The Devil & Dr. Verwoerd

This year on April 6 marked the founding of Cape Town. On that day in 1652 Jan van Riebeeck led colonists to found what would become Cape Town. For Afrikaners this was akin to our Pilgrim Father's establishing a colony in 1620.

Remembering, let alone celebrating, Dutch settlement in South Africa has been tossed into the memory hole.

The grand scheme of the Dutch East India Company was for Cape Town to be a supply link to aid the main chance: trade with the Spice Islands [today's Indonesia]. The role of citrus in preventing scurvy was known and the farmers, the Cape Burghers, were there to make sure Dutch sailors would be scurvy-free.

The Cape Burghers were half-hearted imperialists. They resisted or evaded the chosen instrument for Amsterdam's mercantilist actions, the Dutch East India Company, whenever possible. Their dealings with the Cape natives, the Bushmen and the Hottentots were to keep apart, not subjugate. That pattern of keeping apart was how they dealt with the Bantu 125 years later when they first contacted near the Fish River.

There was an independence movement inspired by the American Revolution [the Cape Burgher movement]. That movement became the impetus for the Voortrekkers. Instead of fighting a revolution they emigrated.

Let me reiterate, when Afrikaners encountered the Bantu [Zulus, Xhosa, Swazi, etc.] it was not the pattern of later European colonizers who moved in on existing people. Voortrekkers were moving into the same empty land at the same time. Neither Bantu nor Voortrekkers had a better claim to the future Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal.

From 1777, the first encounter between the Bantu and the Afrikaners, to the eve of the Boer War, there emerged a mosaic of several regimes, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Limpopo River.

This mosaic of separate regimes ignored boundaries on European maps, but so what? The reality on the ground was some twelve regimes living as neighbors as well as states can.

Then came the Boer War [1899-1902] and England scrambled enough southern African eggs to make their British South African omelet.

Little noted is that a greater portion of Afrikaners died in British-run concentration camps than did the Nazi's victims circa 1933-45. A point that should give pause to the hotspurs for American Empire is what subduing the Boers required. When the last remnants of the "bitter-enders" concluded the Peace at Vereeninging the British had in South Africa as many soldiers as there were Afrikaner men, women and children. It took one British Tommy per Boer to get surrender.

Surrender was not unanimous. Orange Free State President Steyn only agreed to a truce and wanted to repudiate surrender. The Afrikaners negotiating came close to rejecting surrender; only the promise of self-government by Kitchener persuaded Jan Smuts to agree.

Confronted now with a "majority" of Bantu in this British New Order the British played a race card in the formation of the new government. They claimed a federal order would bring in Bantu participation. Afrikaners agreed to a unitary state for British South Africa. For Afrikaners to secure independence from England under this arrangement, they would have to become masters of this new and powerful state.

The Afrikaners had made their Faustian bargain. To achieve independence they sought power. Their power quest in the Union of South Africa regime transmogrified them from being resisters of British imperialism to collaborators of the British regime. Afrikaners bargain with British Imperialism eventually got them viewed as neo-Nazis.

Irony? None that can be seen from here to the horizon.

Were Afrikaners the embodied perfection of PC man, excuse me, PC primate? No, unlike their critics who are perfect. Afrikaners fulfilled Lord Acton's dicta that no class or group of men were fit for power: all classes and groups of men are unfit for power.

Dr. H. F. Verwoerd was South Africa’s Prime Minister from 1958 until assassinated in 1966. He led South Africa from being a self-governing imperial component [“Union of South Africa”] to a Republic outside of the British Empire’s halfway house: the Commonwealth.

Afrikaners triumph in ousting the British was not celebrated on the same par as Kwame Nkrumah's transformation of the British Gold Coast into Ghana. Nkrumah, the Congo's Lumumba, Senegal's Senghor et al were celebrated as liberators around the world.

How was Verwoerd's South Africa treated?

In the Afrikaners march from the Union regime [1910] to the Republic [1961] to apartheid's dismantling [1991] they walked from state resistance to resisting only British-run states.

In time Afrikaners grew weary of holding onto a despised, Afrikaner imperium. So the Afrikaners yielded their hold on the Pretoria government to the “majority.”

Apartheid’s architects were the National Party. They had a conservative wing know as the “verkrampte” who warned of a bleak future if the Nationalists yielded power to the “majority.” They warned of intra-Bantu violence, of anti-white violence, of rising crime generally, of financial hard times, and civil strife leading to civil war. They also warned that South Africa would become a Soviet colony. On the latter point they were wrong. Not for lack of trying by Mandela, it is just that the Soviet Union went out of business around the time he was setting up his regime. The other warnings have come true, but being a Cassandra is never rewarded.

From a paleo’s perspective, Afrikaners would have been better served in giving up on the unitary state, but the “one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them” got them. So the civilization they worked to build and keep for three hundred, thirty-nine years is going with those “Winds of Change” a British politician blathered about forty years back.

But once on a happy day a hundred families started something nice in a far away place and it is worth remembering and honoring.

August 21, 2002