538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets

Speaker 1 I mentioned this story about the vow that was made in 1838, and he went to negotiate with the Zuluking, King Dungan. They signed a treaty.

Speaker 1 The king said, We need to celebrate this, but leave your weapons outside. And so, during the celebration, the Zulu King chanted, Kill the wizards, and they slaughtered them.

Speaker 1 We need to retaliate, we need to attack back. And so, they had a commander of about three to four hundred people.
They were completely surrounded by about twelve thousand.

Speaker 1 A man named Saarul Saliya, he was the religious leader, and he said, We need to make a vow to God. Some people people say that's the origin story of our people.

Speaker 2 Let's flip to the modern time. What was the relationship between the apartheid state per se and this notion of separate homelands?

Speaker 1 The argument was that South Africa should be thought of as Europe. The single biggest problem in South Africa is the triangle of unemployment, poverty, and inequality.

Speaker 1 Ironically, they've gotten to a point where they can only think about inequality.

Speaker 2 It looks to me like the cost of innovation is inequality. Okay, now your book is entitled Kill the Boar.
There's a reason for that.

Speaker 2 Hello, everybody.

Speaker 2 I've watched over a very long period of time the political and economic situation in South Africa both heat up and destabilize.

Speaker 2 And that's taken a somewhat of an accelerating turn in the last few years and because of that I've become increasingly interested in delving more deeply into the history of South Africa to understand the context and then also the political situation on the ground in that country now and I came across the work of Dr.

Speaker 2 Ernst Roots, who wrote this book called Kill the Boar, this book, which was published in 2018. Now, he's also a filmmaker.

Speaker 2 He made a film called Tainted Heroes, which is about the apartheid era in 2016, and another one called Disrupted Land. And I hoped to talk to Dr.

Speaker 2 Roots about South Africa, about its history, and about, well, about its current situation and about hopes and concerns for the future. And that's exactly what we did.
And so...

Speaker 2 The first thing I wanted to do was to delve a little bit into the history of the origin of South Africa because there's a narrative in the West that the evil white Europeans came to a land dominated by black Africans and colonized it and in their brutal and murderous fashion.

Speaker 2 And, well, any

Speaker 2 territorial dispute has its bloody edge, let's say, but the truth of the matter is that the settlement of South Africa is a hell of a lot more complex than that, and that the two primary racial groups that exist there today weren't the original inhabitants of the land, whether they're black or white.

Speaker 2 And so, just knowing that is useful. And we spent the first half, really, of the podcast talking about the history of the settlement of South Africa.
The original people there were Bushmen who aren't

Speaker 2 particularly related genetically to the Bantu, the black people who live there now, or and obviously not to the Europeans.

Speaker 2 So, the situation with regards to ethnicity and race in South Africa is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface. And so, well, that's what we're trying to puzzle out in this podcast.

Speaker 2 So, join me and my guest, Dr. Ernst Roots, for that discussion.

Speaker 2 So, this is likely to be an unsettling conversation, so we might as well dive right in. The first thing I think that people who are watching and listening should know is

Speaker 2 a somewhat more detailed history of the settlement patterns in South Africa.

Speaker 2 Because the presumption, first of all, what most people in the West know about South Africa, you could put in a very small thimble with enough room left over for another thimble, and that includes me.

Speaker 2 And so it's not like I studied that in high school, for example. And so people know nothing about South Africa, like really nothing.

Speaker 2 And they certainly don't know anything about its settlement patterns. And so I suppose people use the analog of the European settlement of the Americas, which is also a very complex story.

Speaker 2 I mean, by the time the pilgrims got to the eastern coast of the United States, there are estimates that 95% of the Native Americans had already died from measles, smallpox, mumps, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And so the settlement story is extremely complex, but it's even more complex in South Africa, and they're not the same.

Speaker 2 So could you enlighten everyone who's watching and listening about the settlement patterns, the relationship between the land and the Europeans, and the black Africans?

Speaker 2 And let's just lay that out so we know where we stand first.

Speaker 1 Well, let me firstly say thank you very much for speaking with me.

Speaker 1 And I can say with great self-assurance that a lot of people in South Africa would be very happy to hear that you are interested in what's happening in South Africa.

Speaker 2 Interested in and terrified by.

Speaker 1 Well, hopefully, we can flesh out a lot of that.

Speaker 1 So, you're absolutely right to say that the history of or the patterns of land ownership and the history leading to this is complex.

Speaker 1 And we can do an entire interview just about that because there were so many events that happened in South Africa.

Speaker 1 Broadly speaking,

Speaker 1 the people who live in South Africa who are of European descent, such as myself, arrived in 1652. That was the settlement when the Dutch East India Company arrived in Cape Town,

Speaker 1 or what is today Cape Town, to start a refreshment station for ships traveling around Africa to trade with the East.

Speaker 1 It was initially the Dutch and they were then joined by Germans and French especially, but some other Europeans as well.

Speaker 1 And we sometimes call them the proto-Afrikaners because the Afrikaner people became a people.

Speaker 1 Obviously, it's not just one singular event and then you are a people, but it happened over time when when we developed our own language and culture in Africa. So that was about 400 years ago.

Speaker 1 But what also happened in South Africa in terms of the different black groups, if you could use that term, who live in South Africa, is we had the and still have what is called the Khoi and the San.

Speaker 1 A lot of people know it as the Bushmen. That's how they're also known.
A lot of them prefer to be called the Bushmen.

Speaker 1 People know them from the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy and so forth. And they are the true indigenous people.

Speaker 1 If you want to say who are the indigenous people of South Africa, it's the koi and the sand. They lived pretty much all over South Africa.
They've been there for tens of thousands of years.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 they're a very ethnic and genetically separate group, right? There's a lot of genetic and ethnic diversity in Africa, more than in the rest of the world, by a lot.

Speaker 2 And the Bushmen, those people are very distinct. In fact, I've read that genetically they're more akin to Asians than they are to black Africans.

Speaker 1 I've heard that too. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So I'm just laying that out, not to make any genetic claim of any sort, just so everybody's clear about that, but just to know that these things are extremely complicated and all so-called black people aren't the same by any stretch of the imagination any more than they're probably less similar from a cultural and genetic perspective than Europeans are to one another.

Speaker 2 I think you're right. Yeah, I think you can make that case pretty bluntly.
So there's a lot of diversity in Africa.

Speaker 1 And I'm very happy that you recognize this because a lot of people don't.

Speaker 2 Because all those black people are the same. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But there are also groups like the South African government who would like people to believe that all black people are the same because that's their way of organizing as a collective on the basis of race.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Well, that way you can make the racial story, the racial oppression story, for example, a lot simpler than it actually is.
Okay, so is there any estimates for the number of people,

Speaker 2 of Bushman people that were there, say, in the 1600s? And what, like, how densely populated was South Africa? And what part of Africa exactly are we talking about?

Speaker 2 Like Africa is a wallopingly big continent, despite the Mercator projection. And so, and

Speaker 2 the people who Americans think of as black, they occupy mostly, they occupy Africa south of the Sahara Desert, but north of, fundamentally north of where South Africa is. Like, how far down?

Speaker 2 How far up were the Bushmen, how far to the north were the Bushmen the

Speaker 2 predominant human population in the 1600s?

Speaker 1 Well, that's a very important point. So

Speaker 1 they occupied, they were several thousands. I don't know if they were 100,000.
I'm not sure. We can check those numbers.

Speaker 1 But they lived pretty much all over South Africa and they lived more to the eastern part, which is important because the eastern part

Speaker 1 is much more fertile land. It's much more humid and that's where the most productive farming land is and so forth.
The western part is arid. It's more deserts and dry and so forth.

Speaker 2 So they live mostly in the east?

Speaker 1 Yes, but they don't anymore.

Speaker 1 And that's important because so if you go to the eastern parts, like the Drakensberg, you would find the cave paintings of the Koi and the San, but they don't live there anymore because they were pushed out by groups coming in from the north who it has become a controversial term, although I don't know what the appropriate term then would be, by the Bantu people.

Speaker 1 So the word Bantu is a word that means people. It just means people in the east.

Speaker 2 That's typical anthropologically. Most tribes refer to themselves as the humans, as opposed to everyone else who aren't the humans.

Speaker 1 Exactly. So they've been known as the Bantu-speaking groups, but today it's controversial to use that term.

Speaker 2 Why is that?

Speaker 1 Because it's a term that refers to black people. And I think some people have used the term

Speaker 1 in the context of making derogatory remarks or something to that effect. I see.

Speaker 2 I see.

Speaker 1 But that's how they were known historically. And that's the Zulus and the Twelzas and the different groups that we know in South Africa today.

Speaker 2 And they came down from the north and pushed out the bushmen.

Speaker 2 Now, also, the Bushmen, from what I understand, and like I don't know lots about the Bushmen either, although what I do know about them is that they were basically hunters and gatherers and trackers, and that they were very sophisticated.

Speaker 2 They had those little lightweight bows and arrows and the poison darts, and they're very good at running down prey, right? And they can live where no one else can live.

Speaker 2 But also, they weren't agriculturalists, from my understanding. And

Speaker 2 there were no places where the Bushmen produced like cities or dense population centers. Correct.

Speaker 1 And they are fairly small, also, which is one of the reasons when the bigger tribes came in from the north and there was conflict between these groups, they were pushed out.

Speaker 1 They were not able to take a stance against the Zulu people, who are typically a strong nation.

Speaker 2 Right, and very, yes, yes, well-armed, comparatively.

Speaker 1 Yes, very militaristic, yes.

Speaker 2 Right, right.

Speaker 2 The Bushmen have those little bows and arrows with their poison darts, but those don't make very effective weapons of war, partly because the poison is long-acting.

Speaker 2 Yes, you know, and for all those people who think, by the way, that the Bushmen were like peaceful agrarian communists and that there was no conflict amongst them, let's say, prior to the Bantu or the Europeans.

Speaker 2 The most common, if I remember correctly, the most common pathway to death for a Bushman man is through murder. So you can use those darts on other people quite effectively if there's a feud.

Speaker 2 I also know that the Bushmen, because they lived in small tribal groups, they didn't evolve a real judicial system and often their disputes would turn murderous.

Speaker 2 And so in some of these areas where the Bantus, for example, came down, the Bushmen would use the Bantu judicial system, which was more advanced, as a means of mediating their own disputes.

