Posted on December 16, 2022

Prospects for the White Tribe

Dan Roodt, American Renaissance, February 25, 2006

1977 Time Magazine on Africa's White Tribe

I was given the opportunity to change the title of this topic but I have preferred not to, even though I do not think that South African whites in general or the Afrikaner people in particular are a tribe. Rather, as I have suggested in my essay published in American Renaissance, which was reprinted in my book The Scourge of the ANC, Afrikaners are a “cultural nation of the European type”: “During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they went through a great Romantic movement, a flowering of literature, translations, music and historical reflection that bound them into (such a nation).”

Boer guerrillas during the Second Boer War

However, upon accepting the challenge of this topic, I was presented with one further dilemma: what to wear. These days in South Africa, the motley collection of people occupying the beautiful Cape Dutch building in Cape Town that used to be our Parliament often arrive in tribal dress for the annual opening, brandishing clubs and spears. We call these knobkieries and assegais. In coming to talk to you about our “tribe”, I would therefore also have to appear in tribal dress. What does Afrikaner tribal dress look like? After thinking about it long and hard, I have decided that I should at least wear a three-piece suit. As you can see, I have also consulted my local witch-doctor who has furnished me with charms called cuff-links to protect me from the bad spirits at this conference.

Nowadays on the internet one may look on a site such as Google Earth at satellite images of various monuments in the world: the Eiffel Tower, London Bridge, Manhattan Island, as well as our seat of government, the Union Building in Pretoria. Not so long ago I spent a whole day in Pretoria with a magazine photographer who was taking pictures of me, one of those faintly embarrassing moments when I as a grey-haired middle-aged male have to pose like a nubile female model of twenty. The photographer concerned was of a certain type: equally middle-aged but dressed like a teenager and professing what she thought were artistic views on politics, a kind of predictable liberalism in the American sense. She welcomed black rule in South Africa, considered crime and violence a passing blip on the upward sloping chart of optimism regarding the formation of one multiracial, multicultural nation in South Africa where, to quote Samora Machel, the former communist president of neighbouring Moçambique, “for the nation to live, the tribe must die”.

In South Africa, there can be no doubt as to which tribe must die. As far as I know, the term “white tribe” was first used by Time magazine to refer to my people in 1977, after which David Dimbleby of the BBC made a four-part series in 1979 entitled “The White Tribe of Africa”. The notion must have met with universal acclaim, for in the same year Dimbleby’s film received the Supreme Documentary Award of the Royal Television Society. Since the late seventies the expression has become something of a commonplace, and of course it is intended as a pejorative term, to ridicule us; “tribes” are after all backward peoples, lacking in civilization.

However, as I continued to gaze at the exposed abdomen of my hipster-wearing, politically correct photographer, I finally could not help passing a few ironic comments on her stereotypical views. As we stood at the Union Buildings I mused aloud, “I wonder what the people who built these buildings would have thought today if they knew that a few tribal chiefs almost one thousand miles from here, huddling around their campfire outside their huts would come to Pretoria in eighty years’ time and forever subjugate their descendants to rule by their tribe, the Xhosa.”

As I shall argue, South Africa is not just a story of one tribe conquering another, as the BBC or Time would have it. The greatest Xhosa chief in history, Rohlihlala Mandela, sometimes referred to as Nelson, did not just outwit FW de Klerk, the last white president of South Africa to subjugate South African whites to the most draconian regime of race preference the world has ever seen, taking the form of institutionalised anti-white racism and even “racial revenge” as a left-wing French journalist (Stephen Smith) has quite rightly called the continuing calamity of farm murders. The BBC’s cliché, “the white tribe”, has been followed by other slogans regularly chanted in South Africa, such as “kill a Boer, kill a farmer” or the charming one recently coined by the so-called Pan-African Students Movement of Azania (PASMA): “kill all whites, English and Afrikaans,” chanted on 19 February 2005.

Kill the Boer

However, and notwithstanding the vicious social violence raging in our country every day where innocent people are attacked in supermarkets, shopping centres, in their cars, in their homes and on the street, on farms and on university campuses, it may not even be necessary to “kill all whites, English and Afrikaans” as the enquiring young minds of PASMA have suggested in their innocent celebration of African solidarity. For the system of institutionalised anti-white racism designed by South Africa’s ANC, with some help from Western governments, think tanks and aid agencies, is so beautiful and so effective that whites will voluntarily disappear by committing demographic suicide.

Demographic Suicide

Demographics of South Africa 1868-2001

This point was brought home to me at the end of last year by an article in the Afrikaans financial weekly, Finweek (30 November 2005). Entitled “Wittes ál meer uitgedun. Die produktiefste segment van die bevolkingsgroep word al hoe kleiner” (Whites thinned out even more. The most productive segment of this population group is getting increasingly smaller), it summarises research showing the following: because of the ANC’s race preference programme, young whites, unable to find jobs, are leaving the country in droves. Up to 800 000 of them have gone overseas since 1991. However, these same young people between the ages of 20 and 40 are of course the ones who will be fathers and mothers to the next generation of white South Africans. With their children born outside the country, the demographic effect on the remaining white population is simply devastating.

