My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan - Or: Africa makes everyone an idiot

[Capsaicin Addict]

So I mentioned reading My Traitor's Heart, the memoir of Rian Malan, in an A&H thread (probably the South Africa one).

Malan is a white South African who left the country for eight years, around the time things were getting awfully interesting in the 80's. He documents his time abroad and his return in the usual, self-flagellating liberal way, but he can't evade some ugly facts (and to his credit, he does not try).

Namely, that Africa makes people stupid.

I really want to grab this guy and shake him, point to every godawful atrocity committed, and say, 'Dammit, this isn't your fault personally. Everyone here is pants on head exceptional!'.

The white Afrikaaners, descendants of the Dutch, deliberately turned their back on the Enlightenment. As the concepts of Western civilization started to coalesce into actual ideals, these morons started calling themselves 'Doppers', after the little metal caps used to snuff out candles.

Stop and think about that just for a minute. It's philosophical Luddism, or antivaxxing, writ large. And these dolts embraced it! They turned their backs on the ideas that, for better or worse, helped shape Western thought and (in my opinion) improve it over time, and happily sat in the dark -- both figuratively and literally. No wonder they were a pack of honest to fuck bigots (as opposed to the imaginary ones that idpol types rant about). Malan puts it:

We shit on the altars of Western enlightenment and defy the high priests who would have us behave in accordance with its moral tenets. It was so; it is so.

But before you start thinking, 'Aw shit, this is where Cappy starts making excuses for the negros', hold your horses. Because no matter how miserably treated the Xhosa, Zulu, or whoever the fuck natives were, that doesn't excuse equally stunning idiocy.

Unsurprisingly, socialism became very popular with the blacks under apartheid. And since this was before the Soviet Union imploded, it was a lot harder to point out its flaws. But what I found darkly hilarious was that various groups (tribes?) would compete against each other for the 'right' to overthrow apartheid and the whites. This is where Winnie Mandela's charming tactic of 'necklacing' fits right in. These idiots were killing each other over whose socialism was 'correct' (granted, that happens a lot). And if it wasn't 'your flavor of socialism is wrong', it was fights over how your great-great-grandfather did my great-great-grandfather dirty and how I must avenge his honor. And round and round and round it keeps going.

And we can't leave out the fact that even when confronted with basic technological solutions -- and when I say 'technological' I'm talking in the simplest terms, like basic irrigation, agriculture, and animal husbandry -- it seemed like the native Africans couldn't remember jack shit. Malan talks about how higher-tech solutions never seemed to stick, which was no surprise. But in the last chapters of the book, he discusses Neil Alcock.

Alcock seems to have been one of those genuinely decent guys trying to break the cycle of fuckwittery in Africa. He wasn't the smartest guy (Malan comments about Alcock possibly having a learning disability) but he seemed to have a green thumb and a talent for growing things. He also had a steel moral core that would've impressed a Catholic saint; I can't for the life of me decide if he wasn't a little mad or not.

But Alcock wasn't stupid. I'll give him that. He definitely had a knack that, if he'd gone elsewhere, would've made him well liked and well off. But no, he expended his energies in Africa, attempting to teach how to rotate crops and livestock. Unfortunately, he wound up landing in the province of Msinga -- a moderately fertile area, but one perpetually contested between two Zulu tribes who simply could not get over their issues. They would fight each other (as I noted above) for the stupidest things, while they starved and lived in poverty.

This was what killed Alcock, of course. He became one more victim of the crossfire -- never mind that he'd treated all who came to his hut (for he was living pretty much like a Zulu anyways) with kindness and respect. Never mind he was trying to improve the place. One more poor bastard who tried to stop the internecine killing and caught a bullet for it. Africa wins again.

Despite the end of the book depicting Alcock being effectively canonized (deified?) by native Africans, it fails to bring me any hope. It's nice that you're remembering him, you stupid bush niggers, but how about you remember what he was doing before he died, not after? And maybe, just maybe, not fucking kill each other like morons for the dumbest shit? The conflict which claimed Alcock's life? Started over two guys insulting a third in a bar.

