land without compensation. Though my cousin’s comment was ironic, it also conveyed a hint of nervousness. As her husband put it, somewhere at the back of their minds there does lurk the possibility that one day the state will simply confiscate their land. Prominent politicians have been threatening to do so for years — and not just firebrands such as Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters party. In 2017, to give one example, then-President Jacob Zuma promised to strip white landowners of their property.
Understandably, then, many Afrikaners will feel relieved to have Trump’s support. And yet, by singling them out as victims, the American President is effectively claiming them as members of a Western civilisation that he is now the guardian of. This doesn’t do justice to the subtleties of the Afrikaans identity, and nor is it likely to win them many friends in the country where they reside.
Indeed, in South Africa as elsewhere, Trump’s comments were immediately mocked. The rebuttal was obvious: the country’s white minority, which includes English-speakers as well as Afrikaners, still enjoy a vastly higher standard of living than their black and coloured compatriots. It has been widely reported that white South Africans, despite making up just 7% of the population, own over 70% of the country’s private land, though the import of these figures is not primarily about economic justice; in England, for comparison, half the land belongs to less than 1% of the population.
The issue, rather, is historical and cultural. Apartheid, the system of white minority rule that ended three decades ago, is still regularly invoked in political discourse. Though often dressed up in Marxist jargon, land redistribution is both promised and demanded as restitution for historical dispossession. At the same time, land carries a special significance for many Afrikaners as well, since farming is a profession and way of life with which they identify to a unique extent. “Boer” — the colloquial term for Afrikaner — literally means farmer.
More importantly, I’m not sure that people in the West citing ownership statistics genuinely understand the situation of South Africa’s white farmers. Take my cousin again. In some ways, she and her family enjoy a very high quality of life. But 15 years ago, her first husband was murdered during a robbery at their farm, and she was dumped in the wilderness with her six week-old infant. Then she married a man whose first wife had also been murdered, on the same farm where they live now. The actual business of agriculture entails a constant struggle against a corrupt, disintegrating and ideologically hostile state. A few years ago, an illegal settlement sprang up in their area, consisting of improvised housing and such basic services as the inhabitants can provide for themselves. It now numbers thousands of people and will, they fear, soon spread onto their land.
These experiences are far from unusual: South Africa regularly sees the murder of 50 farmers each year. Over the past decade, such crimes have invited wider interest in the Afrikaner question. In particular, Western conservatives who suspect mainstream institutions of anti-white bias claim that the attacks are being ignored or downplayed. Elon Musk — himself born and raised in South Africa — has referred to the farm murders as genocide. The issue is inherently muddy due to the inconsistent nature of the crimes, and the very high levels of violence in South Africa more generally. But there are certainly many Afrikaners who resent their own government’s failure to even recognise the problem. “White farmers are regularly characterised as ‘criminals,’ ‘land thieves,’ ‘rapists,’ ‘oppressors,’ by high-ranking politicians,” Ernst van Zyl, spokesperson for the Afrikaner interest group Afriforum, tells me. “Farm murders are often characterised by incredibly brutal levels of torture. In many cases nothing is stolen.”
Arguably, though, Trump’s concern with Afrikaners has less to do with their daily lives than their status as symbols. According to the framework of post-Seventies liberal thought, Afrikaners were the archetypal villains: white invaders who subjugated the indigenous people of a foreign land. It is on this basis that it became unthinkable to express sympathy for them as a group. Trumpism is all about attacking such taboos, and overturning the moral hierarchies they imply. In this case, he is turning the logic of progressive liberalism against itself: are Afrikaners not also an ethnic minority, with all the protections that is said to entail? Can they not also suffer discrimination, and be granted the sacred status of refugees?
This tendency of outsiders to view the Afrikaners in terms of political symbolism, though reductive, is nonetheless made possible by their peculiar history and identity as a group. For centuries, they have inhabited a position of existential ambiguity, understanding themselves by turns or even simultaneously as an endangered minority and divinely sanctioned masters; as humble land-dwellers and custodians of a higher civilisation; as fundamentally both African and European. This is one of the paradoxes of the Afrikaners: their situation is singular and unclear, yet they have become a common point of reference for the expansive and passionate convictions of others.
