The Footprint of Mussolini - TL

Hmm, what joke fodder would Mel Brooks have besides Nazis and Jewish humour in this timeline for his films ? I can picture the Soviet Union, Wallace and Communists in general being added into jokes in his films besides the Nazis. And yes, that means that Blazing Saddles would have Soviet soldiers added into that pledge to Hedley Lamarr scene besides the Nazis.
 
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I also have some news to announce: For Christmas, I've decided to make one additional update for the story, focussed on an area I've been able to string together a few ideas for and thought I'd breathe into a warped, dystopic life: South Africa and the successor Bantustans and the strangest incidents that have occured since the end of the Homeland War in that cursed neck of the world.
As South Africa is TTL's DPRK equivalent (in terms of reputation abroad, this will be interesting).
 
Never sank due to butterflies, although random disasters like mudslides and sinkings would have taken other lives instead.

Balbo posed with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck on either side, rode some of the gentlest more photograph-friendly rides with Walt Disney and Disney made some extremely cringey (in retrospect) comments where he praised Balbo's role in WW2 and saving the Jews of Trieste, Italy's commitment against Communism and how he hoped for an end to the Cool War as a result.

I also have some news to announce: For Christmas, I've decided to make one additional update for the story, focussed on an area I've been able to string together a few ideas for and thought I'd breathe into a warped, dystopic life: South Africa and the successor Bantustans and the strangest incidents that have occured since the end of the Homeland War in that cursed neck of the world.
Nice!!!
 
Epilogue: "Hate us and See if we Care"
Hello all, I finished the extract and realisd that I would probably go crazy trying not to post it for a while, when I need time to write the new draft of my novel. So without further ado, here is the fate of South Africa and her successor Bantustans in further detail.

I horrified myself more in this update than I did during the Second Arabian War posts. Frankly, it just makes me thank God Mandela existed. So, if you're interested in being traumatised, step right up!


Epilogue: “Hate us and See if we Care”

Extract from ‘Life After The End: South Africa since 1990’ by Walt Steiner

After the expulsion of the Non-White population of South Africa (which became known as the ‘Reshuffle’) and creation of the One Race Country clause of the new constitution, South Africa prepared itself for the inevitable and awful diplomatic and economic reckoning. This was the ‘Special Period’ as Treurnicht declared to the population on December 16th, 1989 (the anniversary of the Battle of Blood River which is seen as the battle which allowed the creation of an Afrikaner state). The Special Period is considered as lasting between 1989 and 1994, the year when the first democratic elections since the 1960s happened in South Africa. While it had slowly been the victim of boycotts and disinvestment, South Africa had always been kept afloat in the Roman Alliance and subsequent CIS. Once it was expelled, even losing diplomatic recognition from almost the entire world, the sudden contraction of living standards was unprecedented. South Africa in the 1980s (for the White population) had a higher living standard than Australia or New Zealand, the Rand was stronger than the dollar and one was free to travel to most of the world as they pleased. Suddenly, there was rationing, breadlines and indeed in the rural regions there were cases of starvation. Many had been traumatised in the war, and much of the East of the country lay in ruins with no money to rebuild.

Pretoria especially had been devastated owing to its proximity to the older borders of Bophuthatswana, whose battle was fought with a level of visceral hatred, evil and sheer desire to inflict suffering on human beings of all ages (all ages) with a lighter or darker skin on both sides unmatched in any capacity perhaps since time began. It was so horrifying that Western television stations refused in some cases to show any footage of the Battle of Pretoria for fear of inciting racial division at home. Large parts of Pretoria even today remain in ruins, though mostly to strike terror into schoolchildren on field trips to warn them of what would happen again if South Africa removed the One Race Country clause from its constitution. These trips typically end with a group prayer at the Voortrekker Memorial (damaged by mortar fire during the War) where the children recite prayers ascribing the victory of the Apartheid government in the Bantustan War to God and thanking him for it. For groups from more Conservative areas of South Africa, addendum prayers are added where the children are indoctrinated to say, “Thank you God, for sending Andries Treurnicht to save us.” It is that intense, literally religious sensation that was able to make the South Africans – Afrikaners especially – endure through perhaps the most sudden and total national collapse in living standards in modern history.

Despite abysmal economic conditions, in the early days there was a sense of community due to the collective desire for survival in the face of the MK given that the group had openly expressed its desire to expel the entire White population (at least officially, given their rallies usually involved invoking ‘killing’ instead) and at best ‘cull’ the Coloured population’s ‘influence’ (which also likewise manifested itself in rallies as simply wanting to kill Coloureds). That said the MK was always doomed to fail in the Bantustan War and mainly fought simply because events swept the movement along with it – such is the consensus of historians. Once the MK inevitably lost in the absence of airpower and roughly equal numbers of Blacks and Whites in South Africa following decades of the Salisbury plan’s immigration policy (a task made doubly impossible when the Zulus declared peace with the Whites and broke from the Black population as a whole), White South Africans were harshly defiant of Western sanctions. The word on the street was skilfully captured for propaganda purposes by Treurnicht in the same 1989 speech, saying, “They are punishing us for having survived”. Most South Africans were infuriated at the West, who they blamed for the MK uprising and wanting to wipe out their entire society since they knew the MK didn’t threaten them. Ultimately, since the South African government didn’t actually commit an intentional, mass slaughter of its Black population (despite doing pretty much everything else including many things just as bad), South Africans still insist with 100% certainty that the MK was vastly eviler than the Treurnicht government and are as outraged when they are compared as British people would be to hear Churchill compared to Hitler. The South Africans had come out of one of the most horrifying wars in human history as a solid, loyal group.

