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May 20, 2015 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
38:04
Black Immigrants Pouring into South Africa
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance, and it is my privilege to have with me today a special guest for this program.
He is Dr.
Dan Root. He lives in South Africa.
He is an Afrikaner, a native to South Africa.
He studied literature and philosophy and political science at the University of Witwatersrand and at the University of Paris.
And he also worked for 10 years in financial markets in Johannesburg, but is now best known as the founder of the Praafrikaans Action Group, otherwise known as Prague, which he put together in the year 2000.
He is a regular blogger at www.praag.org.
And he has also written a number of articles for American Renaissance, most recently a very well-received article that we put on our website about the latest attacks on the white history of South Africa by black activists.
And it's a real pleasure to welcome you onto this podcast.
Thanks very much for joining us.
Thank you very much, Jared.
It's really a pleasure to talk to you.
Yes. I wanted to tell you that this article that you recently wrote for us, in which you describe the kind of anti-white, systematic actions that are taking place in South Africa, not only Yes, it's the University of Cape Town.
University of Cape Town.
And also, there is just a general campaign now to try to eliminate the Afrikaans' language and any kind of Afrikaner sense of community and culture in the universities in South Africa.
But one thing that I would point out, for many American readers, What you describe as going on in South Africa and how whites react to it is spookily reminiscent of exactly what's going on in the United States.
There is a similar kind of attempt to replace whites with blacks or Hispanics or Asians, certainly both culturally and in terms of those who are occupying student seats and in the faculty.
And, in fact, it is my impression that what is happening in South Africa is less fierce than what would happen if minorities, or certainly blacks, had the overwhelming majority in the United States that they have in South Africa.
Do you have any sense as to what may be restraining South African blacks today, certainly compared to what we as Americans imagine blacks would be behaving like here in the United States if they had the numbers and power that blacks in South Africa have there?
Yes, well, you're quite right in that we also see the parallels between, say, something like, you know, the riots you have over there, places like Ferguson, Baltimore, and what we experience here.
You know, we've got lots of riots in South Africa almost all the time, protests and strikes, and they also burn down buildings and clinics and things like that.
So there's definitely a similarity there, but as to what is restraining them, I've also often wondered how leaders were insane enough in the early 90s to actually hand over the police and the army and the various other apparatuses of power to them.
And, you know, what is restraining them?
Because they've got all these weapons and they've got the armor and airplanes and helicopters.
Why don't they just attack us?
But I think there is a sense from the local blacks that they do seem hesitant at some level to actually...
To try and dominate us completely, they still seem to fear some sort of backlash and some kind of conflict.
And they are aware of the conflicts that we've had in the past in the 19th century.
For example, but also more recently, you know, very small groups of our policemen, white policemen, used to dominate thousands of blacks.
I've personally experienced that where We had a kind of a meeting in Pretoria near Church Square, and then as we came out of the building, there was a whole crowd of about a thousand blacks outside, and they were very aggressive.
And there was one white policeman assisted by two black policemen, and he had a shotgun.
And they wanted to actually charge us, but because they saw him with a shotgun, they didn't.
Because they were actually, I think they have that sort of collective memory of all the riots of the past and all the times when a small handful of white policemen could actually get the better of them and, you know, through shotgun fire or whatever, storming them.
And I think that's why they don't actually do it.
So you think there's still a residual fear that if whites are prodded too far, they will react in a violent and frightening way?
I think so, definitely.
I think there might also be a sense that there are still powerful Western countries out there that might come to our aid.
Or something like that. But I think, more precisely, there is a residual fear of whites, particularly for the Afrikaner whites.
I mean, I can tell you stories about what happens in the rural areas.
There's a part of the country right up north where whites are only about a 1% minority.
But amazingly enough, that's the area where There's the strongest kind of black-white divide and also where the whites don't seem to have any fear of the blacks whatsoever.
And I've heard stories where some of these white farmers would actually pull their guns on the police and actually tell them to go away and even beat them up and nothing would happen afterwards.
And there was actually once an incident Well, there's a private prison, which is actually run by an American company, as far as I know.
And there were riots at the prison.
And the prison has got a black manager, a black CEO, this private prison.
And when the riots happened, he knew he couldn't count on the official police service up there.
Black dominated.
And so he called a local farmer's militia.
