Amongst the Afrikaners
(original title: The 'Niggers' of the Earth)
Note: In December 2011, I visited South Africa for two weeks to compose a journalistic piece on the state of the Afrikaner people since the end of Apartheid in 1994. That article eventually ran in a journal which is now out of print. But with Afrikaners in the news again these days, I thought it would be appropriate to republish this article, in order to provide context for the complex historical situation facing the “white tribe” today.
Below is the full article, republished in its entirety. —A.N.
VIVA AFRIKANER!
“If you’re out of luck or out of work
We can send you to Johannesburg.”
Though I am neither out of luck nor work at the time, these lyrics from the Elvis Costello song “Oliver’s Army” nevertheless keep turning through my head during my grueling 15-hour flight from Atlanta, Georgia, to the notorious South African metropolis in question.
When Costello recorded this pop-punk classic, a deceptively sweet-sounding jazzed-up calypso tune harshly critiquing British military imperialism, the name of Jo’burg was synonymous with the White Afrikaner Apartheid regime, then still clinging to power. Back in the 1980s, it seemed that everyone and his mother knew all about the odious ideology practiced by the ruling National Party of South Africa. Apartheid was held, in the court of world public opinion, to somehow be a uniquely awful practice, as bad, in its own way, as Nazism had been. It was viewed with such loathing that South Africa in effect became the nigger of the world: ostracized from trade, banned from the Olympics, shunned by right-thinking people everywhere.
Forget the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and other repressive, murderous Communist regimes (so we were instructed by liberal opinion-shapers), it was South Africa alone which truly deserved our greatest contempt. Apartheid, after all, was racial repression, dominance of Blacks by Whites, and therefore fascist, and therefore neo-Nazi, and therefore another Holocaust in the making, which must be stopped at all costs.
Cue the production of movies like Lethal Weapon II, A Dry, White Season, and Cry Freedom, egregiously simplistic cinematic morality plays with noble and magic Negro/White liberal heroes and hateful, mean-faced, invariably Afrikaner villains. Cue also Artists United Against Apartheid’s ridiculous protest anthem “I ain’t gonna play Sun City,” (“Relocation to a phony homeland/ Separation of families, I can’t understand” being among its resplendent lyrics.) And cue the faithful, unthinking, conformist allegiance of the sheeple towards the “respectable” party line.
THE APARTHEID YEARS
To be fair to the propagandists, Apartheid was a lousy ideology, deeply flawed in conception, and often brutal in practice. But these ubiquitous blanket condemnations lacked any saving sense of proportion, whereby one acknowledged that, compared to the rest of Africa, under various bizarre and ghoulish post-colonial regimes run by Idi Amin and other native-born dictators, Blacks actually prospered in Apartheid-era South Africa, and that repression in that country, while deplorable, was relatively mild compared with the tyranny of most Eastern bloc nations of the period.
The Afrikaners—descendants of the original White (Dutch, German, and French) settlers of the African continent and original creators of Apartheid as an official state policy following the victory of D.F. Malan over Jan Smuts in the 1948 election—have long absorbed my interest, for reasons that must relate in some way to the outcast status imposed upon them by self-righteous rock stars and international leftist activist celebrities of the Reagan-Thatcher era. I have a soft spot in my heart for such unreconstructed “niggers of the world”-types, who thumb their noses at the “consensus” of the imposed Zeitgeist, and are hated and pilloried ever after for their effrontery, which is invariably construed as some sort of hateful and repugnant term with a suffix of -ism or -ia (racism, sexism, nativism, homophobia, etc).
In the West today, no one is ostracized more than an alleged thought-criminal, who rejects the a priori tenets of political correctness, and who remains unmoved by ad hominem assaults upon his integrity stemming from his refusal to toe the party line. Though I don’t consider myself a cultural American Southerner, I always enjoy seeing Southerners proudly fly the “stars and bars” of the Confederate Battle Flag, in brazen, stubborn defiance of the edicts of their societal “betters.” As an English teacher and writer, I have actively opposed the culturally-Marxist linguistic scourge of “inclusive language,” which demands that we say “humankind” instead of “mankind,” or “fire-fighter” instead of “fireman,” as well as determinedly rejecting the designs of “diversity” czars who want to dethrone the “Dead White Male” Western canon and have us all reading crappy books written by semi-literate Aboriginal Eskimo albino lesbian hunchbacked cripples out of deference to a specious “inclusivity.”
For almost half a century, the Afrikaner presented a “nigger”-face to a Western world, growing more and more inured to militant modernist liberalism. The Afrikaner wasn’t simply a “racist,” who rejected multiculturalism for favor of thoroughgoing racial separatism; he was also a strongly religious sort of chap, as well. Now modern-day liberals can tolerate conspicuous manifestations of religious fervor, provided that they’re expressed by people who aren’t White, but anytime ethnically-conscious Whiteness and specifically Christian religiosity are combined, the militantly tolerant multiculturalist tends to get all in a snit.
After all—they whinge— weren’t Hitler and the Nazis Christians, as well? (They actually weren’t, but then you can’t expect a modern-day liberal, busy as he is with conscientiously correcting the prejudice and ignorance of his less enlightened neighbors, to be bothered with questioning his own numerous unfounded prejudices or addressing his often grievous historical ignorance.) The Afrikaners, being the “niggers of the world,” had won my sympathy nearly two decades ago, after their leaders caved to world pressure and dethroned themselves, King Lear-like, handing the kingdom over to their enemies.
ARRIVAL— ‘INTO THE FIRE’
Now, in December 2011, I am finally getting to meet my far-flung soulmates. On the generous dime of my benefactors at the National Policy Institute, I have jetted across the world, leaving the relatively safe confines of the good-ol’ U.S. of A. for the southern tip of the Dark Continent, to experience these “niggers” firsthand, now adrift in their formerly recognizable homeland, wandering like poor, homeless, mad King Lear through a gathering, apocalyptic storm.
These days, following the implosion of the Apartheid regime and the advent of true “democracy” in 1994, which has ushered in nearly two decades of rule by the Black-dominated African National Congress, Johannesburg is newly notorious… as the unofficial rape and murder capital of the world.
