Matthew Parris ties himself in knots

I had always considered The Spectator to be a decent magazine, and articles by Matthew Parris – the former Conservative MP – to be worth reading… until I stumbled across this utter trash:

Afrikaners have been endlessly maligned
Matthew Parris
Spectator Magazine, 31 August 2024

This I began writing two weeks ago as an overnight guest in a cosy cabin on a farm beside an endless dirt road in the most remote part of the north-western Cape Province in the country of my birth, South Africa. To many eyes this might seem a landscape of utter desolation: hot, dry and windswept scrubland plateau, flat as far as the eye can see but cut by deep, rocky canyons tight with the most intense and diverse profusion of succulents on the planet: flowering aloes, spiky aloes, furry aloes, ground-creeping aloes and the strange giant palm-like aloe, the Quiver Tree.

Jostling among them, the thorn bushes are murderous. You’d be mad, heroic or both to farm here, but our hosts do, grazing sheep over their thousands of hectares watered only by a couple of wind-pumps with drinking troughs. Scorched by day, frozen by night, to make your life here you’d need either to believe in Destiny with a capital D, or to have no choice. Both are true of our Afrikaner hosts: on their shelves are devotional paperbacks and a game called Bible Charades; above my bed a sweet farmyard painting illustrating Psalm 23, though its owners have hardly been led beside the still waters. Their church, I assume, will be South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church (DRC).

Touring this part of Africa on both sides of the great Orange River (Namibia on the north bank), we have met many such white families, all Afrikaners, all making their living in the toughest of environments, none of them less than devoted to this continent of their birth – and parents’ and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ birth – but few of them (were they to think about it, which perhaps they don’t) with anywhere else to go. Their nationality is South African. The Netherlands lost interest in them two centuries ago. The British mistreated and made war on them, incarcerated them in concentration camps where tens of thousands died, robbed them of the independence for which they’d fought, and have looked down on them and their culture ever since. Since the end of the second world war the wider world has regarded Afrikaners as pariahs: the architects of apartheid.

Here, from an Afrikaner perspective, is their potted history. As Dutch settlers, their ancestors arrived in the mid-17th century, but the British soon eyed up the fertile and strategically important Cape, and muscled in, finally ousting the Dutch jurisdiction at the beginning of the 19th century, sending over large numbers of English settlers and subjugating the Afrikaners’ ancestors, who had developed from Dutch their own variant language, Afrikaans.

Resenting their subjection, some Afrikaners – increasingly dubbed ‘Boers’ (farmers)– began, from the 1830s, a long series of northwards treks, taking ox wagons, families and stock with them. Their courage, and what seems to modern eyes the near-impossible challenge of negotiating rivers and mountains with oxcarts, was incredible. These Voortrekkers (pioneers) were and to this day remain icons for the Afrikaner people – comparable with Exodus for the Jews. Visit the awe-inspiring Voortrekker Monument near Pretoria.

The Voortrekkers set up republics of their own north of the Cape: the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The British seemed un-interested until gold and diamonds were discovered on the Witwatersrand (near today’s Johannesburg), whereupon the rascally but remarkable Cecil John Rhodes and a (conjectured) boyfriend Leander Starr Jameson did their best, finally succeeding, to bounce a doubtful Downing Street into what became a series of wars against the Boers.

The Boer Wars are a shameful episode in British history, little dwelt upon in our classrooms, and over which even the then war reporter Winston Churchill shows some sorrowful respect for the adversary. That great statesman Jan Christian Smuts achieved a post-second-world-war reconciliation, but the enormity of British perfidy was to remain as a taproot of Afrikaner rage and smug English-speaking contempt for the Boers.

I was brought up, as the English in southern Africa usually were, with an unthinking disregard for Afrikaners. In my day this was often linked with dislike of apartheid, but the roots went deeper. Many Afrikaners became the poor whites of South Africa. Most also spoke English (had to) while few English South Africans learned Afrikaans. There were a few Afrikaners in my boyhood Rhodesia and we English children were imbued with the prejudice that they would tend to be oafs: the Boers were boors.

But gradually after the second world war the Afrikaner component of white society in South Africa grew in number and heft, until, in 1948, their Nationalist party took power. Apartheid was born.

I yield to none in my detestation of apartheid. My parents fought it. I was sent to a multiracial school in Swaziland to avoid it. It was a brutal attempt to entrench status and privilege in a people, the Afrikaners, who had themselves been underdogs to the English. But the mistake – from the racist viewpoint – the Afrikaners made was to try to turn oppression into a principled (and Christianised) belief system. The white Argentinians had slaughtered almost all their natives. In South America today you will still note how whiteness equates to privilege. In south-west Africa the Germans had committed a major genocide on their black tribes.

