Decoding South Africa's Fatal Formula

Why we should hope for the best and prepare for the worst as South Africa faces the challenge of economic volatility and geopolitical uncertainty

Niall Ferguson ends his magisterial account of tumult of the 20^th century, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hate (2006), with this foreboding message.

We shall avoid another century of conflict only if we understand the forces that caused the last one – the dark forces that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of economic crisis, and in doing so negate our common humanity. They are forces that stir within us all.

Some 60 million people died in the Second World War. As a percentage of world population that would be like 200 million people dying today, with hundreds of millions more injured and traumatized by war. That’s a lot of violent deaths over a six-year period; like having 100 Russia-Ukraine wars going on around the world simultaneously today.

To make matters worse, the enormous death and destruction to defeat totalitarianism was a pyrrhic victory. The Soviet “empire-state” (Ferguson’s term) under history’s great mass murderer Josef Stalin ended the war more powerful than ever, its reach extending into the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

Well, at least World War II defeated the notion of ethnic superiority some might argue. Not really. The Soviet Union was also genocidal in its treatment of ethnic minorities. Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture led to the deaths of one in five Ukrainians. This was, according to Ferguson, “Stalin’s brutal answer to what he regarded as the Ukrainian question”, i.e. Ukrainian nationalism. Plus ça change.

Stalin persecuted a range of other ethnicities too, including Chechens, Crimean Tartars, Germans, Greeks and Poles. In an Orwellian twist, the Soviet policy of repression “subtly mixed the language of class and race” as Ferguson notes:

Baltic Germans were “Kulak colonizers to the marrow of their bones”. Poles were informed: “You are being de-kulakized not because you are a kulak, but because you are a Pole. One internal OGPU report contained the telling phrase “If it’s a Pole, then it must be a kulak.”

Does that language remind you of something? White monopoly capital, white privilege, settler colonialism. Our black liberationists play the same game of mixing notions of class and race in casting suspicion on South Africa’s “kulak class”.

To be sure, ethnic conflict is rarely about actual difference and far more likely to be about political expedience and misguided ideology. The riddle of Ferguson’s sorry tale of human brutality is that it was all perfectly unnecessary. Surprise, surprise – scientists are yet to discover a hidden Jewish gene that, virus-like, corrupts the Germanic spirit. Surprise, surprise – it rather defeats the point of your sacred communist ideology to murder 30 million citizens to build a humanist utopia.

Ferguson’s thesis is that a “fatal formula” of “ethnic confluence, economic volatility and empires on the wane” is what led to war and genocide, and that we should keep an eye on these three horsemen of the apocalypse if we’re to avoid a repeat catastrophe.

Why then, in the tumultuous 20^th century, did South Africa remained relatively stable compared to other parts of the world? In 1910, after a century of the British Empire keeping the lid on ethnic rivalries in southern Africa it withdrew, handing South Africa to the white minority for safekeeping. Given the weakness of the other ethnicities, white South Africa acted as an empire-state, dominating the country and projecting power across southern Africa. This empire-state – or “settler colonial” state as the black liberation movements called it – was economically successful, gaining some legitimacy from politically oppressed blacks by giving them economic development and toy-states to run in the form of homelands.

But then, using Ferguson’s historic lens, things changed for white-ruled South Africa from the 1970s. In 1975 a European empire ended when Portugal withdrew from Angola and Mozambique. Not coincidentally, the following year the white regime faced its most serious threat, the Soweto Uprising, which sparked youth revolts around the country, lasting for months and greatly unsettling white confidence.

Imperial retrenchment also led to black rule in Rhodesia in 1980, facilitated by Britain who were no longer interested in protecting a far-flung white settlement in Africa. With ever-growing distaste in the west for institutionalized racism, white South Africa found itself drifting from the European mothership; dangerously so, given the growing communist threat. This was because black liberation was a natural communist cause that mirrored Marxist ideals: anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-property rights, anti-western, pro-underdog, etc. Swart gevaar and rooi gevaar were intertwined fears.

From the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s South Africa was deeply involved in what Ferguson calls the “Third World War”. With tacit western support, South Africa and its proxies fought against communist-backed insurgents in Namibia and communist-backed governments in Mozambique and Angola, where white South African soldiers came face-to-face with Cuban soldiers.

Now, South Africa found itself increasingly reliant on the American empire-state to hold back communist encroachment. But America was internally conflicted about helping South Africa. It backed South Africa’s proxies with arms and moral support, while trying to nudge Pretoria away from racist rule. America’s own history of race meant that the anti-apartheid movement was equated with the Civil Rights Movement. This was mistaken. The demographics of the US are different from South Africa. While the Civil Rights Movement was never an existential threat for white America, equal political rights in South Africa were indeed, and remain, an existential threat for white South Africa.

When President PW Botha failed to make significant reforms in the mid-1980s, American financial institutions put the screws on. South Africa’s three-part fatal formula kicked in: ethnic confluence had always been there but now the white empire-state of South Africa was losing confidence in itself and unlike Israel it had no security guarantee from the US. It was also in demographic decline compared to black South Africa; economic volatility was the final nail in the coffin.

However, the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later also presented a golden opportunity. With the end of the Cold War the black liberation movement lost material support as well as ideological coherence. The stage was set for a miracle.

South Africa’s “miracle” transition in 1994 underlined the post-Cold War hope, a new world order that would no longer be bound by Ferguson’s fatal formula. In the post-imperial age, waning empires and ethnic confluence would matter little. When South Africa enjoyed decent economic growth in the first 15 years of majority rule it seemed possible that the country would escape the blight of post-colonial Africa and become a viable nonracial nation-state.

But that’s not how things worked out. The post-Cold War era was not the new normal but an exceptional interregnum. Today, China, Russia and Islamism (embodied most dangerously by Iran) provide ample backing for a black elite casting around for material support and ideological rationale to challenge residual white power. Our black government does not have to bow to western superiority.

In unemployment and GDP growth, South Africa is now worse off than it was in the 1980s. Between the China-led BRICS alliance and Trump’s America, South Africa is also (as in the 1980s) being torn between competing empire-states. And, as in the apartheid era, ethnicity remains the key political factor. How will our new fatal formula play out?

For now, the country is stuck. Ideally South Africa would be evolving toward broad acceptance of universal values as envisaged by our constitution. But there is simply too much resentment in the black political class toward white economic power for this important political evolution to take place. Instead we have “the dementia of ideologies and coarse nationalism”.¹

Politicised white South Africans are following two distinct responses to the crisis: 1. the pessimistic/tragic approach of enclaving and state-proofing of the white civil rights movement (Solidarity, AfriForum, Sakeliga, etc); 2. the optimistic/triumphant approach of the DA who believe South Africa can evolve toward broad acceptance of universal values. For ordinary white South Africans and others disillusioned by black majority rule there is no need to choose between these options. I am a member of both the DA and AfriForum. It’s quite possible to hope for the best, a DA-led national government that achieves economic growth and a west-leaning foreign policy, while preparing for the worst: retreat to enclaves in the midst of total state collapse and make mutually beneficial agreements with non-state black groups.

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1. This phrase and parts of the from the previous sentence referring universal values (paraphrased) is taken from Robert D. Kaplan, but used in a different context: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-islam-created-europe/476388/