Speaker 2 So I just want to bring that up to put to rest any suspicions that the Bushmen, for example, were Rousseau

Speaker 2 noble savages and that everything was peaceful before civilization came along. It's like that's not how the world works, even a little bit.
Okay, so

Speaker 2 in the 1650s, the Europeans came to the very southern tip of Africa, and that was primarily a consequence of the trading routes because people had to sail around the horn. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 2 And they set up this settlement as a refreshment station, you said, for the sailors. And that would be the European sailors who were starting to trade in

Speaker 2 India and so forth.

Speaker 1 Exactly, yes. And in Asia.
And also to service the ships, building ships, repairing ships and so forth, yes.

Speaker 1 So they started there in 1652. Eventually, they had what we call the Freiburgers or the Freebergers, which was that some of the, they were employees of the Dutch East India Company.

Speaker 1 Some of them were then released from their contracts so that they could become farmers, so that they could start developing an economy.

Speaker 1 And so there were some clashes with, for example, the Bushmen already there in the Cape between the the Europeans and the Bushmen, but there was also examples of trading and cooperation and so forth.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 So that's similar to what happened in North America. Yeah.
Like there were lots of it. There was a lots of allied.

Speaker 2 There were lots of peaceful and productive interactions between the natives and the Europeans. And it also depended on which Europeans.

Speaker 2 So the Cree in Canada were much more likely to ally with the English, for example, than with the French. And so these things were very common.

Speaker 1 We had the same dynamics in South Africa with the Afrikaner people and the English as well. Yes.

Speaker 1 And so, but just to get to that point, it's unfortunate that thinking about history, history tends to overestimate or overemphasize the conflict and downplay the cooperation because conflict is more newsworthy, you could say.

Speaker 1 So when we think about history, we think about war and conflict, but we forget the cooperation part. That's very important.
Right. And so

Speaker 1 that was about the time when the Zulu people were settling in what is today KwaZaluna Taland.

Speaker 1 That calls our people in the, what is the Eastern Cape, Cape, closer to where the Afrikaners or the Proto-Afrikanas were.

Speaker 2 When did the Bantu start moving south? And why hadn't they done that before?

Speaker 1 I'm not sure why they haven't done that before, but from what I know, there was conflict up north in Africa, and there were nomadic tribes and some groups of people.

Speaker 2 So they were pushed down as a consequence of inter-tribal warfare in their own lands. Yes, it's still surprising, isn't it, that so much of Africa was essentially unsettled.

Speaker 2 I mean, I know the Bushmen were there, but there weren't very many many of them. And it's also a lifestyle that can't support that huge a population.
It's pre-agricultural lifestyle.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, there weren't very many human beings 100,000 years ago. So, okay.
And so, all right. So, the Europeans start settling in

Speaker 2 the southernmost part of Africa. It's the Dutch East India Company.
It's primarily for trade. The employees of that company get acclimated to Africa.

Speaker 2 They realize that there's immense productive farmland there. Like I read, for example, I know Uganda is farther north, but Uganda has enough arable land to feed all of Africa with no problem.

Speaker 2 And a water table that's 200 feet below the surface of the country that's virtually everywhere in the country. Right.

Speaker 2 So Africa's, God only knows how many people Africa could support if it was well managed.

Speaker 1 Yes, which is why we have some of the best farmers in South Africa.

Speaker 1 So in terms of the history, then

Speaker 1 one major event was with the Napoleonic Wars. We sometimes joke as as the Afrikaner people, we say we skip the Enlightenment because we have this joke.

Speaker 1 We say in Europe, they were reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau while we were hunting elephants.

Speaker 2 That was probably a better use of time than reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau, anyways.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but that's important because I think it, in a way, shaped our culture in a particular way, which is why the Afrikaner people, at least, are much more conservative, much more religious than many of our friends in Europe.

Speaker 2 Should I outline a little bit probably too the conflict between the Dutch, the Boers, and the English. Yes, I want to get you.
Yeah, okay, okay. So

Speaker 2 we've got the setup now.

Speaker 2 So really what happened in South Africa was that there was a relatively small population of pre-agricultural tribesmen, the Bushmen, who were very ethnically distinct from the, let's call them Central Africans for the time being.

Speaker 2 And that in around 1600, 1650, let's say to 1750, there was an influx of Bantu speaking people who were larger from the north, and there was an influx of Europeans from the north.

Speaker 1 I think they came in before the Europeans came, but they were coming in from the north

Speaker 1 in the same century, you could say.

Speaker 2 Okay, in the same century. Anyway, so the Bushmen were starting to feel pressure from an invasion, so to speak, from the north and also an influx from the south.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Okay, so that's a more accurate, and none of this was agricultural to begin with. Yes.
Right. So the now were the Bantu also interested in agricultural settlement?

Speaker 1 Yes, they were more less nomadic than the Bushmen. The Bushmen were more nomadic.
They moved around much more.

Speaker 1 And the Bantu groups were also, in a sense, nomadic, but they settled in, like the Zulus built the Zulu kingdom in KwaZulunatal

Speaker 1 in the eastern part of the country. And they had more degrees of settlement.

Speaker 2 Okay, so we're also seeing an anthropological struggle in the broader sense between the archaic mode of human existence, which was nomadic hunter-gatherer, and the developing agricultural and settled communities.

Speaker 2 Some of them were black in Africa and some of them were white. And so now we've got at least a three-way conflict going on, not counting the conflicts between

Speaker 2 inside the groups. Yes.
Okay, okay. And so by

Speaker 2 mid-1700s, what's the status of the white settlements in South Africa?

Speaker 1 So it developed, it grew, and the borders shifted out toward the, especially toward the east.

Speaker 1 Then the reason why I mentioned the Enlightenment is after the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars took place.

Speaker 2 Specified the time frame.

Speaker 1 1810. Yep.

Speaker 1 And that's when the British came to colonize the Cape, partly as a result of the wars in Europe. And so we had some battles with the British, the Battle of

Speaker 1 Bloberg, the Battle of Meisenberg, and eventually the Cape was colonized.

Speaker 2 Right, so that's while the Brits are really expanding their empire. Yes.
And so now they come into what's now a European settlement in South Africa, and the battle for dominion is between Europeans.

Speaker 2 Now, you see the same kind of thing, in a sense, play out in North America, right? Because, well, it was New Amsterdam before it was New York.

Speaker 2 And, of course, much of the United States was settled by Germany. And a huge chunk, well, that was eventually the Louisiana Purchase was French.
And, of course, Quebec remained French.

Speaker 2 And so who the colonizers were,

Speaker 2 it's not like they were a monolithic group, and there was plenty of fighting between them. So what motivated the English to show up in South Africa, per se, in the 1800s?

Speaker 2 You said it was in the aftermath of Napoleonic Wars, but it was part of the colonial expansion. No doubt.
It's a trade issue as well, I presume.

Speaker 1 I think it's all of that. It was part of the British expanding the British Empire, the strategic importance of the southern point of the African continent, especially trade that was before the

Speaker 2 richness of the land. There's gold.
Was gold discovered? No, not yet. No, not yet.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And so they settled, which led to the great event in our history that many people say is the event that during which we became a people, which was the great trick.

Speaker 1 So, some of the Afrikaner people or the Dutch-speaking peoples in the Cape at the time felt that they cannot be governed by another nation.

Speaker 1 They were very, very aggrieved by the idea that someone came in from another continent and

Speaker 2 took over.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they wanted to be free.
And so they eventually opted to move into the interior of South Africa,

Speaker 1 which was a very dangerous thing to do because people didn't know what they would find in the interior. They sent in some, what they call the commission track.

Speaker 1 They sent in some scouts, and actually, the scouts came back and said that

Speaker 1 they found some people in certain areas, but largely speaking, there were vast open tracts of land.

Speaker 1 Because what's also important, and this is again why the history of land ownership is so complex, that was shortly after the Mufekane genocide, which was a genocide.

Speaker 1 Some figures estimate that about a million people were killed as a result of Zulu expansionism and a conflict between the Zulu king and Mufekane or

Speaker 1 Msilikati who was the I think he was a soldier in the Zulu kingdom and he eventually had his the Matabelis or the Indebele people and it was expansion at war as expansionist wars and it it spread out throughout the southern part of Africa and there was mass extermination campaigns So the scouts came back and they said in some places they found peoples living, in some places there was just no one and in some places they just found bones, skeletons.

Speaker 2 So there was evidence that there was good reason and possibility to get the hell away from the English and move the British and to move farther north and into the central parts of South Africa.

Speaker 2 What sort of size geographical area are we talking about?

Speaker 1 South Africa is about twice the size of Texas. So it's a pretty big country.
Compared to the US, it's small.

Speaker 1 You could say it's the size of Western Europe if you take away Spain.

Speaker 1 So it's a pretty big country.

Speaker 2 Right, right, okay. So there is plenty of northward geographical area to move towards.
Yes. And how many Boers, what year was the trek?

Speaker 1 The 1830s.

Speaker 2 1830s. And how many Boers participated in that? I think about 2000, if I recall.
Okay, okay. So it's a fairly small group.

Speaker 2 Right, right, right. And now, and they used wagons and moved.
Wagons, yes, ox wagons. So it's kind of like the settlement of the American West in that way.

Speaker 1 Very, very similar. The Afrikaner story is...
remarkably similar to the American story.

Speaker 1 Also, we had our wars with the British.

Speaker 1 it's remarkably similar. Our interactions with local communities, the track towards the interior,

Speaker 1 it's a fascinating story, just how comparable it is. Also, culturally speaking.

Speaker 2 Right. So,

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 there was plenty of vacant land in the western U.S. when the pioneers went westward.
There was occupied land as well.

Speaker 2 There's still plenty of vacant land in the western U.S., like plenty, although a lot of it's desert.

Speaker 2 And so, I suspect that, although I don't know this for sure, but I expect that there was more habitation in North America than there was in South Africa at that time.

Speaker 2 I guess I really don't know because I don't know how extensive the Bantu settlements might have been.

Speaker 2 But you said that was also complicated by the fact that there was a genocide and that many, many people were wiped out.

Speaker 2 Of course, the situation in North America was complicated by the fact of the mass deaths that were a consequence of the illnesses that spread across North America like a plague, actually, like three plagues.

Speaker 2 And so, well, all that to just say how complicated these things are. Okay, so these 2,000 people spread north, and then what was the consequence of that?

Speaker 1 So, so

Speaker 1 they, again, going back to the issue of conflict versus cooperation, there were many examples of cooperation and treaties, dozens of treaties that were signed with local tribes cooperating, but there was also conflict.