For this reason, I—a nervous flyer—feel a strange combination of relief and apprehension as we touch down at O.R. Tambo (formerly Jan Smuts) airport. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire,” is a phrase that thrusts itself into my exhausted mind as I file out of the plane and shuffle through customs alongside my weary fellow travelers.
Of course, I am being (slightly) overly dramatic. Johannesburg is a very dangerous city, but—much lurid tabloid-like propaganda to the contrary— it isn’t exactly a war zone. If you exercise proper caution and avoid doing foolish or reckless things or traveling to obviously dodgy locations, you should be okay.
Still, one is immediately struck by the extent to which living and working units in the area are conspicuously fortified. Nearly every private residence and business location in the Gauteng province—an area which includes Jo’burg and its sister city Pretoria, as well as the notorious township Soweto—is a mini castle-keep, complete with a high palisades electric fence, with barbed wires curlicued across the top, and one security company or another advertised prominently at the front.
No resident of the area can simply visit a neighbor by walking up to his front door and knocking or ringing the doorbell; instead, you have to buzz in at the front entrance, and wait for your neighbor to trust that you aren’t a thief, a murderer, or a rapist, before allowing you to obtain entrance by activating the automatic gate.
One is tempted to wonder if this setup isn’t a hysterical overreaction on the part of Whites to the undeniably real crime problem in South Africa. But the more I talked to individual Afrikaners, the more I felt inclined to believe that these fastidious security precautions are eminently reasonable, even necessary.
TRUE HORROR STORIES
Indeed, it seems that everyone has a horror story of some form or fashion to tell, either of a family member or a friend, on a farm or in a city or in a sleepy suburban locale, who became a victim of an awful act of aggravated violence. . . A cousin of one man was relaxing in his home watching a rugby match on TV on a Sunday afternoon, when suddenly a gang of Black hoodlums entered; one of them made a run at his wife in the living room, and as he rushed to protect her, he was shot and killed… A woman’s uncle and aunt were savagely tortured and murdered in their home one night, and nothing was even stolen from the house. . . A fellow in his mid-30s relates that a friend of his once stopped to assist a group of young Black men on the roadway whose car had supposedly broken down; in so doing, he walked right into an ambush—the men attempted an armed robbery, and the friend was gunned down in the ensuing melee. . . Another man opens up about how his girlfriend was carjacked in broad daylight—she found herself set upon by four Blacks with guns at a busy intersection; fearing a gang rape, she left the keys in the ignition and fled in a panic…. A mother tells me of a girl who was suddenly attacked by a Black man with a machete, who hacked her to death without provocation on a dark street one night….
Then there are the less shocking, more numerous accounts of petty muggings here and there; ever-present “smash and grab” raids, whereby a criminal walks up to an unsuspecting motorist, shatters his window with a crowbar or other solid object, reaches in to snatch the driver’s purse or Blackberry from the dashboard or passenger seat; or simple home burglaries which take place while the homeowner is at work or out of town.
To be sure, Afrikaners and other Whites aren’t the only victims of crime—many decent, law-abiding Blacks have also been robbed, raped, and murdered—but there seems evidence to deduce that not a few native Blacks have turned on the Boer nation— their former rulers—with a particularly hateful ferocity. Indeed, illegal and nominally legal activity seem to stem from a similar motivation.
The ruling ANC government frequently changes the names of Afrikaans roads and locations in a transparent effort to punish the people who they felt oppressed them in the past, and imposes quite insane racial quotas upon businesses and social services—even to the point where, for example, prospective black doctors in medical school are held to far less rigorous standards than their White counterparts, in order to increase the representation of Black doctors (never mind, I suppose, how well they treat the sick!).
White farmers, meanwhile, are asked to cede ever more of their private property in the interests of agricultural affirmative action; meanwhile, farm murders continue apace in a steady, dreary campaign of terror.
The details of the murders and assaults of Afrikaner farm families are often upsetting in the extreme: children are raped; elderly couples are made to drink acid and set on fire; one hears of new, bloodcurdling attacks nearly every month. According to credible statistics, there have been nearly 2,000 murders of farmers and their family members since 1991, and the numbers, while fluctuating from year to year, show no signs of abating.
Many have become convinced that the government is in fact behind the murders, whether through deliberate manipulation or as a result of irresponsible, vindictive anti-White rhetoric and propaganda, creating an atmosphere of hate.
‘THE PURPOSE OF TERRORISM IS TO TERRORIZE”
In Pretoria, I speak with three representatives of the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU), who openly declare their strong suspicion that some governmental authorities are complicit in the killings. General director Bennie van Zyl notes that many of the murders seem to take place in areas where the ANC has agitated for a greater degree of “land reform.” (Under the stipulations of “Black Economic Empowerment,” or “BEE” policies, farmers are required to let their black employees have part of their land after a certain number of years of employment.)
“There is certainly a link between violent attacks on farms and land claims,” declares van Zyl. “In provinces where the land claims are big, the attacks are big.”
Van Zyl draws a link between what is happening to Afrikaner farmers in South Africa and what has happened all over the continent from time to time when one tribe or group seeks to dispossess another, the most egregious recent example being the savage massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda in the mid-‘90s.
“It’s a pattern in the whole of Africa,” he says. “And I don’t think that the Western world recognizes this pattern. It’s very hard for us Afrikaners to understand it, and we grew up with those guys (the Blacks).” Using language that would make most North American and European Westerners, liberal or otherwise, blanch and titter as if they’d just heard a dirty joke, Van Zyl claims that in his view, it is simply a part of the African’s nature and mindset to conduct such murderous campaigns. “We (White Afrikaners) believe in God, but they (Blacks) believe in the power of their ancestors,” Van Zyl says. “We accept responsibility, while they replace responsibility. Their leaders want them to be perceived as a people with a deep-seated value system that attaches value to life, but the practice is very different.”
