Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from post-Apartheid South Africa is a polemical work anchored in history, reality, fact, and the political philosophy of classical liberalism. It is a manifesto against mass society, arguing against raw, ripe, democracy, here (in the US), there (in South Africa), and everywhere. Into the Cannibal’s Pot follows Russell Kirk’s contention that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order. It is a reminder that, however imperfect, civilized societies are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes. The tyranny of political correctness, so unique to the West plays a role in their near-collapse. Advanced societies don’t just die; they either wither from within, or, like South Africa, are finished off by other western societies. Ilana Mercer delivers a compelling book; it is required reading for thinking people who care about the destiny of western civilization.

Dedicated to my Afrikaner brothers betrayed, and to my African sisters, Nomasomi Khala and Annie Dlahmini, whose lives touched mine.

This is a book about ideas and ideology. When losing an intellectual argument, there are despicable people who point an accusing finger and shout racism. In our dark times where mob rule and collectivist ideas resonate with so many, this appalling strategy can be very effective.

To those who support colorblind civil discourse, rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom, the golden rule (do unto others as you wish them to do unto you), liberty, freedom of expression and religion and private property rights…regardless of skin color or ethnic background (black, red, white, yellow, brown, green or violet), we extend the hand of friendship.

To those who support all forms of thuggery—including totalitarianism, collectivism, fascism, extremist fundamentalism, unequal treatment under law, income redistribution, nanny state government programs and the soft bigotry of low expectations—your skin color and ethnicity are irrelevant…and your ideas belong in the dustbin of history.

It is no surprise that a manifesto against majoritarianism would not find favor with the mission of most American publishers. Opposition to mass society was once an accepted (indeed, unremarkable) theme in the richly layered works of iconic conservatives such as Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham. Today, by contrast, such opposition is considered as damning as it is impolitic.

And don’t even think of writing a less-than hagiographical account of Nelson Mandela. Time magazine’s Richard Stengel has serialized his tributes to Saint Mandela. (Stengel has completed two. Perhaps a third is planned?) But an opposing voice to the media paean for the democratic South Africa and its deity, written by a dissenting South African exile—this cannot be countenanced.

“What menaces democratic society in this age is not a simple collapse of order,” forewarned Alexis de Tocqueville, “but a tyranny of mediocrity, a standardization of mind and spirit and condition.” In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, this sameness of mind and spirit manifests in a convergence of opinion—even in the neatly bifurcated America.

Thus, while almost every other postcolonial insurgency in Africa has been scrutinized, rival views of post-apartheid South Africa are unwelcome. Despite the country’s body count since “freedom,” the foundations of what was a joint Anglo-American undertaking are not to be faulted or questioned.

The loss of 300,000 innocents murdered since democracy dawned is therefore regularly diminished. People slide into extenuation: “We have our problems, but we now have, I’m proud to say, a working, wonderful democracy in South Africa.” These words were uttered by the roaming Justice Richard Goldstone, who—unlike this writer’s father—attached himself to the anti-apartheid cause only once it became fashionable, safe and professionally expedient.

In itself, the tale of the publication of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa bears telling. For while this polemic respects no political totems or taboos, it is faithful to facts. These facts cried out to be chronicled. They should not have had a struggle to find their way into print.

Yet struggle they did.

“Ilana, if you’d only give me something like Corinne Hofmann’s Back from Africa, publishers would pounce,” promised one literary agent. Hofmann’s salacious account of her time as the sexual plaything of a virile African tribal chief was described by The Times Literary Supplement as “a dated tale of exotic desire and disillusionment.”

As the PC pecking order stands, Into the Cannibal’s Pot might also have been pounced upon had its author been more like economist Dambisa Moyo of the trendy Dead Aid. That popular book consists of derivative deductions which had been reached decades ago by Peter Thomas Bauer, the doyen of development economics. (To give Ms. Moyo her dues, Dead Aid is dedicated to the late Lord Bauer.)

The following is an assessment from a well-known academic publisher whose stock does not exactly fly off the shelves:

I’ve long been aware of Mercer’s writing. Though I rarely agree with her, she’s quite a presence on the right side of the blogosphere. This is an extremely well-written and provocative work. I was riveted as I read it. …The problem here is that the market for a book with such a clear political bias is that much smaller. So I just don’t think we could take it on.

“There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea,” said Dr. Johnson. This is my position with respect to political parties stateside and in South Africa. How can a book that discounts the venerated vote and disavows all political parties have a political bias? Into the Cannibal’s Pot is manifestly against politics! A partiality for small government and big society—in other words, for civilization—is not a “political bias.” No, the prejudice was that of the petitioned publisher; his was a prejudice against an unorthodox perspective that comports with the classical liberal philosophy, and with reality.

Another publisher made the following excuse:

We recently had the chance to review your manuscript. Like everything you do, it is well-written and worthy of publication. However, we do not believe we can successfully market it.

This particular editor added that the imprint would be concentrating instead on the timeless topic of the Olympic Games in China. Obviously that is a far more inspiring subject than this writer’s “unhealthy” preoccupation with the methodical ethnic cleansing of the Afrikaner farmer.

Other respondents lavished praise on a “closely argued stylish effort” (for which, of course, they did not care to make an effort).

To go by the Left’s postmodern strictures, truth is not immutable but subject to a process of discovery. As a practical matter, then, how is a synthesis of the South-African situation to emerge if the antithesis is disallowed?

Let us not discount the publishing world’s ongoing drive for the bottom line and the lowest common denominator. (The publisher who refused to bear Christian Witness, citing the prospects of poor profits, is an example.) This uncompromising dedication does not lend itself to contrarian material, not even when the facts are pressing (and almost too horrible for words). After all, a complicit publishing establishment can shirk responsibility and seek comfort in the fact that the marketplace for books no longer adjudicates the product’s worth. Actually, nowadays this marketplace does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the millions of subjective preferences consumers demand and publishers deliver. Mackenzie Phillips’ squalid story of incest and insanity outsells Ludwig von Mises’ pearls of wisdom. For some this cultural foot-and-mouth will be faith-inspiring, for others deeply distressing.

When South Africa was governed by a racist white minority, it was scorned by the West and treated as Saddam Hussein was, with boycotts and sanctions. Now that a racist, black-majority government controls the country; that it is as violent as Iraq, Liberia, or the Congo and rapidly becoming another Islamist-friendly, failed African state, it is the toast of the West.

Indeed, world leaders and the liberal lickspittle media seldom speak of the embarrassment that is the democratic South Africa—the crumbling infrastructure of this once First World country, and the out-of-control crime—down to an ongoing mini-genocide. Rocker Bono certainly isn’t moved to tears over the seemingly systematic extermination of the Afrikaner farmers of South Africa. The cultural cognoscenti in the US are equally silent about the New South Africa’s unparalleled, radical, race-based wealth-distribution policies.

As Into The Cannibal’s Pot demonstrates, South Africa’s democratically elected African leaders are as committed as their political predecessors, apartheid-era Afrikaners, to restructuring society around race. With one distinction: more people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.^[*] Consequently, the much-maligned Western stronghold established in South Africa under Boer—and before that British—rule is rapidly reverting to type. Gone is the European strongman who suppressed the seething African kraal. What has arisen instead is best captured by Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz: “The horror, the horror.” Dubbed the “Rainbow Nation,” for its multiculturalism, South Africa is now, more than before, a “Rambo Nation.”

Americans, who take for granted their domestic tranquility, can’t afford to finesse the fate of the dying Christian civilization at the tip of Africa. Into The Cannibal’s Pot compels them to stare into “The Heart of Darkness” that is the New South Africa, and by so doing, offers a cautionary tale: in their unqualified paeans to the will of the majority everywhere, Americans must understand that traditionally Western legal institutions, however flawed, are preferable to institutions riven by tribal feuds, fetishes, and factional loyalties.

^[*] See Chapter 1, Crime, the Beloved Country

Universal suffrage is not to be conflated with freedom.

As the democratic South Africa (and Iraq) amply demonstrates, political rights don’t secure the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness; ink-stained fingers don’t inoculate against blood stains. Extant societal structures that safeguard life and property can always be improved upon. But once these bulwarks against mob rule and mayhem disintegrate, they are seldom restored. A civilized society, ultimately, is one in which the individual can go about the business of life unmolested. If he can’t do that simple thing, of what value is the vote?

Post-apartheid South Africa serves as a reminder that such societies, however imperfect, are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes; the new South Africa reminds us that, for better or for worse, societies are built slowly from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by people, not by political decree. Sadly, the facts as this writer tells them indicate that, while the Old South Africa could only have improved; the New South Africa can but decline.

So why is this book so very crucial at this juncture? Simply this: Although grisly horror stories have percolated into the popular press, the emetic facts about the New South Africa have never before been told. They must be! Into the Cannibal’s Pot fills this knowledge gap. This book, moreover, is crucial in curbing the naïve enthusiasm among American elites, and those they’ve gulled, for radical, imposed, top-down transformations of relatively stable, if imperfect, societies, including their own. As the example of South Africa demonstrates, a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure.

In the U.S., a slower, more incremental transformation is under way. It began with a state-orchestrated, historically unparalleled, mass importation of inassimilable ethnic groups into a country whose creed is that it has no creed any longer. American institutions no longer assimilate immigrants.

Rather, they acculturate them to militant identity politics aimed at doing away with merit. Dissolving the American people and electing another, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, will likely erode American institutions further, and may well replicate on American soil the terrifying conflicts that mar the Third World. Ever the source of deafening demagoguery about the virtues of democracy, American leaders might wish to consider that, “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule.”¹

Still, American leaders refused to rest until South Africa became a democracy. And before that Zimbabwe. And after that Iraq. (They were not alone. I trace that chain of culpability in Chapter Seven, “The Anglo-American-Australian Axis of Evil.”) The consequences in each case have been catastrophic. While all people want safety and sustenance for themselves, not everyone is prepared to allow those whom they dislike to peacefully pursue the same. This maxim applies both to Mesopotamia and to Azania (the term once used for South Africa by the governing African National Congress). The time is historically ripe to challenge some of the central tenets of liberal democratic ideology through the prism of another democratic disaster: post-Apartheid South Africa.

If the sanctity of life is the highest value in a civilized society, then the New South Africa has little to recommend it. Societies are only as good as the individuals of whom they are comprised; individuals only as good as their actions. Democratic South Africa is now preponderantly overrun by elements, both within and without government, which make a safe and thriving civil society impossible to sustain. The salient feature of mass politics in the New South Africa is a government unable to control itself and unwilling to control a sinecured criminal class. As a consequence, sundered is the individual’s right to live unmolested.

Our unhappy trek through the wreck of the New South Africa begins with the facts, nothing but the facts. The realities of crime-riddled democratic South Africa are relayed in Chapter One: “Crime, the Beloved Country.” The title parodies Alan Paton’s poignant tale titled Cry, the Beloved Country. The story of the life of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo was to apartheid South Africa what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to antebellum America.

1 Donald L. Horowitz, A Democratic South Africa?: Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (Berkeley: California,1991), p. 99.

Victims of crime in South Africa garner some sympathy, but it is sympathy on a sliding scale. Thus, worldwide, the press extended liberal pieties to liberal Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer. She had survived an attack in her Johannesburg home. The Prince of Wales bewailed the murder of another prominent liberal, Anglo-Zulu War historian David Rattray. He was killed by six armed Zulus. When the nephew of South Africa’s finest novelist (no; it’s not J. M. Coetzee), the liberal André Brink, was shot and killed in front of his wife and daughter, The Economist took note:

‘First he thought it was a mouse, then a rat—and then the rat shot him in the face.’ That is how André Brink, one of South Africa’s most famous novelists, described the recent killing of his nephew Adri, at home at 3am in the morning.²

Former First Lady Marike de Klerk, brutally stabbed in her Cape Town apartment, received a fair amount of international attention too. Not so the Afrikaner farmers who are being culled like springbok in a hunting safari. This brings us to the mini-genocide underway in the democratic South Africa, chronicled in Chapter Two, “The Kulaks of South Africa Vs. The Xhosa Nostra.”

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is largely composed of the Xhosa Bantu tribe. The Xhosa are also well-represented among the Africans armed with automatic weapons, who roam the countryside killing Afrikaner farmers. These rural folk—who, by law, must battle their ubiquitous assailants with only a shotgun, a handgun and a legally limited number of rounds at their disposal³—are convinced that the assaults are state-sanctioned, the ANC’s idea of an early eviction notice; “land reform,” if you will. The evidence suggests that they may have a point, hence the title pitting the “Kulaks” against the “Xhosa Nostra.”

But before we recount how upward of 3,000 members of this once 40,000-strong community—almost ten percent—have hitherto been exterminated, we explain who the Boers are and provide a brief, action-packed, history of Boer, Briton and Bantu. Americans will want to hear this! Decades of emasculation—legal and cultural—have created a hunger among American men, especially, for heroic, historic narrative. The story of the South African settlers, circa 1652, is every bit as epic as that of the American settlers. Despite their comparable foibles and frailties, the last haven’t been blackened by historians as much as the first.

It is commonly argued, in defiance of emerging facts to the contrary,⁴ that crime is an equal opportunity offender in South Africa: whites, blacks and browns are all in it together. What is incontrovertible, however, is that, where economic opportunities are concerned, the minority that dare not speak its name is on the wane. White males, strictly speaking, are not supposed to comprise more than ten percent of the payroll in a South African company. As during apartheid, a class of people is being dispossessed because of their pallor.

Chapter Three, “Dispossession is Nine-Tenths of the Law,”explores this legal attack on property known as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). BEE is yet another unique feature of the South African democracy, whereby racist labor laws have made for what Robert Guest, Africa editor of The Economist, has charitably termed “The world’s most extreme affirmative action program.”⁵ The upshot of such a coercive transfer of private wealth from those who create it to those who consume it is that societal institutions—state and civil—are being hollowed out like husks. South Africa’s gutted institutions serve as a harbinger of things to come in the U.S., where affirmative action is still dismissed as a “minor irritant,”⁶ but ought not to be.

South Africa is a microcosm of what America could become, unless it returns to the principles that made it great. If American institutions continue to subordinate their raison d’être to politically dictated egalitarianism, reclaiming them from the deforming clutches of affirmative action will become harder and harder. Sadly, it is probably already too late for South Africa, where the majority opposes a meritocracy. Americans, however, must once again embrace merit and individualism. Be it in the U.S. or in South Africa, preferential treatment, enforced by legal fiat and rooted in the characteristics of a group (race) rather than the value of the individual, flouts justice in every respect.

The West has grown accustomed to Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s refined former president. Having spent most of his adult life abroad in exile, Mbeki has the mannerisms of an English gent, not a man of the people. But the baton has been passed from the pukka proper Mbeki to the populist polygamist Jacob Zuma, whose favorite jingle is called “Bring Me My Machine Gun.” (It only has two lines; the second beseeches, rather politely, “Please bring me my machine gun.”⁷) In a country in which crimes are seldom prosecuted, the newly-installed President Zuma has the dubious distinction of having stood trial on 783 charges of corruption, racketeering, tax evasion, and rape.⁸

Against Mbeki’s reserved style, there is Zuma’s unbuttoned conduct, dancing half naked in tribal dress. In one of his Noble-Savage moments, after forcing sex on an HIV-positive acquaintance, Zuma promised, disarmingly, that he took a shower as a prophylactic against AIDS. It has been suggested that Zuma has done for South Africa’s international image what Borat Sagdiyev has done for Kazakhstan.⁹ With one distinction: Borat is a fictitious character, the product of Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedic genius; Zuma is “for real.”

Since Zuma’s ascension, wealth transfer in South Africa is expected to accelerate considerably and to resemble ever more closely the unabashed confiscation and dispossession brought about by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. “Mandela, Mbeki, And Mugabe Sitting In A Baobab Tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” or Chapter Four, analyzes the significance of the unqualified support Zuma’s predecessors, Mandela and Mbeki, have lent the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe over the decades. “If you want to see the future of South Africa, it might not be a bad idea to look at the present in Zimbabwe.”¹⁰

The Old South Africa had been governed by Puritans. But as Christianity receded in influence after the 1994 transition, the void left has been filled by Islam. The unintended consequences of bringing the Old South Africa to its political knees, to the detriment of American interests, are covered in Chapter Six, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither?”

America, a humane society, ought to take pity on the persecuted descendants of another Protestant patriarchy. However,even if American immigration policy welcomed white South Africans, which it doesn’t, Afrikaners would find it hard to leave. The Boers (and British) built the place. Like Heidi away from the Alps, Afrikaners tend to wilt when separated from their homeland. Not for nothing have the Afrikaners been dubbed “The White Tribe of Africa.”¹¹ They are as African as black South Africans. What is to be done, then, in light of the fact that Afrikaner farmers, in particular, are being killed off at alarmingly high rates? While it remains for the secessionists to “give territorial content”¹² to their aspirations, secession is one of the escape routes suggested in the conclusion, “Saving South Africans S.O.S.”

Into the Cannibal’s Pot is topped and tailed with hard evidence that allows conclusions vis-à-vis the aggregate characteristics of South African society. Although not necessarily politically correct, such conclusions are perfectly proper. With this in mind, a word about the titular tease. Cannibalism, attests Leonard Thompson, author of The Oxford History of South Africa, was widespread during the upheaval associated with rise of the Zulu Kingdom in the 1820s.¹³ These days, in northeastern Congo, two prominent militias, the Lendu and the Hema, delight in demonstrating to UN observers their culinary creativity with human hearts and livers.¹⁴ While cannibalism—motivated by aggression, ancestral reverence, or survival—has seldom been an athema in Africa, Into the Cannibal’s Pot is meant as a metaphor, and is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery:

In America, religion is relatively nonmystical. Religious teachers here are predominantly good, healthy materialists. They follow common sense. … The majority of religious people in this country do not accept on faith the idea of jumping into a cannibal’s pot and giving away their last shirt to the backward people of the world. Many religious leaders preach this today, because of their own leftist politics; it’s not inherent in being religious.¹⁵ [Emphasis added]

Daniel Etounga-Manguelle, a Cameroonian thinker, and a former adviser to the World Bank, contends that “What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest African societies at all social levels are to some extent cannibalistic.”¹⁶ Why? In part, because of the inveterate values held by so many Africans. These, and other causes—and excuses—are examined in Chapter Five, “The Root-Causes Racket.”

Based on the evidence presented in this book, both Ms. Rand and Mr. Etounga-Manguella would have agreed that South Africans had been tossed into the metaphorical cannibal’s pot. Washington and Westminster insisted that the country pass into the hands of a voracious majority. Unwise South African leaders acquiesced. Federalism was discounted. Minority rights for the Afrikaner, Anglo and Zulu were dismissed. Ironically, America’s founding fathers had attempted to forestall raw democracy by devising a republic. Yet under the wing of the American eagle a dispensation was negotiated in this writer’s former homeland, the consequence of which is the raw, ripe rule of the mob and its dominant, anointed party.