As the historian Hermann Giliomee has written, South Africa was “unique in the world of European colonisation”. White settlers didn’t form their own self-sufficient society (as in North America or Australia), nor did they remain a small administrative and commercial elite (as in India). Rather, they dominated only in certain places, often only precariously, and even there were dependent on African labour. This last point cannot be stressed enough. The relations between Afrikaners and the peoples they encountered in Africa, whether the Khoisan inhabitants of the Western Cape region or the Bantu-speaking tribes inland, were extremely varied. Yet they were usually defined, at least in part, by the contradictory dynamic of trying to remain socially distinct while also needing these groups to serve as workers and fighting auxiliaries. This meant that Afrikaners frequently engineered situations — including, arguably, Apartheid itself — in which they exploited other populations while seeing themselves as an endangered minority.
No less important, the Afrikaners were not the only people of European descent in southern Africa. From the early 19th century, when the region began to be incorporated into the British Empire, they endured an uneasy coexistence with British settlers, numerically fewer but in most other respects much more powerful. Supremely confident in the superiority of their customs, manners and laws, the Victorians in southern Africa often looked down on the Afrikaners as primitive and backwards, and sometimes even as an inferior race. The English South African writer Olive Schreiner remarked that, as a child in the 1860s, it would have been unthinkable for her to eat food or sleep in a bed that an Afrikaner had previously touched. As late as 1946, the average Afrikaner’s income was less than half that of an English-speaking South African’s.
The British had their own bitter conflicts with African peoples, and much of their involvement in southern Africa was driven by land speculation and the mining of gold and diamonds. Yet the British at this time were also a liberal superpower. Inspired by Evangelical Christianity, they were radically committed to the welfare and basic rights, as they saw them, of non-Europeans in their empire. A major source of friction with the Afrikaners was the British insistence on protecting their workers, who included Khoisan peons and, until 1838, slaves of South Asian and African origin. In a foreshadowing of more recent events, some Afrikaners felt they were unfairly discriminated against. One of their leading figures, Piet Retief, complained in the 1830s of the “prejudice” stirred against them by “dishonest persons, under the cloak of religion, whose testimony is believed in England, to the exclusion of all evidence in our favour”.
The struggle for independence from Britain would provide crucial moments in the Afrikaner nationalist mythology. One of these was the Great Trek, when groups of Afrikaner pioneers fled the Cape Colony in their wagons through the 1830s. Some of these were wiped out by disease and battle, but others managed to establish a pair of Boer Republics beyond British grasp. Another milestone was the Boer War, fought 1898-1902, in which these states fought unsuccessfully to maintain their sovereignty from the British Empire. The people who would later become the world’s most famous oppressors were, ironically, also the first anti-imperialist freedom fighters of the 20th century.
Yet Afrikaner identity was late in finding a definite shape, and its eventual contours were far from inevitable. Even in the late 19th century, the word “Afrikaner” was used loosely and inconsistently. Few regarded Afrikaans — essentially a simplified and creolised version of Dutch — as a distinct language. In the Cape, many Afrikaans elites were loyal subjects of the British crown. As one leader put it: “I am, I hope, a patriotic Dutch-Afrikaner, but if anyone dares to touch the English flag I shall shoot him point blank.” An influential proponent of the Afrikaans language, S. J. du Toit (no relation), ended up supporting the British in the Boer War. Today, Afrikaners are not even the largest group of Afrikaans speakers. That would be the coloureds, whose mixed ancestry includes the Khoisan people of the Cape and Asian slaves from the early colonial period.
Likewise, Afrikaners are far from homogenous today. Besides the gruff farmers of popular imagination, there are cohorts of Johannesburg hipsters, artists in the Karoo Desert and suburban white-collar professionals. The South African diaspora in places like the UK and Australia numbers in the hundreds of thousands, of which a significant proportion are Afrikaners like myself. The members of this far-flung tribe certainly do not think alike, as I discovered when I canvassed opinions on Trump’s intervention. Some regard the American president almost as divine, others as Mussolini with a toupee.
Still, I get the sense that the challenges of adapting to South Africa’s crumbling state are bringing parts of the Afrikaans community closer together. At AfriForum, for instance, van Zyl talks about the twin principles of staatsbestand and selfdoen: “state-proof” and “autonomous”. These are clear in the efforts of neighbourhoods and community groups to plug gaps in basic services and infrastructure, from police patrols to road repairs. Such cooperation, together with Afrikaans schools, historical commemorations, religious belief, sports fixtures, and the all-important ritual of the braai or barbecue, have produced a kind of thick identity I’m not sure I’ve encountered in Britain.
