Ezra Pound, Jewish Activism, and the Struggle for Cultural Memory

 

“The terror of Pound for Kazin and the rest of us, if we are honest, is Pound’s racism”
Theodore Weiss, The New York Review of Books, 1986. 

I often take great pleasure from looking into the past and finding, among persons and works of great genius, ideas that we very closely share. It’s not terribly difficult. Times have changed so dramatically, and the window of ‘acceptable’ ideas has so radically narrowed, that almost every great creative thinker of substance prior to the 1950s held socio-political views regarded as quasi-Fascistic by the current dispensation. Most of us will be aware, of course, that these broader cultural shifts have had extremely negative repercussions for the socio-historical legacy of such figures. In short, within a society all too keen to abolish the ‘old White men’ from the history books, such figures will be the first to go.

Against this ominous backdrop, a colleague and literary scholar recently felt the inclination to inform me that the great genius of literature Ezra Pound (1885–1972), who possessed a genuine and open sympathy for Fascism, is being slowly and insidiously exiled from college reading lists and school curricula. It should come as no great surprise to readers of the Occidental Observer that having been caged in a ‘death cell’ for his war-time affiliations, and driven first into a mental health hospital and then out of his country, Pound’s punishment would continue posthumously with his relegation to anonymity. Where my friend erred, however, was in attributing the slow vanishing of Pound to an amorphous ‘neoliberal’ zeitgeist. As an ‘armchair’ fan of Modernist poetry for almost a decade, and an ethno-nationalist even longer, I’ve been more acutely aware of the specificities behind the degradation of the much-maligned poet. Far from being a recent phenomenon, I was also aware that the most important steps in Pound’s marginalization had been put in place decades earlier. Having shared these specificities with my colleague, I now present them here for the consideration of our readership.

The process of annihilating a genius and his worldview from the cultural memory of his people is both straightforward and relatively commonplace. During the course of several research projects over the last decade, it became apparent to me that even where ideologically suspect cultural figures are permitted to remain under study, the socio-political ideas of these ‘tainted’ individuals, no matter how central to their character or intellectual worldview, are sequestered within their social and professional biographies, and often presented as unpleasant ‘moral stains’ upon an otherwise acceptable and productive life. An excellent example in this regard is W.J. McCormack’s 2005 Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats, The Life, The Death, The Politics, which endeavored to ‘expose’ and quarantine the Anglo-Irish poet’s alleged “intense relationship” with Fascism and anti-Semitism. In this way, ‘offending’ but ‘milder’ figures like Yeats are made ‘safe’ for the young and impressionable White minds passing through our college systems. In the more ‘extreme’ cases, however, like that of the explicitly Fascist-affiliated Pound, these ‘moral stains,’ and the indignation they provoke, are deemed unmanageable and unforgiveable. They are amplified, and utilized in attempts to defame and degrade the cultural figure. The process of defamation and degradation eventually forces that figure out of acceptable public discussion and recognition, and thus into obscurity.

The method of defamation and degradation is subtle and slow, like the drip-feeding of poison. It is also in large part facilitated by the now-familiar practise of academic and cultural gatekeeping. Retaining our focus on the example of Pound, it is instructive to study the work of Jewish academic Louis Menand, who has occupied highly influential chairs in English Literature at Princeton and Harvard, and is a prominent critic for both The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. In a 2008 article titled ‘The Pound Error,’ Menand unleashed precisely the kind of withering indictment of Pound that continues to pave the way for his banishment from cultural memory. In Menand’s summation of the poet’s personality, Pound was “vain and idiosyncratic,” but by far the greatest problem was “that he was a Fascist.” Pound is said by Menand to have been possessed of an “obsession with the Jews,” which is true only to the extent that Pound had a preoccupation with usury and financial abuse that inevitably drew him into ideological opposition to some of the key innovators in that area of economic life. Pound, the titan of letters and the enabler of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and T.S. Eliot (among many others), is ultimately dismissed by Menand as “a failure,” notable only for “the shambles of his political beliefs and the limitations of his poetics.”

Emanating from such lofty academic heights, Menand’s invective would be influential enough in demeaning the work and cultural memory of Ezra Pound. But the effort is more widespread and thus even more effective. Although one may instinctively expect the ‘anti-Semitic’ work of poets like Pound and T.S. Eliot to deter the attentions of Jewish literary scholars, the reality is quite different. Indeed, in the mirror image of Menand’s claim, it actually appears that it is Jews who have the obsession with Pound. Pound, perhaps more than any other poet, has exerted an attractive influence over a large swathe of Jewish scholars, all of whom have been pulled magnetically towards him by a burning zeal to deconstruct his work, life, and legacy. This juxtaposition of hatred with attraction is subtly expressed in Anthony Julius’s T.S. Eliot, anti-Semitism and Literary Form, in the course of which Julius writes that Jews reading Eliot’s poetry are both “appalled and impressed.”[1] These academic activists are appalled because they perceive an unjustified critique upon their ethnic group, and they perceive this critique all the more keenly because of their ethnocentrism. They are impressed because they appreciate, and are threatened by, the talent of their target, often despite themselves. The ‘attraction’ arises from the desire to deconstruct and demean that talent, and thus avenge or assuage the critique.

