South Africa Shows Decolonization is Just Tribalism

"We will go to the garage, buy some petrol and burn the foreigner.”

A year after the formal end of ‘Apartheid’ and the African National Congress takeover of South Africa, violent mobs began attacking migrants from other African countries to drive them out.

The mobs weren’t the ‘white extremists’ whom the media loved to cover. They were African.

That the ‘Operation Buyelekhaya’ campaign, meaning ‘‘Go Back Home”, reached a new height after the ANC takeover was no coincidence. Ending apartheid had never been about equality, but about key African tribals consolidating control over the country and making no distinction between ousting whites or members of different African black groups from other countries.

South Africa’s current successor to ‘Buyelekhaya’ is Operation Dudula (‘Push Them’ out in Zulu) and has seen large mobs harassing the country’s large 2.5 million migrant population, shutting down their shops, destroying their merchandise, blocking them from hospitals and preventing their children from attending schools, while blaming them for high levels of crime and unemployment.

The old ‘Kill the Boer’ songs aimed at white people have been supplemented with “Burn the foreigner. We will go to the garage, buy some petrol and burn the foreigner.”

King Misuzulu, the Zulu king, recently gave a speech in which he declared that all foreigners or ‘kwerekwere’ must leave the country. It’s a message that has consistently come from the Zulu.

There is plenty of irony in that because the Zulu had migrated to and colonized South Africa, building a nation in the early 19th century. The territory seized by the Zulu from other tribes was obtained in some cases not much earlier than the arrival of the Boers. The end of apartheid just ended white rule and ushered in a new wave of tribal conflicts still going on today. The myth of ‘decolonization’ ran into the reality that every group colonizes when it is strong enough to do so.

Decolonization has never meant anything other than a particular group, one that is usually even more violent and xenophobic, driving out a supposed ‘colonial’ race or ethnicity to maintain exclusive control over it for its own tribe and its own people. ‘Decolonization’ in Algeria and in other Arab Muslim areas drove out not only Europeans, but indigenous Christians and Jews.

Marxism and highly dubious history transform tribal, racial and ethnic supremacism into the noble enterprise of ‘decolonization’, investing ethnic cleansing, terrorism, genocide and xenophobia, with the aura of moral superiority. The moment the academics and pundits move on from manufacturing the ‘resistance’ myth, the grim and grubby racist reality sets in.

Migrants from neighboring and even more distant countries have flooded into South Africa, and African tribal populations are trying to drive them out. The ANC has accused activists of perpetrating a new apartheid, but really they’re just using the same tactics that were used to drive out white people and their African allies against people they consider equally foreign.

Operation Dudula is far more aggressive than the anti-migrant protests in Europe or MAGA’s deportation campaigns that the media decries. Post-apartheid it turns out that what the population under apartheid most wanted to do is what almost everyone wants to do which is to secure the territory for their people alone. But only some people are condemned for doing it.

Politicians and the media complain that America and Europe aren’t taking in enough migrants because they’re racist, but there isn’t a non-western country in the world more willing to take in migrants than western countries are. And it would be nice if liberals finally admitted it.

Decolonization hasn’t made the rest of the world progressive, it just means that in South Africa, there are mobs demanding that the government “put South Africans first”. But what is ‘South Africa’? The only historical definition of South Africa was the state built by the Boers. There is no historical basis for barring African migrants from crossing into it except as a nation state.

“We grew up in apartheid times, where things were much better than what it is now,” one supporter of the Dudula movement complained.

“South Africa needs to go back to the old South Africa that we know,” another agreed.

And so the circle is complete.

Some proposals have been made to change South Africa’s name to Azania: a semi-mythical appellation mostly used by Marxist Africanists, but few in the nation have shown any interest in it. There wasn’t much in the way of civilization before modern times leaving nomenclature options such as Kaditshwene, a capital of one of the Bantu peoples, had the unappealing name of “What an incredible number of baboons”. And so it remains South Africa with Africans who are protesting in the name of a defunct European state, against the entry of other Africans.

The campaign against apartheid, like most decolonization efforts, was based around the twin poles of group solidarity and hostility to an outside group. After apartheid, a new outside group was needed to serve as the enemy. And, following the familiar course of decolonization in much of Africa, the conflict slowly took the shape of tribal, clan and kin conflicts over land and power.

Post-apartheid South Africa just offers narrower and shrinking forms of apartheid as smaller groups fight over a shrinking piece of the pie. The ANC has turned to Russia and China after the Americans and Europeans who fought to put Mandela in power have become disgusted by the corruption and dysfunction that invariably plagues the nations they worked to decolonize.

By now it’s clear that the happy ending that apartheid opponents were waiting for will never arrive. The ANC is too corrupt to be popular and too weak to rule by force. The time will come when it will fall to the likes of Julius Malema or the Dudula movement. The remaining white and mixed race or ‘colored’ population will flee and the stage will be set for civil war and genocide.

And that will be another triumph for ‘decolonization’.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.