In Support of the Volkstaat: A Holistic American Policy in South Africa

Pictured: Cape Town, South Africa Boat Terminal

Director’s Note: At the New York Young Republicans Gala last December, about 1,000 if us attendees toasted to the Battle Of Blood River in support of the Afrikaner people.

89% of Afrikaners in South Africa are Christian. Their religiosity stems in large part from the vow the Voortrekkers, ancestors of the Afrikaners, made to God before the Battle of Blood River.

In 1838, the Voortrekkers, ancestors of the Afrikaners, led by Piet Retief purchased land from the Zulus. To celebrate, the Zulu king invited Retief and the other leaders of the Voortrekkers to a party and asked them to leave their weapons behind as a sign of respect. They did so, but the Zulus killed all the Voortrekkers present, making sure to kill Retief last so he would watch his people—including his son—die.

The Zulus continued on to slaughter the Voortrekkers including women and children. A few months later Retief’s body was found with the treaty signed by the Zulu king offering them the land.

Andries Pretorius led a small team of the Voortrekkers that were left to confront the Zulus. They were outnumbered some 12,000 Zulus to about 400 Voortrekker men on horseback. The evening before the battle, the religious leader of the Voortrekkers, Sarel Cilliers, led them in a vow to God that if they succeeded, they and their descendants would recognize this day as a sabbath and make sure honor goes to God, not themselves for what He did for them.

Despite being severely outnumbered, not one Voortrekker was killed.

Therefore, Afrikaners honor that day, December 16th, as a holiday and remember their commitment to God. As a result, the Afrikaners are a uniquely patriotic and religious community deeply connected to their land.

By Mike Adams:

The Trump administration has done a lot to improve the fortunes of the Afrikaner people- most recently by granting an additional 10,000 South African refugees to the United States. Afrikaners are—without exaggeration—some of the most mistreated and threatened sons and daughters of the West. We may have our problems with foreigners and their children here in the United States and across the pond in Europe, but in South Africa, the many forms of legal discrimination and personal endangerment that White South Africans face is astonishing.

In response to this injustice against one of the peoples of the West the Trump administration has taken refreshingly swift action. For while American refugee admittance programs have been all but shut down, an exception has been carved out for White South Africans.

Tens of thousands of White South Africans are expected to be welcomed into the country over the course of the next three years while at the same time the Trump administration works to better their situation in South Africa. Afrikaners are now regularly invited to events at the American embassy in South Africa while in D.C. Afrikaner community leaders have been entertained by members of the Vice President’s staff.

Leaders of the Afrikaner rights organization AfriForum now have regular calls with American officials and the US government is overall highly receptive to the issues of Afrikaners.

One can hardly think of a group more deserving of the attention of American foreign policy than the gravely threatened Whites of South Africa, but this current Trump policy is only a stopgap. A stopgap if left to linger as a permanent policy may threaten Afrikaner identity.

(Read and watch our interview with Ernst Roets of Lex Libertas and Joost Strydom of Orania here.)

By all moral means and measures it is right that the American government is doing what it can to protect a vulnerable group of Westerners. Americans share a faith, ethnic origin, and civilization with the Whites of South Africa after all. Afrikaners and English South Africans are the descendants of Dutch and English protestants and so were most of the founders of the American nation and most Heritage Americans today. Yet, our refugee policy is only serving to protect individual Afrikaners, not their unique culture and way of life.

Any Afrikaner who comes to the United States will be expected to integrate into the American nation, and rightly so, but this will also threaten the long-term viability of their ethnic identity—especially if the number of Afrikaners who relocate to the United States is larger than the administration expects. Once a sufficient number of Afrikaners have established themselves in the United States and begin to acquire Green Cards and American citizenship it is highly likely that the usual chain-migration processes will result in many times more White South Africans coming to the United States via those paths than could ever be admitted through the refugee program.

Regardless of the numbers that come, it is all but inevitable that within a generation the children of those Afrikaners who settle in the United States will be functionally indistinguishable from any other protestant White American.

This integration reality leaves a yawning gap in America’s attempt to protect the Afrikaners. We can bring them here to protect them from the persecution of the South African government and to keep them safe from the anti-White crime that plagues South Africa, but we still need to fill that yawning gap in our foreign policy toward the rainbow nation: a way to ensure Afrikaners can continue to exist as an ethno-religious group, and one free from rule by others. That solution is for the administration in Washington to explicitly support the Afrikaner dream of a state of their own. America must support the Volkstaat.

The most important reason for backing the Volkstaat is that it is the moral thing to do. Multicultural societies inevitably fall into a Hobbes’ war of all against all. Right now, the multicultural South Africa is being run to the benefit of its Black majority (or more precisely its Black ANC elite) and primarily to the detriment of the Whites of that country, though Coloureds and Asians in South Africa have also faced issues under certain quota systems.

The failures of the ANC elite have even led to a country that cannot provide enough water, cannot keep the lights on, cannot keep the streets safe, and cannot keep White South Africans safe. All of these issues have culminated in numerous separatist movements across the country, including Cape independence, Zulu independence, and the Afrikaner Volkstaat movement. For, as with any multiethnic experiment, South Africa is one of continued failure. First there was Apartheid which was a morally and logistically unsustainable system of White rule that eventually gave way to the current morally and logistically unsustainable rule of the ANC and their vision of a rainbow nation (sans Whites).

All of this leads to the inevitable conclusion that in order to keep Afrikaners safe in the largest numbers and ensure the continuity of their unique culture they must have a state of their own. The Afrikaners need a place of their own where they govern for themselves and only themselves. An example of this already exists in Orania where only Afrikaners may live, work, and make a life. This ethos would be extended to the whole of the Volkstaat.

The United States has a long history of supporting ethnic separatist movements. America supports the independence of the Albanians of Kosovo, it supported the Tibetan cause, and American foreign policy currently supports the autonomy and self-determination of the Kurds in Iraq.

It would be refreshing for American nationalists if the United States government supported the self-determination of a Christian European people like the Afrikaners over a Muslim, Arab, or Asian group with whom the American people have little in common. Also, unlike these groups, Afrikaners will require comparatively little support once their sovereignty has been secured.

In Orania, the Afrikaner community has transformed an area of desert into a fertile and lush place where homes are surrounded by grass and greenery and where the fields produce a range of crops and livestock. The town produces its own drinking water, electricity, runs a school with a near 100% graduation rate, and enforces its own laws without interference from unreliable South African police.

There is no doubt that Afrikaners are capable of building a self-sustaining nation-state with relatively little financial commitment from outside sources, unlike the Albanians of Kosovo or the Kurdish who rely heavily on American and European patronage.

The United States also won’t need to put American troops or lives at risk to secure Afrikaner independence. As the second largest import and export partner and the largest provided of foreign aid to South Africa the US a great deal of leverage over the government in Pretoria. Just as the West did to the apartheid regime America could make life incredibly hard for the elite of Black dominated South Africa. The US can and should cut them off from sources of banking, luxury goods, import, and trade revenues. The spouses of South African elites should not be allowed to travel to the West and the children of South African elites should be barred from attending American universities. The United States can and should bring cases against South Africa to the International Courts regarding the treatment of Afrikaners, and the American state can use its control of major international institutions like the IMF to assure that South Africa receives little financial assistance until the government in Pretoria agrees to give the Afrikaners a sovereign Volkstaat.

More than 30 years ago, the West succeeded in destroying the apartheid regime and, inadvertently, the only protection Afrikaners had from mistreatment. Since then the West has left them to languish in a failing multi-ethnic state. It’s time for a change. It’s time an Afrikaner Volkstaat.