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May 11, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
59:45
How Whites Get Ahead in South Africa
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
It's my pleasure and honor to have with me in this studio today, Dan Root.
Dan Root is a 13th generation South African.
He has a PhD in Afrikaans literature and is a high-profile figure in the Afrikaans literary circles in his homeland.
He is also the head and founder of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, And he is a good friend of American Renaissance.
He has written many excellent articles for us over the years and has been a speaker at no fewer than three American Renaissance conferences.
So, Dr. Root, welcome and thank you so much for joining us.
It's a great pleasure, Jared, Mr. Taylor, and it's always very pleasant and interesting to talk to you.
Well, I will...
I'll tell you that those of us who are racially aware in the United States, we see the news coming out of South Africa as something very disturbing, and we often see it as a foretaste of what could happen in the United States as demographics change.
And we can even imagine a time when South African whites are a little bit like what we saw in Zimbabwe.
We can imagine them streaming out of the country with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and seeking refuge in whatever country is willing to have them.
But I gather that you think that that is not necessarily a realistic worry, that there is reason to be more optimistic about the future for whites.
South Africa is a country for which white people essentially have practically no future and that they should give up on it.
But you tell me I'm wrong and I'd be delighted to hear your reasons.
Yes, well, Mr. Taylor, I think up until recently we were just another kind of post...
To use a very Modish term, post-colonial dystopia in Africa, such as Zimbabwe or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or any of those countries depicted in that excellent movie from the 1960s,
Ideo Africa.
I don't know whether you ever saw it.
Yes, but that sort of laid the...
I think it defined Afro-pessimism for many people, and I think...
That side of the continent is still very much with us with the corruption, the violence, and often civil wars breaking out.
But South Africa is different.
It's always been different to the rest of the continent.
I think there was one of the officials from the previous government who was quite involved in the information.
Well, outside the country, Dr. Eshel Rudi and he and his brother, Nika Rudi, they spoke of the three Africas.
There's North Africa, then Muslim Africa, and Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and so on, Algeria.
And then you've got the real sub-Saharan Africa, and then we were the third Africa, a kind of a Western...
Until recently, quite a developed country.
Well, it's precisely that developed white-run Africa that, at least from overseas, appeared to have been on the verge of collapse and almost sinking into just the African morass.
But you're telling me that that process, if it ever got started, is being reversed.
Yes, I would say I think we have gone through the trough of this African decline.
It was driven, of course, by these Afro-Marxist leaders that the rest of the world admired so much.
And they have, to a large extent, destroyed the state and many state institutions, including the state electricity, utility, ESCOM.
The post office, the railways, you know, there are images from the railways where literally stations have just been stripped of everything, of windows and roofs, and they carry away even the railroad tracks as scrap metal.
So there is that aspect to South Africa, but there is another side to it, which is very much, you know, still a first world country and which is efficient.
When we talk about the banking sector, the retail sector, the professions, to some extent, the medical profession is still intact, although they are trying their best to change that,
or the term they always use is to transform it.
Transformation was in the past a...
Euphemism for revolution.
And when you change things in a revolutionary way, they call it transformation.
So what is happening is that the private sector is really developing very rapidly and adapting to global conditions, global technology, and we've got very good internet connections in South Africa.
So you can do the same thing.
In South Africa as you can in the United States, you know, you could function as well there as you can here.
But there is, to some extent, after this whole COVID nightmare that we've lived through over the last two years or so, there's another aspect, I think, where the more efficient governments elsewhere in the West have controlled their people and they've embarked on this.
Form of totalitarian technological control of their own populations, where it seems to me that the Western countries are tending towards a kind of a science fiction dystopia, science fiction nightmare, whereas we have the advantage that our government,
due to its incompetence, is not going to be able...
They're trying to, but they're not going to be able to...
Go along that path.
So it's going to leave us more free than many citizens in the West.
And we will be able to act, you know, do all sorts of things out of our own free will, whereas a lot of Europeans especially.
We'll be much more constrained and much more policed.
And we've already seen this during the whole COVID debacle.
It sounds, though, you're saying that as South Africans, you can take advantage of an incompetent government, take advantage of a collapsing central authority, and then just work things out on your own, the private sector.
Is that a generally correct thing?
Yes, I would say so.
And then you've also got a town like Irania.
Where, you know, a community of people have set up something of their own out there in the Northern Cape, which is a very desolate area.
And in another country, you know, in a Western country, especially in Europe and perhaps even in the United States, that would not be allowed because they would need all sorts of planning permissions and they would, yeah, they would need...
You know, permits from government to construct or to create infrastructure, whereas they've just gone ahead and done it.
