Between the holy fire and the fires of hell : the absurd choice of the white tribe of Africa

Abstract

A comparison between the two colonial wars at the beginning of the 20th century underlines the fact that European colonial praxis involved a strange dichotomy between a brutal hunger for power and money, on the one hand, and a pietistic belief in Europe’s God-given calling to bring civilisation to the barbarians. The fact that the rulers of the Boer republics happened to be white and of European descent made no difference to the colonial power, either to their superior attitude or to their self-proclaimed right to organise and order Africa as they saw fit. The German war machine conducted a war very similar to that waged by the British Crown’s troops during the South African War. Comparing the history of the Afrikaners with the sad experience of the Hereros and Namas between 1904 and 1907, it remains a mystery that the white tribe of Africa never felt any solidarity with the indigenous people of Namibia. They never saw a similarity between their own suffering and the devastated lives of the indigenous people. And to see the Hereros and Namas as allies in the battle against a common enemy, European colonialism, did not cross their minds. 1 Researcher for the Pentecostal Project at the Research Institute for Theology and Religion, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa. Nico Horn In 1922, when a popular uprising occurred amongst the Bondelswarts in the south of South West Africa, the South African government – then led by the Boer general Jan Smuts – viciously suppressed the uprising by bombing the Bondelswart town of Waterberg and killing several unarmed civilians, among them women and children. The Afrikaner had gone full circle. The once respected resistance fighters had not only been co-opted into the structures of their former masters, they had become oppressors themselves.