538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets
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What is the history behind the settlement patterns in South Africa?
I mentioned this story about the vow that was made in 1838. And he went to negotiate with the Zulu king, King Dungan. They signed a treaty. The king said, we need to celebrate this, but leave your weapons outside. And so during the celebration, the Zulu king chanted, kill the wizards. And they slaughtered them. We need to retaliate. We need to attack back. And so they had a command of about 300 to 400 people. They were completely surrounded by about 12,000. A man named Sadal Saliha, he was the religious leader. And he said, we need to make a vow to God. Some people say that's the origin story of our people.
Let's flip to the modern time. What was the relationship between the apartheid state per se and this notion of separate homelands?
The argument was that South Africa should be thought of as Europe. The single biggest problem in South Africa, it's the triangle of unemployment, poverty and inequality. Ironically, they've gotten to a point where they can only think about inequality.
It looks to me like the cost of innovation is inequality. Okay, now your book is entitled Kill the Boar. There's a reason for that. Hello, everybody. I've watched over a very long period of time the political and economic situation in South Africa both heat up and destabilize, and that's... taken somewhat of an accelerating turn in the last few years. And because of that, I've become increasingly interested in delving more deeply into the history of South Africa to understand the context and then also the political situation on the ground in that country now. And I came across the work of Dr. Ernst Rutz, who wrote this book called Kill the Boer, this book, which was published in 2018. Now, he's also a filmmaker.
He made a film called Tainted Heroes, which is about the apartheid era. in 2016 and another one called Disrupted Land. And I hoped to talk to Dr. Roots about South Africa, about its history and about, well, about its current situation and about hopes and concerns for the future. And that's exactly what we did. And so... The first thing I wanted to do was to delve a little bit into the history of the origin of South Africa, because there's a narrative in the West that the evil white Europeans came to a land dominated by black Africans and colonized it in their brutal and murderous fashion. And, well, any... territorial dispute has its bloody edge, let's say, but the truth of the matter is that the settlement of South Africa is a hell of a lot more complex than that, and that the two primary racial groups that exist there today weren't the original inhabitants of the land, whether they're black or white, and so just knowing that is useful, and we spent the first
half, really, of the podcast talking about the history of the settlement of South Africa. The original people there were Bushmen who aren't particularly related genetically to the Bantu, the black people who live there now, and obviously not to the So the situation with regards to ethnicity and race in South Africa is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface. And so, well, that's what we're trying to puzzle out in this podcast. So join me and my guest, Dr. Ernst Roots, for that discussion. So this is likely to be an unsettling conversation, so we might as well dive right in. The first thing I think that people who are watching and listening should know is that a somewhat more detailed history of the settlement patterns in South Africa.
Because the presumption, first of all, what most people in the West know about South Africa, you could put in a very small thimble with enough room left over for another thimble, and that includes me. And so it's not like I studied that in high school, for example. And so people know nothing about South Africa, like really nothing. And they certainly don't know anything about its settlement patterns. And so I suppose people use the analog of the European settlement of the Americas, which is also a very complex story. I mean, by the time the Pilgrims got to the eastern coast of the United States, there are estimates that 95% of the Native Americans had already died there. from measles, smallpox, mumps, etc.
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