I can think about football, but not for very long. So, when I observed the generally convivial, if noisy, multi-racial crowd in South Africa, it did not take long for me to forget about the ball game and start to think about Boudicca’s massacre of the Romans in Verulamium and of Suetonius’ slaughter of her and her army that followed it. This is known as being cultured.
My line of thought was this: although many whites have left Africa, there are also many who are committed to making a future for themselves and their families there. Presumably they are not troubled by the thought that their descendants will eventually intermarry with the black majority around them. Their not so distant ancestors who settled Africa were so troubled yet went to Africa anyway.
Vast amounts have been written about why it is wrong for people of one race to oppress those of another race. Much has been written about why it is wrong for people of of one race to be prevented from marrying those of another. What has been written about much less is why the whites in Africa thought they could succeed in ruling over the blacks and keeping separate from them forever. Because, simplifying massively, that must have been what those early white settlers thought. Racial mixing was not acceptable to them, being ruled by people of another race was not acceptable to them, yet they took the irrevocable step of taking their families to another continent where their race would be vastly outnumbered.
And they did this with the example of Boudicca and Suetonius known to them. Bloody rebellion followed by equally bloody reconquest, and the empire still goes down in the end. By the time whites were leaving Britain to settle in Africa no one knew which of them had Roman ancestors. Did they not wonder whether their descendants would eventually merge with the natives in the same way? Or if not that historical example for the Dutch, French, Germans, Portuguese or Belgians, any one of a thousand others would teach the same moral: that ruling castes do not stay ruling or castes forever.
On the other hand, that word “castes” reminds me that the caste system in India has lasted thousands of years. And the Jews have been “a race apart” for almost as long.
How did the early white settlers envisage the future of whites in Africa? Did they hope to become the majority as had happened, or looked set to happen, in America? Or is this whole business of imagining the far future a purely modern pastime, given that Christians of olden days thought of the time between creation and Last Judgement as lasting thousands rather than millions of years?
(Please, not too much modern politics in the comments. Isn’t there a football match you could watch instead?)
Don’t know about the Boers, but didn’t the British keep their old passports in their pockets? They were moving to colonies and not to independent countries. So maybe at the time it didn’t matter how much they were outnumbered.
I suspect they thought things would turn out much the same way the situation did in North America; that the natives would be forced off land the European-descended people wanted. That the number of white people would keep going up even as the number of native people went down, because the white people controlled all the resources and could afford to aggressively expand their population.
I am not sure that people then or now had much of a long-range game plan. In general, people care about the future of their kids although they only have the haziest of notions of what that might entail. There comes a time horizon… perhaps 30 years or so beyond which people don’t imagine much. People also discount the future.
Incidentally I had a very similar discussion a while back with a friend of mine about Dictators.
How do the Mugabe clan or the Kim family imagine that this stuff will play out in the long run? At some point would it not be advisable to get themselves and their brood out of the damn country? Presumably Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong-Il do care about their kids and grand kids even if they don’t give much of a damn about their people. How long does Mr Jong-Il imagine that he and his family can maintain the present status quo… Fifty years? A hundred years?
Well population density was low, if not for the Imperial drive in late XIX and XX century that put almost all Africa under an European Empire we could have been today with several countries in Africa some mostly Whites and others mostly Blacks.
I think you are projecting. I doubt they felt any such thing at all, why should they? They did not move there on a whim, settlers had been there since 1652.
I suspect that if the Boers and Afrikaners felt anything on the matter, it was Biblically derived – that they had a duty of care towards the descendants of Ham, or the ‘hewers of wood and the drawers of water’. i.e. attitudes were paternalistic, and yes they would have expected it to continue forever.I think history tells us that such is human nature?
An excellent post with some good questions, but isn’t it true that everything from the beginnings of civilisations to the utter crap we have today can be largely attributed to sheer, bloody, groundless arrogance?
If think of yourself as being sui generis, the question doesn’t arise in the first place. You are different, and better, by definition and that is that. Anybody from this in-group daring to differ will be excluded as “not really one of us”, and descendants of racially mixed couples will be declared to be chattel by the way of the one-drop rule.
It really is that simple, up to the time that you lose the power to make it stick.