However, despite the fact that this vastly reduced tension in the country, vastly eased the people’s suffering and vastly lowered crime rates, Treurnicht would infamously decide to trash one of South Africa’s few positives in the Post-Homeland years. He announced the policy of ‘Afrikaner Action’ at the beginning of 1992, a move to shore up the Afrikaner identity of South Africa, which he felt had been diluted by waves of immigration from White in Europe. To that end, Afrikaner became the only official language in the country, with Namibia consequently losing her autonomy and German language rights. The Union Jack was removed from the South African flag, people were pushed to live out in the country and most infamously, no one would be promoted in government or have a top military position unless they were members of the Calvinist Church. These new laws were met with outrage among the Non-Afrikaner population, who made up an outright majority of Whites in the country (though the Afrikaners had always had disproportionate power since the 1961 Referendum). While the Cape British population were outraged, there the SADF were more brutal with dissent and imprisoned many who condemned Treurnicht’s attempt to legitimise only one of the White ethnicities in South Africa. But it was Namibia where some of the most infamous resistance happened. On December 24th 1992 (the anniversary of East Germany voting for unity with the West), 50,000 ethnic-Germans walked down the streets of Windhoek singing ‘Die Gedanken Sind Frei’ in protest of the forbidding of the teaching of German. The protests repeated every few weeks, gradually growing, until finally on February 3rd the SADF began arresting demonstrators (some of whom had actually been arrested by the Stasi in East Germany) killing two and further embittering resentment in the country. In response, ethnic German farmers announced that unless German once again become an official language in Namibia that they would refuse to work the soil that year, which would almost certainly cause a famine. The turmoil gave many hopes that it would lead to intelligent reform in South Africa, and for many, something even better happened.

On April 22nd 1993, Andries Treurnicht died during a heart operation, throwing South Africa into an even greater mess than before. His death was met with global celebrations, but especially in Africa. Including the Bantustan War and subsequent deaths and starvations in the successor states, he has been accused as having led to the deaths of roughly five million people. This is roughly the same as the Holocaust, though trying to come up with a precise number of deaths in the Bantustans was hard work at best given the lack of organised information gathering, difficulty of access and the question of how much of the deaths can be explicitly blamed on Treurnicht. Though he regularly graces the top ten lists of most evil dictators in history alongside Hitler and Himmler, Stalin and Mao, Aflaq and the Mad Mufti, unlike the aforementioned he remains on average relatively popular in South Africa now that Federal Afrikaner Action has been consigned to the dust bin of history. Among those on the Cape, a typical refrain is that they’re alive today because of him so that they have to give him a modicum of respect. In the East of the country among the Afrikaners, he is deified as the man who fulfilled the predictions of the Boer Prophet Siener van Rensburg, who predicted an ‘Uhuru’ or ‘Night of the Long Knives’ where Blacks would rise up in an attempt to kill all Whites before being beaten back due to the faith the Boers would have in almighty God. It is strongly believed in the rural Afrikaner areas of the country that Treurnicht was literally a divine prophet sent to save the Afrikaner people from extermination. It isn’t rare to see his visage in churches as if he were a literal Biblical prophet. These areas are a favourite of documentary filmmakers coming to South Africa (the only excuse to travel to South Africa that will result in you still having friends when you get home) simply due to the surrealism of seeing so internationally reviled a figure treated like a divine saint.

Treurnicht did not have a clear successor beyond various toadies within the National Party, which he had purged once he took power to remove anyone open to peace and negotiations with Black representatives like in Rhodesia. Magnus Malan, who had become a war hero among South Africans (and war criminal among Westerners) for his ruthless bombing campaigns and use of chemical weapons in the Bantustan War had little interest in party politics but could see that the internal situation was deteriorating dangerously. Thus, within hours of Treurnicht’s death, the SADF seized key areas of the country and put the National Party leadership (long since hollowed out into Treurnicht’s sycophants) under house-arrest like the coup against former President Botha, who died in 1988 under mysterious circumstances that many believe indicate Treurnicht murdered him. Malan was one of the few truly popular figures left in South Africa and sought to leverage that in his campaign to restore order the country. Ironically enough, Malan believed that it would be in South Africa’s best interest if it moved away from dictatorship, both in terms of reducing international pressure and having a government that was more stress-tested against popular uprising. To those ends, Malan and others began formulating a new constitution in 1993 and finished in 1994, though carrying over the racial policies of the 1989 Constitution. This would make South Africa a country with a strong presidency and a strong parliament with Prime Minister in tow. It would also enshrine regionalism as a guiding principle of the new South Africa, with Namibia being granted all its old privileges of German identity. Afrikanisation policy continued full steam in the Orange Free State and Transvaal regions (down to only Calvinists being given any government jobs) while the Cape region was granted full reprieve, turning Cape Town into the most multicultural location in all of South Africa. The Old Union Jack was likewise restored to the South African flag and Afrikaner Action was explicitly forbidden at the federal level. In government, the two main parties were the National Party, who primarily represent the Afrikaners and more conservative elements of the other ethnic groups, and the United Party, primarily based on those of the immigrants who came in the latter half of the 20th Century to South-Africa who had a more nuanced view of South Africa’s place in the world. The National Party was more agrarian and working class, indifferent to South Africa’s image to the rest of the world and supporters of autarky and state involvement in the economy along Fascist lines, while the United Party was the party of the former Middle Classes (considering almost everyone had been impoverished due to the war and sanctions) who favoured a more free market approach to lifting South Africa which would be leveraged by trying to play nice with the rest of the world within reason. Some Afrikaners have floated the idea of another partition of South Africa, perhaps with a German Namibia, multi-ethnic (all-White) Cape Republic and Afrikaner state in the remainder. One of the big reasons this arrangement has never been seriously pushed in government is due to significant fears of how the nukes would be divided, since everyone knows this is the one thing keeping South Africa as it presently stands from being invaded.