Since Into the Cannibal’s Pot stands for peaceful, progressive, and sustainable change, it will resonate with those who saw the folly of imposing majority rule on Iraq. Democratizing Mesopotamia has resulted in horrifying material destruction and lasting moral damage. Democratizing Azania has, similarly, made it abundantly clear that the franchise is not to be equated with freedom and that political rights do not safeguards natural rights. The cause and the consequence of the almost over-night, top-down transformation of South Africa is a society where might makes right.

In the interstices of this polemic, the reader will find my story and the story of those I love and had to leave behind. Above all, this tome is a labor of love to my homelands, old and new.

16 Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York, 2000), p. 74.

Ilana Mercer has been lauded by iconic author and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz as “dangerous … intelligent, informed, independent, courageous.” Historian, and New York Times bestseller-list author, Thomas Woods has called her “one of the few writers on earth whose talents I truly envy, adding that, in his opinion, “She should be a household name.” Joseph Farah (CEO of WND.com) has described her as “standing out like a beacon in a vast sea of punditry. She’s always hard to pigeonhole. She’s always witty and incisive.” Paul Gottfried (historian and author of such books as Conservatism in America) wrote: “Ilana takes on indelicate cultural, social, and political issues and challenges her opponents to rethink their positions.” The outspoken libertarian broadcaster Ron Smith of Maryland’s WBAL Radio has called her “a refreshingly original writer on the issues of our time.”

As the only writer to have defended NFL quarterback Michael Vick on the basis of libertarian (propertarian) principles—or so said Fox News TV commentator Sean Hannity—she was invited, in 2007, to debate the matter with Mr. Hannity, after which he commented:

Having read your columns throughout the years, I think I know you a little bit—I know you come from a very intellectual point of view, an intellectually honest point of view—you have given the most articulate argument I’ve heard on the other side of this [animal rights issue], one that is consistent with many of the views you have.

Ms. Mercer was born in South Africa—her father, Rabbi Abraham Benzion Isaacson, was a leading anti-apartheid activist eventually forced to leave the country—and spent her formative years in Israel. In the 1980s she returned to South Africa, where she married, had a daughter, and after completing her degrees, including a double major in psychology and Hebrew, worked as an AIDS counselor. In 1995, she and her family immigrated to British Columbia, Canada, before moving with her husband to America’s Pacific Northwest, which she calls home. Ms. Mercer left South Africa with the proceeds from the sale of her apartment stashed in the soles of her shoes. Had she been apprehended smuggling her property out of that country, she’d have been jailed together with her husband; they both stood taller on that trip. Ms. Mercer, who happens to know what living without freedom is like, has seen first hand the same oppression sneak-up on unsuspecting Americans. (For instance, the South-African model of detention-without-trial is slowly becoming a fixture of the American legal landscape.)

Her book Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash with a Corrupt Culture (2003) was hailed by the late Aaron Russo (former libertarian presidential candidate) as the work of “a true warrior—a modern-day Joan of Arc—in the fight for freedom.” A Fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, and the Jeffersonian think-tank Free New York, Inc., she has appeared as a guest on scores of broadcast talk programs: including those of Sirius Satellite Radio’s Mike Church; of the late, legendary talk-show host George Putnam; and of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In addition to appearing on RT, the global Russian television news network, she was among the participants in the 2003 Public Network television series America At War, debating the media’s dereliction of duty during the invasion of Iraq.

Ms. Mercer is—and has been for the last decade—a featured columnist for WND.com (which, according to Web monitoring site Quantcast, had one million daily visitors as of September 2009). Other publications where her articles, essays, columns, editorials, book and film reviews have appeared are The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The Orange County Register, Insight On the News (an affiliate of The Washington Times), London’s Jewish Chronicle and Quarterly Review, The Ottawa Citizen, The Calgary Herald (for which she penned a regular weekly column),the two Canadian national newspapers, the Financial Post and the Globe and Mail, The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Free Life: a Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, and the Foundation for Economic Education’s Ideas on Liberty.

Ms. Mercer’s work has been cited by The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Time’s European edition, among other prominent publications. She maintains a popular blog, where she comments on the issues of the day. In her role as proprietor of the libertarian Barely A Blog (BAB), she has attracted such contributors as Tibor Machan (Cato Institute adjunct scholar), George Reisman (emeritus economics professor at California’s Pepperdine University), and the aforementioned Thomas Szasz.

ILANA Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer and theorist based in the US. Her acclaimed, weekly column, begun in Canada, has been going strong since 1999. (Articles Archive.) Ilana is the author of The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June 29, 2016), the first libertarian book of Trump, and of the seminal Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011).

Ilana’s weekly column appears in The Unz Review, WND.COM, for which she has penned WND’s exclusive “Return to Reason” feature (now called “The Paleolibertarian”) since 2001, Townhall.com, American Greatness, Britain’s Ludwig von Mises Centre For Property and Freedom, London’s Quarterly Review, founded in 1809, and CNSNews.com.

She has also contributed to the Mises Institute’s Wire, as well as to its Power & Market Blog; to the Ron Paul Institute, the Abbeville Institute, The American Thinker, The Daily Caller, The Liberty Conservative, The Heartland Institute, The Hudson Institute, to Intellectual Takeout and to Chronicles, a magazine of American culture.

Under the handle “The Paleolibertarian Column” or “Paläolibertären Kolumne,” in the German, Ilana’s weekly column was featured respectively on Russia Today and in Junge Freiheit, a German weekly of excellence, for some years. Likewise did the column run on Taki’s Magazine. Formerly syndicated by Creators Syndicate, Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank).

Since the late 1990s, Ilana has written for The Financial Post, The Globe and Mail (Canada’s National Newspapers), The Vancouver Sun, The Report Newsmagazine, London’s Jewish Chronicle and Quarterly Review, The American Spectator, The American Conservative, The New Individualist and the Foundation for Economic Education. Her work has appeared in The Ottawa Citizen, The Orange County Register, The Colorado Gazette, and in other Freedom Communications, Inc. newspapers across the United States, including The Valley Morning Star, The East Valley Tribune, Jacksonville Daily News, Washington County News, Holmes County Register.

Ilana’s work has also been published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Free Life: a Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, the Foundation for Economic Education’s Ideas on Liberty and in Insight On the News (a former affiliate of The Washington Times), for which she has penned essays in symposia debating intellectual property.

Ilana has written weekly columns for the conservative Calgary Herald, Vancouver’s North Shore News. As was she an analyst and commentator for Free-Market News Network, founded by the late Harry Browne, one-time libertarian presidential candidate.

Ilana’s commentary has been mentioned in the European edition of Time (see “Trading Places” by Peter Gumbel, appeared in the print edition of March 28, 2005), cited in the Boston Globe (“The Downside of Diversity” by Michael Jonas, August 5, 2007); the New York Times’ Economix blog (“Are Federal Workers Overpaid?” by Prof. Nancy Folbre, October 13, 2009), and featured on web sites such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute, LewRockwell.com, The Hudson Institute, The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Laissez Faire City Times, Rational Review, Antiwar.com, Frontpage Magazine, and Jewcy.com, an acclaimed “online ideas-and-culture magazine.”

Ilana, who supported Ron Paul for president in 2008 and 2012, was asked by the Paul campaign for a written endorsement. Here it is:

“Ron Paul stands alone among the presidential contenders for a solvent, sovereign America—he has the will to stop the squandering of men and matériel in Iraq and the intellectual wherewithal to salvage an ailing currency, fortify forsaken borders, and restore individual liberties.”

John Derbyshire, formerly of National Review Online, called Ilana’s case for the Texas Republican “Pauline Gospel at its best”:

“The most persuasive Paul booster remains the ravishing, brilliant, and eloquent Ilana Mercer. I don’t say you’ll agree with her, only that this is the Pauline Gospel at its best. If you won’t buy it from Ilana, you won’t buy it from anyone.”

Ilana is the founder, editor, and creative force behind IlanaMercer.com. This aesthetically pleasing thematic website, on which ilana’s essays are archived conveniently, reflects her vision, transformed into pixels. She is also the proprietor of the weblog Barely a Blog (BAB), to which prominent thinkers such as Tibor Machan (RIP), George Reisman, and the late Thomas Szasz have contributed. (Mercer contributed a dust-jacket blurb to Professor Szasz’s book, Coercion As Cure.)

Ilana has been a guest recently (May 1, 2021) on Michelle Malkin’s “Sovereign Nation,” on Newsmax TV (“it’s systemic anti-whiteness”), ABC Radio (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and on radio stations across America. These include “Talk Back,” the nationally syndicated show of the late, legendary George Putnam, The Mike Church Show (aka the “King Dude”) on the Sirius Patriot Channel, and Sean Hannity’s nationally syndicated radio show, on which she appeared, regrettably, to defend NFL quarterback Michael Vick (honest thinkers admit to mistakes). About Ilana’s work, Mr. Hannity said this:

Having read your columns throughout the years, I think I know you a little bit—I know you come from a very intellectual point of view, an intellectually honest point of view—you have given the most articulate argument I’ve heard [‘In Defense of Michael Vick’‘] on the other side of this, one that is consistent with many of the views you have. (August 17, 2007)

As has Ilana appeared on Russia Today (RT), most recently to mine the legacy of Mandela, and on the Public Network’s television series, “America at War” (#434), where, in 2003, she debated the media’s dereliction of duty during the invasion of Iraq. Her analysis of Martha Stewart’s legal travails, “Convicted for Fearing Conviction,” was voted among the best Mises.org articles of 2004. In the same year, she received the “Ron Paul Liberty in Media Awards (LIMA)” for the essay “Wartime Socialism.”

Ilana was born in South Africa, which her father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, decided to leave pursuant to harassment by the South African security police on account of his anti-apartheid preaching and activism. (Ilana herself, on return, decades later, fought petty apartheid tirelessly.) The family departed in the 1960s for Israel, where Ilana spent her formative years. She returned to South-Africa in the 1980s, married and had a daughter. The family emigrated to Canada in 1995, and then went on to settle in the US.

Described as an engaging, iconoclastic polemicist by National Post editorial writer Lorne Gunter, Ilana typically marshals powerful analytical argumentation in support of her case. “All I can tell you is that you can’t win an argument with this woman. I’ve tried and failed,” said Victor Niederhoffer, Ph.D., in May of 2012. Dr. Niederhoffer is a noted stock-market investor, a former business partner to George Soros, and founder of the New York City Junto liberty forum.

In a review titled “The Passion of Principles,” the Objectivist magazine The Free Radical called Ilana’s first book, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With a Corrupt Culture, “a perfect mix of reason and rhetoric.” (Here are part 2 & part 3 of the review.) The late great Ron Smith of WBAL Radio, Maryland, had described her as “a refreshingly original writer on the issues of our time.” Others have praised Ilana as a particularly strong stylist, with “no less powerful an intellectual punch as Ayn Rand, only wickedly funny.” (Citations are here and here).

Ilana’s latest book is The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June 29, 2016). It was the first serious analysis of the Trump phenom, and certainly the first libertarian book of Trump. Released in June of 2011, her second book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from post-Apartheid South Africa. Into the Cannibal’s Pot is a polemical work anchored in history, reality, fact, and the political philosophy of classical liberalism. It is a manifesto against mass society, arguing against raw, ripe democracy, here (in the US), there (in South Africa), and everywhere. “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” follows Russell Kirk’s contention that “true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order.” It is intended as a reminder that, however imperfect, civilized societies are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes. The tyranny of political correctness, so unique to the West—plays a role in their near-collapse. Advanced societies don’t just die; they either wither from within, or, like South Africa, are finished off by other western societies.

All is not grim. Ilana does pause to turn the arrows in her epistolary quiver away from the state—the Thing the inimical Sir Humphrey Applebee of the British satire “Yes, Prime Minister” called a disorganized criminal organization. She covers popular culture, mainstream media, Hollywood, and pseudo-science. From sex to music, it’s all here, minus the unpalatable pabulum served by the mummified media.

When she is not expatiating upon the issues of the day, Ilana enjoys running outdoors. She has been a long-distance, recreational runner since the mid 1990s. Parrots are another passion—in particular, the plight of psittacines in captivity and in the wild. Ilana supports parrot rescues in the community. So too is the cause of the near-extinct Cape Parrot (Poicephalus robustus) close to her heart. Ilana is owned by an adorable hookbill called Oscar-Wood (Poicephalus fuscicollis).

Then there is Music. Chamber music and Bach—any Bach—are her first loves, but she finds the hard core, intricate and masterful brilliance of progressive rock outfits like Symphony X, Dream Theater, Magnitude Nine, and Kamelot (sic) as alluring, to say nothing of neoclassical wizards such as Sean Mercer and Tony MacAlpine.

For a fun quiz conducted with Ilana read “The Third Degree à la Germany: Answering To Junge Freiheit” (November 11, 2016).

ILANA ON THE ISSUES

(Click to expand – click again to close)

To the publisher of this volume to whom added appreciation is due.

To Thomas Szasz, Thomas DiLorenzo and Erik Rush—firm friends all.

To my proof-reader and copy-editor R. J.Stove: The manuscript was polished for publication by the epistolary Wizard of Oz.

To James Ostrowski and Nebojsa Malic for useful comments.

To researcher Rhona Karbusicky, who provided unstinting assistance.

To a nineteen-year-old homeschooled, consummate professional named Aaron Sleadd.

To my dear daughter, who helped me through a punishing publication process.

To my sweet mother, Ann-Wendy Cumes, and my beloved father, Rabbi Abraham Benzion Isaacson, for their backing.

And to my husband, Sean Russell Mercer, who kept me going.

~ Ilana Mercer

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority…from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason. —Lord Acton^[*]

If a young South African were to ask me whether to stay or leave, my advice would be to go. —Breyten Breytenbach^[†]

The Williams family is emigrating—leaving South Africa for good. The family will be departing for the UK without their twelve-year-old daughter. Emily Williams was killed at seven in the morning on her way to school, a victim of an armed robbery underway at the home of a classmate who was being fetched by Emily and her mother. Many of the family’s friends are following Roger Williams’ lead. An executive director and chief financial officer at AECI, a South African chemicals group, Mr. Williams believes “everybody should have the right to go about their business and go to school without worrying that you’re going to become a victim of crime.”¹

René Burger is the little sister of Schalk Burger, a young rising star in South African rugby. Twenty-year-old René, a medical student, was headed for classes at the Tygerberg hospital in Cape Town when she was abducted from the well-patrolled hospital grounds by three men. They drove her to a remote location and gang-raped her at knife-point.

Young Noah Cohen emerged from soccer practice in time to watch his father die. Sheldon Cohen had been sitting in his car outside a Johannesburg sports stadium waiting for Noah when he was shot by “three young men.”²

An elderly Jew is murdered on his way to synagogue in Johannesburg on Saturday morning, shot for refusing to hand over the “valuables” in his tallit bag, the pouch in which an observant Jew carries his prayer shawl.³

A family friend writes: “Crime is out of control down here—you hear of truly horrific stuff all the time. Johannesburg is particularly bad. I recently sold my house and moved into a security village where all the houses are accessible only through one entrance. There are guards who phone you if someone you know wants to get in to see you. Insane!”

This is a snapshot of life in suburban South Africa circa 2008, fourteen years since freedom. Ordinarily, case studies do not a rule make, but you’d be hard pressed to find a family in democratic South Africa whose members have not been brutalized. The travails of this writer’s extended family are fairly typical. They tell of the lives of good people ruined by rubbish: A sister’s partner suffering permanent neurological damage after being brutally assaulted by five Africans; a brother burglarized and beaten in his suburban fortress at two in the morning by an African gang (his wife and infant son were miraculously spared); a father whose neighbor was shot point-blank in front of his little girls as he exited his car to open the garage gates; a spouse, two of whose colleagues were murdered (one shot by African taxi drivers in broad daylight, left to bleed to death on the pavement near his girlfriend’s place), and whose cousin and uncle were hijacked, aunt raped and beaten within an inch of her life. Sean Mercer, Ph.D., found out recently that a fondly remembered professor at his alma mater had been beaten to death with an umbrella by an angry African student.⁴ A Cambridge graduate, Brian D. Hahn was a prodigious applied mathematician at the University of Cape Town.⁵ He is no longer, but his webpage is still online. Hahn, it states, was born in November 1946 in Cape Town, born again in August of 1966, and died in February of 2005. His colleagues tell of a humble man who practiced his profession and faith faithfully. Rest in Peace.

“The circle narrows,” mourns Afrikaner poet and former anti-apartheid activist, Breyten Breytenbach in an essay for Harper’s Magazine:

The grandmother of a close friend—she’s as old as [Mandela]—pleads with her robbers not to be sexually violated, she even claims to be infected with a communicable disease; the nephew of a fellow writer is shot in the face, killed in his own house by a night intruder whom he mistook for a rat; the son of my eldest brother is stabbed in a parking lot outside a restaurant, the blade pierces a lung, the police never turn up, he is saved because his companion calls her boyfriend all the way in Australia by cell phone and he could summon a nurse he happens to know in Johannesburg. (The woman is on a first visit to the country; she leaves the next day and swears never to return.)⁶

This writer and her immediate family, presciently, left South Africa in 1995, shortly after the white minority ceded power to a black majority. A year prior, we had voted in South Africa’s first democratic election. In 1990, I’d been on the Grand Parade in Cape Town, among a crowd of thousands, to witness Nelson Mandela’s release after twenty-seven years in prison (it was a riot, literally). In previous decades my father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, had been a well-known anti-apartheid activist. With him I attended the inauguration of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and met and took afternoon tea with the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Nevertheless, the writing was on the wall.

When we departed, South Africa was still a country with a space program (on which my husband Sean Mercer worked), gleaming skyscrapers, and department stores that rivaled Macy’s. The Central Business District in Johannesburg bustled. Crime was controlled, or at least confined. When mobs stoned cars en route to the D. F. Malan Airport in Cape Town (geographical names across the country have since been changed to expunge Afrikaner history), a tough and competent police force sprung into action. An equally impressive Western system of Roman-Dutch law, and a relatively independent judiciary, dished out just deserts in response to the ubiquitous “muti-murders” (African ritual killing, including human sacrifice in Venda⁷), and to“necklacing” (the more contemporary African custom of placing a diesel-doused tire around a putative offender’s neck and igniting it). Or to the rape of babies. To borrow from Gen. Sir Charles Napier: Before 1994, when African men raped infants because they considered the “practice” a traditional salve for AIDS, South African policemen followed through with their custom: they tied a rope around the rapist’s neck and hung him. “Afrikaner rule,” the noted liberal historian Hermann Giliomee has observed, “was characterized by an obsession with imposing restrictions through proper legislation and with due process in executing these laws … The government did not attempt to cover up deaths in detention, despite a torrent of unfavorable publicity. Although political opponents were at the mercy of their interrogators in prison, both the policeman and the prisoner knew that neither was outside the law.”⁸

It goes without saying that a condemnation of the New South Africa is not an affirmation of the Old. More crucially, realism is not racism. The undeniable reality is that, a decade since this abrupt transfer of power, the rule of the demos has turned a once-prosperous, if politically problematic, place into a lawless ramshackle. The BBC World’s John Simpson recently—and reluctantly—disclosed that South Africa jostles with Iraq and Colombia⁹ for the title of most violent country in the world. So violent is the “free” South Africa that, for a period, the freewheeling ANC government imposed an official blackout on national crime statistics. It now releases them once yearly.