Speaker 1 And one of the most significant or the most well-known battle was the Battle of Blood River, which was when the Fuertrakas, as they were known, which essentially means pioneer, also also

Speaker 1 another similarity. It means those who go out ahead.

Speaker 1 They were known as the Fuhr Trackers. And so they had conflict with the Ndebele people of Msilikati, this soldier from the Zulu who was part of this, you know.

Speaker 2 So he was a rebel in the Bantu.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had conflict with the Zulu king.

Speaker 1 And then they also had conflict with the Zulus. And one of the battles, I should just mention this in passing, was the Battle of Fakop,

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 1 the Fuartrakers were attacked by the Hindu Beles of Msilikatsi. But it was an ambush.
They didn't expect it. And so it was men and women and children who had to defend themselves.

Speaker 1 And it's an important part of our story because the women were there in the field next to the men with their Furlayas, as they called it, these front-loading rifles, the very sort of primitive guns that they had at the time.

Speaker 1 And they had to defend themselves as they were attacked.

Speaker 2 And from what I understand, too, the victory of the Europeans over the Zulus, the Bantus, let's say, was by no means a foregone conclusion. That they were very formidable fighters.

Speaker 2 And there was a difference in weaponry, as you just pointed out. But it wasn't like the Boers had machine guns.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it took quite some time to reload the gun.

Speaker 1 It took quite some time. So sometimes you had to get people to help you to reload the gun.
And also they were... They had sheer numbers against them.

Speaker 1 So I mentioned this story, but maybe I should tell this to you as well, the story about the vow that was made in 1838.

Speaker 1 I mentioned this when I spoke with Tucker Carlson as well.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the Fur Trackers, they had a democratic election internally and they elected this leader, Petratif, was his name.

Speaker 1 He became sort of the leader of this track and he went to negotiate with the Zulu king, King Dungan,

Speaker 1 who was the younger brother of Shaka, King Shaka. He actually killed his brother and then he became the king.

Speaker 1 And they negotiated for a piece of land. And

Speaker 1 the treaty was broadly speaking that they would get a piece of land between the Tugela and the Umzumvubu rivers and for which they had to get cattle back that was stolen from the Zulus by another tribe.

Speaker 1 And so they brought the cattle back. This Ratif was warned against this.
Some of the people said to him, listen, this is very dangerous and be careful. And he said, no, we have to do this.

Speaker 1 We need to get land and we need to buy land.

Speaker 1 So they went to the Zulu king. They gave the cattle back.
They signed a treaty. The king made a cross on a piece of paper on the contract.

Speaker 1 And he then said, the king said, we need to celebrate this. And so he said, come to my camp tonight and we'll have a celebration, but leave your weapons outside.

Speaker 1 And so during the celebration, the Zulu king at one moment chanted,

Speaker 1 which means kill the wizards. And so they took the entire group to a nearby hill and they slaughtered them.

Speaker 1 And this Ratif, who was the leader they had him stand and watch how his men were slaughtered including his son who was who was with them with them and they killed him last

Speaker 1 so then they went out to attack the the lagers the camps where the fur trackers were uh especially women and children i believe the number is 185 women and children who were killed during these attacks surprise attacks at at night the fur tracker people then said or the Afrikaners said, we need to retaliate, we need to attack back.

Speaker 1 And so they had a commander of about three to four hundred people to go and attack the Zulus. At one moment, they found that they were completely surrounded by about 12,000 Zulus.

Speaker 1 Some people, some estimates, say 20,000, but I think 12,000 is the number that's most commonly used, like all around them on the hills.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 they were about 300 against 12,000, surrounded by 12,000. And so they thought, well, we're going to die.

Speaker 2 This is it. That's kind of what you'd think.

Speaker 1 And then a man

Speaker 1 of, I'm very proud to descend from him, a man named Sarul Saliya, he was the religious leader, and he said, we need to make a vow to God.

Speaker 1 And so they got together and they wrote a vow. And the vow said that

Speaker 1 they make a vow to God that if he protects them in the battle that lies ahead, that they would commemorate this day as a Sabbath,

Speaker 1 even after, regardless of what day of the week it is, that we would tell our children to commemorate this day as well.

Speaker 1 and that we will build a church where he wants us to build a church, and that the honor of the victory will go to him and not to us.

Speaker 1 And so that battle took place on the 16th of December 1838

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 the consequence of the battle was that not one of the Fur Trackers were killed.

Speaker 1 3,000 Zulus were killed in the battle.

Speaker 1 So it was a spectacular event.

Speaker 1 And some people say that's the origin story of our people. That's when we became a people.
And that's partly, this is so important to us. Firstly, because we still celebrate 16th of December.

Speaker 1 december we commemorate that as a sabbath we go to church on the 16th of december we have cultural festivals and so forth not because of the battle against the zulus but because we were protected by god um

Speaker 1 and and so but it says a lot about why we are so conservative why we are so why we love the land so much and the country and and why we are so religious still

Speaker 1 so that's After that, they went further north and they settled and they established Pretoria, which is the capital of South Africa today.

Speaker 1 And many of the northern towns and cities eventually became developed.

Speaker 2 Okay, now since then, let's skip ahead a little bit. Since then,

Speaker 2 the Bantu people have multiplied and the Europeans have multiplied.

Speaker 2 I don't know to what, I don't know the population ratios or the absolute numbers, so maybe you can fill me in on that. And I'm curious about

Speaker 2 where the bulk of the population growth has come from. Like how much more European influx from Europe directly has there been to South Africa? How much of it is multiplication of the Afrikaner stock?

Speaker 2 And I'm curious about the same thing with regards to the Central Africans who came down and also invaded the Bushman territory.

Speaker 1 Well, it's certainly both.

Speaker 1 So the population in South Africa grew quite rapidly in the centuries that followed among the white communities and also the black communities.

Speaker 1 up to the point where now there are about 60 million people in South Africa.

Speaker 2 Okay, and what's the racial mix?

Speaker 1 It's about

Speaker 1 the white section, which are the, what you could say, the white Anglos, the English-speaking, and also the Afrikaner people, are just below 5 million. The Afrikaners are about 2.7 million.

Speaker 1 And the African or the black African population has grown rapidly. Interestingly enough, this is worth mentioning.

Speaker 1 It's often said that the apartheid system was a genocide. There's a lot to criticize, and we should talk about that, about just how bad it was and what went wrong.

Speaker 1 But genocide is not the right term because the black population in South Africa doubled in, I think it was in the first two decades of the apartheid system, and then it doubled again.

Speaker 1 after that.

Speaker 1 So there was a massive population growth among black South Africans, especially in the last century.

Speaker 2 Right. And so now you said 60 million people in South Africa as a whole, and 5 million are of European descent, and 2.7 million of them are Afrikaner.

Speaker 2 And the rest, and what about like Indians and Asians and so on?

Speaker 1 So they would be slightly less.

Speaker 1 We can look up the exact numbers.

Speaker 1 They are slightly fewer. There's also what we call a colored community.
I think in some countries they'd say mixed race,

Speaker 1 quite significant, quite big as well, bigger than the Afrikaner community. They generally speak Afrikaans, the same language as us,

Speaker 1 but they have their own culture that they've developed over time. They also live mostly more in the southern parts of South Africa.

Speaker 1 So just from a racial perspective, South Africa is very diverse. But as you mentioned initially, races are not homogeneous.

Speaker 1 So if you consider the fact that within the different racial groups, there are different cultures and communities, the diversity, the complexity of South African society is really something that people should take note of.

Speaker 1 And it's easy to simplify that by simply saying, oh, there are white people and black people, and the whites and blacks are in conflict.

Speaker 1 That's so oversimplified that it's a false narrative.

Speaker 2 Right, right. Well, and a false narrative that can be usefully repurposed.

Speaker 2 Okay, so now my suspicions are, and we'll get back to this as we proceed in our discussion, that the history that you briefly outlined, which puts things in context quite nicely, would be criticized by leftist and radical historians.

Speaker 2 Okay, so what would be the counter story for?

Speaker 2 Because like I, the way that like I didn't, I don't know a lot about South Africa, but what I do know is in accordance with what you just described.

Speaker 2 I knew that the land was basically sparsely occupied before the Europeans came, and that most of the people who live there now who aren't European came from Central Africa and weren't there originally.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 it's actually a story of, well, a sparsely inhabited hunter-gatherer society that was mobile,

Speaker 2 being pressured from the south and from the north by two competing, you could say, two competing diverse racial groups, and

Speaker 2 that produced a population explosion over the last 300 years, the transformation of a hunter-gatherer society into an agricultural and industrial society.

Speaker 2 And that's roughly the story that you told. Now, but that isn't the story that the typical Westerner who isn't South African, if you guys are Westerners, which I guess you know, we are,

Speaker 2 you know, whatever that, what, yes.

Speaker 2 And so that's not the story that is on everyone's, like at the tip of everyone's tongue, and everyone being people who are absolutely 100 ignorant about south african history like they are about their own history and so but if if we were giving the devil his due what's the strongest european colonial narrative i mean i guess that would probably more involve even the english or the british so so unfortunately uh That narrative is so oversimplified that it's almost farcical.

Speaker 1 So the one claim would be that Europe is the continent for white people and Africa is the continent for black people.

Speaker 1 So it doesn't matter that the groups who live in South Africa came from the north of Africa. They still came from Africa.

Speaker 2 That's kind of hard on the North Africans.

Speaker 1 Yes, but so my answer to that is that implies that if you apply that same argument to Europe, then you should say black people in Europe are not welcome. They should go back to Africa.

Speaker 1 Because the narrative in South Africa is whites must go back to Europe because this is black people's continent.

Speaker 2 Well, it also begs the question of which black people.

Speaker 2 Like, is it the San, the Bushman, or the Bantu, let's say? And it's not like that's the only kind of black people that are in Africa.

Speaker 1 And so the political slogan is that when the Dutch came, they didn't bring any land on their ships. So that's sort of the joke that, oh, you didn't, you came and you colonized.

Speaker 1 And the narrative is that they wouldn't say that South Africa was densely populated because they know it wasn't, but they would say that all of it belonged to...

Speaker 1 to the black groups who were living in South Africa. And so the arrival of the Europeans was essentially colonized.

Speaker 2 That's a particularly tricky argument when you're talking about people like the Bushmen because my suspicions are from what I understand about them anthropologically first of all they conceptualize themselves as belonging to the land rather than the reverse which is a much more typical attitude of hunter-gatherers because they're nomadic they don't own land there's no ownership notion and so no i mean what a what what have the bushmen own

Speaker 2 They definitely owned their bows and arrows and the things they could carry with them, which were very lightweight.

