Category Archives: South-Africa

Updated: Hermann Giliomee: Reluctant Historian of the Afrikaner?

I’m reading Hermann Giliomee’s The Afrikaners: Biography of a People. Giliomee is the historian of record on the topic. At the same time, I’m also reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. (I reviewed one of his later volumes for The American Conservative.)
Perhaps my South African readers—at least those who are in the know—can respond to my initial observation:
Besides Fischer being a better writer, Giliomee seem to lack any fondness for his subject—the kind I detect in Fischer, who simply delights in the American settlers, human foibles and all.
I was so looking forward to reading Giliomee, but I find his door-stopper quite a downer. He’s a fine historian, make no mistake; Giliomee has an impressive command of the primary sources. But he’s too negative about early Afrikaners.
For example, unanswered in Giliomee’s account of the travails of the 4000 odd settler/farmers in the Cape is why these people were subjected to ongoing cattle theft and brutal attacks from the indigenous peoples. Giliomee says the natives felt encroached upon. This may count as a necessary, but insufficient, condition. We are talking about a vast country. The locals would have hardly noticed the few farms that dotted the landscape.
Similar questions are completely elucidated in Fischer’s accounts. He leaves his readers with no lingering, nagging questions. Again, I’d have liked to detect some passion in Giliomee—an Afrikaner himself—for his subject. But maybe his known liberalism prevents him from connecting to his roots.

Update: Dan Roodt, a BAB A-Lister, writes:
“You are perfectly right about Giliomee’s book. It is full of detail and sources, but it lacks a central argument or passion as you call it. I think he was too scared to write anything that could be considered nationalist or un-PC.
Giliomee’s greatest failure, I think, is in the last part where he simply repeats all the clichés of how the old government fell, leaving out the role of the Western powers and all the behind-the-scenes wrangling that was going on.
Yesterday the power went out three times, at 10, at 4 and again at 8 p.m. for two hours each time.”
**
I’m beginning to think I’ve been too charitable to Giliomee. Contrast his The Afrikaners with Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed. The last speaks in so many voices other than the historian’s. It’s replete with excerpts from personal diaries, accounts from tutors and travelers, and outsiders looking in on the settlers. Hackett also mentions his own roots and is manifestly proud of his ancestry.
In the magnificent Albion’s Seed you learn exactly from where in England the settlers came, how they built their homes, courted, married, made love, sired children, buried their dead, and punished outlaws; what they ate and how they prepared food; how educated they were. In one wonderfully vivid diary, a husband speaks of his wife’s high-spirited nature and temper; how they make-up after fighting (“I gave my wife a flourish”: don’t you love that? He sauces it up even more.)
Early Americans were as flawed as the Afrikaners and as brave and adventurous. However, none of this emerges from Giliomee’s account. Admittedly, I have not yet finished the thing. But so far, it’s dry, dour, and sour. No diaries are drawn from; you learn nothing about how farmers lived, loved, raised children.
Conversely, Giliomee is quick to highlight miscegenation, on the rare occasions it occurred, and cruelty to slaves (a wrong Americans were also guilty of, but Hackett Fischer doesn’t blacken them for the sins of their times; he simply narrates the facts). Giliomee is also diligent in bringing to light stories of rogue Afrikaners; about heroes and emerging leaders you learn less.

Update # II:Erasing The Afrikaner Nation

Classical Liberalism, Communism, Crime, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Media, South-Africa

“CNN’s Kyra Phillips has led her viewers to believe that dangling a noose—an impolite and impolitic form of expression—is a hate crime; a black man beating a white man to a pulp—not so much. Being maimed or murdered, evidently, doesn’t compare to being maligned. Phillips and the feminized establishment media have difficulties differentiating a felony from an affront to feelings. No wonder these wonder men and women are mum about who’s killing whom in the democratic South Africa, the pride of the liberal press…”

I’m aware that in “Erasing the Afrikaner Nation” I’m reminding readers, on the happy occasion of the Thanksgiving, of brutal injustices. But, as I give thanks for the safety and security I enjoy in my American home, and for the love of my beloved husband and daughter, I think too of the innocents—members of my extended family included—imperiled in my former homeland.

Happy Thanksgiving,

ILANA

Update # I: Some of the letters received and promptly discarded were the ones with The Expected Epithet. As one wise scholar once said to me, “If you are not called a racist, then, it seems to me, you are in intellectual trouble and it is high time to reconsider your own thinking.”

The other less expected avenue of attack was a defense of Marxism, coupled to a claim, thrown into the ignorant mix, that the South African Communist Party is a spent force in that political landscape. On display here is an ignorance of the ANC, its history and philosophy.