I'd like to talk about Irania specifically a little later on.
But back to this, what you just said, that you can do anything in South Africa that you can do in Europe or the United States.
And yet, it seems to me if your electric utility is not functioning properly, or if people are looting the rails in your rail system.
That doesn't sound like a nation in which you can do the kinds of things we take for granted in the West.
But you say there are sort of workarounds for these problems?
Yes, there are.
Of course, the road transport has taken over a lot where we used to use rail.
And, you know, specifically talking about the collapse of the post office, you know, there are now any number of private companies who are performing those sorts of functions and doing it efficiently and even at a good price.
Even some of the retail groups and there are these private courier companies and private post offices almost that have sprung up, that have mushroomed.
And so we can send things around the country safely and it will arrive in 24 hours or 48 hours.
So we don't need the government anymore to run a post office for us.
This is remarkable.
I suppose then some of the missing pieces are electricity.
I mean, you don't have huge privately owned electric generation capacity, do you?
No, we don't.
Although there are some of the mines and some of the bigger companies.
For example, I think the Sassel oil from coal.
They actually generate a lot of their own electricity using their own energy.
And I think we are now on the cusp of a transition like that where the central government will just have to relinquish its monopoly of electricity generation.
If the economy is to grow at all and leave it, you know, hand it over to the private sector.
And then very interesting things are going to happen because we've got lots of sun.
The solar power is something that works in South Africa.
And they will, you know, use the latest type of technologies to move away from these old-fashioned coal.
You know, coal-fired power plants to actually give us all the electricity we need.
And in fact, individual houses in the area where I live, a lot of people now have solar panels on their roofs and so on.
And, you know, for maybe between $5,000 and $10,000, you can equip your house to such an extent that you move completely off-grid regarding your energy needs.
So it's quite possible.
Is the central government, which is now run...
By Blacks.
Is it willing to relinquish that kind of control, do you think?
It isn't willing to do it, but it's being forced to.
Because, you know, the economy is not growing and there's a lot of pressure also, I think, from abroad on it to do that.
Because they have demonstrated that they are not competent to run these public utilities and just the demand for energy.
We'll make sure that people will find alternatives.
Well, it sounds like the Postal Service, it can go into almost complete collapse, but people will find ways to get packages and letters wherever they want them to go.
Exactly. This almost sounds like a libertarian paradise.
It's an Ayn Rand novel, practically.
Exactly. Where the competent people step in and shoulder the burden, and government is in the process of disappearing or withering away, the way the communists wrote about it.
Exactly. You're quoting Karl Marx there in the Communist Party Manifesto where he said that the state will wither away under communism.
But, you know, under African communism, we now have the state withering away before our very eyes.
And one other good example of that was during the Durban riots last year, you know, there was complete chaos down in Durban and in KwaZulu-Natal province where, you know, large masses of Blacks just looted warehouses and supermarkets and so on.
And the government was completely impotent in front of this.
And then the supermarket groups, I mean, there was actually a famine almost threatening down there.
And the supermarket groups stepped in.
They'd just been looted, but they didn't care about that.
They actually just sent hundreds of trucks down there with food and they got the whole thing going within a week or two.
So it was sort of back to normal within two weeks without any government intervention, with the government just wringing hands and making pronouncements and so on.
So it shows that that efficiency that's already there, it can be instantly mobilized to also go into almost a political,
like reestablishing order in a certain part of the country.
During what we call the Black Lives Matter riots and looting and burning in the United States in 2020, the government could have controlled it.
The government certainly had the capacity.
We have the police forces, we have the National Guard, which is called out in some cases.
But there was a choice.
Not to do so.
I gather your description of South Africa suggests that the South African authorities, even if they wanted to control this, simply didn't have the capability.
Yes, they didn't have the capability.
They don't, actually.
And that's why we have something like, you know, there are about, I think, 200,000 members of the police, but we've got about 750,000 private security officers.
So, and they are more involved in protecting lives and property than the police actually are.
The police are sort of almost bureaucrats sitting in police stations and just whiling away the time and filling in forms.
You know, they don't really have an effective presence on the ground here.
anymore or whatsoever.
Well, I would imagine that this results in a terrible crime problem for blacks in the townships because they probably cannot afford private security
and if the state security is in a state of collapse.
True, that is very true.
There is of course some level of vigilantism in the black townships where they would actually punish offenders on the spot and sometimes even kill them.
But yes, they are, paradoxically, under this system, the blacks are more disadvantaged than ever, than they ever were under white rule.
And many blacks have said that because they are more insecure, they are poorer, they are more jobless, and so on.