Malan, perhaps taking inspiration from Hindenburg, feared that South Africa could not stand without strong leadership for the short-term and ran for President in 1994, winning 80% of the vote against a handful of straw-candidates as no one in the United or National Party wanted to oppose him. Notably, the United Party were back in power for the first time in more than thirty years after having been banned since the 1960s following the new elections. The new Prime Minister was Alwyn Schlebusch, who had been purged (not Soviet style, fortunately) from the National Party due to his dislike of Treurnicht and suspicion over his German surname, who subsequently became the face of the re-established United Party. But any hopes for a mass diplomatic reappraisal were quickly shot down when Schlebusch affirmed the One Race Country policy (with only a handful of dissenters on the party fringe), given that the policy remained extremely popular in the embittered, shaky country – with Malan telling him that any attempt at removing the policy would lead to his dismissal. Though there were diplomatic successes among some of the Middle Eastern autocracies, these were only just enough to keep the show on the road, not to recreate the economic bonanza that South Africa was in the 70s and 80s. Malan would continue as President until 2009 when he finally stepped down and died two years later. Many believe a second Homeland War would have occurred, if not for him, in both the Afrikaners and the remaining White population, making him a more revered figure in most of South Africa than Treurnicht himself.


Extract from ‘The Warrior Race: The History of the Zulus’ by Peter Skowland

Across the remains of the conflict, Zululand remained the only fully South African Bantustan to have had a relatively prosperous existence compared to the nightmare that had befallen its neighbours, managing to snag the vast majority of the Natal region save a handful of White cities like Durban, which now resemble military ports far more than civilian centres. Infamously, the Zulus participated in the rounding up and expulsion of ethnic Xhosa in the Natal/Zululand region to create a pure Zulu state (save for marriages) during the Bantustan War. South Africa did little to trip up or harm Zululand and the Zulus are the only Bantustan to have still had peaceful transitions and continuance of government since Zululand was founded in 1988. They were and are still run by President Buthelezi, over 90 years old - the oldest President in the world - in a constitutional monarchy with the Zulu King Goodwill acting as head of state. Buthelezi attended every anniversary for the Battle at Blood River, constantly preaching the need to reconcile the nations of Africa as separate but still friendly. His campaign has meant that South Africans typically have a stronger opinion of Buthelezi than their own Prime Ministers. Due to their strong, independent identity, international brand as legendary warriors and a stable, homogenous society, they have been able to set up a functioning society that cooperates with the West on relatively friendly levels. Though full recognition is denied by almost every country on Earth, trade still occurs with the rest of the world on a regular basis, certainly much more than South Africa. However, to announce oneself as Zulu in a café in Nairobi would lead to you being kicked to death on the floor, such is the African animosity towards the Zulus both for their historical campaign of conquest in the 1800s against African tribes and their current status as traitors. That status was eternally cemented during the early years of the 1990s, and all for a war they didn’t even start.

The seeds of the Zulu-Xhosa War of 1992-1994 were naturally sown long ago due to the longstanding hatred between the two ethnicities, but internal realities in the Bantustans forced quick decisions. Chief Kaiser Daliwonga Matanzima, the long-time leader of Transkei, was overwhelmed by the sudden arrival of almost a million people from Ciskei, not to mention wayward Xhosa from elsewhere. Even though they were all Xhosa, the Transkei locals were desperate for all the resources they could get and saw the arriving Ciskei as too many mouths to feed, given that the aid wasn’t enough for them as it was. From 1990-1991, some of the most horrendous xenophobic violence occurred in Transkei, with some reports saying as many as 10,000 died in the fighting. In order to try and create unity, Matanzima came up with the idea of invading Zululand, since attacking South Africa itself would lead, so the South African ambassador said, ‘To a nuclear strike over Umtata’. However, South Africa had no pledges to protect the Bantustans – though the Bantustans were pledged to protect South Africa if it had been hit. Many believe the Zulu-Xhosa War was deliberately engineered by Treurnicht and others using this one-way clause to further divide and weaken the Bantustans. If that was the intention, it was masterful. On July 17th 1992, Xhosa forces invaded Zululand, much to the shock and anger of Buthelezi and the Zulu people. The two largest Bantustans were now at war, and perhaps the two with the most historical bad blood between each other.