The world largely knows about the depredations of Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF Party in neighboring Zimbabwe. In that country, Mugabe’s forces have systematically forced the White farmers off of their land, bankrupting many and physically attacking others. As a result, a once relatively prosperous African country has turned into a blighted, impoverished scourge of a land.
When I ask if South Africa might become the next Zimbabwe, the representatives of the TAU respond that it’s already happening, simply in a covert manner. “It’s a case of a velvet glove covering an iron hand,” says TAU service manager Chris van Zyl.
I shed my liberal leftism long ago, in my undergraduate years, and today I call myself a moderate racialist, yet I find myself discomfited by the implication that Black Africans have some sort of natural proclivity towards ruthless violence. I also find it hard to accept that the ANC, incompetent and corrupt as it may be, has actually organized a murderous campaign against White farmers. I admit as much to these men, who in response own that not all Blacks are culturally depraved; many, in fact, are perfectly nice people.
However, they also ruefully note that the current ruling political party of South Africa—one of whose rally songs is “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer”—isn’t exactly falling over itself trying to make a priority of stopping the farm murders, or stopping Black-on-White violent crime in general.
Even if they aren’t directly complicit, these men maintain, the African National Congress has very little interest, if any, in protecting Afrikaners from harm.
“If there is crime, it suits the ANC,” says Bennie van Zyl. “The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize.”
SURREAL VIBES
During the time I spend in Johannesburg and neighboring Pretoria, the word “surreal” keeps leaping to mind.
It’s just hard to get a handle on this strange place. There is dire talk of continuing Black-on-White crime and even whispers of a coming Rwanda-style attempted genocide, an event supposedly predicted by legendary Afrikaner seer and mystic Nicholaas “Siener” van Rensburg, a kind of Boer Nostradamus who allegedly predicted the assassinations of Koos De La Rey and Hendrik Verwoerd, the advent of black rule in South Africa and the bitter blossoming of the deadly and virulent AIDS epidemic.
Though the Afrikaner nation is largely religious, spiritual devotion does not equate to superstitious credulity; not all buy into the “van Rensburg-as-prophet” notion. Yet there are mounting fears of a widespread, racially-motivated Krystallnacht-like “purge” against Whites taking place in the near future, whether provoked by official anti-Afrikaner ANC rhetoric, or merely as the result of uncontrolled mob violence following some galvanizing event (such as the death of Nelson Mandela) or mounting Black frustration over unemployment and poverty (which haven’t improved and have in fact largely worsened since Mandela’s election in 1994, but both of which are still commonly blamed on the “legacy of Apartheid” and White racism and colonialism).
Such fears of a looming mass slaughter strike me as lurid and overblown, even paranoid. Then again, this is Africa, where terrifying tribal violence has been, and continues to be, commonplace. It’s difficult to picture the world not intervening while Black mobs massacre Afrikaners in the streets all across South Africa… then again, “the world” largely didn’t intervene when Hutus slaughtered millions of Tutsis in Rwanda back in the mid-90s.
Nor has the “world” openly condemned the unrestrained violence against the South African farmer since the ascendancy of the ANC. But expectations of such impending horrors would be easier to digest if much of the country didn’t still strike this visitor as fairly “normal,” orderly, and familiar, in a modern, Western sense. You can, after all, find in this country all of the amenities most First Worlders have come to expect as their birthright. South Africa has posh shopping malls, hip coffee houses, state-of-the-art movie theaters (with stadium seating), fast food restaurants, and well-stocked gas stations (though they call them “garages”). It also has cable television, Internet service, and operational traffic lights (called “robots”).
Yet if you allow yourself to get lulled into complacency by all of this seemingly civilized Western-style prosperity, you might be in for a nasty shock. For example, if you spend too much time lost in thought at a red-lighted “robot,” you might suddenly find yourself carjacked, kidnapped, or sexually assaulted. This is a country where one is advised to run a red light in certain locations if possible, since to stop, that is to say, to obey the given traffic laws, means to make oneself vulnerable to property theft or bodily harm. It is a country in which many drivers plaster their vehicles with “Baby On Board” bumper stickers, not, as in America, in order to shame other motorists into driving safely around them, but rather to beg potential criminals to allow them to take their child out of his harness in the event of a carjacking!
I only have to imbibe this schizophrenia-inducing atmosphere—whereby, day after day, one hopes for tranquil normalcy while at the same time gravely fearing a sudden spasm of violent calamity—for a mere two weeks, and it nearly wears me out. One night I wake from ambiguously horrifying nightmares, gasping desperately for air, having been briefly assailed with some variation of cerebral shell-shock. If merely visiting South Africa produces such a reaction in a person, then how much more severe must be the psychic response to actually living here?
‘MY FIRST REALITY CHECK’
Dan Roodt, a distinguished writer and long-standing Afrikaner activist, meets me at an upscale “garage” halfway between Jo’burg and Pretoria. As we sit together and munch on our sandwiches, he reflects on what he calls this “extremely bizarre” set of contemporary circumstances in his country.
“In South Africa, we have the most violent peacetime society in the world,” Roodt says. “It’s almost like a low-intensity war. And there is always a risk that some incident could trigger riots and unrest.”
Roodt blames the “climate of hate” created by an ANC-dominated education system, which he holds responsible for much of the virulent racial antagonism raging among the country’s citizens today.
“South African Blacks are more anti-White than any population in the world,” he observes. “It’s a part of this whole ‘victim’ mentality. The ANC has created a fictional past ‘reality’ that feeds the present violence.”
By endlessly harping on the supposed evils of past White rule, and at the same time cynically playing on base tribal superstitions (President Zuma recently told voters that their ancestors would afflict them with sickness them if they voted against the ANC in coming elections), the present rulers of South Africa have “insured that they’ll never be voted out of office,” Roodt owns. At the same time, he says, many Blacks old enough to remember the Apartheid years will admit that, in many ways, things were better for them then than they are now.
“They (the Blacks) had jobs back then, and things were predictable,” Roodt says. “Social services were competent, unlike now,” he adds, noting the collapse of infrastructure and the graft, corruption, and incompetency that runs rampant among members of the current government.
