The Boer Diaspora

Emigration is what historically led to the founding of the Boer people. We are a people born out of two great migrations, the first being that of the Dutch, German, and French Calvinists from Europe to South Africa, largely with the help of the Dutch East India Company during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the early nineteenth century, the Great Trek of the Boers from the British-ruled Cape to the northern parts of South Africa was essentially the birth of the indigenous Boer nation of South Africa. The Boer republics founded out of this migration were unfortunately conquered by the British at the turn of the century, and the First Boer Diaspora followed, wherein a number of Boers migrated from Southern Africa to Kenya in West Africa (most of whom returned later, however) and to Patagonia in Argentina.¹ Notably, a group under the leadership of the Boer general, Ben Viljoen, a released prisoner of war, migrated to Northern Mexico and formed a small Boer farming colony there with the help of the American President, Theodore Roosevelt. Under the leadership of Viljoeen and a fellow Boer, Wilhelm Snyman, Boers were given the opportunity to buy undeveloped properties in northern Mexico at cut-rate prices. However, they were completely broke, and after Snyman visited with president Roosevelt in April 1901, the U.S. President arranged a meeting for the Boer exiles with the Mexican Secretary of the Treasury, José Ives Limantour. After negotiations, the Boers were offered 33,000 hectares of land near Carmargo, Chihuahua. Consequently, again with the help of Roosevelt, who helped popularize Viljoen’s book about the Boer war, the Boer war circuses were held to raise money for the buying of the property. However, many of the young Boers involved in the project quickly intermarried with their Mexican neighbors, and the Boer nature of the enterprise was lost.² Most conservative Boers also moved elsewhere, including general Viljoen, who became a US citizen in 1909. Viljoen thereafter was commissioned as a major in the territorial National Guard’s First Regiment of Infantry. In 1911, he was also part of a delegation who traveled to Washington, D.C., promoting statehood for New Mexico.³ The first Boer diaspora, therefore, ended either in a return of the refugees or in assimilation.

The second Boer diaspora started in the early 1990s when then State-President of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk, initiated a process with the purpose of handing over a white country with a European culture, unique only in its large amounts of black guest-worker residents, over to the Marxist ANC. Uncertainty was common among the white people of South Africa, not knowing what to expect from a newly formed government that consisted largely of former terrorists belonging to a militant ruling party. There were urgent calls from organizations, such as the Boer Crisis Action and the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), for the Afrikaners not to support cooperation between the National Party government and the Marxists during the referendum that was held in 1992 among white South Africans, but 69% voted in favour of continuing the talks with the ANC.⁴ It is estimated that roughly 60% of Afrikaners and 85% of British-South Africans effectively ensured an ANC take-over with their vote in that referendum. In retrospect it can, on the upside, serve as an example to expose the shortcomings of democracy. It did, after all, lead directly to major socio-economic deterioration in South Africa on countless levels.

The fear caused by the uncertainty about the future did convince a large number of Afrikaner-Boers to pack their bags and leave this country for greener prospects, even before the official regime-change of 1994. However, the most important factors, leading to the emigration of nearly 1.5 million whites out of South Africa ever since,⁵ has been the unsafe environment with its high crime rate, the deliberate attempt to slaughter the Boer people, affirmative action, forced racial integration, a denial of white people’s right to self-determination, secularization, a lack of basic service delivery from the government, declining standards of education, and good job offers from overseas employers for qualified Afrikaners and other white South Africans.⁶ The move of a small number of Afrikaners to the Afrikaner town of Orania cannot be overlooked as an integral phenomenon within the contemporary Afrikaner-Boer diaspora. However, most whites emigrate to Australasia, North America and the United Kingdom, with some even moving deeper into the African continent, especially to farm in nations with governments that are at least less hostile to white farmers than the ANC is.⁷ A significant number of Afrikaners are already residing in Western countries, including an estimated 100,000 in the UK, 50,000 in Australia and 30,000 in Canada and New Zealand respectively.⁸ As of 2011, Georgia, ironically the homeland of the Bolshevist leader, Josef Stalin, has launched a project to encourage the immigration of Afrikaners into the country to boost its declining agriculture industry.⁹ This project is particularly encouraging, as Afrikaners are renowned for their agricultural abilities and the current South African government so blatantly attacks this paramount aspect of the Afrikaner’s existence. Furthermore, of all the nations where Afrikaners are moving, the scenario in Georgia seems to lend itself most suitable to the establishment of a stable Afrikaner community on foreign soil, something Afrikaners have constantly failed to do in the past.