While the Zulus had been somewhat uneasy with their neutrality during the Bantustan War, this was the event that solidified their drift away from the other Bantustans in South Africa. The Xhosa received large amounts of covert aid from the EAF and Ethiopia, but they remained outnumbered and outgunned by the Zulus. Buthelezi was given only moral support from South Africa for propaganda purposes both at home and abroad, but what the Zulus had was enough. Though all Bantustans were forbidden from having an air force, navy or WMDs, the Zulus had a moderately sized and decently equipped army that was likely the finest among the Bantustans simply owing to the superior quality of life in the region. Thus, the initial thrusts into Zululand were quickly isolated and picked off, with the Zulu army now revving up for its first major armed campaign as an independent nation in over a century. The occasion excited the Zulus and brought a unique sense of nationalism that the Zulus were the strongest native African race. One Zulu politician would infamously say during the conflict, who has since been quoted by disgusted Afro-Nationalists ever since, “It is a lie that Whites and Blacks are equal. Whites and Zulus are equal. We are above the common tribes of Africa like a king is above paupers.” Inspired by the legends of Shaka, Zulu forces adorned their gear with symbols of the old Kingdom as they began to move into Umtata. Guns were blessed by witchdoctors, hallucinogenics were given out to troops before battle and guerrillas were killed by spears as opposed to bullets once captured – that is to say, impaled and left to die from their infections over the course of several days. As Treurnicht commented to his cabinet, “It appears the conflict has reawakened the long-dormant fury of that great warrior race: thank goodness for the Atomic Bomb.”

The Zulus pillaged their way across Transkei like the days of yore, burning down and obliterating city after city with ferocity akin to savagery. Killing was common, rape even more so with the subsequent surge in HIV and AIDS thereafter. Eventually anti-rape measures were better enforced because the Zulus were worried that their soldiers would return and import an epidemic with them, rather than any humanitarian concerns for the women and children who were the victims in the onslaught. The Battle of Umtata began in September 1992 and lasted until the next February. By the time the battle was done, the whole city had been reduced to ruins for a second time after the SADF had pulverised it from the air in 1988. The conquering Zulus treated the Xhosa with equal detestation as the South Africans did, making sure to raze what little remained, leading to yet another famine that year. Chief Kaiser Daliwonga Matanzima was killed fleeing between cities on February 9th by common bandits, who robbed the car for its fuel, rubber and the dead men’s pockets without realising who he was. This led to eight days of no one knowing where the Chief was that ultimately culminated in his being found by famished peasants looking for food, deciding to feast on the bloated corpse they found in the car before recognising who it was and turning the corpse over to the Zulus in return for guaranteed food for the year. Once this was discovered, the Zulus contacted the three most prolific Xhosa generals and asked them if they would consequently surrender. All three quickly agreed, again in return for guaranteed food for themselves and their families. The Xhosa surrender was met with thunderous chest-pounding in Zulu media, who proclaimed that the results had made them rediscover their heritage and reassert their supremacy over the tribes of Africa. What little food the Xhosa had was handed over to the Zulu, leading to the single worst famine in the region’s history, with nearly 800,000 people perishing due to famine on top of the 75,000 who directly perished in the war. The former ANC leader, Nelson Mandela, successfully escaped the country during the bedlam and made his way to the West for asylum - nearly perishing on multiple occasions. Though the UN did their best, the subsequent total breakdown of order in the Transkei made any attempt to govern, improve people’s conditions or help practically anyone was almost impossible. This remains the last major war fought between the Bantustans (though Venda and Ngwaneland have had numerous low-key conflicts complicated by neither side being strong enough to invade the other).

President Malan sent Buthelezi a letter after news of Xhosa surrender was announced:

“Mr. President, the people of South Africa would like to extend their congratulations, from one warrior race to another.”


Extract from ‘Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth: The Fate of the Bantustans’ by Lin Choi

It wasn’t only Transkei who suffered grievously during the same time period. For example, the Ndebeleland Bantustan was estimated to have lost 22% of its entire population due to disease and starvation during the Special Period. Many scholars believe this to be an act of outright genocide owing to the level of restrictions South Africa gave to the UN to allow them to give aid to the Bantustans, especially states entirely surrounded by South Africa. Treurnicht is rumoured to have told one army official that the deaths in Ndebeleland were an ‘Excellent opportunity to deal with the overcrowding situation’. In contrast to Zululand’s order, Gazankulu has the record for most violent upheavals, with 13 coups in the space of a single year in 1994 – including three in a single week. Lebowa was in a state of Civil War essentially since its founding but the SADF did not intervene to favour a side until a year in when local government official complained that farmers near the border could hear gunshots on the other side of the border which was interrupting their sleep patterns and wanted it stopped.

Since the 2001 intervention from the SADF in Transkei to deal with yet another MK revivalist group – typically religious mystics promising to lead Blacks to victory over the SADF – the South African playbook for the Bantustans is typically to simply give diamonds, money and advanced weapons to crime leaders in the Bantustans to let them take over the country. The crime leaders are surprisingly effective (from South Africa’s point of view) since they have no interest in doing anything to offend their patrons and simply enact their psychopathic wants on the public at large. These have included one temporary leader of the Transkei literally ordering his guards to abduct any person off the street to see him get eaten by a lion since he had ‘never seen a man get killed by a lion before’. Another in Venda made Prima Noctus the official law of the country after he had seen it in a movie from the main villain and thought it was a brilliant idea. Not only did he legalise it, he mandated it – saying men could not have sex with their wives until they had been raped by him first – for the entire country. He was killed on the seventh woman, who held poison in her mouth and kissed him, breathing it down his throat and killing both of them. The dictator’s entourage quietly dropped the policy. Politics and violent crime in the Bantustans are inseparable, with the Bantustan governments being run more in line with gangs in urban turf wars than national governments. Some have literally become leaders by shooting their predecessors in broad daylight in the throne room if the President/King/Emperor/Prophet/Führer (yes all of these names have been used by at least one Bantustan leader since 1989) was sufficiently unpopular. From 2008-2018, not counting Rehoboth, Nambaland and Zululand, the average length of time a government lasted in a Bantustan was two years before some kind of violent upheaval. This may sound horrifying, until you realise the average was under one year in the 90s. The crime leaders are brilliant at keeping things relatively quiet while also ensuring the Bantustan is worse off than when they began, and are thus South Africa’s favourite people to do business with, especially since they are so astonishingly corrupt that they would often sell off UN aid for more diamond money from South Africa.

