A race apart

South African democracy has not, on the whole, been kind to the Afrikaner. During Nelson Mandela’s benign oversight of the Rainbow Nation, liberal Afrikaners persuaded themselves that all would turn out well in the end. But in their hearts, they sensed it would go wrong. And so it has. At the time of writing, President Zuma is aggressively defenestrating his finance minister, one of the few competent figures in his tawdry administration, and the rand is sinking so fast as to make post-Brexit sterling seem positively muscular.

Kajsa Norman notes that, since the first democratic election in 1994, at least 117,000 whites have been purged from the civil service, traditionally home to poorly educated Afrikaners. Thousands more have been driven off their farms due to ‘land redistribution’ measures, and hundreds of farmers and their families have been murdered. Things are so bad for the rural Afrikaner that some of them are trekking off to central and west Africa, where their agricultural skills are actively sought.