The South African Communist Party, the African National Congress, and the ANC’s terrorist arm, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), were overlapping, intricately intertwined entities, historically and ideologically.

The Communist Party is a rib from the ANC’s rib cage. There is an overlap in membership, confirms the government’s own website, with “a number of SACP members occupying seats in the General Assembly by virtue of their dual ANC membership—The party’s membership overlaps with those of the ANC and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), its partners in what is known as the tripartite alliance. It has significant representation in the ANC and government, from the executive down to local government structures.”
“The party believes in the establishment of a socialist society, which it says should be characterized by democracy, equality, freedom, and the socialization of the predominant part of the economy.”

“Socialization,” to those who still don’t know, is antithetical to freedom. This is the embodiment of Orwellian speech.

The ANC-orchestrated “racial socialism” that is contributing to the destruction of South Africa would do any modern, media-savvy Marxist proud. This is not merely affirmative action—which is bad enough—but rather, legislation that does away with property rights, with the aim of transferring wealth, by stealth, from white owners to black non-owners. ANC position papers hint at its ideological direction/intentions. The leopard has not changed its spots; it’s just a very cunning leopard.

Update # II (Nov. 27): A number of “Christian” souls have written in to gloat: Afrikaners are getting their comeuppance because of the sins of apartheid. The more hateful of these letters were not published.

These collectivists conflate the actions and legislation enacted by the state with the wishes and will of all European people—Boer and British alike. Such is the collectivist mindset.

However, even if we concede the collectivist’s argument, the destruction wrought by the criminal class (that includes the ANC government) to South Africa’s economy and productive workers dwarfs compared to the sins of apartheid. What you have in the offing is the looming demise of a civilization. As for the numbers, I quote from an essay familiar by now to readers of BAB and IlanaMercer.com:

“Few know that during the decades of the repressive apartheid regime, only a few hundred Africans perished as a direct result of police brutality. A horrible injustice, indubitably, but nothing approximating the carnage under ‘free’ South Africa, where thousands of Africans perish every few months. (Let us not beat about the bush; crime in South Africa is black on black and black on white.)”

But then, collectivists love what they’d call “creative destruction.”

Update # III: Advice to South Africans Pondering Emigration

IMMIGRATION, South-Africa

I received the following missive from a South African reader.

“Hi Ilana

My wife and I might move from Johannesburg to the US within the next few months. I would very much like to communicate with you regarding plusses and minuses of leaving SA.”

South Africans in a similar predicament may find my reply helpful:

“Rationally and objectively, there are only plusses to being afforded the opportunity to leave South Africa. The facts about South Africa I’ve documented in many essays. These facts, oddly enough, are not always known, processed, or understood by South Africans.
The only question is really how you and your family cope with your good fortune. Some people can’t handle being away from family, friends, and place of birth. They would sooner risk death and a bleak future for their kids than leave. That’s irrational—to me and mine—at least. I am forever shocked at how many South Africans return to that hell hole.

So, it is not the objective facts you and your family must consider, but your psychological grit and resolve to be positive and realize you’ve been afforded a life-saving opportunity. My daughter kicked and screamed at the time—she was 12—but now thanks me for dragging her out of there.

That’s really the most important advice I can give.

Best of luck to those who leave and to those who remain behind, including members of my own immediate family.

Ilana

Update # I (Oct. 23): With respect to my comment hereunder about Dan Roodt’s dismissal of the emigration option for Afrikaners: It is one thing to contend that Anglos are far less attached to South Africa than Afrikaners, and assign the difficulties in departing to this attachment. That’s a valid and true argument. But to claim that immigration is not a life-saving opportunity because, decades down the line, the West will have been turned into another South Africa by its treacherous rulers—that’s wrong, illogical, and, hence, self-immolating.

Right now—and for decades to come— murder rates in suburban Canada, Australia, Europe and the US are negligible. The overall aggregate of 6 per 100,000 for the US (as opposed to between 89 and 120 per 100,000 for South Africa) is a function of factoring in the “contribution” of high-crime areas. When I moved into my home, I inquired at the local police station about the murder rate in my new American community, only to be told that, twenty years back, there was a family murder-suicide. (Since then there has been one Mexican-related brawl resulting in a fatality.)
To a rational person—to whom the sanctity of life is everything—these statistics say it all. I can rest assured that if I haven’t heard from my daughter—far more precious to me than allegiances to a country—she is just busy (or naughty).

A drop in the sea of mass immigration to the West, South African immigration, nevertheless, could help counter the influx from the Third World, and strengthen this part of the world.

