Rhodesia Shows Asylum Isn't How to Help the Boers
Look to the Western Cape
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President Trump made headlines when he, somewhat unexpectedly, given past US policy toward the country,1 offered white South Africans asylum in America.2 Yet further, he cut off American aid for the country, citing its obvious abuses of the Boers and their rights.3
On one hand, this makes complete sense. Whites make up only 7% of South Africa, with black voters dominating the electorate, and so the “wolves voting to eat the sheep for dinner” problem is one that’s not escapable within their system. Rhodesia avoided this problem with propertied voting,4 and pre-Mandela South Africa with the apartheid system. But now, with propertied voting seen as entirely out of the question and anti-black apartheid replaced with anti-white “Black Economic Empowerment”5 and “Expropriation without Compensation,”6 it essentially has an inescapable, anti-white form of apartheid that seems intrinsic to its form of post-colonial “democracy.” That is what really ought be expected of the country, as the ruling ANC regime has deep communist roots and has long made clear it is a “liberation” party rather than one that aims to rule for the benefit of all South Africans. Paired with the utterly awful crime problem, the situation inside South Africa seems hopeless.7 So, it seems, if whites in the country are to be aided, the easiest way to do so is to just give them a safe place to go.
But that is probably the wrong approach. In fact, though they appreciate the offer, the Boers largely appear to oppose it.8
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Why? Because they recognize that South Africa, particularly the Western Cape, is their country. They were there first, before the tribes like the Zulus that now rule the country. They turned it from untamed land inhabited by no one into immensely productive, settled agricultural land. Much like the Anglos in Rhodesia or Virginia,9 they created something new out of land that was never settled.
Further, when they did so, they became something new. Much like Americans in 1850,10 the Boers are a new people and culture, one forged by the unique mix of European groups that settled in the Western Cape — Dutch, French Huguenots, and Germans — and the unique conditions of the unpopulated, rough territory.
So, for them to leave is much harder than, say, the British leaving Kenya because of the ravages of decolonization; rather than just leaving their homes, which is sad enough in itself, the Boers who leave South Africa have to leave behind everything related to who they are. It means leaving behind their people and culture, and thus losing the unique identity that makes them who they are. In other words, they have no other home. Leaving South Africa would mean having no home.
But encouraging those who want to leave to do so, noble as it might be in intention, doesn’t just mean they will likely lose their strong cultural attributes and become as deracinated as other Western peoples in the process. It also means that those who stay behind will surely lose everything that remains.
This is a lesson clearly taught by Rhodesia.
The Rhodesian Lesson
The reason that the Rhodesians lost the Bush War isn’t that the West decided to side with the communist terrorists. It isn’t that the destruction of their oil supplies permanently disabled their war effort. It isn’t that the black population rose up en masse to overthrow the Rhodesian Front.
Rather, it was that too many Rhodesians fled the country. The hundreds of thousands who fled over the 1960-80 period11 meant that their country lacked the manpower it needed to fight the war; as the ever-dwindling (and by the mid-1970s it was shrinking) white population got smaller and smaller, there weren’t enough young men to fill the ranks and fight the communists, nor to even staff the civilian economy.12 And so Rhodesia, which probably would have survived had it lasted until the Reagan presidency, as he took its side,13 collapsed in 1980 and let Mugabe take over.
That’s not to say the whites who fled didn’t have very valid reasons to do so — a massive spate of attacks on farms and numerous civilian airline shootdowns in 197914 could convince anyone it was time to go — or that the other reasons for the fall, such as the oil situation, weren’t serious factors in it.
But it must be said that Rhodesia probably could have survived had the 150,000 whites who fled between 1960 and 1975 stayed and fought rather than fled, as their doing so would have increased Rhodesian manpower, and thus potential military personnel and a tax base to fund them, by well over 50%. As always, there are a million factors that could have affected the outcome. But their leaving was the critical factor.
And then, because they left, their country fell, and the wonderful society it had created disappeared into the maw of communist destruction and treachery. What was a beautiful, prosperous land and could have remained one well into the future instead became yet another horror story of decolonization.