I’ve spoken to numerous Afrikaners who have tried Europe or the United States and found life under the care of a more structured “first world” state to be suffocating and infantilising. I remember asking one such man if South Africa’s violence didn’t bother him, to which he shrugged and said that everyone dies eventually. Others, of course, are less glib. My cousin’s husband told me that he’s still excited about the country, that there is so much to enjoy — but for his children’s and grandchildren’s sake, he worries about the volatility of South African politics and the on-going deterioration of the country’s institutions.
The backing of Trump and his supporters may also turn out to be a mixed blessing. To an important degree, his gesture relies on an image of the Afrikaners as an embattled outpost of Western civilisation, about to be swallowed by the chaos of the African continent — a metaphor for the perceived threat to traditional ideals within the West itself. Insofar as this implies that somehow, after 350 years, Afrikaners still do not fully belong in Africa, it risks deepening the longstanding ambiguity of their situation, and playing into the hands of those who really would like to turf them out.
Wessie du Toit writes about culture, design and ideas. His Substack is The Pathos of Things.
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SubscribeLet’s not forget the key components of Afrikaner success: their incredible work ethic, orderliness and dogged determination. The Portuguese in Brazil had land and slaves as well.
“I’ve spoken to numerous Afrikaners who have tried Europe or the United States and found life under the care of a more structured first world state to be suffocating.”
It is easy to sympathise with this notion. We get up at the same time for work and to get the children ready for school, food shopping is Friday, visit to Mamgu (grandma) is on Sunday. Then through the week we have TV for the oldies and internet for the youngies. Most days we visit the UnHerd site to get a summary of news and opinions. All of this is really suffocating for us ‘free thinkers’. I think I’ll go out and shoot something for breakfast.
The boundaries of Afrikaaner culture and ethnicity are not clear cut. There are many white, English-speaking, South Africans who have one or two Afrikaaner grandparents or great-grandparents and thus can trace their roots in the Cape back 300 years. Yet they don’t regard themselves as Afrikaaners, nor speak much of the language.
Moreover many white South Africans with this heritage have taken ancestry DNA tests and discovered that they are a few percent Xhosa, San, or Indonesian because of intermarriage in the early days of the Cape Colony.
It doesn’t really matter how you identify, if your neighbours are persuaded to see you as an interloper they are entitled to rob (and kill).
Unfortunately, there’s a lowest common denominator thing going on here. Being colour-blind works if other groups are similarly colour-blind; but once other groups band together on the basis of race/culture/religion and start seeing you as prey, it’s suicidal not to seek out your own kind for self-defence. And if you’re heavily outnumbered… leave. Or set up enclaves.
I don’t know how many Whites remain in Zimbabwe, but – assuming I’m right that most have been driven out or have left – then I see no reason why the trajectory of anti-White sentiment in South Africa will be any different, with the same results.
Over the long-term it’s self-destructive to be an minority ethnic group which is both elite and dependant on the labour of other groups. In the end, envy will get you. I hope self-sustaining Oriana continues to grow, it’s currently too small and powerless.
If you’re not welcome somewhere, best to leave.
The historic example of those who stay is not encouraging.
I’m English and clearly not welcome in London, should I leave now?
Growing up as an Afrikaner boy, my life was structured around self improvement, family hierarchy, and belief in God. I found the culture oppressive and cruel until I moved to the UK in 1999. I now appreciate what it takes to live in an unforgiving continent.
As much as I appreciate the UK, the lack of any need for self reliance and perseverance in the face of seemingly impossible problems, stultifying. The nanny state results in an infantilized population as the article points out. It goes much further than that. If you grow up in a welfare state society, you become blind to the possibility of living life any other way (or if you do not, you frown upon it). You also become risk averse and hyper sensitive to personal problems. No wonder we have an epidemic of mental health problems among the young.
I married a Brit and my children consider themselves English. I take them back to the rural Karoo in South Africa every few years. I like them to see how their dad grew up hoping that some of the qualities my parents attempted to instill in me (often unsuccessfully) rub off on them. I think they are qualities the British once held themselves but somehow lost. And what a loss it was.
What ever happened to the Afrikaner Atomic Bomb?*
*Apparently constructed with ‘help’ from Israel, including a ‘delivery system’.
What would they do with it now? Nuke their neighbors?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident
No, ‘nuke’ Pretoria, their persecutor.
There were six nuclear bombs constructed. They were indeed made with Israeli help and were dismantled, before the ANC became the government I think.
Thank you. A rather naive mistake as it turns out.
