Paint the town red and green with your genes

I HAVE a strange, almost disingenuous, probably contradictory approach to this. I have written around this issue in this column before. On the one hand I don’t really care; people can identify themselves as anything or associate with any “cultural" group of their choice. For all my interests in my family origins and heritage, I really am fine with being coloured. A marker placed here is that we should, at least, start with honesty. Hence my skoorsoekerigheid with the DA, and most of its followers. (See here, or here.)

This honesty has to do with accepting that very many millions of us would not have had a presence in South Africa were it not for colonisation. The Multi-Regional Hypothesis (humans suddenly sprang from the earth in places as far and wide apart as Rapa Nui to Irkutsk) has lost out to the Out of Africa thesis. 

Nonetheless, and just to be clear: Defending the rights of everyone who lives in this country is a hill I would die on! We did it before, in the 1980s, and we would do it again.

On the other hand, the issues of race, identity, exceptionalism and exclusivity – politicised and weaponised – really strip my moer. It is divisive, it causes instability, conflict, tension, it reduces trust among citizens – and scientifically it is nonsense. This dualism is reflected in the two other columns I write, one for Business Day in which I have to pretend to be serious (I can actually make a good case for this ...) and one for Daily Maverick in which I soek skoor with anyone or anything that moves. It all helps put food on the table, a roof over my head and clothes on my back – and pays for that monthly R5 000 medical aid subscription for only myself.

Orania as Cradle for Inbreeding?

Diversity is what so scares people in the US Europe, where “the great replacement theory” has gone mainstream, and among the Boer Bloedbroers of SolidAfriforum, who believe that white people are being killed off and or erased systematically (as policy) in South Africa. Yet to create a location where a very specific branch of Saxons can live in peace and harmony and reproduce mainly among themselves means inbreeding will follow.

Inbreeding has been identified as among the main causes of genetic disorders, developmental delays, physical abnormalities, reduced fertility rates and higher risk of early mortality and reduced immune function. “The closer the biological relationship between parents, the greater the probability that their offspring will inherit identical copies of one or more mutant genes. Thus the offspring of incestuous matings are four times more likely to have inherited identical gene copies from each parent than children born to first cousins, with associated adverse effects that may include developmental delay, physical anomalies, and intellectual handicap,” were among the findings of Alan Bittles of the School of Medical and Health Sciences at Edith Cowan University and Centre for Comparative Genomics. (See his research paper “Incest, Inbreeding, and their Consequences”, published in the 2001 International Encyclopaedia of the Social & Behavioural Sciences).

Unless the people in Orania introduce a different new strain of Saxon/white people, and invite people like, say, the Acadians (French in North America) who may be interested in preserving their racial heritage, or other disaffected white people who see Orania as a safe haven, the current population of the enclave will probably marry within the group. Outside the Deep South of the US, there aren't very many groups of white people who want to preserve their race.

Never mind the fear of a dark planet in countries like Poland (it would be unfair to pick on them but a 2013 study by the Centre for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University, found 69% of Poles do not want non-white people living in their country), or the increase in “replacement fears” in the US and UK – there actually has been a general decline in incest and inbreeding across the European world. It remains most virulent in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where 20% to more than 50% of current marriages are between second cousins or closer.

A strong case can be made that the Anglo-Saxon male fears a more colourful world, and has set his sights on the target of diversity, equity and inclusivity. (The term Anglo-Saxon has been described as racist. I use it here precisely to demonstrate the way that, say, British racists, notably Tommy Robinson, proclaim that the Anglo-Saxon people are under threat from multiculturalism and “replacement”). We need only look at what is happening in the US.

This fear of a colourful planet, framed as “protecting our culture” is really what drives Orania’s people. If truth be told, I am “culturally” closer to the Afrikaner, than I am to indigenous Africans or Europeans. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, because I spent almost three decades immersed in European social, political economic and educational institutions, and I often pretend to be Xhosa because of my respect for the late Oliver Tambo, and I also did so for a brief childhood period in Grahamstown.

