You said that the A.N.C. has created a new Black élite at the expense of the old white élite. But even with that being the case, white South Africans still own more than fifty per cent of the country’s land, correct?
Yeah. The most recent land audit, which was conducted in 2017, found that white South Africans own nearly three-fourths of South Africa’s freehold farmland. So land ownership in South Africa is still incredibly white. If you look at wealth inequality figures, that’s still heavily racialized. And so the pattern of generational economic privilege, which is a product of apartheid, still remains. And there’s a refusal on the part of these groups to countenance that. The simple reason for that is they want to make South Africa great again. We should believe them when they say that. And what that means is restoring racial hierarchy.
You referred earlier to the white people in South Africa and divided them into Afrikaners and non-Afrikaners. Can you talk more about that division?
This is a very long, complicated, and contested history, but, in short, South Africa’s white population is either descended from Dutch-speaking settlers or English-speaking settlers. And there’s always been a very stark division between those two groups. South African colonialism was this revolving door of either British control and dominance or Dutch/Afrikaner control and dominance. During the Boer War, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—which resulted in defeat for the Afrikaners against the British and culminated in the union of South Africa, in 1910—there was this rapprochement between the Afrikaners and the British. But I think Afrikaners have historically felt as if they were subjugated and subservient to respectable British élites in this country. And apartheid as a social and economic policy was fundamentally about engineering Afrikaner uplift. In the early part of the twentieth century, Afrikaner poverty was widespread and there were a lot of fears about the possible regression of Afrikaners to the status and economic position of the so-called native Bantu.
And so apartheid was effectively a policy of affirmative action for Afrikaners. And one that also built a mythology around Afrikaners as a persecuted group who arrived in a strange and foreign land, and who were met with resistance from the native populations, but also confronted an outside occupier, i.e. the British, and through a series of trials and tribulations, were able to establish themselves.
Those tensions still persist. Afrikaners as an ethnic group have a stronger sense of cultural identity, of folkish attachments to the land. In their civic organizations—the key one being AfriForum, which is a lobby for what they call the preservation of Afrikaner culture and identity—land ownership is viewed as key. Whereas descendants of the British are much more classically viewed as cosmopolitans.