“NO other race is so easily satisfied, so good-tempered, so care-free,” observed the Afrikaner statesman, Jan Smuts, in reference to the ‘negro and the negroid Bantu’ during a lecture he delivered at the University of Oxford back in 1929 – further describing them as a ‘child-type with a child psychology and outlook’.
Separate from such a disparaging verdict, the pre-1948 pro-British South African prime minister also referred to the Bushmen as ‘mentally stunted’ and a ‘desert animal’ – going on to compare them with White people, ‘the leading race in the world’ thus: “We see the one crowned with all the intellectual and spiritual glory of the race, while the other still occupies the lowest scale in human existence. If race has not made the difference, what has?”
Smuts appeared to had been very much at home in Britain, the colonial empire to whose capital, London, he led a mission about South Africa’s future in 1906 – which would culminate in the country later on attaining dominion status for the Union of South Africa in 1910. And who to lend a sympathetic ear to Smut’s undertaking than a familiar nemesis in the person of one Winston Churchill, who at the time happened to be Britain’s Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies.
Time could have rapidly healed both men’s wounds enough for them to prioritise the empire’s interests and let bygones be bygones, considering that in 1899, Smuts, then a Field Marshall, had interrogated Churchill, then a young lieutenant who had been captured by Afrikaners during the Anglo-Boer War – and conversely, he himself had also been captured by British forces during the same war.
Whatever the cause of the toenadering, the duo went on to become close friends – as well as prime ministers of their respective countries. History though, exposes Churchill as also sharing racist views not dissimilar to Smuts’, such as the following rabid selection: in 1902 calling for further colonial conquests because the Aryan stock is bound to triumph; describing Kenyan rebels as ‘brutish children’; Palestinians as ‘barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung’ – additionally with him in 1954 being quoted thus: “I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them.” Churchill’s expressed disgust for such (presumably Asiatics) was curious considering that a eugenicist whose doctrine he was a disciple of named Francis Galton rated them higher than Black people – fervent enough to propose that the Chinese should migrate en masse to Africa to displace the ‘inferior’ Africans.
A cousin of Charles Darwin – the theorist of natural selection and author of On the Origin of Species – Galton emanated the concept of eugenics (a set of beliefs and practices which aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population) which from his perspective, inter alia, involved introducing coercive methods to eliminate ‘feeble-mindedness’ within the White population and protect it from being sullied by supposedly inferior races such as Black people and Australian Aboriginals deemed as belonging at the simian bottom.
So impressive was Galton’s tenet in the earlier part of the 20th century that it was embraced by prominent figures such as the family planning campaigner Marie Stopes who advocated forced sterilisation including for all ‘half-castes’ at birth – as well as the science fiction novelist H G Wells who, for those he regarded as inferior races, averred: “Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go . . . it is their portion to die out and disappear.”
In Southern Africa then, eugenics manifested through the ilk of Eugen Fischer (a German eugenicist who, inter alia, conducted human medical experimentation during the Herero and
Nama genocide and sterilized Herero women in the then German South West Africa) whose writing on the study of bi-racial ‘Basters’ (an ethnic group descended from Cape Coloureds and Nama of Khoisan origin – other sources cite them as offspring of German or Boer men and Khoikhoi women – concentrated around the town of Rehoboth in Namibia) was disseminated to show the dangers of ‘race hybridisation’.
The preceding data is but an introductory background to the rising tide of White supremacy increasingly expressed through acts of extreme violence by young White men around the world.
And probably no author would had been apt to probe into the malady than journalist and lecturer Gavin Evans who in this tome’s preface expressly mentions having grown up in an apartheid South Africa where the relation between words and their frequently fatal consequences was never in doubt. In addition to eugenics, Nazism and apartheid, Evans also delves into the revived lexicon entries of Race Science, Alt-right and the Great Replacement (a theory espoused by French author Renaud Camus that ‘replacist’ elites are complicit in the replacing of White European populations by non-Whites through mass migration), currently gaining prevalence around the globe.
Resuscitating a chilling documentary film-like synopsis of alt-right mass killings committed post 2010 in a chapter titled Eight Killers, 202 Bodies, Evans notes a pattern of South African obsession among far-right killers in some of the cold-blooded carnages, from Dylann Roof (who killed nine Black people in a Charleston church on June 17, 2015) who admired how ‘such a small minority held the Black in apartheid for years and years’ – to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian killer of 77 people who partly vented regarding hesitating for several years to write about the South African genocide, due to the fear of being labelled a racist and linking ‘genocide of Europeans in South Africa’ to the murder of White farmers.
Trump’s name inevitably features in Evans’ analysis – inadvertently in another South Africa-related episode when Afrikaner singer Steve Hofmeyer’s malicious claim that a White farmer was murdered every five days and that the number of White South Africans killed by Black people would fill a ‘World Cup soccer stadium’, prompted a tweet from him in which he mentioned instructing his Secretary of State (from his first tenure at the White House) to scrutinize the large scale killing of farmers.
Deeming such publicity by a US president as jackpot for his exclusivist nationalistic cause, Hofmeyer furthermore issued a video in which he prattled: “We take our cue from Donald Trump and his tweet showed concern about the land grabs and the farm murders.”
His racism was reminiscent of the racist diatribe British guitarist Eric Clapton spewed at a shindig in Birmingham, England in August 1976, at which he yelled: “Stop Britain from becoming a Black colony. Keep Britain White.”
An adherent of pseudoscience (a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method) who was once recorded on the Oprah Winfrey Show saying to its host, “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes” – Trump’s steering of the US towards authoritarianism is enabled by an influential circle of White men with South African ties such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, who spent his formative childhood in apartheid South Africa; Cape Town-born “AI and crypto tsar” David Sacks and Joel Pollak, the South African-American conservative political commentator.
By sheer incidence, Evan’s no-punches-pulled tome launched around the period the US expelled South Africa’s ambassador Ebrahim Rasool for ‘race-baiting’ – a move interpreted in certain quarters as vindictiveness on the Trump Administration’s part in retaliation for, inter alia, the South African government’s case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and its perceived pursuit of anti-White policies such as land expropriation.
Wackiness abounds a dime-a-dozen, such as this gibberish from Steve Sailer, a columnist of an Alternative Right online magazine named Takimag: “Blacks tend to be colourful but not too competent, east Asians competent but colourless.” To White supremacists, it doesn’t matter that a 1950 ‘Statement on Race’ by a group of academics commissioned by UNESCO reached general agreement in recognising that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species, Homo Sapiens.’
Author, Gavin Evans was born in London but grew up mainly in Cape Town.
He practiced as a journalist in South Africa and the UK. He is the author of Dancing Shoes Is Dead – a memoir of boxing and politics set against the backdrop of South Africa under apartheid.
A trade paperback, White Supremacy: A Brief History of Hatred is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R295.
