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Notes -
Apartheid was a system created to serve the Boer / Afrikaans community at the expense not only of the blacks, but also the Anglo whites, cape coloured, Indians and Chinese.
No other European colony in Africa had a formalized system of racial segregation and internal passporting as developed and extensive as South Africa. Not Rhodesia, not Namibia, not even the Belgian Congo (although violence against the natives there was often more brutal, to be clear). Apartheid served the specific function of providing huge amounts of low cost agrarian labor to serve the pastoral Afrikaner homesteading and farming fantasy. The larger scale and more industrial agriculture seen in what what are today Botswana, Zambia etc (where white farmers are still commonplace) both had less need for laborers and could employ natives at market rates from inside the community.
Apartheid happened as a racial affirmative action movement tied to a specific ethnoreligious tribe who believed they were owed South Africa by God. This is immediately apparent if you read DF Malan and other founding figures in the Purified National Party, hardcore Dutch Reformed Calvinist isolationists who despised the British Empire, involvement in overseas conflicts and who were deeply opposed to industrial capitalism from a socially conservative perspective.
They believed that the nation given to them by God was under hostile foreign occupation, by Anglos, and that they were oppressed domestically by an English, Jewish and Indian mercantile elite that ruled the cities, ran every major newspaper, controlled the stock exchange and ran almost all corporation. Enough Afrikaner elites had previously joined the above group to run the country, but a combination of the depression and rising Afrikaner ethnonationalism eroded their support, leading a substantial fringe (often those most associated with the church itself) to found the breakaway movement that would eventually gain support, merge back with the establishment Afrikaner movement and then implement apartheid in the late 1940s. Malan came at the right time, because the mercantile elite in South Africa had experienced a drastic reversal of fortunes in the depression which crippled almost all export-driven businesses (much of the economy), leaving them vulnerable.
Apartheid was designed to entrench an existing state of affairs that served the Afrikaner population. Urban whites would not compete with urban blacks (who were also migrating rapidly to cities) for jobs, while rural Afrikaners could continue to employ black laborers cheaply because they could no longer take higher paid roles in and around the cities. Lastly, Smuts and his predecessors had presided over the mass immigration of white Anglos and others from the British Empire, who were seen as taking jobs and opportunity away from Afrikaners. An irony of fate is that without the Afrikaner nationalism that produced apartheid, there would likely be many more white South Africans today.
The ‘benefits’ accorded to the white population from apartheid were therefore not evenly realized. Rural and suburban Afrikaners benefited from labor so cheap that even a postal worker could employ a cook, a nanny, a pool boy and live the lifestyle of the American or Australian upper-middle class. But the urban PMC dealt with economic stagnation (apart from a brief period in the late 50s and early 60s), high labor costs, an entrenched Afrikaner elite who cared little for economic progress until the Cold War made it necessary, sclerotic institutions and then, as apartheid became less internationally acceptable, with sanctions, lower quality domestically made goods, and international opprobrium, which the rural Afrikaners in the north couldn’t care less about.
Of course, neither Musk, Sachs nor Thiel are Afrikaners; Musk is Anglo, Sachs presumably Jewish, Thiel German who spent some time in Southern Africa in his youth. But SA political dynamics are still affected by the gulf between Anglos and Afrikaners, and Anglos care little about what happens to random Afrikaner farmers in the north or about ethnonationalist Afrikaner projects like Orania.
If they created what was of value in the country, then it’s not “affirmative action”, it’s justly securing the fruit of one’s labor with the knowledge that other peoples may not or do possess the same high trust genes and culture adaptive for great nation building. The Bantu had the opportunity to develop their own things in their own areas that rivaled Afrikaner development, but they were not able to do this, and aren’t able today. Neither are Indians, it would seem, from reading about experiences in India. Perhaps, much like soil-rich produce, you need high-fertility farming communities outside of urban areas in order to sustain the very spark of the civilization so prized, lest the less-trustful urban genes proliferate.
It’s not really about the Bantus, it’s about the economic relationship between the Afrikaners and the Anglos which over time created a great deal of resentment. The opposition to English immigration was because Afrikaners weren’t even thinking about black people voting, but about the Anglos, for example.
Clearly the Anglos possessed the genes for great nation building. But they were economic competition and had different economic interests, and a long history of ethnic hostility toward the Afrikaners (which was certainly reciprocal).
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The enmity the Afrikaner’s feel towards anglos might have to do with the whole war waged against them and then being the first population ever to be put into concentration camps (the first coining of the term) where tens of thousands of boers died, in what amounted to a genocide. Strange that you left that part out
Obviously, but there are specific reasons for what happened from the 1930s to late 1940s that go beyond that.
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