Bigotry is irrational by definition, and so it is not surprising that those afflicted by it would fail to make a rational analysis of the present, which would make it impossible for them to make rational predictions for the future.
When the whites got there the indigenous population was fairly stoneage. No written literature, textiles, somewhat simple music, very basic technology, etc, etc.
The people from Europe just saw that and I guess a status quo (a meta context?) was established spontaneously in their minds that they were the guys with advantage. There was little rigid separation of the races until the British socially coerced it (“done thing” and all that) and then the Afrikaaners in their lack of sophistication (duplicity?) made it into a law around 1948, I think.
A similar lack of forethought exists today regarding what our lives are truly going to be like in 20 years time. The social control that is normal today would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
But surely Alisa, what seems like “bigotry” now would have been “common sense” then!
Great post by the way.
Sure el windy, but it doesn’t make it any more rational or any less bigoted (no quotation marks). People also used to think that the Sun orbits the Earth, and we can guess that there were erroneous predictions made based on that premise. I am not attacking those people for their bigotry (most of us are still bigoted in some way or other to some degree), just stating what I think is a fact.
How can we so confidently predict eventual racial mixing? And even if the races mix, won’t the dominant culture remain dominant, for the same reason it became dominant in the first place? What is left of African culture in the US? The characteristics and abilities that made the modern world will require that cultures that did not develop computers, spaceships and mass entertainment will have to give way to those which did. If race doesn’t matter, cultural assimilation – not integration – is as inevitable as racial integration, if not more so.
Let’s stop looking at the world through today’s constrained Politically Correct eyes, where skin color is the only thing that matters and every enlightened person of European ancestry must carry a “holier-than-thou” burden of delicious vicarious guilt.
It would be more on point to ask this question about India — where stiff upper-lipped English wallahs went out to take over & exploit a crowded continent. There, the Brits aimed to displace the local ruling class with their own more-enlightened selves — and benefit personally by so doing. They were like the Normans arriving in 1066 to replace the local failing Anglo-Saxon ruling class.
The Boers & Brits in South Africa were arriving in what was then a largely empty land, just as the European settlers in the American colonies had done. Yes, there were some stone-age primitives there already (both continents), but not many. The natives did not have the technology to support a large population. It is probably a reasonable assumption that most of the European arrivals in South Africa did not expect to have much to do with any natives of any skin color. Those Europeans were simply escaping their own over-populated (for the technology of the times) lands.
We forget how much technology changes the population a land can support. When Europeans (Spaniards) arrived to exploit California, there were only about a quarter of a million natives in the whole land. That was all California could support with stone age technology. Now there are about 35 million Californians living on the same land area, and feeding millions more.
Alice:
I think it is safe to say that we already have – otherwise we would be reading Daily Kos instead.
Yes, but did the Normans make a point of totally separating themselves from the locals, even those belonging to the local ruling class? Or put it another way: if Africa was just as technologically backwards as it was prior to the arrival of the Europeans, but it was populated by white people, would the Europeans have treated the locals the same way the did?
“The Boers & Brits in South Africa were arriving in what was then a largely empty land”
Is there any info on this? I have heard people say the land was empty and that most SA Blacks are from peoples originally outside the geography, but when you are a migratory herdsman, your range can appear “empty” in the eyes of settled agriculturalists.
Thing is, the peoples of Africa and the world have been displaced by migrations and settlements of peoples able to exploit the territory more effectively.
Is it only a problem if those people are white? Why is it ok to invade and take a city by force, yet such an outrage for others to claim it back, conveniently forgetting the previous violence? I am not trying to excuse, but one must not be hypocritical. Maybe that is the basis for the outrage, that the actions were excused at the time.
“Yes, but did the Normans make a point of totally separating themselves from the locals, even those belonging to the local ruling class?”
Yes, absolutely. The Normans continued to speak a form of French among themselves, and learned the rough dialects of the local Anglo-Saxons to communicate with their subjects. Within living memory, certain British Royal protocols were still carried out in French.
One might guess that there would have been a certain amount of fraternization with the more comely of the Saxon wenches. Boys will be boys! But the Normans considered themselves a separate ruling class, rather like their English descendants in India.
Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel “Ivanhoe” captures the sense of the tension between the ruling Normans and the downtrodden Saxons, from a perspective sympathetic to the defeated Saxons.
