The Lie of Apartheid

Essay one from the book:  The Lie of Apartheid and Other True Stories from Southern Africa

It is one of the many bitter ironies about South Africa that the policy of apartheid—to which Afrikaners clung for decades as their only hope and salvation from Third World domination—was in fact an impracticable and unworkable system which led directly to the Afrikaners’ demise as a political force in that country.

      The politicians—the National Party—who fostered apartheid are the primary criminals in this tragedy, holding out a false illusory hope to the Afrikaners, and then when the inevitable became just that, changed track and gave in, abandoning their followers to African National Congress (ANC) rule as callously as they had earlier lied to them.

      For apartheid—in reality forced social segregation—was nothing but an illusion, a twisted distortion of the demographic reality of South Africa, not to mention the truth that it was ultimately, morally repugnant as well. The conservative white South African politicians never understood what the driving force of political power is: namely, physical occupation. Political power comes from physical occupation: not historical rights, not title deeds, not moral rights—only occupation. Those people who occupy a territory determine the nature of the society in that region.

      Two examples, familiar to all, illustrate this point well:

* Example 1: North America. On that continent, the American Indian (Amerind) people lived for thousands of years, creating a culture which dominated that continent. The culture of North America reflected the fact that the Amerinds lived and formed the majority population there.

      After 1500 AD, however, that continent filled up with white immigrants from Europe. These white immigrants displaced the Amerinds by squeezing them out of possession of North America. The Amerind culture had dominated for thousands of years, because they were the majority population. Within one hundred years, this had changed. This shift reflected the fact that the majority of inhabitants of North America had become white Europeans. The Amerind civilization “fell” because the population of North America changed.

      This effect—the displacement of peoples and the subsequent disappearance of their civilization—has direct implications in racial terms. The rise and fall of any particular civilization can therefore be traced, not by the economics, politics, morals, etc., of a particular civilization, but rather by the actual racial presence of the people themselves.

      If the society which has produced a particular civilization stays intact as a racially homogeneous unit, then that civilization remains active. If, however, the society within any particular given area changes its racial makeup—through invasion, immigration, or any decline in numbers—then the civilization which that society has produced will disappear with them, to be replaced by a new civilization reflecting the new inhabitants of that territory.

* Example 2: Israel. The state of Israel is today a political reality, not because the Bible says Jews belong there (although many Jews and Christians might think so) but simply because the Zionist movement has ensured that Jews are a majority in that territory. This was done through a deliberate policy of settlement and immigration, coordinated over decades.    

      This also forms the rationale behind the current Israeli government’s plans to build up Jewish settlements in the West Bank: by physically occupying the territory, they hope to change the makeup of that region to the point where it becomes de facto part of Israel.

      History teaches us that there are two main reasons for a change in the racial makeup of any society: either military occupation, or the use of alien labor. The American Indians serve as a textbook example of the “military occupation” case study, as detailed above, while South Africa serves as a textbook example of the “use of alien labor” case study. When a change occurs through the use of alien labor, the following process occurs:

- The dominant society imports (usually racially) foreign labor to do the menial work in that society.

- These racial aliens then become established, and settle down and multiply in numbers by drawing upon the society’s structures (in white countries, their science, healthcare, technology, etc.).

- They finally dominate that society by their sheer numbers.

      It is, simply put, a demographic reality: those who occupy a land determine the nature of that society. And so it was—and is—with South Africa, where population figures reveal precisely how the use of alien labor by the Afrikaners dispossessed them of their fatherland.

      Consider the following: in 1904, the first population census of the old Transvaal revealed that there were 297,277 whites, and 937,127 nonwhites in that region (Transvaal, 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica).

      Importantly, the 1904 census also tells us that of these nonwhites, some 135,042 were not from the Transvaal, and were only in the “Witwatersrand to work in the gold and other mines,” and that only 77 percent of all blacks in the Transvaal in 1904 were actually born there (Ibid.).

      With transient migrant laborers removed from the equation, this means that there were 297,277 whites and 802,085 locally born blacks in the Transvaal.

      According to the 1960 census, the population of the Transvaal numbered 6,225,052, of which only 1,455,372 were whites (Transvaal, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1966, Volume 22, page 423).

      These were only the figures for the Transvaal, it needs to be noted. For the entire country, the figures were even more frightening: 4.5 million whites to anywhere between 30 and 35 million nonwhites.

      What caused this population imbalance to swing from 802,000 blacks in the Boer homeland in 1904, to 4,769,680 in 1960—just fifty-six years? The answer: the blacks multiplied because they were drawn to the Transvaal by the offer of work. Once settled there, they used the benefits of white society (healthcare, technology, etc.) to exponentially increase their numbers.

