We have one of the most anti-Western governments in the world, consistently voting with China, Africa and the Arab countries at the UN. Not only that, but people of European descent like Afrikaners or the English South Africans have been legally and otherwise defined as foreigners in their own country.
(Originally posted in January 2011.)
In South Africa the cliché, “truth is stranger than fiction”, is heard almost every day. More recently, the country has become so bizarre in its zealous pursuit of multiculturalism and affirmative action that some days one feels as if this must be another planet where normal terrestrial principles no longer apply.
As everyone knows, South Africa is the most Western and European country in Africa. The other day I was walking through the military museum in Johannesburg where tanks, cannons and aeroplanes are lovingly preserved, even German ones belonging to our former enemy in two world wars. South African military aircraft from the First World War onwards used to have the old Dutch “Prince flag” on the tail, the orange white and blue banner brought here by the father of our nation, the Dutchman Jan van Riebeeck who arrived on 6 April 1652.
We Afrikaners have therefore been living in this country as long as the Americans have in America. Like Americans, albeit on a smaller scale, we have been involved in European affairs and wars for hundreds of years. Until 1994, as the famous Harvard political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, also observed, we imagined ourselves being “part of the West”.
Next to the war museum is an imposing sandstone memorial built by the British for their dead during the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902, causing a young man in our company to remark: “This could have been in Europe! It reminds me of the Brandenburg Gate.”
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