The Story Of How White Ethnic Groups Came To Be In Africa, Stretches Back Over 2,000 Years.

A lot of people tend to forget that there are white ethnic groups in Africa, most people when they think of Africa conjure images of The Lion King, Civil Wars, and Safaris in the African Savannah.

White Africans have been on the continent since the times of Rome and Carthage, isolated in present day Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Western Sahara due to the lack of transportation needed to breach the Saharan Desert in North Africa. 

During the 1500s, the advent of sail boats and established trade routes in the Sahara meant that Europe could access the southern half of the African continent previously unexplored by them.

By 1890, various White African ethnic groups numbering in the hundreds of millions dotted across European Colonies in Africa.

In Southern Africa today, there're three main groups of White Africans: Afrikaners, Rhodesians, and the Deutschnamibiers.

Afrikaners are the decedents of Dutch colonists who founded Cape Town in 1652 and fled from the British during “The Great Trek” after the British Empire seized Cape Town during the Napoleonic Wars.

Rhodesians are a mix of Afrikaners and British pilgrims tasked with finding gold in what is now Zimbabwe and Zambia in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries.

And Deutchnamibiers are the descendants of German and Dutch colonists in what is now Namibia, settling in the area in the 1790s.

These three groups make up a large majority of the white African population: With 4.7 Million in South Africa, 100,000 in Zimbabwe, 40,000 in Zambia, and 150,000 in Namibia.

Making the total of white African population in the region: 4,990,000.

But white Africans aren't just in Africa, you can find them as far west as the United States and as far east as the Solomon Islands where their population numbers are higher.

This beckons the question: Why are there so few White Africans left in Africa?

In the 1950s and 1960s during Decolonization, there were concerns from the colonial elites as to what would happen to the whites born in their African colonies.

With many of the whites returning to their Empire's respective countries almost immediately after the colony in question gained independence (Notably in Kenya, Madagascar, Sudan, Somalia, The Gambia, and Uganda).

But others were more resilient, especially the Rhodesians and Afrikaners.

The Afrikaners by the early 1940s had regained control of South Africa after the Boer Republics were absorbed into the then Union of South Africa in 1902, which now had the South West African Protectorate (Modern day Namibia) making up more land the Afrikaners to expand.

That expansion resulted in conflicts with both the native Namibians and the Deutchnamibiers, still living there after the fall of German South West Africa in WW1, with many skirmishes breaking out in the Namibian desert and countryside.

Coupled with the growing Zulu and Xhosa population, the Afrikaner government instituted the now infamous Apartheid System.

In the mid 1990s, Apartheid was scrapped with the combined efforts of the late former South African presidents F.W. deKlerk and Nelson Mandela.

After which black South Africans were now free to do the same things as the white minorities, and though some were grateful for this gesture, some were also out for revenge.

The White Genocide refers to various events and incidents in both South Africa and Zimbabwe of white farmers having their lands seized, businesses shut down, and hate crimes being committed towards the Afrikaners and Rhodesians, the most major of which is murdering them in their homes.

During the peak of white genocide in South Africa around the mid 2010's, former South African president Jacob Zuma approved of plans to “Aggressively pursue the reclamation of our lands taken by the white colonizers”.

This aggressive reparation scheme by the now black supremacist African National Congress (ANC) led to hundreds of farm seizures that contributed to just under 150 acts of murder as “Revenge for Apartheid”.

This has caused many Afrikaners to flee in droves since 1995, to the UK, US, Namibia, and Australia.

With the unintended side effect of a brain drain to occur in South Africa.

The Rhodesians had the same issue as South Africa, but it resulted in the infamous Rhodesian Bush War that lasted from 1965-1979, with just under 100,000 people killed on both sides.

In 1964, the then Prime Minister of the colony of Southern Rhodesia, Ian Douglas Smith, wanted to declare independence.

The UK government, led by former prime minister Harold Wilson, was more than happy to grant Ian Smith's request, on the condition that majority rule was granted to the Zimbabweans in Southern Rhodesia.

Ian Smith and other Rhodesian leaders found these conditions unacceptable and on November 11^th 1965, declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI).

This resulted in sanctions being placed on the new Rhodesian Republic, by the UK and later the Commonwealth.

Nearly a month later two groups aimed to take down the white minority government: The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) a militant group of communist Zimbabwean revolutionaries led by the infamous Robert Mugabe, and the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) which was a multi-racial political party led by Michael Nkomo.

Despite the sanctions on Rhodesia, many countries were all too happy to help the white minority nation fight the communist guerrillas.

The United States, South Africa, Portugal, and Belgium all supplied various weapons of war and aid to the Rhodesian Army, along with selling oil and goods to and inside the country.

In 1979, Rhodesia became a bi-racial government led by both Ian Smith and Abel Muzorewa though despite this historical act of unity, the ZANU's still waged war.

Between the winter of 1979 and the spring of 1980, Abel Muzorewa, Ian Smith, and Robert Mugabe went to Lancaster House in the UK.

Meeting with then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to sign a peace treaty ending the Rhodesian Bush War.

In the summer of 1980, Rhodesia was dissolved and elections were held and Robert Mugabe became the President of Zimbabwe (Under still contested circumstances) until he was ousted on November 21^st 2017.

After the transfer of power in 1980, many Rhodesians fled to South Africa and the UK.

In 1987 all white political parties were banned, and by 2014 a single Zimbabwe Dollar was worth £0.00209 (Roughly $0.0026319).

Deutchnamibier is German for: German Namibian.

After WW1, the British South African Government put the colonists of former German South West Africa into reservations akin to Native Americans in the United States.

During the 1970s and 1980s the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO) began a revolution in the South West Africa Protectorate to demand Independence from South Africa, during this time Deutchnamibiers took up arms with SWAPO as they too had been oppressed by South Africa.

In 1990, Namibia gained independence from South Africa, but because the Deutchnamibiers helped SWAPO, they were spared relocation to South Africa or West Germany and were treated as heroes.

As a result of the Colonial/Imperialist Era injustices often committed by White Africans, modern society sees them as: “Bigoted racists who tried to maintain the power given to them by their respective European Empires”.

The truth however only reflects this in some quantity, many whites in Sub-Saharan Africa are facing persecution and genocide, simply for being the same ethnicity as P.W. Botha, Sir John Chancellor, or Theodor Gotthilf Leutwein.

In the age of social media denouncing white people for having so called: “Privilege”, the seemingly tolerated persecution and genocide of White Africans proves that it can get much worse, with dire consequences.