AH Challenge White State in Africa

The challenge is to form a white nation in (southern) Africa which is: A) at least 75% white, and B) speaks a Germanic language (i.e. English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, etc.).

Can be based on an OTL nation or completely of its own creation. The larger the better. Double points if it has a modernized black state as a perpetual opponent.
 

Grey Wolf

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Walter_Kaufmann said:
The challenge is to form a white nation in (southern) Africa which is: A) at least 75% white, and B) speaks a Germanic language (i.e. English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, etc.).

Can be based on an OTL nation or completely of its own creation. The larger the better. Double points if it has a modernized black state as a perpetual opponent.

Actually this may not be too hard. OTL the Boers from Transvaal and the Orange Free State formed at least one other Boer state, I've forgotten its name but it was pretty small and turned out not to be economically viable so ended up being absorbed. I have no idea of the racial make-up, admittedly, but it could well have had less % of blacks than the larger states because it was smaller and more compact

Grey Wolf
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Jewish Uganda

There is, believe it or not, an indigenous Jewish community in Uganda. They are called the Abuyudaya. They originated when one of the local warlords, who had some quibble with the Brits, converted to Judaism to spite them. There were once several thousand but the number subsequently dropped to a couple hundred.

Interestingly, he converted in 1919, by which point the Jewish Uganda idea had been discarded by both the Jews and the Brits as impractical. It is safe to say, though, that there might have been some local sympathy for the Jews, if they were to settle there. The Falasha from Ethiopia and the Lemba from Zimbabwe (both Subsaharan African Jewish groups) might also congregate there.

Herzl himself proposed Uganda as a temporary alternative to Palestine, in 1903. Israel Zangwill and Nahum Syrkin threw their weight behind it as well, and continued to support it even after the 7th International Zionist Congress put the kybosh on the idea, in 1905. Support grew for the idea in the following years, due to the pogroms, but the Balfour Declaration put the last nail in the coffin of Jewish Uganda.

Let us assume that the Balfour Declaration never occurred, or that the 7th Zionist Congress accepted Herzl's idea (unlike, I know, but this is a conterfactual history...). Zangwill had the support of Jacob Schiff, a Jewish American banker who, among other things, established the museum that currently puts food on my table. In OTL, Schiff had generously supported Zangwill's other schemes, and I suspect that he would provide the finances for the Uganda Proposal.

The earliest date for which we have census data for Uganda is 1903, coincidentally the year of the Jewish Uganda proposal, so we can say that the black population started out at 1,649,900.

Naturally, the Eastern European Jews who settled in Uganda would speak Yiddish, fulfilling your requirement that the white settlers speak a Germanic language. To survive in such an alien environment, they would need local allies - such as the Abuyahuda, the Falashas, and the Lemba - but would soon overtake them in population (in OTL, Schiff's enterprises brought 10,000 Jews to Galveston. Let's assume that he settled them in Uganda instead).

Between 1882 and 1914, over 75,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine, fleeing persecution in their homelands, but half of them left, finding Palestine no more hospitable. If these dissillusioned Jews went to Uganda, then we would have perhaps 32,500.

So, we start with 42,500 Jews. Not much by any standards, but a start. This population will probably double by 1937, at a healthy growth rate. This is, interestingly enough, roughly the number of Jews who were in Palestine at the time.
 
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Straha

Banned
Walter_Kaufmann said:
The challenge is to form a white nation in (southern) Africa which is: A) at least 75% white, and B) speaks a Germanic language (i.e. English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, etc.).

Can be based on an OTL nation or completely of its own creation. The larger the better. Double points if it has a modernized black state as a perpetual opponent.
...How about the domination of dra-*gets shot by a sniper*
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Jewish Uganda Part II

I'll spare you the number crunching from now on. Assume that, in a world without a Balfour Declaration, and all other things being equal, half the Jews end up in Palestine, and half elsewhere (perpetuating the ratio that existed before Balfour).

Hmm... I've come up against a brick wall. World Jewish population today is only about 17,567,600 million, with 37% of that residing in Israel. So, even if 100% of them were to settle in Jewish Uganda, they would still be outnumbered by the local population by nearly 6.5 million people (coincidentally the population of Israel today). Only about 42% of the population could potentially be Jewish, assuming that there isn't some sort of massacre that decimates the local population (something I'd rather not assume). Logically, the actual total would be much less than 42%. Argh.

So, this is unfeasable, barring the survival of the 6 million who were killed in the holocaust, or an African holocaust which would decimate Uganda.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
East Prussians and Volga Germans Moved

The Soviets dispersed ten million Germans from Eastern Europe (others remained; during the 90s, Ceacescu joked that Germans were his country's greatest export). Nearly two million Germans lived in the Soviet Union itself; of these, perhaps half a million were deported to Siberia, and the rest seem to have disappeared.

Perhaps these displaced Germans could have been settled in former German colonies? Namibia (former 'Deutsch Sudwest-Afrika') at that time had less than half a million souls (today perhaps two million), and Tanzania (former Deutsch Ostafrika/Tanganyika) had 5,790,000. If the German DPs were settled in either of these two areas, they would outnumber the native population - 75% in Tanzania, and 96% in Namibia.
 
Combine an early settlement of Jewish majority colony 'new zion' in africa (say around 1820), with the enforced emmigration of jews during wwii. Locate it near South Africa.

Yiddish would be the language, but it is considered a German language.
 