Apartheid was one of many world racist horrors. English-speaking white South Africans relied upon it for their own comforts, sniffed at DRC doctrine, but never voted in great numbers for parties pledged to multiracialism. Only the Jews in South Africa can hold up their heads, producing many who fought apartheid. Gandhi (‘A general belief seems to prevail in [the Cape] that the Indians are little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa’) was a Hindu nationalist, not an equal rights campaigner.

In short, Afrikaners have been made a scapegoat for the politics and practice of white supremacy. They do not deserve this. And they have nowhere else to go.

I have come to admire these people; admire their continued contribution to sub-Saharan economies, their considerable literature and poetry, the many brave internal dissidents their culture produced, and their unquenched farming spirit in hostile landscapes that others spurn. Nobody in recent South African history deserves three cheers; but the Afrikaners deserve two.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/afrikaners-have-been-endlessly-maligned/

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Parris, perhaps blinded by the hospitality he recently received in the Northern Cape (ie. a part of South Africa which was NOT one of the Boer republics, but rather benefited from British Colonial rule until 1910) ties himself in knots to equate modern-day Cape Afrikaners with the warlike, expansionist and deeply racist and antisemitic Boer republics of 130-odd years ago. Parris pretends that ‘The British mistreated and made war on them, incarcerated them in concentration camps where tens of thousands died, robbed them of the independence for which they’d fought’, and – just as ridiculously – claims that ‘subjugation’ was the cause of the Great Trek.

In reality, it was the Boer republics – specifically Kruger’s Transvaal – which ‘mistreated’ people. Kruger moved Heaven and Earth to discriminate against English speakers, doing all he could to deny them the vote, and treat them as second-class citizens. And it wasn’t just English speakers who Kruger’s ghastly regime victimized – Catholics, Jews and, of course, non-whites were also treated as lesser races. Indeed, pretty much the only thing the ever-fractious Transvaal Boers were able to agree upon was a line in their Constitution that proudly declared: ‘The people are not prepared to allow any equality of the non-white with the white inhabitants, either in church or state’.[i]

In stark contrast, and despite what Parris has dreamt up, Afrikaners in Britain’s Cape Colony (a colony with a colour-blind franchise system) were equal before the law and not denied the vote – indeed, they dominated politics in the territory. It is noteworthy that, when the Boers invaded in 1899, precious few Cape Afrikaners flocked to Kruger’s banner and threw in their lot with the invaders; the vast majority were perfectly happy under equitable and stable British rule, and remained loyal, with many even serving against the various desperados and banditos who did (foolishly) rebel.

Though it pleases Parris to parrot Apartheid-era propaganda, no one was ‘incarcerated’ in concentration camps. Other than night time curfews, the refugees who were housed in them were free to come and go as they pleased, and many were housed with their families as an alternative[ii]. The menfolk often found work in nearby towns, or were employed to defend the camps from Boer raiders[iii], while many girls were trained (and paid) to work as nurses. It is also strange that Parris doesn’t feel the need to mention that the camps were established in response to a brutal terrorist campaign waged by the Boers, after they had been soundly defeated on the battlefield in the war they started.

And as for the ‘subjugation’ which Parris claims caused the Great Trek, it was – in reality – the banning of slavery by the ‘wicked’ British that revved-up the extremist / lawless / trashy elements which existed on the fringe of civilized Cape society[iv]. That Parris lionizes those who were determined to leave liberal, benign British Colonial rule so they could keep their slaves is remarkable. It is also remarkable that, while trumpeting the achievements of the Voortrekkers, Parris doesn’t find a moment to mention that the lawless republics they haphazardly established involved violently snatching great swathes of land from black people, killing untold thousands and displacing whole tribes.

And as for these republics, Parris claims that Britain ‘made war on them’, but (rather inconveniently for his made-up version) the First Boer War was actually an insurrection by Boer extremists against British rule in the Transvaal, while the Second Boer War (aka: The Boer War) was sparked by an attack on / invasion of British territories by the Boer republics. So quite why Parris pretends that Britain ‘made war on them’ is anyone’s guess; presumably he also thinks Britain ‘made war on Argentina’ in 1982.

Parris also declares that Britain was ‘uninterested’ in the Transvaal until ‘gold and diamonds were discovered on the Witwatersrand (near today’s Johannesburg)’ – this flies in the face of historical reality, as Britain actually annexed the Transvaal (to save the Boers from the Pedi and Zulu) back in 1877[v] – almost a decade prior to the Witwatersrand gold rush. Not only that, but Britain remained the suzerain power over the Transvaal even after her defeat in the First Boer War. And quite what diamonds Parris thinks were discovered on the Witwatersrand is beyond me – as he simply made that bit up.