I cannot comment on other European nations (Certain aspects of the German Ostsiedlung in Bohemia and Transylvania seem analogous) but what is described here is precisely the model that we English/Scottish Protestants applied to Gaelic Ireland. So not, putting the modern ‘Racial’ lens aside, unique at all.
The Protestant ascendancy was never self sufficient in Irealnd. It was Planted at about the same time as the Boers reached the Cape, it was spread thinly across the island of Ireland excpet in Ulster and The Pale and remained, despite the greatest efforts to attract ‘reliable’ protestant immigrants, dependant on ‘indigenous’ Irish labour right up until 1920.
see if unheard deletes this
the average IQ of a White S African is 100 ish
the average IQ of a Black S African is around 66
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289609001275
S Africa simply cannot function without Whites, but the Black Majority is not smart enough to know that.
You might think that’s racist, but it’s the reality. So Black S African’s will be easily led and destroy their country, the White S Africans should get out
There is a fundamental issue with Black Africa that no one wishes to account for, but it explains everything, the poverty, the crime, the goverments,slavery. If your national average is 66, then your best are hovering around 90 who will be the minority
That’s simply not sufficient to operate a modern country
If you hide the question, then you cannot find an answer, i don’t know if it’s solvable but this is a problem that touches Europe and the Western world. 2 billion Black African’s , who simply are incapable of operating on masse in a peaceful modern society, they can’t build power plants, create complex structures.
so Black Africa will always fail, it’s only value to the world to but it blunty is what we can dig out of the ground there
That may be true currently, but measured IQ has a lot to do with education and inculturation. At the time of WW1, Military IQ testing showed most Southern and Eastern European immigrants scoring in the 80s on IQ test, on par with black Americans, and well below native born whites. After a generation of acculturation and mandatory education, in WW2 these groups scored just as well as native born whites.
At the same time, northern, urbanized blacks scored on par with white, while southern blacks (from rural share-cropping backgrounds) drove the average down for all blacks. In a similar way, at mid-century, Sephardic Jews in Israel scored very low on IQ tests. Again, they came from isolated communities in low education, low economic development, Arab countries. Once they lived in Israel for 30 years, their IQ rose to the norm.
Black Africans may have low IQs today, but that’s heavily driven by lack of education, urbanization, and a culture that does not reward or promote academic pursuits. They’re not doomed to stay that way. That’s where the Gov’t should be focused, but it’s easier to buy votes through corruption and racism.
You may find this interesting:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to
Various environmental factors should be considered. Not just education, but malnutrition, pollution and disease. The general consensus is that environmental features aren’t sufficient to explain the gaps.
It’s bizarre that people are so reflexively against the idea of racial differences in intelligence.
Most people accept that black dominance in various sports is not due to cultural factors. East Africans and West Africans are physically very different from each other, and they excel at different sports (long-distance running and sprinting, respectively).
Our evolution is shaped by our ancestral environment. It would be very strange if that only applied from the neck down.
There is no ancestral environment that didn’t reward intelligence. Intelligence always improves survivability.
Culture is far more likely to be the defining factor. Why else should dirt poor Asian kids from poverty stricken regions outperform in school? Asians aren’t generally more intelligent than whites. Look at relative economic and scientific development. The kids just work harder, just like Jewish kids 2 and 3 generations ago.
Perhaps cultural values lead to evolutionary changes as well.
Culturally driven sexual selection would tend to favour those qualities valued by the culture. If your culture values intelligence (or competence or coconsciousness) your mating preferences would lean that way as well. Perhaps some cultures simply don’t value those things as much.
BTW East Asians average higher intelligence than Europeans but not as high as Ashkenazi Jews.
There are different ways for a man to ensure his genes survive to the next generation.
One strategy is to find a good wife and do everything you can to ensure your children are safe and well fed. At northern latitudes, you need a certain amount of resourcefulness, forward planning and deferred gratification to survive the winter. These correlate with general intelligence.
In less extreme environments, where food is abundant year round, intelligence is less important than other traits like strength, endurance and aggression. At the extreme, men may pursue an antisocial strategy to maximise grandchildren: murder and rape.
I would like to see the same IQ test administered to northern American blacks and southern American whites.
One of the things it is forbidden to study in the US is the 10% IQ difference between whites and blacks even when class, education and every other criteria is allowed for.
Precisely, and exactly what the late Professor Hans Eysenck said some years ago now.
Ah, Eysenck! His treatment was surely the start of “cancellation culture”. It’s success back then, and the cowardice of all relevant “authority” to prevent it, engendered our current censorship of free speech.
