What is a Sensitive Young Man Meant to Make of the History of Apartheid?
Liberal Myths Part Four
This essay forms part of a series for my paid subscribers on the liberal myths that have shaped modern anarcho-tyranny:
My writing on anarcho-tyranny can be found here:
The film Invictus contains a scene in which Mandela, en route to taking office, passes by a white schoolboy rugby team training. A ‘racist’ Afrikaner rugby coach declares to his team that this is the day that South Africa goes to the dogs.
Whatever you may think of the attitude of apartheid apologists, whatever you may think of Mandela, it is undeniable that the ANC, the same ANC which Mandela believed would exist even in Heaven, has driven Africa’s wealthiest and most beautiful country into the ground.
In a twist most inconvenient, most embarrasing, most blasphemous to the global religion of rainbowism, the most reactionary of white South Africans have been proven correct.
Consider: the unemployment rate has increased by close to 50% under the rainbow regime, the murder rate is the second highest in the world (returning to levels last seen during the ANC’s own ‘People’s War’ during the final years of apartheid), and deaths in detention are much higher than during the days of ‘total onslaught’ and the fearsome security police. The arrest of 400 000 mostly young people for lockdown offences surely dispelled any remaining illusions of the ‘born free’ generation of South Africans.
In 2002, Afrobarometer polling showed that 60% of the country believed apartheid South Africa was better run. In 2016, similar polling revealed that 62% of all South Africans believed life had either got worse or stayed the same since the end of apartheid.
Everyday South Africans recognize these complexities even if elites don’t:
Obviously this is incredible given the religious nature of the ‘rainbow nation’ narrative and the messianic persona of Mandela.
This was not meant to happen.
South Africa was meant to show that progressive ideology could solve problems and govern diverse societies with competence and generosity. But now reality has called into question the entire modern political programme of the capable liberal state dissolving all the old superstitions of religion, marriage, tribalism, and nationalism. The miracle never arrived and the party is over.
And yet it remains too early to pronounce the death of rainbowism in South Africa or abroad, sickly as it is.
The ANC, despite losing their majority last year, commands well over double the support of the erstwhile opposition party, the DA, who in the current coalition have done nothing to prevent the legislative march toward the Soviet-inspired National Democratic Revolution. Their splinter groups, the EFF and the MK, support their policies. It remains bold enough to con tinue to push through the nationalisation of all healthcare; it has not repealed affirmative action; it is pushing for race-based property expropriation.
The problem critics of what I term ‘liberal terror’, face, is that the religious acceptance of rainbowism and the Mandela mythos will not die until the spell is utterly broken.
You would think that the savage South African riots of 2021 or the barbaric levels of crime would have done the trick, but for liberals, ideology reigns supreme. You can elucidate all the ways in which the ANC regime has waged war on the country, yet the myth that the apartheid regime was exterminating black South Africans on a World War II scale serves to undercut any facts, as well as the suggestion that ‘rainbowism’ is a monstrous deception, not only in South Africa but throughout the entire world.
Together with Martin Luther King (a truly odious character), Mandela (strong competition for MLK in personal viciousness) is a global symbol for a post-western order in which all European sins are purged by open borders, radical social policies, and a usurpation of the nation state by enlightened global bodies led by the likes of the WHO and NATO.
This is, of course, a problem because the persistence of the ‘good ANC gone bad’ myth, the myth of ‘moral giants’ who sadly succumbed to the temptations of corruption, demoralizes whole segments of independent-thinking people the world over, who may otherwise be emboldened to seek new beginnings and new political orders.
Happily, it is not necessary to convince the masses of the deceitfulness of the post-apartheid mythology. Generally, many people who avoid media know this already. Conversely, the midwit, media class, famously rationally impermeable to the proposition that only men have penises, can be ignored too.
No, the battle lies with sensitive, young independents, who by no means want to embrace cheap bigotry or low-rent racism, but nonetheless know they need to live in a certain way of mental honesty and pragmatism in order to be happy.
Such young people simply need to be shown that it is possible to reject apartheid as wrong and wrong-headed without concomitantly believing it to be some kind of historic crime against humanity. For in the long litany of human brutality, apartheid was not even the worst crime of the apartheid era - that title would surely belong to the necklacing and lynching campaign of the ANC which claimed exponentially more black lives than the apartheid regime ever did.