There is another serious obstacle to South African emigration. I’m reproducing here the exchange I had on this aspect with Lawrence Auster:

“I asked Ilana Mercer:
If thousands of Afrikaner farmers are being brutalized and murdered like this how is it that they just remain on their farms waiting to be killed? Why haven’t they fled? Yes, it tells of people arming themselves to the teeth, but surely many must have fled, as in Zimbabwe.

She wrote back:
Americans do not understand how hard it is to immigrate. I find most Americans think that if you apply to enter, well then, the U.S., Canada, or Australia will let you in. NOT SO. It is virtually impossible to immigrate legally to the U.S., Canada, and Australia if you do not have the right qualifications or huge sums of money. This of course should make for commentary about our immigration system, which selects for law-breaking, venality, and risk taking, etc. I’ve dealt with that somewhat here [too]. Our refugee policies should favor the Boer, but we favor the likes of the “Lost Boys of Sudan”—more photogenic. Where do you think the Zim. farmers fled to? The U.S.? No. Most left for South Africa, as far as I know. Some might have had British passports. The Boers don’t have that.”

Update # II (Oct. 24): In response to the thoughtful comments of a friend about a possible defining battle for the West looming on the South-African front: I hate to be cynical, but there is no political framework for a fight. There is little hope of the Boers winning, as long as majority rule is the system in place. The only way the Boers (whose leaders relinquished power due the West’s pressure) can achieve self-determination is by seceding. Currently, the designated Afrikaner homeland is Oranje, a bleak, landlocked backwater in the Orange Free State. My friend seems to believe there is fight in the people. I’m pretty up-to-date about matters South African, and all I hear of is cooptation—having no option, the minority population has accepted the decay, and even joined it. A piece written by Dr. Roodt, in particular, even details considerable libertine excesses among a generation of young Afrikaners.

I’d also like to say something to suburban Americans preaching South African resistance: you don’t know what it is to live in fear of your life. Until you have experienced such fear—until you personally know people who’ve been hijacked, raped, murdered, or all of the above, don’t fight by proxy. How naïve and insulated are Americans! They routinely plunge (by proxy) other countries into chaos (Iraq), leaving their poor civilians mired in mayhem, while they continue their suburban existence far away on American soil. Don’t preach the merits of South Africans fighting the good fight until your beloved have been imperiled by killers, who’ll never be apprehended and who rule the roost.

Update # III (Oct. 31): Danie writes from South Africa: “Those who’ve already left have a responsibility to give us hope and not rub our noses in how bad we have it here.”

My answer: As a writer, I have only one obligation and that is to the truth. My mandate doesn’t include making people feel better in the face of reality—not about South Africa, Iraq, tyranny, the consequences of the national debt, etc.

Updated: Rugby Racism?

Africa, Law, Race, Racism, South-Africa

As the diversity doxology has it, justice will be achieved when racial and ethnic groups are reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population. The absence of such perfect representation is blamed on endemic white racism.

The doctrine is based on one big post hoc fallacy—reasoning backward is a logical error. If B (lack of representation) then A (racism) is an error, as in WRONG! Consider: in professions and academic pursuits where mathematical precocity is a factor, white Americans trail Asian-Americans. And white Gentiles lag behind Ashkenazi Jews. By logical extension, these realities must imply a systemic bias against whites, which is nonsense on stilts. But reason and race baiting are mutually exclusive, so long as those baited are white.

Naturally, no one ever demands that the NBA or the 100-meter dash be made to better reflect the general population.

Rugby is, traditionally, an Afrikaner sport. Afrikaners have always loved and excelled at it. Now TIME magazine is inferring racism from the fact that there are more whites than blacks on the South African national team.

Look at the complexion of, say, the Kaizer Chiefs soccer team. To be fair, in its hissing fit, TIME does qualify its racism taunts with the following information:

“Then again, rugby has never been the first-choice game among the black majority, and in South Africa’s national soccer team, only one or two white players make the cut. ‘You can tell a mostly white high school when you drive by its rugby field,’ Cronjé says. ‘Black schools have soccer fields.’”

The aim, very plainly, is not to leave the Afrikaner anything of his traditions and history. Witness the haste with which the ANC government is expunging South Africa’s past by renaming places across the country. This jocular account of bestowing on old South African boulevards names like Arafat and Che Guevara is courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, a chief cheerleader for the new dispensation in my old homeland.

(More on the New South Africa in our Archive.]
Update: Against the contention made in the Comments Section that “Affirmative Action is an ideology that has been hijacked”: The equal-rights-for-all principles instantiated in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were subverted over the decades by judges and federal administrators, and replaced with “affirmative action in favor of blacks.”
As Harvard scholar Richard Pipes averred, in the book Property and Freedom, the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “gave the government no license to set quotas for hiring personnel by private enterprise or admitting students to institutions of higher learning, yet the federal bureaucracy acts as if it had.”