And about 60 farmers got into their pickup trucks or their guns, and within a few hours, they'd actually subdued this entire prison.
So I think they do know that when it comes to the crunch, then whites could quickly organize, and we are still, even though we've had very strict gun rules and so on, And gun control, we are still fairly well armed, you know, with lots of shotguns, hunting rifles and pistols.
So, they are still reticent to take the final step, as it were.
Well, that's certainly very interesting.
I also have a sense, and maybe these two ideas simultaneously seem to exist sometimes in the minds of blacks, but is there not also a sense, at least in some, that whites are good to have around, that whites know how to run things, that they would be real difficult if whites were all just completely chased out of South Africa?
Oh yes, definitely.
You know, I've even listened to or watched some of these black talk shows where they talk about our whites, almost as if we are, you know, their employees or something like that.
And of course, you know, I've just looked at the statistics about the universities that I mean, about two-thirds of the university professors are still white, and that's of all the universities, including the black universities.
And when you look at the so-called formerly white universities, there are by far even majorities.
So, you know, without whites, The universities wouldn't function in South Africa.
If you look at professions like accounting and law and so on, all those professions are still dominated by whites.
In the accounting profession, they've got an affirmative action program going on there, but the last statistic I saw was that we call them chartered accountants in the United States, I think we call them controllers or something like that.
There were about 26,000 of them in South Africa and about 25,000 were whites and about 500 Indians and then 500 blacks.
So in very many professions, despite 20 years of very strong affirmative action, the blacks haven't made inroads and anything to do with accounting or IT services, even in the government departments, there are still whites employed there to run the computers and to do the accounting, because that's an area...
I mean, it's part of...
Very many institutions here are in a complete shambles regarding the accounts, including the municipalities.
And it's because in those areas, they've actually got rid of the whites and they didn't have...
To what extent is Zimbabwe to the north something of a message to South African blacks?
Do they not look at what's happened under Mugabe and realize that he's gone just a little bit too far.
He's killed the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I think there is definitely a sense of that.
You do see the Even these more radical black commentators that are very anti-white Liberal newspapers that they tend to shy away from pleading for a kind of Zimbabwe style, just pushing the whites out.
And they do acknowledge that there is a problem in Zimbabwe.
I mean, some of them, Mugabe is very popular in South Africa.
You know, when he came here about a month ago, he was cheered by all the black crowds in Soweto and so on.
And there's a sort of myth that Zimbabwe has a marvelous education system.
And some of the blacks in the crowd, there were interviews on television with them and they would say, well, we hope that Mr.
Mugabe will bring his fine education system to South Africa.
I mean, the University of Orore does not even...
It's not even remotely on any ranking whatsoever.
Last time I heard some of the classes had stopped because they'd run out of money, but some of the blacks here are still this sort of myth that they adhere to this myth that Mugabe has done something for education in Zimbabwe, which he hasn't really.
Although some of the blacks that do come here They seem to be more hard-working than our blacks and a lot of them seem to be a little bit more intelligent and also Canned reading white, amazingly enough.
But I ascribe that to the previous kind of colonial education system that they had up there in Zimbabwe.
Well, surely the fact that a good number of Zimbabwe blacks are coming to South Africa to try to find work, and I've never heard of black South Africans going to Zimbabwe to find work.
Doesn't that suggest something about which economy is being more successful?
Oh yes, I don't think there's any doubt about that.
There's a whole issue at the moment around xenophobia because our blacks are actually killing all the foreign blacks and they want to actually expel them.
And the government has...
We've also done some raids on some of these million foreign blacks and they wanted to repatriate about a thousand of them, which they'd rounded up and arrested.
But then, amazingly enough, there was a group of white liberal lawyers who went to the And they got a court order against that.
Is that right?
That's right, yes.
The lawyers for human rights in Johannesburg got a court order against the government to stop them from expelling these foreign blacks from South Africa.
And that happened about a week ago.
Well, gosh.
Blacks must have been flabbergasted by this kind of effort on the part of whites.
This must be very, very confusing to them.
Yes, I didn't quite see any commentary about that or listen to any of the black radio stations, but they must have been quite surprised by that, I must say.
I'm starting to think that perhaps at some point there could be some kind of alliance between us and foreign blacks.
Against the local blacks because they dislike them even more than, it's amazing, but they dislike the foreign blacks even more than they dislike us.