What the fuck.

I don't know what it'll take to 'cure' Africa. Kim du Toit once wrote a biting piece entailed 'Let Africa Sink', and after reading this book it just looks better and better. If you can't be arsed to learn from your mistakes, well, you deserve everything that happens, and maybe the rest of the world should just fuck off and let you claim those mass Darwin Awards, since every time we try to help, everyone gets hurt, or becomes stupid.

--Capsaicin Addict, who can't wait for the famines to start in South Africa since those dumb fucks are using the Zimbabwe plan of land redistribution.

 

[Marco Fucko]

A lot of non-stupid South Africans jumped to North America or Europe when apartheid ended. I remember on the Killstream some SA guy trying to bring awareness to the farm murders and he mentioned that he's trying to get his family on board with leaving but they're too stubborn. If that's what's keeping a lot of whites there then I can't extend my sympathy.

If you're too stubborn to bug out when the government is absolutely fine with organized criminals murdering you and stealing your shit then I say let Darwinism take its course.

 

[eldri]

Don't forget the chinese and their current problems with getting Africa to produce anything at this point.

 

[Wallace]

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the only two options for Africa at this point are to either pull out completely and let it sink, as du Toit said, or install a White Western Raj for the next century.

 

[wylfım]

There are gorillas with higher IQ than the average of some African countries.
Picture the most exceptional person you know, and then imagine someone dumber than that. Giving them money will do fuck-all because they'll just blow it on petty warfare, hookers, and cocaine.
The only hope is to force-modernize them, which of course no one will ever accept because "muh colonialism"

 

[millais]

I don't know where you get the idea that Doppers were some kind of anti-intellectual weirdos. In fact, the Enlightenment had been over for 50 years by the time the Doppers were established in the 1860s. They were religious conservatives, sure, but no more so than the various Protestant religious revival types in the America or UK in the mid-19th century. Their primary issue with mainline Boer Calvinism was related to a number of fundamentalist sticking points. They didn't want hymns sung during church services, only psalms, as hymns were not verbatim from the Bible. They didn't want candles in church services as it evoked the papist tradition, hence one possible source of their name. There's not even any strong scholarly consensus as to where the name originated. It's also speculated that since they were predominantly influential in rural communities, they were originally called "Dorpers" (ie small townfolk), which evolved into "Doppers" over time. Some also think that since they opposed the practice of individual communion cups, "Dopper" is a reference to "dop" (ie, a dram, or small drink of alcohol). The Doppers get a bad name because their most famous follower was Paul Kruger, a man born and raised in the 1830s when the only book available among the Voortrekkers of the wild frontier was the Bible. Of course he would have a rather narrow worldview.

And the backwards religious types that the rural Boer Doppers typified hardly manifested in the ruling class of the Afrikanervolk in the years after the Second Boer War. Doppers were only ever a small minority of the Boer population; most Boers were mainline NHK or NGK adherents. At any rate, after the war, the old Boer leaders were replaced overnight by Cambridge and Oxford-educated Cape Dutch barristers and colonial administrators, who really only shared a tenuous linguistic connection to the Boers of the interior country. The Cape Dutch and the Boers were always divided by socioeconomic class, imperial loyalty, liberal/conservative split, and urban/rural split. Even their language bears marks of separation; the Boers spoke a kind of rural or border Afrikaans that originated in the Eastern Cape, very distinct from the established Western Cape dialects of the Cape Dutch.

The bleeding heart Cape Dutch liberals are prone to blame all the ills of post-1948 South Africa on the uncompromising steadfastness of the Boer people without realizing that it was Cape Dutch who rushed the timetable for majority rule in order to receive the standing ovation of the international community without considering that dire consequences of giving the reins of government over to the Bantu without first bringing the Bantu up to the same level of economic development as the Afrikaner.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I don't know where you get the idea that Doppers were some kind of anti-intellectual weirdos.