Speaker 2 And I don't believe they had domesticated domesticated animals i don't believe not originally later they had yeah yeah but that was the same in in the americas like the indians there the indians i'm going to use that phrase because it's not politically correct let's say they didn't have horses till the spaniards showed yeah exactly so there were now there were some domesticated animals in south america um llamas for example and It's not that easy to domesticate animals, as it turns out.

Speaker 2 So I don't know what the Bushman would have owned. Like, I'm not even sure, especially ownership of land.
I think that's a conception that you develop once you become

Speaker 2 herds and you have agriculture before that and a permanent settlement. Like, how do you own land when you don't have a permanent settlement? That's not your relationship to the land.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so the argument is if something like if you have walked over a mountain once, then that mountain belongs to your tribe, something along those lines.

Speaker 2 Which is playing out in Australia, for example, right now, in a major way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, and in Canada, for that matter.

Speaker 1 But this is a classic example of what Huntington would call the clash of civilizations.

Speaker 1 It's just different perspectives on, for example, the issue of property rights, the notion of what does ownership mean.

Speaker 1 Different cultures, different communities, but also different civilizations have different perspectives on that.

Speaker 1 And now we're sort of in this place now where the Western perspective has become the dominant perspective.

Speaker 2 Right. And so it looks self-evident.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes, exactly. But yeah, that was

Speaker 1 the fact of the matter is there were large tracts of land that wasn't inhabited.

Speaker 2 Well, and there's also a really complicated question here, too, which is

Speaker 2 there was a very small population in South Africa

Speaker 2 in consequence of the Bushman's lifestyle.

Speaker 2 So then you ask yourself, well,

Speaker 2 is there any net good

Speaker 2 absolutely speaking, in generating a technological revolution that radically increases the carrying power of the land.

Speaker 2 Because that's the question about agriculture. That's the question about domesticated animals.
It's certainly the question about industrial civilization.

Speaker 2 And I guess the answer would be something like you'd hope that if there were hunter-gatherers and then agricultural people came along or industrial people came along that in optimal circumstances there would be a series of treaties and the treaties would hold and everybody could have their cake and eat it too.

Speaker 2 There's going to be conflict because there's always conflict between, well, herders. There's certainly conflict between hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, herders, and industrialists, right? So,

Speaker 2 those conflicts are going to emerge. You could imagine a series of treaties that would mediate that.

Speaker 2 I mean, complicated to establish and to maintain, especially given the unbelievably vast cultural differences. But I guess that's what you'd hope for for a non-warlike solution.

Speaker 2 And some of that did happen in North America and

Speaker 1 in Africa. But I want to add still happening.
I'd like to add one thing is

Speaker 1 weapons technology or warfare technology. So Neil Ferguson talks about the killer application.
That's one thing that has a massive consequence.

Speaker 1 So many of these...

Speaker 2 Like stirrups.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, like the tribes that came in from the north had spears

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 the bushmen weren't able to defend themselves against spears.

Speaker 1 Then the Zulu people, King Shaka,

Speaker 1 developed or had a different approach to using the spear as a weapon.

Speaker 1 He made the stick or the staff end much shorter so that you don't throw away your spear because he became concerned that you go to war and then you throw away your weapon. And then what do you do?

Speaker 1 And so he said, we shouldn't throw away our weapons. We should have big shields so that when they throw spears at us, we should be able to defend ourselves.

Speaker 1 And then our spear is something that we can use to stab, and then we still have it.

Speaker 1 And just that one thing had a massive consequence in terms of Zulu dominance in South Africa.

Speaker 2 Just that one thing.

Speaker 2 Like the stirrups that allowed mounted, armored Europeans to become knights. Right.
And then

Speaker 2 to go to South America and wreak absolute havoc because they were basically the equivalent of tanks. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 1 Isn't it this the Space Odyssey story with

Speaker 1 I think there's reference to the ancient primates and the one group is able to pick up a stick of bone.

Speaker 1 And the fact that one group is able to do that and the other isn't just means that was a big deal the other group gets

Speaker 2 throwing yes yeah yeah so right so these things from our perspective as industrialized people these look like trivial technological transformations but you know

Speaker 2 what's trivial is not obvious yeah so you know i read for example that when the europeans went especially into the uh pacific especially the pacific islands but this happened to many certainly stone age people that they came across that they were prone to distribute steel axes like they were nothing well these are people who if you were the big man in the kingdom you had a really nice stone axe and those bloody europeans came along and were giving away steel axes like they were nothing was a little on the demoralizing side you might say it's the equivalent of the atomic bomb it's a game changer exactly yeah yeah so okay absolutely okay okay so So you said that the antithetical history would be, well, the black people owned the land, and so that's why all black people are the same people, yeah, and they had a concept of ownership.

Speaker 2 And ownership applied, despite the fact that these were widely dispersed nomadic tribesmen, ownership applied to all the land, like over what district?

Speaker 2 I mean, that's something that's sort of ambivalent. You said when the scouts went north, they found huge tracts of land that were unoccupied.
I mean, even in

Speaker 2 European, say, British English, British common law now

Speaker 2 if you leave a tract of land uninhabited

Speaker 2 if there is a tract of land that's uninhabited and someone comes along and improves it and builds a domicile at some point they obtain rights over it because there's a deep principle that if you're not using the land it doesn't belong to you

Speaker 1 right certainly not intrinsically and even under a contract like because you can end up with and you know squatters rights can obviously be taken too far but we should note that there is a principle if you're not using it you don't own it right it's the the dutch legal principle of res nullius is is a piece of land or property that that doesn't belong to anyone because it's there's no one there right and and so if so that's something if you if so a res nullius is something that you can occupy uh but that's not the narrative that's not that's not the mainstream narrative i think there are very few historians who actually push this mainstream narrative.

Speaker 1 I think most historians who are worth their salt know that the history of land land ownership in South Africa is much more complex.

Speaker 2 Well, then that begs a question.

Speaker 2 And now we can, let's turn from the historical to the more political, and then we'll start talking about the current day in South Africa because I think we laid the groundwork quite nicely. So

Speaker 2 the typical

Speaker 2 observer of South Africa pretty much buys the

Speaker 2 land was inhabited by the black people, and then the white people came and stole it. They buy that narrative.
Right.

Speaker 2 So given the complexities of the situation and the fact that, as you just pointed out, most historians worse their salt tell a story that's somewhat approximately akin to the story you just described.

Speaker 2 Why is it that that isn't the story that's widespread in the West as such? Why do you think that is?

Speaker 1 That is a very good question, and I think it... I think it deserves a long answer.
And I might not have the full answer. Yeah, well, fair enough.

Speaker 1 Because I think it ties in with a lot of the problems that the West has in terms of this deep-rooted sense of guilt

Speaker 1 that Westerners have about their own history, about their own past, and this oikophobic, I think that's Roger Scruton's term of sort of hating your own and having a deep sense of remorse for your own history and feeling sorry for that.

Speaker 1 I think it's rooted in that. It's this down with us mentality that we are the bad guys and we need to feel.

Speaker 2 Do you see any of that in South Africa among the Bantu?

Speaker 2 No, no. Like literally none? Is there any streams of black thought, let's say, in South Africa, where there's guilt being manifested for what happened to the Bushmen?

Speaker 1 To be honest, I haven't seen that.

Speaker 1 What I can say is Prince Mongosutu Bitelezi, who was a very well-known Zulu politician, anti-apartheid activist, he once apologized to the Afrikaner people for the massacre of Peter Tif that I mentioned earlier.

Speaker 2 Okay, so that's one example of remorse for

Speaker 2 expansionist overreach, let's say. Yes, that's right.
Because I'm curious about why this would be a particularly a European malaise, right? Because it seems to be particularly a European malaise.

Speaker 2 I mean, maybe that does that have something to do with the intrinsic peacefulness of Christianity? Maybe.

Speaker 2 I mean, we don't have to wander down that rabbit hole, but it is an interesting thing to speculate about. Like, why has this become

Speaker 2 this self-hating become a Western obsession?

Speaker 1 I think it's oversimplified, but I think Enlightenment philosophy has played some role.

Speaker 2 Okay, is that part of the reason that you noted earlier that the Enlightenment skipped? Yes. Okay, develop that a little bit then.

Speaker 1 So, why I say Enlightenment philosophy played a role? I mean, there are many examples. We mentioned Jean-Jacques.
So, Voltaire, for example, if you read his works, he places a lot of emphasis on,

Speaker 1 many modern philosophers do, sort of detachment from the community.

Speaker 1 We have to cultivate your garden, which is a good thing, but the Voltaire view of cultivating your garden is, you know, don't look at what's happening in the world out there, just focus on your garden at your home, something like that.

Speaker 1 But Voltaire also writes a lot about how other, you could say, civilizations are actually better than the West. He writes a lot about the East, about

Speaker 2 so, okay, so that's interesting. You know, that could be actually an indication of something that I think was part of the reason for the destruction of Rome.

Speaker 2 You know, and Nietzsche wrote about this a fair bit. So, well, so imagine you have a relatively homogeneous local community.
Let's call it Christendom.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, there's a lot of fractionation inside Christendom and a lot of factions fighting. But roughly speaking, there's an overarching ethos, which is Christian in its

Speaker 2 essence. And even the warring parties agree on many things.

Speaker 2 Okay, but now you expand and you expand and you encounter, well, the Chinese, let's say, and you encounter the Indians, the actual India Indians, these sophisticated alternative societies, the Buddhists, the Muslims, who have cultural traditions as sophisticated and rich as your own.

Speaker 2 Well, so Nietzsche's take on that was twofold. He said, well, first of all,

Speaker 2 You think you're right to begin with, but part of the reason you think you're right is because you don't know any other ideas.

Speaker 2 It's like 14th-century Christians didn't believe Christian things, they weren't like Enlightenment rationalists who adopted Christian superstition.

Speaker 2 I mean, they looked at the universe through a Christian lens, there wasn't another viewpoint apart from a couple of secular people and some heretics. It was like the world was Christian.

Speaker 1 That's your frame of rest.

Speaker 2 That's everything about it. That's that it, you know, you're, you, you see,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 there's no contrary philosophy. Okay, now you expand.
Well, and you're also doing this with regards to the Enlightenment discoveries and scientific.

Speaker 2 And now there's like eight competing viewpoints, each of which has the same depth, let's say. And so

Speaker 2 at some point, you have a terrible case of indigestion. And then Nietzsche says something even more subtle than that.
He says, well, you know, first of all, There's a monolithic worldview.