Roodt is a lean, elegantly handsome, rather patrician-looking 54-year old man with a full head of thick silver hair and a gentle, unassuming, soft-spoken manner that seems in some ways at odds with his passionate, at times almost strident rhetoric. Like many Afrikaner intellectuals his age and older, Roodt began his academic career as a man of the Left, furiously critical of the National Party and its Apartheid policies, only later to take a severe Right-ward turn following the ascension of the ANC to power and the troubled times that followed.
“Our generation had the sense that our parents were conformists,” he says, recalling his turbulent adolescent years. “There was a sense of rebellion at the time. At our schools, some of the older teachers were bullies who abused their authority over us… Once I began rebelling against the way things were, I just went further and further.”
In fact, Roodt went all the way to Paris, France, in part to avoid being conscripted into the armed forces and forced to take part in the border wars South Africa was fighting against hostile Communist-backed neighboring regimes at the time. But he eventually became dismayed by the brazen ignorance and despicable malice displayed by many of his Parisian comrades-in-arms at the time.
“That was my first reality check,” he reflects. “These people I came to know looked at South Africa in a completely simplistic way.” Their perspective, in fact, was ludicrously “black-and-white”: that is to say, the Whites were brutal oppressors, and the Blacks were noble and righteous seekers of justice and liberation.
Roodt became irritated by such instances of typically leftist hive-minded groupthink, and he also began to resent how his home country got assailed with one economic sanction after another by country after country as the years rolled by. “Why should we be singled out for ignominy, when other countries have much worse human rights records?” he asked others at the time, never obtaining a satisfactory answer.
Then came the crucial turning point of his self-imposed exile from South Africa. In the late 1980s, Roodt was invited to meet with the cultural section of the African National Congress in a seminar set up by a certain left-wing “liberation theology”-minded church group in Germany. His experiences at this seminar led him to suspect that an ANC takeover would be disastrous to those of his ethnic and racial background.
“Even though I was still a trendy, liberal literary scholar, I felt a sense of rejection from the Blacks and Coloureds present,” he recalls. “That sent me thinking. On the way back from Germany, I realized that I couldn’t betray my own people to become one of these unreconstructed Communists.”
These days, Roodt is contemplating the best way to continue the struggle for Afrikaner self-determination. Among other projects, including forays into politics, he has alighted upon a (literally) novel concept: he is in the early stages of composing a science fiction manuscript, set on another planet in a distant future, that explains the contemporary clash of races in an allegorical sense. Through such an unusual format, Roodt said he hopes to open minds that are currently paralyzed by rigidly enforced PC dogma surrounding the issue of racial differences.
“I’m at the stage where I feel like I need to do something extraordinary to change people’s minds,” he says.
NEW HOMELANDS
Foremost among the goals of Roodt and others like him is to forge an authentic Afrikaner homeland, a place where the descendants of the historic “Boers” can feel safe and can be assured of their legitimate interests being protected.
Nearly everyone I speak with in Jo’burg and Pretoria said that they found the current state of things utterly untenable. Most fear creeping demographic disaster through massive emigration and low birthrates, continued economic disenfranchisement via relentlessly applied government-sponsored affirmative action and so-called land “reform,” and rising violence against their persons and property in the form of Black crime and terrorism.
Yet for all of the problems the 21st Century Afrikaner faces from without, his stubborn, individualistic streak hampers him from bonding with his kin and facing his enemies in a united front. An oft-heard, somewhat bitter joke I heard on several occasions from many sources, each independent of the others, runs thusly:
Q: What do you get when you put three Afrikaners on a desert island?
A: You get four different churches, and five different political parties.
Though there is much difference of opinion regarding which path to take out of the current quandary, there seems to be a general consensus that accepting the status quo indefinitely is a recipe for both individual and collective disaster, if not eventual ethnic extinction. Desperation hangs so thickly in the air that one can almost smell it. To many, it seems the future holds only the bleakest of prospects. Several hundreds of thousands of Afrikaners have emigrated from their home country to other places in the world since 1994—and even earlier, when the proverbial writing was on the wall that the Apartheid-era government was in its death throes.
Yet while many have left the country (and the continent) for such distant destinations as New Zealand, Australia, England, Canada, and the United States, and others have retreated within their heavily fortified homes behind barbed-wire fences and electric gates, hoping for the best while steeling themselves for the worst, a relatively small number of contemporary Afrikaners have opted to pursue a radical, risky, but potentially more rewarding course of action. Some, that is, have staked their hopes on the prospect of seceding from the current wreck of a “Rainbow Nation,” and constructing a kind of Boer ethno-state in its very midst, with the intention of reclaiming their genetic and cultural self-determination, and saving the Afrikaner identity from dilution and eventual extinction.
Currently, two such communities exist, though there is talk of more attempts to be launched in the near future.
KLEINFONTEIN
Kleinfontein is essentially a Pretoria suburb, located near “Diamond Hill,” the site of a legendary battle in the Anglo-Boer War. Orania, which has garnered much more national and international attention, can be found along an unassuming country road in the arid karoo of the Northern Cape. Both towns are 100 percent Afrikaner in ethnic composition, and the traditional Afrikaans language—an intriguingly uber-guttural tongue sometimes described as “bastard Dutch”—is proudly spoken and fiercely promoted.
The short-term game plan of both Kleinfontein and Orania, of course, is to peacefully coexist with the South African governmental powers-that-be, not to brashly declare themselves inheritors of a new nation, as if spoiling for a fight. One gathers, however, that the leaders of both communities are keeping a sharp eye on social and political trends and measuring their prospects for political independence in the near future, should present cultural deterioration continue apace.
Needless to say, the greater the peril that Afrikaners feel themselves to be facing in their day-to-day lives, the more attractive such radical living options will start to appear, and the more Afrikaners flock to places like Kleinfontein and Orania, the harder it will be for such communities to avoid being seen as dangerously insubordinate hotbeds of rebellion against good “Rainbow Nation” values. For now, however, both towns are basically left alone.
