Dylann vox7/26/2023 South Africa's flags are inextricably bound up in these narratives. "Meanwhile, in the rest of Africa, there were constant genocides, ethnic repressions, dictatorships, abject poverty, disease epidemics, wholesale crime and murder." "The White people made a great nation of South Africa and Black people thrived and prospered there," David Duke, the infamous former Louisiana state representative and head of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote in a 2010 post on his website. A resistance movement led by Nelson Mandela eventually toppled the apartheid government in 1994, and South Africa is a functional (if troubled) democracy today.īut American white supremacists take similar lessons from apartheid South Africa as they do from Rhodesia. Apartheid, the formal segregation system imposed by the Afrikaner regime, was so vile that even Rhodesia's government distanced itself from it. Twice colonized, first by Dutch settlers and then by the British Empire, post-independence South Africa was dominated by the white minority, with those of Dutch heritage known as Afrikaners. The story of apartheid South Africa is a bit more familiar. The lesson of Rhodesia, for white supremacists, is that black people are a threat to a healthy white-run society. They called it, naturally, "New Rhodesia." Earlier this year, about 150 people on a white supremacist web forum volunteered online to "found" a "new country" in Africa. Its long serving leader, Robert Mugabe, has become a nasty authoritarian: Zimbabwe under Mugabe has been an economic basket-case, suffering some of the world's worst hyper-inflation, and a human rights disaster.Īnd that is why people like Roof mythologize Rhodesia today: they see it (falsely, of course) as proof that countries are better off when white people run them. But the new Zimbabwean government had serious problems. In 1979, the Rhodesian government was toppled by an armed uprising - no surprise, considering black people outnumbered their white counterparts by about 25:1 (the equivalent number in South Africa was 7:1, per Horne). By 1976, "there was a sprawling proliferation of pro-Rhodesian organizations in the United States," University of Houston historian Gerald Horne writes "The transatlantic question of race was the essential glue that held the lobby together." In the United States, where the civil rights movement was winning historic victories, white supremacists saw the viciously racist Rhodesian government as a victory worth celebrating. In 1965, white natives led by a man named Ian Smith declared independence from Britain, and founded a country named Rhodesia, named after Cecil Rhodes (the British imperialist who led the colonization of the area). It was a terribly racist country, akin to apartheid South Africa, and became a sort of cause celebre for white supremacists in the 1960s and 1970s - one they still mythologize today.Īfter the area was colonized by the British in the late 1890s, a racial caste system quickly emerged in what would become Rhodesia, where white people controlled the commanding political heights, as well as most of the land, while black people served as peasants. Rhodesia used to be where today's Zimbabwe is. Here's a guide to what those flags mean - and why a man who appears to have committed a vicious hate crime would sport them on his jacket. That would be apartheid South Africa, which you might be aware of, and Rhodesia, which is a little less known. We know that not just from his actions: the above photo of Roof, identified by the Charleston Post and Courier, shows him wearing a jacket with the flags of two avowedly racist nations. Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old man suspected of walking into a historically black church and massacring nine parishioners, is in all likelihood a white supremacist.
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