Even though the elite is always preaching a kind of pan-Africanism and black solidarity on the ground, it doesn't exist at all.
And the local and the foreign blacks just don't see eye to eye.
I mean, the foreign blacks also live in the inner cities.
Where whites used to live, and they've got their own networks there, whereas the local blacks all live in these former kind of part-time group areas, which they call townships, places like Soweto and Alexandra and these kinds of places.
And they don't really allow the foreign blacks to live there among them, although there are some now who have sort of infiltrated there, but they are quite at risk.
Yes, we've heard about some of this violence, but what kind of productive alliance could you possibly anticipate between whites and yet a different batch of blacks?
Once foreign blacks were established there, would they not be just as troublesome as South African blacks, do you not think?
I haven't given it too much thought, but it seems that the foreign blacks are more amenable to whites in the sense that they normally work for whites.
And they don't go on strike as much, and they don't have all these kind of welfare state perks that the local blacks have.
And also they come from countries where they know there's a lot of poverty, and without whites there are no jobs.
So they are least inclined to actually be anti-white than the local blacks who have always had it so good with all these whites around.
I see. Yeah, and there is that kind of division.
So it's sort of a logic of my enemy's enemy is my friend kind of thing.
And, you know, towards the end phase, the last phases of the Angolan War and so on, there were very successful kind of platoons and battalions of our previous army Consisting of Angolan blacks or Namibian blacks under a white command.
And they used to fight very well under a white command.
So I think, you know, because we haven't really got the numbers, when it comes to the crunch at some point in the future, there could be some sort of an alliance, I would imagine, between them.
These foreign blacks and the local whites.
And already, in most of the restaurants everywhere, especially in Johannesburg, they're all staffed by these foreign blacks, by Zimbabweans and Malawians and so on.
And the local blacks, they want to have government jobs.
They're not interested in working anymore.
And if you phone some of these government departments that don't answer the phone, It's very difficult to get anything done with government or the municipalities because our local blacks now just earn salaries and they're either ill or they're on holiday or out to lunch.
There's not much work going on there at all.
And they're not interested in doing the work that they used to do previously.
You know, doing manual labor and working in the service industry and so on.
Most of those jobs now are filled by these foreign blacks.
That's certainly an aspect of South African society, the extent to which foreign blacks have taken over the real non-bureaucratic service type jobs or manual labor.
That is certainly rarely reported in the Western press.
I think it's something that, even under apartheid, it was something that the Western press Wasn't very happy reporting the extent to which South Africa even then was a magnet to immigration from all throughout Southern Africa because it was so much more successful than the surrounding black-run countries.
Oh yes, we've always had this problem of illegal immigration, even in those days when the rest of the world was saying it's so terrible for blacks in South Africa.
You know, at the height of apartheid, I think, even in the 1960s, about 100,000 blacks in South Africa owned motor cars.
And at that time, we had more black automobile owners than whites who owned cars in their ex-Soviet juniors.
And they could run businesses and whatever.
There were just all these other rules and regulations around the so-called group areas and the kind of southern-style segregation that we used to have at the time.
But South Africa has always been fairly prosperous compared to all the other African countries.
And just to give you an idea, I looked up the GDP numbers the other day, and Zimbabwe has a GDP of $7 billion per annum.
Now, that's about the size of, I would say, a medium-sized city in the United States.
That's the entire country's economy.
Johannesburg has a GDP of about 76 billion, just the city of Johannesburg, so we're about 10 times bigger, our city is 10 times bigger than the economy of the whole of Zimbabwe.
For heaven's sake. Of course, Zimbabwe is a remarkable case of a country which had been run for quite some time by whites and run very successfully, which when it fell into Robert Mugabe's hands was pillaged in just a tragic and horrible way.
I understand that its GNP per capita is vastly lower than, oh, in the 1960s, for example.
Oh, yes. I don't have the exact numbers from the 1960s, but I know that currently Zimbabwe is, if not the poorest, about the second poorest country in the world.
It's about $200 per annum per capita GDP. So they live on about a dollar a day or slightly less than that.
I also saw that 92% of Zimbabwean GDP actually consists of government spending.
The entire private sector economy has just about collapsed.
There's nothing left.
If I may, if I may return to this question of foreign blacks coming into South Africa, is it possible, are there any available figures as to what the percentage of blacks now in South Africa are not from South Africa, not native blacks, or is that a number that's hard to find?