But, of course, the ideology and, shall we say, the dominant ideology in the West...
No, but I suppose vigilantism is a kind of privatization of security also,
of a local and sometimes brutal but sometimes affective kind.
Yes, you're very much right there.
What about large corporations?
I mean, we hear about this BEE, black economic empowerment.
That's what we would call affirmative action, preferences for blacks.
And it's my impression that that goes on to a quite ferocious degree, far beyond what even we have here in the United States, which is bad enough.
But to that extent...
Our large corporations, I would assume government offices are these days staffed almost entirely by the blacks, the few white experts sprinkled here and there were absolutely necessary.
And large corporations also, they become subject to this kind of BEE pressure, do they not?
So my question for you would be, if a young white person is looking for a job, does he have any chance in a white corporation or is he likely to then work for one of these Food, grocery retailers that can really step into the breach if need be, or what are these people that distribute the mail in a private sector?
What are the prospects for a young white South African who wants a career?
Well, they are currently suffering under the system, I would say.
They're the ones who haven't got much experience or who have the right qualifications, the right technical sort of degrees.
They do struggle to find jobs, and some of them are emigrating from the country and maybe working in other countries for that very reason.
But it's interesting how certain sectors are drawing more whites than others.
And as you say correctly, I think the lower levels of the banks and, of course, the government bureaucracy, that goes without saying it, it's just about 100%.
And in my local bank branch, I've seen how it went from more or less 99% white to 100% black within 20 years.
But I see in the motor industry, for example, there are a lot of white people still involved in that, you know, dealerships, the mechanics, the people, you know,
turning... To cars, buying and selling cars, that sort of thing.
It's almost like NASCAR.
It draws a certain type of white person.
And then in teaching and education, that's also still very much, I would say, an area where whites are very active and they've also set up private colleges and schools and so on.
So there they can find jobs.
And then you've got entrepreneurs, people who start their own businesses, run restaurants or filling stations.
Although the corporate sector is applying that, they get the pressure from the government and they apply it to the whites in general as well.
So it is fairly difficult to find a job in South Africa, I would say.
But the converse of that is that People have also started helping each other in a way that maybe some other Westerners don't.
Especially in small businesses and so on.
In the small business sector, yes, that's almost completely white.
I would say the smaller companies, smaller turnovers that are not subject to all of these quota systems and rules about BEE and affirmative action.
There, you know, you find lots of whites, including young white people.
Well, it sounds as though there's a kind of selective pressure here.
It's the ones who are willing to be entrepreneurial.
Or willing to do something that is not start at the bottom of a big company or go to work for the government, people who have the imagination and the drive, those people can be successful in South Africa despite all the built-in headwinds against whites.
Yes, I would say so, definitely.
And as you've used the right term, selective pressure.
And in a way, it's been a very painful adaptation for us because before, Afrikaners were these career-minded people who would, you know, at the age of, whatever, 20, they would join some government department and eventually retire there at age 65 with their eyes on their pension and so on.
And they would be loyal to this department and they weren't paid all that much money either.
So all of that is gone.
You know, there are now just blacks in every government department.
So that same person, now he's in a survival mode.
He has to now, you know, look at the situation in front of him and find some solution for himself and his family.
So although it's been very painful, again, harking back to maybe the Ayn Rand kind of thing.
Yes, we are in a situation where we do have to survive.
We've got absolutely no social security net at all.
So either you end up completely destitute or you find something to make money, to survive and to participate in the economy.
And I'm increasingly thinking that people could also, and many...
Are already doing that, participating in the global economy and the economy outside South Africa online.
You know, lots of people have got even semi-permanent jobs, you know, online in the UK or in Europe or wherever, where they're working in South Africa or in Australia.
They're sitting in South Africa, maybe in a nice house looking.
Out on the ocean in the Southern Cape and working for, you know, providing services in Australia or working for an Australian company.
So, to some extent, you know, the internet and globalization are coming at exactly the right moment for us in that it has given us all these other opportunities.
These remote...
And you said also that to an extent that we would not find in Europe or the United States, white people are looking out for each other.
They have this notion that, well, my fellow whites are being discriminated against in large companies, public sector, so we've got to help out.
Is that a correct assessment?
Yes, that is a correct assessment.
There is a sort of a growing solidarity.
Among people where they find that they have to help one another and do business with one another and where possible also employ other, especially young people who need the income because they want to get married,
start families and so on.
How is the flux of immigration, immigration now?
I understand that there are a certain number of South Africans who had fled the country in despair, but are now discovering that they can make a go of it and coming back.
So is the net inflow, outflow?
How is the white population holding up?
Well, there is a slow decline of the white population, but that's also due to aging.