The surfeit of crime statistics, say those who chronicle crime, can be misleading because “crime definitions vary from one country to the next.” This is an argument that the African National Congress’ grotesquely mistitled Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula often seizes upon, to conceal the blood-soaked facts of violent crime in his country. Following its chief’s example, the South African Police Service (SAPS) has developed an agile facility with misleading statistical comparisons. To diminish crime under its jurisdiction, the SAPS is fond of drawing skewed comparisons between low-crime spots in South Africa and high-crime spots in otherwise low-crime countries.

Juxtaposing the incidence of murder in low-crime Pretoria and high-crime Washington, D.C (29.1 per 100,000 inhabitants¹⁰) is an example of the practice. The same sources like to point to the incidence of rape in Canada: evidently one of the highest per capita in the world, having surpassed both the U.S. and Zimbabwe.¹¹ But the only way First World Canada—with its 1.77 murders per 100,000 population¹²—can lay claim to this dubious distinction is by legally redefining rape. The cause of this is the baleful influence of feminist Catharine Mackinnon on American and Canadian jurisprudence. The consequence of it is that a woman can seek and find in the law a legal remedy to the regret or rage experienced following an impromptu romp between the sheets.

The redefining of rape in American and Canadian law is the product of the collaboration between advocacy groups and feminist stakeholders, and has been exposed by John Fekete in Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising. Undergirding this sub-science are statistically promiscuous surveys such as Statistics Canada’s 1993 “Violence Against Women” survey, and its American equivalent. As Professor Fekete has demonstrated, this voodoo consists of single-sex surveys with no input from men; is fraught with problems of unrepresentative sampling, lack of corroboration, a reliance on anecdotes, and a use of over-inclusive survey questions. Suffice it to say that, contra North America, in South Africa, where a rape occurs every twenty-six seconds,¹³ the crime of rape is unlikely to mean mere sexual harassment or sexual disappointment. Very many South African young men consider rape a form of recreation, their rapacity even finding expression in the vocabulary: gang rape is jocularly referred to as “jackrolling.”¹⁴ Ironically, the provincial chauvinism of the cloistered gender feminists of the West has helped trivialize the plight of their African sisters.

Ultimately, murder in all its horrible finality cannot be statistically finessed. This is why, in proportion to population size, it is the best gauge of the precariousness or safety of life in a given society. The U.S. Bureau of Justice concurs: “Homicide is a fairly reliable barometer of all violent crime.”¹⁵

Let us, then, survey homicide statistics for South Africa. They are easy to understand, if hard to digest.

Between April 2004 and March 2005, 18,793 people were murdered in South Africa (population 43 million). In comparison, the “high-crime” United States (population 299,398,000¹⁶ ) suffered 16,740 murders. Put differently, South Africa has sixty homicides per 100,000 people; the US approximately six.¹⁷ The European Union (population 728 million) has approximately 1.59 homicides per 100,000 per year.¹⁸ On average, in South Africa, sixty-five people are murdered every day, three times that number are raped; and 300 are violently attacked and robbed daily.¹⁹

These official figures, say other researches, are more serendipity than science.

According to Robert McCafferty of the United Christian Action, Interpol had pegged South Africa’s murder rate at “114.8 murders per 100,000 inhabitants,”²⁰ roughly double those released by the South African Police Service (SAPS). In 1995 and 1996, Interpol counted 54,298 annual homicides to the SAPS’s 26,883. While slightly more optimistic, the South African Medical Research Council (MRC) corroborated the trend Interpol uncovered. It reported approximately a third more murders in South Africa than the official police statistics reveal,”²¹ tallying an average of eighty-nine daily deaths, or 32,000 a year. A discrepancy of over 10,000 murders is, shall we say, more than a margin of error.

McCafferty, whose data is a distillation of information from criminology journals, the SAPS, Crime Information Analysis Centre (CIAC), Institute for Security Studies (ISS), Interpol websites, and “the major newspapers on crime statistics and related issues,” concluded that “what sets South Africa’s crime apart from basically every other country on earth is the incredibly high levels of violent crime”—murder, attempted murder, serious and common assaults, rape, and all categories of robbery: that is, robbery with aggravating circumstances, armed robbery, and car hijacking.

During his term of office, former president Thabo Mbeki wielded the “racist” ad hominem deftly. Mbeki ignored the BBC’s otherwise incontinent exhilaration about everything else South African, choosing instead to frame as racism the network’s newfound realism vis-à-vis crime.²² Mbeki countered a BBC crime exposé by asserting that “nobody can show that the overwhelming majority of the 40-50 million South Africans think that crime is out of control. Nobody can, because it’s not true.”²³ It so happens that South Africans are fed up (“gatvol” in Afrikaans) with crime, as is evident from the petitions, protests and vigils staged across the brutalized country. Asked about their feelings of safety compared to 1994, a majority (seventy percent) of South Africans surveyed by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in 2001 answered that South Africa was “not safer than it was before 1994.”²⁴ Even if Mbeki had been able to get most South Africans to concede that crime was insignificant, that would not settle the matter. Unfortunately for Mr. Mbeki, truth is not adjudicated by majority vote.

To most Western observers, the new dispensation in this writer’s old home engenders unconditional praise the world over. For them, not knowing whether you’ll survive the day is but a spot of bother. Conservative columnists are as prone as anyone else to be nonchalant about the present situation. One of them described South Africa as “the greatest triumph of chatter over machine-gun clatter. It’s not perfect, and crime is at an all-time high in South African cities, but at least the massacres are a thing of the past and life goes on much better than before.” If by “massacres” our correspondent meant Sharpeville, where in 1960, panic-stricken policemen of the apartheid regime shot dead sixty-nine black demonstrators, why, in democratic South Africa that’s the daily carnage quota.

Few realize that during the decades of the apartheid regime a few hundred Africans in total perished as a direct and indirect consequence of police brutality. A horrible injustice, indubitably, but nothing approximating the death toll in “free” South Africa, where hundreds of Africans, white and black, perish weekly. Nor did apartheid’s casualties come close to the ANC’s during “the armed struggle.” Freedom’s forebears “necklaced” 400 non-combatants, and murdered hundreds more—Zulu opposition, state informers and witnesses, rural headmen, urban councilors, “and others perceived to be collaborators of the system or enemies of the ANC.”²⁵ “Between 1976 and 1994,” writes Giliomee, “state agents deliberately killed between two hundred and three hundred people active in the struggle against the state.”²⁶ It takes the free agents of democratic Azania only five days to deliberately kill as many of their fellow citizens.

Still fewer realize that during the decades of the repressive—and reprehensible—apartheid regime, which ended officially in 1994, crime rates in South Africa were overall much lower; in whites-only areas they were not dissimilar to those in other Western countries. McCafferty, whose brief it was to compare “the number of murders in the ‘Old South Africa’ (under apartheid) … to the ‘New South Africa’ (post 1994),”²⁷ counted 309,583 murders over the forty-four years spanning 1950 to 1993. In the first eight years of the “new democratic dispensation,” 193,649 people were murdered. In other words, under apartheid, on average, 7,036 people were murdered each year, a small number compared to the carnage under the ANCniks: 24,206 annually. The latter is the South Africa Police Service’s low-ball estimation, which both Interpol and the South African Medical Research Council have disputed.

The ANC government now claims that matters have improved and that it is winning the war on violent crime. The Democratic Alliance disputes this. The tiny, tokenistic, opposition to the “all-powerful black majority party” puts the ostensible drop in crime down to the fact that fifty-one percent of victims no longer bothers to report crime, given that corruption is rife, arrests rare, and prosecutions and convictions still rarer.²⁸ Recent findings suggest that the SAPS’s optimistic, homicide statistics are not to be believed. As reported by The Economist, the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation has confirmed the existence of a “pervasive pattern of (police) manipulation of statistic.” By an amazing coincidence, the reported decline in violent crime and the government’s 2004 announcement of its intention to cut such crime have dovetailed.

Doctored or diminished, the SAPS’s statistics spanning 2006 to 2007 reveal that 19,202²⁹ South African lives were lost (population 43,786,115³⁰ ) compared to the United States’ 16,574³¹ (population 303,824,646³²). A yearly average of 19,202 murders (under democracy) still constitutes almost three times as many as 7,036 annual murders (under apartheid). Clearly, the era of apartheid remains a Golden Age with respect to the sanctity of life, for blacks and whites alike.

McCafferty’s numbers notwithstanding, such an unsettling claim is usually met with this brittle argument: Murders are not more numerous under majority rule, but merely more evenly spread. Let us celebrate, for democracy has desegregated crime! In his searing 1986 critique of apartheid, Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black And White, Joseph Lelyveld (a former New York Times editor) surmised: “Apartheid [ensured] that the victims of most black violence [were] black and the victims of most white violence white.”³³ At the time, Lelyveld avoided further damaging deductions, such as that apartheid separated the high-crime from the low-crime communities. The Group Areas Act of 1950, the basic statute that had guaranteed absolute residential segregation under apartheid,³⁴ served to confine crime to the black townships. Ditto influx control laws: “Africans who had not established a claim to be in urban areas were given only seventy-two hours in towns and cities to find work and were compelled to register at a government labor bureau for this purpose.”³⁵ Let us not beat about the bush; violent crime in the New South Africa is predominantly black on black and black on white. Since the demise of apartheid, it has both increased and spread from slum to suburb. However, even assuming that violent crime has not increased but is only more “equitably” distributed, why is that good or even tolerable? Does parity in the probability of being victimized constitute progress? Does the fact that whites are now as likely as—data³⁶ suggest more likely than—blacks to be slain herald a more just dispensation? An answer in the affirmative evinces a quest for vengeance, not fairness.

While it is true that “there is nothing new about hideous, sadistic, violent crime in SA,”³⁷ the Afrikaner National Party, for all its faults, kept the lid on the cauldron of depravity now bubbling over. At the time, Lelyveld, and left-liberals like him, inveighed against the heavily armed “plainclothes white security cops who cruise[d] around the major black townships in big Fords and Datsuns.”³⁸ But, among the many demonstrators forever punching the air, most distinguished between “ordinary (good) police and riot (bad) police.” Or so wrote the late Fredrik van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the former anti-apartheid opposition, the Progressive Federal Party (PFP). In The Last White Parliament, Slabbert attests that “Without exception, [blacks wanted] ordinary police to remain in the townships and help with [much needed] crime prevention.”³⁹

Dubbed the father of apartheid, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd was certainly “[k]eenly interested in urban security.” To that end, “township streets were purposely wide so police could control movement easily.”⁴⁰ Indubitably, law and order in the townships of Old South Africa was less a function of the Boer’s brotherly love for the Bantu than of his orderly habits. But it was subject to investigation by a relatively independent judiciary; reports tabled often finding against the police. For example, Justice Kannemeyer’s report (which was debated in parliament) of the response to the riots that erupted in 1985 was, to quote the headline in the Johannesburg-based Star,at the time, a “‘devastating indictment’ of police.”⁴¹ The only “devastating indictment” of Jacob Zuma’s police force issued these days emanates from outside the government and well beyond its vengeful reach. (Try as I did, I was unable to get white policemen and women—old hands working deep in the guts of the reconstructed SAPS—to talk about the “workplace”: they were afraid.) The ANC’s response to a police force shot through with corruption has been the dissolution of the crack, anti-corruption unit known as the “Scorpions.”⁴²

The Afrikaner’s quaint and quintessentially Western practices are etched vividly in journalist Keith Richburg’s Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. Just before Afrikaners “surrendered without defeat,”⁴³ Richburg, Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post from 1991 to 1994, journeyed to South Africa from the killing fields to the north, on assignment. In the course of his duties, he filed a report from the scene of a tribally motivated killing near Johannesburg. Zulu and Xhosa were embroiled in pre-elections strife. Twelve people had been gunned down. A small massacre by African standards—at least, so thought Richburg, who has described Africa as a continent where everywhere black bodies are stacked up like firewood. Imagine his astonishment when “the police, mostly officious-looking white officers with ruddy complexions—came and did what you might expect police to do in any Midwestern American city where a crime has occurred. They cordoned off the area with police tape. They marked the spots on the ground where the victims had fallen.”⁴⁴ Topping this CSI-worthy protocol was a statement to the press “promising a ‘full investigation.’” This civilized routine Richburg characterized as utterly misplaced on a continent where nobody counts the bodies; and where chasing down and charging a man with murder is like “handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”⁴⁵

The Old South Africa was the odd man out in Africa. Maligned by Joseph Lelyveld, the Afrikaner’s presence in high-crime localities was why a semblance of law and order was maintained and common criminals pursued and prosecuted to the benefit of all.

Little wonder then that “pollsters note a small but growing number of blacks experiencing ‘apartheid nostalgia.’ ‘It’s not that they want to return to apartheid, but in retrospect it was a time when things worked better,’” says Robert Mattes, co-director of the Afrobarometer poll.⁴⁶ That’s an understatement. Certainly back then soccer moms and dads were never shaken down during a match—a common occurrence these days. Back then The Christian Science Monitor’s South African correspondent did not compose his dispatches from behind “ten-foot walls, electric fencing, burglar bars,” and within reach of “at least one panic button wired directly to an armed-response team.”⁴⁷ Back then shopkeepers were not compelled to cower behind iron bars, as they do now. Gun battles were unheard of on the streets of South Africa’s major metropolises, some of which have come to resemble Mogadishu, pavements strewn with garbage, skyscrapers overrun by squatters, and landmarks vandalized beyond recognition. To wit, the Impala Stampede, a “giant bronze statue that used to adorn the entrance to Anglo American’s offices, was torn down and destroyed by the rampaging gangs.”⁴⁸

In the New South Africa, rising prices at the pump corresponded to a rising body count, as petrol attendants are targeted for crude.⁴⁹ An attendant trend did not accompany the steep gas prices during the 1987 oil embargo against South Africa. This writer would safely fill the tank and travel to Hillbrow to lunch with her late grandfather. Hillbrow was then a hip, cosmopolitan, Johannesburg suburb. Today it is South Africa’s Harlem, before gentrification. Equally uneventful for this writer was the walk to work from the Eloff street bus terminal in Johannesburg’s city center, where the magnificent five-star Carlton Hotel was open for business. It closed in 1997; the safety of the guests could no longer be guaranteed. The green glass Garden Court Hotel and the Great Synagogue have suffered the same fate.⁵⁰ Fearing for its safety, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, once “the tenth largest in the world,”⁵¹ joined the exodus from the Johannesburg Central Business District (CBD) to the suburb of Sandton.

Defiantly and heroically, a consortium called “Business Against Crime” (BAC) has undertaken to beat back the dirt and decay that had blanketed Johannesburg’s CBD. These intrepid entrepreneurs aim to restore the “mothballed” monuments, reopen boarded-up buildings, and replace brothels and shebeens with legitimate businesses. These are not guys with guns: The BAC’s frontal assault on crime relies on a system of closed-circuit TV cameras! The Economist has proclaimed this “public-private partnership” a success. At the same time, the magazine has conceded that conviction rates in South Africa still hover at a “dismal” eight percent and have only just begun to inch upward.⁵²

Optimism aside, it is hard to see how the prospects of being caught on camera would deter a hardcore criminal for long since he has a ninety percent chance of getting away with murder. Considering that the country now has one of the world’s highest murder rates and lowest conviction rates, a South Africa thug can safely pursue his vocation without fearing the consequences, confirms criminologist Neels Moolman.”⁵³ Since freedom, the SAPS, a reconstructed, racially “representative” force, has relaxed the pursuit of criminals. Besides, the democratic South Africa’s criminal class is unlikely to flee before the regiments of an ill-trained, illiterate and corrupt outfit. If anything, evidence abounds of cooperation between criminals and cops, starting at the top. Jackie Selebi, the SAPS’s national police commissioner is a bent and brutal man who’s been linked to the mob⁵⁴ (and was eventually dismissed by President Zuma).

The swirl of statistics tends to conceal the casualties of crime. One such casualty is Baby Tshepang. “Tshepang” means “have hope.” If Tshepang has hope it is against all odds, for she was raped and sodomized, in 2001, when nine months old. The culprit was a twenty-three-year-old man—Tshepang’s sixteen-year-old mother’s former lover. Rape of infants in South Africa has reached “epidemic proportions,” writes Linda M. Richler in the Child Abuse Review, and “occurs with unacceptably high frequency.”⁵⁵ Roughly ten percent of all rapes in the country—52,425 a year⁵⁶—are committed against children under three years of age. In the span of the two months following Baby Tshepang’s rape, another five children under twelve months of age were raped. In two of the cases, media reports suggested the child’s caregivers might have accepted money for making the child available to the perpetrator.⁵⁷

Sexperts and sociologists have a habit of sanitizing savagery with odd-ball pseudoscientific assertions: “To penetrate the vagina of a small child,” writes Richler ponderously, “the perpetrator must first create a common channel between the vagina and anal canal by forced insertion of an implement.”⁵⁸ In the gaping wound that was Baby Tshepang before she was sewn back together, Richler has detected a technique where there was only brute, libidinal force. She offers no forensic evidence for her claim. Richler’s less iffy inference has it that this nauseating crime wave may well be rooted in the “virgin cleansing myth”—the idea that sex with a virgin cures HIV/AIDS and offers protection against acquiring the virus. (Seen in the context of the late Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msiming’s espousal of beetroot, garlic and lemon as antidotes for AIDS,⁵⁹ this makes perfect sense.) Oddly enough, when epidemiologists speak of mapping the spread of the epidemic in a country in which one in five adults is infected,⁶⁰ they are somehow parted from their critical faculties, rarely mentioning epidemic sexual violence as a vector of transmission.