It is very hard to find because a lot of them are undocumented and, you know, the estimates range from about four million to Even as high as 15 million.
Now there are about 40 million blacks in South Africa, so that's excluding whites, Indians, and colored, or mixed-race people who live mainly in the Cape province.
But I would guess there are between 5 and 10 million of them in South Africa.
They're about a quarter of the population.
And all of that immigration has happened in the last 20 years.
Because the ANC has had almost an open border policy.
It's not official, but anybody can just kind of walk across the border or even bribe a border guard to come in.
And there's actually, maybe you should put it on your website, there's actually a funny YouTube video about that.
There's kind of a Practical, there's one of the radio announcers who's also a bit of a practical joker and he pranked the border post in the north of the country saying that he was from Zimbabwe and he's just climbed over there.
They wanted to know how to get to Johannesburg or something like that.
They took him seriously.
And they also show in this video, they've got some scene there where there are some Zimbabweans climbing over the fence or something like that.
But it's kind of a light-hearted way of looking at the problem, but it's very real that we have all these people.
Coming into our country all the time.
So, if nothing else happens, I reckon that, you know, at the moment, the South African population officially is standing at 55 million.
But it's going to double again in the next 20 years or so, and we could be above 100 million, you know, by the year 2035.
And we don't have the water, we don't have the sewage, our infrastructure is not being maintained.
And South Africa is a very dry country, so who knows what's going to happen?
So this system is not, in the long run, it's not viable.
Something will have to happen to change it, or otherwise it will collapse of its own accord.
Do you think that the government has any sense of the necessity to control immigration?
I think they are getting pressured now by their supporters and by this so-called xenophobic violence, which has become an embarrassment.
Because in 2008 or thereabouts, we had xenophobic riots and about 100 people were killed.
None of whom...
And there weren't any charges afterwards.
Not one person has been charged with murder or assault or anything like that from that period.
And that was a big embarrassment to them.
The foreign press don't really report on the farm murders and the whites getting killed, but as soon as there is a conflict among blacks and the foreign blacks getting attacked by locals, then they tend to report about that overseas, and therefore it's a big embarrassment to the government.
They can live with whites being killed, but not with these foreign blacks getting killed.
And a lot of the foreign African countries I've also sent messages through their ambassadors and so on.
For that reason, they are concerned about it, but they don't seem to have a notion that in the long run it could actually destroy the country.
They don't think of it that way.
I've often found with Africans that numbers in themselves do not mean much to them.
It's just a number.
You know, 50 million, 100 million.
You know, who knows what the difference is between, you know, 50 million people more, oh well, we'll accommodate that.
Who knows how, but it's too abstract a notion.
Well, that's certainly interesting, but even as a practical matter, do you think South Africa, as it's governed today, could control its borders?
I would assume that an illegal immigrant, once he's inside South Africa, doesn't really have to worry too much about being found or tracked down and deported.
Well, in theory, there is a system, and the local police do stop them sometimes, but I think most And there is a place, I think they call it Lindela or something like that, west of Johannesburg, where they actually detain them and then deport them by train.
But they deport maybe a few thousand in a year, and then there are hundreds of thousands coming across the borders.
So it's not really making a dent in this immigration into South Africa at all.
Well, this is really a perspective that is somewhat new for me.
The idea of black-run South Africa being subject to the kind of massive third world, so to speak, immigration similar to Europe or the United States.
It's an ironic situation for a black-run country.
Yes, certainly. It is ironic.
And, you know, our blacks, I can remember having an argument like that sometime ago with somebody from New York, and I think there was an actual He was also arguing that every South African black is a middle-class consumer.
He's not very high up in the rankings compared to Europeans or North Americans, but he's a middle-class consumer who owns a fridge and a microwave.
TV and cell phone and all sorts of other types of electronic equipment.
They spend a lot of money on clothes and on beer and things like that.
And compared to the average African out there, yeah, he's a middle class person and that African is destitute.
So all these destitute Africans are Swarming to South Africa.
I've even been up to Nairobi in Kenya.
And the message is out there everywhere that South Africa, if you can't afford to go to Europe or the United States, South Africa is your next best bet.
Because if you come here...
If you look at Johannesburg, this entire complex...
It's called Gauteng, this city in this kind of conurbation in the centre of the country here, where the gold was discovered more than 100 years ago.