Speaker 2 And so you're pretty secure about that because that's just the way things are.

Speaker 2 Then you encounter these competing belief systems and they're pretty compelling and competing ethical systems as well and then it starts to become a question when it never was who's right well good luck sorting that out that's what wars are for right it's really hard to sort that out but then nietzsche says something even more interesting he said well you have belief system one then you encounter belief system two and you see there's a conflict and it isn't obvious who's right then you add belief system three in there and you think oh oh it's not just that there's a conflict in belief systems it's that the idea that there's an absolute truth itself or even truth itself now becomes questionable.

Speaker 2 That's when moral relativism makes its ugly appearance and nihilism. And so not only do you lose faith in your initial unquestioned presuppositions, but you lose faith in the idea of certainty itself.

Speaker 2 And then there's, you have no strength. I mean, I think part of the reason the Romans couldn't withstand the

Speaker 2 barbarians, let's say, is because they died of indigestion. Like there was no unity of purpose anymore because they had bitten off more than they can chew.

Speaker 2 And you could certainly, I think, part of the reason the UK is in the dreadful situation that it's in now is exactly because of that. It's like when you go to India

Speaker 2 and you're a little island and there's hardly any of you, and you go invade India, it's a real toss-up who's invaded who.

Speaker 2 Like you might have the upper hand for 50 years, but when you're outnumbered by a factor of what is it, 100 at least,

Speaker 1 who's going win that contact is by no means obvious yes so so maybe a different way of putting this as opposed to reference talking about enlightenment philosophy is to say the west has had to make this the west went through some form of a recognition that the western frame of reference is not the frame of reference but a frame of reference and i think a lot of people in the west

Speaker 1 were not quite sure how to deal with that.

Speaker 2 We still aren't.

Speaker 1 Yeah, which leads to a lot of conflict. And one way of dealing with

Speaker 1 dealing with that is to say that our way is right and everyone else's way is wrong, and we need to enforce our view on the rest of the world.

Speaker 2 And then you get a kind of ethno-fascism that can develop out of that. Yes, and that doesn't work.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, that's got its problem, so to say.

Speaker 1 And another way of dealing it that is equally bad is to say, well, we need to dissolve.

Speaker 1 We have an identity crisis as a result of this.

Speaker 1 And so maybe those guys are better than we are. And I think the appropriate solution lies in the middle, the golden mean, is to say that

Speaker 1 we have a particular frame of reference. And we see that in South Africa all the time, that there's a Western frame of reference, but people who aren't Westerners don't have that frame of reference.

Speaker 1 And one practical example in South Africa is property rights. So we believe in individual ownership of property.

Speaker 2 Because we also believe in individuals.

Speaker 1 Yes, yeah. But the Zulu culture is much more one that emphasizes a monarchy and communal ownership of land.
So the king owns the land.

Speaker 1 And I don't think the correct way to deal with that is for me to go to the Zulu people and say, you guys are wrong. You need to change your culture.
You need to adopt our way of thinking.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's not that easy to navigate. And I think that's why South Africa is such an important case study for the world, because we have these communities living on this piece of land.

Speaker 1 And how do we deal with that? Because people think about things like history, as we mentioned, differently. They think about things like property rights differently.

Speaker 1 They think about ownership and so forth in different ways.

Speaker 1 And the appropriate way to deal with that is not to try to enforce your way of thinking onto the other, but to try to find a way where there's mutual recognition and respect between different perspectives.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but even that presumes that there's something like boundaries, right? Like so that you can each have your space, so to speak.

Speaker 2 And so there's a metaphysic under that even, which is, well, there can be treaties and the treaties are made between sovereign, what, individuals or at least sovereign peoples.

Speaker 2 And even even that can be, as pointed out, say in the massacre, there was a treaty there. Well, you know,

Speaker 1 which to us was very important, but in their culture, it's not that, not that big a deal. And the signed document is almost irrelevant.

Speaker 2 Well, the fact that there's eternal war between different tribes is an indication of the complexities of negotiating such things. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 2 But it is the case as well that there's two streams in human history. And one stream is kill the foreigner.
And the other stream is, no,

Speaker 2 we've got our differences, but they have something to offer, and we have something to offer. And if we can get the trade arrangements right, we could both be better off, right? And you know,

Speaker 2 well, that's the battle. It's like, can you get the trade arrangements right? That's really hard.
And if you don't, well, then it's capitulation or mayhem, right?

Speaker 2 So, we're trying to figure out how to get the trade arrangements right. And you guys are right on the cutting edge of that.
Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 Now, this book of yours, Kill the Boar, let's flip to the modern times. Now, you know, I can remember in the 1980s going to McGill, and at that time, apartheid was a major issue.

Speaker 2 And we should let everybody listening and watching know what the apartheid state was exactly so we get that clear.

Speaker 2 But there was immense pressure, especially from the more radical end of the political belief spectrum,

Speaker 2 to divest any investment in South Africa, to put pressure on the government to dispense with apartheid.

Speaker 2 And I watched that and I thought, well, apartheid is a pretty brutal regime, and it has its marked catastrophic disadvantages, but you bloody radicals, you're messing with things you don't understand and you're virtue signaling like mad and you're not going to have to bear the consequences of your idiot interference.

Speaker 2 Because I figured and I still do that the most likely outcome for South Africa is that because of the vast disparities in population size and distribution of wealth, is that the white South Africans are going to find themselves in serious trouble.

Speaker 2 Now, that already happened in Zimbabwe, right? That already happened in Rhodesia, and we haven't talked about the relationship between those states and South Africa at all yet, but we might.

Speaker 2 But, like, the most likely pathway forward is the one that requires the least intelligence and effort, right? Because there's way more ways for things to deteriorate than for them to improve.

Speaker 2 Like, there's like one way for them to improve it, a million ways for them to go wrong. And the wealth disparity in South Africa is a major, major problem, like a massive problem.

Speaker 2 And that has to do with land ownership as well. And so

Speaker 2 it seems to me that there's great danger, at least, in that as an outcome. And now I've watched, especially in the last few years, because

Speaker 2 let's say for the 35 years since the 1980s, I don't remember exactly when the apartheid state disintegrated.

Speaker 1 When was it? 1990 was when it indicated. 1990.
1940.

Speaker 2 It was basically 35 years away from that. And so

Speaker 2 things maintained a somewhat stable equilibrium until five years ago.

Speaker 2 Is that about right?

Speaker 1 Let me just say something about the dismantling of the apartheid system. By the end of the system, initially it started out as an attempt to deal with these

Speaker 1 complex dynamics that we've been discussing. And the broad idea was let's give everyone homelands.
We have a strong central government to keep everyone in check.

Speaker 1 And then the different nations have their own homelands. And, you know, that sounds great, but in practice,

Speaker 1 it's not quite that applicable, especially when you still have a strong central government that sort of manages everything. But by the 80s,

Speaker 1 the Afrikaner people knew this is not working.

Speaker 1 We need to change.

Speaker 2 What was the relationship between the apartheid state per se and this notion of separate homelands? Exactly. So there were nations or states states set up like a federation, essentially.
And they were

Speaker 2 racially or ethnically or both. Like

Speaker 2 how were the states configured?

Speaker 2 Culturally.

Speaker 1 So the argument was that South Africa should be thought of as Europe, which I don't think is a bad argument because the point is it's a big piece of land that's very diverse.

Speaker 1 And how do we deal with that? And the solution to Europe is not have one big European government.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, we've seen where that goes.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 So the solution must be some form of decentralization.

Speaker 1 But the way to do that, they thought, was to have one big centralized government that sort of manages the decentralization.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, there were all these laws that were implemented. And it was also during the time of the Cold War.

Speaker 1 So they had the Suppression of Communism Act, which said that if you promote communism, it's a crime.

Speaker 1 And you're going to be prosecuted.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, this whole suppressing communism thing is a very complex rabbit hole as well. Exactly.

Speaker 2 The communists turn out to be quite a lot of trouble, especially in places where there's a lot of wealth disparity.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the concerns about the threat of communism wasn't exaggerated.

Speaker 2 That's certainly it's hard to exaggerate the threat of communism.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 Especially in

Speaker 2 parallel with wealth disparity because it's a revolutionary ethos. Exactly.
And one that results in nothing but bloody, brutal murder in mayhem, starvation.

Speaker 2 Like as a solution to the problem of disparity of wealth, it's not a good one. Yeah.
So

Speaker 1 the point I want to make is by the end

Speaker 1 of the apartheid era, the the metaphor that was used was like riding on the back of a tiger and having to get off.

Speaker 1 You know you have to get off this tiger, but the question is, how do you get off without getting eaten? That was the question that at least the Afrikaner people were grappling with.

Speaker 1 How do we end this in a way that is peaceful and in a way that would not and sustainable?

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 And it was the transition, I would say, was at least peaceful, fairly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, not bad.

Speaker 1 The violence in townships, I think, is underestimated, but especially black-on-black violence in South Africa.

Speaker 2 Tell people what the townships were and are.

Speaker 1 So that's the

Speaker 1 it's urbanized areas that are very poor in South Africa, where the majority of black people live. And

Speaker 1 at the time, there was some very, very vicious rival

Speaker 1 warfare, you could say, between competing political groups who were competing for support of black people, as if that's one whole.

Speaker 1 And the ANC, who's currently governing,

Speaker 1 was not the biggest initially, but they became the biggest because they were supported by the Soviet Union and the Chinese and they got weapons and so forth.

Speaker 2 Well, in terms of getting off a tiger, things went not too bad. Like it could have been, it could, as apartheid fell apart, it could have been like the fall of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2 It could have been a lot worse. It's quite the miracle that it wasn't just absolute bloody mayhem immediately.

Speaker 2 And, you know, there were a lot of remarkable people who took leadership at at that point to make sure that it did go well. Nelson Mandela.
Miraculously well, all things considered.

Speaker 1 Nelson Mandela probably being the prime example of someone who continuedly called for peaceful solutions. And he was criticized by that within his own party for that within his own party.

Speaker 1 But I think to you, you mentioned

Speaker 1 safe, but also sustainable. So the solution we got was a safe one, but not sustainable.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, walk through that.

Speaker 2 Tell everybody

Speaker 2 what has unfolded and what the current situation is.

Speaker 1 Well, there's so much that has unfolded, but one way to think of it is that in terms of the way I put it is, we have two problems. The one is the ship is headed in the wrong direction.