Ah, time to re-read that one.
See, my point is that r’ (more fool you, spambot) is a tricky one compared to all the other human attributes that commonly serve as pretext for bigotry: you cannot actually change it. You can learn how to speak French, maybe with an accent, but your kids will have no accent already. You can covert to a different religion and indoctrinate your kids into it. But your skin pigments will trickle down to your offspring for generations, even within mixed marriages (which naturally are not going to be common anyway).
Not that I claim to be an expert, but from what I read things looked extremely different at the time.
The population of Sub-Saharan Africa was very small. The explosion has come following the introduction of 19th/20th century Western technologies. And there was not for a long time any kind of multiracial ‘country’ with one race oppressing the other. Rather, the whites and the native population lived on different farms did not much interact except to raid one anothers’ cattle along the frontiers. The white farmers slotted into the existing early-agrarian power structure much as just another set of native tribes. If they were sometimes aggressive and expansionist against the Bantu, so were the Zulus.
Things started to go wrong when the native and Indian (immigrant) populations merged into a single society with the whites. The whites were not willing to concede equal rights and many even up til the 80s still saw the natives as a different country.
This was further complicated because, as ever in Africa, the populist black movements tended to be hard left if not overtly Soviet-backed, which made the whites even more unwilling to concede them equal votes in an absolute democracy. What has happened could have been a huge amount worse (look at Zimbabwe), and possibly would have been if Apartheid had fallen before the Soviet Union. But the ANC doesn’t have entirely excellent libertarian credentials even compared to EU countries.
As for lasting forever, Cape Town was founded in 1652. 350 years isn’t forever, but for any country it’s a pretty good run.
Alisa — nice one on fooling the Politicially Correct spambot! (See how intrusive Political Correctness is? Even on proudly independent Samizdata, the “r” word is verbotten).
Consider the short history of Europe: white people killing other white people, interspersed by white people hating white people, and white people exploiting white people.
Think of BP’s CEO Tony Hayward at that Congressional Hearing. Americans heard only a foreigner. But English listeners could tell within a fairly narrow radius where Hayward had been brought up and within what socio-economic class. And many of those English listeners instantly disliked Hayward because of those factors.
I once hear a lady in Scotland describe a man as having “a face like the map of Ireland” — meaning that he was obviously of Irish heritage, the dreaded “other”.
Regressives’ narrow focus on skin color is disgusting, and historically not particularly relevant. All the regressives are doing by focusing on skin color is making a statement about their own superiority — they notice skin color, but tell themselves they don’t automatically judge the person because of his skin color.
Still, put those same white regressives in a trendy bistro in central London when a drunk Scandinavian staggers in, and watch how quickly those holier-than-thou regressives fit that white guy into a stereotype.
The original settlers established the Cape colony for purely trading reasons, there was no intention to replace local natives, they were expected to provide the Cape with food through trade, the concepts of racial purity were not inherent and irrelevant to the objectives.
Unfortunately the natives were unwilling to trade and unfriendly, often (understandably) hostile, so some of the Cape settlers established farms, these people were to become the Boers. They used slaves but also interbred with them (but because of the native hostility the slaves were imported, most of their descendants are the “coloured” population today), the mixed races were considered part of the original colony.
When the British took over, the Boers were forced inland, and encountered the Xhosa and Zulu, both aggressive tribes who had displaced the previous population, consequently there was little interbreeding and lots of traditional tribal rivalry over territory.
Attitudes on race were no different from the Xhosa and Zulu, when the Boers got control of the country the attitude became apartheid, but it was born out of historical necessity rather than from their colonial past.
Not that it excuses it, mind.
Alisa, the whole idea you’ve got there that whites are not automatically ethnically, racially, intellectually, and culturally superior to non-whites is a narrative of the modern world. You are wearing historical blinders in assuming that people back then would be as “sophisticated” in their thinking as yours “obviously” is.
They didn’t see a future of eventual race mixing any more than you see a future when your descendants would regularly have sexual intercourse with their house pets.
However, if you extrapolate the course of history, with the past several centuries of increasing moral degradation and lewd sexual terpetude, it becomes rather obvious that it is a historical inevitability that our descendants will be engaging in beastiality on a regular basis, on the grounds that humans and animals are equal….