And the fact that our birth rate has also been low, not as low as in Italy or Germany, but it has been relatively low.
But I would say that the ones who wanted to leave have already left, and the people are staying there now, probably not all that many of them would emigrate.
They've reconciled themselves with this new...
Well, it seems to me that they're precisely the kind of people,
because they're successful.
And because they're white, that people like Julius Malema, who is this Economic Freedom Foundation or Freedom Fighters guy who wants to dispossess the whites of all of their agricultural property, he's just the kind of guy who would fix his sights on people like that and try to either tax them or just take their businesses outright.
But my impression so far in this conversation is that You're saying the government really doesn't have the capacity even to do that.
And at some level, maybe they're even grateful that they're delivering the mail and feeding people.
True. No, you're quite right.
And in fact, I neglected to mention agriculture.
You know, that's always been the kind of the domain of Afrikanas and, you know, rural people.
Very few English speakers, except in KwaZulu-Natal, are involved in agriculture at all.
And that's been one of the few sectors over the past few years that has seen significant growth and development.
And we're also exporting a lot of agricultural.
Produce all over the world to Europe and the Middle East and Far East and so on.
And there you have got owner farmers who are involved in that business.
It's not as in some other countries where you've got a couple of big corporates dominating agriculture, maybe in Latin America or elsewhere.
And the governments, they're constantly in their rhetoric.
Constantly talking about taking the land and settling black farmers on the land and so on.
It's constantly in their rhetoric, as in Julius Malema's rhetoric as well.
But after almost 30 years, they haven't succeeded in doing that.
I mean, they've actually poured billions into it.
They've actually bought land and settled black farmers on the land.
Some of the statistics suggest that 80-90% of those projects have actually failed.
And they've already expended so much money on that that they don't have the cash left to do more.
And the latest thing I heard that Ramaphosa was saying, he was hoping that white farmers would donate land.
So the president of the country who is in charge of this billion-dollar budget He's actually begging white farmers to donate land to blacks.
I mean, where in the world have you heard something like that?
It shows just how desperate it has become.
And I don't believe that this agricultural, what they call the so-called land reform, will ever take place because they've not been able to do it up to now.
And of course, these farmers feed the entire population.
Well, you see, this is where, viewing South Africa from afar, and with perhaps an excessively cynical view, we can imagine someone like Julius Malema or Ramaphosa himself being persuaded, okay,
the time's come to do what they did in Zimbabwe, and send in these black militants, and if necessary, just drive off the white farmers and take over their property.
Is there any extent to which it's perhaps impossible to read the minds of the ANC government, but do they have any awareness of how spectacular failure that in fact was in Zimbabwe?
At some level, do they realize that would be committing suicide?
That would be killing the goose that lays the golden egg if they send in these militant blacks who don't know a straw about farming and expect them to run these modern South African farms?
Yes. Well, they have made noises about food security and so on.
And I think they do realize that if there had to be a food shortage in the country and riots, and eventually it would also affect their power and their own supporters might turn against them as a result.
In fact, there's a very interesting movement going on at the moment where some of the young blacks are actually...
Coming out against immigrants and immigration into South Africa.
They want all the foreign African immigrants in the country to be sent back to their countries of origin.
It's almost, you know, if you had to translate it into European terms, it would be, you know, it would be called an extreme right movement in South Africa, but it's black.
And the government's very concerned about that because it's actually...
Also torpedoing their classical kind of black nationalist, you know, pan-African type of discourse that they've had for decades, you know, ever since the Second World War, even earlier than that.
You know, these people like W.B. Dubois, he also was one of the founders of that.
So in their own ranks and among the young blacks, it's actually being...
They are being threatened, I think.
And some of these younger blacks, like this anti-immigration fellow Glomini is his surname, they're not particularly hostile towards whites because they realize that whites play a very useful role in South Africa.
So it's merely these old, these geriatric sort of Afro-communist.
Leaders in ANC and then these extremists like Julius Malema who are holding forth in trying to destroy the whites or drive them off the land or nationalize their assets and so on.
You know, I just had the strangest vision in my mind.
I was imagining if we had an ANC government spokesman sitting at this table.
It's a big enough table for all three of us.
And it would be fascinating to hear.
A thoughtful, I mean, some of the ANC people are probably, just as you say, these aging Afro-communists who are just going to speak in platitudes.
But it would be interesting to have someone who represented the power structure in some way, but who was reflective enough to be able to comment intelligently on the things that you're saying.
Perhaps there's no such person.
probably there's no such person who would join us at this table today.