Exactly!
But off course Eysenck and Peter Fenwick and others were absolutely correct.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3PXJVBDDQACIT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.53oO94sYR9fUUpUBC4BtDASBvcecAqzcTfwf_OBxRpRlPYjck7uTYP-DES6fzIBAcTtUdj9MEYNLVzK78uAX4W8H3ROSWtcUptWwzYlRCKwwcY9mJ8SZ2QRUK0SSNtWCcFoJ4bck8hekMykQiiWI66TVQ-YCqF54HC1FXbsS335dp4_dgSUtAelkIJ4T3kAkfIVPSLX–Ad-rg8zFWn55fvTm6qSlHGjSNT2XBYPSWo.BEESn8f9DsQhmINR5CuGf4H2ldqs9s5lY0RPS1eVM8I&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+bell+curve&qid=1741259734&sprefix=the+bell+curve%2Caps%2C66&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Whiteness-Original-Sin-Jim-Goad/dp/1729700411/ref=sr_1_2?crid=34TD6ZU27BUNQ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.L4at2S-vWV-rivGuOULHZg.gi4Lve8HRJ5ucv1H7iMiT6uDdcmMEPoJ_C16reNn378&dib_tag=se&keywords=whiteness%3A+the+original+sin%5D&qid=1741260058&sprefix=whiteness+the+original+sin%2Caps%2C83&sr=8-2
Harder to rule over a well educated and intelligent population- hence the gross infantilisation of west that has been nurtured over the past three decades and which Joe Van der Berg refers to above.
Most white Africans never truly let go of their African identity—ironically, unlike many Europeans, including Brits and Australians, who often sever ties with their homelands after emigrating including language and any desire to belong. White South Africans frequently retain land, homes, and family connections, staying engaged through visits and current affairs. Yet, their deep attachment to Africa is rarely explored; instead, discussions are often derailed by oversimplified and tiresome narratives of racial hostility, as short-sighted as US racism itself. White Africans hold an unspoken understanding of Africa and its people, and I hope the author delves into that angle—it’s a story that needs to be told.
I’m curious to know what kind of an IQ test was administered.
Mr Renton, I agree . South Africa can not survive without whites. Look at what has become of Zim for example.
It’s obviously a good and generous offer on the part of the USA. The downside is that any large scale evacuation of Afrikaners will lead to the extinction of their language and culture, while the Afrikaners themselves will, in time, disappear into the mass of white Americans.
It might be better if the USA were to use its material and diplomatic clout, covertly if need be, to help Orania to thrive. That little town is already the embryo of what could become a self=sustaining Afrikaner country but it won’t get there without help.
The Afrikaner farmers seem similar in appearance to the Amish or Mennonite farmers here in America, who have famously avoided full assimilation. It’s conceivable to think that a new, highly distinctive immigrant group can maintain their culture here.
They are already targets.
This was an excellent article. It provided nuanced information, important details, beyond what I already knew. Well, done.
It’s a pleasure to read a well written piece about something I barely had any knowledge of. Thanks.
First and foremost, this is a fascinating article, and the image—a striking portrayal of a white African living in a hut—captures the essence of what many Afrikaners refuse to leave behind.
It’s essential to compare reality rather than rely on hyperbole. If South Africa is the opposite of America, what are the real similarities and differences? It seems odd to label one as racist but not the other based on gut reactions, as seen in many comments. This omission intrigues me.
A white minority in a Black-majority nation presents an important anthropological study. Unlike the Americas and Australia, Africa had long-standing contact with Europeans before colonization. African and European empires coexisted, sometimes harmoniously, for centuries. Colonization is part of history, but not all of it.
When Europeans colonized the Americas and Australia, indigenous populations had little prior contact, leading to immediate and acute aggression. In contrast, African-European relations were already established—until they took a dark turn to build the “New World.”
Today, white South Africans, a small minority, must navigate Africa’s broader struggle for equality—just as marginalized groups do worldwide. The notion that they should always feel comfortable or secure is delusional, especially considering how white-majority countries treat their own minorities (e.g., Black Americans in the U.S. or Muslims and South Asians in the U.K.). No group is entitled to permanent comfort; struggle is universal.
If white South Africans were as dominant as apartheid implied, they would have built a system that both sustained their power and respected the indigenous population. Instead, they chose oppression, reinforcing the Western double standard: what benefits the goose is rarely considered for the gander. This raises the question—what did they expect for the future?