….
Now that you’ve finished gagging, consider that that is how those original settlers would have looked at your article.
I think this was indeed what was bound to happen, but then mining came in as a game changer. Suddenly, there was an extreme shortage of labor that could only be resolved by paying (relatively) high wages to Africans. Soon, seasonal mine work supplemented subsistence agriculture as a source of income for the tribes, and with this increasing wealth they could sustain higher population levels.
Forget regressives (oops, another ‘r’ word – lets not be bigoted against those poor regressives), I’m talking about all of us. We judge people by the way they look, before they even have a chance to open their mouth or move their hand. That’s a simple, physical more than psychological, fact. It takes a rational effort to suspend judgment pending further information. So unless we are conditioned to the contrary by prior experience, we tend to identify with those who look more like us, and reject the others.
“we tend to identify with those who look more like us, and reject the others”
Alisa, I love your comments. But on this topic, you are a victim of insidious Political Correctness. (Hey! Victim status. You’re a winner in the “liberal” world).
Several millenia of continuous strife among “white” Europeans proves that human beings do not identify with those who look like us — or if we do, we use much more subtle clues than mere skin tone.
I am no expert in African affairs, but those who are tell me that African countries are plagued to this day by inter-tribal strife among peoples whom the ignorant regressive would classify as undifferentiated “black”.
Those disgusting “liberal” regressives have taken us ever further from a world in which people are judged only by the content of their characters. It is time for the rest of us to begin fighting back. Let’s start by rejecting the unsupportable nonsense that “white” people identify only with other “white” people. If that were true, the world would have been spared Barack Hussein Obama.
Alisa,
“which would make it impossible for them to make rational predictions for the future.”
I don’t think anyone, rational or not, can predict the future. That is – we do predict it all the time, but it turns out different.
About the main question: “did they think it will last forever?”
People who migrate to a far country tend to be young, and all they think of is their immediate fate, and their chances to improve their own lot. Children come later, and no one plans far into the future. People aren’t dumb, they know it is impossible to plan far into the future.
They believed in progress and thought that in time all the people of the world would become as rational, as law-abiding and as peaceful as themselves.
Interesting discussion folks but so far entirely retro focused.
What really interests me is the mindset of today’s neo-colonials immigrating into already highly populated, sophisticated European countries. Do these neo-colonists expect that they can maintain their laws (Sharia), their customs (honour killings) and happily exploit the generous welfare state of the indigenous populations set up to cater for much smaller families?
To expand on that last comment, the (largely non-existent) debate in the MSM on immigration has passed over a topic which may well, in today’s austere times, soon be under the spotlight. This is that the costs to the state per child, in terms of NHS, schooling and child benefit, must be at least £5K per annum. Ergo an immigrant family with 4 kids will be taking out a minimum of £20K per annum, plus NHS and other costs of parents – say £25K in total. This is before any other benefits on housing, tax credits etc. So we know in advance that the vast majority of low income immigrants are going to be a drain on the state rather than net contributors. Exploitation of the indigenous population? Certainly.
To avoid any accusation of bigotry, I fully recognise that most of these people have come here in search of a better life and are prepared and do work hard to achieve it. The exploitation is the result of a system which they themselves did not set up. If one can get over the politically correct mindset of colonial guilt which has infected western thought for the last decades, the parallels beween neo-colonialism and the old western adventuring are really quite fascinating.
And yes, there are a large number of indigenous abusers of the sytem as mwell. But this thread concerns colonialism.
The solution is obvious, RW… abolish the welfare system ->> no welfare system to abuse ->> no welfare system to attract the ‘wrong’ sort of immigrant (parasites) ->> more of the desirable kind of immigrant attracted (i.e. high initiative people looking for a better life in a low tax, low regulation environment).
A win-win.
Natalie,
That’s a beut of a piece. For some obscure reason it reminds me of a line from Borges. Somrthing like, “Where the Saxon warred with the Dane and mixed their blood”.
Alas I’m not cultured enough to recall it exactly or indeed to ref precisely but…
Anyway, I wish I’d written what you had there.
Jacob, c’mon, you know very well what I meant. Obviously no one can predict the future, but one can make predictions (not the same thing as actually successfully predicting) that are either based on rational analysis of the past and the present or not.