Leo Caesius said:
ISo, this is unfeasable, barring the survival of the 6 million who were killed in the holocaust, or an African holocaust which would decimate Uganda.
So, we just butterfly away the holocaust.
 
What about with Namibia during the early 20th C, if the Germans embarked on a definite systematic 'ethnic cleansing' of all black ppl in the country, and implemented a largescale influx of settlers from Germany and ppl from impoverished European countries such as parts of Italy and the A-H Empire who volunteered to settle in Africa and get absorbed into the German-speaking pop ? Or possibly same pattern in Tanganyika ?
 
Germans would never do that. Despite a lot of bad press they got, they were actually some of the more fair-handed colonial rulers in africa.
 

Susano

Banned
Well, a starting point could be our favourite (wella t leats mine :D ) african general, Lettow-Vorbeck. Suppose he doesnt surrender as ordered by Berlin, and resumes the fight. Lets also suppose he wins, and East Africa gets independant one war or another.

WW2 still comes, but due to some weird second PoD, the sovjets fare better, and actually get most of Germany. Also they are even more bloody and genocidal in the german settled lands. Finally, the western allies convince Stalin that genocide is not a good idea, but insetad shipping the Germans to East Africa.
Hm lets see. That would be arround 20m Germans in ca 1945. In 1918, East Africa had 7.7m inhabitants...sinceI guess the population has grown between 1918 and 1945, this would miss the 75% mark, but not by much...
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
DominusNovus said:
So, we just butterfly away the holocaust.

Actually, now that I have thought about this, it's not so unfeasible.

I seem to remember that that the Nazis briefly considered resettling the Jews in the eastern occupied territories (such as the Ukraine, where 15,000 Jews had been resettled in 1924 with the help of Jacob Schiff's American Joint Distribution Committee). The difficulty lies in whether to take the Nazis' statements at face value (never a very good idea) or recognize that "deportation" and "resettlement" were almost always euphemisms for extermination.

If there was an established Jewish state in Uganda, perhaps the Germans would have chosen to expel them from their former homes and resettle them there, perhaps with the help of the Joint. That means 6 million get resettled in Uganda with the 450,000 or so who would have been there already by 1940. At this point, there are 6,450,000 European Jews against 3,785,000 locals. By the end of the war in OTL, there are another 250,000 Jewish DPs - the Sh'erit ha-Pletah - many of whom would probably end up in Uganda, as the British have put a stop to immigration to Palestine. That gives us perhaps 6,700,000 Jews against 3,800,000 locals - about 64/36%.

Assuming that the two groups continue to grow at an equal rate, and immigration to Uganda continues, I see no reason why we would not reach the 75% mark within time, especially if Jewish Uganda has a less tumultous history than Uganda or Israel in OTL. Of course, there would undoubtedly be a large amount of miscegenation - which ultimately soured Herzl and the 7th Zionist Congress against the idea in the first case - so I'm not sure how the numbers would break down. However, the official language of this state would either be Yiddish or German, probably the former.
 
OTL :: A people called the Bantu lived somewhere around Cameroon, far enough north to be outside the tsetse fly area. Then their cattle evolved to resist the nagana pest trypanosome disease which the tsetse fly carries. Then the Bantu spread and spread south.
ATL: Their cattle remain vulnerable to nagana same as horses and camels are. The Bantu stay home. The white explorers and armies find central and south Africa thinly inhabited by hunters. Soon aouthern Africa is mostly white inhabited up to the south limit of the tsetse fly.
 
hmm... what if the S. African colony never expanded to include so many of the black homelands that it did in OTL? The original colony around the cape was set on lands originally inhabited by the San, not negroes. Most of the San people were driven to extinction. If SA never expanded into Zulu and other such lands, it'd be mostly white and Boer/English speaking...
 
I know it's no what you had in mind, but WI South Africa carried the polic of Apartheid further, shunting all its black population into nominally independent 'homelands', in effect reservations ion marginal lands? The workers needed in the RSA would be permitted to return on temporary visa, of course, but they'd better behave or they'll be liable to deportation (naturally). Very highly favored blacks would be permitted citizenship, which offers yopu yet another mjeans of splitting the opposition (they stand to lose heavily from desegregation/reunification). The Indians lose citizenship, are allowed to stay, but made uncomfortable.

I could see this - not likely (it'd stick ion the craw of the Ebnglishg-speaking South Africans, most likely), but possible. It takes away the problem of having to justify why the equal bit in 'separate but equal' doesn't materialise, and RSA could even claim to be generously allowing economic migrants from 'underdeveloped kaffir states' to make a living and send back much-needed hard rands to their families. And it would - technically - be a 75% (or more) white, English/Afrikaans-speaking nation. Although the UN may have something to say about that 'nation' bit.
 
What if the following happened?

1) Some whites immigrated to Dutch South Africa, possibly under a Dutch plan to strengthen the colony vis a vis the Brits.

We could boost the population by about 50K from the American Revolution and French Revolution.

2) More flee from Holland itself when invaded by Revolutionary France.

3) The loss of the Loyalists costs Canada dearly, more people must move and now it is London trying to hold on there.

4) By 1850 the white population is already well over a million and South Africa is much more popular for immigrants than in OTL. More importantly is that the British treat it more respectfully while a moderate majority is able to keep the Boers calmer(and perhaps better treated).

5) South Africa is formed out of nothing more than the Cape Colony, with small settler populations in Transvaal and Orange Free State as in Zimbabwe.

POOF!!! White majority.
 
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