by Marco Malaguti

When talking about the Republic of South Africa in Europe only a few clichés come to mind. In fact, many people know that South Africa has a mixed population, made up of blacks and whites, and that after the abolition of the apartheid regime and Nelson Mandela's coming to power, these groups coexist more or less peacefully in the new multicultural South Africa, the Rainbow Nation. In reality, things are not as simple, nor as idyllic, as they may seem, and the division into “blacks and whites” traces a stereotype more apt to describe realities such as the United States of a few decades ago than present-day South Africa. In fact, in addition to whites and blacks, the country is home to the Khoisan, [combination of San, or Bushmen, and Khoikhoi, or Hottentots] the true natives of South Africa, an indigenous population that does not belong to the Bantu group like the rest of the state's black population, to which are added, in the cities, substantial Indian and Malay minorities of the Islamic religion (the so-called Kap Malay), who arrived during British rule.

A complex mosaic

Ethnically speaking, to speak of “blacks” in South Africa, as in many other states of the Dark Continent, makes no sense: the Bantu macrogroup, in fact, is jagged into numerous ethnic groups (the most important are eight, with the Zulus constituting the relative majority), all of which are extremely proud of their differences. They are joined by numerous immigrants from former Portuguese Africa (particularly Mozambique) and Nigeria. In turn, the whites are also ethnically divided, with the bulk of South Africa's white population belonging to the Afrikaner, or Boer, group, descendants of Dutch settlers, who speak Afrikaans, a language born from the Dutch dialect of the early arrivals mixed with the languages of other Protestant European emigrants (Huguenots, Germans, etc.) who fled the religious wars. Finally, the descendants of British settlers, who speak predominantly English. To all these groups must be added, in addition, the many mestizos (coloureds), living mainly in the western part of the country and in Cape Town, and the descendants of Indians, Malays and other Southeast Asian peoples “imported” by the British as cheap laborers, especially in Natal.

A tropical Yugoslavia

The country, then, turns out to be multifaceted and complex, more like what was once Yugoslavia than the paradisiacal melting-pot that European singers of multiculturalism like to paint. Racism in South Africa is still very much present, however, but it is mainly directed against whites. Open threats of genocide and plunder are almost daily externalized by many South African politicians (including the left-wing extremist Julius Malema), and the plight of white South Africans, particularly in their Afrikaner component (about 6.5 percent of the population, settled mainly in rural areas), seems to enjoy no attention or interest in the West. Recently many of them have also migrated abroad, the most famous among them being Elon Musk.

A foundation to save white Africans

To protect the Afrikaner population and their rights, the Afrikaner Foundation (www.afrikaner.org) was recently established. Its purposes are multifaceted and could be summarized as the preservation of the traditions and way of life of the Boer people and their right to exist in the face of the insulting labels often attached to them by the international media. The foundation has a very close relationship with Orania, an Afrikaner community located in the country's rural center along the banks of the Orange River, and which represents a successful development model that is in some ways unique both within the country and the entire African continent, whose population is growing by more than 15 percent per year.

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Focus on education

A successful model that is complemented by Akademia, a university-ranked, Christian-affiliated institution linked to the foundation that provides a high level of education to its students independently of the South African state and helps the community break the stereotype, unfortunately ingrained in the West, of the dull-witted settler devoted exclusively to working the land.

Never again Mugabe

More generally, the AF's goal is to show that despite current stereotypes, there are also white Africans (as indeed vindicated by the name that the first Dutch settlers gave themselves as soon as they arrived in these virgin and depopulated lands) and that these whites who came to present-day South African territory at the same time, if not earlier in the Cape region, as the Bantu (previously only scattered nomadic Bushmen lived in the region south of the Key River and the Great Karoo), also have full rights including the elementary right to exist. The experience of neighboring Zimbabwe, formerly Southern Rhodesia, from which whites were badly expelled (and often killed) by the Marxist dictatorial ZANU government of former President Mugabe, has for decades served as a warning to Afrikaners and non-black South Africans more generally (Indians and Arabs were themselves discriminated against by blacks in the African territories of the former British Empire, think for example of the Zanzibar massacre against the Arab minority in 1964 or the expulsion of Indians from Uganda during the Idi Amin Dada regime in 1972).

Beyond stereotypes and guilt

Even in the case of the Afrikaner population, forgotten by world public opinion because of a stubborn and almost unquenchable white guilt, a kind of Damnatio memoriae prevails, as if this population not only does not exist but is not even entitled to a history (that of Afrikaners in South Africa is almost four centuries long). To ensure that this history can continue is a right-duty of every European patriot, who owes at least friendship to these brave farmers overseas.

Photo colored by Tinus le Roux

Marco Malaguti
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Research fellow at the Machiavelli Center. A philosophy scholar, he has been working for years on the topic of the revaluation of nihilism and the great German Romantic philosophy.