No 'Mandela Miracle' for the Afrikaners
IT WAS the rural Afrikaners who carved South Africa out of the bush and cultivated the land to make the country the envy of the continent for almost 100 years. They reaped the just rewards of their labours under the apartheid government but now, since black majority rule, they have been frozen out of mainstream society and now are very much at the bottom of the social pile.
Nothing epitomises the decline of the Afrikaner in South Africa more than the Florida Lake Caravan Park in Johannesburg. In its heyday in the fifties and sixties it was a favoured stopover spot for rural Afrikaners as they made their summer migration from the field to the coast. The park, which doubled as a bird sanctuary, provided the travellers with every comfort they could want during their stay. The immaculate lawns, the well kept hedges and white picket fences and the crystal clear waters of the lake were something that typified South Africa at the time.
Florida Lake Caravan Park is now an Afrikaner refugee camp, crowded to overflowing with out of work and poverty-stricken Afrikaners living in anything from caravans to tents, to cars and cardboard boxes. One resident is 60 year old Paul van der Hague, a former farmer but now living on a tiny pension. Last month he was mugged as he collected his pension and now he has to survive for the next tour weeks on the generosity of this fellow squatters at Florida Lake or by begging at the traffic lights by the entrance to the park.
Paul's wife died in 1993 and his son left South Africa soon after to start a new life in Holland.
"I'm so glad my wife is not alive to see what I have become. We enjoyed a golden age in South Africa when my grandparents came out here during the time of the Boer War. We had a homestead and appreciated a quality of life that satisfied all our aspirations. We were forced to sell up and move to the city because of the unrest of the 1980's but I would have been better off staying and toughing it out. Now I have no chance of work to supplement my income and I cannot afford the rent required to stay in my flat and that is why I'm living in a caravan in Florida Park"
Government officials just shrug their shoulders when quizzed about the plight of South Africa's poor whites. They point out that ifs just the way of things in a country where unemployment is over 40%.
In fact, life for the Afrikaner in South Africa is about to get much worse with the A.N.C. Government pledged to bringing in positive discrimination in jobs, housing and welfare in favour of blacks after next year's election.
Webmasters Note : Although this article is concerned about the
Afrikaner's plight, it can also applied to all Whites in the Southern Africa.
This article first appeared in the now defunct 'vanguard', issue 52