Thankfully, for the victims, political correctness doesn’t plague the private, entrepreneurial sector. “The connection between violent crime and AIDS in South Africa was underscored by ‘rape insurance’ policies launched in November 1999,” write Dave Kopel and Drs. Paul Gallant and Joanne Eisen of the Independence Institute. LifeSense, a medical benefits organization underwritten by Lloyds of London, has been offering a “Rape Care” package to rape victims which “provides a top-up policy should the rape survivor become HIV-positive as a result of rape. Dr. Angus Rowe, a spokesperson from LifeSense, stated that ‘in an environment where rape is so pervasive we need to extend protections to rape survivors in the families.’ Rape Care policy holders will have access to counseling and medical treatment, ‘an anti-retroviral starter pack, the home delivery of the full 28-day anti-retroviral treatment, and HIV testing for one year.’”⁶¹ Had the private sector not similarly—and speedily—moved to palliate the South African people’s desperate need for protection against criminals, who knows how many more would be ravished or killed? There are now 400,000 “guardian angels” in private security toiling to make up for the state’s failure to protect its citizens.⁶²

One doesn’t have to be an HIV/AIDS counselor to conclude that endemic sexual violence increases the spread of the disease. It so happens that this writer was such a counselor at the Cape Town chapter of ATIC, the AIDS Training, Information and Counseling Centre. The African women I counseled there were educated and well turned out, yet they giggled like girls when prophylactics were mentioned. African patriarchs disdain protection, they told me, coyly cupping their mouths and laughing—at me. They were, however, deadly serious. For these women, insisting on your, “like, reproductive freedoms”—uttered in staccato, tart tones, indigenous to North America—meant risking the wrath of quick-fisted husbands. At the time, the counseling model used at ATIC was developed for gay American men. Based on my experience with these urban, urbane women, I recommended—and was commended for—changing the laughable, gay-centric guidelines. If sophisticated African women were afraid to suggest sheaths to their men, all the more so their rural, uneducated sisters.

One tenet of the gay-centric counseling model applies to Africa in spades: the reality of rutting, rampant sex. When the puritanical apartheid government “finally stirred into action, launching AIDS education and prevention programs, it met considerable resistance,”⁶³ attests historian Martin Meredith. Anti-apartheid activists accused the government of wanting to prevent Africans from having promiscuous sex so as to retard population growth and “check the advance of African liberation.” AIDS, they joked, stood for “Afrikaner Invention to Deprive us of Sex.”⁶⁴ Although Mbeki persisted in the belief that AIDS is a conspiracy—Big Pharma having replaced the Afrikaner as culprit—there isn’t a corner in post-apartheid South Africa that has not been missionized by AIDS educators. Still, infection rates remain, for the most, unaffected. Rocker Bono, the warbling modern father of foreign aid, has praised Africans for being a “rare and spirited people.” Sadly, if the spirit didn’t move them in so many wild ways, rates of infection in Southern Africa might not have reached twenty to 33.7 percent of the adult population. Africans are having unprotected sex irrespective of the mortal dangers of AIDS, a phenomenon which Austrian economists might explain with reference to time preference rates. In this case, time preference rates signify the degree to which different people will discount the future in favor of immediate gratification. Time orientation, agrees Lawrence E. Harrison, an associate at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, is a central value in progressive as opposed to static cultures.⁶⁵ Educational efforts aside, the number of people infected in Southern Africa bespeaks a high time preference: the habit of consistently risking the future for fleeting fun. Put it this way: The Catholic Church’s consecration of condoms will likely have the same overall effect on African AIDS infection rates as its condemnation of sex outside marriage.

Let us not forget these child victims. Certainly Breyten Breytenbach does not. Breytenbach, the exiled Afrikaner poet “who served seven years in South African prisons for his anti-apartheid activities,”⁶⁶ invokes for our remembrance South Africa’s children at large, and Meisi Majola’s two-year-old boy in particular. The tot was snatched from his home and his genitals mutilated. “To be used as muti…a potency potion.” Little Courtney Ellerbeck’s broken body mirrors the unremitting violence inflicted on the most innocent members of South African society. The child hobbles about cheerfully with the aid of calipers with lockable knee joints, metal hips, and a walker. She is the country’s youngest crime victim. Courtney was born a paraplegic after being shot in utero by a hijacker.⁶⁷

Because the ANC disregards the importance of private property and public order and the remedial value of punitive justice, innocent victims of crime often defend themselves in their own homes on pain of imprisonment. The Amendments to the Criminal Procedure Act demand that, in the course of adjudicating cases of “private defense,” the right to life (the aggressor’s) and the right to property (the non-aggressor’s) be properly balanced. “Before you can act in self-defense,” remonstrates Anton du Plessis of the Institute for Security Studies, “the attack against you should have commenced, or at least be imminent. For example, if the thief pulls out a firearm and aims in your direction, [only] then you would be justified in using lethal force to protect your life.”⁶⁸ In a country where, as columnist Barry Ronge noted, husbands and children are routinely forced to watch while mothers are raped, victims must now “calibrate the extent of the menace” before defending loved ones. Why, even for giving chase, victims may now be prosecuted as aggressors.

Between a rock and a hard place, to use that cliché of in-betweenness, is where Jaco Swart found himself when confronted at two o’clock in the morning with two intruders in his homestead. The twenty-six-year-old Swart hails from Delareyville, a small farming community in South Africa’s northwest. This town is named for General Koos de la Rey, hero of the Boer War. Young Swart is a hero too. But for choosing to defend home and hearth in the New South Africa, he was arrested and charged with murder and attempted murder. Swart had dispatched the one assailant and injured the other with a licensed firearm. Not only can self-defense be an offense in the new constitutional democracy, but it may be considered racist when practiced by whites. COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, under whose auspices, presumably, home invaders fall, accused Swart of racism.⁶⁹

The sixteen-year-old son of Len Parkin of Pretoria was awoken at three in the morning by two armed men, and instructed to lead them to where his parents slept. The boy complied. The criminals shot his father. Despite his injuries, Len Parkin seized his handgun and managed to hasten the descent into hell of the one assailant. An opprobrious police inspector, one Paul Ramaloko, said: “Because Parkin is in hospital, he hasn’t been arrested. The public prosecutor will now decide whether the victim was using his firearm in self-defense or not.”⁷⁰

An elderly couple—he seventy-seven, she seventy-three—may spend the rest of their days in jail for attempted murder. The plucky pair had overpowered an intruder who had grabbed their pistol and was poised to pounce.⁷¹ Not far from where these heroes reside live my in-laws. I used to rest easier knowing that if a thug entered their Western Cape home, my elderly mother in-law could easily dispatch him with her six-round .32 Special. It was comforting to know that in the unlikely event of her requiring further firepower, my father-in-law could weigh in with his .38 Special. But with the advent of the Firearm Control Act of 2000 (FCA)—whose constitutionality is currently being challenged—the Safety and Security Minister unveiled “an arsenal” of stricter gun-control laws, decreeing that “gun-toting cowboys”⁷² such as my elderly mother and father in-law would no longer be tolerated, and “non-threatening” home invaders would no longer face on-the-spot justice. Should my in-laws awaken to find a malefactor beating down the door, they shall have to hold their fire and attempt to ascertain his manifestly acquisitive—and almost certainly murderous—motives.

Lucky are the outlaws in the New South Africa. Less lucky are the in-laws.Their licenses, “granted under the old Arms and Ammunition Act,” were supposed to be valid for life and mandatory renewal unconstitutional.”⁷³ Now, they, and each of South Africa’s three million legal gun owners, have been required, under the FCA, to re-apply for permits. If she wishes to keep her handgun, my mother-in-law will have to trundle to the only licensed gun seller in the region and, for a fat fee, acquire registration forms and a booklet, which she must study and prepare to be examined on. Once she passes the exam, she will head to the police station, where again, she will be fleeced and forced to fill in more forms that’ll be sent to the capital. There, an ANC official will decide whether she truly needs a handgun for “self-defense.” This process can take years. Kopel, Gallant and Eisen predicted that Mbeki’s FCA would outlaw ninety percent of lawfully owned firearms currently in civilian hands.⁷⁴ Preliminary reports appear to substantiate their estimate with respect to new applicants as well.⁷⁵

In a country where almost everyone knows someone who has been raped, robbed, hijacked, murdered, or all of the above, the reasons the revamped SAPS gives for denying an application are: a “lack of motivation,” “your husband can protect you,” “the police will protect you,” “you are too young.”⁷⁶ Talk about an “eff-off” attitude! The applicant must also prepare for a house call from their protectors for the purpose of inspecting the safety deposit box. Since my seventy nine-year-old infirm mother-in-law has forfeited the pleasure of this procedure—my father-in-law will soldier on—she must surrender her handgun to the police. In this way it can be sold by the notoriously corrupt officers of the law to other industrious trade union workers. For giving up her gun, she will get no official receipt or acknowledgment. If the thing is used in a crime, she’s liable. Ditto if she tampers with the mechanism to render it unusable.

As would increasingly be the case, there are those who dismiss as “right-wing scaremongering” any claim that the right to self-defense is seriously circumscribed in a country that needs it more than any other. A case in point is Professor Anthony Minnaar of the Department of Security Risk Management at the University of South Africa (UNISA), my alma mater. Placing “the perpetrator” in irons following a “shooting” in said “perpetrator’s” home, and irrespective of the circumstances, is standard—and proper—police practice,^[*] maintains Minnaar. In case you wonder, “the perpetrator” in Minnaar’s nomenclature is the proper term for a victorious victim of an assault. Besides, admonishes Minnaar, charges are, for the most, dropped. Or if the charges are imposed, they are commuted to a lesser charge such as culpable homicide with a self-defense plea. Beleaguered South Africans, however, need fewer Minnaars and more laws that exempt them from any criminal or civil liability if they are forced to use deadly force in self-defense.

Worlds away from South Africa, Americans have also been subjected to a state-orchestrated volcanic change in their society, the consequence of the unchecked flow of millions of Third World illegal immigrants into the country. As Heather Mac Donald, scholar at the Manhattan Institute, has documented in detail, the sturdy American castle is being catapulted by criminal aliens, although not yet sufficiently so as to make Americans fret over the erosion of the Castle Doctrine. However, as a number of landmark cases would suggest,“Make My Day Laws”⁷⁷—a favored American sobriquet for Castle Laws inspired by the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry character—will become more important commensurate with rapidly changing demographics and the attendant spike in crime.⁷⁸

A man’s home is not mere property—it is his castle. In defending his home, an individual is defending a safe haven for his most cherished belongings: his person and his beloved. Someone eager to violate another’s inner sanctum will be more than willing to violate the occupant. This applies in spades to South Africa, where life is snuffed out for a cell phone or for the simple pleasure of it, and where home invasions are on the yearly rise, and frequently culminate in torture, rape and murder.⁷⁹ Confronted with a home invader, there’s precious little a homeowner can do to divine the intentions of the intruder. This is the distinctively American subtext of the Castle Doctrine, which is unevenly applied across the U.S., despite the fact that the Second Amendment to the American Constitution affirms a natural right to self-defense (recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in Heller vs. The District of Columbia).

Not that you’d know it, but South Africans have a right to live free of all forms of violence, “public” or “private” in origin.⁸⁰ Section 12 of their progressive Constitution protects the “Freedom and Security of the Person.” Clearly “progressive” doesn’t necessarily spell progress: Nowhere does this wordy but worthless document state whether South Africans may actually defend this most precious right. A right that can’t be defended is a right in name only—implicit in the right to life is the right to self-defense. The South African Constitution is descriptive, not prescriptive—full of pitch-perfect verbal obesities that provide little by way of legal recourse for the likes of Messrs Parkin, Swart and all the other good guys with guns.

Whites have been told to accept their lot. Or “[to] continue to whinge until blue in the face,” as Charles Nqakula counseled those who carp about crime.¹²⁰ Securing subjects in their lives and property has not been a priority for the ANC. South African historian Rodney Warwick believes that the state’s stout indifference does not exist in a void. Ditto the steady, anti-white venom the ANC cobra-head keeps spitting. “The de facto situation is that whites are under criminal siege explicitly because of their ‘race,’” he writes in the Cape Argus. “The black criminal collective consciousness understands whites are now ‘historical fair game.’”¹²¹ Warwick sees the physical vulnerability of white South Africans as flowing from a confluence of historical antecedents that have placed them in a uniquely precarious position. “The white minority,” he writes, “surrendered [its] political dominance for non-racial constitutional safeguards.”¹²² By foreswearing control over the state apparatus, whites ceded mastery over their destiny, vesting their existential survival in a political dispensation: a liberal democracy. In a needlessly optimistic assumption, whites imagined blacks too would be bound by the same political abstractions, and would relinquish race in favor of a constitutional design as an organizing principle in the society they now controlled. Having surrendered without defeat,¹²³ for a tepid peace, Europeans are, moreover, particularly and uniquely vulnerable within this political dispensation because of their history on the continent. Remedial historical revisionism notwithstanding, South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not exactly the product of the people currently dismantling it. Instead, it was the creation of British and Dutch colonists and their descendants. For what they’ve achieved and acquired—and for the sins of apartheid—they are the objects of envy and racial enmity.

A chronicler of Africa, the observations of African-American journalist Keith Richburg agree with Warwick’s. Richburg believes that on the Dark Continent, tribal allegiance trumps political persuasion and envy carries the day. He cites the fate of the Tutsi—an alien, Nilotic African people, who formed a minority in Rwanda and Burundi—among the Hutu who are a Bantu people. The Hutu have always resented the tall, imposing Tutsis, who had dominated them on-and-off since the fifteenth century, and whose facial features the lovely supermodel Iman instantiates. When Hutus picked up machetes to slash to bits nearly a million of their Tutsi neighbors in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, they were, on a deeper level, contends Richburg, “slashing at their own perceived ugliness, as if destroying this thing of beauty, this thing they could never really attain, removing it from the earth forever.”¹²⁴ Are shades of this impulse alive in the savagery inflicted on the European “settlers” of South Africa (and Zimbabwe and the Congo before them)? Who can say for sure? This much I do know: Empowering majorities in Africa has helped, not hindered, the propensity of hostile masses to exact revenge on helpless minorities.

…the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention. —Alexander Solzhenitsyn^[*]

My people will not listen unless they are killed.—Cetshwayo, Zulu King, 1878

The farmers of South Africa are being killed off at genocidal rates,” I said to broadcaster John Safran during a 2007 interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Was I being hyperbolic? For the answer, an incredulous Mr. Safran quizzed Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, who heads “Genocide Watch.” Stanton confirmed what scant few among Western media care to chronicle. “The rates at which the farmers are being eliminated, the torture and dehumanization involved—all point to systematic extermination.”¹ Since the dawn of democracy, close to ten percent of farming South Africa has been slaughtered in ways that would do Shaka Zulu proud.

The reader will be accustomed by now to gauging murder rates per units of 100,000 people. In low-crime Europe, that rate stands at two murders per 100,000 people a year. In American inner-city ghettos it rises to about forty and above (according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, in New Orleans it’s fifty six per 100,000). By Chris van Zyl’s assessment—van Zyl is safety and security manager for the Transvaal Agricultural Union—Boers are being exterminated at the annual rate of 313 per 100,000 inhabitants,² 3,000 since the election of Mandela in 1994;³ two a week,⁴ seven in March of 2010,⁵ “four times as high as is for the rest of the [South African] population,”says Dr. Stanton. This makes farming in South Africa the most dangerous occupation in the world. (Miners, by comparison, suffer 27.8 fatalities per 100,000 workers.⁶)

But no one who matters is counting. And some are even denying it, the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), for instance. Back in 2004, The Economist had already counted 1,500 rural whites dead “in land-related violence.”⁷ By 2010, the deniers at the SAIRR were finally willing to concede that “not all murders in the country are a function of simple criminal banditry.”⁸ They still put the figure “conservatively” at only 1,000, even as most news outlets are reporting upwards of 3,000 farmers murdered. The 3,000 figure consists of “some 1,000 white farmers, along with 2000 of their family members.”⁹ Perhaps the SAIRR has forgotten to factor in the families. The uncomfortable fact that South Africa’s farmers are conservative, Christian, and Caucasian might help explain why the likes of CNN’s Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper have yet to show up in fashionable fatigues to report from this unfashionable front.

As Carte Blanche, a South African current affairs television program, has documented, the victims of this onslaught are almost invariably elderly, law-abiding, God-fearing Afrikaners, murdered in cold blood in ways that beggar belief. The heathens will typically attack on Sundays. On returning from church, the farmer is ambushed. Those too feeble to attend Sunday service are frequently tortured and killed when the rest are worshiping. In one crime scene filmed by Carte Blanche, Bibles belonging to the slain had been splayed across their mangled bodies. In another, an “old man’s hand rests on the arm of his wife of many years.”¹⁰ She raped; he, in all likelihood, made to watch. Finally, with their throats slit, they died side by side.

There’s an ethereal quality about Beatrice Freitas, who has survived two farm attacks. Her equanimity belies the brutality she has endured. Beatrice and her husband immigrated to South Africa from Madeira forty years ago. They built a thriving nursery near the Mozambican border. It supplied the entire region with beautiful plants. Some people build; others destroy. Beatrice tells her story as she drifts through the stately cycads surrounding the deserted homestead.

When the four men attacked her, Beatrice says, her mind “disappeared.” She and her permanently disabled husband, José, were tied up while the home was ransacked. When the brutes were through, they wanted to know where she kept the iron. They then took her to the laundry room, where two of them raped her, coated her in oil, and applied the iron. They alternated the iron with kicks from their boots. When they were through, twenty five percent of Beatrice’s body was covered in third-degree burns. They suffocated her with a towel, and left her for dead, but she survived. She says the Lord saved her. No one was ever arrested—not then, and not after the couple was attacked three years later. This time José died “in a hail of bullets.” Arrests and convictions are rare. Carte Blanche tells of Dan Lansberg, shot dead in broad daylight. Members of his courageous farming community caught the culprits, but they “escaped” from the local police cells.

Sky News¹¹ sent its correspondent to the northern province of South Africa, where viewers are introduced to Herman Dejager. Before retiring every night, Herman prepares to fight to the death to protect what’s his. He checks his bulletproof vest, loads the shotgun, and drapes ammunition rounds on the nightstand. You see, Herman’s father died in his arms, shot in the face by intruders.

Kaalie Botha’s parents were not so lucky: “You can’t kill an animal like they killed my mom and father. You can’t believe it.” The Achilles tendons of Kaalie’s seventy-one-year-old father had been severed, so he couldn’t flee. He was then hacked in the back until he died, and his body was dumped in the bush. His wife, Joey, had her head bashed in by a brick, wielded with such force that the skull “cracked like an egg.”

Murdered farmers are often displayed like trophies. According to Dr. Stanton, who was “responsible for drafting the UN resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” there are eight stages of genocide. Dehumanization is the third. Stanton is convinced that these “hate crimes” amount to genocide under the convention.¹² “Genocide is always organized, usually by the state,” he has written at Genocide Watch’s website. The farmers believe, seconds Sky News, that “these attacks are a government-sanctioned attempt to purge South Africa of white land owners, as has already happened in Zimbabwe.”¹³

“Rather than simply reflecting SA’s overall high crime rate, murders against farmers,” contends van Zyl, “… are part of an orchestrated strategy to drive white farmers from their land.”¹⁴ This verdict accords with the truth that for these murders, robbery is seldom the motive. Rarely is any valuable item removed from these grisly crime scenes. For the edification of “racism”-spotters in the West, the assailants, confirms Stanton, are as ethnically distinct as their victims.