In any case, Natalie’s question seems to have been ‘what were they thinking’, and my answer can pretty much be summed up as ‘nothing much’, even after they settled, had children and even grandchildren. My point being that indeed most of us don’t plan too far into the future, but if we base our actions on irrational impulses or false premises (such as bigotry), the future is not likely to be kind to us, planning or not. The current Financial Crisis is a case in point.
It is often said that Britain aquired and Empire in a fit of absent mindedness. Except in a few instances (North America and perhaps Australia, though that started as a dumping ground for undesireables) we came to trade not colonise, but ended up running the places nevertheless.
With regards to South Africa, when Britain took over from the Dutch in the Cape Colony in the early 1800’s, we gave whites, blacks and coloured the vote. With the abolition of slavery in 1837, the majority Boer population became sorely pissed off, because as Chuckles said the Boers had a stange take on Christianity. They believed God had given them the right to enslave the black population, in order to enlighten and civilise them.
Shortly thereafter they started the Great Trek, looking for their own seperateness.
Come independence the Boers took over from the minority British and in 1948 they introduced Aparteid (an Afrikkans word).
The blame for the mess in S Africa should really be put squarely on the Boers. The British were relatively benign by comparison.
Dang me! Every post I write gets smited these days. That’s three in a row. What is occuring? 😉
[deleted… do not ever try to mess with smite bot… sorry but that is one of our inflexible policies here]
Alisa,
“that are either based on rational analysis of the past and the present or not”
What I said is that it doesn’t make much difference. Predictions tend to fail even when based on rational analysis. Especially long range ones.
“Bigotry is irrational by definition . . .”
“[I]f we base our actions on irrational impulses or false premises (such as bigotry) . . .”
Alisa, you really seen fixated on the idea the bigotry is ipso facto “irrational”. I don’t agree, at least not in every case. It certainly was a survival characteristic in the days when we all lived in tribes; suspicion and mistrust of persons from other, probably hostile, tribes was essential. For that reason alone I think it’s hard-wired into the human psyche. You can’t overcome millenia of survival-adaptive behavior with a few decades (or even a few centuries) of “modern” enlightened thinking.
And it isn’t entirely irrational even today. There are perfectly valid reasons to be wary of persons having very different cultural norms than our own, and in the absense of more data certain markers (skin tones, language, dress styles, behavior patterns) are a perfectly valid means of forming an initial impression as to whether the unknown person shares one’s culture and values. Not perfect, of course, and it should be subject to revision upon the receipt of further information, but not inherently “irrational” either.
We all form initial impressions of other people based on the (necessarily incomplete) data available to us; otherwise, we couldn’t function. Such preliminary judgments only become “irrational” when we cling to them even after receiving contradictory data.
I suggest you examine your premises (or your prejudices, as it were). It seems to me that your knee-jerk dismissal of “bigotry” is itself a species of bigotry (or “political correctness, as it’s called these days).
Speaking about predictions – read the previous post on Alternate histories, and the short piece by David Friedman, linked there.
In the civil war in the US – no one could predict, a month before it’s outbreak, how devastating it would be.
And in WW1, most people in all countries, marched cheerfully to war, believing they will be back home by Christmas.
So, reflecting about things “lasting forever” isn’t within the capabilities of the human species.
Laird, there seems to be some confusion: what you describe (suspicion of the unknown) is not bigotry, no matter what the PC police are saying.
Exactly.
Again, I am trying here to stick to Natalie’s original question and the initial comments that addressed it. It was perfectly rational and reasonable for the first Europeans arriving in Africa to treat the locals with suspicion, and indeed skin color was the easiest way to tell the locals from the Europeans – nothing irrational about that. But we are talking way past that “unknown” stage. The Europeans stayed in Africa, they got to know the natives quite well, and yet some of them continued treating them as an inferior species. They set themselves apart as a ruling class, and skin color was established as precondition to entry. Do you find it rational? If so, what is the rationale behind it?
Jacob: the sun is going to rise tomorrow. If you print too much money you get inflation. If you touch an exposed wire you get electrified. “Ruling castes do not stay ruling or castes forever.” Need I go on?
There’s quite a bit of confusion here.