But there must be fascinating conversations going on among the more intelligent, more thoughtful ANC types, perhaps some of the younger people, who do sympathize with these younger blacks, younger black South Africans,
who don't want their jobs taken by Malawians or Mozambicans or wherever it is they're coming
I understand that there are sometimes riots against these people.
That would almost be like, I don't know, the Cubans in America rioting and burning the places that the Mexicans are running.
That kind of, wait a minute, we're here and we belong here, but you don't and out you go.
There's a certain almost, I don't know, primitively admirable nationalism about this.
Of course, we wouldn't want it to take such violent form.
What is the government's attitude towards that kind of...
I mean, sometimes it's outright murderous violence, is it not?
It is, yes.
In 2008, they called it the so-called xenophobic riots.
Eighty people were killed during the...
Eighty people?
Eighty, yes.
And not a single...
A perpetrator was charged with anything, murder or assault or anything like that.
80 dead people and not a single indictment?
80 dead people and not a single conviction or criminal charge.
So, yes, that also speaks volumes about the criminal justice system.
In South Africa.
Well, but does it also say anything about the sympathies that the authorities might have for these nationalist black South Africans?
Or is it really just a question of incompetence?
Perhaps it's impossible to say.
Well, it's incompetence, but they're also, I think they're scared of actually prosecuting people like that because there would be a political backlash against them, even though they don't support those people because they are dreaming, you know, they are...
Really dreaming of Wakanda or something like that.
You know, they think that Africans are still building Wakanda and they're going to have...
There's a thing called the African Union and it's going to be like the European Union.
You know, and there's going to be free movement of people all over Africa and an African currency.
You know, they're just...
I mean, the economists are quite open in saying that it's impossible and...
And just a pipe dream, but it doesn't prevent them from talking about these things and having conferences about it and making declarations and signing documents and so on.
And, you know, it's almost as if the ANC is really busy with make-believe government, in a sense.
And, you know, they're driving these black cars along, you know, with escorted along the roads.
I mean, the AA has even come out against those things, saying that they cause accidents and it's not always necessary for somebody to get from A to B at the maximum speed and with all the other road users being pushed off the road.
But that's what they do.
That's what they're busy doing.
They imagine themselves to be these world leaders, you know, like a Joe Biden.
With Air Force One and the cavalcade of Cadillacs, you know, they've got a cavalcade of BMWs and Mercedeses, and they're going to show people we're in charge.
But in fact, many people, even blacks themselves, have said that they are not in charge.
There's sort of a phrase where some of these more kind of politically correct black people in South Africa have said, we're in power, but we're not in charge.
And that is, to a large extent, true.
Well, I love this phrase you used, that the ANC is involved in make-believe government.
Well, that sounds like the perfect job for them.
Exactly. Let them pay themselves fat salaries, engage in make-believe, and then let the private sector, primarily white people, actually run the country.
True. That, to some extent, is already happening, I would say.
And people, even some of the mainstream political commentators have also...
Perhaps not in those terms, but they have expressed that idea already that, you know, they are just involved in their kind of talk shop politics all the time.
And the private sector is literally running the country.
Without them, it would have come to a standstill a long time ago.
It's just that they are just...
Taking too much taxes still.
Yeah. But I know in the small businesses, they're paying very little tax and they're losing every possible loophole in the tax laws that exist to get away from paying taxes or paying just the absolute minimum.
So, you know, in the smaller business, more sort of anarchic business sector.
Yeah, it's already a kind of an Ayn Rand world of, you know, Milton Friedman or something with minimal government and maximum profits.
Gosh, well, it sounds as though if things continue to move in this direction, you would have this titular but essentially make-believe government.
Precisely. While the competent people, mainly whites, make things happen.
Exactly. You know, and I'm surprised talking to people.
You know, teachers or lecturers and people like that, they've all got money.
And the amazing thing is that somebody with a job like that, they might even run a little business on the side, like a guest house or something like that.
And you're talking about white people now.
Yes, white people.
And then they've got millions of rands in the bank, you know, and they're looking for investment opportunities.
So, it's happening.
See, this is so different.
From the image that we have of this constantly collapsing South Africa.
And it makes your perspective so fascinating to those of us who have this very, very gloomy view.
But it bespeaks a kind of possible accommodation, at least if the power structure is strictly African.
But how many...
Would you say, how many white people still?
I mean, I know there are still white liberals in South Africa.
They run the newspapers and the radio and the television.
They seem to.
Although, I would say there's even been a kind of a change in their language over the last five years or so.
You know, those sort of die-hard liberals are now hard to find.
Even these liberal journalists have written books denouncing government corruption and incompetence.