Speaker 1 And what I mean by that is those in power openly say they want to implement socialist solutions. They want to take property rights.
They think the way to help to uplift the poor is to attack the rich.

Speaker 1 Because that has happened. There are many examples.
Right.

Speaker 2 Well, and we should, let's rephrase that a bit.

Speaker 2 There's a difference between rich

Speaker 2 and productive.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Productive people have something for themselves, but they produce a lot for other people.

Speaker 2 And from what I understand about, well, I think this is true in Zimbabwe, Rhodesia, and South Africa, it's like, well, South African farmers, they feed the country.

Speaker 2 So if you do what was done in Zimbabwe, and you confiscate the land because the rich people own it, the oppressors, you confiscate the land. Well, then what happens? Well, everyone starves to death.

Speaker 2 That doesn't then, everyone's equal because they're all six feet underground. Exactly.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, so, like, the problem, part of the problem we have in the West is the language has been captured so completely by the left that it's almost impossible to have a discussion like this without using their terms.

Speaker 2 Like, most pro-free market people in the West talk about capitalism. Yeah.
That's a really bad idea. It's like, it's not capitalism.
It's free market. And this, it's not the rich

Speaker 2 poor exactly in South Africa, as if the rich only have what they have because they took it from the poor. It's like, no, the South African farmers, most of whom are white, actually know how to farm.

Speaker 1 They're some of the best farmers in the world.

Speaker 2 One way they did this, which is they were Dutch, a lot of them. And look at what the Dutch do in Europe.

Speaker 1 I think the Dutch are probably the best, I think, productively the best farmers.

Speaker 1 They are.

Speaker 2 That's that's their status in the in the european west right so go dutch farmers yes so they're rich because they make stuff

Speaker 1 so so one thing they did with which is very smart and very strategic is the anc when they took power they said the single biggest problem in south africa is a triangle it's a triangle of unemployment poverty and inequality yeah and so they lump those three things together and so the solution is to find or the quest is to find a solution for these three things, which is essentially the same thing.

Speaker 1 But unfortunately, they don't seem to know how to encourage production. They don't know how to fix the unemployment problem because they think the solution is socialism.

Speaker 1 And so the way, ironically, they've gotten to a point where they can only think about inequality.

Speaker 1 And so they get Margaret Thatcher at that famous line saying, you would rather have the poor be poorer provided that the rich is less rich. And it's that.

Speaker 2 No, there's actually an anthropological theory about human beings that's relevant to that so you know we evolved in our genetically modern form 350 000 years ago okay so one question is

Speaker 2 well what the hell were we doing for the 330 000 years like before the ice age say and the answer is well we were engaging in non-stop inter-tribal warfare And then within our own tribes, every time anybody got something that everyone else didn't have immediately, we just killed them.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we had to figure out how to, yeah.

Speaker 2 We've, we had to figure out how to let some people have more than other people some of the time. Because the alternative solution is like, imagine a new product comes along, like a flat screen TV.

Speaker 2 Well, the first people to get the flat screen TV are the billionaires. But if you wait five years, then everybody gets a flat screen TV.

Speaker 2 You have to wait. And so

Speaker 2 if the

Speaker 2 socialist idea is something like, well, if a new innovation comes along that makes people wealthy, it can't be implemented until every single person can have exactly the same amount all at once.

Speaker 2 Well, so it looks to me like the cost of innovation is inequality because things have to start somewhere.

Speaker 2 Now, you know in the West that if you're rich, what does it mean if you're really rich compared to just like middle class? It means you're...

Speaker 2 Your house has exactly the same amenities, but three times the square footage.

Speaker 2 It's like, or your car is more luxurious while you're stuck in the same traffic right the incremental difference is truly it's trivial between middle class and ultra wealthy you know and i mean people might say well you know that's easy for you to say because you're rich it's like if you're middle class you're rich and if you're too stupid to realize that you know nothing about the world

Speaker 2 and so in in south africa but you we know one of the things that promotes violence like this is absolutely crystal clear from the anthropological sociological and psychological literature.

Speaker 2 Extreme inequality breeds male violence like mad because low status

Speaker 2 poor men have nothing to lose by engaging in mayhem, right? You see this in gang warfare.

Speaker 2 You see it, you know, so for example, if you look in the in North America, this is true across the world, places where everyone's poor, there isn't much violence.

Speaker 2 And places where everyone's rich, there isn't much violence. But places where some people are poor and some people are rich, look the hell out.
And South Africa's got that in spades.

Speaker 2 And so the easiest solution for a politician, especially an unscrupulous one, is to say, well, you see those people over there in that house? They took it from you.

Speaker 2 That's what the bloody Bolsheviks said to the peasants. And that worked very effectively.
It's like soon there were no people who were rich, right? None.

Speaker 2 And then everyone was dead. Yeah.
So, okay, so you guys have this problem in spades, and the communist influence

Speaker 2 is stronger now than it was 40 years ago.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 But also not. So that's the irony.
So that goes to the point about the ship I mentioned. The ship's headed in the wrong direction.

Speaker 1 But even though the ship is heading in the wrong direction, the ship is sinking. And what I mean by that is...

Speaker 2 That's a bad combination. Yes.

Speaker 1 So the fact that the ship is sinking has become a bigger problem than the fact that it's headed in the wrong direction.

Speaker 1 And when I say the ship is sinking, I mean that we just have massive state failure in South Africa.

Speaker 1 So they want to implement all these very radical policy ideas and they have become more radical because they talk about a two-phase revolution.

Speaker 1 Phase one is getting control of the levers of power through democracy and phase two is once you have power, you need to use the levers of power to implement your socialist ideas, which is where they are now.

Speaker 1 So we have this plethora of new, very

Speaker 1 radical, leftist policy ideas in South Africa.

Speaker 1 But on the one hand, they're not really able to implement this because firstly of large-scale corruption, but just sheer incompetence within the South African government.

Speaker 1 So every sphere, everything that the government is supposed to be doing in South Africa, with the exception of tax collection,

Speaker 1 is collapsing.

Speaker 2 Okay, tell us what that looks like. Like, can we start with the stability of the power grid? Like,

Speaker 2 what do you... What's the difference between South Africa now as a modern industrialized state and South Africa, say, 10 years ago? What are you seeing fraying? What does it look like in the streets?

Speaker 1 So we can literally take any example, but let's take power as an example. We started having rolling blackouts maybe a decade ago.

Speaker 1 And it was first, it was you would have an hour without electricity because they're not able to provide electricity for everyone because they didn't build power stations.

Speaker 2 Well, providing electricity for everyone turns out to be very difficult. Yes.
And then stay on top of it.

Speaker 1 So you have to build stations, but you also have to maintain. Yeah, right.
And neither of these two are happening.

Speaker 1 So we're about at, I think the last time I saw about at half of the capacity we would have been if the power stations were maintained.

Speaker 2 With a massive population increase.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly. And so, yeah, so that's one part of the problem.
But then,

Speaker 1 so where we are now, initially, it's the metaphor. Let me say this because I think this is relevant.

Speaker 1 So Sero Ramapaza, who's the president of South Africa now, was the chief negotiator for the ANC during the negotiations for the African National Congress.

Speaker 2 That's it, yes.

Speaker 1 The ruling party. And so one member of parliament who was an opposition member of parliament wrote in his memoirs that he was part of the negotiations.

Speaker 1 And he asked during this negotiations, he asked Robert Paulza, who's, as I said, the president at the moment, what's your plan for dealing with the whites? To which he said, well, that's easy.

Speaker 1 You deal with them like boiling a frog alive.

Speaker 1 You know, the metaphor, putting the frog in the water and just lifting.

Speaker 2 You hear that metaphor a lot nowadays in many places.

Speaker 1 Yes, just lifting the temperature gradually and then the frog doesn't jump out

Speaker 2 and so the problem with that is we really see that how we something gets worse we hear that we have for example one hour of rolling blackouts and everyone complains and that's fine for a week or a month and then it's two hours and then it becomes three hours people can adapt a like unbelievably well and the new normal becomes normal so fast it's just beyond like i just remember during covet it's like six months in it was like oh this is how life is and you just forget about what it was like before.

Speaker 2 And part of that's a testament to human adaptability, but it's also an indication of the fragility of our, even our fundamental expectations.

Speaker 2 Okay, so there's a level of collapse that is slow enough so people won't rise up. And yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So now we have times where they are up to 12 hours a day without electricity.

Speaker 2 And that's everywhere. And what people do.
So

Speaker 2 diesel generators? How do you deal with that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, we put up solar powers. So people adapt to that, those who can afford it.
You have solar power.

Speaker 2 Right. So the richer people still have power.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 Ironically, making the gap.

Speaker 2 Well, look, as soon as your infrastructure starts to deteriorate, the poor people, like people die from the bottom up, right?

Speaker 1 Literally, that's the thing.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Water is an example.

Speaker 1 So we lose about 40, almost 50% of our water as a result of leakages. pipes not being maintained.
And the funniest story was in one town, the town didn't have water.

Speaker 1 And then the municipal manager said, but remember, these pipes were built by the apartheid government, so we should blame the pipes.

Speaker 1 So they're not maintaining the pipes, but the fact that they were built by the previous government means that the pipes are the problem.

Speaker 1 But not maintaining them.

Speaker 2 That's right. Well, that's like failure as an indication of our moral virtue.
That's what the degrowth people have been doing in the West, too.

Speaker 2 We're not economic failures. We're aiming at degrowth.
And man, we're hitting the target.

Speaker 1 And so we have, that's a good example where, again, people who are more wealthy can make a plan. They dig boreholes or something.

Speaker 2 Well, it's the definition of wealth. Yes.
You're protected from entropy.

Speaker 1 And the people who suffer the most are poor black South Africans who live in townships, who die from drinking water that is contaminated.

Speaker 2 Right. Yeah, when the water would be even a more crucial issue than power.
Exactly. Right.

Speaker 2 They're integral. What else do you see?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 we have the transport system, for example. Our railways have collapsed.

Speaker 1 The port in durban in in the eastern part of the country uh last i read was it was number

Speaker 1 was it 405 rated number 405 on a list of 405 ports so the worst one in the world um which is a big deal because you need a well-functioning port for the economy to function

Speaker 1 so so that's an example the ports for people not to die again once again um the the transport i mentioned that the roads the fact that the roads aren't maintained and then we have these practical things things like like um

Speaker 1 uh well policing is more than just practical uh so and once again an example of the more wealthy people who are able to adapt to that so we higher private security exactly so private security in south africa is currently double the size of the police and the army combined.