Posthumously, Pound possessed no shortage of Jewish ‘admirers.’ The death of a notable figure often gives rise to renewed interest in that individual’s work and its significance. One might argue, particularly in the modern era, that the first ten to twenty years following that death may set the tone for how or if that figure will be remembered over a much greater length of time. After Pound died in Venice in November 1972, the remainder of the 70s was taken up by a widespread fascination and rediscovery of his poetry, but this enthusiasm was not shared by Jewish intellectuals. Following Pound’s death one of the most ardent and vocal was the New York Intellectual, and prominent literary critic, Alfred Kazin. Alfred Kazin would remark bitterly in 1986 that “in the museum of modern literature no figure commands more space than Ezra Pound. … The literature on Pound is enormous and swells every month.” What set apart the coming attentions of Kazin, and later Theodore Weiss, Macha Rosenthal, Charles Bernstein, Nancy Harrowitz and, most recently, Noel Stock, Tim Redman, Louis Menand and David Biespiel, from the early enthusiasm of the 70s, was the deconstructive and antagonistic slant of the Jewish academics. In words that almost perfectly mirror Julius’s claim to be “appalled and impressed” by the work of T.S. Eliot, Kazin’s scathing 1986 rebuke was titled “The Fascination and Terror of Ezra Pound [emphasis added].” The objective of these Jewish attentions was not to partake in celebration and the cementing of a cultural icon in the literary canon, but rather to break down the target’s reputation and weaken his place in cultural memory. In attacking the posthumous enthusiasm for Pound’s work, these intellectuals were in effect condemning Pound to a second, cultural, death.

In this deconstructive effort, no arguments were too tenuous, and no line of attack was too abstract or extreme. Assaults on Pound’s legacy and work by these Jewish intellectuals in the decade immediately following his death were astonishing in their bitterness. When, in 1973, the English literary scholar Michael Wood wrote a positive review of two (gentile-authored) works on the poet, he was met with remarkable ferocity by the Jewish New York writer Max Geltman. Wood had committed the sin of writing that he perceived great tenderness in the work of Pound, to which Geltman responded by asking whether “the word ‘tenderness’ is meant to imply the kind of tender care lavished on the gas chambers.” In the protracted invective that followed, Geltman would deride Pound, with sneering condescension toward his rural origins, as that “sputtering comet out of Hailey, Idaho.” At its conclusion, Geltman would round off the piece with an obscure reference to a forlorn note allegedly written by a child at a “Nazi Death Camp.” Wood’s response was both brave and damning, describing Geltman’s attack as both “stupid and incoherent.” And Wood’s conclusion was a perfect indictment of Geltman’s tactical use of Jewish schmaltz: “There is, however, nothing in Pound which is quite as ugly as the closing paragraph of Mr. Geltman’s letter. If fidelity to the holocaust means exploiting the memory of that child for the sake of a cheap, polemical pathos, then I’m all for forgetting.”

Unfortunately, strong-willed non-Jews like Wood had by the 1970s been disprivileged numerically at the higher levels of academia and popular criticism. As a result, and in marked contrast to the enthusiasm and celebration of the early 1970s, by the 1980s the balance of opinion on Pound began to tip heavily against him. Alfred Kazin’s 1986 attack on Pound was even more significant than the Geltman affair, and would be described by an acquaintance of the poet as reaching “some heights of virulence,” with the “more than strong” suggestion that Pound “was to blame for the 7,740 Italian Jews who died at Auschwitz.” For Kazin the New York Intellectual, Pound was the epitome of the ‘White Imperialist,’ a “genius not least in his American gift for appropriating land not his own.” Above all though, Kazin’s scathing rebuke represented an attempt to push the popular Pound, and other Modernist poets associated with the reconstruction of Homeric myth, if not volkisch thought, back out of the spotlight:

Modernism…has threatened to take over the curriculum. Eliot’s prescription, that past literature should constantly be assimilated to the taste of the present, had led to a steady omission and distortion of actual history. Modernism must not become the only writer of its history…. Modernism is not our only tradition.

In this respect, Kazin found ready agreement from Princeton academic Theodore Weiss, who assented that “Whatever their fascination, Pound and modernism are overdue for relegating to the dead past,” and suggested that “Pound and modernism be ignored or, if dealt with, done so negatively, and that poetry itself be considered peripheral, inconsequential as it is in a modern industrial society.” More recently, David Biespiel states that if Pound’s “violent fascism and anti-Semitism” weren’t bad enough, his poetry should be dropped because it is “getting less and less contemporary and more and more lost to time.” Thus, through Jewish domination of the key ‘valves’ of culture, we have witnessed the steady shift from a situation in which “the literature on Pound is enormous and swells every month” to one in which Pound is a “peripheral” nothing; a “failure;” or worse.