And one of the well-known liberal politicians from South Africa, Helen Zillow, who used to be the leader of the opposition at one point, I mean, she's been in trouble for some of her tweets where she said something to the effect that...
Colonialism also brought good to Africa.
She said that once and it caused an absolute scandal and so on.
So people are, I think, coming towards this new perspective where...
Yeah, where the positive contribution of whites is being acknowledged in both the past and in the present.
There's been a re-evaluation.
And anybody with any sense can see that the government was run better in the past than it is now, especially at the municipal level.
And then you've got the Western Cape province, which is not, at the provincial level, it's not under ANC control.
And, you know, I went there...
We went there last year to Plettenberg Bay with my youngest son, and he'd never been there before, and he said, this feels like another country.
And it's true.
As soon as you drive over the provincial borders, suddenly the roads are pristine.
There's no litter lying around.
You know, and things just flow, and it functions, and you can see there's order there, and the services are provided, the buildings are maintained.
And that's because the ANC is not in charge.
Exactly. Who is running the government there?
Well, it's the Democratic Alliance, the opposition party.
But on an ethnic level, it's an alliance between the white voters and the colored or mixed race voters in that area who are in the majority.
So they form this alliance and they're keeping out The ANC, to their utter frustration.
And yes, it's going also its own way.
And then the municipalities there, like the municipality of Cape Town, they're looking at alternative energy, generating their own energy.
So in a few years' time, Cape Town might be completely independent of ESCOM and a lot of the other municipalities there because they'll be generating their own electricity.
This is remarkable.
So, on the one hand, you have one province in which there is at least semi-competent government doing the things government is supposed to do, and then in the other provinces, and at the national level, you have this incompetent government whose functions are being taken over by the privates.
You have almost these competing models of how to run a society.
Precisely, yes.
Yes, in the Western Cape, as you say, The provincial government and the municipalities, and in the rest of the country, the private sector.
And between those two, you know, the old ANC is just there, you know, busy, spending money on themselves, being corrupt.
But, you know, you can only buy so many cars.
I suppose there are certain sheiks in the Middle East.
A thousand cars in a hangar or something like that.
You don't have that yet in South Africa.
Yes. And, you know, they consume a lot of alcohol and, you know, maybe a lot of the time they're drunk as well.
So their kind of nefarious influence is self-limiting in a way.
Well, I suppose the trick is to keep that part of the population, that part of the economy, small and make sure that it just doesn't slop over into everything.
And I don't know to what extent that will be possible, but it sounds as though the ANC, even though it is in titular control, is not expanding the number of fat bureaucrats, or at least to the point where it really is a terribly damaging force to the economy.
No, you're right.
And to some extent, you know, they've also got one or two loans now from IMF and the World Bank and so on.
So there would also be pressure from them if they had to.
Overstep the limits in their spending.
And he said, paradoxically, South Africa, you know, despite this extremely corrupt, incompetent government, if you look at our economic statistics, or at least the state's finances, we're in a better condition than probably most countries in Western Europe.
And all of the ones in Africa, except maybe Botswana.
You're talking about government debt, for example?
Government debt, yes.
Government debt is a proportion of the GDP and so on.
I mean, it has gone up a lot over the last few years, but it's now kind of hitting some sort of, it's levelling out at the moment, and there's some hope that it will stay like that.
And, you know, if you compare us to France, I mean, France looks like a third world country.
You mean from the macroeconomic picture?
From a macroeconomic perspective and also the fact, you know, until recently and probably still, we're running a trade surplus whereas a country like France has this huge trade deficit.
You know, we're still exporting a lot of stuff, you know, minerals and also the agricultural produce.
We've got a small but sizable motor industry.
And, you know, things are just chugging along there.
So many people wouldn't think of emigrating from South Africa because they have it so good there.
And, you know, just before flying to Washington, I spent another 10 days or so in the Southern Cape.
And, I mean, there are some spectacular beach houses and so on there.
And people are just living in yachts at the yacht club and so on.
Some people just have it so good there and why would they leave?
And they've got the money to buy whatever security they need if there's sort of any violent intruder threatening.
Of course, within limits.
I think we can go down the road where it would become a kind of a Mad Max kind of a situation.
But to some extent, yeah, I mean, it hasn't, except for parts of the 19th century, I don't think it has ever been that bad in South Africa.
Well, gosh, so you've got the example that we spoke about earlier, private sector doing the job government.
Ordinarily does.
And then in Southern Cape, you've got government actually doing some of the things government is supposed to do.
And then I suppose as a third approach, you have what you had mentioned earlier, and that's the Orania approach.
Could you tell us about the origins of Orania and how well it's working in your view and what sort of place it is?