Kleinfontein is a fascinating and impressively-conceived, if dusty and somewhat hardscrabble little place, full of winding dirt roads and rambling country houses, protected by a pair of guards and a checkpoint at the entrance. A statue of Hendrik Verwoerd—former South African prime minister and fervent Apartheid organizer and promoter—stands at the center of the town square.
Verwoerd, who was brutally stabbed to death by a crazed Coloured man in the House of Assembly in Cape Town back in 1966, is an object of veneration to residents of both Kleinfontein and Orania, though both communities heavily reject the man’s policy of mandating racial segregation by law, if for no other reason than that it wound up making the Afrikaner spoiled and “soft,” reliant on other ethnicities to cook his food, clean his house, tend his garden, and otherwise perform his menial tasks.
The insistence that the Boer people need to relearn self-reliance was a constant refrain, one I heard emphasized by nearly everyone. One particularly mordant joke manages to reference both the fear of Black crime and apprehension that the modern-day Boer has lost the hardy, self-sufficient will that so characterized his intrepid Voortrekker ancestors:
Q: Who is an Afrikaner today?
A: Someone who’d rather get murdered in his bed than make it himself.
Kleinfontein’s founders hold that Gauteng is the most opportune province in which to establish a new Boer homeland, as the greater Pretoria region remains the place most heavily populated by self-identified Afrikaners. Still, even in Gauteng, the percentage of Afrikaners is quite low with respect to the general population. Country-wide, recent estimates are that Whites make up only 9 percent of the current population of South Africa—that is to say, around 5 million people in a country of over 50 million citizens (with the untold numbers of non-White illegal immigrants pouring in daily through the porous northern border, rendering the Whites of the country even more racially outnumbered). Of that five million, it’s estimated that around three-and a half million are of Afrikaner descent—the rest being chiefly British. With such dwindling minority status, Afrikaners zealous to maintain their heritage must take particular precautions.
ORANIA
With this perilous situation in mind, the founders of Orania planned ingeniously. They purchased land in the Northern Cape adjacent to the Orange River in the late 1980s, in sparsely populated country. Hendrik Verwoerd took pains during his lifetime to insure that the dry land in this area be irrigated; upon Orania’s establishment in 1991, its residents immediately began raising various crops and readying them for “export” to the rest of the nation, as well as to the world.
Today, Orania has grown impressively prosperous through sales of pecan nuts, alfalfa, wheat, maize, olives, apricots, and peaches, as well as through the manufacture of a diverse array of homemade products from jewelry to bricks to coffins. The population of Orania began quite small, but has grown incrementally through the years—now there are over a thousand residents, and many others who plan to move there in the future once they obtain the means and can obtain local work.
Kleinfontein and Orania are around the same size, but perceptions of late are that Klienfontein has stagnated somewhat, while Orania looks to be poised for ever-greater growth and development. It is difficult to tell if such perceptions are based on anything solid, or are merely indications that Orania’s founders and backers have run a cannier—and more ambitious— PR-campaign. In any case, I determine that my investigation of the current state of the Afrikaner nation would be incomplete without paying a visit to these mysterious and strangely alluring Oranians. I call ahead, book a room at a humble, rustic inn, rent a car, and one morning undertake my own “Great Trek” of sorts to a largely undiscovered country, seldom seen by American eyes.
MY ‘GREAT TREK’ TO ORANIA
The 350 mile drive from suburban Johannesburg to Orania proves to be exhausting. Partly this is due to the typical psychic discombobulation that inevitably ensues when a born-and-bred American driver suddenly has to get used to piloting a car with the steering wheel on the right hand side of the car instead of the left, and of having to stick to the left-hand side of the road, rather than the right.
But other factors don’t help, either. For one thing, even in the Jo’burg suburbs one is constantly set upon by vendors hawking their wares—newspapers, pamphlets, maize stalks, and all sorts of worthless knickknacks—at every stoplight. Occasionally beggars get into the act; there is indeed a strikingly formal manner to African-style begging—they cup their hands together, as if in prayer, and bow their heads humbly to you, looking as pitiful as a sinner before an angry deity. You learn early on to wave them away with a firm gesture of determined disinterest, scrupulously avoiding eye contact all the while.
Then there are the roads themselves. Major South African roads look like American freeways around the cities, but once you get further out, they begin to more closely resemble lesser-used and less-well kept American state highways, complete with potholes and sudden detours into desultory little towns full of cracked plaster and strewn rubbish.
The signage is often confusing, as well; for a while, I follow an arrow on a sign which seems to point towards the continuation of the road I want, but it actually steers me directly into a filthy, poverty-ravaged township. (When the road turned into dirt, I decide I must have misunderstood the where that arrow indicated that I go; I promptly whip a “U-ie” (as they call such a maneuver around here) and find, after returning to the spot of the mistake, that the place I needed to turn was just after the road I’d mistakenly taken.
Hopping onto the N-12 outside of Jo’burg, I then pass through Potchefstroom, then proceed south through Warrenton and Kimberley, in whose dingy city center I temporarily lose the trail again. I have to turn several more U-ies before I regain sight of the N-12; once again, I have been thrown off by ambiguous signage in the midst of a dizzying series of twilit intersections. I pause to purchase a “Zinger Burger” from a roadside KFC (the most popular American fast food chain in this country), and once more head south towards Hopetown.
Hitting this lonely stretch in the gathering dusk, I soon find myself utterly in the dark for a good couple of hours. Here in the karoo, the semi-desert terrain of the Northern Cape, towns are scarce, and this once major highway has essentially become a ragged country road. I grip the wheel, put my brights on when possible, and remind myself to “stay to the left, stay to the left, stay to the left.” Occasionally trucks pass from the other direction with a zoom and a whoosh, and I briefly hyperventilate at the friction of what seems to be a near-sideswipe. Finally, at Hopetown I turn left on N-396 and in forty kilometers, at 10 p.m. I arrive in Orania, where it appears the entire town has gone to bed.