No, when historians place apartheid in the context of centuries and millennia, in the shadow of modern death camps, Soviet and Chinese genocides, the French Revoutionary Terror, South American human sacrifice, Shaka Zulu and Mzilikazi’s Southern African ethnic cleansing, Robert Mugabe’s gukurahundi, the Rwandan genocide, the brutality of the never-ending wars of Central Africa, the Middle East conflagration instigated by the US and Britain, not to mention Genghis Khan and the barbaric conquests of the likes of the pedophilic Mehmed II, the approximate 1000 deaths (probably less) at the hands of apartheid forces over close to four decades of the apartheid system will be marked as a moral wrong, but not as a world-historical atrocity.
Mere consideration of the simple facts that during apartheid black lifespans shot up, that black lawyers and doctors came into existence within a generation or two of having no written language, and that the South African state had to police borders to keep other Africans outside of their field of control, should put paid to the notion of a uniquely evil white nationalist state.
Nobody berates China daily for the tens of millions of deaths during their own social engineering project, the Great Leap Forward. Nobody berates Zulus daily for the deaths of over a million black South Africans at the hands of Shaka Zulu and his impis. Nobody berates the Americans for the deaths of a million Japanese civilians during World War II, many of those deaths occurring while the government was trying to surrender…
Quite frankly, it is ridiculous therefore to demand whites in general, and South African whites in particular, to live their lives in placatory guilt, peculiar only to them.
No, we are allowed to be on our own side.
Allow me then to elucidate some of the complexities of the apartheid story. I aim here not to praise apartheid, but to bury it…
In order to do so, I will lean on two works of history, both of which were mentioned recently by Robert Duigan of Marhobane fame: the revisionist work by Klaus Vaque, The Plot Against South Africa, and the work of the honest liberal Afrikaner historian, Herman Giliomee, in his The Last Afrikaner Leaders.
Let me begin with the more respectable Giliomee, of the University of Cape Town, the University of Stellenbosh, and the liberal Institute for Race Relations. Giliomee’s book examines how it was specific decisions and actions by Afrikaner leaders that led to the end of apartheid.
He begins by pointing out that apartheid and its leaders were considered firm and stable, and that it was not considered by many respectable thinkers in Britain and the US to be a great abomination:
In the mid-1960s British journalist Douglas Brown remarked that apartheid had no counterpart in history and that ‘no race has ever been so universally condemned for preserving its identity’ than South African whites. Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and commentator Allen Drury observed that the white community, which had established one of the world’s most sophisticated and viable states, ‘cannot understand why they must be expected to give it up. They will not do so.’
Indeed, the notion that apartheid was a crime against humanity was proposed and ratified by the Soviet bloc in the United Nations, a great irony considering that communism has no peers in its very real crimes against humanity.
It was this same Soviet bloc to whom the ANC was entirely loyal, and thus it was no stretch to imagine that the ANC would simply mimic Bolshevik crimes and destruction to the detriment not only of whites but of the entire population. In the Cold War it was more than likely that a Communist ANC would gain the vote for all, but only once… How else to intepret the fact that the South African Communist Party had charge over the ANC’s armed struggle, or that militant ANC leaders had already consulted with Mao in China regarding strategy and aid in the 1950s? Of course, virtually every other new African democracy would turn into one-party states often replete with Maoist-style assaults on their populations.
Giliomee goes on to point out how remarkable it was that ultimately the apartheid regime, with its police and army intact and loyal, to give up power entirely, without suffering a revolution. Not only that, the regime would negotiate a settlement that would utterly exclude whites from political power, ‘despite the fact that, by the end of the 1980s, it paid 90% of the personal tax (31% of the total revenue) and most of the sales tax (27% of the total revenue).’
It was only mere decades prior that segregation had been regarded as entirely natural across the political spectrum, from right-wing whites, to liberal Americans, all the way to the early ANC itself.
Giliomee uncovers the earliest written use of the Afrikaans slogan for segregation, apartheid, or apart-ness. He finds it in the written record of a church conference in 1929, in a context which belies any notion of ‘fascism’:
In addressing a conference of the Free State Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) on missionary work, held in the town of Kroonstad, Reverend Jan Christoffel du Plessis said: ‘In the fundamental idea of our missionary work and not in racial prejudice one must seek an explanation for the spirit of apartheid that has always characterized our [the DRC’s] conduct.’ He rejected a missions policy that offered blacks no ‘independent national future’. By ‘apartheid’ Du Plessis meant that the Gospel should be taught in a way that strengthened the African ‘character, nature and nationality’ – in other words, the volkseie (the people’s own). Africans had to be uplifted ‘on their own terrain, separate and apart’… Du Plessis envisaged the development of autonomous, self-governing black churches as a counter to English missionaries, whose converts tried to copy ‘Western civilization and religion’.