Speaker 2 Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because the police are, I mean, I was in an army.

Speaker 2 So that's really a reversion to something like, it's quasi-feudal society at that point.

Speaker 1 Yes, and then what happens again in poorer communities is they resort to some form of mob justice because the police aren't there. There's a guy who rapes people in your community.

Speaker 1 Everyone knows who he is and the police doesn't do anything. So the people deal with him themselves.
So you get vigilante justice in South Africa. So

Speaker 1 that, and we can go down the list, the education system. One poll found that

Speaker 1 80% or survey, 80% of the schools in South Africa are dysfunctional. I believe the top,

Speaker 1 I think the number is the top 200 schools in South Africa, which are predominantly the more wealthy schools, have more distinctions

Speaker 1 for children who finish high school than the next 6,000 schools combined.

Speaker 1 So the education system. And so again, everything, one economist who's a very renowned economist in South Africa, he sort of makes a joke, but it's not just a joke.

Speaker 1 He says people ask him, where should you invest?

Speaker 1 What should you do to make money? And he says, it's easy.

Speaker 1 You should look at what is the government supposed to be doing and invest in something that is in the private sphere that is doing that thing, whether it's electricity generation, whether it's water, whether it's private security, whether it's private education.

Speaker 1 Those are the areas that are.

Speaker 2 So, okay, so your metaphor was not only is the ship going in the wrong direction, so that's in

Speaker 2 we're going to do more stupid things faster, but the additional complication is that all the evidence is that the whole thing is fraying at the seams and sinking. Right.

Speaker 2 And that that's the most, well, of course, the most likely trajectory always is the disintegration of a complex and sophisticated industrial society because those bloody things are impossible to produce and very difficult to maintain.

Speaker 2 And so now that one of the terrifying things that, you know, you brought up earlier is that, you know, whither goes South Africa, there goes the West. It's just like delayed.
And, you know,

Speaker 2 that's partly why I'm interested in South Africa. It's like, hmm, okay,

Speaker 2 let's not be thinking that couldn't happen here because that is here for all intents and purposes. It's just on the cutting edge of here.
Okay, now your book is entitled Kill the Boar.

Speaker 2 There's a reason for that. So why don't we delve into that? We've got about 20 minutes left, something like that on this side of the podcast.

Speaker 2 Let's switch to the like cutting edge, let's say, of the revolutionary inclination in South Africa, because I've really noticed, especially in the last two years, like things have been heating up like mad.

Speaker 2 You know, I watch X a lot and I follow a lot of South Africans and I'm starting to see, well, I'm starting to see some evidence of the worst of possible outcomes increasingly becoming likely.

Speaker 2 And so you're obviously concerned about something approximating that. So

Speaker 2 let's delve into this particular phrase and illustrate for people where that came from and what it means.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, I'd love to talk about that. And I would also love to hear your views on that because this is, I know you have a particular interest in people do what they say they'll do.

Speaker 2 That's my view. You want to know what Hitler was going to do? Read Mein Kampf.
You know, and you think people hide their motives.

Speaker 2 It's like, no, most people aren't sophisticated enough to have two personalities, the well-developed lie and the actual plan. People more or less do what they say they're going to do.

Speaker 2 And so when they're chanting kill the boar or singing about it, that's even if

Speaker 2 none of the individuals in that chanting mob would take the next step, the spirit that infuses the mob,

Speaker 2 it's already there.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the counter-argument would be that it's just a metaphor. Yeah, right.
And they should respond.

Speaker 2 Bullshit. Yeah.

Speaker 2 No, seriously. That's not the metaphor.

Speaker 2 Well, come on. There's metaphors and kill the ex.

Speaker 2 That's not a metaphor.

Speaker 2 That's not a cover for some benign.

Speaker 2 for some benign revolutionary ideal. No, it's like it's it's the it's the call to blood of the psychopaths wielding the sword.

Speaker 2 And maybe there's some good thinkers around the edge who think, oh, they don't really mean it. It's just a metaphor.
It's like, make no mistake about it. The worst of them mean it.

Speaker 2 And it doesn't take very many people to mean things. 3% of the population, that's

Speaker 2 the purpose. Oh, gosh, no.
It wasn't the

Speaker 2 majority of Russians weren't Bolsheviks.

Speaker 2 Tiny percentage, 3 to 5%, maybe.

Speaker 2 So, you know, don't be thinking, you don't need that many organized psychopaths to wreak bloody blue murder. That's for sure.

Speaker 1 So there was a a cartoon about this in south africa it was two farm attackers they've just murdered a farmer and they were running out of the house and then the radio had a news report which says kill the boar is just a metaphor and then the one attacker turns to the other and asks what's a metaphor yeah and and so that so so the kill the boer is a chant um and what happens and now again considering that people say it's just a metaphor you have these politicians um many of which are more to the left of the ruling party who are already quite to the left left.

Speaker 1 So they have these political rallies.

Speaker 2 The fringe of the fringe.

Speaker 1 Yes. And then they make these speeches.

Speaker 2 Let's name a politician. Who's the guy who's been pushing this?

Speaker 1 Julius Malema in particular is the guy, the leader of the economic freedom fight. Yeah, yeah.
So they fight for economic fighting.

Speaker 2 It looks like he's lots of fun. Yeah.
And so now, has he been pushing the metaphor camouflage?

Speaker 1 He would say he's celebrating the struggle against apartheid, and that's why he chants this. But then he would also conclude that he would also say that the struggle isn't over.

Speaker 2 Right, the struggle is never over for the communists. Well, it's over when they all die.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So he would make a speech, and the speech would be along the lines of we need to slit the throat of whiteness. He would say things like that.
He would say, That's all conceptual, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and then he would make a, this is an exact quote. He would say, all white people are criminals and they should be treated as such.

Speaker 1 He would say that during a speech, and then he would give an applause.

Speaker 2 Standard Bolshevik nonsense.

Speaker 1 And he says, if you, and then they do the dehumanization thing, they call them cockroaches and all of that.

Speaker 2 Right. That's that's the utilization of disgust as a so disgust is a very, very dangerous emotion.
Like people have this misapprehension that the German Nazis were afraid of the Jews. It's not fear.

Speaker 2 It's disgust. Yep.
The thing about fear, fear freezes you. And fear, if you're afraid of something, you also respect it.
If it's disgust, you want to eradicate it. You burn it.

Speaker 2 You eliminate it, right? It's a disease, like mold. There's no quarter given.
So any appeal to disgust.

Speaker 1 Oh, they would say filth. They would say that

Speaker 1 white filth. Yeah.
So it's the disgust.

Speaker 2 Yeah, blood, purity, all those metaphors. They're all disgust, not fear.
Yep. Yeah.
And so anybody who's making an appeal to disgust, boy, you better be thinking there's murder on their mind. Yep.

Speaker 1 So they would do that. They would talk about economic inequality and the road, they would suggest that the road to your wealth is to go and attack those people over there.

Speaker 1 And then they would say things like, again, this is a direct quote. If you see a beautiful piece of land, go and take it.
It's yours.

Speaker 1 So they would make these claims.

Speaker 2 Only the thieves own it now.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah, exactly.
The people who own it are criminals.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's exactly what the bloody Bolsheviks did with the Kulaks in the Ukraine before they starved six million people to death. Exactly the same place.
Well, and you can see why it's effective.

Speaker 2 You know, you talk to people and you say, well, look at how miserable your life is. It's like, yeah, it's pretty damn miserable.
Look at those people over there. They have everything.

Speaker 2 Why do they have everything and you don't have anything well it's because they're evil people and they took it from you well it kind of looks like that

Speaker 2 yeah the moral thing to do is to kill the cockroaches right well then you think well where does our food come from it's like well you know we'll deal with that exactly that's what they will we'll deal with that later when the when the when the edenic uh landscape that we're promising makes itself manifest, which of course never happens, right?

Speaker 2 But you can see why it's so effective.

Speaker 1 And so this same guy, he would, again, during a speech and he was asked about this in court.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because it became a free speech case, didn't it? Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So he said, we are not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least for now. That's the line he used.
And so in court.

Speaker 2 Well, then, everyone's relieved by that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, at least for now. Happy.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there was a court case against this song, this chant, and he was asked to explain this. And he said, I can't guarantee the future.

Speaker 1 So the lawyer asked him, if you say, I'm not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least for now, do you foresee a future where you might call for the slaughter of white people?

Speaker 1 And he said, yes, I do.

Speaker 2 I foresee that.

Speaker 1 But that would be their fault. It would be the fault of white people.
Of course. For not

Speaker 1 getting to the program.

Speaker 2 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 And so they would make these speeches. And then once the speech is finished.

Speaker 2 Well, the Jews in Nazi Germany, you know, they brought it on themselves. Yeah, it's like, oh, no, that's the standard claim.
Of course it is. Of course that's the claim.

Speaker 2 You know, that's the claim that that's analogous to the claim is, well, they're conspiring against us. We better act before they do.
You know, that's a genuine precursor to genocide.

Speaker 2 Like when that kind of rhetoric starts, that's what happened in Rwanda. It's like those people, they're preparing to attack you.
You better get ready.

Speaker 2 Then you add the disgust and you add the economic inequality and you heighten that with some ethnic tension and

Speaker 2 then and you give people the excuse to go. Plus, they're so angry.

Speaker 2 And you can see why people who are like young and absolutely poverty stricken with no hope, they're so angry.

Speaker 2 And if they have the opportunity to turn that anger into vengeance, even for a day, especially the worst of them, it's like, oh my God, oh, mayhem breaks loose. And then there's nothing for anyone.

Speaker 2 Well, oh, well, that's tomorrow. You know, yeah, yeah, brutal, brutal.

Speaker 1 So they would then burst into this chant. And it's not even a song.
It's just a chant: kill the boy, kill the farmer. And there are different variations there often.

Speaker 2 Yeah, kill the farmer. There, that's a

Speaker 2 slogan aimed at death. Yeah.
kill the farmer. Okay, well, what are we going to eat? Each other doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, that's what happened in Ukraine because they descended into cannibalism, Venezuela, as well. Yeah, right, yeah, right.

Speaker 2 You know, at one, I think this may be still true, but at one point, in the not too distant past, well, so I mean, in the last decade, it was illegal for doctors to list starvation as the cause of death.

Speaker 2 That's how the communists dealt with hunger. It's illegal to die of starvation.
Oh, problem solved. Problem solved.
Problem solved. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's it's it's yeah, it's bizarre. But you know what's really, really shameful is, so I and many others have been campaigning against this for quite some time.

