There hasn't been a lot about South Africa in the news lately. Compared with the "Arab spring" sweeping North Africa, the Western campaign to turn Libya into a heap of rubble, civil wars in west and central Africa, and famine in east Africa, not much is going on in the south.
Yet South Africans of the pale pink variety are deserting the ship which is slowly sinking into the morass of corruption, incompetence and chaos that is Africa today. They are coming to "white" countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada in record numbers.
The UK, however, is not a preferred destination because South Africans, particularly the Afrikaners, remember that it was once-great Britain (and later the United States of Civil Rights) that forced majority (i.e. black) rule on a country that wasn't ready for it, and was getting along quite nicely, thank you, as it was.
The Afrikaners - white South Africans of Dutch, German and French Huguenot descent - had their first real beef with the British in the mid-19th century. They got understandably tired of being told by English missionaries how to deal with the "noble savages", how to govern their society, even how to worship. So they left, trekking north across the Oranje and Vaal rivers to establish their own republics: the Transvaal and the Oranje Vrijstaat (Orange Free State).
Fair enough? Not in the eyes of the British. There followed a series of wars between the imperialist Brits and the fiercely independent Boers, as the Afrikaners became known. ("Boer" means "farmer", and that's what most of them were.) The first was in 1880-1. The second and third lasted from 1899 through 1902 and are collectively known here as "the Boer War".
The conflict is known in South Africa as "the Anglo-Boer Wars", which is more accurate as the British were the instigators. They sought to impose one-man-one-vote democracy, enforced racial equality, English law and the English language on a society not suited to any of those things. (Reminds you of the Middle East today, doesn't it?) For their part, the Afrikaners wanted only to be left alone.
The British won the war, not without more than a little difficulty in spite of a huge superiority of men and materiel. The definitive account of how they did so - including a description of British concentration camps - is to be found in The Boer War, by Thomas Pakenham (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1979; Futura Books, 1982). An earlier, shorter book of the same title was written by John Selby, and published by Arthur Barker Ltd., London, 1969.
In his The Boer War, Selby states, as the fact is, that although the British won the war, the Boers won the peace. One of the terms of the 1902 treaty that ended the war was that the Afrikaners could decide racial questions for themselves. In 1948 the mainly Afrikaner Nationalist party won the union-wide election. It then applied the policy of separate development - "apartheid" - to the entire country.
Selby says: In 1899, although world opinion favoured the Boers, many individual countries supported the British. In 1968 it seems that world opinion is against the South African government...but as in 1899, a large body of opinion is on their side. This group applauds the success the South Africans have made of their ecnomy...and it watches, with some sympathy, the South African government trying to do its best for the country.
That was in 1968. The campaign of the one-worlders and reverse racists against "white supremacy" intensified throughout the 60s, particularly in Britain and America. Britain divested itself of its African colonies, long before they were ready to manage their own affairs. And in the USA the civil rights movement and that great lover of racial equality, LBJ, brought about the "reforms" that have produced the peaceful and harmonious society Americans enjoy today.
We return to Selby: There are obviously some things that are wrong in South Africa...but to many observers the present government appears to be handling their task with common sense, and to be trying to be as fair as they can to all races, faced as they are with such a racial mixture.
The government undoubtedly believes that, geared as it is to Western industrialization, South Africa without white men to run it would certainly face economic ruin and might even become a Congo or Nigeria. And they are not willing that either should happen.
The South African government to which Selby refers handed power to the black majority in 1994, thanks largely to pressure from the "white" governments of the West. The world waits now, hoping (but not betting) that Selby will be proven wrong. White South Africans, however, are voting once more...with their feet.
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