WeeklySA_AdminEMPRIRE: Author reveals US President Donald Trump’s overreaching arm in the country’s politics…
By Jacob Mawela
“No other race is so easily satisfied, so good-tempered, so care-free,” once observed Afrikaner statesman General Jan Smuts in reference to his understanding of the “negro and the negroid Bantu during a lecture he delivered at the University of Oxford in 1929.
The then South African prime minister also referred to Bushmen in unkind and derigatory terms, suggesting they were “mentally stunted and a desert animal”.
Smuts appeared to have been very much at home in Britain, the colonial empire, to whose capital London he led a mission about South Africa’s future in 1906 – which would culminate in South Africa later attaining dominion status of the Union of South Africa in 1910, with Winston Churchhill, then Britain’s under-secretary of State for the Colonies, lending a sympathetic ear to his request to exclude African people from any participation in the newly formed union.
Time could have rapidly healed both men’s wounds enough for them to prioritise their self-interests, letting bygones be bygones, considering that, in 1899, Smuts, then a Field Marshall, had roughly interrogated Churchill, then a young lieutenant who had been captured by the Afrikaners during the
Anglo-Boer War – and conversely, he himself had also been captured by British forces during the same war.
Gavin Evans, who in this book’s preface, expressly mentions having grown up in an apartheid South Africa where the relations between words and their frequently fatal consequences was never in doubt.
In addition to eugenics, Nazism and apartheid, Evans also delves into the revived lexicon of race science entries, a theory espoused by a French author Renaud Camus.
Resuscitating a chilling documentary film-like synopsis of “alt-right mass killings” committed post-2010 in a chapter titled ‘Eight Killers, 202 Bodies’, Evans notes a pattern of South Africa’s obsession among far-right killers in some of the cold-blooded carnages – from Dylann Roof (who killed nine black people in Charleston church on June 17, 2015), and admired such brutality.
Trump’s name inevitably features in Evans’ analysis – inadvertently in another South Africa-related episode when Afrikaner singer Steve Hofmeyer claimed that a white farmer was murdered every five days and that the number of white South Africans killed by black people would fill a “World Cup soccer stadium”. This prompted a tweet from him in which Trump mentioned instructing the secretary of state (from his first tenure at the White House) to scrutinise the large-scale killing of farmers in South Africa.
Deeming such publicity by the US president as jackpot for his exclusivist nationalistic cause, Hofmeyer issued a complimentary note: “We take our cue from Donald Trump and his tweet showed concern about the land grabs and the farm murders.”
His racism was reminiscent of the racist diatribe British guitarist Eric Clapton spewed at a shindig in Birmingham,
England, in August 1976, at which he yelled: “Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Keep Britain White.”
An adherent of pseudoscience (a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method) once recorded on the Oprah Winfrey Show, saying to its host: “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you host…you have to be born lucky in to have the right genes” – Trump’s steering of the US towards authoritarianism is enabled by an influential circle of White men with South African ties such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, who spent his formative childhood in apartheid South Africa.
By sheer coincidence, Evan’s book was launched around the period the US expelled South Africa’s ambassador Ebrahim Rasool for “race-baiting”– a move interpreted in certain quarters a retaliation against the South African government’s case to bring Israel to book at the International Court of Justice (ICJ)accusing it of genocide against Palestinians.
Evans was born in London but grew up in Cape Town. He practised as a journalist in South Africa and the UK. He is the author of Dancing Shoes Is Dead – a memoir of boxing and politics set against the backdrop of South Africa under apartheid.
• A trade paperback, White Supremacy: A Brief History of Hatred is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers. Available at leading bookstores countrywide. It retails for R295.