Then comes the AIDS statistics, which are more horrifying than almost any other. In Venda for 2018, it was estimated that 40% of the population had HIV. Whistle-blowers in South Africa allege that the South Africans deliberately tainted water supplies and sent poisoned equipment to the Bantustans to produce these kinds of results, which in many cases has simply led to the near total breakdown of society. Despite Katangan scientists having discovered the cure for AIDS in 2018, South Africa continues to deliberately hold back treatment in its internal Bantustans, while seafaring Bantustans like Zululand are better able to work their way around any issue. On general environmental issues, the trees have all been cut down, native wildlife has nearly perished and the rivers are poisoned. It is normal to see children smoking, eating garbage or even eating human flesh simply to survive. Conditions are going, in other words, exactly as planned.

When the Bantustans were made, they were typically surrounded on all sides with barbed wire and fences, with border-guards who were in no mood to let a soul outside of the living hells that had been created by Treurnicht. Millions of people were dumped completely clueless in land they did not recognise and had nowhere to stay in, and on top of that, they would be packed like sardines into these miserable failed states, all the while mocked by the yawning acres of one of the least densely populated countries in the world in South Africa. Further grief awaited UN aid workers as any and all White aid workers were simply attacked on arrival in many of the non-Zululand Bantustans, no matter how many times they were informed that they were not like the Treurnicht Government, they would not listen. After a Japanese aid-worker was killed in 1990 in Transkei because he ‘looked White’ – the UN made the decision that only Blacks could deliver UN aid to the affected regions. The EAF took the lead in this and have become the unofficial moral leaders of Africa as a result. In most of the Bantustans, there is nothing that one could consider an ordinary life, with most of the population lives in day and night fear of crime, public services are essentially non-existent and starvation and disease are everywhere. Suicide and depression rates are among the highest in the world given that the population is acutely aware of how they are stuck in so small and crowded an area without any hope of overcoming the nuclear giant that has trapped them in their miserable open-air prisons. This has led to the horrifying invention of the term ‘grabbing/grab the wire’. It is a term that figuratively means ‘giving up’ and is based on how many in the Bantustans, so wracked with misery at how awful life is where they live, with no hope for improvement, that they simply walk up to a border fence and simply grab some of the mesh, waiting for a guard to arrive while standing perfectly still in hopes of a quick death. Border guards are so used to this that they wordlessly understand what they are asking for and just shoot straight through the head for a quick kill after taking their time to aim. There have been many cases where whole families have done the process, sometimes all together, some one after another. As one border guard told the New York Times in 2012: “I saw my friends die in front of me in the Bantustan War – but doing this every day has haunted my soul more than all the things I saw in that war put together. They tell us we’re doing them a favour by putting them out of their misery … one day I might ask to join them.” Only Venda has significant cross-country illegal immigration (that is, across South Africa and not just moving to another Black majority state), with thousands attempting to flee to Rhobabwe and the Lusitanian Kingdom. With almost 10,000 people trying to illegally cross the border every year, 90% are shot and killed in the attempt.

But even with the successful escapees, there is little hope for a successful future. Most are interned in camps in Rhobabwe on arrival (with the full approval of the Black portion of the government despite their public condemnations of the Rhodesian Front for loudly being against it). The only hope that the arrivals get is that Mozambique will ask them to become Catholics, accept Communion and enter into Church service. Though this involves renouncing ones ties to their home culture, most Vendans leap at the offer. Ironically, the South Africans have inadvertently harmed one of their long-term goals. One of South Africa’s agendas, according to whistle-blowers, is to make life for the Bantustan residents so unbearable that it will sufficiently horrify the remainder of Africa into offering them asylum, the residents will beg to leave, immigrate elsewhere thus further reduce any chance of the Bantustans and South Africa being united. The problem is that the Bantustan residents in some cases have been so thoroughly dehumanised that no country would conceivably want to take them in. Charity for Non-White South Africans was already exhausted when the Coloured expulsion happened and there is little demand for an even more war-torn and desperate population. Even the EAF passed on laxer refugee rules for the Bantustans, since the population had for so long been denied education, basic human dignities and basic human necessities that they were considered unable to be integrated into normal life again. As one EAF politician explained, “Take an innocent man, throw him in jail for thirty years, have him forced to steal and kill to survive, starve him, beat him, humiliate him, take everything away from him, and then take that man and push him into the streets of a country he has never known, with technology he never could have believed, and ask yourself: ‘Will that man contribute to society or degrade it? We cannot help them now – we can only avenge them.”