      The formalization of apartheid by the National Party after 1948 did not address the real issue which has faced every minority trying to rule over a majority country throughout history. This inherent contradiction of allowing huge numbers of racial aliens into a territory whilst trying to prevent that majority population from dominating that society has never been solved.

      The truth is that it cannot be done.

      In South Africa, almost every white household had (and still has) one or more black servants.

      Afrikaner farmers—who are subject to a viciously high rate of attacks and murders—generally have hundreds of black laborers working their huge farmlands.

      In the mines, the economic heart of the country, the vast majority of common laborers, numbering many hundreds of thousands, are black.

      All over the country the overwhelming majority of laborers doing almost everything, from factory work to driving, from road building to house building, from restaurant workers to shop clerks, are black.

      Over this mass of economic integration, the apartheid government attempted to enforce social segregation and still maintain a white government: it was a plan which was doomed from the start.

      Apartheid was based on a fallacy: the fallacy that nonwhites could be used as labor to drive society; that nonwhites could physically form a majority inside South Africa, but that they could not determine the nature of South African society.

      This then, was the lie of apartheid: that it was possible, through strict segregation, to ensure that blacks could not rule over a country in which they were the majority.

      The historical record is clear: there has never been a society in which the majority of the population has not determined the nature of that society.

      White South Africans, it must be said, more or less believed the lie. They were happy to have black domestic servants cleaning their homes, ironing their clothes, making up the very beds in which they slept—and were prepared to believe that this mass of established black labor inside their territory would never have any effect upon the political power structure of their country.

      It is said, in fact, that the definition of a white South African is “someone who would rather be murdered in their bed than make it.”

      Amusing? To be honest, not really—consider these true examples:

* Under apartheid, blacks could not use white public toilets, but they were used to clean those same toilets each day. One can only wonder at the naiveté of such an arrangement.

* Under apartheid, blacks could work in restaurant kitchens, prepare the food, put it on the plates, and deliver it to the white patrons’ tables, but they could not eat that food at the same table in the same restaurant. What hypocrisy is that? Surely if one was going to be consistent, one would have forbidden blacks from working in restaurants completely. But no, apartheid didn’t go that far; it was built upon the premise that blacks did the work.

      Cynical observers talked about the “grass mower” syndrome amongst South African whites. They regarded black labor as akin to lawn mowers. A lawn mower sits quietly in its shed or garage until you need it, then it mows the grass, and then you put it back in the shed where it stays quietly, not causing any trouble, until the next time it is needed.

      Somehow, white South Africans believed that black labor was like a lawn mower: you could have it around, and when you didn’t need it, you could hide it in its little shed where it would be good and quiet—until you needed it again.

      The reality is, of course, dramatically different.

      Another important part of the apartheid lie was that military force could keep the system intact. The demographic reality once again belied this: the South African white population totaled about five million at its height, while the black population at that time was around thirty million.

      Of the five million whites, less than eight hundred thousand were of military serviceable age, and not all of these could be called up at any one time. The state had to rely on no more than a few hundred thousand military personnel to try and control a black population of millions.

      Given that demographic reality, it can be seen that apartheid was unsustainable by military means. Yet the lie continued, and young white South Africans were conscripted into the army and police to fight and die for a system which was doomed from the very beginning.

      At the same time, white Western healthcare and technology were made available on a massive scale. The largest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere was erected in the black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, specifically for the black population.

      Infant mortality rates for blacks fell dramatically (and were way below that of the rest of black ruled Africa). This rapid population growth put additional pressure on the demographic makeup of the country.

      As the demographic balloon swelled further and further, the apartheid government was forced to think out ever more stringent and oppressive laws to protect the whites as the black population continued to leapfrog in number year after year.

      Laws such as detention without trial and the banning of books and people were bad enough by themselves, but as the conflict intensified, both sides started using methods which would be shunned by any decent society. The apartheid state used officially funded death squads and police torture became routine. The ANC placed bombs in restaurants, and encouraged mobs to necklace murder collaborators, amongst other outrages.

      In the name of a lie—that apartheid could be sustained—the state caused morally repugnant acts to take place on both sides of the political divide. The black resistance movements adopted a guerrilla hit and run policy of attacks on strategic targets. To combat this unconventional war, the South African Police were given extended powers of detention and other draconian measures. These could only be short-term firefighting measures, as the main issue: that of preventing majority black occupation of the country, was never addressed by any apartheid law. 

                                                                         

      The white government tried to give practical application to the policy of “Grand Apartheid.” Independence was given to a number of traditional black tribal homelands, the first in the mid 1970s.

      In this way, the apartheid government deluded itself into thinking that black political aspirations could be satisfied with the right to vote only in these tribal homelands—despite massive numbers of blacks living outside of these territories in the white urban areas. (These so-called “white” areas were not majority European once all the black domestic servants, laborers, and farm workers were counted.)                  

