White Supremacist Militancy Thriving in South Africa

White Supremacy in South Africa

[South Africa\White Supremacy]
CFR: “Dylann Roof, murderer of nine African-Americans at Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015, was in no small part inspired by white supremacism in southern Africa.”
Photo: YouTube

As white supremacist militancy has raced across the Western world, it has not spared South Africa from being swept up in the chaos.

Domestic South African white supremacist movements both inform white supremacist movements elsewhere, and at the same time are influenced by global trends on the extreme right.

South Africa, of course, has its own long—and painful—history of white supremacism. The formal apartheid system, which governed the country for over 40 years, institutionally oppressed the Black population, concentrating political, economic, and judicial power exclusively in white hands.

Since the 1990s, when apartheid finally collapsed, race relations have remained raw, and the white population still holds much of the economic capital. The country remains one of the world’s premier examples of the postcolonial challenges in managing racial tensions and promoting a sustainable national identity in a democratic context with the rule of law.

Accordingly, South Africa still inflames the passions of white supremacists around the world.

Dylann Roof, murderer of nine African-Americans at Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in June 2015, was in no small part inspired by white supremacism in southern Africa—his Facebook profile picture showed him in a jacket emblazoned with the flags of Rhodesia, a bastion of white supremacy before it achieved independence as Zimbabwe, and apartheid-era South Africa, and his manifesto was published on a personal website titled “The Last Rhodesian.”

The centrality of South Africa to the white supremacist struggle around the world has been summarized by the radical website American Renaissance in March 2018: “the fate of white people around the world is linked to that of the Afrikaners.”

Within South Africa, there are periodic reminders of the enduring threat of white supremacist violence.

Read rest of story here: https://www.cfr.org/blog/transnational-white-supremacist-militancy-thriving-south-africa

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