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This Will Not End Well
Julius Malema, leader of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters party.
Do you pay much attention to events in Africa? Me neither. It appears, however, that South Africa is determined to head down the same bloody path as Zimbabwe – that of radical Land Reform and racial retribution.
On February 27, the South African parliament voted 243-81 to begin the process of amending the country’s constitution to allow for confiscation of white-owned land without compensation. The motion was put forward by the Marxist party — the Economic Freedom Fighters — and supported by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party and the new president Cyril Ramaphosa (who just took office on February 18). This is bad news, not just for the white landowners but also for ordinary South African citizens and especially the poor (of which there will be more if this policy is implemented). It is also bad news for the entire African continent as South Africa is one of the few African nations with anything resembling a modern economy.
Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) gained its independence in 1980 and, to date, that first day of independence was probably the high-water mark for the nation. It quickly became a one-party nation run by the far-left Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and its demagogic leader Robert Mugabe. Early on, he implemented a toxic blend of statist economic policies, racial resentment and retribution, and government corruption, culminating in the confiscation of white-owned property.
In 1973, the per capita GDP of Rhodesia was $1,432 which has fallen to $1,081 as of 2017. I’ve included a couple of graphs which illustrate this economic decline but economic statistics tell only part of the story. In recent years, Zimbabwe has experienced epidemics of diseases such as cholera (not to mention malaria and plague) which have long since been brought under control in the developed world.
This 2005 article by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof describes how ordinary black Zimbabweans wish they could get back the white, racist government that had oppressed them prior to 1980 in order that they and their families might have enough food to live and survive. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe, which peaked shortly after the 1980 independence at 60.97 years (men & women combined) fell precipitously to a low of 44.06 years in 2002, although thankfully it has begun to rise in the last few years.
The first graph shows the GDP per capita for South Africa, Zimbabwe, and several other African nations from 1960 to 2012 as a percentage of the world average GDP per capita. The second graph compares the GDP per capita of Zimbabwe to other sub-Saharan countries from 1980-2014 with certain recent eras of Zimbabwe color-coded (pink = Land Reform, grey = Hyperinflation, light blue = government of national unity).
It seems that South Africa, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, has been able to avoid the sort of racial acrimony experienced in Zimbabwe upon the end of the archaic and evil apartheid system and the start of majority rule. Unfortunately, it looks as if that will not remain the case. There are few worse policies any nation can pursue than to murder and/or run off its most productive citizens but that appears to be the path that South Africa is set to embark upon. This article provides a much more knowledgeable take on the situation than I could.
I came across this story on the Instapundit website a couple of days ago and since then I’ve been searching without much success for articles about this in the US press. That is disturbing to me because this seems like a very big deal.
Published in General
I agree. I just came upon him when researching this issue and I like the cut of his jib. I’ll probably add him to the list of blogs I look at on a regular basis.
Not necessarily. The Normans did this with the Anglo-Saxons.
It’s more complicated than you make out.
Assimilation and non-assimilation matter.
My guess is there will not be any assimilation – just as there was none in the past -which was the disaster producing this disaster.
You might think I’m exaggerating, but I believe this is what would ultimately happen in the US if we start down the path of reparations.
Yes, it seems to be doing quite well. Checking into it a little, Botswana has a different history than either Zimbabwe or South Africa. It had the good fortune to be colonized by Great Britain and so did not experience apartheid. It also was exposed to Britain’s philosophy and practice of an impartial rule of law, limited government and free markets. Also, they gained their independence earlier – in the mid-1960’s. and since gaining that independence they appear to have taken it upon themselves to follow the best aspects of the British system (as mentioned above) and have made a point of avoiding the racial resentment politics. They score well on a variety of metrics that attempt assess things like freedom and development especially for an African nation.
Good fortune indeed. I have been to a number of former British colonies, and a number of former colonies of other European powers. The former British colonies are, without exception, vastly superior. More prosperous, less corrupt, more free, with better governance in every way. Thank God I live in a country that got its start as a bunch of British colonies.
Agree.
Isn’t Zimbabwe a former British Colony?
Of course, the lands taken by the Boer and British had not been occupied by the current tribal inhabitants since time immemorial… those inhabitants would be the Khoisan peoples who were driven out, oppressed, and in some places exterminated by the various peoples who colonized the Khoisan homelands and ultimately fought it out in the Mfecane… and some of whom had the agricultural surpluses to organize a Spartan-like society because of cereal crops brought from the New World by the Portuguese… and I don’t notice any current proposals to turn the various tribal homelands back to the Khoisan.
One might say that what’s going on is basically another tribal war between the less recent tribal conquerors and the more recent tribes of European origin, who, with European backing, European social technologies, and ultimately the machine gun and other mid- to late- 19th century European military technology managed to prevail for quite some time.