      The white government also refused to adjust the size of these traditional tribal areas to fit the changed demographics, stubbornly insisting that the black homelands—some 13 percent of the country’s surface area—could accommodate what was rapidly becoming over 80 percent of the total population, even if it contained much of the prime agricultural land, as was the case.

      In a nutshell, the apartheid government refused to accept the basic truth of racial dynamics: those who occupy a space determine the nature of the society in that space, irrelevant of to whom that space originally belonged.

      White South Africa’s fate was sealed when the territorial division was not adjusted to fit in with the demographic realities, when all the effort was put into creating black homelands and none put into creating a white homeland, and with the continued insistence upon the use of black labor.

      The partial reforms of the mid 1980s—repealing of the laws forbidding mixed racial marriages and mixed racial political parties, and limited constitutional reforms which gave Indians and Coloureds their own parliamentary chambers—did little to stop the increasing violence.

      In fact, racial violence increased dramatically. The reforms created an unfulfilled “revolution of rising expectations,” and it was precisely during this cycle of black violence and white counter violence that the racial war taking place inside the country exacted its highest death tolls ever.

      In 1990, the white government finally faced the truth that it could no longer effectively control the ballooning black population, so it unbanned the ANC and released Nelson Mandela from prison. By 1994 power had been handed over to the ANC in a one-man, one-vote election. Although strict apartheid had ended in the 1980s, it is from 1994 that the policy is considered to have been laid to rest.

      It was an inevitable result: apartheid could not be maintained. It was in practical terms, unenforceable due to the demographic reality, and it was morally unacceptable as well, based as it was upon violent suppression.

      White South Africans, therefore, sowed the seeds of their own downfall with apartheid, a system of segregation that could never be maintained in the face of their own use of black labor.

      Apartheid had to fall: the only question was when, not if. The politicians, who sold it to white South Africans as their only hope and salvation, lied: either deliberately, or out of ignorance of the reality of the relationship between demographics and power.

Can the Afrikaners be Saved?

      From the above, it is clear that the use of nonwhite labor was the direct cause of the downfall of apartheid and white rule in South Africa. Afrikaners lost control of the country because of their lack of understanding of demographics, and not due to farfetched “conspiracies” or “betrayals,” as many would like to believe.

      This occupation took place because white South Africa failed to understand that if they employed black labor, those blacks would inevitably form the majority in that society, and ultimately—and rightly—demand political power.

      The question therefore arises: given the current situation, can the Afrikaners be saved? 

      The answer is relatively simple:

* In a united South Africa, in which they are the perpetual minority, the answer is no.

* In a smaller region where Afrikaners form the majority population, the answer is yes.

      No minority has every survived indefinitely in the face of a growing hostile majority, particularly one in South Africa where the material discrepancy between white and black is so vast.

      There is only one way in which Afrikaners can be saved. This would be if firstly they came to an understanding of the relationship between demographics and political power; and secondly, if they then adjust their expectations and political behavior in accordance with their actual numbers and their ability to majority occupy territory.

      Only once a majority of Afrikaners understand this truth, can there even begin to be talk of a practical plan for saving them from ultimate long-term extermination at the hands of the Third World.

      Theoretically, if a majority of Afrikaners should come to this understanding, then it would be possible for Afrikaners to save themselves—as no one else is going to save them.

      Let us be positive and say that theoretically, Afrikaners did come to an understanding of the relationship between demographics and power politics.

      Then they would stop wasting time blaming crackpot conspiracies for their downfall, and stop dancing around wasting time playing party politics in a majority rule system in which they are just as doomed to failure as they were under apartheid. Instead, they would start practically working toward creating a territory or region in which they became the demographic majority.

      This would, as a result of their small numbers, be a much smaller territory than the current area of South Africa. Its exact location can be decided when and if that time ever comes. However, it must be majority occupied by Afrikaners (like Israel was created by being majority occupied by Jews), and those who settle there must be prepared to do their own labor. (There are immense problems in this, and this writer would be pleasantly surprised if the majority of Afrikaner farmers could be persuaded to dispense with their hundreds of farm laborers and mechanize like their American counterparts; or if the majority of white South African households could be persuaded to make their own beds and wash their own dishes instead of using the plentiful “maids,” but that is another story.)                                                                                                          

      Yes, this means gathering together the stock Afrikaner nation into a defined area. For example (and this is just a theoretical example), if 500,000 Afrikaners had to settle in the old Eastern Transvaal, and physically occupy it, then this territory would de facto, and later even de jure, become an Afrikaner state.

      The only way that Afrikaners can be spared the fate of all First World minorities in Africa, is for them to abandon their dependence on nonwhite labor, accept that their salvation lies in a smaller territory, and congregate in that smaller territory where they will form an outright demographic majority.                                                                                           

      There is no other way: all else is chaff in the wind. History will tell if the Afrikaners have it within them to undertake this second Great Trek.