The author. Do you want me to quote the full chapter about this? I have the e-book in front of me right now.

Frankly, the guy struck me as an amazing milquetoast.

The bleeding heart Cape Dutch liberals are prone to blame all the ills of post-1948 South Africa on the uncompromising steadfastness of the Boer people without realizing that it was Cape Dutch who rushed the timetable for majority rule in order to receive the standing ovation of the international community without considering that dire consequences of giving the reins of government over to the Bantu without first bringing the Bantu up to the same level of economic development as the Afrikaner.

Probably. But my point is that there would never be a good time. Everyone involved had fucked up and shit the bed. Blacks couldn't figure out how to work together beyond basic tribal units, and whites were absolutely convinced (except for the bleeding heart liberals, natch) that the only way to run the place was to grind blacks into the dirt so they were no longer a threat.

And if you're going to go THAT far, you need to man the fuck up and go all the way, Vlad Tepes style, because if you don't the people you've ground down WILL eventually kill you.

 

[millais]

The author. Do you want me to quote the full chapter about this? I have the e-book in front of me right now.

Frankly, the guy struck me as an amazing milquetoast.


Probably. But my point is that there would never be a good time. Everyone involved had fucked up and shit the bed. Blacks couldn't figure out how to work together beyond basic tribal units, and whites were absolutely convinced (except for the bleeding heart liberals, natch) that the only way to run the place was to grind blacks into the dirt so they were no longer a threat.

And if you're going to go THAT far, you need to man the fuck up and go all the way, Vlad Tepes style, because if you don't the people you've ground down WILL eventually kill you.

Whoever he is, I think he is vastly overstating the impact of the Doppers on the national thought and political consciousness of the Boer and Afrikaner people. They were only ever a fringe minority even in the rural communities which they typified. The real people in charge of the political destiny and government of the Afrikaners were all British-educated university men of the Afrikanerbond, not backwater theocratic fundamentalists. The backroom schemers, social engineers, and power brokers of the Afrikanerbond saw Afrikaner nationalism and Calvinism as a kind of opiate of the masses, a way to pacify and control the so-called "poor white" non-landowning class of Boers who had lost their property and land in the rinderpest epidemic of the 1890s and the subsequent war with the British Empire. The mine worker strikes and white labor unrest of the 1910s and 1920s further convinced the elite Cape Dutch of the Afrikanerbond that they would end up having a kind of pan-racial class warfare on their hands unless they could distract the impoverished Boers with a kind of Afrikaner nationalism that appealed to a common cultural heritage and economic fear of the Bantu other.

And by the time of the majority-rule referendum, the Nationalist Party had been pursuing a successful policy of "separate development" since the 1960s, which was intended to bring the Bantu up to the same level of economic development as the Afrikaner and make the Bantu into an equal partner ready to share in the burdens of governing the country. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, practically all forms of "petty apartheid" had been signed out of law (ie racial segregation, anti-miscegenation, racial employment quotas), and the only thing that remained was unequal enfranchisement and racial restrictions on land property ownership. The latter measure actually benefited the Bantus and Coloureds in some respects by banning white real estate developers and land speculators from buying up and gentrifying vast tracts of black and coloured lands in desirable urban and suburban areas.