Nevertheless, and given my belief that culture necessarily changes over time (rather than the reified culture of Orania’s people), all the traditional markers of identity have a limited lifespan, and they have poor definitional powers anyway. Other than Christianity, racial exceptionalism, that “culture” thing and whiteness, I often associate with almost everything that the people of Orania hold so dear; from rugby to the poem “Winternag”, kaiings, pap en vleis, and Afrikaans as my moedertaal. I would miss dhal and rice, though, if I ever moved to Orania. #JustSaying.

Outbreeding is what has made us as diverse as we are. If you travelled on easyJet from the Bosporus to the Korean Peninsula, you get a sense of the marvel of outbreeding since the days of the 14th-century Moroccan world traveller Ibn Battuta. The same sense prevails when you travel from San Diego to Patagonia; from Cairo to Cape Town, or from Myanmar south across the Nusantara in Malaysia to Polynesia to the Northern Island of New Zealand ...

Let’s face it, Europe has been changing colours rapidly since the Atlantic Community began its ruptures in the Americas, the Caribbean and Pakistan/India, gave away Palestinian land to European settlers, destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan and contributed to the destruction of Syria. It was okay for Christopher Columbus, Jan van Riebeeck or Stamford Raffles to create European outposts (and establish comprador classes that subjugated indigenous communities), but now it’s not okay for African, Asians, Latin Americans, Austronesians or Polynesians to seek safety and a better life in Fortress Europe.

We can go back further and repeat the line: If you (Europeans) did not go to Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Africans, Asians and Latin Americans would not have ended up at your doors. Then again, I think the movement of people along trade routes over centuries has been a good thing. Outbreeding is, scientifically, also a good thing. When people have sex and make babies, they spread genes, change admixtures and disrupt phenotypes because recessive characteristics tend to get buried under dominant ones – I think. Although the genes remain present in the population. Mixing only spreads those genes around the widest number of people, which makes them more likely to thrive.

Justification of European violence

I doubt the Saxons of Orania would accept any of these scientific explanations. One thing that does stand out from the social media feed is the justification of European violence (structural, somatic and psychological) on the basis that King Shaka killed many people. Really. So King Shaka’s killings justify all subsequent injustices by European settlers? This goes back to the old civilising mission rubbish: Well, we brought civilisation to these places, where people were killing one another.

There are two (immediate) responses to this. First, the European mission civilisatrice was used to justified colonial expansion (in search of new markets for capitalism), with European powers such as Great Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain systematically, and often violently imposing their values, institutions and religions on the colonised in Asia, Africa and Latin America. I know of a single country that does not mind all that: Singapore. There the indigenous people were erased and the British established a Chinese settler colony which (today) prays at the shrine of the white man that “founded” the Island State, Stamford Raffles. This is reminiscent of the way that we were taught (thanks to Kleurlingsake) that South African history started with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck.

The second response is to the idea that Africans or Asians were killing one another “before the white man came". Really? Now, I am not justifying Africans or Asian wars but the idea that pacific Europeans came to civilise savages erases, quite conveniently, the Hundred Year War in Europe (1337 to 1453) before the European mission civilisatrice. It glosses over the early evidence of organised violence in 5 000 BCE (Talheim Death Pit), or any of the hundreds of European wars over thousands of years (Roman Civil Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars or the Gothic Wars) until they, the Europeans, exported capitalism to the world in search of markets.

You don’t have to be a communist to understand capitalist expansion and the violence, abuse and exploitation it has been known for. (See William Dalrymple’s books The Anarchy and last year’s brilliant The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World.) But you certainly have to be honest, and admit that (at least in Orania), you are building a shrine to apartheid, and filling it with nostalgics, with boxes of Kleenex for tears about the loss of white power.

My personal view is that spreading your genes as far and wide as possible makes for a more colourful world. And just because I am moedswillig, I would bet R5 that I share European genes with most of Orania’s citizens (I have green eyes and a fair skin, ffs), but I am honest enough to accept that I am coloured. And that’s a good thing.

♦ VWB ♦

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