Post here historical leaders who were of an ethnic minority (or foreign ethnic group) from the country that they ruled over.
- Thread starter athgtq16129
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If you squint and bend the rules: Hendrik Verwoerd of South Africa
Obviously Apartheid would be the biggest example of such a situation of minority rule. But even among the white ruling class, Verwoerd stood out.
He wasn't born in South Africa. He was born in the Netherlands to Dutch parents. As a toddler, his family moved to South Africa. Despite born to a Dutch family, he was brought up around people who would later become the Afrikaners and fully assimilated to the culture.
This is why I say he counts if you squint, because by the time Hendrik became PM, he considered himself to be an Afrikaner.
Obviously Apartheid would be the biggest example of such a situation of minority rule. But even among the white ruling class, Verwoerd stood out.
He wasn't born in South Africa. He was born in the Netherlands to Dutch parents. As a toddler, his family moved to South Africa. Despite born to a Dutch family, he was brought up around people who would later become the Afrikaners and fully assimilated to the culture.
This is why I say he counts if you squint, because by the time Hendrik became PM, he considered himself to be an Afrikaner.
Jean Ping, a prominent Gabonese politician, who ran for President and was chair of the AU Commission, is half Chinese.
en.wikipedia.org
Jean Ping - Wikipedia
Honestly it's not that out there. Standard Dutch was the official language of the Boer republics for pretty much all of their existence, and Afrikaner pride developed relatively late
Well you can always look at it from the flipside.
The notion of Afrikaner identity was in it's infancy when Verwoerd came to Africa.
And many people at the time, who's descendants would become Afrikaners, identified as Dutch still.
So it can be argued Verwoerd was an Afrikaner. He certainly thought so by the time he became PM.
Not really, Afrikaner identity had been a thing for years by then, first recorded use of someone calling themselves an Afrikaner was in the early 18th century.
And I don't think people considered themselves Dutch, despite speaking Dutch or a proto-Afrikaans as a lingua franca.
And while many Afrikaners had Dutch ancestry, this wasn't the majority ancestry, many Afrikaners were descended from French and German settlers, along with some British and African origins.
And English was the lingua franca of the early American colonies but they didn't consider themselves English.
Crazy Boris
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I wouldn’t count him, personally. Keep in mind the word Afrikaner literally means African, and Afrikaners have deep roots in Southern Africa, they’re not recent immigrants anymore, and certainly weren’t by Verwoerd’s time. There’s something to be argued about when exactly the Cape Dutch became not-Dutch, the first instance of someone calling themselves Afrikaner goes back to the 1780s or something, I think that by the time of the Boer Republics there was a semblance of a separateness from being Dutch among the Afrikaners, maybe closer to how the Québécois distinguish themselves from the French of the Metropole than a fully distinct identity just yet, but I think it’s safe to speak of the Afrikaners as a distinct nation by then.
Some interesting guys to talk about in postcolonial Africa. The half-German Nicholas Grunitzky of Togo was also a minority on his mother's side as she was of Yoruba parentage and that ethnicity is much more prevalent in countries east of there. Zaire under Mobutu had a figure who was functionally the prime minister born Leon Lubicz whose father was of Polish/Jewish extraction and whose mother was a Tutsi from Rwanda.