Well, you know, Orania was founded by...
Somebody called Karol Bosov.
He was a theologian and a government employee, but he was very much involved in the old racial think tanks in South Africa.
There was a thing called SABRA, South African Bureau for Racial Affairs, I think, where they tried to come up with a blueprint of how the different ethnic groups in South Africa could coexist.
And then he, after in 1994, he founded this community at Orania.
You know, initially people scoffed at it and they said, oh, it's just a few diehards who wanted to create a new apartheid and so on.
But they've actually now grown and there are a few thousand people living there and they've got infrastructure, which they all created themselves.
And it was all done with white Afrikaner labor as well.
Which is really difficult to do in South Africa because ever since the Dutch got there in 1652, you know, I don't think...
Well, it's always been the problem that you could get cheaper labour, either slave labour or the local...
You know, population, Aboriginal population, who would be prepared to work at a lower wage than any European.
So that's always been our problem.
But in Irania, they've been very strict about that.
And they only use, or they've got a so-called own labour policy.
Eerfolgsarbeid, they call it.
You know, there's a Dutch phrase, eigen volk eerst, you know, own nation first.
Something of the same order.
I see.
Eier volk, volks eier arbeid, yeah.
And so it is an explicitly all-white and also all Afrikaner community, is it not?
Yes, exactly.
Although if you have a Polish wife or something, I don't think they'll turn you away.
I see.
But the household at least has to be to some degree Afrikaner and Afrikaans speaking.
Exactly. Well, you see, this is something that most whites who don't pay any attention to South Africa couldn't even imagine existing there.
They would imagine that the government would immediately come in and say, no, no, you can't have anything that's all white.
But this apparently has been going on for how many years now?
Several decades.
Exactly. And it's flourishing.
There's greater demand to get in than has space for them.
And to me, the great thing about it is, and this may not be as necessary in South Africa as it is in the United States, but it provides an environment in which people can rear children.
In a healthy, positive, affirming environment.
I should imagine that growing up as an Africana child in Irani would be a wonderful thing.
You're surrounded by people who think that your society, your way of life is wonderful and that your family fits right in.
Unlike here in the United States where racially conscious whites are sort of little islands, little tiny islands in this great ocean of anti-white sentiment.
But it seems to me just a remarkable achievement.
It is.
I think so, too.
You know, even though on paper it doesn't look like that, it's only a small town and, you know, it's not a thriving metropolis with multinational companies kind of queuing up to invest there.
But as a concept and as a project, it has been...
Remarkably successful.
What's the population now?
I think it would be about 3,000 to 4,000 people, if I'm not mistaken.
It could even be bigger by now.
But it's definitely growing, isn't it?
It is growing, and there's a definite demand for housing there.
Initially... You could buy a piece of land there for almost nothing.
But now it's fetching just about the same prices as elsewhere in South Africa.
And there's sort of a backlog of people who want to live in Urania, but there's not enough homes for them.
And they're constantly building new ones.
I imagine there is a fairly strong religious sentiment there.
Dutch Reformed Church?
Yes, there are a few churches there, among which the Dutch Reformed.
Traditionally, you had the three Reformed Churches, the Dutch Reformed and the Reformed is another one.
The other one has another name, which also means Reformed.
Afrikaans, you can say it in two ways.
Herformed and gereformeerd.
It's a sort of more Germanic word
I see.
Yes. But my guess is, and maybe I don't know whether there's statistics on this, but my guess is the fertility rate in Irania is probably one of the highest in South Africa, or at least certainly among the white population.
I imagine they're having children.
Well, I don't know of any studies like that, but there are, yes, there is a thriving school and they've got a, you know, something that we used to have in the old days in South Africa was a municipal swimming pool.
You know, communal swimming pool where all the kids went and, you know, played with one another and had fun in the water.
And they've got something like that in Irania.
And, yeah, and there's a lot of...
Cultural activity there as well.
Because I think the general level of education there is fairly high, the people living there.
So, you know, there's lots of theatre and discussions and little cultural projects going on and commemorations and historical festivals, that sort of thing.
And I think that's a very healthy environment for a child to grow up in.
You know, there was a time...
Oh, maybe 10 years ago, maybe not as long ago as that.
I remember seeing images of white beggars, white indigent camps in South Africa.
Really a rather shocking thing to see white children, some of them living in just the most squalid conditions.
It's my understanding that Orania has actually welcomed some of those people.
Of course, with the demand that they...
Reform, that they work, and that they not be mooches or anything like that.
To the extent that that's true, that that seems like a real public service as well.
It is, yes, yes.
I've heard that they have taken in people like that.