The first Dutch settlers at the Cape encountered only the stone-age Khoisan, hunter-gatherers whom they displaced or enslaved. They also imported labor from the East Indies (the “Cape Malays”, who still exist as a distinct population). What they expected to happen in the long term was probably not clear even to them.
When Britain took over the Cape, the Boers were unhappy and migrated into the interior. Here they encountered the sedentary Bantu, who were themselves fairly recent migrants from north of the Limpopo. The Boers subjugated the Bantu. The Boers seized most of the largely vacant land, set up whites-only governments, and made the Bantus farm labor. They expected this arrangement to continue indefinitely, even though there were probably more ‘kaffirs’ than whites in the Boer republics.
A comparable situation was the slave-owning U.S. South. Most of the Southern ruling class expected negro slavery to continue forever. “Moderates” such as Robert E. Lee thought it might end after a thousand years or so.
Alisa, your original comments that I quoted were generic: not limited to colonial Africa. Hence my generalized response.
But if you want to confine yourself to that specific application, why do you consider “treating them [the natives] as an inferior species” to have been irrational? Put yourself in that place and time. The settlers had no knowledge of animal taxonomy (as we apply it) or evolution; why was it “irrational” of them not to consider different-appearing natives with a demonstrably inferior stone-age culture to be their equals? Superior, in the grand scheme of things, to gorillas and the great apes, perhaps, but obviously (to their eyes) not the equal of European man. Hardly an irrational position to take at the time.
Alisa,
“If you touch an exposed wire you get electrified. “Ruling castes do not stay ruling or castes forever.” Need I go on?”
No, you need to distinguish between the trivial and the elaborate, important or significant events, between the first and second sentence. The are not in the same category.
Sure, we can predict exactly when the next sun eclipse will be, but not whom one will be marrying and when, or what the price of a stock will be in a month’s time.
“will it last forever?” is something impossible to predict, no matter how rational or smart you are.
Absolutely Laird, that’s why I said that it only became irrational after they (the whites) had have lived alongside the natives for a while and had a chance to get to know them as actual human individuals. And, granted, the natives were far less developed and inferior to whites in many ways, but surely not so inferior as to justify violence against them in the form of displacement and enslavement? And how could I possibly be generic, with that elephant in the room called ‘apartheid’ – or was it mere fiction invented by the PC establishment of which I am an unwitting victim?
Finally smited – was beginning to worry that I lost the touch.
Jacob, that last one is the easiest one of them all: nothing lasts forever.
Alisa, what you originally said was “Bigotry is irrational by definition . . .” No qualification; no reference to apartheid; just a blanket statement for all people at all times. That is what I objected to. If you wish to withdraw and/or modify it, that’s fine with me.
As to your latest point, that “it [their bigotry] only became irrational after they (the whites) had have lived alongside the natives for a while and had a chance to get to know them as actual human individuals”, well, we’re just going to have to disagree. Their mindset (“metacontext,” in SI parlance) did not permit them to view the natives as “human individuals”. All their teachings were to the contrary. Treating them as inferior beings was no more “irrational” at that time and place than is our current “subjugation” of domestic animals. Our descendants may view that practice just as you view that of the colonials. You simply can’t put yourself into their place, and view the world through their eyes. I submit that what’s irrational is for you to apply your definition of “irrationality” to a completely foreign place and time.
Foreign place and time? Apartheid existed in S. Africa until just a few decades ago, Laird. Come on.
As to my “blanket” statement, I qualified it several times, by explaining that I don’t consider racial discrimination as bigotry when it is based on real ignorance of facts. Under such conditions it is not irrational, although it is still based on false premises.
I recommend Surellin
My understanding is that, 1). for whichever European state had the chance, a presence on the Cape was desirable for commercial and naval reasons, and such a colony in a nice climate would grow, and 2). after the Portuguese presence introduced a bunch of bad diseases and wiped out the natives, there really weren’t many locals to worry about conflicting with. The Zulus, too, were immigrants into south Africa. There would have been hundreds of miles between their presence on the east coast (Kwa-Zulu) and the Cape colony. All the space in the world for anybody optimistic enough to emigrate from Europe in the first place!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ&feature=related
Whilst nobody is a racist nowadays, of course (anyone going to say they are?!), the Victorian Era was rife with racism, so the Boers were just average white people of that time. In old stories you can come across curious expressions, like the verb ‘to jew’, meaning to swindle someone. and we still use old racist stereotypes in speech, like ‘Dutch’ courage, and ‘French’ letters.
those colonists were simply doing what the British were doing in Australia, after all.
