Four centuries after the Europeans arrived in sub-Saharan Africa, four decades after they began withdrawing from their colonies, their genetic sediment survives across the continent, mostly now to its benefit.
The native whites are scattered over the mainland and the offshore island states in pools ranging in size from the millions in South Africa to the thousands in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Namibia, and the hundreds in Mauritius, Seychelles, Madagascar and mainland states such as Gabon.
All told they probably number around five million, somewhat less than in the heyday of white supremacy. Their numbers are unlikely to increase, more likely to decline. There will be no more white settlers, not in significant numbers. The white settler has been consigned to history.
The settlers now are going the other way — both whites and blacks seeking a new life outside Africa. Thousands of black Africans slip illegally into Europe, many risking their lives in leaky boats on the Mediterranean. In many cases, those blacks with qualifications emigrate legally, to America as well as to Europe, in a brain drain the continent cannot afford. After 40 years or so of independence, many of the black Africans, it seems, want to escape from Africa, to the lands where the whites still rule and life is better. If they see irony in this it probably doesn’t bother them — they are more concerned with improving their lives, or even with mere survival.
There are mini-migrations within Africa too, notably a steady stream of thousands of Africans into South Africa from as far away as Nigeria and Senegal, looking for opportunity in the richest country on the continent. Their influx is resented by many whites, not only from the basic xenophobia shared with many black South Africans but also because it swells the proportion of the whites’ numerical minority, or at least emphasises it.
For all their centuries of settlement in Africa, the native whites are at present more insecure and vulnerable than ever before. Stripped of the power that once enabled their kind to rule all Africa, they live in a state of anxiety about the present and of uncertainty about the future. These fears persist despite their having experienced long periods of black rule — more than 40 years in Kenya, 24 in Zimbabwe, 14 in Namibia and 10 in South Africa. In none of these countries is the whites’ Africanness unequivocally accepted, despite their long presence. Some of those in South Africa have an ancestry there stretching back 10 generations or more. The forebears of some were born at the Cape when Louis XIV ruled in France and Oliver Cromwell in England. Yet many blacks, while not necessarily seeing the native whites as aliens, still have difficulty accepting them as fellow Africans.
The people of negroid origin who form the great majority in Africa are happy to recognise African fellowship with peoples of a lighter complexion or otherwise different physiognomy, such as the Arabs of the Mediterranean littoral, the Berbers of the Sahel, and the Hamites of the Horn, and they presumably will come to accept also the Caucasians of the south when the stigma of white supremacy has faded enough.
Black reluctance to accept the whites seemingly has less to do with ethnicity than with history, more to do with resentment than with race. Though the blacks of South Africa did not take hatred with them into the new democratic dispensation, they did bring understandable resentment of what white supremacy had done to their kind.
The resentments of the past persist long after their causes — though not the effects — have disappeared. While black Africans in general increasingly recognise that colonialism is becoming outworn as a catchall excuse for all their misfortunes and failings, they see good reason to believe that its deleterious effects persist. Certainly the humiliation and exploitation of colonialism and apartheid are woven forever as a bitter thread in the black cultural fabric. The resentment of white supremacy may not dim until those who experienced it at first hand have all died, perhaps not until their descendants can no longer claim with justification that they are still suffering from its deprivations and exploitation. And that may take more than a generation or two, perhaps not until the whites are no longer perceived to be a minority still unfairly privileged.
This is an extract from The White Africans by Gerald L’Ange, which is published by Jonathan Ball