Reluctantly, the South African Human Rights Commission agrees. Its commission’s report fails to break down their figures by color; but it does admit that “the majority of attacks in general … are against white people” and that “there was a considerably higher risk of a white victim of farm attacks being killed or injured than a black victim.”¹⁵

Conspiracy is difficult to prove; depraved indifference less so. That the ANC plans to dismantle the Commando System is damning—the Commandos are a private Afrikaner militia that has existed since the 1770s, and is the sole reliable defense at the farmers’ disposal. Contrary to the pro-forma denials issued by the ANC’s fulsome officials, the Daily Mail newspaper confirmed, in February 2006, that the government is still set on forcibly seizing the land of thousands of farmers, should they refuse to settle. By the year 2014, a third of Boer property will have been given to blacks.

True to the dictum that the victim must always be denounced, lodestars for the left like the SA Human Rights Commission, the ANC, “development organizations,”¹⁶ and the malfunctioning mass media the world over blame the farmers for mistreating their farmhands, who, understandably, retaliate. Much to its disgrace, America’s Ford Foundation goes as far as to fund “local land NGOs in their efforts to encourage people to claim productive farmland, in many cases without legal basis.”¹⁷ However, the Helen Suzman Foundation—whose mission it is to continue the life’s work of the famed progressive parliamentarian for which it is named—found that ninety three percent of farm workers indicate their relationship with their employers is good.”¹⁸

In one respect, and in one alone, the excuse-making industry is right: the crimes are indeed personal in nature. As mentioned, theft is seldom the motive. The trouble with excuse-makers is that the extent of such violence is far worse under democracy than it was under apartheid. Back then, farmhands were presumably treated more inhumanely than they are now. But also, back then, those who perpetrated capital crimes were very likely to get caught, and the threat of the scaffold loomed over them. Sixty-nine-year old fourth generation Natal farmer and stockman Nigel Ralfe was but a lad when an elderly farming husband and wife, the Lowes, were murdered by three men who worked near the victims’ Natal-lowlands farm. Once the culprits were eventually captured and tried—not before they had sliced a guard’s throat with a bread knife—their families were ferried to Pretoria for free to see their sons swing on the gallows. Years elapsed before another such crime was committed in that area. The occasion of Mr. Ralfe’s reminiscing? In March of 2010, his own wife Lynette was shot to death by laborers. Given that South Africa now has a political system which, as Mr. Ralfe puts it, is “run by jailbirds,”¹⁹ he does not expect his Lynette to get justice.

Could it be that killers kill not because of “racism” or “oppression,” but because they can? Perish the thought.

In the new South Africa, there is a renewed appreciation for the old slogan, “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,” chanted at political rallies and funerals during “The Struggle” (against apartheid). ANC youth leader Peter Mokaba is credited with originating the catch phrase. Mokaba went on to become a legislator and a deputy minister in the Mandela cabinet. By the time he expired in 2002 at the age of only forty-three (rumor has it of AIDS), Mokaba had revived the riff, using it liberally, in defiance of laws against incitement to commit murder. Given the mesmerizing, often murderous, power of the chant—any chant—in African life, many blame Mokaba for the current homicidal onslaught against the country’s white farmers.

Mokaba’s legacy lives on. Late in February of 2010, a senior member of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC)—a competing socialist, racialist political party whose motto is “Africa for the Africans”—set-up a page on the social networking site Facebook. For all to see were comments such as the following, written by one Ahmed El Saud:

Kill the fucking whites now!!! If you afraid for [sic] them, lets [sic] do it for you. In return, you can pay us after the job has been done…text us… We are not afraid for [sic] the whites like your own people…its disgrace [sic]…he ask you and you dont [sic] want to…we will do it Mandela! [sic].²⁰

Other messages matched the savagery of El Saud’s sentences, if not their syntax. One boasted of “an army of 3000 people ready to kill white people within a day if it were called upon to do so.”²¹ Western Cape PAC chairman Anwar Adams, the responsible functionary, refused to remove the page. Needless to say, his sinecure has not been affected.

The ANC took a pixilated page out of the PAC’s Facebook. Days later, the following eloquent post appeared on a Facebook page under the name of ANC Youth League president Julius Malema:

You fucking white pigs. Malema is our leader. He will kill [President Jacob] Zuma within the next six weeks. “Look ahead, my fellow black people. We will then take our land, and every trespasser, namely white whores, we will rape them and rape them till the last breath is out. “White kids will be burned, especially those in Pretoria and Vrystaat. Men will be tortured while I take a video clip and spread it on YouTube,” read one post. It continued: “Its [sic] true what Malema said, silently we shall kill them… Police will stand together…our leader will lead us to take our land over. Mandela will smile again. “White naaiers, we coming for you! Households will be broken into and families will be slaughtered.²² [Emphasis added]

Was the murderer of seventeen-year-old Anika Smit, also in March of 2010, a Facebook friend of Malema? When Johan Smit bid his bonny daughter goodbye, before leaving the home they shared in north Pretoria, he did not imagine he’d never again see her alive. Once he had returned from work, he found the naked and mutilated corpse of his only child. Her throat had been slashed sixteen times and her hands hacked off.²³ She had been raped.

Eugène Terre’Blanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) that seeks the establishment of a homeland for the Afrikaners,²⁴ was alone on his homestead, over the Easter 2010 period,when two farmhands bludgeoned the sixty-nine-year-old separatist to a pulp with pangas^[*] and pipes. To leave the old man without a shred of dignity—Crimen injuria in South African law—they pulled down his pants, exposing his privates. Based on hearsay, the pack animals of the Western media insisted that the motive for the murder was a “labor dispute.”

In Malema’s defense, the ANC claimed he was not responsible for the Facebook page. The youth leader might be hard to track down in cyberspace, but Malema performed in person at the University of Johannesburg, stomping about with a group of students and singing, in Zulu, “Shoot the Boers, they are rapists.”²⁵ ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe spin-doctored Malema’s live performance by choosing to dismiss the power of “Kill the Boer.” He maintained, implausibly enough, that the killer phrase does no more than pay homage to the Party’s illustrious history and is “not meant as an incitement to violence against whites.”²⁶

No one who remembers the role of Radio Rwanda (first) and Radio-Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM), next, in galvanizing the Hutu to exterminate the Tutsi “inyenzi” (“cockroaches”) in 1994, can shrug off what is under way in South Africa. Many South African blacks have a pathological preoccupation with variants of “Kill the Boer; kill the farmer” (which is why it is naïve to imagine that banning an incitement to murder will do anything to excise a dark reality embedded so deep in the human heart). In its hypnotic hold on the popular imagination, the mantra resembles the “Kill them before they kill you” slogan that helped excite Hutus to massacre 800,000 of their Tutsi fellow countrymen. In Rwanda, it was the old media that transmitted older hatreds; in Mandela’s South Africa the new media are doing the same.

Is Facebook the face of incitement to genocide in South Africa?

Peter Mokaba’s funeral was attended by Jacob Zuma (not yet President) and his two predecessors, Thabo Mbeki and Nelson Mandela.²⁷ At the sight of the coffined Mokaba, the crowd roared, “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer!” Witnesses will not say whether “Madiba” (to use Mandela’s African honorific) partook, but to dispel any doubts about the esteem in which Mokaba is still held despite his savage slogan, the ANC named a soccer stadium, built for the soccer World Cup, after this son of the New South Africa.

There was bitter blood on Bantu lands well before the settlers arrived. The all-time PIG (Politically Incorrect Guide) to Zulu history notes correctly that the Bantu, like the Boers, were not indigenous to South Africa. They “dribbled south” from some “reservoir in the limitless north,” and, like the European settlers, used their military might to displace Hottentots, Bushmen, and one another through internecine warfare. We’ve committed the little San people of Southern Africa (the Bushmen) to folkloric memory for their unequalled tracking skills and the delicate drawings with which they dotted the “rock outcroppings.” The San were the hunters, but they were also among the hunted. Alongside the Boers, Hottentots “hunted down Bushmen for sport well into the nineteenth century.⁹⁸

The PIG in question is Donald R. Morris’s epic, The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation. In “the book to end all books on the tragic confrontation between the assegai and the Gatling gun,” Morris places Cape Town’s founder and Dutch East India Company official J. A. Van Riebeeck, on landing at the Cape in 1652, 500 miles to the north and 1,000 miles to the west [sic] of the nearest Bantu.⁹⁹ Joined by other Protestants from Europe, Dutch farmers, as we have seen, homesteaded the Cape Colony. Shaka Zulu himself considered the European clansmen to be the proper proprietors of the Cape frontier, with whom he would need to liaise diplomatically if he wished to subjugate his black brethren, the Xhosa-Nguni¹⁰⁰ peoples, on the southern reaches of his empire abutting the Cape. (And boy, did he subjugate them!) Indeed, the white civilization which formed south of the Orange River¹⁰¹ did not encounter the black civilization in the interior for some time. And during that time, the coastal clans warred against one another, continually raiding other kraals, driving off the cattle and exterminating the victims.¹⁰² Before the consolidation of the Zulu empire, eight hundred or so distinct Nguni Bantu clans vied for a spot under the sun in the Natal region between the mountains and the coast. Where are these lineages today?

Particularly brutal was the period spanning the early 1820s known as the Mfecane, “the Crushing.” Up to two million natives died “in a decade that depopulated what is today the Orange Free State.”¹⁰³ This death-toll was partly, but not entirely, the fault of Shaka, who destroyed the clan structure in Natal—the Zulu paramount chief was a monster of psychopathic proportions who once sated his scientific curiosity by dissecting seven hundred pregnant women. The tribal warfare caused mass migration, whereby “not a single clan remained in a belt a hundred miles wide south of the Tugela River; in an area that teemed with bustling clans only thousands of deserted kraals remained, most of them in ashes. A few thousand terrified inhabitants [hid out] in the bush or forest in pitiful bands, and cannibalism flourished,”¹⁰⁴ as it did whenever the kraal economy was demolished in ongoing warfare. Yes, “cannibalism, which was fully repugnant to Bantu civilization as it is our own, became common, and reached the point where entire clans depended on it and nothing else to feed themselves.”¹⁰⁵

Mobs on the move marked their “aimless tracks” with (DNA-rich) human bones. Was there never a duty to divine these bones for purposes other than soothsaying—say, to do the devoured justice? These days, white South Africans supinely accept their obligation to give up the lands they are supposed to have stolen, on the grounds that it holds ancestral remains. Should not the relatives of cannibals who gobbled up their black brethren be held to the same standards? The Bushmen have been barred by the Botswana Bantu from claiming their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari. Where’s the international uproar? Should we not be discussing intra-racial reparations?

Penetration into Natal in the early 1800s was confined to Port Natal, where a small trading post operated at the pleasure—and with the permission—of Zulu kings such as Shaka and Dingane. Port Natal settlers succored the natives. The post soon became a sanctuary to which the “detribalized natives” fled in their thousands, on the run from the daily depredations of tribal life. These natives soon came to see in the settlers “a fine defensive shield,” under which they themselves could “re-establish a semblance of normal kraal life in the open.”¹⁰⁶ How, we must ask, have the descendants of these benefactors been rewarded?

Ask the Dunns of Durban. They descend from John Dunn, a Bantuphile who settled in Natal in the mid-1800s, and to whom King Cetshwayo gave “a large tract of land along the coast north of the Tugela with full rights of a chieftain.”¹⁰⁷ There John Dunn lived and loved like a Zulu man, with as many wives. The King’s kin have sabotaged and subverted the great Cetshwayo’s wishes, subjecting Dunn’s descendants, Pat Dunn and her family, to “just about every ‘gross violation of human rights’ which Amnesty International defines”¹⁰⁸—land invasion, intimidation, arson, attempted murder.

John Dunn was a white trader and adventurer. A settler. Alexander Merensky and Heinrich Grutznerwere were German missionaries. Ask their descendants how they are faring.

The year was 1865. These two missionaries built a mission station and church on a Middleburg farm in the Eastern Cape. The natives called the mission Botshabelo, “place of refuge,” because the missionaries sheltered tribespeople fleeing the local Pedi chieftain and his impis. Botshabelo became known far and wide “as a witness to Christian teaching.”¹⁰⁹ The desperate refugees were saved both spiritually and existentially—taught literacy and crafts and converted to Christianity. How have their progeny honored the memory of the righteous men who rescued them from a gory death? By laying successful claim to the historical site European missionaries built—a place that was never traditional tribal land. The graves of members of the missionary families are buried on the land. Evidently, respect for ancestral remains does not cut both ways.

He who believes he has a right to another man’s property ought to produce proof that he is its rightful owner. “As the old legal adage goes, ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law,’ as it is the best evidence in our uncertain world of legitimate title. The burden of proof rests squarely with the person attempting to alter and abolish present property titles.”¹¹⁰ It is to this potent principle that democratic rule in South Africa has taken an axe—or, rather, an assegai.

The question of land ownership deeply concerned the nineteenth century trek Boers, as they prepared to decamp from the British-ruled Cape Colony and venture north.¹¹¹ Accordingly, they sent out exploration parties tasked with negotiating the purchase of land from the chieftains, who very often acted magnanimously, allowing Europeans to settle certain areas. Against trek Boers, it must be said that they were as rough as the natives and negotiated with as much finesse. On the high veldt, at least, trek Boers did “drive organized clans off the lands they wanted, retaining only a few families of squatters on each farm to provide labor.”¹¹² However, the narrative about the pastoral, indigenous, semi-nomadic natives, dispossessed in the seventeenth century of their lands by another such people, only of a different color—this is as simplistic as it is sentimental. When Boer and Bantu finally clashed on the Great Fish River it was a clash of civilizations. “The Bantu viewed the land as entailed property that belonged to the clan. A chieftain might dispose of the right to live on the land, but he could not dispose of the land itself. The European mind in general could not grasp this concept and regarded a land transaction as a permanent exchange of real property.” As Morris observes in his matter-of-fact way, “The Bantu view insured European encroachment and the European view future strife.”¹¹³

Perhaps inevitably, twenty-first-century “restitution” is not dominated by individual freehold owners reclaiming expropriated land. Instead, a group of blacks scheming on a particular property will band together as a “tribe,” and pool the taxpayer grants which its members have received gratis for the purpose of purchasing occupied land. “This has complicated the process,” says restitution advocate Dr. Clarissa Fourie of the University of Natal, “as evidence of these rights is not as easy to assess, since there are no title deeds to substantiate these claims.” This by the admission of an advocate. If unambitious, the band may claim a commercial farm as its own. If ambitious, members may “claim the sun, the moon, the stars, and the oceans.”¹¹⁴ “Some of the claims are on very high-value land,” admits Fourie. “There is one claim that has been made which covers 129 citrus farms in the Mpumalanga Province.”¹¹⁵ Another shoots for central Pretoria, the capital.

The dearth of original documents deeding the claimed areas to the claimants has not stopped claims from proceeding to court. A claimant’s assertion that his tribe’s cattle once grazed in an area will often suffice before the bar of law to back the “historical inquiry.”¹¹⁶ As a leader in the Democratic opposition put it, “We are moving from the rule of law to the law of rule.”

Where blacks owned freehold land and were evicted subsequent to the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts—these prohibited natives from “hiring or acquiring” land outside the “scheduled native areas”¹¹⁷—restitution ought to have been possible, based on title deeds kept on record. By now the approximately three million Africans forcibly resettled under apartheid policies ought to have been compensated financially.

It seems to me patent that land that has been farmed intensively and scientifically must never be given to men whose capacity and craving is for kraal life: a small herd of cattle and the labor of as many wives as can be afforded.¹¹⁸ Considering this very reality, and where a land claim has been shown to be valid, financial compensation is the only just restitution.

The “tribe” or band of individuals claiming these vast tracts of land most certainly does not have a right to the installations on them. Deeply corrupt and corrupting is the notion that a claimant inherits both the land and the improvements upon it; that a successful land claim will put a claimant in possession of everything the dispossessed man has worked to build in the course of a lifetime and which has increased the value of the farmstead many times over.

Take Theo de Jager. This jolly, rotund man—the chairman of the Land Affairs committee of AgriSA, the national agricultural trade association founded back in 1904¹¹⁹—has forfeited two farms in the Limpopo Province, “northernmost province of South Africa.” Lost first was the land purchased around 1998, and claimed by (ambitious) locals together with other farms in the area. When the farms failed, the farm hands burned them to the ground in a show of frustration. An American reading these words in the comfort of his Nebraska ranch house or his Manhattan brownstone might well be left incredulous at the sheer crudity of this process. But in the New South Africa it has been extremely common. De Jager picked up the shards of a broken life and bought another farm. The Lords of the Land saw that it too was good, and lunged for the man’s land again.

A farming family like de Jager’s has built the home and filled it with memories. Preparing to move into the homes of white private property owners is an act of conquest. The signal message conveyed by legitimizing such proceedings in law is: covet and you shall be rewarded.

Even if received opinion is accepted without question—that early Afrikaners had no right to homestead vast expanses of unoccupied land or, thereafter, repel marauders—and even if we deny that the subsequent development and capitalization of the land has benefited all the country’s inhabitants in the form of employment and abundant foodstuff; even if we readily concede the justness of every single claim adjudicated in the Land Claims Court of South Africa; even if these incorrect assumptions go unchallenged—at some stage we must question the sheer waste and wholesale destruction of wealth which this supposed justice entails. Whether you believe land reform in South Africa is always and everywhere a case of returning stolen property to its rightful owners, or that it is theft plain and simple—whichever is the case: “to the extent that massive stealing becomes the order of the day,” warns libertarian theorist Walter Block, “a social breakdown is the inevitable result. Not for nothing do the Ten Commandments “prohibit not only robbery, but even coveting the property of others.”¹²⁰

The Department of Rural Development and Land Reform has admitted that ninety percent of redistributed farms were “dysfunctional,” to put it mildly. Dr. du Toit observes that there is not one instance of a successful land handover in the entire country.¹²¹ At some point, wanton destruction on such a scale can only be considered unjust, if not plain criminal. A sufficient difference in degree constitutes a difference in kind. Enlarge a motorcar enough and it becomes a minivan. Depending on the number of casualties, murder bleeds into a massacre. Destroy enough land and lives and you may no longer claim to have done so in the name of restoring rights. All you have done is to mock the very idea of rights out of meaning.

In the United States, at present, only whites can be racists since whites dominate and control the institutions that create and enforce American cultural norms and values…all white individuals are racist.^[*] —Carolyn Pitts, American affirmative action officer

It is imperative to get rid of merit as the overriding principle in the appointment of public servants.^[†] —Mario Rantho, ANC parliamentarian

Known in South Africa as Black Economic Empowerment, “BEE” is the equivalent of the racial quotas Barack Obama champions, only with many times the sting. Like affirmative action, BEE aims to take “jobs away from one group in order to compensate a second group to correct injustices caused by a third group who mistreated a fourth group at an earlier point in history.” This droll, but depressing, distillation of discriminatory, collectivist hiring practices, courtesy of Edwin Locke of the Ayn Rand Institute, doesn’t do justice to South Africa’s enormously ambitious BEE program. BEE, and its latest permutation, BBBEE (Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment), makes property ownership for whites in the democratic South Africa a misnomer. The country’s current rulers can and do demand that a percentage of a white-owned company be taken over by blacks, on pain of it being closed down. This goes well beyond racial quotas.