What do other cultures call The Victorian Age? Do the Italians call it the Garibaldi Age, and the Germans the Bizmarkian Age?
They were not vastly outnumbered Natalie.
When the Dutch first started to settle in what became South Africa (the 18th century) the Bantu tribes were still moving south (they mostly had not arrived yet) there were just bushmen and so on (as despised by the Bantu tribes as by the Dutch).
Indeed even as late as 1948 I am not sure that whites (English and Dutch and so on) were “vastly” outnumbered in South Africa – they were outnumbered, but it was nothing like today or even the situation in the 1980s.
Remember the French saying “demography is destiny” – the white people in South Africa were prepared to oppress the blacks in 1948, but they were not prepared to drive them out or exterminate them (both of which would have been physically possible in 1948).
Note that lack of will (lack of will to do evil I grant you – but still lack of will) and the higher black birth rate – and then everything else is inevitable.
As for white people in South Africa – they are leaving or being killed (via violent crime) a few interracial crowds at Association Football matches are not going change that. There is no point in crying over it – the whites have had years to leave, so if they choose to stay……. After all most whites treated blacks badly when they were in charge.
Ethnic matters (racial and nonracial), generally:
Remember how quickly things change.
For example when I was born Muslims were of no importance in Europe (there were hardly any), now they are very important indeed.
Perhaps by the time you die Natalie, Muslims will be the main part of this area of the world and even the word “Europe” will be fading from the memory of humanity.
Although this is a matter of ideology (Islam being a religion – a set of beliefs) as well as ethnicity.
If there was conversion of Muslims to Christianity (on a massive scale) then Europe may survive – but I see little chance of that.
Future historians may ask “how did the Europeans, who had produced so much, allow themselves to be wiped out” – but, in truth, there is little than can be done.
Are you going to kill Muslims (just for being Muslim)? Or drive them out – again just for being Muslim?
No – neither am I.
So there is nothing that can be done. Unless there is great wave of conversion of Muslims to Christianity (or to Randian Objectivism come to that), but I see no sign of that happening in Europe.
And the fertility rate of the various European peoples has collapsed (perhaps partly due to the collapse of Christianity) – often it is as low as one child per women (slow motion genocide – and not so slow motion actually).
In such circumstances the forces of Islam (and so on) could hardly be blamed for taking over – as European civilization is clearly dying (and that is NOT their fault).
The United States:
The conflict in America is not just political – it is also cultural (between “Red State” and “Blue State” Americans), and this cultural conflict has its religious and demographic aspects.
For example, black people who adopt conservative forms of Christianity (or conservative forms of atheism – such as Randian Objectivism) become “Red State” (or whatever) Americans – this is recognised (although not spoken about) by both sides. This effects their culture – even down to very basic things.
The same is true of hispanics.
For example, the left have no problem calling certain hispanics racists, what is meant by this word is not that these hispanics hate other brown skinned people (or whatever), the word racist is used by the left to mean “conservative American” so they are NOT in error in using the word to describe anti leftists who happen to be black or hispanic (one simply has to remember what the word racist really means).
Actually there is a cultural element as well as a political element – and by “culture” I mean very basic things.
For example, even as a non-American I can tell conservative Americans and liberal Americans (Red and Blue – whatever) apart by the sounds of their voices (regardless of what they are talking about) and the way they move (although it hard for me to explain exactly how I can tell – but I can).
It is hard to think of more basic (and seemingly non political) things than that.
And yes, it is NOT dependent on race. And it changes when people change sides (which some do).
Paul;
That has been my experience as well, at least to a certain extent.
People flow toward money.
The difference between Europe and the United States is an influx of Islam vs a influx of Catholicism.
Intermarriage rates for second-generation (U.S.-born) Hispanic husbands and wives are 29 percent and 31 percent respectively—or about three-times that of foreign-born non-citizen Hispanics.
Don’t make the PC assumption of “one drop of blood” binds you to the minority. What is being created is an identity that is completely new.