French author Jean Raspail has referred to the “demographic crash of the West”. If the West is experiencing a demographic crash, we are facing a Great Crash of 1929 induced by the ANC’s race laws. As the article in Finweek argues, the current generation of white men between the ages of 40 and 60 represent most of South Africa’s intellectual capital. The average age of a South African civil engineer is 60. As only 2 percent of South African chartered accountants are black (a term which includes Indians and mixed-race Coloureds), it is feared that the steady stream of departing young accountants will cause a collapse of the financial system in the not too distant future.

Afrikaner Negatives

Apart from negative demographics as a result of a low birth-rate and racially induced emigration, Afrikaners are up against the following:

  • Language discrimination with the object of destroying the Afrikaans language, the main source of cohesion among Afrikaners who represent 60 percent of the white population.
  • An effective tax rate of over 60 percent whereby wealth and income are transferred from us to the Afro-Saxon elite mainly composed of the ruling Xhosas. As we are dependent on private security services, health care and schooling funded from after-tax money, the ones who still work have become a “working poor” by Western standards and the unemployed or under-employed ones have formed a new class of “poor whites”, educated and economically employable but unemployable in terms of ANC race laws.
  • So-called “land reform” whereby 30 percent of the country’s land will be turned over to blacks. As only 12 percent of South Africa is really suitable for farming, this could mean that most, if not all, farmland will either be bought up with public funds or expropriated and given to blacks in a repeat of what happened in Zimbabwe, with the difference that the South African economy is not nearly as dependent on agriculture as that of Zimbabwe.
  • New gun laws intended to disarm whites so that they will not be able to defend themselves against future confiscation of assets during “land reform”, and to stave off a future revolt of desperate whites unable to work or trade anymore as a result of the race laws.

Blacks used to complain about apartheid, but apart from the Group Areas Act restricting them to certain areas, there were no real restrictions placed on black mobility or economic activity. On the contrary, black economic activity was encouraged and subsidised in the quasi-independent homelands in the forlorn hope that blacks would migrate away from white areas if given their own economic kickstart. In addition, black education and healthcare were almost entirely funded by the white taxpayer so that apartheid could be seen as a kind of internal foreign aid system, as opposed to the external aid provided by the developed countries to most sub-Saharan African states.

In contradistinction, the ANC’s system of “transformation” represents blatant anti-white racism, with a plethora of laws restricting white education, ability to trade, access to capital, ownership of land and other assets. In fact, apart from anti-Jewish measures during the 1930s in Nazi Germany, I am unaware of a similar system of systemic ethnic and linguistic discrimination in modern times. I have made a brief and non-exhaustive list of race laws currently in force in South Africa. Please note the Orwellian euphemisms used to disguise the ANC’s arsenal of anti-white legislation:

  • Public Service Act Proclamation 103 of 1994
  • Labour relations Act no 66 of 1995
  • South African Police Service Act no 68 of 1995
  • Employment of Educators Act no 76 of 1998
  • Employment Equity Act no 55 of 1998
  • Higher Education Act 101 of 1997
  • National Sport and Recreation Act no 110 of 1998
  • National Empowerment Fund Act no 105 of 1998
  • Marine Living Resources Act no 18 of 1998
  • Broad-Based black economic empowerment Act no 53 of 2003
  • Pretroleum products Ammendment act no 58 of 2003
  • National Gambling Act no 7 of 2004

The Employment Equity Act probably represents the cornerstone of these race laws. It sets up a racial classification system in which whites are on the bottom rung, Indians and Coloureds in the middle and black Africans on top. In practice it prohibits banks and other large companies from employing young whites and aims to make all private corporations “demographically representative”, i.e. whites may not occupy more than 9 percent of posts. As the white demographic crash continues, white participation in the formal economy will eventually sink to zero.

Please note that apart from these explicitly racial laws discriminating against whites, there exists also a myriad of regulations, so-called economic “charters” and unofficial practices that curtail white economic activity, employment and access to capital. Even small and family businesses are now being targeted. Such businesses will not be able to sell their goods and services to any large corporation, let alone the government, and will be denied access to bank credit if they do not have black partners who must own at least half of their firms.

The Racial Scorecard

There exists a racial scorecard that is widely applied in private firms and government departments to value employees:

  • Black female 6 points
  • Black male 5 points
  • Coloured or Indian female 4 points
  • Coloured or Indian male 3 points
  • Handicapped white female 2 points
  • White female 1 point
  • White male 0 points

The French philosopher and commentator Alain Finkielkraut was absolutely right when he said last year that “. . . the lofty idea of `the war on racism’ was gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century. A source of violence.”

Probably the Most Violent Country in the World

South Africa under ANC rule has attained the dubious distinction of being the most violent country in the world. A recent advertisement on state television stated that 2000 women were raped in South Africa every day. We have more than 50 000 annual homicides. On the other hand, violence may be a symptom of totalitarian societies but it is not the only symptom. The comparison with communism is even more apposite in other ways.