MY ORANIAN ODYSSEY
John Strydom, the kindly if insistently industrious public relations officer of the town, escorts me through the rows of charmingly austere little houses and up a small hill, to where my accommodations have been prepared in a row of rooms still largely under construction. The wind whips madly through the lonely brush as I grab my suitcase and stagger into my spare but clean little suite, overtired and a bit grumpy and frazzled from the arduous trek I’ve just completed. Unlike the original Voortrekkers, I haven’t had to ride in a creaky ox wagon or fight off Zulu impis, but I still feel worn out and down for the count. I sleep well into the morning, but a buzzsaw from a nearby construction site provides a jarring wakeup call.
For the next three days, I explore Orania, talk with its residents and representatives, and take in the sights and sounds. Having arrived with no consciously preconceived notions, I find myself surprised just the same. It seems, in many ways, a very ordinary country town: clean, safe, possibly even a little bit dull.
Indeed, those seeking evidence of a weirdly sinister right-wing neo-Nazi cult in Orania are sure to emerge disappointed. I find the place fairly well bursting with friendliness and pleasant vibes. One is struck, in fact, by just how normal these people seem. They aren’t “freakishly” normal, in a 1950s Leave It to Beaver kind of way; they don’t look like they’ve emerged from any sort of a time warp or temporal anomaly out of a Twilight Zone episode; they don’t dress in ostentatious Victorian garb like characters in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, nor are they clad in unflattering prairie dresses and long patriarchal beards like dwellers of some unsavory polygamous settlement in the heart of rural Utah.
Instead, the Oranians wear contemporary clothes, sport modern hairstyles, listen to rock music and watch Hollywood movies. At the same time, they also seem focused on remaining apart from the larger society—indeed, it may be said that they practice a kind of voluntary “apartheid,” dedicated to “separate development” of a sort. Moreover, nearly all Oranians seem to be quite religiously observant, though not all belong to the same church. Many are Dutch Reformed, the historical Calvinistic faith of the Afrikaner nation; others are members of the Nederduisch Hervormede Church or the Gereformeerde Church, the more traditional-minded and austere versions of the DRC; still others are members of various conservative “house churches.”
But whichever church body they call home, the Oranians agree to disagree on certain matters of theological doctrine and pull together around issues they view as crucial to their contemporary survival. And they feel that they can only ensure their survival and the continuance of their beloved traditions if they unite around a common vision of the polity, one that lays emphasis on both culture and ethnicity.
There is much gloom and doom among Afrikaners today regarding their prospects for the future, but the architects of the Orania project seem to grasp instinctively that a message of grim, militant pessimism doesn’t sell well. The Orania campaign, thus, is to accentuate the positive. Posters around the town sing of Orania as a “dream come true.” The most prominent promotional photograph depicts five pretty, long-legged young girls, each clad in orange, leaping joyously into the air, alongside the perky proclamation “Welcome To Orania!”
The poster communicates youthfulness, vitality, innocence, even a kind of subtle (if wholesome) sex appeal. It causes the viewer to consider the town, not as a bitter refuge-spot for dead-enders, but as a fun place, where one can live free from care and dwell happily with one’s brethren, and maybe meet a potential wife or husband. And the pitch seems to be working: many do come to Orania, if only to stay temporarily. In addition to its export business of crops and commodities, around 30 percent of Orania’s draw comes from the tourist industry. There is a fancy spa and a chalet-style motel, and an upscale restaurant overlooking the Orange River, along with a camping site. Guests commonly spend a night or two in the middle of a trip to or from Cape Town to relax and recharge. Thus, news of the existence and mission of Orania continues to spread via word of mouth.
The overwhelming majority of the people I meet in Orania prove to be welcoming and warmly accommodating. The fact that I’m an outsider (“uitlander”), that I don’t speak the language, and that I’m there in the capacity of a journalist would all seem to be strikes against me. Orania has seen its share of newspaper and magazine writers over the course of its 20 year existence, and needless to say, most reporters have been of the “smirking liberal” variety—the type who are friendly and sympathetic to your face, take advantage of your sincerely offered hospitality, then proceed to write cruelly nasty articles about you. Despite the fact that the Oranians have no real reason to trust me, most are open with their thoughts, and only a rare specimen here or there seems in any way suspicious of my motives.
SEBASTIAAN OF ORANIA
Perhaps the most interesting person I speak with during my stay in Orania is a shy, retiring, rigorously intellectual 36-year old man named Sebastiaan Biehl. One would normally expect a man of his cerebral bent to be found in academia; in Orania, however, he works as a real estate agent. Biehl is an “uitlander” who, one might say, has gone native. He is from Germany, but he has found his calling, to dwell among the Afrikaners—one might even say he is an Afrikaner convert of sorts.
When I ask to confirm that he is German, he answers, “Yes, I was, originally.” But he now considers himself a thoroughly naturalized Afrikaner; he speaks Afrikaans as a first language, and has even published a novel, entitled Beslissing In Die Karoo, in Afrikaans. Biehl’s journey began two decades ago, when he began to correspond with a pen pal who lived on a farm in the Free State province. When he visited in the summer of 1992, he said, it had the effect of a “revelation.” Indeed, after working on his friend’s farm for a couple of months, he had the sensation of finally having found his place in the world.
“I felt like I had come home,” he recalls.
As a solitary, thoughtful lad, Biehl had long felt alienated from contemporary European mores. The erosion of faith in an increasingly secularized society had led, in his observation, to a culture that had grown “cold and immoral,” rife with social ills. Among the Afrikaners, Biehl says, he discovered “a deep-seated conservatism of the hearty sort,” and at the same time he experienced “a rebirth or a rejuvenation of faith.” When he returned to the country of his birth, he came to perceive ever more clearly that he didn’t belong there.
“I saw Germany with new eyes,” he recalls. “I found it superficial and materialistic and hectic and… godless. I couldn’t wait to get back to South Africa again. There was a feeling of freedom there, of wide open spaces. It was like stepping back in time.”
He went to college at South Africa’s Free State University in 1996, earning a degree in Political Science with a focus on History and Politics. Along the way, he changed his first name, adding an additional “a” to his given name of “Sebastian,” in the Afrikaner style. After college, Biehl settled in Bloemfontein, and then in 2005, after much soul searching, he opted to take up residence in Orania. He took a job as a realtor, though it had little relevance to his collegiate training, because he wished to choose a profession in which he could help his adopted hometown to grow and expand.