I remember reading in Paul Johnson’s Modern Times that whites actually outnumbered blacks in South Africa well into the first half of the twentieth century.
The apartheid regime was created only in 1948, when the black population started to dominate. So until that time, it’s quite probable that whites did expect to overwhelm the black population. And maybe it wasn’t such a crazy expectation.
Settlers did end up overwhelming natives in North America and Australia. So who knows why this didn’t happen in SA as well.
Of course in South Africa many white people had African anncestors (although it did not do to point it out) due to bit of interbreeding over the centuries.
Hence the supposed need for the “Racial Classification Board” with its “scientific” tests on things like skin colour and hair (yes hair was a big thing).
Oddly enough one of the first signs that the “New South Africa” was a a lot waffle (in spite of Nelson Mandela going to rugby matches) was the choice to KEEP the Race Board (although it may have renamed).
If they new country was really going to be “nonracial” why would you keep the board?
And, of course, soon all sorts of quotas and so on were appearing (with the new Consitution “interpreted” into meaninglessness).
Saxons and Normans.
England was not “failing” – not in any sense, apart from one.
England lost a key battle and its leaders were killed – that can happen to anyone (military history is a real thing – it is not just a subset of economic or political history, battlefield judgements or even accidents can transform general history).
Did the Normans keep themselves apart – biologically no (more on this later) but culturally oddly yes.
The first King after the death of Harold to support the English language in literature was Edward III (centuries later) and it was a very different English language by then.
Law was in Norman French for centuries also.
However, biologically the mixing was much faster – with many Normans marrying Anglo Saxons (although note the power relationship – English women married Norman men and adopted their culture, it was almost never Norman women marrying English men and adopting their culture).
Famously Henry I (the youngest son of William) married a direct decendant of Alfred the Great.
He was able to use this to rally the English to his side in his wars against his elder brother.
However, Henry still spoke Norman French and his law courts still used it – and Norman law, not Anglo Saxon law. Although English law came to have an effect on what became known as Common Law.
It should be remembered (because it is often denied) that there is a lot of Norman law in Common Law.
Although there are some odd things – I will give only one example.
In the county of Kent (only a few miles from the capital) English land law (not Norman land law) was used RIGHT UP TO THE 1920’s.
This is because of deals made between the Kent people (the landowners and the general folk) and William.
Stange but (I assure you) true.
The upper class British settlers
in Kenya were remarkably obtuse. Meinertzhagen was expelled from the colony because he told the gov. general and his assembled dinner guests that their new country would last twenty years until the natives formed labor unions and demanded the right to vote. Twenty years later they had Harry Thuku to contend with, but they still kept their heads in the sand (See Something of Value and White Mischief for some of the details.)
Oh, b y 1652 most native Africans were safely ensconced in the Iron Age +
It has been very interesting for me to read the above. As a South African, 44 years of age – having lived here my entire life – I wish all South Africans could debate and contribute as well and as informed as you have. When I first started reading this forum my thoughts were “Ag, just another bored bunch of Europeans talking about things they know nothing of”. These types of debates could save our country. The reality is that we have debates on these issues, and many others equally as important to our survival – and they are clouded by resentment and blame and all the emotions that come from a twisted history.
This is a beautiful country, and God has blessed us abundantly (I think this is the same everywhere in the world). As Paul Marks has pointed out these situations are a global issue not exclusive to our small part of the world. It seems most modern conflicts are based on an inbred fear and ignorance of what people different to us may take or contribute to our lives. History will however allow us to justify these fears as the dominant group in each part of the world has always ruled the weaker group suppressing them and fearing their progress. Oppression was not invented in South Africa and today, even with our history, we are applying the same failed attitudes by applying a new form of oppression which is justified as rational and reasonable based on our history. White people were oppressors, arrogant, greedy and selfish.
I was relieved to read however that there was some reasons why we behaved this way as a race because my world now makes a little more sense. The clever people of this world should rule, and not the ignorant, loud and pushy individuals who always seem to find their way into power. Debate is the only cure and I just wish my fellow South Africans could calmly and purposefully seek a resolution so that we can enjoy this great nation and not tear it apart as we are about to do. Thank you all so much for your enlightened contributions it certainly has helped me to understand my world a little better (and I will share this with all my friends).