Black History Month 2018: Voortrekkers

South Africa wasn’t always such a depressing place.

The history of South Africa is such a complex and unique subject that I couldn’t address it in a single article. It is the homeland of the Afrikaners who are the White tribe of Africa. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, the White man didn’t show up until the late 19th century.

In places like Uganda and Nigeria, Europeans came late and left early as empire builders, but in South Africa the Dutch and English came as settlers. South Africa has more in common with the European colonization of North America and the Caribbean than with Africa.

BARTOLOMEU DIAS

The Portuguese explorers Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco de Gama were the first modern Europeans to reach South Africa in 1488 and 1497 respectively. The Greeks and Phoenicians may have reached the Cape of Good Hope in Antiquity. The Arabs and Indians may have also made it this far. This is why Europeans had some inkling that it was possible to sail around Africa to the markets of Asia.

SOUTH AFRICA CLIMATE

The most important fact to know about the Western Cape of South Africa is that it has a Mediterranean climate like Europe. The interior also has a hot arid climate. Overall, Southwest Africa has a desert or arid climate which made it unattractive to Bantu farmers expanding out of Central Africa and East Africa.

20-INCH RAINFALL LINE

South Africa is best understood as two places.

It was originally inhabited by two different races. The Bantu tribes like the Zulus, Sothos and Xhosas settled east of the 20-inch rain line that stretches north from Port Elizabeth through the Transvaal.  The Khoikhoi or the San people also known as Hottentots and Bushmen who are a different race and the most archaic humans on earth were pushed to the west of that line into the arid parts of Southwest Africa.

HOTTENTOTS

When the Portuguese and Dutch arrived in the Western Cape of South Africa and Southwest Africa, they found the region was populated by the San and the Khoikhoi.  They are the same people except that the former are hunter gatherers while the latter are pastoralists.

BANTU EXPANSION

In spite of Julius Malema’s claims of a Africa being a black continent, North Africa is dominated by Caucasians and Southwest Africa was dominated by the San and Khoikhoi. These people were the original inhabitants of Central Africa and Southern Africa. Along with the Pygmies, they were displaced by Bantu farmers from West Africa expanding out of Nigeria and Cameroon. The Sandawe people of Tanzania are a remnant of a Khoisan population which used to have a broader range.

The Dutch settled in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 to create a kind of rest area between the Netherlands and their possessions in Indonesia. The Dutch didn’t set out to create a settler colony in the Western Cape but thousands of immigrants who were mostly Dutch, Germans and French Huguenots settled there. They gradually drove out and enslaved the Khoikhoi and imported slaves from the East Indies.

TREKBOER EXPANSION

These Trekboers or European farmers expanded out of the Cape of Good Hope in the late 17th and 18th centuries. It was far reminiscent of the English in Virginia or the Dutch in New Amsterdam and the Hudson Valley expanding at the expense of Native Americans than anything else going on in Africa.

CAPE COLONY EXPANSION

Cape Colony grew to dominate Southwest Africa.

During the French Revolution, the British seized Cape Colony after France overran the Netherlands, and the Dutch ceded their sovereignty over it after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Once again, the fate of Cape Colony was reminiscent of the Dutch in New Amsterdam which became New York. The British sent settlers to the Cape which began the long rivalry in South Africa between the English and Afrikaners. It can’t be stressed enough that the British imposed colonialism on the Afrikaners long before they established British rule over Black Africans in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.

KANG SHAKU ZULU

In the east of South Africa beyond Cape Colony and the 20-mile rainfall line, the greatest of African Kangs, Shaka Zulu, was building the glorious Zulu Empire in the early 19th century.

ZULU EMPIRE

The fact that Shaka Zulu is celebrated as a great African warrior tells you everything you need to know about European colonialism. Shaku Zulu is estimated to have killed 2 million Africans in his wars before he was killed by two of his own brothers. This figure dwarfs by several dozen orders of magnitude the death toll of any European colonial war in Africa. It is twice as many people who died in the American Civil War. The Ndebele immigrated to Zimbabwe during this conflict.

GREAT TREK

In the aftermath of 19th century Britain’s Anglicization policies, attempts to enfranchise natives and the abolition of slavery in British Empire in 1833 (we’ve already seen how the British middle class was becoming acutely sensitive to the plight of poor Africans in Sierra Leone), the Afrikaners were fed up with British rule and migrated out of Cape Colony and across the frontier.

BOER REPUBLICS

The Boers carved out the Orange Free State and the Transvaal which became independent Boer republics. They were surprised by how depopulated the region was when they arrived. This wasn’t because dey stole our civilization. Instead, it was due to the ocean of blood that had been spilled in the area by Shaka Zulu and the Matabele in the genocide known as the Mfecane.