Race-based wealth distribution, and in particular racist labor litigation, is yet another unique feature of the South African democracy. This phased process requires that all enterprises, public and private, make their workforce demographically representative of the country’s racial profile. By the year 2014, the transformation must have been completed. The penalties for non-compliance promise to be stiff. Currently, if a company wishes to bid for government contracts, it has to take on a black partner. Private companies operating in South Africa cannot win government contracts if they are not co-owned by blacks. If they want to engage in any prospecting whatsoever, all mining companies must part with a portion of the company.

^[*] Frederick R. Lynch, Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action, (Westport, Connecticut, 1991), p. 32.

^[†] As related in CBN Archive, All affirmative, no action, July 1997,
http://www.cbn.co.za/archive/97-jul/schoombe.htm.

This declared discrimination on the basis of color has issued from a party that came to power promising to create a non-racial society. Instead, the ruling clique has institutionalized “apartheid in reverse.” “White unemployment has risen by almost 200 percent in five years,”³¹ notes an Australian television broadcaster. According to Reuters’ Finbarr O’Reilly, it doubled between 1995 and 2005. “Solidarity,” South Africa’s oldest trade union—and the only union left which is founded on Christian, as opposed to socialist, principles—says that the number of white South Africans living below the poverty line is 450,000, namely, ten percent of the country’s total white population. And even these figures are over-optimistic. BEE policies have, in practice, barred a segment of the population from the formal economy for good. The individuals most likely to be affected by the ANC’s determination to make the work force reflect the population’s complexion are the Afrikaners whom the ANC especially disfavors. In the years shortly after 1900, the problem of poor white Afrikaners was endemic. By and large, it resulted from the Afrikaners in question being “forced off the land by the disasters of the [Anglo-Boer] war,”³² and having their homesteads and crops razed by the British. For a long time, successive governments’ pro-Afrikaner policies eradicated the poor white Afrikaner class. Now this class is once again burgeoning. Bethlehem in Pretoria is an example of an informal settlement where Afrikaners, by and large, live in huts without sanitation or electricity.³³ Coronation Park, in Krugersdorp west of Johannesburg (where I spent the first year of my life), is another.

When he was quizzed about the pervasive “quota culture,” Essop Prahada, Minister in the Presidency (whatever crony appointment that is), barked: “You cannot have transformation without pain.” At the same time, Prahada has insisted that BEE is not motivated by race but by socio-economic considerations. When asked why poor whites were not eligible for BEE privileges, Prahada blasted the aforementioned Australian reporter: “You are sitting here worrying about whites. Our main concern must be the millions of our people living in poverty.”³⁴ (Again, my emphasis.)

Prahada’s racial solidarity is not misplaced in the democratic South Africa, where redistributive “justice” is a constitutional article of faith. The country’s constitution has a clause devoted to “Limitation of Rights.”³⁵ Apparently, the constitutional scholars who compiled the document saw no need to protect the rights of minorities “that [had] not been victims of past discrimination.”³⁶ The possibility that the fortunes of hitherto un-oppressed minorities might change did not occur to the occupants of the Bench. Neither did this cross the “mind” (my tongue is firmly in my cheek here) of President F. W. de Klerk in the early 1990s. De Klerk turned the screws on his white constituents, failing to fight for—and secure—a power-sharing dispensation, wherein black and white interests would be balanced.³⁷ Instead, he acceded to crude majoritarianism, thereby forfeiting equal treatment for white South Africans within a democratic South Africa.

Was not apartheid a form of affirmative action for the Afrikaans minority? It most certainly was. “Afrikaner nationalists implemented one of the first and most successful affirmative action programs in the form of their ‘civilized labor policy’ of job reservations for white Afrikaners.”³⁸ However, I am here concerned with reality, not race. Res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself). Preferences for Afrikaners targeted a minority of the population. During the apartheid era, moreover, the most skilled workers were invariably Boers or Britons. This was true too in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), RIP. Unfair as apartheid was—and maybe in no small measure because of it—overall, such preferences for a relatively skilled minority did not destroy government and civil society. Conversely, non-merit based quotas for a preponderant segment of society still lacking in commercially useful skills is doing the trick, as the major beneficiaries of BEE form a numerical majority.³⁹ “One-third of all municipal councilors controlling budgets in the billions are illiterate.”⁴⁰ “[B]arely one percent of black high school students pass higher grade math, and very few opt for tough subjects at university, such as science or engineering,” avers Guest. “Less than two percent of chartered accountants, for example, are black.”

Mathatha Tsedu, the black editor of the Sunday Times, South Africa’s largest-circulation weekly, recently stung his subscribers by writing the following: “It pains me to say this, but my African colleagues who manage large companies or government departments tell me that to get a job done, you usually have to employ a white.”⁴¹ Alas, white males, strictly speaking, are not supposed to comprise more than ten percent of the payroll. Consequently, fifty percent of all white males are self-employed, “waging a constant struggle for survival in small businesses run from homes and garages without pension schemes, medical aid or access to capital, which is largely reserved for blacks.”⁴²

With wealth distribution usurping wealth creation, it is no surprise then that, by Newsweek’s telling, the average black household income shrank by nineteen percent between 1995 and 2000.⁴³ According to the Cato Institute’s current estimation, “The number of people living in absolute poverty has doubled since the ANC came to power in 1994.”⁴⁴ Or since democracy.

Other than to gum up commerce and retard economic growth, the pragmatic upshot of “legislating outcomes”⁴⁵ for blacks has been to increase exorbitantly the wages of a small pool of highly courted, qualified blacks—a “black managerial aristocracy”⁴⁶—and to disenfranchise some of the ablest white workers. Or, conversely, to subjugate them. The ANC has contributed to the creation of a unique cognitive caste system. Throughout the work force, explains Roodt, white subordinates with graduate and postgraduate degrees are doing the hard-core intellectual and technical work for their black bosses. The latter often have no more than a tenth-grade diploma but are paid a great deal more than their intellectual skivvies. A black matriculant (possessor of a high-school diploma) is perfectly poised to climb the corporate structure; yet a white, in order to have a ghost of a chance at remaining employed, had better possess the Masters or the Ph.D. degree.⁴⁷ Given their pallor, promotion for whites is unlikely.

Lost in all this minute-made “justice” are the natural laws of economics. Taking from those who produce wealth to give to those who consume it is bound to decrease wealth production and increase its consumption. Lost too is the idea that wealth needs to be created; that the Good Life is won not through gifts but through graft—education, skills, merit, and hard work over generations.

What South Africa has become today, America is on the verge of becoming, unless it returns to the principles from which its greatness sprang. Sadly, it is already too late for South Africa. Americans, however, must once again embrace a merit-based individualism. Enforced by legal fiat, preferential treatment that pays tribute to a type, not to the individual, flouts justice in every respect, and is profoundly un-American.

As we have established, in the U.S., the government already presides over an elaborate system of reverse-racism laws. Being black guarantees special privileges. The coolness of being black and the considerable leverage the identity affords those who cultivate it is why celebrities like Obama, Halle Berry, and Alicia Keys have chosen to identify with the fathers who abandoned them over the (devoted, liberal, white) mothers who reared them. Berry, Keys, and Obama have embraced this politicized racial identity. To do so is smart, because in America, black is indeed beautiful. Yet in an America that has placed Obama in the Oval Office, the prevalence of alleged deep-seated racism is still inferred, post haste and post hoc, from the fact that African-Americans lag behind Anglo-Americans in academic achievements and socio-economic status.

In a court of law, statistical data is taken as both proxy for and proof of discrimination. Creedal multiculturalism simply doesn’t admit of the possibility that aptitudes and abilities may vary by culture or ethnicity, as well as from one individual to another.¹¹⁶ According to this view—pervasive in bureaucracy-stiffened business and government agencies and in teaching institutions—racial and ethnic groups must be reflected in academia and in the professions in proportion to their presence in the larger population, if justice is to be achieved. (Although the NBA or the 100-meter dash will not be forced to better reflect America.) The absence of such perfect representation is blamed on endemic white racism. But in professions and academic pursuits where mathematical precocity is a factor, white Americans trail Asian-Americans. And white Gentiles lag behind Ashkenazi Jews. By logical extension, these realities must imply a systemic bias against whites in the U.S., which is nonsense on stilts.

Malaysian governments certainly adopted this illogic toward their Chinese population, whose starting status as indentured laborers didn’t stop it from rising to dominate business, the academy, and the professions. To achieve “racial balance,” pro-Malay affirmative action laws were mandated in all government-controlled institutions. This is the same logic to which Hitler had awoken. In proportion to their numbers, Jews were grossly over represented in Germany’s economic, professional, and cultural life, a reality Hitler sought to amend. He used the state apparatus to find a “Final Solution” to the Jewish advantage. Indeed, be they apartheid, affirmative-action, or the “Final Solution,” policies of racial discrimination have generally issued from the state. It’s hardly hyperbolic to say that Hitler’s “Final Solution” was a reductio ad inferno of affirmative action for Aryans. Not for nothing were the Chinese of Malaysia and Southeast Asia referred to by King Rama VI of Thailand (reigned 1910-1925) as “The Jews of the East.”¹¹⁷ The pogroms waged against them, and the persecution of the over-achieving Indians of East Africa—these were condoned, if not facilitated, by respective governments.

But here’s the paradox of state-mandated racial preferences; individuals will do business with people they dislike, even circumvent the law, if such circumvention turns out to be lucrative. Thus, despite the Malay disdain for the Chinese, Malaysians are more likely to patronize Chinese professionals and businesses. Malay-owned-and-run banks make more loans to the more creditworthy Chinese, Indians and owners of foreign enterprises.¹¹⁸ Ditto black-owned banks in the U.S. Since they are “under less pressure than white-owned banks to consider race and ethnicity,” explains Steven Farron in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, they “direct a considerably smaller proportion of their investment to black neighborhoods, black-owned business and black individuals than do white-owned banks.”¹¹⁹

Despite the incinerating antipathy toward Jews in Nazi Germany—antipathy far in excess of the alleged racism African-Americans complain of nowadays—Jews remained active in the German economy until the state shipped them off to the ghettos and the death camps. Writes Farron: “Even though collective German public opinion regarded Jewish overrepresentation in the professions as a serious problem, the aggregate German individual preferred employing Jewish lawyers and doctors despite the impediments placed in their way. After her suicide attempt, Eva Braun, the Führer’s mistress, was treated by a Jewish doctor.”¹²⁰ Wallach’s famous drapes adorned both the Göring and Hitler abodes. And Nazi party members purchased goods overwhelmingly at Jewish stores.

In Apartheid South Africa, white industrialists—miners especially—“put continual pressure on the South African government to allow them to use more black labor.”¹²¹ Afrikaner farmers also chose overwhelmingly to ignore racial job quotas, despite their own racist predilections, and also despite high unemployment among rural Afrikaners. Well before the official dismantling of apartheid laws (carried out, incidentally, by the white minority government), the agricultural sector, skilled and managerial jobs included, came to be dominated by blacks. As was the semi-skilled labor market—clothing, furniture, millinery, sheet metal, construction, mining, baking. Clearly, whites, acting as individuals, chose to subordinate ethnic advancement to optimize their livelihood.

Free market economists (the only kind worth consulting) have long since insisted that the rational, self-interest of individuals in private enterprise is always not to discriminate. “The market is color-blind,” said Milton Friedman. “No one who goes to the market to buy bread knows or cares whether the wheat was grown by a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or atheist; by whites or blacks.”¹²² As Thomas Sowell put it so well, “prejudice is free, but discrimination has costs.”¹²³ And as expounded by Professor Farron:

[P]eople demand that their governments restrict the economic and occupational success of specific ethnic or racial groups. However, when the same people act as individuals or business owners, they actively resist and/or circumvent these restrictions. The reason is a fundamental economic principle … If an individual or business, while engaging in economic activity—hiring, money lending—considers any non-economic factors, the person or business will suffer economically… When individuals buy products or services, few practice discrimination, no matter how desirable they think it is and no matter how eagerly they want their government to enforce it.¹²⁴

Arguably, however, the good economists, while certainly not wholesale liars as are their Keynesian counterparts, are still offering up a half-truth. Rational self-interest does indeed propel people, however prejudiced, to set aside bias and put their scarce resources to the best use. But to state simply that “discrimination is bad for business”¹²⁵ is to present an incomplete picture. This solecism stems from the taint the word “discriminate” has acquired. The market, by which we mean the trillions of capitalist acts between consenting adults, is discriminating as in discerning—it is biased toward productivity. Hiring people on the basis of criteria other than productivity hurts the proprietor’s pocket. Thus, we can be fairly certain that, absent affirmative-action laws, the market would reflect a bias toward productivity. In other words, what the good economists are loath to let on is that a free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler.

In America, a return to the republic of private-property rights, individual freedoms, and radical decentralization is predicated on rejecting infringements on property. This entails not compelling property owners to part with their real estate or rightful revenues in the name of affirmative action. And in turn, this entails recognizing what is flippantly called political correctness for the codified and legalized theft and coercion it really is.

In South Africa, the pool of haves is destined to be drained, or shrink to an unsustainable size. Driving this development is the Marxist-Leninist zero-sum analysis that sees wealth as having been attained at someone else’s expense. Propelled as it is by envy, this false and dangerous proposition has brought about the persecution of “ethnic minorities … which have achieved prosperity from poverty—Jews in Europe, Levantines and Indians in Africa, Chinese in south-east Asia.”¹²⁶ And now, Europeans in South Africa.

When we gained power, the country was at the edge of the abyss; since, we have taken a great step forward. —Anonymous African government minister

Our party must continue to strike fear in the hearts of the white man, our real enemy.^[*]—Robert Mugabe

The West has already abetted the destruction of one other western outpost in Africa: Zimbabwe. Conveniently, the American chattering class has reduced Zimbabwe’s collapse to the shenanigans of one man: Robert G. Mugabe.¹ In lengthy policy papers and assorted disquisitions (including a State Department Human Rights Report²), politicians and pundits alike have expounded over the years on the tragic tribulations of Zimbabwe. Strong language (and active verbs) are routinely deployed to implicate Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party henchmen for banning political protest, suppressing “freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, and academic freedom,”³ rigging elections, rounding up and torturing opposition leaders, to say nothing of detaining them without trial, and displacing people in their hundreds of thousands by turning them out of their shanties.

The Marxist Mugabe did all that and more. He instituted a Soviet-style command economy, nationalizing industries, the press included, and turning what was once Africa’s breadbasket into its dustbowl. This entailed abolishing private property and distributing the commercial, white-owned farms that fed the country—“employed one-third of the wage earning labor force”⁴ and generated all its exports—to rabble, who looted them and then let them fall into disrepair. Like a house of cards, farm-dependent industries soon collapsed. Famine and widespread starvation ensued, making Zimbabwe aid-dependent. Mugabe responded by fixing prices, which caused severe shortages and killed off what little economic activity that still took place in that country. “The population of thirteen million Zimbabweans was ten percent poorer by the end of the 1990s than at the beginning.”⁵ Because fewer Zimbabweans are now capable of substantial production, the amount of goods in the Zimbabwean economy keeps decreasing. But while the economy contracts, the money supply keeps increasing, as Mugabe continues to print money promiscuously. The result has been hyperinflation which, at the time of writing, stood at a staggering five sextillion percent.⁶ The natural laws of economics cannot be suspended by man, but Mugabe is no ordinary mortal. The torqued-up tyrant bolstered his economic planning with the attendant massacres, slaughtering his political opponents, among whom were free traders. Rigging elections was another of Mugabe’s pastimes, and still is. Zimbabwe’s infrastructure is falling apart. The smell of sewerage hanging over the capital Harare is more than metaphoric—the treatment facilities, like the power grid, are no longer maintained.

The dirigiste direction in which Mugabe took Zimbabwe has met with circumscribed condemnation in the West. Commentators have not protested the evils of property confiscation under Mugabe—they did not cavil over the fact that land transactions were not “conducted on a willing-seller willing-buyer basis.”⁷ Rather, the chattering class in the West fumed that prime, commercial farmland has ended up in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies, rather than being “fairly” redistributed to all black Zimbabweans.⁸ Similarly, when Mugabe first lunged in the 1990s for land that was not his, Britain, the United States, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund had not been terribly exercised. Land grabs per se were fine, so long as “fair payment” was offered. The process “lacked transparency,” one pointy-head snorted, as though theft—expropriating from Peter in order to lavish on Paul—transparent or clandestine, was ever above board.

At some point in the reams of repudiations and recommendations issued authoritatively about Zimbabwe, American writers will shift mysteriously to the passive voice. Text is layered with oblique references to a Zimbabwe where all was sweetness and light. One is told that once-upon-a-time this helter-skelter of a society used to export food. That not so long ago, life expectancy, now thirty-three years, was sixty years; that in that bygone era, unemployment, now over eighty percent, was extremely low. Veiled vocabulary describes a Zimbabwe that had the “best health care system in Africa,” and the highest literacy rates. Mugabe reversed all that, we are told. But who was the Prince among Men who presided over the good times before Zimbabwe’s Dantean descent into hell? Chroniclers of Zimbabwe seldom overburden themselves with the inconvenient details.

Enter the phantom Ian Smith, prime minister of Rhodesia, RIP, whose rule brought about economic prosperity that benefited all his compatriots. A native of Rhodesia, Smith became the leader of the former British colony, declaring its independence from Britain in 1965. Smith resisted the tide of black nationalism sweeping Africa and insisted that “there would be no majority rule, ‘not in a thousand years,’ in Rhodesia. Black Africans, Mr. Smith said, were not ready for self-government.”⁹ For opposing raw democracy—Smith insisted that the white man had “built [Rhodesia], and intends to keep it”¹⁰—this Anglo-African was ostracized by the international community, which refused to recognize his minority white rule, and punished Rhodesians with boycotts and sanctions.

To be fair, the U.S.’s policy toward Rhodesia had been slightly more nuanced during the Cold War, given that America equated African majority rule with Marxism. Anticommunist crusader Ronald Reagan pursued a foreign policy of “constructive engagement”¹¹ with South Africa. For this he was maligned by many an American academic, who more often than not also rooted for the proxies of Cuba and the Soviet Union in the region. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger promised apartheid-era South Africans to “curb any missionary zeal of my officers in the State Department to harass you,”¹² for which he, in turn, was castigated by Christopher Hitchens.¹³ But once Jimmy Carter was elected, Marxism was no longer considered an impediment to mob rule. The U.S. joined the UN, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the international community in a commitment to ensconce Mugabe. Acting in cahoots with the United Nations and, yes, South Africa, the U.S. eventually pressured Smith to concede to majority rule. However, Smith’s 1978 power-sharing negotiations with moderate black leaders did nothing to assuage the unholy alliance acting with the international community’s acquiescence. The West would not rest until Smith ceded power to Mugabe and his nationalist guerrillas.