Some of the growth of the black middle class has been via the distribution of bureaucratic spoils and the resultant natural expansion of the administrative state as the provider of spoils. Some of it has been genuine innovation; if enough of the new black middle class are makers rather than takers, there might be a constituency for a less violent solution. It looks like Ramaphosa is probably a taker/crony capitalist rather than a maker and has decided to ride the tiger of the violent takers. Where he can steer it is still uncertain.
There are competing visions of how pre-industrial farmers can modernize. Europe provided one such vision; it also, through racism and crony capitalism, proved at best a mixed blessing in its colonies. This is creating an opportunity for the Chinese, themselves hardly strangers to racism (as this gweilo learned from occasional drunken rants from his Chinese college roommates) going in both directions–as well as imperialism and crony capitalism.
And electrical power. Rolling blackouts are now a way of life.
Lack of electrical power and mining engineers who know what they are doing is also hampering mining for gold, diamonds and platinum, further degrading the SA economy.
Nelson Mandela brought many injustices to the attention of the world, but he was peaceful and tried to forge solutions. The same parameters that lead to Marxism, Communism and Fascism in other countries are ripe here – deep resentment and anger against each other, racial strife, and in walks a leader minus the balance of faith and reason. These governments end in so much suffering, and you can be sure this situation is being fueled by bad actors outside of South Africa.
I remembered decades ago, reading a story where the Christian evangelist Pat Robertson said the next world war, WWIII, will start in the Horn of Africa. That stuck with me because I thought it was odd. At the same time, there is a major evangelizing effort in this dangerous region by both Protestant and Catholic organizations – Ron Susek has been very involved. His program is called Great Commission Youth Summit.
http://www.seaministries.org/faithwalknews
http://catholicherald.co.uk/news/2016/04/26/south-african-bishop-warns-politicians-against-war-rhetoric/
The Chinese can finish building out the “String of Pearls” and wait for the aggressive natives of ZA to kill each other off and then step in to save the day, which probably won’t be much fun for the surviving natives. About the only thing that might have stopped the Chinese would have been a 320+ ship U.S. Navy. I guess that gives us the timeline. Likely for Taiwan, too.
Or north of the Sahara.
The Jewish mystical tradition has it that the Gog-Magog war will begin with a war between “Ishmael” (the Arabs) and “Edom” (Biblically the descendants of Esau;) the Roman Empire is generally considered to have been the epitome of Edom. Europe is arguably Edom’s modern embodiment, that war seems to be under way. Ishmael is predicted to win.
But wait. What’s going on in Europe isn’t war, is it?
Military historian Martin van Creveld has a very interesting essay in volume X of the late Jerry Pournelle’s tour de force anthology series There Will be War (available under Kindle Unlimited.) The essay is entitled War and Migration. Van Creveld convincingly argues that there is no difference between the two.
I believe you might find people who agree with that on, say, the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations.
Yes, it was. I sure don’t know enough about it’s history to know why it’s independence turned out so much worse than any other new nation in the area. It seems to have had more than its’ share of conflict and racial strife during the colonial era. Also, Rhodesia split off from the Brits in 1965. The causes for why it turned out the way it has post-1980 may be that the political leaders among the Europeans from Cecil Rhodes through Ian Smith were worse than elsewhere in the area combined with the fact that the Zimbabwe African Nation Union (ZANU) and Robert Mugabe were much worse than the major political players in the neighboring nations.
Having poked around trying to find more about this I think @zafar is correct with his analysis. The act by parliament is conditional upon a number of other things having to happen in order for it to proceed so it could take years. Nonetheless it is going to end badly, because even if it ultimately fails this time around it increases the likelihood it will eventually happen and will lead to increasing economic instability.
Yeah. I worked for a year in a research lab back in the day. Down the hall was a guy my age doing more or less the same thing; both of us applying for med school. The guy down the hall was from an wealthy family in Mexico City. His coworkers told me that as near as they could tell, he never had to pick up his clothes because the maids did it. He had gone to the top prep school in Mexico, did well in the sciences at Stanford, and had Stanford and the Ivy League medical schools competing to offer him full rides because here was a guy with a Spanish surname who was a lock to do well.
Back to Africa. In my sophomore year of college, I briefly dated a plush looking blonde girl whose family was from South Africa. She told me her father had Hollywood connections and she could get me on Jeapardy if I wanted. I was too chicken, and also wasn’t serious about this girl and wasn’t sure I wanted to owe her that. Anyway.
Her roommate was dating a Kuwaiti guy, and we all went to an iftar party at the Kuwaiti’s place. I don’t exactly remember the food, because he was pouring some pretty stiff screwdrivers but meat was involved somehow.