Biehl says he has absolutely no regrets about his radical lifestyle makeover. Though certain traits still mark him as an “uitlander”—he is, for example, a Lutheran in a community of Calvinists—he couldn’t be happier than to dwell exactly where he does. “Orania will always be where my roots are,” he says. “You have to pay a price if you want to be free.”
THE ANGLO-BOER WAR: FESTERING SCARS
I have business in Gauteng before I return to the States, so I leave Orania behind on an early Sunday morning while everyone’s at church, winding my way back to suburban Jo’burg. I opt, however, to spend an evening in the city of Bloemfontein to see the Women’s Monument, a site first christened in 1913, dedicated to the remembrance of the women and children who were rounded up by the British during the Anglo-Boer War and dispatched to concentration camps, where many thousands starved to death.
The main fixture of the site is heart-grabbingly powerful (see above). Before a massive obelisk, on a platform ten feet above the ground, there are three sculpted figures: a young woman bears a dead child in her arms, a desperately forlorn look upon her face; she is flanked by a middle-aged woman, who gazes into the distance stoically.
As I stand at the foot of this statue, I find myself tearing up a bit; the simultaneous torment and determined endurance on the faces of the two stone women somehow says everything one needs to know about the horrors of “total” war and its dreadful victimization of the innocent. During the Anglo-Boer war, the British resorted to horrifying atrocities in order to achieve domination over the scrappy Afrikaners; they slaughtered livestock, burned down farms, and doomed helpless civilians to sure, agonizing deaths. They weren’t the first ones to do such things—Generals Sherman and Sheridan, under the command of Abraham Lincoln, decimated the American South in much the same manner half a century before. Nor was the British army the last to go “scorched earth” on its enemies, as all familiar with the bitter history of 20th-century warfare, and the hardly less horrifying first decade of the 21st century, can attest.
But one cannot escape the sense that the British establishment of concentration camps represents some massively significant betrayal of ostensibly humane and “civilized” Western values, regardless of which side, the Brits or the Boers, had the more legitimate claim to political control over the Orange State and the Transvaal back in 1899. The Afrikaners suffered horrendously in this war, in manifold ways: physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Anger and bitterness for the wounds they endured at the hands of the British, in fact, still fester viciously to this day, over a century later.
THE VOORTREKKER MONUMENT
Three days after viewing the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein, I visit another important Afrikaner landmark, and I once again find myself emotionally shaken, moved beyond measure for reasons I barely understand. The Voortrekker Monument sits atop a hill in the outskirts of Pretoria.
It is an imposing, cathedral-like edifice— somewhere near 130 feet tall—which can be viewed from a vast distance. In some ways, the Voortrekker Monument is the architectural antithesis of the Women’s Monument. Completed and christened in 1949, it celebrates a major victory for ascendant Afrikanerdom just as the Women’s Monument commemorates the horror and humiliation of an ignominious defeat.
The year before the construction of the monument, in 1948, the Afrikaner-favored National Party, led by D.F. Malan, defeated Jan Smuts, long-standing incumbent prime minister of the British-led United Party. A half century after losing the Anglo-Boer War, the Afrikaner had at last seized the upper hand and taken control.
Afrikaners tend to view Malan’s electoral triumph of 1948 the same way that most of today’s Black population sees Mandela’s ascension to the South African presidency in 1994: it was a moment, following a great, decades-long struggle, in which they finally won what they felt to be their birthright. Crucial in building this victory was a canny campaign to celebrate the heroic valor of the Boer Voortrekkers of the previous century, who under the leadership of Andries Pretorius, won what they felt to be a miraculous victory over far-superior Zulu forces at Blood River in present day Kwazulu-Natal on December 16, 1838.
Prior to the battle, the Voortrekkers had suffered several terrible defeats on the veldt at the hands of Dingaan Zulu’s mighty army, including a notorious “sucker-punch” ambush in which Dingaan invited Piet Retief and various other Voortrekkers to his camp under the auspices of signing a peace treaty, before directing his troops to torture and massacre the unarmed White men. Following this grievous incident, Zulu warriors conducted numerous destructive attacks on Voortrekker laagers, killing around 500 men, women and children.
Reeling with grief, and facing the prospect of impending utter extinction, the bedraggled camp of devoutly Christian pioneers led by Pretorius turned to prayer. On December 9, they took a vow, declaring before heaven that if God granted them victory in the coming battle, they would forever commemorate the date. A week later, on December 16, the ragtag 480 Afrikaners turned away a fiercely invading force of Zulu impis numbering somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000, killing over 3,000 of their enemy and suffering not a single casualty in the process. It was afterwards hailed as Geloftedag, or “Day of the Vow.”
Geloftedag is still a holy day in the traditional Afrikaner calendar, a day to remember the bravery and dedication of one’s ancestors, as well as being a time to give thanks to the Almighty for his manifold blessings. It is like Thanksgiving, Veteran’s Day, Passover, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one: a time for unabashedly celebrating one’s national and ethnic heritage, while also engaging in solemn, sober spiritual reflection.
Geloftedag services are held in churches, parks, and other locations across the country, but the Voortrekker Monument is the largest and most publicized of all such venues. The building itself is an extraordinary enough place to investigate even on a quiet day. One ascends its massive staircase and walks along the length of its impressive exterior, scrutinizes its high stone walls flanked by massive statues of bearded Boers holding huge rifles, and one is filled with a sense of awe, as well as a kind of terror.
This is a structure designed to intimidate; there is an undeniably brutal quality to its beauty. If the Voortrekker Monument had a voice, it would be low, loud, and thunderously threatening. It is the sort of building that Leni Reifenstahl would have loved to use as a set piece. To call it an example of “Fascist architecture” may be misleading, since ideological affinities between National Party-led South Africa and Nazi Germany are quite tenuous, for reasons already mentioned. Still, just as the National Socialists in Germany chanted “Seig Hiel” at their rallies, the Voortrekker Monument unashamedly demands that we “hail” a glorious “victory” for the Afrikaner tribe in South Africa.