The Lancaster House accords paved the way for “the transition from Smith’s evil regime to the independent black-run nation of Zimbabwe,”¹⁴ writes Keith B. Richburg in his remarkable “journalistic tour de force,” Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. Remarkable, because, were this Washington Post reporter not a black man, he’d be labeled a racist by America’s liberal literati. A racist, or a self-hating African, or both. Having experienced Africa, and then daring to describe its horrors in doleful detail, Richburg got down on his knees and thanked God that “his nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons,”¹⁵ made it out to America. Remarkable yet, because despite witnessing every atrocity imaginable north of Zimbabwe during his tenure as the paper’s Africa bureau chief, Richburg—bystander as thousands of bloated, disemboweled bodies floated down the Kagera River into Lake Victoria from Rwanda; witness as ordinary moms and pops in Nairobi laughed and lopped off the limbs of a petty thief; friend to colleagues “shot, stabbed, beaten to death by mobs”¹⁶—despite all that, Richburg still held out hope for Zimbabwe in the mid-1990s. By then, Mugabe had been killing to consolidate power for a considerable time.

Elections across Africa have traditionally followed a familiar pattern: Radical black nationalist movements take power everywhere, then elections cease. One man, one vote, one time. Or, if they take place, they’re rigged. When Mugabe was elected leader for life in 1980, he celebrated Britain’s vote of confidence by eliminating over 10,000 innocent Ndebele in Matabeleland, with whose leader, Joshua Nkomo, Mugabe refused to share power. Nkomo, who had much the same status then which Morgan Tsvangirai has now, refused to accept the 1980 election results and his supporters, from the Ndebele tribe, retreated to their stronghold of Matabeleland, and launched a low-level campaign of terror”¹⁷ aimed at the still-substantial white population. The Ndebele death toll remains indeterminate because, as Richburg wryly observes, “Zimbabwe had graduated into the ranks of an independent black African country, and one of the criteria for membership in the club is that you stop counting the bodies.”¹⁸

Certainly, members of “Africanist circles abroad”¹⁹ chose to discount the rising body count and the one-party putsch in Zimbabwe. On college campuses across the U.S., Mugabe was a hit, never a hit man; his liberation war was not to be tarnished by the inevitable reality unfolding on the ground. “Peace has come to Zimbabwe, Third World’s right on the one,” belted singer Stevie Wonder on the 1980 platinum album, “Hotter than July.” Youngsters around the U.S. retorted: “Now’s the time for celebration, Cause we’ve only just begun.” Naturally, vanity diplomacy was a favored pastime of the West’s “Sexy Beast,” Mugabe. The revolutionary freedom fighter was spokesperson and cherished idol of the anti-apartheid growth industry abroad. It took decades and piles of dead bodies before Robert Mugabe lost luster in the eyes of the American mainstream media. By the time the megalomaniac Mugabe was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II (1994)—and given honorary doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh (1984), Massachusetts (1986), and Michigan (1990)—he had already done his “best” work: slaughtering all those innocent Ndebele in Matabeleland (1983). Western conventional wisdom was no wiser. (And the UN responded invariably by … condemning Israel.)

As the dictator Mugabe hangs on to power for dear life, reasonable people are being persuaded by the pulp press that if not for this one megalomaniac, freedom would have flourished in Zimbabwe, as it has, presumably, in Angola, Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan,and the rest of strife-torn Africa south of the Sahara. Reasonable people are also expected to infer from popular analysis that once Mugabe is dislodged, dies, or agrees to divvy power, the leader of the Zimbabwean opposition party will not deign to commandeer the state’s security forces to subdue his opposition as his predecessor has done. The pundit peanut gallery’s latest modish messiah is the aforementioned Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Thus, late in 2007, when Mugabe passed a new bill designed to “move majority control of foreign-owned companies operating in the country to black Zimbabweans,”²⁰ nobody noticed that members of the MDC, the party of Mr. Tsvangirai, protested—but not against state-sanctioned theft. Like its western supporters, the MDC faulted the measure for failing to empower the people sufficiently.²¹

The MDC’s rickety political plank promises indubitably what the majority of Zimbabweans want, including “equitable” land reform. A euphemism for land distribution in the Mugabe mold, this concept is an athema to private property rights. The latter are nowhere to be found in the MDC’s agenda for Zimbabwe.²² Conversely, the right to housing, food, education, health care, and enriching employment, ad infinitum, makes Zimbabwe’s opposition party’s platform almost as ambitious as Barack Obama’s, down to the Manna From Heaven Healthcare windfall he has implemented. Like the American Democrat, Mr. Tsvangirai is promising Zimbabweans everything they want. Similarly, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change doesn’t seem to understand that his country is bankrupt and that, unlike the mighty U.S.A., Zimbabwe has no line of credit. Or that, as the great American writer Henry Hazlitt put it, “Government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else.” Or that there are precious few left in Zimbabwe from whom to take. The shortages and queues, courtesy of communism, exist in Zimbabwe as they did in the Soviet Union. Jokes from Hammer & Tickle, a book of black humor under Red rule, are not out of place in Zimbabwe:

The problem of queues will be solved when we reach full Communism. How come? There will be nothing left to queue up for.²³

Contrary to convictions in the West, any improvement experienced subsequent to the dethroning of the dictator Mugabe will be due to the West’s renewed investment in Zimbabwe and not to the changing of the guard. For even if Mr. Tsvangirai proves no dictator-in-waiting, there is nothing in his political platform to indicate he will not continue to rob Peter to pay Paul until there is nobody left to rob. Entirely absent from Mr. Tsvangirai’s “philosophy” is an understanding that only the rule of law and the protection of individual liberties, private property—especially of wealth-creating whites—can begin to reduce the dizzying scale of Zimbabwe’s problems.Without these building blocks and bulwarks of prosperity and peace—Zimbabwe cannot be rebuilt.

The seductive narrative about Zimbabwe gets this much right: There is nothing new about “Robert Mugabe’s feared militiamen”²⁴ and their “rampage through Zimbabwe’s last productive farms,” as they threaten “to drive the country to starvation with a campaign not just to reclaim white-owned land but to destroy the farming system.”²⁵ Still less novel is the meaningless game of musical chairs enacted throughout Africa like clockwork. The Big Man is overthrown; another Alpha Male jockeys his way into his predecessor’s position and asserts his primacy over the people and their property. Westerners whooping it up for Tsvangirai are hip to the former, but not to the latter.

Mobutu Sese Seko ruled Zaïre ruthlessly, only to be overthrown by Laurent Kabila. Under Kabila nothing changed except Zaïre’s name; it became the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sandwiched between Nigeria’s Strongman Sani Abacha and Olusegun Obasanjo was one more general. Then military rule was abolished and Umaru Yar’Adua elected. Yar’Adua died in May 2010. Ethnic violence continues unabated; instead of extracting oil from the earth, Nigeria’s factions quarrel and kill over crude. Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki was opposed by one Raila Odinga. The latter, now Prime Minister, is of the Kalenjin clan; the former of the Kikuyu. Even in one of Africa’s success stories it all comes down to tribal rivalries. A coalition was finally formed after Kenyan blood was spilled, and public office is now being scavenged by two thieves and their posses, instead of one. Kenneth Kaunda oversaw the transition from a one-party state to the multi-party Zambia. But once the new Big Man on the block, Frederick Chiluba, was faced with an election, he banned the opposition parties—and Kaunda. In Côte D’Ivoire, stability ended with Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s reign, after which a succession of leaders have consolidated power by siccing Christians onto Muslims. While General Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda, preys—in league with Rwandans—on the Congolese, Joseph Kony, a Ugandan Homie, butchers his compatriots. The reputation of the Janjaweed militia of Sudan precedes it.

The good news now is that Zambians, under their latest leader Rupiah Bwezani Banda, are no longer dying in large numbers through ethnic clashes. The bad news is that they’re dying in large numbers from hunger instead. “Even when regimes have changed hands, new governments, whatever promises they made on arrival, have lost little time in adopting the habits of their predecessors,”²⁶ observes historian Martin Meredith. One can only hope that Zimbabwe’s Tsvangirai measures up to Zambia’s relatively benign Levy Mwanawasa, Banda’s predecessor, who died in 2008.

Of the forty-four countries of sub-Saharan Africa, The Economist’s democracy index lists twenty-three as authoritarian and thirteen as hybrids. Only seven, including South Africa, hold notionally free elections.²⁷ In all, Meredith singles out only South Africa and Botswana as well-managed African democracies.²⁸ Still, Sideshow Bob Mugabe’s epic villainy was, evidently, nothing but a detail of history. An anomaly in the annals of Africa south of the Sahara. There were no lessons to be learned relevant to averting the destruction of another—this time the last—Western outpost in Africa.

Juxtaposing the malevolent Mugabe with his eternally suffering people affords the wags of the West yet another bogus bifurcation: the long-suffering African people vs. their predatory politicians. While ordinarily Africans do seem to be caught eternally between Scylla and Charybdis, the government of Zimbabwe—and others across Africa—doesn’t stand apart from the governed; it reflects them. Consider: Early on, Mugabe had attempted to heed “a piece of advice that Mozambiquean president Samora Machel” had given him “well before independence. Machel told him simply, ‘Keep your whites.’”²⁹ Mugabe kept his whites a little longer than he had originally envisaged, thanks to the Lancaster House agreements. These had “imposed a ten-year constitutional constraint on redistributing land. … But in the early 1990s, with the expiration of the constitutional prohibition, black Zimbabweans became impatient.”³⁰ Despite this, as Richburg notes, “Mugabe remained ambivalent, recognizing, apparently, that despite the popular appeal of land confiscation, the white commercial farmers still constituted the backbone of Zimbabwe’s economy.”³¹ Restless natives would have none of it. Armed with axes and machetes, gangs of so-called war veterans proceeded to fleece farmers and 400,000 of their employees without so much as flinching. In the land invasions of 2000, 50,000 of these squatters “seized more than 500 of the country’s 4,500 commercial farms, claiming they [were] taking back land stolen under British colonial rule.”³² They assaulted farmers and their families, writes Meredith, “threatened to kill them and forced many to flee their homes, ransacking their possessions. They set up armed camps and roadblocks, stole tractors, slaughtered cattle, destroyed crops and polluted water supplies.”³³ The “occupation” was extended to private hospitals, hundreds of businesses, foreign embassies, and aid agencies. The looting of white property owners continues apace—even as, in 2009, a power-sharing agreement to divide what remains of Zimbabwe between Mugabe, Tsvangirai, and another nascent player, Arthur Mutambara, was brokered. At the time of writing, another seventy-seven of the country’s 400 remaining white-owned commercial farms had been invaded and occupied.³⁴ A unity government has meant that Mugabe and partner are seizing white-controlled farms in unison.

This may come as news to the doctrinaire democrats who doggedly conflate the will of the people with liberty, but these weapons-wielding “mobs of so-called war veterans” converging on Zimbabwe’s remaining productive farms express the democratic aspirations of most black Zimbabweans. And of their South African neighbors, a majority of whom “want the land, cars, houses, and swimming pools of their erstwhile white rulers.”³⁵ Sooner or later,” The Daily Mail’s Max Hastings has surmised,

[M]ost African leaders find it expedient to hand over the white men’s toys to their own people, without all the bother of explaining that these things should be won through education, skills, enterprise and hard labor over generations.³⁶

That’s what Mugabe discovered.

In quick succession, Tsvangirai withdrew from Zimbabwe’s runoff presidential election and sought shelter at the Dutch embassy. “We can’t win; save yourselves” was his message to his supporters. To suppress the results of the latest elections, Mugabe and his blood-besmirched junta continued to do what they do best: kneecap—and when necessary kill—members of the opposition. Across the Limpopo River, Mugabe’s pals—first Thabo Mbeki, and then Jacob Zuma—kept their lips zipped. At the time, the former South African president, Mbeki, chaired a special session of the United Nations Security Council, during which he ventured that there was no crisis in Zimbabwe. Western analysts had therefore hastily deduced that Mbeki, who was president of South Africa from 1999 until 2008, was “a sidekick to the man who ruined Zimbabwe.”³⁷ How deeply silly. Whatever one may think of Mbeki, the man led the most powerful country on the continent; Mugabe the least powerful. The better question is: Given the power differential between the two, why would Mbeki, and Mandela before him, succor Mugabe? Was Mandela Mugabe’s marionette too? Yet another preposterous proposition.

Back to the original question: Why have the leaders of the most powerful country on the continent (Mandela and Mbeki) succored the leader of the most corrupt (Mugabe)? The luminaries of Western café society were not the only ones to have given Mugabe a pass. So did blacks. “When Mugabe slaughtered 20,000 black people in southern Zimbabwe in 1983,” observes columnist Andrew Kenny, “nobody outside Zimbabwe, including the ANC, paid it the slightest attention. Nor did they care when, after 2000, he drove thousands of black farm workers out of their livelihoods and committed countless atrocities against his black population. But when he killed a dozen white farmers and pushed others off their farms, it caused tremendous excitement.”⁷³

When he socked it to Whitey, Mugabe cemented his status as hero to black activists and their white sycophants in South Africa, the US, and England.

“Whenever there is a South African radio phone-in programme [sic] on Zimbabwe, white South Africans and black Zimbabweans denounce Mugabe, and black South Africans applaud him. Therefore, one theory goes, Mbeki could not afford to criticise [sic] Mugabe,”⁷⁴ who is revered, never reviled, by South African blacks.

Left-liberal journalist John Pilger and classical liberal columnist Andrew Kenny concur: bar Zimbabweans, blacks across Africa and beyond have a soft spot for Mugabe. While issuing the obligatory denunciations of the despot, Pilger makes clear that Mugabe is merely a cog in the real “silent war on Africa,” waged as it is by bourgeois, neo-colonial businessmen and their brokers in western governments. From his comfy perch in England, this Hugo Chávez supporter preaches against colonialism and capitalism. Writing in the Mail & Guardian Online, Pilger untangled the mystery of Mbeki and Mugabe’s cozy relationship: “When Robert Mugabe attended the ceremony to mark Thabo Mbeki’s second term as President of South Africa, the black crowd gave Zimbabwe’s dictator a standing ovation.” This is a “symbolic expression of appreciation for an African leader who, many poor blacks think, has given those greedy whites a long-delayed and just come-uppance.”⁷⁵

South Africa’s strongmen are saluting their Alpha Male Mugabe by implementing a slow-motion version of his program. One only need look at the present in Zimbabwe “if you want to see the future of South Africa,” ventures Kenny.⁷⁶ When Mugabe took power in 1980, there were about 300,000 whites in Zimbabwe. Pursuant to the purges conducted by the leader and his people, fewer than 20,000 whites remain. Of these, only 200 are farmers, five percent of the total eight years ago.”⁷⁷ Although most farmland in South Africa is still owned by whites, the government intends to change the landowner’s landscape by 2014. “Having so far acquired land on a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ basis, officials have signaled that large-scale expropriations are on the cards.”⁷⁸

In South Africa, the main instrument of transformation is Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). This requires whites to hand over big chunks of the ownership of companies to blacks and to surrender top jobs to them. Almost all the blacks so enriched belong to a small elite connected to the ANC. BEE is already happening to mines, banks and factories. In other words, a peaceful Mugabe-like program is already in progress in South Africa.⁷⁹

Except that it’s not so peaceful. South Africans are dying in droves, a reality the affable Mandela, the imperious Mbeki, and their successor Zuma have accepted without piety and pity.

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.—Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Did we ever seriously intend to bring about a democratic dispensation in South Africa, with its checks and balances and accountability? Or was it about settling old colonial scores?—Breyten Breytenbach

The It Girl of foreign Aid can be quite the village scold. Actress Angelina Jolie was asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper (not quite in these words) why she thought Africans butcher, mutilate, and rape their compatriots with clockwork predictability. Why do grown, Sierra Leonean men hack off the arms of small Sierra Leonean girls and rape them to shreds? Why is this repeated in Uganda, Sudan, the Congo, Rwanda, Somalia—you name them? “We have…we colonized them,”¹ stammered Jolie. She also offered up this tautology: It’s “from the violence”—“they had their limbs cut off from the violence.” Or if you find that last redundancy meaningless, Jolie whipped another rabbit from her hat: blame “drugs, perhaps.”

When discussing crime and culpability (punishment is altogether problematic), the likes of Angelina Jolie prefer the passive voice. In the progressive’s universe, crimes are caused, not committed. Evil actions don’t incriminate, they mitigate. Perps don’t do a crime, but are driven to their deeds by forces beyond their control. Or so the experts tell us. As a popular television ad blares, “Genocide is ravaging Darfur.” In truth, Arab gangsters with genocide on their minds—the Janjaweed—are ravaging African Darfurians. (Muslim racial violence gets the same sympathetic treatment from mainstream opinion makers that black African racial violence does.)

Indeed, Angelina was parroting a widely shared misperception. In their capacities as U.N. goodwill ambassadors, or Time magazine “Persons of the Year”; in the free access they enjoy to popes and presidents, Brangelina (Jolie plus Brad Pitt), Bono, and their enablers in the media (such as the aforementioned Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper) are dictating the cultural and political script vis-à-vis Africa. To cite columnist Peggy Noonan: “These people have read an article and now want to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.” According to these self-styled social reformers, underdevelopment and poverty; perennial genocides, and spiraling crime—these are indirectly our doing. Or so the sanctimonious stars claim when they let down their guard. When it comes to development aid, we’re stingy and indifferent. If colonialism was our original sin; capitalism is our cardinal sin. Our voracious system of production is a zero-sum game. To wit, the standards of living we enjoy come at the expense of Africa’s poor. Or so these professional do-gooders will typically claim. In short, the West is responsible for African misdeeds and misadventures.

The paradox at the heart of the root-causes fraud is that causal explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed or failure is a fait accompli. Good deeds and success have no need of mitigating circumstances. Confronted with people who perpetrate evil and live chaotic lives, lefties will toss free will to the wind. They acknowledge human agency only if and when adaptive actions are involved. (And even then only half-heartedly, as left-liberals are forever exalting man’s basest instincts and debasing his most exalted. Trust a liberal to see God in cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope.)

American pseudo-intellectuals—that generally means the tele-experts—have been tireless in developing the “science” of excuse-making, where misbehavior is medicalized or politicized and aggression seen, invariably, as a symptom of oppression (for which the putative oppressor should be blamed). Their exculpatory idiom in the case of the common criminal is “Daddy didn’t love me.” In the case of the Jihadist du jour it’s “America loves Israel more than me.” And the Boer killer is a “victim” of apartheid.

Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality makes it amenable to “therapeutic” or state interventions; pharmacology or foreign aid, take your pick. In the case of South African criminals, Time magazine exemplifies the root-causes reasoning, having asserted, in a 2004 article, that unless a successful handover takes place in South Africa, crime will persist.² By Time’s reasoning, crime is caused by deprivation and not depravity. Therefore, accelerating race-based wealth distribution will remove the reasons for crime.