And, you know, there have been quite a few organizations now looking at that problem and trying to help people.
and a friend of mine was also you know he started to kind of help each other community where they also took in people like that and provided wooden
I mean, in places where people don't have electricity,
they actually We'd provide a facility for people to charge their cell phones and then ask them money for that.
So you find that all over Africa.
So any solar panel, you also have to protect.
A solar panel and a battery, you have to protect those two things.
But he's also successfully done it.
And there's another...
Yeah, there are quite a few projects like that.
One of the things I think that has also caused this has been...
The lawlessness that the ANC has brought, you know, crime and also then drugs.
We've got a lot of Nigerian drug dealers in South Africa and the white population has also fallen victim to that, especially young people.
And that leads then to a condition of dependency on these drugs and a kind of, yeah, just listlessness.
Yeah, a very dark life and some of those poor people have been substance abusers or alcoholics and so on.
I imagine Irania would be a place to really clean those people out extremely competently and thoroughly.
Yes, and they've got social workers there like we used to have because during the...
The 1930s, we had a lot of poverty in South Africa during the Great Depression, and that was then successfully addressed.
In fact, with the aid of, after the Koningi report, I think the US Koningi Corporation actually sponsored the research into that.
But now, of course, I don't think they would sponsor us anything like that today.
No, the Americans would not be interested.
certainly not anything that had its purpose helping indigent South African whites.
We're not even supposed to think that there is such a thing, and even if they are, then they deserve
Well, we've covered an awful lot of ground.
I know that you have spent a lot of time in Europe.
You're very familiar with the United States.
Can you tell me just something about life in South Africa that we wouldn't expect?
And you've already said some things that I think many of our listeners will find quite interesting and eye-opening.
But what strikes you, what should we know about South Africa that we're unlikely to know?
Well, I think Europeans who go there, they're quite surprised to discover that it looks more like...
The United States doesn't resemble Europe, really.
And a lot of our older, with the exception of a few towns and so on, a lot of our older architecture has been destroyed and we've put up these high-rise buildings, which then some cities, the inner cities of all the big cities except Cape Town have also fallen by the wayside,
a bit like Detroit has.
So it's more along the American model.
It's a car society.
Driving around, I've just been down to North Carolina on your highways.
I've also heard that America's roads are not all that great, but it seems to be well-maintained.
I was quite surprised to see you've got beautiful highways and so on.
And we've also still, despite the...
Decay there, we've still got some fairly good roads, the main ones, so you can drive along the highway and have proper infrastructure and so on.
So it's like America, we use cars a lot.
And now with this COVID thing, I think it's actually an advantage to have your own personal vehicle.
So South Africans, it's a car society, they place a high value on motor vehicles, sometimes too high.
I would say people would sort of indent themselves to buy a nice car.
Yes, and that sort of thing.
But yes, and then we've got the African bush and nature and things that all the Europeans and other Westerners and Americans come to South Africa to experience.
And they are very much enthralled by that.
And it's quite unique.
You know, the flora and fauna of Africa, and especially South Africa, we've got certain plant species and so on that you don't find anywhere else in the world in South Africa.
But, okay, there's that car society, and we've got huge shopping centers as well.
Huge ones.
You know, I've been to Tyson's Corner here in Washington, and...
It's still in Oakton, right?
Or is it already in DC?
It's the next town up.
Okay. But, yeah, I mean, there are some places in South Africa that are just so enormous.
So, yeah, we've got more shopping centers probably than most countries outside the United States.
So, that's another thing that you don't associate with South Africa.
Well, I don't even have to visit then.
It's just like America.
Exactly. A lot of people who come to South Africa, I've heard of some A person, his wife, some guy, his wife, he was transferred to Nigeria for a job and he didn't want to go there because his wife wouldn't go there.
But then when his wife visited South Africa, she said, oh, she was British.
She said, oh, this is like America.
I'd like to live here.
Well, gosh, on that note, and on a note that is, as I say, so different from the impression so many of us have about South Africa.
I believe we'll bring this conversation to an end.
And I thank you so much.
And ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you have found this conversation as enlightening and as interesting and the novel perspective that I have.
And I thank you all for watching this.
And I hope you will subscribe to this video channel.
And also, I would invite you to visit amren.com.
A-M-R-E-N dot com.
You will find many interesting things, perhaps not everything quite so interesting as Dr. Root, but I think that the perspective you will find there is one that you'll find extremely useful.
Again, thank you very much for your attention, and you, Dr. Root, thank you so much for your willingness to join us.
It's been a great pleasure talking to you, Mr. Taylor, and I hope I've given some useful information to your viewers.
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