The Cape Dutch under de Klerk threw a wrench into those plans by abruptly accelerating the orderly transfer of power to majority rule from a 20+ year timetable to a 5 year timetable. Had they waited 15, even 10 years, the wealth gap between the races could have been substantially shrunk before handing the country over to the Bantu. The Cape Dutch claimed their hand was forced by the UN and US economic sanctions, but actually South Africa was only suffering slightly above average inflation during the entire period of the twenty year sanctions, with no indication of an upward trend at the time of the handover of power.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

Whoever he is, I think he is vastly overstating the impact of the Doppers on the national thought and political consciousness of the Boer and Afrikaner people. They were only ever a fringe minority even in the rural communities which they typified. The real people in charge of the political destiny and government of the Afrikaners were all British-educated university men of the Afrikanerbond, not backwater theocratic fundamentalists. The backroom schemers, social engineers, and power brokers of the Afrikanerbond saw Afrikaner nationalism and Calvinism as a kind of opiate of the masses, a way to pacify and control the so-called "poor white" non-landowning class of Boers who had lost their property and land in the rinderpest epidemic of the 1890s and the subsequent war with the British Empire. The mine worker strikes and white labor unrest of the 1910s and 1920s further convinced the elite Cape Dutch of the Afrikanerbond that they would end up having a kind of pan-racial class warfare on their hands unless they could distract the impoverished Boers with a kind of Afrikaner nationalism that appealed to a common cultural heritage and economic fear of the Bantu other.

And by the time of the majority-rule referendum, the Nationalist Party had been pursuing a successful policy of "separate development" since the 1960s, which was intended to bring the Bantu up to the same level of economic development as the Afrikaner and make the Bantu into an equal partner ready to share in the burdens of governing the country. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, practically all forms of "petty apartheid" had been signed out of law (ie racial segregation, anti-miscegenation, racial employment quotas), and the only thing that remained was unequal enfranchisement and racial restrictions on land property ownership. The latter measure actually benefited the Bantus and Coloureds in some respects by banning white real estate developers and land speculators from buying up and gentrifying vast tracts of black and coloured lands in desirable urban and suburban areas.

The Cape Dutch under de Klerk threw a wrench into those plans by abruptly accelerating the orderly transfer of power to majority rule from a 20+ year timetable to a 5 year timetable. Had they waited 15, even 10 years, the wealth gap between the races could have been substantially shrunk before handing the country over to the Bantu. The Cape Dutch claimed their hand was forced by the UN and US economic sanctions, but actually South Africa was only suffering slightly above average inflation during the entire period of the twenty year sanctions, with no indication of an upward trend at the time of the handover of power.

Someone's been doing homework, I see. SA native or just general interest?

I'm not giving you flack, by the way. It's nice to see someone come with actual data and history in hand to argue against things.

 

[millais]

Someone's been doing homework, I see. SA native or just general interest?

I'm not giving you flack, by the way. It's nice to see someone come with actual data and history in hand to argue against things.

I think a lot of the times the Cape Dutch or those of the same general socioeconomic strata of English-speaking, middle-to-upper class, urban Afrikaners get to dominate the international conversation on their history and make themselves out to look better than they really are and pin all the blame on those descended from the Boers and poor whites. The thing is that those same liberal Cape Dutch are the only ones with the financial means to uproot themselves and flee overseas or wall themselves off in gated communities without having to live and deal with the mistakes of their misrule of South Africa. It's the modern day descendants of the Boers and poor whites who have to suffer all the consequences of living in a failed state and simultaneously get shit on by internet commentators for being "too stupid" to emigrate.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I think a lot of the times the Cape Dutch or those of the same general socioeconomic strata of English-speaking, middle-to-upper class, urban Afrikaners get to dominate the international conversation on their history and make themselves out to look better than they really are and pin all the blame on those descended from the Boers and poor whites. The thing is that those same liberal Cape Dutch are the only ones with the financial means to uproot themselves and flee overseas or wall themselves off in gated communities without having to live and deal with the mistakes of their misrule of South Africa. It's the modern day descendants of the Boers and poor whites who have to suffer all the consequences of living in a failed state and simultaneously get shit on by internet commentators for being "too stupid" to emigrate.

