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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3273 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 11, 2022

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So- small scale question. I read up on apartheid, Rhodesia, and colonialism in Southern Africa after the discussion of Rhodesia and decolonization in the main thread a few weeks ago, and I think I got a pretty good mental model of why South African whites behaved the way they did in setting up apartheid. But does anyone know why they didn’t make more of an effort to attract white immigration? In particular, segregation in the south was collapsing shortly before apartheid started showing serious cracks and the shortage of whites became obvious as minority rule’s official #1 problem. Why didn’t the apartheid regime put more effort into attracting racist white Protestants? It seems like they managed to maintain a fairly good economy with a skilled labour shortage and a lack of white bodies for their security services.

Is there an obvious problem I’m missing? Yes, Afrikaner nationalism was a factor, but they seemed happy to welcome Portuguese immigrants from Angola.

TLDR: Afrikaners in the National Party cut off white immigration even from places like the Netherlands when it was most available ie post WW2 and through the 1950s because of a belief that it would help them retain power (because immigrants were assumed to be more supportive of the British and more liberal in general) then tried to encourage it in the 60s after they realized black fertility was much higher than white fertility but of course this was of limited use since European living standards had recovered after their post WW2 slump.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02582473.2016.1188977

Thank you, that makes more sense. It still leaves the question of why there wasn’t an effort to pitch a still-segregated society to at least some subset of segregationists in the 60’s or 70’s, but it’s possible that limited success with European immigration caused them to think it would be a lost cause.

Afrikaners were very parochial at the time (remember South Africa only made TV legal in 1976) - my father who is American and moved to South Africa in the early 80s for work remembers getting asked if he had met cowboys and Indians by rural Afrikaners despite having grown up in Manhattan lol. I don’t think people being mad about school integration or bussing was really on their radar.

Also South Africa was still poorer than the US - my parents didn’t have a telephone until after I was born for example.

Are you asking why they did not try to entice whites from the Southern USA to move to South Africa? I don't know what your mental model of South African whites is, but your model of whites in the South seems a bit off; I rather doubt that oppression of blacks, or of anyone, was so central to the lives of very many Southern whites that they would be willing to move to another country just for the opportunity to keep doing so.

The lack of actual mass migration from the dominant group in a wealthy society doesn’t seem too difficult to explain, the question is why SA didn’t try to encourage it- after all, they claimed to be aiming for a white majority country and periodically welcomed groups of white immigrants to that end. And racist white protestants seems like both what segregationists mostly were and what SA wanted living in their country.

I rather doubt that oppression of blacks, or of anyone, was so central to the lives of very many Southern whites that they would be willing to move to another country just for the opportunity to keep doing so.

It absolutely was for a tiny minority in 1865 but not in 1965.

Racist white Protestants seem like the least likely group to move away from their land to Africa of all places. Unless they lost a war like confederates in Brazil, I don’t know where one could find such white people in the 1970s

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