The implications this mass emigration has for South Africa are catastrophic. A large number of the skilled and qualified portion of the labour force is lost because of this. Furthermore, for every skilled emigrant, an estimated ten unskilled labourers lose their jobs (a clear indication of the counter-productivity of affirmative action).¹⁰ Afrikaner numbers also dwindle in the process, which complicates the status of this people as an ethnic minority in South Africa even further. With the economic crisis the West is experiencing at the moment, the annual number of Afrikaner emigrants has dwindled for the time being, but a rapid increase in the number of people leaving the country is expected again in the near future.¹¹ As for the implications this immigration of Afrikaners has for the West on the other hand, I regard it as generally positive. Firstly, with the low contemporary birth-rates of many white nations, an influx of white Afrikaners can only help boost national strength. Furthermore, Afrikaners are, as a rule, partly due to the limitations on cultural Marxist influences under the National Party government, still relatively more religious than the vast majority of Westerners, and they often help evangelize and sanctify the nations where they settle. Having escaped Marxist rule, Boers abroad are also well-known to be able and willing to have a productive impact on the economies of foreign nations.

While oikophobia (alienism) is always immoral and deserting one’s own nation for purely self-centered interests is most definitely an abomination, there are under the present circumstances real merits for Afrikaner-Boers to emigrate from South Africa. Boers who settle abroad permanently are faced with the challenge of attempting to either maintain their culture or to assimilate into the nation they moved into, and, because, as with the first Boer diaspora, the latter tends to happen with the current emigration, this has hindered a great number of Boers who have seriously considered emigrating (including my own family) from doing so. Especially in light of the current circumstances in South Africa, this route is not necessarily immoral or contrary to God’s purposes when the assimilation takes place in a nation that has a similar racial background. Yet, this could, if continued, spell the end of the Boer people, and many Boers who rightfully love their own identity and culture as a divine gift still believe that God potentially has a purpose with our people here in Southern Africa. They therefore remain here to be a witness for His glory and to support our fellow kinsmen who might be unable to emigrate in the midst of all the suffering that is endured. This makes the assessment of the consequences of the Boer diaspora from a white ethno-nationalist perspective extremely complex.

My wife and I, like so many of my fellow youthful Boer kinsmen in this day and age, are leaving the country after having signed a one-year contract as an English teacher in South Korea. The financial advantages were the reason for choosing to move to the far east, both culturally and racially very alien to me, for the next year. I would personally prefer to reside and especially raise my children in a Christian Afrikaner, or even any secular white society, rather than the Mongoloid nation where I am moving for the time being. Therefore I am leaving South Africa, a country that has become so Africanized over the last couple of years that I myself at times feel very much like a foreigner in my own country. In Korea, I, as a white Afrikaner, intend to reside only as a foreign guest worker with no intention of assimilating into their homogeneous nation or threatening their culture in any way. Despite not knowing what the future holds in store, I know that I cannot reside there forever. Like my fellow freedom-loving Boers (and unlike the South Koreans), I remain without a homeland for the time being, the only state where one can enjoy the comfort of fellowship with my kinsmen in a safe and friendly homogeneous society, reaping the benefits of true Christian government and the application of the principle of kin-rule. I urge all Christian nationalists to pray with us that the Boer people and all the white nations of the world, by the grace of God and by whatever means He pleases, might one day again enjoy the right to rule ourselves in Christian states, where God’s law is triumphant over the ungodliness currently experienced in the neo-Babelist empires of our time.

 

 

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