Speaker 1 And I'm, I can honestly say I'm not aware of a single cause in South Africa

Speaker 1 by people in the media, the government and so forth.

Speaker 2 In South Africa. In South Africa.
And in the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 And largely in the rest of the... No, I mean, I'm talking about a South African cause for which you get attacked more than campaigning for the farm killings to stop and for the hate speech to stop.

Speaker 2 So explain that.

Speaker 1 You would be accused of fear-mongering.

Speaker 1 Right. And so we had this term Roich Hefar, the red danger was the fear about the communists.
And now the accusation is Swart Kafar. So

Speaker 1 you are...

Speaker 1 you are depicting black people as dangerous when when it's it's a minority it is a minority who's doing these things but but you get viciously attacked depicting resentful communists as dangerous, like they are.

Speaker 2 Right, right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I think there's a reason why. I think there's because some form of a hierarchy of recognition in terms of who should be recognized for the hardships that they face.

Speaker 1 And when it comes to recognizing hardships in South Africa.

Speaker 2 Oppression Olympics.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is sort of an inconvenient reality when you talk, when you go to the area of oppression.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. So people don't want that to be part of the conversation.

Speaker 2 Jews, you know, that's a rough one because they're the radicals who play the oppression Olympics game won't let the Jews play because they're successful, right? So you don't get to play.

Speaker 2 You don't get to be in the oppression Olympics, even if you have reason to be terrified out of your skulls, say.

Speaker 1 Because it's inconvenient to us. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, it's a counter.

Speaker 2 It goes against the narrative in a terrible way, the victimization narrative. Exactly.
Right, right. So, yeah, so that's definitely playing out in South Africa.

Speaker 2 There's no doubt about that yeah yeah because the rule is the fundamental rule of that narrative is if you're poor and dispossessed you're moral and oppressed And, you know, some people who are poor and dispossessed are moral and oppressed, and some aren't.

Speaker 2 And look out for the ones that aren't, because some of them are vicious, psychopathic, murderous criminals, and you don't need that many of them.

Speaker 2 And they're generally about 3% to 4% of the population. So heaven help you when they organize.
And people are so so naive about that. You see that, especially on the left.

Speaker 2 You saw this again in the Soviet Union because the rule was, well, if you're a criminal, then you're part of the victim class, which is why the bloody Russians let the criminals run the gulag camps.

Speaker 2 You're a socially friendly element. Well, why are you a criminal? Well, it's because you were oppressed by the landowner.
It's like, no, I'm a murderous thug. No such thing.

Speaker 1 Just victim. So the criminal is a victim.

Speaker 2 The criminal. And the worse the criminal, the more the evidence for the victimization.

Speaker 2 And it's partly because, like, to give the devil is due, a lot of the radical progressive leftists, especially the sheltered middle class type, they're very agreeable.

Speaker 2 By temperament, they're empathic. They're maternal.
They have no idea.

Speaker 2 There's no space in their worldview for the sort of person you don't want to have hiding under your bed at three in the morning when you come home from a party. It's like, those people don't exist.

Speaker 2 They're just victims. It's like, you wait till you run across one.
You'll change your tune. But if you're protected enough, you never have to deal with that reality.

Speaker 2 You know, because you're Jean-Jacques Rousseau and everybody's a noble savage. It's like, well, most people, most people are peaceful, even if provoked.
Some people aren't.

Speaker 2 Right. And you better be able to draw the distinction between those kinds of people because otherwise you're at the mercy of the worst of them.
Right.

Speaker 2 And this is a lesson that's very hard for people to learn. Well, you guys are going to be facing this in no time flat while you all are already.

Speaker 1 can i say something about that about sort of the road ahead because that's yeah probably the most important part so uh president trump has started speaking out about what's happening in south africa for which we are very grateful uh which has led to quite a backlash from the south african government who and their response is it's not happening that's the official right yes yes yes it doesn't exist there are no farm murders fear mongering yeah yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 1 so so I do think one of the issues that's on the table now is refugee status is yes for the Afrikaner, especially the farmers, to flee to the U.S.

Speaker 1 or to get some form of protection from the U.S. And I know some people are interested in that.

Speaker 1 But what I should also say, and that's why I'm so grateful that we spoke about the history part at first, is

Speaker 1 our concern is that if we just leave the country, our culture dissolves and our communal identity dissolves and we become Americans or whatever.

Speaker 2 And so. Well, plus the entire country descends into like lawlessness, chaos, and everyone dies.
Yep. Right.
Because if all the white South African farmers leave, that's 100% what will happen. Right.

Speaker 1 Well, and you can look at the rest of Africa as an example,

Speaker 1 Zimbabwe and so forth.

Speaker 1 So we need to find some form of a

Speaker 1 what I would call dispensational solution.

Speaker 1 The solution is not simply to say we need a different president or we need a different party to take over parliament because there's fundamental structural problems with the political system.

Speaker 1 It's like trying to repaint the skirtings when there's a problem with the foundation of the house.

Speaker 1 And the reason why I say that is because the country is very big. It's very diverse.
It has a very strong central government.

Speaker 1 And also the country is quite poor. And poor countries tend to have more socialistic governments that are not necessarily...

Speaker 2 That's because they want to be poorer still. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And they're not necessarily interested in... economic investments.
It's just about blame shifting and scapegoating.

Speaker 2 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 So, so, and and I think, and this is our message also to people in America: is it's great if there are people who want to flee or get out to help them, that they should get help.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 we must also look towards some form of a solution for the problem.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, we've got five minutes left on this side.

Speaker 2 One of the things I would, so for everybody watching and listening, most of you know that we do another half an hour behind the Daily Wire paywall.

Speaker 2 And I think I'm going to concentrate mostly on what South Africa,

Speaker 2 what the Boers, let's say, the Boers who were concerned about this, what they would want to see from the West politically and sociologically. So, I'd like to do that on this side.

Speaker 2 We're only going to be able to do about five minutes here, but you can come and join us on the Daily Wire side for an additional half an hour if this is a topic of particular interest.

Speaker 2 That's what we'll talk about there. Okay, so let's at least lay out the outlines of that.
Like, what do you see?

Speaker 2 What can the West, the rest of the West, offer under these circumstances to everyone in South Africa? Because it's a catastrophe, this is an impending catastrophe for everyone.

Speaker 2 Like it might be the white farmers that are first on the chopping block and that's highly likely. But as soon as they're gone, everyone else dies.

Speaker 1 They can't for the job.

Speaker 2 It's not good.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so

Speaker 1 there could be many different solutions.

Speaker 1 But I think what we are quite certain about is the direction that we need to head in, and that could lead to different outcomes. But the direction...

Speaker 1 The way I see it is it's some form of a combination between decentralization of political power so that those in power have much less power.

Speaker 2 So that turns South Africa into something more like Europe, let's say, where there are a multitude of

Speaker 2 nations.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it could be a federation, it could be some form of cultural autonomy, it could be territorial autonomy, it could take different forms.

Speaker 1 It could be balkanization.

Speaker 1 So decentralization and the other aspect is sort of the bottom-up approach is self-governance.

Speaker 1 Because people, people, and that's not just for the afrikaners or the white anglos or it's it's the south africa is a people call it a community of communities there are so many different nations and tribes and so forth and they don't get to make decisions about their own affairs because the central government decides and the central government's the central government regards things like cultural identity and so forth as backwards tribal things.

Speaker 2 Well, you see the same thing playing out with the European Union at the moment.

Speaker 1 It's very similar. It's very similar to the European dynamics with the European Union.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the problem is that as the size of government mounts, the proclivity for society to become tyrant and slaves magnifies, right?

Speaker 2 You need those intermediary structures, which are something like, well, families, towns, cities, states, you know, maybe separate countries in some sort of federation with

Speaker 2 serious limitations on the top-down power, right?

Speaker 2 That's a subsidiary structure, the classic alternative to tyranny and slavery.

Speaker 1 and and and

Speaker 1 there's a big problem in south africa with traditional leaders or let's say the king of the zulus for example not being recognized by the government for for his role that he's playing and and so the government the way we talk about it is the difference between natural identity and artificial identity yeah yeah they have the slogan that says for the nation to prosper the tribe must die right and so but the nation for us is something else than the way a lot of westerners think about the nation, because the nation in our context is an artificial thing.

Speaker 1 It's a construct. It's putting all these people together, lumping.
It's like saying you are all just Europeans now. And so Europe is the nation.
And the nations or the countries.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, that Enlightenment emphasis on the atomized individual leaves no place for the...

Speaker 2 town, the city, the family, the state.

Speaker 2 Right. We haven't sorted that out well in the West at all.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think the West has gone too far.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 We missed the idea of subsidiarity. We don't know what to do with the complexities of structured social identity, right? We figure the autonomous individual is the only unit of analysis.

Speaker 2 And that's true under very limited conditions, right? One of the conditions might be something like first approximation to cultural homogeneity and a Judeo-Christian metaphysic, right?

Speaker 2 And so where that doesn't apply, you don't have atomized sovereign individuals. Yep.

Speaker 1 And when it gets to the point point where the community dissolves and the atomized individual finds himself against the Leviathan, there's nothing you can do. You can't do anything against

Speaker 2 you can pray.

Speaker 1 That's the only thing you can do.

Speaker 1 So the only solution is,

Speaker 1 again, what we call natural community or natural identity, as opposed to these artificial communities we see today, is for communities to have...

Speaker 1 to be well organized in the context of their communities, to have community institutions. That's very Tocquevillian.

Speaker 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, when he wrote Democracy in America, he said, Well, this is what is going to make America great in the 1830s.

Speaker 2 Well, and America's got that right with its 51 state or 50 state experiments. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 2 Because they're always, Americans are always doing something intelligent somewhere, no matter how many stupid things they're doing other places, right? Well, they keep renewing because of that.

Speaker 2 It's a miracle to see. Okay, we should stop on this side.
And so, everyone, join us on the Daily Wire side. We're going to talk more about solutions.

Speaker 2 We're going to talk about, well, what the Boers, for example, in South Africa need to see from the West, and well, the pathway forward. Well, really,

Speaker 2 what are we trying to avoid in South Africa? Mass murder and starvation, which is by far the most likely outcome as far as I can see at the moment.

Speaker 2 So, join us on the Daily Wire side to continue the discussion.

Speaker 2 And thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale today for facilitating that and the Daily Wire for making this distribution of this podcast widely possible.