Desmond Tutu, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, has died aged 90.  A Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1984, never an ANC member and in later years not even an ANC voter, he was much despaired by post-Apartheid South Africa’s violence and political corruption.  But he was an idealist, not a realist.  The term “rainbow nation” was his invention.  He evidently expected his country to develop into some world-exemplar of Christian tolerance and racial justice.

So here is the question which Desmond Tutu could not confront.  One might call it the African Question. It’s a bit long!

As enslaving another people ... any people ... is manifestly wrong, and segregation by law is not tolerated by liberals because its practise inevitably leaves the Africans holding the shitty and humiliating end of the socio-economic stick (and by Jews because it doesn’t produce the deracinated, amorphous gentile of the End Time), and if the only permitted basis on which society may be constructed is panmixia and equality in all things while, at the same time, living with the African sociobiology is simply not tolerable for other races, including Europeans, then how but by complete separation is any people to live a fitting and properly satisfying life?

Unfortunately, Europeans in southern Africa (and in America too) wanted the whole land. The Dutch-Flemish wanted to settle the land while the British wanted control of its economic resources - to which end the Raj model couldn’t be made to work owing to the nature of African tribal life.  The military incapacity of Africans likewise invited a full colonisation approach, and the forcing of them into an effective slave-labour status.  It is easy say with hindsight that this was a short-sighted policy led by ambition and greed, which were just the standards of the time.  But such it was and, inevitably, that required the adoption of sub-optimal control measures which, much later, could not indefinitely withstand the pressure from reformists within and grandstanding political elites without. 

Still, it was never a European land.  Africa is not a European continent.  Today, we hold this to be true of our continent, which is for us natives and our children alone, so we must be consistent and say the same of every other native people.  Only total separation on the land can deliver a sustaining settlement.

As for Bishop Desmond, he did right by his people, which we, as nationalists, cannot criticise.