From our very first issue, the lead story dealing with the cruel nonsense of "returning democracy to Haiti," THE BARNES REVIEW has employed history's truth to deal with the inevitably linked problems of Third World governing incapacity and the international establishment's self-serving hypocrisies relative to them. We have repeatedly warned, by way of history's unique insights, of the local and worldwide consequences wrought by Western cowardice and confusion in the face of demagogic mobocracy.
Nowhere is the problemÑand the potential for vastly destructive mayhemÑgreater than in South Africa. Few people have equaled that land's white settlers in terms of building a solid and inspirational land from sheer wilderness, a saga similar to that of our own pioneers, whose magnificent legacy of achievements are now downgraded or distorted in favor of "Native American" worship.
In 1652 the Dutch East India Company founded a shipping station at the Cape of Good Hope. The early white settlers, largely Dutch Calvinists, soon pridefully referred to themselves as "Afrikaners" or "Afrikanders." Largely poor and fiercely independent, they braved open and unknown but largely fertile lands. The farmers among them became known as "Boers." They built homes, tilled virgin land, grazed herds and moved deeper into the lush "no man's land," coming upon occasional groups of large nomadic black natives. In short, they built a solid and modestly prosperous white nation where none had existed.
But in 1806, during the Napoleonic wars, Britain moved in and took permanent possession of a young country that was now a colony. Britain needed the Cape as a naval base, but few from the British Isles found immigration to this land of rough work and modest living attractive. In 1852 and in 1854 Britain recognized the independence of the two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
Then, in 1877, largely coincident with the discovery of large diamond deposits, London annexed the Transvaal and moved to federate South Africa under the Union Jack. In 1880 the Boers rose up against British rule, inflicting three limited but humiliating defeats. Subsequently, Prime Minister William E. Gladstone returned a measure of sovereignty to the Boers.
But in 1895 an Anglo-Judaic cabal led by plutocrats like Cecil Rhodes and Albert Beit conspired to take over the Transvaal for the EmpireÑjewels for the Crown and for their own pockets. Afrikaner farmers were literally cheated out of great tracts of valuable land. There followed the first and second Boer wars, magnificently brave fights for independence blackened by Britain's invention of the concentration camp and even worse cruelties which would be called genocide today. These camps largely "housed" Afrikaner women and children; their purpose being to break the spirit of the Boer fighting men who so bravely vexed Horatio Herbert Kitchener and his forces. Many Boers starved to death.
In the 20th Century the Afrikaners proved not only hardy and productive citizens but, like another conquered people, the Irish, gave more than their share of blood in Britain's wars. Their reward, as most are well aware, has been their casting as modern day pariahs in a land they built from scratch.
Within these 1990s, and after decades of economic sanctions from their Western brethren in virtually all of the industrial nations, South Africa is now a black-ruled domain, under an all-but-invisible white and Jewish plutocracy.
Unfortunately, looking at a few educational developments alone, all is far from well. And the insidious, debilitating pattern should be familiar to us all. A recent Associated Press story out of Johannesburg reports that the South African Broadcasting Company has made deep cuts in Afrikaans programming. Indigenous tribal tongues will now dominate.
The London Daily Mail reported in February that the whites-only primary school in Potgeitersrus was being taken before the South African Supreme Court for refusing admission to black pupils. Traditionally 85% of the school's pupils have been taught in Afrikaans, 15% in English.
The Daily Mail wrote of the "trim lawns and red brick classrooms" of the school but noted: "The patience of the African National Congress-led provincial government finally snapped after the white parents voted overwhelmingly against accepting blacks."
Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg was long considered the most liberal and integrated school of higher learning in South Africa. But the New York Times reported February 10 that these days, with the escalation of black demands, "South Africa's most prestigious university has never been more racially divided. . . At Witwatersrand the transformation process has grown especially vicious. . . "
In the Times article the university's head, Dr. Robert Charlton, motioned to the beautiful campus, fine buildings and excellent living conditions all students experience. And from his ivory tower he exclaimed, with all the masochistic disorientation that rots Western liberal minds: "I just don't understand. Why should we be targets now? Maybe we need more sensitivity training. . . I don't know."
In the same February 10 edition of the Times, a two column story reported a gathering of sub-Sahara Africa's finance ministers that was partially headed "Africa's Ills." It wrote of "Guinea, a mineral-rich country that has never managed to take off economically" and that in Niger "the difficulties of mastering the democratic process after the country's first free elections were compounded by a stark financial crisis.
The courageous and overwhelmingly positive history of the Afrikaners is being withheld not only from the rest of us, but is now being submerged within their own country. Instead, see a mass buckling of Western will and spirit; courtesy of a half century of perverse indoctrination. Today, it may be too late for South Africa, but we pray that it is not too late for America to reverse its own back-to-mud madness.