Ah, the irony indeed, since those urban Afrikaaners, their Dutch ancestors sat on their hands and refused to send the Boers anything except tax collectors. Had the Boers not already settled into a mindset viewing native Xhosa as the enemy (and in truth, I can't blame them; cattle rustling was a cottage industry on both sides), one wonders what might've happened to those soft city folk? The Boers had, when faced with the prospect of troops being sent to the hinterlands to keep them in line, threatened to kill half the soldiers, salt their corpses, and send them home with the survivors.

We can debate might have beens all night. I still think everyone involved was a damned fool.

 

[millais]

Ah, the irony indeed, since those urban Afrikaaners, their Dutch ancestors sat on their hands and refused to send the Boers anything except tax collectors. Had the Boers not already settled into a mindset viewing native Xhosa as the enemy (and in truth, I can't blame them; cattle rustling was a cottage industry on both sides), one wonders what might've happened to those soft city folk? The Boers had, when faced with the prospect of troops being sent to the hinterlands to keep them in line, threatened to kill half the soldiers, salt their corpses, and send them home with the survivors.

We can debate might have beens all night. I still think everyone involved was a damned fool.

All the Boervolk and their free burgher forbears ever wanted was to be left alone. They never wanted to rule the Cape, they just wanted a piece of land to call their own in the uninhabited interior of the subcontinent where they could practice their faith and speak their language in peace. And they were doing a pretty fine job of it before the British showed up to take their country away from them.

They were always so few in number that it was not in their national spirit to expend priceless life and limb in fighting bloody wars to resolve their conflicts with the British and Bantu except when backed into a corner with no other choice left. Whenever local conditions grew too unbearable for them, whether from drought, or native attacks, or levying of excessive taxes, or imposition of English hegemony, their initial reaction would always be to sell up and trek north.

The only reason the relations between Xhosa and the Grensboere of the Eastern Cape deteriorated as much as it did was because first the Dutch and then the British colonial authorities refused to spend enough money to properly police the Fish River frontier until the tensions inevitably broke out into open warfare. The colonial authorities chose to allow settlement beyond the guarded frontiers of the old Cape Colony, but then complained when the settlers came into conflict with the Xhosa due to having to take the law into their own hands in regards to farm attacks and cattle theft.

In the Cape, the early Boer rebels never so much as harmed a single soldier or representative of the colonial authorities. They chased the local colonial magistrate or landdrost out of town and seized goods or property that had been impounded over nonpayment of taxes and the like, but that was about the extent of their civil unrest. Only once they were beyond the bounds of British colonial law in the terra nullius of Natal and the Transvaal did they take arms against the imperial forces.

 

[Coleslaw]

All the Boervolk and their free burgher forbears ever wanted was to be left alone. They never wanted to rule the Cape, they just wanted a piece of land to call their own in the uninhabited interior of the subcontinent where they could practice their faith and speak their language in peace. And they were doing a pretty fine job of it before the British showed up to take their country away from them.

They were always so few in number that it was not in their national spirit to expend priceless life and limb in fighting bloody wars to resolve their conflicts with the British and Bantu except when backed into a corner with no other choice left. Whenever local conditions grew too unbearable for them, whether from drought, or native attacks, or levying of excessive taxes, or imposition of English hegemony, their initial reaction would always be to sell up and trek north.

The only reason the relations between Xhosa and the Grensboere of the Eastern Cape deteriorated as much as it did was because first the Dutch and then the British colonial authorities refused to spend enough money to properly police the Fish River frontier until the tensions inevitably broke out into open warfare. The colonial authorities chose to allow settlement beyond the guarded frontiers of the old Cape Colony, but then complained when the settlers came into conflict with the Xhosa due to having to take the law into their own hands in regards to farm attacks and cattle theft.

In the Cape, the early Boer rebels never so much as harmed a single soldier or representative of the colonial authorities. They chased the local colonial magistrate or landdrost out of town and seized goods or property that had been impounded over nonpayment of taxes and the like, but that was about the extent of their civil unrest. Only once they were beyond the bounds of British colonial law in the terra nullius of Natal and the Transvaal did they take arms against the imperial forces.