BATTLE OF BLOOD RIVER

The Voortrekkers had attempted to resettle in Natal. 470 Voortrekkers fought off and defeated an army of around 15,000 Zulu warriors without losing a single man in 1839. They killed 3,000 Zulus in the biggest battle ever fought in South Africa and one of the greatest European triumphs in Africa.

BATTLE OF ROARKE’S DRIFT

Several decades later during the Anglo-Zulu War, 150 British soldiers fought off 3,000 to 4,000 Zulu warriors in the Battle of Roarke’s Drift in January 1879.

BATTLE OF ISANDLWNA

1,300 British soldiers were massacred on the same day by a force of 20,000 Zulu warriors in the Battle of Isandlwna. The British ended up winning the Anglo-Zulu War though.

ANGLO-BOER WARS

The British didn’t merely conquer the Zulus and Xhosas. They also conquered the Boer Republics during the Second Anglo Boer War. The British waged scorched earth warfare and placed Boer women and children in concentration camps. More Boers died in this conflict than Ndebele and Shona had died in the conquest of Zimbabwe or Hausa-Fulani had died in the conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate or the Mahdist War in Sudan. The Boers had settled on the world’s biggest gold deposit in the Witwatersrand.

UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA

Great Britain succeeded in its long term objective and combined all the various republics of Southern Africa into the Union of South Africa in 1910. The Boers ended up in a British dominion that was dominated by Anglo and Jewish corporate interests. Jews were heavily involved in financing and developing the diamond and gold industries in South Africa in the late 19th century. Tens of thousands of Jews flocked to South Africa in the late 19th century

South Africa fought on the British side in both World War I and World War II and came away from it with control of Namibia which had been German South West Africa. In the Transvaal and Orange Free State, suffrage was limited to Whites. In Cape Province and Natal, it was limited to men with property and literacy requirements. The result was an overwhelmingly White electorate which was further expanded when White women were granted the right to vote in the 1930s.

HENDRIK VERWOERD

In 1948, the National Party came to power and the Afrikaners became the dominant force in South Africa and began to implement the apartheid system, which would last until 1994. Hendrik Verwoerd and John Vorster ruled South Africa from 1958 until 1979 and aggressively implemented the apartheid system. The Union of South Africa became the Republic of South Africa under Verwoerd in 1961. Afrikaners became much more wealthy, powerful and influential in South Africa during this period.

APARTHEID

The apartheid system in South Africa was a much more ambitious version of Jim Crow.

The goal was to effectively create a White ethnostate in South Africa by partitioning the country into White areas and independent black homelands. Bantustans were created which were not unlike American Indian reservations. Millions of blacks were resettled in these tribal homelands. Several of the Bantustans were granted independence and the blacks there were stripped of their South African citizenship.

BANTUSTANS

In hindsight, the 1960s and 1970s were the peak of South Africa. It was modernizing and becoming a First World country under Afrikaner rule. South Africa developed nuclear weapons. The first human-to-human heart transplant took place in one of South Africa’s hospitals in the late 1960s.

P.W. BOTHA

F.W. DE KLERK

The downfall of White South Africa can be laid at the doorstep of P.W. Botha and F.W. De Klerk who were the presidents of South Africa between 1978 and 1994.

Among the leading causes:

• South Africa was expelled from the United Nations in 1974.
• The Portuguese Empire collapsed in 1975. Angola and Mozambique became independent countries.
• The US, European Economic Community (precursor of the EU) and Japan imposed economic sanctions on South Africa in 1986.
• Rhodesia became Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe in 1980 which finally ended the buffer zone between South Africa and the independent nations of sub-Saharan Africa.
• The ANC waged a terrorist campaign from bases in South Africa’s northern neighbors.
• Multinational corporations were pressured by SJWs in the West to divest in South Africa.
• The demise of the Soviet Union made the ANC seem less threatening.
• The UN arms embargo.
• The international arms embargo.
• Nelson Mandela became a cult figure in the West during his incarceration in the West. The smiling Madiba played the role of the Numinous Negro.

The geopolitical situation, overwhelming political pressure, the international embargoes and boycotts and the terrorism and political turmoil emanating from the black community had a profound effect on South Africa’s businessmen and young people. They were tired of being stigmatized and demonized as racists. They were tired of being international pariahs. They were weary of the economic costs of apartheid.

President F.W. de Klerk arranged for Nelson Mandela to be released from prison in 1990. The ANC was unbanned. The de Klerk government began negotiations with Mandela. The first elections on the one-man, one-vote principle were held in 1994. The ANC won those elections and Nelson Mandela became president. The world hailed the advent of the Rainbow Nation as a great triumph of liberal democracy … and then it forgot about South Africa.

The ANC has been in power ever since. South Africa has followed the trajectory of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. As the economy has failed, the ANC has radicalized and now South Africa is poised to follow in the footsteps of Zimbabwe and seize the land from the White community. In less than 50 years, Afrikaners have fallen from the leaders of a First World country to facing the worst trial in their history.