Will English-speakers join a Volkstaat?

Anton Barnard from PRAAG on the subject of English-speaking whites in the volkstaat.

The ruling Xhosa Nostra are determinedly English-speaking, to the extent that I suspect they are secretly ashamed of their mother tongue.

Be that as it may. Let's for a moment leave aside the atrocities committed against the Boers by the British in the Anglo-Boer war of a century and more ago, and let's never underestimate the feelings of hatred that the concentration camps and genocide perpetrated by the British still arouse. Let's rather concentrate on the modern-day white English-speakers who live in the strange conglomeration of different nations, but without any sense of nationhood, called South Africa.

The Afrikaners have long suffered prejudice at the hands of English-speaking whites, rather than the other way around. I still remember the taunts of "stupid Dutchman" from my youth, and even today English- speaking radio presenters are fond of mocking Afrikaners for their accents. Too many English whites, some of Eugene TerreBlanche's supporters are a caricature of Afrikaners - stupid, fat, alcoholic, backward, khaki-wearing racists.

It was English-speaking South Africans who were in general much more in favour of transformation in the old South Africa, compared to Afrikaners, with student politics at Wits and UCT being decidedly more radical and left-wing than at Tuks, for example. Nobody thought it strange if a white English-speaker supported the Struggle, rich Northern Suburbs-bored-housewife supporters of the Black Sash being a case in point. When an Afrikaner supported the Struggle, it was highly unusual and such a person gained instant notoriety - Bram Fischer and Beyers Naude, for example.

And yet, the New-South African joke is squarely at the expense of English-speaking whites. The worst fears of Afrikaners are starting to materialize in the form of rampant racial discrimination, disguised as "transformation", "employment equity" and "black empowerment".

The supreme irony is that the naïve English-speakers who believed that Africa was going to embrace the principles of liberal democracy, social justice and minority rights they had in mind, are also feeling the exact same heat when applying for a job as Afrikaners do. They are also being murdered by gangs of thugs produced by the very revolution which a lot of them actively supported - Michaela Rawstorne was not an Afrikaner. When the Pan-Africanist Students Movement of Azania (PASMA) demonstrated recently in Pretoria, they chanted, "Kill all whites - English and Afrikaans". To the ANC's Africanists and other black racists, a white is a white is a white, English or Afrikaans-speaking, and whites need to be "transformed" into oblivion.

I would venture that English-speaking whites are not only in the same boat as their Afrikaner compatriots in terms of experiencing racism, ANC-style, but that they are, in fact, worse off. Look at the clumsy term "English-speaking South African", as compared to "Afrikaner", for example. The very fact that there is no collective name for English-speaking South Africans, says a lot about their lack of identity.

They are not English or British, and many of them have been in South Africa for generations. But they are clearly not South African either, at least not to the racially obsessed ANC, not having nearly enough pigmentation to be acceptable in the twisted new paradigm of forced domination by means of demographic swamping. There are few people Thabo Mbeki despises more than Tony Leon, for example.

There is not a very clearly discernible white English-South African culture either. Many of the ways in which they would distinguish themselves from, say, an Australian, are actually reflections or a pale imitation of Afrikaner culture.

What are the choices facing English-speaking South Africans, then? There are probably only three. The first, which many have chosen, along with admittedly a lot of Afrikaners, is emigration to a suitably lily-white Anglo-Saxon country. The second is to try and live with the monstrous regime they were instrumental in creating in South Africa. Due to the blatant racism practised by the ANC, this means internal emigration, hiding from crime behind packs of dogs and electric fences, a lowering of expectations in the workplace and generally keeping a low profile.

The third option, which I don't think would sound very appealing to most white English-speakers, would be to join forces with or even become Afrikaners, in order to free themselves from the oppression of the ANC. The only practical, long-term way of doing this, is self-governance by whites in their own country, homeland or Volkstaat, if you prefer. Many of them would, however, object that globalization means that English is the lingua franca of the planet, and becoming Afrikaners would disadvantage them in terms of being denizens of the Global Village.

If anybody is going to make a "Volkstaat" a success, however, it will be Afrikaners. You need a "volk" to make a Volkstaat, and English-speaking whites can clearly not be described as a nation. Perhaps some English-speakers would say to themselves that it is better to have your children taught in schools with real standards, to live in a safe neighbourhood, and to get something for your tax money, but then have to speak Afrikaans, than it is to face the bleak Africanist nightmare of a second Zimbabwe.

These people may then become Afrikaners in a Volkstaat. But I'm not holding my breath that there will be many of them.

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