Extract from ‘Treurnicht’s Legacy: Finding Faces in the Land of Monsters’ by Paul Stone

During the Special Period, especially after Afrikaner Action became national policy, immigration into South Africa was highly restricted to essentially only Northern Europeans, on top of naturally being less desirable to move to. Of the major pure immigrant groups today, it mainly consists of Dutchmen and Rhodesians who believe the country’s self-segregation (not dissimilar to a Californian prison) isn’t enough for them. The only people who move to South Africa in noticeable quantities today are Far Right activists who travel there under South Africa’s White Refugee clause, which was enshrined in law in 1996, giving the ‘unassailable right of members of the White race persecuted in defence of their racial identity to find safe haven in South Africa’. The refugees (overwhelmingly males) have become a notorious source of tension, similar to KKK supporters who immigrated to Rhodesia, due to their low skills and education and sense from the locals that the newcomers were entitled and didn’t want to fit in with the local culture. The law was altered in 1999 to specify that only ‘prisoners of conscience’ could apply, when actual criminals started coming into South Africa and committing heinous crimes against the locals. Yet even here, images of truth-speakers escaping imprisonment for saying Whites did not deserve to be treated as second-class citizens was met with the far more mundane reality that these ‘prisoners of conscience’ were mainly idiots who started screaming racial slurs in public. In terms of immigrants, roughly 10,000 people still trickle into South Africa every year. Emigration was primarily held back, however, due to outrage over the funding of the MK by the West and the knowledge that South Africans were so hated abroad that it would lead to significant problems seeping in. This consequently scared many South Africans into staying in their own country. Indeed one source of hope to outsiders, that the growth of the internet in South Africa would help them wake up to the horrors of what was happening in the Bantustans, was cruelly dashed when studies revealed the knowledge of being so viscerally detested by so much of the world simply made South Africans defensive.

Of all the immigrant groups have made the biggest splash in South Africa since their opening to mass White migration in the latter half of the twentieth century it is the German-speakers who would be the top of any list. While the Afrikaners attempted to solidify their grip across an entire country, ironically recreating the mistake of Apartheid to begin with, the Germans consolidated their location into what was the land their ancestors had once conquered – Namibia. Namibia was sparsely populated in 1989, even by South Africa’s positively Mongolian standards. Almost all Blacks had been expelled to external countries, leaving only two Bantustans with one being Coloured, who were lucky enough to escape the expulsion of Coloureds that occurred in South Africa proper due to having their own clearly defined Bantustans and general exhaustion after the war and integration of Namibia. This left an area of South Africa (as that was what Namibia now was, an annexed region with Windhoek as South African as Pretoria) that was soon doubly lucky as the regional security would be entrusted to the ethnic Germans authorities.

While Namibia had always been a popular destination for German speakers, Treurnicht’s deeply unpopular Afrikaner Action program highly encouraged German speakers to travel to areas where their culture and language could be practiced without significant pushback. With Namibia being so empty, creating parallel German speaking societies was quite easy. As of 2020, 80% of Namibia is of ethnically German ancestry, including Austrians and Swiss. German and Afrikaner are taught together in school, with English very much the third-place language. This marks the only major region outside Europe where German is an official language. They quickly made their mark on the local culture, giving Windhoek an annual march on V.E commemorating the Free German Army by veterans and their descendants – no German official has ever attended the event and came back with a job. Kaiser Wilhelm Street remains the main roadway and the place does its best to evoke an explicitly Germanic feel. A small but persistent independence movement exists that wants to create an independent, Germanic Namibia. But perhaps the best evidence for differences between the Germans and their Afrikaner countrymen can be found in their treatment of the Baster people.

Like the other Non-Afrikaner ethnic groups, the Germans were primarily on the Western coast of South Africa when the Bantustan War began. The White ethnic group that by far bore the brunt of the civilian atrocities in the conflict were the Afrikaners, particularly those in isolated outposts who were swallowed by the MK’s wave of slaughter while the White immigrant population typically lived closer to safer regions in the West of the country around Cape Town, or at least nowhere near the dangerous rural regions. This led to a persistent belief in Afrikaner circles that they were the only White ethnic group who had truly suffered in the war and that they had fought and died while the other immigrant groups sat around, did nothing and then had the guts to argue ‘Aren’t you being a bit harsh?’ As such, the Afrikaners have always been the most unforgiving towards the successor Bantustans while other groups, like the Germans, have been more liberal, as was the case for the Baster people of Rehoboth.

The Basters are a mixed-race group of people who are descendants of the male Afrikaners and Black women. Yes, their name is indeed derived after the word ‘Bastards’, though the population claim to have ‘reappropriated it’ to make it a name denoting power and pride. When the ‘Reshuffling’, as Treurnicht infamously put it, had concluded and they were the sole Bantustan with a Coloured population, the population quickly accepted that the best thing to do was try and build ties with South African authorities to have a relatively easy life, at least compared to the nightmares that existed out East. But it was their next step that caused the most controversy: Baster leaders encouraged their people to mimic the Afrikaners as close as possible. To that end, the Basters announced they would mimic the Afrikaner Action program, celebrating the same holiday schedule as South Africa, making Calvinism a requirement for government positions and dressing in traditional Afrikaner fashion. The plan was to thaw the hearts of the South African authorities by making them look as identical as possible to their neighbours to allow a level of lenience. To an extent this has been true, in that Pretoria has not done much to disturb the arrangement between Namibia’s German-dominated regional government and Rehoboth. This is because, owing to the relative indifference of the ethnic Germans to the issue, Rehoboth has more freedom than the rest of South Africa’s mutilated Bantustans put together.