Whatever apartheid became, whatever its sins, this is simply not the stuff of crimes against humanity.
After 1948, the apartheid government would consider that the land granted to the native reserves was sufficient to deny blacks representation in the ‘white areas’. This would unravel as the economy showed itself to be more and more dependent on black labour. This was the chief conceit really of the entire system. How can you preach apartheid and separate development whilst benefitting from black labour and influx into urban areas ruled by whites?
Of course, the contradiction could have been somewhat resolved if there had been no democracy whatsoever and all were alike. Instead, the apartheid government had maintained a parliamentary supremacy and consituency-based democracy inherited from their former enemies, the British.
Giliomee moves on to understanding the architect of grand apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, which is probably his most interesting profile of his selected Afrikaner leaders. He dispels the idea that Verwoerd was regarded as a second Hitler internationally, quoting an American correspondent in South Africa:
There can be no doubting the sincerity of his belief that ultimately his actions will benefit the African people as a whole’; and Allen Drury again, after he interviewed Verwoerd just before his death: ‘I found him to be extremely intelligent, extremely competent, much superior in brains and ability to most of his noisy critics abroad . . . [He was] the only man who could possibly have continued to lead his people and his nation to a gradually more reasonable, and ultimately more humane, accommodation with other races.
Verwoerd believed that the advanced educational and economic levels of white South Africa would spell intense envy and resentment within an integrated South Africa, thus there had to be separation in order for black South Africans to develop themselves. He proposed investment in homelands to this end and only local, township-based self-governance in the cities. To accommodate urban blacks, 100 000 houses had been built by the end of the 1950s, in a very basic fashion, as temporary dwellings away from ‘home’. Investment in the homelands was very limited because Verwoerd believed development there should not be dominated by white capital, but should be slow and steady and demonstrate a self-reliance akin to the Afrikaner after the catastrophe of the Boer War.
Giliomee is critical of the self-interested ‘naivete’ of Verwoered, but he does nevertheless report that when the homelands were granted autonomy, newspapers in England, such as The Guardian and The Sunday Times in London lauded the act:
The latter described it as a courageous step towards a viable alternative to integration. It lauded the £75 million the government had committed in development aid and compared this favourably to the £14 million Britain committed in aid for the British protectorates in southern Africa.
Mandela himself regarded homeland independence, at the time, as meaningful and positive.
Verwoerd is also notorious for proposing ‘bantu education’ but Giliomee points out that liberals and ANC leaders alike had similar views, including the revered ANC academic, ZK Matthews, who called for ‘a separate curriculum for Africans and Europeans so as to preserve the ‘African heritage.’ Verwoerd himself infamously stated, ‘There is no place for [the African] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.’ But he went on to state also, ‘Within his own community, however, all doors are open.’
Contrary to popular belief, mathematics was part of this curriculum, and by the time the senior certificate was taken, there was parity with white education, hence the steady increase of black university scholars throughout apartheid, albeit with limited places and constraints resulting from a lack of teachers and poverty. Nevertheless, during the entirety of apartheid, black enrollment in education rose from 25% to 85%.
Giliomee is critical of the scheme of grand apartheid, criticising Verwoerd for a blinded ideological naivete regarding the true possibilities of development in the homelands, or the idea that black urbanisation could be stemmed or controlled in such a way as to maintain both a colour bar in the workplace and no representation in the places where black labour was key to general economic flourishing. But he is somewhat sympathetic to Verwoerd’s underlying assumptions which were nearly universal in their time:
Verwoerd’s fundamental error, apart from basing his policy on flawed population projections, was his assumption that his policy would ignite the enthusiasm of the main black ethnic groups for a state of their own instead of working for an inclusive, black-ruled South African nation. He believed there was no single African nation, but seven or eight nations, each eager to pursue a separate political destiny in its own state. It was a policy that served white interests particularly well, and most of his white contemporaries strongly believed in it… While such a white perspective was clearly biased, ethnic division in other parts of Africa was serious enough to spark serious conflict. Right to the end of the 1980s reputable scholars working on South Africa based their constitutional proposals for a post-apartheid government on the assumption that the black community would split up into different parties. A 1983 poll showed that close to half of rural Xhosa and rural Zulu indicated that they would feel ‘weak and insecure’ if other groups were to have more power than theirs in a future government.