Indeed, making things up seems to be a theme of this article, as Parris then makes the wild and completely unsubstantiated claim that Dr Jim – one of the great ladies’ men of the time – was Rhodes’ boyfriend… and that this improbable (ahem) ‘gay couple’ somehow ‘bounced’ Downing Street into a ‘series of wars’ against the Boers.

This is, of course, just yet more utter bullshit from Parris. In reality, precisely one war was fought between the British and the Boers after the Jameson Raid (ie. the attempt by the Johannesburg English-speaking community to gain democratic rights in the corrupt and racist Transvaal) and that was The Boer War (1899 – 1902) which was – wait for it – started by the very Boers that Parris has suddenly decided to champion. Why he feels the need to spin that into a ‘series of wars’ is unclear… as is why he thinks being attacked and invaded by a violently expansionist, and deeply crooked, banana republic equates to ‘British perfidy’.

Even a stopped-clock is correct twice a day, however, and Parris finally gets something right when he says that Apartheid was implemented (overwhelmingly thanks to votes cast by Afrikaners[vi]) in 1948. Parris, however, neglects to note that the victorious National Party did not field a single English-speaking candidate in that election[vii], and that largely English-speaking Natal consistently voted against that National Party. Another thing Parris conveniently leaves out is that what the establishment of Apartheid really meant was that (a rather more liberal version of) the system the Transvaal Boers had established in their republic almost a century earlier was finally extended across the whole of South Africa – which had been Kruger’s aim when he started the Boer War back in 1899.

While acknowledging the lunatic fringe of extremist neo-Nazi Afrikanerdom that still curses South Africa even today, there can be no doubt that most modern-day Afrikaners are welcoming, hospitable, and thoroughly decent people; as Parris suggests, they certainly do not deserve to be endlessly blamed for the horrors of Apartheid, or the warmongering Bible-bashing lunacy of Krugerism[viii]. But this doesn’t mean that inconvenient historical reality can just be thrown to the wolves as Parris seems desperate to do.

The Voortrekkers were not the gallant heroes of Apartheid-regime legend: as tough and resourceful as they undoubtedly were, their primary motivation was to retain their ‘right’ to keep slaves, and they carved out their unstable and chaotic republics by killing and displacing countless thousands of black people.
Likewise, The Boer War had nothing to do with ‘independence’ or ‘British perfidy’, and everything to do with a quasi-insane attempt by Kruger to conquer an Empire from the Zambezi to the Cape – a ‘crusade’ he had been planning for since at least 1887[ix].
And like it or not, Apartheid (and the even more vile precursor system in the pre-war Transvaal) was inextricably linked to pie-in-the-sky notions of Boer racial supremacy, and their more extremist elements considered (still consider?) themselves as an island of ‘God’s Chosen People’ in a sea of primitive savages, grasping Jews, and scheming Brits.

Educated and open-minded Afrikaners are well aware of their chequered history, and have long since seen through Apartheid-era sob stories. So desperately trying to blame everything on a nasty British bully will only make Parris some friends among the knuckle-daggers of the Afrikaner Far Right – until they learn that he, unlike the late Dr Jameson, is gay. But spewing out such nonsense actually helps no one, and only keeps self-pitying myths of Boer victimhood staggering on a little longer.

NOTES:

[i] Thompson, A History of South Africa, p.102

[ii] ‘Fools Rush in—writing a history of the concentration camps of the South African War’

[iii] Van Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War, p.252

[iv] Binckes, The Great Trek Uncut, p.182-6

[v] Guyot, Boer Politics, p.33

[vi] Despite what Parris claims, English-speaking South Africans tended to vote for the anti-Apartheid United Party, and the later Progressive Party.

[vii] It is also remarkable that the National Party won the election – allowing it to implement the horrors of Apartheid – despite only getting 41.2% of the vote, much less than the 50.9% won by the United Party. For more on this, read: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/apartheid-was-helped-by-twisted/

[viii] Yet, for some reason, there are those who seem to think modern-day Britons should be blamed for much-less unpleasant things done by their ancestors hundreds of years ago

[ix] A delegation from the Transvaal met with their counterparts from the Orange Free State in secret talks, in which Kruger’s men tried to persuade their southern neighbours to join them in an offensive alliance against the British. The astounded leaders of the Orange Free State rejected this insanity out of hand. For more details of this deliberately over-looked smoking gun, read: ‘Episodes in the my Life’ by John Fraser – one of the members of the OFS delegation