I support Afrikaners who choose to stay in Africa and reconcile with their history rather than flee to Europe or the Americas, only to experience the very infantilization the author describes—ironically overlooked by many readers. White Africans are telling us that, even in struggle, they prefer living there because it offers something missing in the West. That is the crux of this article!
Do not leave. Stay. Be uncomfortable. But be true to yourself!
Controversial suggestion:
Although there were terrible wrongs committed against blacks and coloureds in South Africa, it was insane to switch to majority rule and assume that everything would be fine.
Although Indian partition was disorderly and deadly, I suspect less misery would have resulted from partition of South Africa into a number of states, some white-majority, most black-majority. War would have been a risk, but the status quo is horrific.
So, being a minority is so horrific that separation was the only solution—yet this logic never seems to apply when whites are in power? If majority rule is inherently dangerous, then what does that say about how minorities are treated elsewhere? The argument assumes vulnerability, but only when it’s not white rule. Funny how that works.
And now let us follow you through, with Gaza in peril, wouldn’t the same argument apply? Should the minority there be given their own state for their safety too? This kind of comment is written without first thinking through its implications—but unconsciously, it reveals far more than it intends! hmmmm
If you can stretch beyond the Black/White paradigm which the English Speaking World seems to think is universal then you will se that the minority secession is a commonly used tool of state-building in post-colonial situations.
Singapore is a noted example of minority secession as indeed is the creation of Pakistan, Northern Ireland and Northern Cyprus. Bangladesh was perhaps the only instance of Majority secession we know of.
The management of minority populations within majoritarian national mass democracies was the great riddle during the period of decolonisation. The Kenyan Somalis, the Palestinian Jews, Muslim Indians, Hindu Pakistanis, Kurdish Iraqis, Dayak and Iban Malaysians, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Masai and Kikuyu in Kenya, The Biafran War – all were about the dilemma of rule faced by minorites as they entered into majoritarian democracies.
It is not, to coin a phrase, a black and white issue.
Fascinating reading. And well done Trump for being the first ever western leader to show any sympathy for the white minorities of Africa, who’ve been demonised by the Woke global elites for so long.
And seeing as the spectre of Apartheid has been brought up (predictably), let it not be forgotten that the South Africans got their idea for Apartheid from how the Americans segregated their black and white populations in the USA South – even down to separate benches in parks, separate entrances/counters at post offices, etc. The entire machinery of Apartheid was implemented fully in USA long before its transplantation to South Africa.
The Afrikaaners made one major mistake. They gave their policy a name – Apartheid. It differed from its USA parent in one important respect: In USA lynchings were common practice outside of the judicial system and ignored by it. In South Africa the courts of law were in place of lynchings!
“Insofar as this implies that somehow, after 350 years, Afrikaners still do not fully belong in Africa, it risks deepening the longstanding ambiguity of their situation, and playing into the hands of those who really would like to turf them out.”
Did this article mention black supremacist hate and racism once?
Now that the most powerful man in the world – so powerful that the president of the United States is his colorful sidekick – is an Afrikaner, small wonder that leftists are quaking in their Birkenstocks. They are about to lose their grip on academic discourse. I love being alive in such a time!
One has to wonder if Musk may be racist along with many of his other unattractive qualities.
Trump should stay out of SA politics although its politics are undoubtedly a mess. The best thing that could happen to SA is the election of a white President (the rainbow nation in action) provided s/he was not a member of the ANC.
Good article,pity about the picture. I do not know a lot of Afrikaners that look like that and I know a lot of them.
The media or opinion pieces will be taken more seriously when there is consistency in calling people who incite to target a specific group, to correctly call them a racist, and not a ‘firebrand’. This double speak is part of the problem.
Cut through the blather and we see an argument for moral relativism. Some cultures are better — far superior in many cases — than others, but this is supposed to be racism. Africa is turning away from Western civilization in favor of its ancient tribalism. Remember Rhodesia? That decay into chaos will be the template for the rest of the aptly named Dark Continent.
If all of the white farmers just up sticks and leave, it will not take long for South Africa to be starving.
Mister Du Toit, I am not Afrikaner but still a saffa . I agree with some of your points in the article but then you repeat the typical liberal statement that whites / Afrikaners ” still enjoy a vastly higher standard of living than their black and coloured compatriots. It has been widely reported that white South Africans, despite making up just 7% of the population, own over 70% of the country’s private land, ” That is totally kak. Totsiens.