Do White South Africans Deserve Refuge?
A people under siege...
South Africa is a land of unparalleled beauty. The people are friendly. There is something majestic in the air, the soil, the mountains, the bush, and the ocean.
But it is also a country filled with unspeakable violence and horror.
For seven years, I lived in a rural part of South Africa known for its serene splendour. I have many happy memories there.
But there are also dark stories I recall from my time in that region:
A woman decapitated in a neighbouring town; a man hacked to death by machete five minutes from me; a friend’s pregnant cousin murdered in her sleep; a shoot-out 50 metres from my bedroom; a married couple who lived down the road strangled with wire and dumped into a river. This is not exhaustive.
Before I moved to this area, I had lived in Pretoria briefly. One night my wife and I, along with our seven-week-old baby and two-year-old son, were tied up at gunpoint in our bedroom whilst being robbed in the middle of the night. A kilometre away, on Jan Smuts’ old farm, his descendants experienced something more frightening and they promptly fled to Australia. In that same town, years earlier a neighbour of my wife’s family had been gunned down in his driveway.
Now, white South Africans are not supposed to complain about this. The story goes that black South Africans bear the brunt of the country’s barbaric violence.
But stop and reflect for a moment. What kind of an argument is this? Because black South Africans treat each other worse than they do whites, whites should not complain? Are white South Africans not allowed to have collective interests? This seems to be precisely the argument, which implies a goal of ethnic cleansing from the outset.
This argument is particularly applied to the issue of farm murders. We are told that farm murders are no different to all the other brutal homicides in the country. How is that a defence? That torture, rape, and killing are just ‘normal’? How is that more acceptable, or dare we say less ‘racist’, than such cases being politically motivated?
Bear in mind, this is a country in which political leaders leading masses of followers in the chanting of ‘Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer’ is deemed constitutionally protected speech. The president himself has refused to denounce the song, even as he calls white farmers leaving the country ‘cowards’.
Another notorious political leader, Julius Malema, leader of ANC splinter party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, has often asserted he is not calling for the killing of whites, yet, but he can make no guarantees for the future.
Watch a selection of Malema and other political leaders encouraging violence against their white countrymen:
Intriguingly, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa has declared the ANC would love for Julius Malema to return to the fold, stating that deep down, he is ‘still ANC in his heart.’
And yes, farmers are uniquely at risk of murder in the country. They are killed at more than double the rate of policemen. That is undeniable. But it is also the manner of the murders that suggests something darker than normal violence.
I am talking about women raped in front of their children, eyes gouged out, boiling water poured over kids, countless stabbings. The media never discusses this, of course. Read some examples here, if you can stomach it.
This takes place in a certain context. Not only are there the calls for violence - there is legislation that systematically reduces the number of white men allowed to be employed in medium and large companies, even as the vast welfare state depends on their taxes. Skilled jobs in multiple industries will soon see caps of 4% for white male employees. Importantly, these restrictions have hurt the poor majority the most, as skills and capital have been wasted in the midst of a deindustrialising economy.
The government has also recently passed a law to seize property without compensation, the passage of which was accompanied by the above Mugabe-like rhetoric from political leaders about taking white-owned land.
And yes, no ANC leader has ever denounced Robert Mugabe, that butcher and destroyer of an entire country.
Contrary to liberal apologists for the law, both domestic and foreign, land invasions are happening already in the country, and the ANC’s national spokeswoman recently warned foreign investors that they should invest elsewhere, perhaps in India, if they were concerned about property rights:
Note: the country’s official unemployment rate now sits at 32%.
These past few weeks, Donald Trump and the South African-born Elon Musk have been widely denounced for drawing attention to the white experience in South Africa.
Trump has been derided for suggesting there is a genocide underway. Yes, this is clumsy rhetoric. No political organisation in South Africa claims there is a genocide happening in South Africa. But how much can you really blame him when you consider the existing Rwandan-style rhetoric and the accompanying violence?
Frogs being boiled slowly are poor judges of the danger they face. Notoriously, Ramaphosa did say in the 1990s that his plan was to boil whites slowly.
What is claimed is not genocide, not yet (as Malema would put it), but rather that whites are under siege, given the rhetorical and legal atmosphere in the country, given that as a minority there is no possibility of whites voting themselves out of this predicament, even as the majority continues to vote for the corrupt, thuggish and comically incompetent ANC and its splinter groups, year after year.
Musk has been brutally criticised for sharing the ancestral guilt of his white South African ancestry. The criticism of Musk is a totem for an implicit, darker sentiment: do white South Africans not deserve a bit of punishment? Are we and our parents not responsible for a uniquely evil regime in human history?
Well, the last all-white election in the country was a referendum in 1992 in which most whites voted to end apartheid. Before that was a 1989 election. Nobody in their 40s or younger ever voted in the apartheid system. I was four years old when Nelson Mandela was released.
Uniquely evil?
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission put total apartheid political deaths at around 22 000, with approximately 95% of those deaths being faction fighting between the ANC and its rivals. (Recall Winnie Mandela declaring the country would be liberated by tyres, petrol, and matches. Her thugs were not necklacing whites…)
To put the 22 000 in context, there are approximately 30 000 murders per year in South Africa now. And there are exponentially more deaths at the hands of the current police force compared with the fearsome apartheid security forces.
Remember also that in the 1980s, Mugabe and his Shona supporters had killed up to 30 000 Matabele rivals in Zimbabwe. All whilst retaining the support of both the western world and global communism, as well as the ANC.
The history of South Africa is far more complicated than outsiders and media figures believe:
Today, it is estimated that, after subtracting all government spending on whites South Africans, each white man, woman, and child contributes, per capita, R100,000 per year to government revenue. Since 1994, white South Africans have contributed a total of R15 trillion to the ANC regime. Radical economic transformation has happened.
It is true whites still hold 72% (not 96% as if often claimed) of private farmland. Much of this land is in the western half of the country which is semi-desert and was not previously settled, and virtually all of the successful land claims since 1994 have been resolved not with land redistribution but a monetary settlement. The ANC government itself holds a quarter of total land and mineral rights beneath all land.
But I am not writing this to enter endless historical debates and crude statistical comparisons. Nobody wants to go back to apartheid. But neither do we want a besieged future dominated by fear and vilification.
I am writing about what is happening now and what could happen in the future.
A vast majority of South Africans are peaceful and friendly. Most white people love their country and want a domestic solution. Most black South Africans do not list racism or racial justice as being anywhere near their top priority, despite media reports. Most South Africans just want a shot at getting a job and living in peace.
But there is a demon in South Africa’s democracy. For complex sociological reasons, a destructive and evil regime has retained its hold on power for decades, even as unemployment has surged to world-historical levels, even as 25% of university graduates and 60% of young adults are unemployed, even as civilians are killed at a higher rate than Ukrainians. The government managed 400,000 arrests for lockdown infringements. It is hard not to view the rampant violent crime as a policy choice.
This demonic dispensation has chosen the most obvious scapegoat for its sins: my own people, white South Africans, many of whom, including me, can trace their African heritage back to the 17th century.
The rhetoric described above makes this obvious and undeniable.
At what point does denying this amount to complicity?
I see no future for them in South Africa.