Us Against the Horde—Some Thoughts for 16 December

Today is a holiday in South Africa, the Day of the Covenant celebrating the Afrikaners’ miraculous victory over the Zulu forces of Dingane during the Battle of Blood River on 16 December 1838. Whereas the new black-nationalist government of South Africa erased most holidays celebrated by white South Africans and was at one time even considering abolishing Christmas as being “Eurocentric”, it has kept December 16, albeit under a new name, so-called “Reconcilition Day”.

In the Newspeak of the New South Africa, “reconciliation” normally means accepting black racial domination and aggression. For example, as part of ongoing attempts to obfuscate the horrific crime and racial violence that characterise South Africa today, various liberal and left-wing groups have advocated that white victims of black violence should get reconciled with their aggressors. A white female rape victim, for example, might pray together with her black male rapist in prison—if ever he did go to prison as most such crimes go unpunished in South Africa—and will foregive him so as to be reconciled with him.

Within the sick mentality of our society, this type of travesty is seen as the new ethical ideal, often embraced by mainstream churches and religious leaders. The South African pathology of “reconciliation” derives from traditional African justice where the harmony of the tribe took precedence over individual rights. Even murder was easily forgiven after paying a few head of cattle to the victim’s relatives, something which occurs to this day in South Africa, even in urban areas.

However, whatever the TV news will say tonight about the many ways in which whites may prostrate and humiliate themselves as part of getting officially “reconciled”, tens of thousands of white Afrikaners in towns and cities all over the country will be participating in a very different type of patriotic and religious ceremony. Like their forebears did 170 years ago on the eve of that great battle in which 450 whites defeated an army of at least 13 000 Zulus without any losses in their ranks, they will recite the famous oath:

“My brothers and fellow citizens, here we stand in the presence of the Holy God, creator of heaven and earth, to make a vow unto Him, that if His protection shall be with us and He give our enemy into our hand so that we might be victorious over him, that this day and date every year shall be spent as a memorial and a day of thanksgiving, just as a Sabbath is spent and that we shall erect a temple to His honor wherever it will be pleasing to Him and that we shall also instruct our children that they must also share in it, as well as for our generations yet to come. Because the Honor of His name shall thereby be glorified and the glory and honor of the victory shall be given Him.”

South Africa’s ANC regime has been trying to erase the Covenant and the Battle of Blood River from the history books in a way that reminds one of the constantly changing past in George Orwell’s 1984. The hero of that book, Winston Smith, is employed in the Records department of the Ministry of Truth where the falsification of history is his official job. As Orwell puts it: “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

Despite the suppression of Afrikaner history in schools, as well as the changing of Afrikaner place names to eradicate all evidence of the founders of their towns and cities, the Day of the Covenant has remained like a glaring anomaly beyond the formidable reach of the Ministry of Truth.

Not only do most Afrikaner leaders deliver a vast number of speeches on that day, but English-speaking whites are increasingly becoming interested in joining the annual commemoration and are seeing great significance in the event. As one of them, Peter Hammond, has recently commented: “It is remarkable that, despite the treachery that the Boers had endured at the hands of the Zulu, and the massacres of so many unsuspecting women and children on the banks of the Blaauwkrans River, that no atrocities were committed by the Boers in retaliation. Instead, the Biblical injunction to love their enemies was fulfilled by the vigorous missionary work which was established by the Reformed Church in Zululand, establishing schools, hospitals, churches and orphanages, even within sight of where Piet Retief and his followers were so brutally murdered. In the century and a half since that original Day of the Covenant, many millions of Zulus have come to Christ and Zululand has been blessed by Revival. In a very real sense all of that began with the Covenant proposed by Sarel Cilliers, and enthusiastically adopted by the Wencommando.”

Today the Battle of Blood River has become an allegory of the impending struggle for survival to be fought by Western man on a global scale. In places like South Africa where whites are already a minority of less than ten percent it is a real physical struggle with members of the surrounding African horde attacking us at random every day. Not only have South African blacks benefited from quadrupling and even quintupling their population since 1950, but the ANC’s open-border policy has allowed illegal immigrants from other African countries to stream across our borders, adding to the numbers already present.

Elsewhere in the West, in North America and Europe, however, it is a moral and ideological fight that is no less intense. Whereas the strategic threats posed by China and a resurgent Islam are universally recognised by Western commentators, the leading role played by blacks from Africa in the moral assault on our civilisation is not. White guilt is after all not defined by the history of Western interaction with China or the Middle East, but by American slavery and European colonialism in Africa.

Africans and their apologists are in the forefront of the accusation of “racism!” levelled not only at every white person somewhere in his or her lifetime, but more fundamentally at Western culture and history itself. Black radical thinkers from WEB Dubois onwards, through Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Thabo Mbeki and, I daresay, Barack Obama, have been unanimous in their condemnation of the West and its history as evil and rotten to the core.

The Chinese and Middle-Easterners will no doubt stay at home. But the 800 million Africans who will rise to just under 2 billion in the next few decades, will descend on the ageing Western world like they are overwhelming the formerly European cities and towns of South Africa, appropriating everything in their path with the self-righteous violence that has become the African way.

The United States, lest we forget, already has an African American as president. The election of Barack Obama was seen as a milestone in Africa’s claim, based on her growing population numbers, to a greater share of world resources which will be provided by Europe and North America. While Mugabe is wrecking Zimbabwe, the US is pumping in aid money to keep the country’s population alive, demonstrating that the inhabitants of Zimbabwe have as much of a claim on US resources as the American taxpayer.

White demography is plummeting and we all know it. Among the many pronouncements of John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, the following is the least quoted: “The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.” Keynes ascribed both the First World War and the Russian Revolution to rapid population growth in Germany and Russia, respectively.

Thermopylae and Poitiers are often seen as two critical battles that saved white, Western culture from extinction in their times. However, as a symbol of the shrinking global European population facing the barbarians at the gate, especially from Africa, Blood River has become far more apposite.

In this dark hour when it seems that, apart from the corporate oil wars of the Bush administration, the West has lost its will to stand up for itself, we need to be reminded of the Gideon-like triumph of Andries Pretorius and his men over the Zulu army on 16 December 1838. Outnumbered thirty to one and armed only with antique muskets that took 30 to 40 seconds to reload, they fought bravely and won, against all odds.

Only a superhuman effort of the same order could save us here in South Africa today from being driven from our land like the white Zimbabweans were from theirs. Very soon, our kin all over the Western world who are like sleeping babes before the impending peril will face the same predicament—of being a racial minority surrounded by a hostile and aggressive majority.

The Day of the Covenant should be internationally celebrated among all those who believe that our Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian civilisation is still worth fighting for.