Giliomee goes on to profile other important Afrikaner leaders, including Verwoerd’s successor, John Vorster (who famously paused government spending on whites in order to close the gap with blacks: spending on the homelands would increase to 9% of the budget), the Afrikaner liberal opponent to apartheid, Van Zyl Slabbert, the paradoxical reformer and hardliner, PW Botha, and the last Nationalist leader and apartheid’s undertaker, FW de Klerk.
It is beyond the scope here to share his insights into each, suffice to say the theme that runs throughout is the possibility of power-sharing as a solution to South Africa’s racial conflict and oppression. This was the solution continuously offered by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who offered a concrete example of this in Natal, but he was strangely ignored by the government.
Instead, leaders like Slabbert, and then De Klerk, would move beyond the power-sharing idea, going even beyond the offers of Buthelezi (and the suggestions of the KGB) to embrace ultimately the ANC’s post-Cold War offer of a mass, ‘normal’, democracy in which minorites had no safeguards against the majority.
Giliomee points out that this would inevitably, as in all multi-ethnic states, lead to a totally corrupted democracy, as the electorate would become a mere expression of ‘tribal’ loyalties, with no genuine accountability to voters, who looked only to support their ‘side’, for better for worse.
Gilliomee is at something of a loss to explain why De Klerk failed so miserably in fulfilling his promises to his own voters. One moment stands out, involving a member of De Klerk’s cabinet, Tertius Delport:
Early on the morning of 18 November 1993 the cabinet met to hear the outcome of the decisive talks between De Klerk and Mandela the previous night. De Klerk told them he had accepted Mandela’s demand for majority decision-making in cabinet and then adjourned the meeting briefly to allow cabinet to contemplate this. Delport recounted his shock at the announcement. ‘I realised it was final, die koeël is deur die kerk (the die has been cast). We had given in on all six issues. I said to Dawie de Villiers, my provincial leader, “I cannot accept this, I am going to resign.” Dawie said: “You will have to tell FW.” I walked to FW’s office and knocked on his door. When he opened it I grabbed him by his jacket’s lapels and cried: “What have you done? You have given the country away. You have allowed children to negotiate. What we have now is not power sharing; it is conventional majority rule. We have lost all power.”’
Thus Giliomee concludes:
The settlement that De Klerk negotiated fell well short of his constituency’s expectations and the ANC, as it later turned out, refused to throw the National Democratic Revolution, adopted by the South African Communist Party in the early 1960s, into the dustbin where it belonged.
If Giliomee paints a picture of an Afrikaner system that was grappling with real issues and fears, who indeed put themselves first, above black South Africans, but who were nevertheless not by any stretch of the imagination brutal genocidaires, Klaus Vaque is something of a real apologist for the regime. What he says must be understood as coming from that point of view. Nonetheless, when he presents facts, they must be grappled with, because they necessarily show much of the falsity of how South African history is told by the current victors, the ANC.
The central thesis in the book is that South Africa was ultimately standing alone against both the Soviets and an America that was not right-wing or ultimately opposed to the essentials of communism, from its inception in Russia:
In his book National Suicide, Professor Antony Sutton, a scientist at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University in America, cites irrefutable evidence that ‘During the past five years we have on the one hand threatened Russia and communism with the sword, while on the other we have secretly given aid to the Bolsheviks on such a colossal scale that without it the communist despotism in Russia would probably have collapsed. In 1944 Stalin admitted that about two-thirds of all large industrial undertakings in the Soviet Union had been accomplished with American aid or technical assistance.’
Within this framework of understanding South Africa as a lonely bulwark against international liberalism and communism, Vaque is eager to point out that the country, whilst denying political representation to blacks, nonetheless uplifted all its citizens in an economic miracle in Africa:
Between 1962 and 1972, the UN paid out 298 million dollars to underdeveloped countries. In the same period, South Africa spent 558 million dollars on the development of its black territories.