While Namaland and the Namibian administration continue to suffer fraught ties due to lingering bad blood over the Nama Genocide during the Colonial Era, Rehoboth and the Namibian regional government enjoy relatively pleasant ones. Movement in and out of the border is astonishingly easy, as compared to the literal shoot-on-sight policy that exists around Eastern Bantustans and it resembles the Canadian American border more than anything else. It’s not normal for Basters to go weekend shopping or watch a rugby game in Windhoek. Of course, there are limits. The Basters can never permanently settle, find employment in or become citizens of South Africa due to their not being sufficiently White. Yet they have garnered a reputation as the only group in the whole of the successor Bantustans who have a relatively lax border control with South Africa. Unlike Zululand, the Baster people’s insignificant size (a population of merely 40,000) has meant that few Africans care about whether they have ‘sold out’ since they acknowledge their powerlessness in the face of being surrounded by the despised power – the fact they aren’t fully Black also helped minimise the sense of their being ‘traitors’.

The behaviour of the Basters has created an interesting question in South Africa that only now has been forced to be addressed: Could the Basters be considered ‘White’ and consequently be given citizenship? This is debated both within Baster communities and within South Africa itself. Older Basters aren’t fans of the idea, wanting to hold on to a sense of their own identity, while a younger generation is more open to the idea to make their lives significantly easier by being able to freely travel South Africa. Among South Africa’s broader population, the idea is gaining traction but popularity for the option remains at around 40% in most opinion polls. Many South Africans are impressed by their allegiance to Afrikaner traditions, and their significant European DNA also helps matters but at the same time there is concern it would open the floodgates to the total removal of the One Race Country clause. Once they are defined as White, the Mestizos, mulattos and everyone will be feared among reactionary elements as wanting to barge in and once again demographically overwhelm the ‘pureblood’ White population. It is believed that the full recognition of citizenship to the Basters will be a major condition in ‘The Deal’, the hypothesised agreement South Africans imagine will be reached when the major Western powers reopen contact and trade with South Africa. Not helping matters has been the rise of violent organisations, both in Namibia and elsewhere, who have threatened to kill the Basters for their ‘Uppityness’ in seeking to overturn the racial order and system as it currently stands. One march in Windhoek in 2018 attracted 7,000 demonstrators holding signs like ‘No Kefirs on our soil!’ and “Better dogs be citizens than Kefirs.” Then in 2019, the Baster couple of Cornelius van Wyk and Elizabeth van Wyk, vacationing in Swakopmund, were lynched side-by-side from a tree by a group calling themselves ‘The Knights of the Fiery Cross’ an obvious take on the Ku Klux Klan. We know this because both had been stripped naked and branded with the group’s insignia. The group had also been linked to attacks on Zulu tourists a year prior. The incident sparked outrage across Namibia especially, with the Namibian regional government announcing they would officially declare Basters as ‘White’, as did the Cape regional government. While this had little significance as it was up to the Federal government to define it, Pretoria now has serious headaches over the issue, both in terms of addressing the Basters and the terrorists. Though the shadowy group has been made illegal, it is unlikely that the group suspected to be of primarily rural Afrikaners will be easily found out, especially given that they likely have sympathisers at the highest reaches of power.


Extract from ‘From Darkness Into the Light: The Future of South Africa’ by Pamela Theron

South Africa remains the only country in the world that specifically limits citizenship to those of a single race, and this constitutional requirement has been at the forefront of Western demands ever since. The ‘Dymally Amendment’ created by African American legislator Mervyn Dymally and approved by Congress in 1992, states that the United States cannot recognise any government that explicitly restricts citizenship to a single race. This is of course in defiance of the Treurnicht Constitution’s first paragraph, which states that “The rights of citizenship, employment and settlement in South Africa are the sole property of the White race, and can never be extended to any other”. This impassable deadlock has been the eternal basis of South Africa’s dispute ever since, with most Western nations agreeing removing the ‘One Race Country’ clause is ultimately what South Africa would need to do to return to the family of nations. However, the clause remains broadly popular in South Africa, especially among the politically more influential Afrikaners.

As a consequence, recognition to South Africa was almost totally suspended and embargoed during the Bantustan War and the Reshuffling. Only a handful of states refused to forgo relations. Among them were Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, due to the settler community’s veto who argued that White farmers would bear an undue burden of an embargo. A more interesting case was Katanga who, though stopping most government interaction, was forbidden under their both celebrated and chastised 1963 Constitution, which gave some of the strictest property and business rights in the world, to the extent Katanga is still rated by observers to be the freest place to do business on Earth. There is a saying among neighbouring African countries that Katangans would bet the world would end on Sunday and boast that they will collect the winnings the next Monday. So while the Katangan government went cold, they were powerless to stop (primarily Black) opportunists from filling in the trade gap and becoming fabulously rich. For the remainder of the Treurnicht years, these countries were by far and away South Africa’s main trading partners. The break came in 1994, when democracy was restored. At this the Kingdom of Saba, Arab Federation, Arabian Kingdom and Kingdom of Hejaz reopened trade relations. This was supposed to be to convince South Africa to calm its roguish behaviour, but it was actually the beginning of one of the most astonishing money laundering operations in history. The dictatorial countries ended up being used by Turkey, Iran and Italy to siphon off diamonds from South Africa in return for money while none of them would end up taking the reputational hit of dealing with the loathed state. From this point on, the usefulness of the embargo effectively collapsed and South Africa’s economy began to broadly recover from its implosion during the Bantustan War. Even the sports boycott lost its sting, as the famous Springboks Rugby team while denied permission to play abroad, simply created a new league in 1997: the Home-Rugby League, which consisted of the main regions of South Africa (Namibia, the Cape, the Orange Free State and Transvaal) with the Zulus joining in 2003.