THE MIRACULOUS DEFEAT OF DIGNAAN ZULU AT BLOOD RIVER
If one objects that everything seems crudely simplistic and shamelessly triumphalist in tone, it could reasonably be retorted that all sites dedicated to national accomplishments and ideals—from Mount Rushmore to Trafalgar Square to the Arc de Triomphe—share this characteristically unselfconscious “hurray for our side” spirit of chauvinistic bravado.
Today, of course, in our politically correct “post-colonial” age, historically White nations are discouraged from indulging in such sentiments, thus lending the Voortrekker Monument a rather delicious air of ripe, forbidden fruit. The majestic interior contains a marble frieze which runs across the wall from one side to the other—a pictorial history is presented of the Voortrekker movement. We see the Boers leave the Cape and escape British tyranny to forge a destiny for themselves in the wilds of a savage and untamed continent. We see Piet Retief’s disastrous—and fatal—mistake of attempting to make peace with the double-dealing Dingaan. We witness Zulu impis preparing to kill Afrikaner women and children; the Black warriors brandish their spears before helpless throngs of terrified Whites. One old woman holds a baby in the crook of her left arm while she reaches out with her right hand and grasps the muscular arm of a Zulu; she looks up at him beseechingly, but he glowers back at her with pitiless hatred. A boy tries to shield his younger sister from attack by putting his little arms over her head; another boy picks up a musket dropped by his dead father, and takes aim at his attackers, thus presaging the ultimate triumph of frontier gumption and divine will in the miraculous victory of Blood River.
The final scene in the frieze is, indeed, a depiction of this famous battle, in which the embattled Boers routed an army 20 times their size. For a people that now view themselves as outnumbered and existentially imperiled, every day losing ground to their enemies, the contemplation of such an incredible past triumph must inspire the same sort of pride and reverential longing that an observant Jew must feel when he ponders the notion of the Red Sea parting at Yahweh’s command, saving the Israelites from certain doom.
DAY OF THE VOW
On Friday, December 16, 2011, I attend Geloftedag ceremonies at the Voortrekker Monument. It is a bright, brilliant day, and by 8 a.m., a large crowd has already gathered. Once more, as at Orania, I am struck by just how un-striking the
gathered throng appears. Most are dressed in semi-formal attire, as one would for church, but many more wear jeans, shorts, and sneakers. Very few sport 19th-century period costumes, which is a bit of a disappointment. . . I’d expected to run across some colorful, brash, outspoken, feisty characters, but for the most part, this crowd just seems like a lot of orderly, peaceable, well-behaved White folks. I would almost call them “innocuous.” Aside from the penchant of many children to go barefoot (a unique Afrikaner cultural phenomenon) and the prevalence of the Afrikaans language, these people could be amiable, mild-mannered suburbanites sitting beside me at an Atlanta Braves game at Turner Field.
Still, the fact that so many of them went out of their way to attend this event must be important, and it’s quite possible that I, an ‘uitlander’ who doesn’t speak the language, am missing something. The people pack into both levels of the building, while some find shady places to sit outside; led by a keyboard player and a cantor, the crowd duly sings patriotic songs and Christmas carols from a shared program.
A smiling minister delivers a sermon in a friendly, personable manner—an Afrikaner friend later tells me that he emphasized the importance of acting for the glory of God, not out of a desire for personal gain. Though this pastor related his message to the Blood River battle and its aftermath, the content of the homily still sounds like standard evangelical boilerplate, like something one might hear delivered by some blandly handsome young preacher at a Baptist megachurch in heartland America. It somehow seems like a “lite” version of Afrikanerdom, a watering down of the fierce, uncompromising spirit which built this edifice over half a century ago.
But just as I began to fret that the Boer cause may have been rendered utterly toothless by modernity, I found myself witness to a moment of real, almost elemental power, which convinced me otherwise. Of course, this moment has to wait until all of the singing, and the speechifying, has ceased. Afterwards, the crowd gathers around a cenotaph, or plaque, located in the middle of the bottom floor. Some lean over the railing of the floor above, and peered downward. On the cenotaph reads the words “Ons vir jou, Suid-Afrika” (“We for you, South Africa”).
As the noontime hour approaches, a beam of sunlight shines through a strategically carved hole high above our heads in the roof of the Monument; the crowd buzzes excitedly as the circle of sunshine makes its way along the floor, before finally alighting on the cenotaph at exactly 12:00. Then the crowd suddenly stands, and in lusty, full-throated voices, belts out “Die Stem van Suid-Afrika,” the former national anthem of South Africa prior to 1994:
From the blue of our heaven
From the depths of our sea,
Over our eternal mountain ranges
Where our cliffs their answer give
We will answer to your calling,
We will offer what you ask
We will live, we will die, We for Thee, South Africa!
Following this impromptu performance, the crowd gives a hearty cheer, then several parents send their children to pose in front of the sunbeam as they take photographs. People are still standing in a circle, facing one another, and I feel myself in some ways witness to a nation facing itself, wondering what comes next.
It is grand and glorious to sing together, as if with one voice, of giving one’s life for one’s country, but what does one do when the song ends, and one recalls that his country, in essence, no longer exists?
It is a dire question that many in Europe and North America will no doubt be asking themselves in the coming years. Due to his immediate circumstances, the Afrikaner feels urgently compelled to ask it now. Whether he ultimately succeeds or fails to find the correct answer, we will find much to learn from observing the various steps he is currently taking to attempt to secure a proper homeland for himself and his children.
And if he actually manages to triumph, against all odds, and again emerges victorious, as his ancestors did at Blood River, then unreconstructed Westerners will find in the study of the Afrikaner’s present struggles an invaluable treasure, an ace that we can keep in the turbulent times ahead.
Andy Nowicki is the author of several books, most recently The Insurrectionist, and Muze, as well as the recently-published The Rule of Wrath. Visit his YouTube channel.
Saw this right under Eve Fairbanks' bourgeois showboating and denial under the "Africa" section. Would you consider writing a response article to that at some point?