I mean, this place is, it compares favourably with maybe the Ile de France in Paris, a sort of area around Paris, or say the area around Frankfurt in Germany, or parts of the United States.
You know, if you add up the three big cities, the East Rand, the Pretoria, and Johannesburg, that now form part of the same kind of urban complex, you're looking at a GDP of maybe $150 to $200 billion now.
And that compares very favorably with a lot of Western cities or urban conurbations out there.
So they come here and they see all these...
You know, highways, and concrete, and shopping centres, and shops, and cars, and traffic, and you know, it's like being parachuted.
Right into the middle of a western country, but it's in Africa.
And it's just a few hundred miles from where they come from.
Mozambique, or Zimbabwe, or Malawi.
Malawi is also an extremely poor country where they kicked out the Indians in the 1970s.
And then their economy collapsed, and it hasn't recovered ever since.
And they've been living on aid since the 1970s.
This really is a stark irony.
Southern Africa, the wealth of which was built clearly by a settlement from Europeans, now that blacks are running it, you say that in the long run the place could really just become swamped because of other blacks who wish to share in this wealth.
Oh yes, and you know, if you look There's even one of the black academics, I think he's actually from Ghana or someplace like that, or Cameroon, I'm not sure.
I think it's from one of the French-speaking West African countries.
And he even wrote an article in the newspaper where he said Johannesburg was the Paris of Africa and that all the black intellectuals from all over Africa want to come and live in Johannesburg and get jobs into our universities where the taxpayer will pay them a salary to kind of think up and write books They're anti-white propaganda and articles and so-called research.
Well, I don't suppose that we will ever get the ANC government to take a stand at the UN trying to stop all of these massive flows from poor countries into rich countries.
That's something that's almost difficult to imagine.
But at the same time, it seems to me that they would be better off thinking in those terms.
They could be our allies in that respect.
I think you're right.
Logically, they should also argue for less immigration and stricter border control.
And they have been trying to tighten up things around the borders, but with not much success.
But again, it comes down to the notion of logical contradiction, which to us Westerners If there are two ideas that contradict one another, you've got to choose one.
But in their minds, they can be both kind of for pan-Africanism and that Africa should be one country and people should be free to go where they want, and at the same time be against In favor of border controls, but then not apply them very strictly.
So it all becomes a very hazy kind of, you know, hodgepodge or jumble of ideas.
And that's the way things work here.
There are never hard and fast Logical concepts, very black and white lines being drawn.
It's always very hazy.
Everything is very hazy and that's the way it goes.
All of this, of course, means that those of us whites in other countries, we look at South Africa and we fear for the future of our cousins, other Europeans who are in South Africa.
And I certainly hope that things will not get too dark too quickly.
But how do you see, perhaps we can wrap up with this question, how do you see the future of whites in a situation that you're describing, which sounds really rather menacing even for the blacks who are running the place, much less for the whites?
Yes, well, I think most people, most whites in South Africa now do see a very bleak future ahead for them.
There was an email going around where somebody calculated that by the year 2030 we would only be 1% of the population.
I think that might be a bit pessimistic, but it's certainly possible.
So, personally, I think that we should kind of regroup in some part of the country more towards the south and We'll be along the coast and rebuild a city there, which could function more or less independently from the rest of the country.
We would have access to the ocean, have the communications, and perhaps even our own undersea data cable to bring us to Europe and the rest of the world.
That was even suggested to me by someone that we should have our own Singapore Kind of a more or less white ethnic, ethno-state along the southern Cape Coast.
And there are places there that are suitable for this kind of idea of a A city-state.
And already a lot of people are spontaneously moving there.
But the problem is that our economy is still centered here in the interior of the country.
So it's going to be a question of really having to plan the thing and creating a new economy almost from scratch down there.
Well, being reduced to a Singapore seems like a very sad and tragic fate for a people who carved their own nation out of the wilderness.
But that, of course, is better than being completely eliminated and expelled.
but whatever happens, we certainly wish you luck.
And Dan Root, I think we will be calling on you in the future for further dispatches,
because, again, what is happening in your part of the world is we have a kind of morbid fascination
because we see something of our own future there as the United States itself becomes increasingly not white.
But in any case, thank you, thank you very much for being with us today, and I look forward to talking with you in the future.
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