But 2006 would give South Africa its first major international break, when Korea successfully burnished their international bad-boy reputation by opening relations with the pariah due to Japan’s refusal to pay reparations for the Comfort Women of World War 2. The move was met in the West with widespread anger but also mockery for how unrelated the two points seemed. But it would be the first of a series of new diplomatic victories in the coming years. In 2009, North Sudan likewise opened trade and recognition to South Africa – more to its longstanding animosity with Black Sudan. Then in 2017, a diplomatic bombshell was announced when in Russia, a country eternally sworn to neutrality in her constitution and to not take sides in international disputes, the High Court decided that Russia was violating her own constitution by not recognising South Africa and supporting sanctions against it. The move was a deathblow to the sanctions strategy of the West, and trade began to tick back up significantly. When Switzerland attempted a similar law on the basis of neutrality in 2019, the voters successfully pushed for and won a referendum forbidding the country to do business with South Africa while the One Race Clause was still in effect – thus demonstrating how pertinent the issue remains.

These victories have produced a glut in trade for South Africa, and has made the country now roughly as prosperous as it was before the war with trade slowly returning to 1980s levels. At the same time, South Africans are more or less familiar with the world through the internet, which is haphazardly censored, with porn of all kinds illegal. With these diplomatic successes, the calls of reformers in the United Party to remove the One Race Country clause has largely been deflated since most South Africans in polls believe that they will be given full diplomatic recognition in time ‘regardless of whether the One Race Country clause still exists’. This optimism among South Africans is mirrored by pessimism among Westerners that South Africa will ever change its ways. Polls now show that 35% of Americans (and roughly a similar proportion of Imperial Federation citizens) believe that South Africa should be recognised even without having to make serious changes to its One Race Country clause – it was 10% in 1992 when the Dymally Amendment was first passed. More interestingly, 70% of Americans (and a similar number of IF citizens) believe South Africa will be recognised with scant concessions within their lifetimes.

But of all parties, China is perhaps the most interesting, and it’s there that the most rumours and speculation emerge. South Africa has invested almost every spare coin it has into finding rare Earth metals to diversify from diamonds and have a powerful incentive for any state to do business with it. The intention is practically explicitly to bribe China with the lure of Rare Earth metals in order for it to become the premier military power in the world, in return for recognition and non-interference in South Africa’s internal affairs. Polls now show that more Chinese people want to end the non-recognition of South Africa if it could grant them favoured status in that nation’s largely sealed-off economy. The Chinese by all accounts are largely waiting for an opportune moment to make the move, which would almost certainly lead to a domino effect of CIS members (even those who have publicly denounced the state) recognising South Africa. By then, of course, the West’s economic embargo would be utterly useless and South Africa will have ‘gotten away with it’ to quote Henry Kissinger. But despite the world’s fury at the thought, with how much the Bantustans are at each other’s throats, how dehumanised their populations have become, how violently resistant the South Africans are to new arrivals, it seems almost inevitable that that is exactly what will happen.

[…]

Whether the world likes it or not, South Africa will likely be back at the table in the near future, with that smug, self-righteous grin burnished by their having defied and outlasted the entire world that says, “Hate us and see if we care.”
 
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Meanwhile in the tenth circle of hell:
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- I killed and mutilated millions of Africans. But you South Africa! You disgust even me!

This wasn't a .... pleasant lecture to say the least.
 
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@Sorairo That was powerful and terribly depressing. South Africa is a blight on this world, but as you said as the world allows them to trade they will 'get away with it' - what a horrible thought.

Very well written. Thank you.
 
Well, that was certainly a trip.

In the worst way imaginable.

Great epilogue, even if it leaves one of the foulest tastes in my mouth of anything I've read on here.
 
New stuff to add to not only the story, but my views on the universe as a whole.

But yeah, pretty much agree with everybody else here. Having a white supremacist state exist very much well into the 21st century is...an unlikable thought to say the least. I wouldn't be surprised if FOM's South Africa makes an appearance next to Wakanda in a future ISOT map game.
 
This is worse, much worse.
North Korea is a pariah state, hated by all. No one outside of China does business with them. Only a fool goes to North Korea for anything outside of diplomacy. South Africa, though? Not only are they a needed trading partner, they seem to revell in their status as the most hated nation on earth. It is as though all of the worst impulses of man have been squeezed into this nation, both in South Africa proper and in the Bantustans. It is as if God has simply given up on them, and let Satan run amok.
 
Man that was dark. And SA basically welcoming immigration of the rest of the world’s KKK / skinhead types, it will never get any better.

On some level are other nations silently relieved to use SA as a relief valve for citizens that don’t fit in modern society?
 
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