But it was a surreal place for a secular Jewish kid to wind up and even from the conversation in English I knew I was in enemy territory.
I agree and it’s better to think of this as a struggle between two African tribes, the Boers and the Bantu. The Boers are descendents of Dutch settlers who came in the 17th and 18th centuries and they think of themselves as African, and having no support from their homeland. As they expanded north and east, the Bantus, including the groups later known as Zulus, were migrating southward. Between the two the native tribes were eliminated.
The British were the late entrants to the scene. They really were colonialists and spent as much, or more, time subduing the Boer tribe as it did the Bantu.
I am missing something. Who’s assimilating and what does that have to do with my comment?
South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe were ALL British colonies.
The Botswana difference stems in part from their having relatively few white settlers – certainly not enough to stay on, declare Independence, and build on colonial land and population control mechanisms when setting up and running their state.
Also – sorry to rain on the parade – but the British Colonies did not have free markets or the impartial rule of law. Trade barriers were set up to protect British (not local) industry and the laws (rather obviously in Southern Africa, but in the 13 colonies as well) privileged white people over others.
I can see some justice in calling the Boers the White Tribe of Africa (let’s bundle the SA English with them for conceptual ease). But if that’s entirely who they are, why are they getting so much more attention from the West than any other African tribe? Is their situation the worst? I think the reaction tells me that they aren’t just another African tribe, but still recognizable relatives for many – and perhaps they see themselves that way as well?
Boers and Zulus. They will be called Bulus or Zoers, depending.
Zafar – I’m sure you know more about the subject than I; but, I have to disagree with a couple of your statements. Yes, SA was a British colony for a significant time. But, leaving it at that ignores the influence of the Dutch settlers who played a major role from the late 19th century forward. Also, Britain gave up sovereignty over SA in 1931. And, although there was racial discrimination prior, the apartheid laws of 1948 were much harsher than anything that came before.
Second, there is a difference between free markets & free trade. The US in the 19th C was protectionist, but still a free market economy. Free markets was what the Brits preached, however imperfectly practiced, and it seems to be what the Botswana took away from the experience.
I doubt that even the CCP has the stomach for that kind of brutality.
The over 10,000 dead at Tienanmen Square – whose deaths the CCP continues to think was the proper response – and both the Tibetans in exile and those living as second class citizens under the Han invaders/migrants (see #74) might say something different. Whatever the Chinese do is likely to have a longer sighted plan behind it than what the Belgians did.
That’s why I specified Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), because it was more “pure” British.
Apartheid was much harsher, and yes – I agree that the Boer aspect also added to South Africa’s mix.
Wrt Zimbabwe, Agricultural regions (first column) from the FAO:
And a map:
And another map showing ‘tribal trust land’ and European area in Rhodesia.
It’s not a neat overlay, but there’s significant overlap of the area set aside for European ownership and the regions which support the most intensive agriculture (and therefore the greatest potential for prosperity in an agricultural economy), yes?
Hence the continued juice that conflict over land still has in that country. I think it’s a conflict that will result in no good, but it’s completely understandable.
One can do a similarly messy map for South Africa, comparing agricultural regions:
With the Apartheid Bantustans:
But this one for Kenya’s White Highlands illustrates the basic issue almost perfectly:
In all three of these situations (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya) the colonial exit (in Kenya post-Mau Mau) or post Apartheid(esque) regime peace agreements (in Zims and SA) guaranteed the protection of settler (white, though irrelevant to the issue) economic rights (= land ownership).
Hence our conundrum. Without those agreements they would still be fighting. But because of these agreements the economic injustices that drove independence movements were never directly assauged – or at most in an attenuated way, that basically coopted by inclusion the leaders of ‘the struggle’ – so they’re fighting still.
(@tigerlily – I don’t know much, I just
gigglegoogle like mad.)There’s also this: The former owners of the good farmland tended to be the richest and most powerful groups around – and they resent the loss of their wealth and power.
According to Peter Grant, traditional religion is also a factor:
Those politicians are often hereditary tribal leaders as well; that was the case for Nelson Mandela. I personally have encountered an arrogant and privileged young man from a West African country; his father was an important politician. The family had been in power for generations as royalty – and as priests of the traditional religion; they were what the former colonial rulers of this country referred to as “witch doctors.”
I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but I read recently that ISIS is very active and growing in Africa.
Good point. ISIS, Al Qaeda and their offshoots.
ISIS is in a lot of places, but it isn’t responsible for everything that happens there. South Africa has issues enough.
A provocative perspective on the reporting:
http://africasacountry.com/2018/02/searching-for-white-genocide-in-south-africa/