South Africa Is In the Same Position
South Africa is now in a similar position. The whites within it have to decide whether all is lost and it is time to flee, or the battle can still be won and it is a time to dig trenches.15 Describing the latter mindset in an excellent article for IM 1776 titled “A Time to Dig Trenches,” South African Boer activist Ernst van Zyl noted:16
Over the past several decades South Africans have mainly chosen to emigrate to Western, Anglosphere countries. These emigrants concluded that the time has come to move, and that movement closer to the cultural and political power centers of the Western-dominated global order was their best bet. As Russell Lamberti put it: “[w]e now live in a world of people on the run.”
But the problem with constantly moving to higher ground to escape the rising tide is that you eventually run out of higher ground. If you recently emigrated, or semigrated to what you deem a more defendable position, you now have a duty to take root and hold your ground there. The harsh reality is that, at some point, you will have to make a stand. If not you, it will be your children. And isn’t there something abhorrent about “outsourcing” the responsibility of solving the biggest problems and challenges of your time to future generations?
Our mindset should be to fight for what we want to preserve in our towns, neighborhoods and communities. In its prime or in its decline, the crushing boots of advancing empires or the shockwaves of their collapse will always find you, as my Afrikaner ancestors have learned repeatedly throughout our volatile history. No wonder, then, that Southern Africa is also the home of AfriForum, one of the most developed proverbial trench-digging operations in the world.
Thus, asylum is a wonderful offer but the wrong one. America should take the Boers in if they really must flee, but the time for that hasn’t yet come. In fact, as everything from the success of Boer-only town Orania17 to the Battle of Blood River18 show, it’s that being detested and outnumbered is but a speedbump for the Boers, not an insurmountable roadblock.
Trump’s next steps should take that into account. Encouraging the Boers to flee their homeland will only create yet another Zimbabwe-style humanitarian catastrophe in South Africa. Rather, what we ought do is prevent the state from pursuing the expropriation without compensation policy19 and, at the same time, aid the Boers in their political attempts to defend themselves against the South African state.
For example, Americans should take a strong stand in support of the Holy Grail of Boer political activism: Western Cape Independence.20
The Cape, particularly the rural land outside of Cape Town, is, given its history as the area first settled by the Boers, far safer and whiter than the rest of the country; it is a base where they could expect to dig trenches and defend themselves.
Cape Independence would create a base into which those in the country could flee and, once there, have defended borders while living in an area in which they could work, build, and show what can be accomplished in the absence of an ANC-style, race communist government.
Further, if the Cape became independent, America would have a great deal of cause to support it, and would be better able to invest in it without fear of BEE-style race laws like those currently destroying South Africa and blocking American companies from doing business there.21 That is, after all, why Boers in the Cape are already joking that they should secede from South Africa and become America’s 51st state:22 independence from the race communist hell that is South Africa and American support would solve nearly all their problems.
The thing is, however, asylum and Western Cape Independence — or some similarly helpful scheme like creating a Lebanon-style government that keeps power out of the hands of any one racial or ethnic group23 — are largely mutually exclusive. Either the Boers can flee here and be safe while risking deracination, something they very much don’t want but might need, or they can attempt to hold onto some of their country and create a world in which their children can grow up as Boers rather as assimilated immigrants to America.
But both can’t happen. As Rhodesia shows, a mass exodus of the group trying to preserve what’s left — in that case, the Anglos and, in this case, the Boers — is a ticking time bomb that ultimately destroys the movement and limits any opportunity for future success.
So, if the Boers are to survive as a group, they need to remain in and hold onto at least some of South Africa. The Western Cape is probably the best base in which they could do so. If President Trump wants to help them, which it appears he does, the best thing he could do is support Western Cape Independence, something the Boers have called on him to do,24 and thus give those Boers a fighting chance against the South African regime. That would be a political process, eminently justifiable, what the Boers want far more than asylum, likely profitable for American businesses, and finally put us on the right side of conflict in a region in which we have long sided with the race communists.25
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Featured image credit: By Johnnyhurst - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33357596
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Great article Will! They are going to have to organize and act quickly. I think the exodus has already begun. I know many South African women who have left ZA. My guess is it starts with young women and before long there isn’t a next generation just like Rhodesia.