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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3266 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.

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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