Here we arrive at the crux of the transformation underway in South Africa. “Even assuming that…improvements were possible under conditions of hard-core affirmative action, it must be admitted that criminal justice treats the symptom and not the cause of social violence.”³ Better policing, more efficient courts and more secure prisons—these are valiant but vain efforts. Violent crime cannot be easily curtailed, not now that an entirely different set of values and norms has permeated South African institutions and society at large. The point can be illustrated by way of an American example:

During the neoconservative-dominated Bush administration, Americans were lectured that the democratic impulse was universal and a democratic heart throbbed in every thorax. With enough “persuasion” (and a little shock and awe), Afghani and Iraqi alike could be fashioned into global democrats, citizens of the world. Struck by historical and philosophical Alzheimer’s, leaders like Condoleezza Rice took to comparing the carnage in Iraq to the constitutional cramps of early America. This unlikely comparison was made by those who take for granted, or don’t know, their own philosophical heritage, and are ignorant of the history of others. Then as now, there exists no philosophical connection between the feuding Mohammedans (Iraqis) and the heirs to Baron de Montesquieu’s classical liberalism (early Americans). Faction fighting in Iraq is as old as the sand dunes, and tyrants as constant as the Tigris. Similarly, the new dispensation emerging in South Africa has very little to do with the birth pangs of a fledgling Western democracy, and a great deal in common with age-old enmities seen elsewhere in Africa.

Western civilization, and the legal philosophy of liberalism that evolved within it, may be defined in terms of the continuous development—revived in western Europe, circa A.D. 700—of certain distinctive institutions, beliefs and values, including “certain ideas concerning the nature of reality and of man,”⁴ to borrow from James Burnham. These ancient traditions cannot easily be grafted onto other cultures. Where they have taken root, it seems to have been the result of colonization and imperialism more than emulation.

The ideas of human rights—the dignity of the individual and the respect for diversity—are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. “European mores are unavoidably the basis of modern life.”⁵ If not for Africa’s bumptious encounter with the West, these concepts would still be as alien there as the jejune Jolie (who claims “she has found her place among these people in need,” but face it; even if Jolie chose to relocate to a mud hut, wear grass skirts, and carry groceries on her head, she’d still be immune to every cruel contingency plaguing Africans). The same goes for the ever-endangered democratic institutions which the West has planted in that continent’s blood-soaked soil. The fate of South Africa and Iraq gives rise to the depressing thought that perhaps liberal civilization has spread about as far as it’s going to do in the foreseeable future.

Much as Americans are taught to react to the sins of slavery and Jim Crow, white South Africans treat apartheid as Sisyphus his rock: a burden that defines them. Forgotten in the recriminations over that contemptible caste system is the irony to which leading Africanists have called attention: “[T]he consolidation of a democracy was more likely in the ‘settler’ societies of Africa, where there was a tradition of electoral competition, than in neopatrimonial regimes like Zaïre or Rwanda where competition was outlawed.”

What do you know?

“[T]he existence of a democracy for whites, which for so long was seen as the insuperable obstacle to an inclusive democracy, turned out to be an asset.”⁷³ (To be accurate, South African liberal institutions go back to nineteenth century Cape-Colony liberals, who “strove to free people from human bondage and to give whites and blacks the vote.”⁷⁴) Moreover—and as Hermann Giliomee, who might be considered the David Hackett Fischer of South Africa, has observed—“to project the democracy and human rights of the interim constitution of 1993 as the kind of democracy the ANC has always fought for is indeed to produce a giant optical illusion.”⁷⁵ For the kind of democracy and human rights espoused by the ANC in the 1980s was precisely the fraudulent “democracy” of societies like the USSR and Cuba. “Indeed the Freedom House ratings of 1980 scored Cuba and the USSR lower in human rights than apartheid South Africa!”⁷⁶

For better or for worse, the National Party of the apartheid era was not a Chilean or Argentinean military dictatorship, “but a party re-elected by whites in successive elections.”⁷⁷ The dominant-party despotic democracy that South Africa is fast becoming is not in this tradition. Still, “Everything that goes wrong with it is considered ‘a legacy of apartheid,’ writes an exacerbated Jim Peron, an American expatriate, whose idealism drove him to settle in post-apartheid South Africa. “The violence in the rest of Africa is a ‘legacy of colonialism.’ It’s a legacy that has gone on for almost forty years. Every time something goes wrong (and that happens constantly), the same litany of excuses is recited. ‘We inherited this problem from the corrupt apartheid regime.’”⁷⁸ There’s another pesky problem with this particular blame-game: South Africa’s flourishing criminal class consists mainly of youngsters who’ve come of age and blossomed under black rule.

If anything, by staving off communism, the apartheid regime saved black South Africans from an even worse moral and material fate.

Except for Rhodesia before Mugabe, minority-ruled South Africa, with all its depredations, offered Africans more than any other country on the Dark Continent. Patterns of migration have always functioned as clues to social reality.⁷⁹ Then as now, “black migration patterns into South Africa far exceeded black migration patterns out of South Africa.”⁸⁰ Granted, entering African migrants were not “voting with their feet” for apartheid, but they were certainly voting for law and order and a livelihood.

In the “first twenty three years of apartheid, between 1948 and 1981, the South African economy grew at a rate of 4.5 percent.”⁸¹ Of course, in the famous words attributed to both Disraeli and Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Duly, Marxists put the high growth rate down to exploitation. However, when “exploitation” was replaced with “liberation”—and Africans broke free of the colonial yoke to gain political independence—they promptly established planned economies, in whose shadow nothing could grow, plunging their respective countries into despair and destitution.

To the liberal West, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere were the faces of black liberation, but both leaders cut a swathe of destruction through the rural economies of their respective countries, Zambia and Tanzania. One shudders to think what the ANC would have wrought on the sophisticated, industrialized economy of South Africa if given a chance. Had Mandela ascended to power in the 1960s instead of languishing on Robben Island and in Pollsmoor Prison, he would have nationalized the South African economy and banned private enterprise. That’s what the ANC’s Charter called for in 1955. That’s what South Africa’s black-ruled neighbors to the north did.

While black Africa and East Europe circled the drain due to communism, South Africa was experiencing an economic explosion, courtesy of the NP’s conservative economics,⁸² which columnist Andrew Kenny cautiously commends for “guarding some important aspects of private enterprise and protecting some vital areas of democracy,”⁸³ to say nothing of maintaining the rule of law. An oasis in the African desert, South Africa’s economy grew at an annual rate of six percent during the 1960s. Time magazine, BPC (before political correctness), crowned H. F. Verwoerd, the architect of this prosperity—and of “separate development”—“one of the ablest leaders Africa has ever produced.”⁸⁴

In his submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, F. W. de Klerk, who received a Nobel Peace prize for surrendering South Africa to the ANC, corrected the record: “Apartheid was not only about white privilege but also about development and redistribution of income from whites to blacks. The economy had grown by an average of 3.5 percent per year under apartheid, the black school population grew by 250 percent in the first twenty-five years of apartheid, and the black share of total personal income had nearly doubled from twenty percent in the mid-1970s to thirty seven percent in 1995, while that of whites declined from seventy one to forty nine percent.”⁸⁵ As bad as the Bantu Education system was, it vastly improved black literacy.⁸⁶ Twelve years into the Nationalist government’s rule, the rate of literacy among the Bantu of South Africa was already higher than that of any other state in Africa, or that of India.⁸⁷

Indeed, the increase in the African population’s learning and longevity under apartheid attests to the constantly improving public health and government services for blacks. From the 8.6 million recorded in the 1946 census, the black population rose to 17.4 million in 1974 and 28.3 million by 1991. From the 1940s to the 1990s, life expectancy for blacks soared from thirty-eight to sixty-one years!⁸⁸

Since the dawn of democracy in 1994, life expectancy has plummeted by nine years.⁸⁹ Crime has reached crippling levels. As documented in detail earlier in this volume (above all in the chapter called “Crime, The Beloved Country”), crime in the New South Africa is second to none in the world and certainly much higher than in the Old South Africa. By Time’s telling,⁹⁰ unemployment had jumped from nineteen percent in 1994 (before “freedom”) to thirty-one percent in 2003 (after “freedom”). Less damning data provided by an Economic Advisor to former President Mbeki puts unemployment in 1993 at 31.2 percent, steadily rising until, in 2005, it stood at 38.8 percent. The trend is consistent and persistent.⁹¹ Breyten Breytenbach has been breast-beating over the New South Africa’s barbaric criminality, the plague of raping, theft, and fraud, the indecent enrichment of the few, manipulation, redeployment as a form of impunity, public office as an exercise in scavenging, the breakdown of essential services, entrenched and continuing racism, the lack of public morals or even common sense … the irrevocable ‘progress’ of South Africa to a totalitarian party-state.⁹²

Giliomee confirms that both the government and the private sector accelerated wealth distribution from white to black in the 1970s. By 1994, blacks were consuming taxes; whites were paying them: Blacks “contributed R23 billion to government revenue, and received R34 billion in cash-and-kind transfers from the government, of which the largest part went to social welfare, housing, health and education.” According to the International Monetary Fund, “whites in 1987 paid an average of thirty two percent of their incomes in tax, but received only nine percent in benefits.”⁹³

There is a lot to dislike about the self-aggrandizing Brangelina of Benetton and their fashion accessories: couture, color-coded kids. But where is Bollywood’s match for these giving, gullible, Anglo-American do-gooders? Wherever you look, those perpetually demonized Europeans are untiring in doing the world’s good works, and saving the planet and its creatures.

According to Forbes Magazine, the largest charities by revenue in the United States [which, I suspect, means the largest in the world] are the Mayo Clinic, Salvation Army, YMCAs in the United States, United Way, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, American National Red Cross, Catholic Charities USA, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Goodwill Industries International, and The Arc of the United States.⁹⁴

Who were the worthies who founded these magnificent, munificent organizations?

Mayo was founded by William Worrall Mayo (hint: he was not from Bangalore or Beirut). The Salvation Army by William Booth (another WASP). The same goes for the YMCA (George Williams, yet another WASP). Two ministers and a rabbi brought the United Way to fruition. Drs. George Crile, Frank Bunts, and William Lower founded the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 1921, and Clara Barton the Red Cross. We know who founded Doctors Without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières. The most generous people in the world are Bill and Melinda Gates, founders of the Gates Foundation, the World’s largest charitable group.

The same sort of kindly humanitarians are at work at the Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital in Soweto. Soweto is “the black satellite city outside Johannesburg,” South Africa. “Saving Soweto”⁹⁵ is a superb documentary by the Arab television network Al Jazeera, detailing the heroic work undertaken at the Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital. Back when the present writer’s uncle, Professor Charles Isaacson, headed the Department of Pathology there, the place was just plain Baragwanath; nobody thought it essential, in that far-off era, to invoke in the hospital’s title an ANC Marxist leader like Chris Hani (who was murdered in 1993). But some things don’t change, even if names do. Today, as was the case under apartheid, “Baragwanath” is “the only hospital in South Africa’s biggest township.” Now as then, the staff members ministering to the multitudes in Soweto are supervised and mentored by selfless Christian and Jewish medical men and women. What would South Africa do without these good people?! Where in the world are their African, Asian and Latin equals? And why is their kind slandered so?

If anything is guaranteed to help freeze a people in time it is a culture of blame. Those who’ve had their fill of “black pain” will understand why the phrase is held here between the tongs of quotation marks. My family tree was rudely truncated by an event far more fatal than was slavery: the Holocaust. I do not carry this legacy with me. I blame only those, mostly long dead, who planned and executed the Final Solution. Members of my family have never ascribed their misfortunes and misdeeds to that contemporary calamity. They’ve owned their failings. Like American Japanese, who were interned en masse in places like Manzanar or Minidoka during World War II, Jews have gone on to become among the highest earners in the countries to which they migrate.

94 William P. Barrett, “The 200 Largest U.S. Charities,” Forbes Magazine, November 22, 2006.

95 “Saving Soweto,” Al Jazeera, January 2009,
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/general/2009/01/200919143440701450.html (accessed January 2009).

In The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek insisted that “The assigning of responsibility is based, not [necessarily] on what we know to be true in a particular case, but on what we believe will be the probable effects of encouraging people to behave rationally and considerately.”⁹⁶

Another wise man, libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, counseled that “In dealing with crime … liberals are concentrating on the wrong root causes. That is, on ‘poverty’ or ‘child abuse’ instead of a rotten immoral character and the factors that may give rise to such a character, e.g., lack of respect for private property, unwillingness to work, and emphasis on short-run ‘kicks’ instead of forethought about the future.”⁹⁷

Still another smart man, Thomas Aquinas, “believed we are free to be either virtuous or vicious and are responsible for being one or the other.”⁹⁸ According to philosopher Anthony Kenny, Aquinas believed “freedom belongs to the will in so far as it is capable of acting on the results of deliberation about alternatives.”⁹⁹

Be it in Africa or in America, the cornerstone of a free society rests on the concept of the individual as a responsible, self-determining agent. As long as this concept is under attack, free societies will be imperiled.

However, as essential as it is for the health and wealth of a free society, the idea of individual responsibility is insufficient. The values which people—and peoples—bring to the polity are inestimable, and they have such compounding impacts on social stability from generation to generation that they can all too readily be underestimated. Cultural influences cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair. Athena was sprung from her father’s head; democracy has grown slowly in the soil below. Athens became Greece became Europe became the West. And there it stopped. Africa has not become America.

When I am weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle. —Louis Veuillot^[†]

To love the little platoon we belong to is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.—Edmund Burke, 1790

The West’s insistence on bringing the Old South Africa to its political knees has had another unforeseeable outcome: an Islam redux. As the influence of Christianity receded after the 1994 transition, that of Islam increased. This is a great shame—and not only because it is to the detriment of America’s national interests. Islam is no tonic for a country wracked by unfathomable cruelty and violence. The continent cries out for a spiritual transformation. A belief system according to which the murderous, not the meek, shall inherit the earth—provided they’re Muslim—is not what the “Rambo Nation” requires.

South Africa was a staunchly traditional Christian country. Stores closed on Sundays, which was a holy day, not a holiday. Television came late to the place but so did pornography and the gay rights movement. “From liberalism to the creation of apartheid, Christianity has been of great importance in shaping many political ideologies,”¹ notes the editor of a volume titled Christianity in South Africa. Christian mission schools were the engine of education in Africa,² including the education of black, anti-apartheid leaders. Even more than “secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts,”³ Christian evangelism in Africa has helped change hearts.

The Christian faith has shaped the relationship between the European missionaries and the Africans, and it gave contours to the fight both to establish and abolish apartheid.

As for the establishment of apartheid: neo-Calvinist theology lent metaphysical and moral justification to the Grand Design of H. F. Verwoerd, also the architect of apartheid. In the Book of Genesis and in the “happenings at Babel,”⁴ Verwoerd and his devout coreligionists believed they had found the firmest foundation for “the idea of the nation as the ordination of God,”⁵ in general. And, in particular, for the notion that each nation needed to exist as well as maintain its distinct nature. “The fact that God had given the various nations their separate existences,” posited E. P. Groenewald, professor of New Testament Studies,“implied that they should remain separate. Israel itself was the proof of how God had willed national separateness.”⁶ Scripture itself, argued scholars of Groenewald’s ilk, “provided full support for this”. For one thing, there was Deuteronomy 32:8:

When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance

When he divided the sons of man

He fixed their bounds according to the number of sons of God…⁷

As for the abolition of apartheid: the struggle to reconcile the idea of separate development with the Christian Gospel moved other Christian intellectuals to oppose apartheid. And in particular, one of Afrikanerdom’s foremost anti-apartheid activists was Reverend Beyers Naude, who resigned his position as a Moderator and as minister in the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK),⁸ in protest against that body’s pro-apartheid stance. There were many others who, like Naude, believed apartheid had defiled their Christian faith. Examples are Dr. Reverend Allan Boesak and Reverend Trevor Huddleston.

The Judeo-Christian teachings underpinned great moral struggles in both South Africa and America, separate development in the former country, slavery and segregation in the latter. There, I said it. Like early Americans, the Puritans of South Africa had a deep affinity for the Mosaic faith and morals. In The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk traced the influence on the New England Puritans of the Hebraic faith and traditions. For sustenance and guidance, the Puritans drew on Exodus—whose theme is the flight from bondage to freedom—as did they on Kings and Romans. Like the New England Puritans, the Dutch Calvinists who settled South Africa were steeped in “John Calvin’s Hebrew scholarship.”⁹ Both in Africa and in America, the Puritans saw in the children of Israel and the story of the Exodus a metaphor for their own quest; their Protestantism they considered as a continuation of God’s covenant with the people of the Old Testament.¹⁰ As they interpreted it, the preservation of their respective communities of believers and its cultural characteristics was preordained.¹¹

If Deuteronomy furnished the NGK, mainstay of the apartheid state, with the theological justification for “ordained separation,” then devout, Jewish, anti-apartheid activists took away something entirely different from this early book—the fifth of thirty nine—in the Hebrew Bible. My own father was a leader in the Promethean struggle to end apartheid. Rabbi Abraham Benzion Isaacson’s fight for justice for South Africa’s blacks was inspired by the advanced concept of Jewish social justice showcased in Deuteronomy and in The Prophets. Deuteronomy is replete with instructions to protect the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widows, the orphans, the aliens. This ethical monotheism, developed centuries before classical Greek philosophy, is echoed throughout the Hebrew Bible, and is expounded upon by the classical prophets, who railed so magnificently against power and cultural corruption.

Roared Isaiah: “There is blood on your hands; wash yourself and be clean. Put away the evil of your deeds, away out of my sight. Cease to do evil and learn to do right, pursue justice and champion the oppressed; give the orphan his rights, plead the widow’s cause” (1:11-17). Right or wrong, this was a role Daddy felt compelled to assume. As he explained to the editor of Cutting Through The Mountain: Interviews With South African Jewish Activists, his hatred of injustice “was greatly strengthened by the reading of the [Hebrew] prophets. They are the world’s teachers”:

I got it from the inner spark of the Torah; from the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus: ‘you shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.’ … whatever I did and have done up till now … was based on … Jewish teaching. Not Marxism, not Leninism, and not any other ‘ism, not liberalism. And not Zionism. But Torah.¹²

In the Hebrew prophets, in particular—from Amos to the second Isaiah—John Adams saw exemplars for the American order, political and private. “A vast majority of Americans at the time of the framing of the constitution”¹³ were intimately familiar with the Law and the teachings of the prophets. In Kirk’s telling, these laws were “not a set of harsh prohibitions imposed by an arbitrary tribal deity. Instead they are liberating rules that enable people to diminish the tyranny of sin; that teach people how to live with one another and in relation to God, how to restrain violence and fraud, how to know justice and to raise themselves above the level of predatory animals.”¹⁴ “The great prophets restrained the kings’ ambitions,”¹⁵ and constantly—at great personal risk—rebuked the king and the people for their transgressions.