By the end of 1970, the blacks in South Africa owned 360 000 motor vehicles: more than the whole of black Africa put together. While the populations of countries such as Malawi and Mozambique earn an average income per head of less than R20 a month (and only in very few black countries does it exceed RI00) in South Africa the average figure is R352.
Between 1975 and 1984, the real income of black workers rose by 27.5 per cent, compared with 6.4 per cent for whites.
A black citizen of South Africa can undergo a complicated heart-valve operation for little more than one US dollar. (Between two and three thousand such operations are performed annually in one hospital in Pretoria alone.) A black American would have to pay fifteen thousand dollars for the same operation in the USA.
In 1970 the blacks earned R1 751 million, or 25.5 per cent of the total national wage income. By 1984 their share had risen to R17 238 million; a rise of over a thousand per cent in fourteen years.
In 1985, there were forty-two thousand black students at South African universities. There are five black universities and twenty-eight polytechnics subsidized by the government.
The proportion of black businessmen in the total commercial life of the country rose from one per cent in 1977 to ten percent in 1987. The industrial areas in the towns are open to all races; so are the shopping areas for black entrepreneurs in most towns.
South Africa far outstrips most developing countries in health care. (According to the UN definition, South Africa is one of the developing countries.)
According to the World Bank Atlas of 1985 the South African infant mortality is 55 (i.e. per thousand live births up to the age of one year) and therefore makes a better showing than three of the six regions into which the
World Health Organization divides the earth: the Eastern Mediterranean (112), Southeast Asia (110) and all Africa (119). The black infant mortality is 82, or 31 per cent lower than in the rest of the African continent.
The national healthcare services (doctors etc.) amount to 480 per hundred thousand of the total population; about 380 more than the average for the “third world”. Every year more than eleven hundred black patients come to South Africa from other countries to be treated by medical specialists. (Die Vaderland 2.3.87)
Soweto, the black metropolis outside Johannesburg with a population of some 1.2 million, has five modern sports stadiums. Pretoria, the capital, with a white population of 600 000, has 3. Soweto has over 300 schools, Pretoria 229.
He goes on to point out that black workers earned three times as much in South Africa as in the rest of Africa, with union rights, the country trained more black doctors than any other African country, was the only country during the mid-centry with a decent-sized black midle class, blacks owned more cars than Russians, and the country kept many other African countries afloat by means of its food exports. Migrant workers from these countries in South Africa also supported millions of families across the continent by sending their rands home.
He goes on to contrast this with the actions and attitudes of the globally beloved struggle leaders to whom the government was encouraged to cede power, and to whom it did cede power after the book was published.
On 13 April 1986 Winnie Mandela, wife of the imprisoned ANC communist Nelson Mandela, shocked the whole world by saying: “... With our matchboxes and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.”
That did not prevent Willy Brandt, President of the Socialist International and former Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, from receiving the good lady at dinner in the residence of the German ambassador in Pretoria two days later.
Mrs Mandela is already being represented to the readers of newspapers in the Western world as future “first lady” and “mother of the nation”. How the liberation of the blacks in South Africa in the manner of Mrs Mandela and the ANC will be effected is evident from the “necklace” treatment, by which more than six hundred innocent blacks have departed this life.
A listing of various quotes from the Anglican bishop, and Nobel Laureate, Desmond Tutu speak for themselves:
“Some people think there was something funny about the birth of Jesus ... Maybe he was an illegitimate child.” (Cape Times, 24.10.80)
“When justice prevails over injustice, as in [Marxist] Zimbabwe, that shows that the Kingdom has already arrived.” (Ecunews 11, 1980)
“I thank God that I am black. At the Last Judgment the whites will have much to answer for.” (Argus, 19.3.84)
“A young fellow with a stone in his hand can do far more than I can with a dozen sermons.” (Daily Telegraph, London, Nov. 1984)
“Every Christian must be a revolutionary. Jesus was a revolutionary. I am a revolutionary, if by that you mean somebody who wants to change things completely.” (Rapport, 20.4.86)
Vaque concludes by describing how eager the US and the UK were to fund such leaders and arm them, sending millions to communist and nationalist regimes that border South Africa, despite their vicious treatment of their own populations.
GK Chesterton famously stated, the past is not what it was. History is told by the victors. The ANC, backed by the world’s superpowers, won their struggle.
But now, as they run the country into the ground whilst enriching themselves, it is long past time to bury their myths, to reject rainbowism and the ‘diversity myth’ in all its forms, and to live again.