Sorry for necromancy, but how many Afrikaners are Cape Dutch or Boers? How many other groups of Afrikaners are there?

 

[millais]

Sorry for necromancy, but how many Afrikaners are Cape Dutch or Boers? How many other groups of Afrikaners are there?

There's about 3.5m Afrikaners in total, and of that, about 1.5m self-identified Boers. I believe the distinction is largely a matter of cultural and political self-identification these days, since over the past 100 years, there has been substantial internal migration and intermarriage between Cape Dutch and Boers, and during the apartheid years, the Nationalist Party government did a very thorough job of subsuming Boer identity into the larger Afrikaner sociocultural bloc through language standardization, civic education, and mass media. It used to be that Boers could be easily distinguished from Cape Dutch by their dialect, ancestry, and hometown, but not so anymore.

These days, it seems like Boer identity is somewhat returning to its historical origins as a cultural outgroup based on shared circumstances of rural lifestyle and the associated dangers and risks. This is in contrast to the urban, cosmopolitan Afrikaner, who does not share the same concerns or economic interests as the rural farmer or townsman. The latter grouping is not exclusively Cape Dutch by descent or locale, but the contrast between the distinct rural and urban blocs certainly draws compelling parallels between the historical Cape Dutch and the historical Boers.

Historically, there were a great number of Afrikaner subgroups due to the fractious nature of the people, their physical isolation from one another, and their semi-nomadic predilection for selling up and trekking off to establish new "micronation"-like freebooting republics whenever they were unsatisfied with the state of the government or church in their previous home.

But the establishment of British hegemony in Southern Africa pretty much put a stop to further trekking and brought all the Afrikaners under one government, and the social engineering of the Nationalist Party during the latter half of the 20th century pretty much obliterated all the remaining cultural distinctions. The simultaneous collapse of universal Afrikaner religiousness as a result of the moral crisis of the apartheid years has also done a lot to obliterate the once substantial distinctions between the various Afrikaner Calvinist denominations, which were almost cultural subgroups of their own.

Aside from the Boers and the urban Afrikaners (ie the modern equivalent, if not direct descendant, of the Cape Dutch), I think there's maybe only two other distinct and extant Afrikaner subgroups, both historical oddities which due to their geographic isolation alone have not yet been fully absorbed by the larger Boer and Afrikaner cultural identities.

There are the "Southwest" Afrikaners, descendants of Boers who trekked to Angola and Namibia in the 1870s due to their dissatisfaction with the Boer president of the Transvaal republic at that time. After the Boer War of 1899-1902, their numbers were augmented by Boers and Cape Rebels who chose exile in what was then German Southwest Africa over submission to British rule. They used to be a much larger and significant population, but the South African government organized a repatriation scheme in the 1930s for the Angolan Boers due to bad drought conditions, so that reduced their numbers a fair bit. These days they are all concentrated in Namibia.

There are also the Argentine Boers. These are descendants of Boer exiles and Cape Rebels who participated in a colonization scheme in Chubut, Argentina in order to avoid living under British rule after the Boer War of 1899-1902. Again, they used to be a pretty sizable colony, but the South African government in the 1930s put together a repatriation scheme for the Argentine Boers, which brought a good number of them back to Africa. These days the Argentine Boers are almost extinct due to Argentine cultural assimilation; they still constitute a vibrant, sizable and distinct community, but they aren't really Afrikaners any more in the sense that they mostly speak Spanish and have taken up Catholicism.

There used to be more Boer expatriate and exile communities dotted across the colonial territories of Southern and Eastern Africa, but pretty much all of them chose to repatriate to South Africa during the postwar decolonization period to avoid being massacred by the new black African governments.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

A lot of non-stupid South Africans jumped to North America or Europe when apartheid ended. I remember on the Killstream some SA guy trying to bring awareness to the farm murders and he mentioned that he's trying to get his family on board with leaving but they're too stubborn. If that's what's keeping a lot of whites there then I can't extend my sympathy.

If you're too stubborn to bug out when the government is absolutely fine with organized criminals murdering you and stealing your shit then I say let Darwinism take its course.

Sounds based and honorable to me. Willing to stick to your land no matter what happens, because if you abandon it you're giving up on your nation.

 

[Marco Fucko]

Sounds based and honorable to me. Willing to stick to your land no matter what happens, because if you abandon it you're giving up on your nation.

The type of thought process that gets honored and upheld after the fact, staying with something that's sinking or sunk and dying with it, isn't for me. If I were in SA and had any means I'd bounce to the US, Australia, whatever the cheapest airfare/boat ride was. If the US somehow becomes a war torn shithole I'd pack my minimal possessions and head somewhere else. I get you and millais are country types of people, to a certain extent. That's not really a wrong way to live, but not my thing.

Me? I'm probably bouncing, if I can't see some way to adapt to radical social change and ingratiate myself with the new regime (i.e it is racially based).

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

The type of thought process that gets honored and upheld after the fact, staying with something that's sinking or sunk and dying with it, isn't for me. If I were in SA and had any means I'd bounce to the US, Australia, whatever the cheapest airfare/boat ride was. If the US somehow becomes a war torn shithole I'd pack my minimal possessions and head somewhere else. I get you and millais are country types of people, to a certain extent. That's not really a wrong way to live, but not my thing.

Me? I'm probably bouncing, if I can't see some way to adapt to radical social change and ingratiate myself with the new regime (i.e it is racially based).

Oh, believe me, I'd flee too. I just can sympathize with that mindset. As is, my career path has a very high likelihood of taking me out of Appalachia and a good chance of taking me out of the South. Different levels of investment. I think it's probably a bigger deal for the Boers because they know that if they all leave, their culture will die.

 

[millais]

Sorry for necromancy, but how many Afrikaners are Cape Dutch or Boers? How many other groups of Afrikaners are there?

Oh also I neglected to mention the "poor white" Afrikaner underclass. It's more of a socioeconomic substrata rather than a cultural or religious grouping, but it is large enough to be a third grouping side by side with Boers and Cape Dutch/Urban Afrikaners.

The "poor whites" have been extant since the rinderpest epidemic of the 1890s wiped out the livestock and land assets of the least prosperous Boer families. The newly impoverished Boers ended up as sharecroppers and farmhands (the so-called "bywoner" social class) working for richer Boers, or worse, they migrated to the mining boom towns and big cities for unskilled labor in the mining industry and other urban jobs. The urban slums of the "burgher-right stands" was like the Boer Republican version of the modern day "white squatter camp".

A few years later, the British Army's razing of Boer and Cape Rebel farms and the destruction of the associated property and invested capital during the 1899-1902 war further enlarged the number of "poor whites" and drove them in ever larger numbers to the big cities for work. They became a very volatile source of labor and social unrest due to their endemic poverty, which has not changed much over the past century. A big part of the Nationalist Party's social engineering with regards to bringing all Afrikaners under the single cultural umbrella of standardized Afrikaans language, Afrikaner Calvinism, and a constructed national mythos was their desire to redirect the energies and attentions of the "poor whites" away from the organized labor movement and towards more nationalistic pursuits. Even apartheid-era legislation was initially intended to restrict opportunities for black skilled labor so that the "poor whites" could have guaranteed jobs in the civil service, healthcare system, security services, and military-industrial complex despite their lack of advanced education and marketable skills. So during the Nationalist government years, the guaranteed job security kind of made the "poor white" strata appear to diminish in number and extent.

But with the end of minority-rule government, all those job protections for the "poor whites" vanished overnight, or else the jobs themselves were terminated/downsized (especially in the military/security field), so the "poor whites" were reduced all the way back to the impoverished state of their forbears in the concentration camps and the burgher-right stands.