The strong presence within elite Western English faculties of a Jewish bloc advancing Jewish interests (marginalizing an ‘anti-Semite’ and a literary movement ‘tainted’ with ‘anti-Semitism’) is somewhat ironic given that Jewish literary critics like Anthony Julius issued maudlin complaints that “it is well known that English faculties in America were once especially hostile to Jewish applicants.”[2] What Julius is referring to is the subtle conflict that played out across Western universities between the 1920s and 1950s; a conflict that would ultimately end with Jewish intellectuals like Weiss and Menand flooding the leading positions at Ivy League colleges, and other Jewish intellectuals like Kazin taking command of the leading avenues of criticism. If the WASP ‘old guard’ ever really exerted the privileges of academic and cultural gate-keeping, this had been conclusively wrenched from their grasp by Jews by the early 1960s.

The conflict cannot be seen as benign in either its progression or its results. In English departments, and presumably in many other disciplines, both WASPs and Jews perceived group interests as being at stake. At Yale, WASP professors expressed doubts and concerns that “Jews lacked the cultural and religious background for teaching English literature,”[3] which was presumably the subtle articulation of the belief that Jews would be implicitly hostile to much of the English literary canon. On the other hand, one need only survey a handful of memoirs by Jewish literary scholars to learn that such hostility was clearly in evidence. For example, when asked about his experience of 1950s Yale, Harold Bloom replied sardonically that it was “an Anglo-Catholic nightmare. Everyone was on their knees to Mr T. S. Eliot.”[4]

Given such evidence, any argument that Jews and gentiles shared the same cultural interests should be treated with a healthy scepticism. Indeed, it is concerning to say the least that a group evincing demonstrable hostility to the cultural figures, interests, and heritage of White Europeans now dominates the upper echelons of that same culture. Jewish academics have become an important segment of our hostile elite.

While we may be encouraged by our current culture-shapers to believe that the entry of Jews into our arts helped us to become more ‘worldly’ and ‘objective’ in our creative life, sober reflection on contemporary Jewish activity in English literature reveals quite the opposite. Even if we accept Bloom’s perspective, it may be said that we have merely replaced the ‘Anglo-Catholic nightmare’ with a Jewish one. And rather than being on our knees to ‘Mr T. S. Eliot,’ everyone is now on their knees to Jewish victimhood. The apparent Jewish inability to appreciate English literature beyond the narrow purview of ethnic interest is demonstrated with even the briefest of bibliographies from the field’s leading scholars:

Derek Cohen and Deborah Heller’s Jewish Presences in English Literature
Bryan Cheyette’s Constructions of ‘the Jew in English Literature and Society and his Between Race and Culture: Representations of ‘the Jew’ in English and American Literature
Harry Levi’s Jewish Characters in Fiction: English Literature
James Shapiro’s Shakespeare and the Jews
Edgar Rosenberg’s From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction
Gary Levine’s The Merchant of Modernism: The Economic Jew in Anglo-American Literature
Heidi Kaufman’s English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Esther Panitz’s The Alien in the Midst: images of Jews in English Literature
Edward Calisch’s The Jew in English Literature: As Author and as Subject
Matthew Biberman’s Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature
Eva Holmberg’s Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination
Phillip Aronstein’s The Jews in English Poetry and Fiction
Nadia Valman’s The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture
Frank Felsenstein’s Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture
Jonathan Freedman’s The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America
Sheila Spector’s British Romanticism and the Jews: History Culture and Literature
Anna Rubin’s Images in Transition: the English Jew in English Literature, 1660-1830

These works represent only the tip of a very large and growing iceberg. They are in addition to hundreds of articles appearing in influential journals and magazines. Writers like Julius would have us believe that the position of the Yale academics of the 1950s was based on irrational bigotry — the ignorant anxieties of dusty old White men. And yet the trajectory of literature in the English language, both in respect of its past and present, has moved in a radically different direction since the end of the WASP dominance.

This new departure has not been for the better. The likes of Pound, Yeats, and Eliot have now given much ground to ethnically myopic works like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), about a neurotic and compulsively masturbating Jew, and Howard Jacobson’s similar, if more periphrastic, The Finkler Question (2010). I am only half-joking when I suggest that our grandchildren will learn their Chaim before their Homer.

While I have labored on the importance of academic gate-keeping, it is important to note that the deconstruction of a cultural figure may take forms other than the assault of elite journalism and co-ordinated academic critique. It also takes the form of exclusion and socio-cultural taboo. In 1999 a panel of thirteen writers and poets, including John Updike, voted to honor Pound with a carved stone that would have put him beside such figures as T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe in a part of the nave of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, inspired by Poets’ Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey. The effort was ultimately thwarted by a concerted campaign of pressure on the Cathedral to block Pound’s inclusion. One of the few public representatives of the campaign was the academic and Pound ‘scholar’ Tim Redman, author of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Redman, a Jewish academic who has made a career out of combining hate with attraction, explained his opposition to Pound’s inclusion with the remarkably curt, blunt, and unsophisticated retort that: “He contributed to a climate of opinion that enabled the Holocaust to happen.”

T.S. Eliot is often excoriated for his now infamous line that “The rats are underneath the piles / The Jew is underneath the lot.” Eliot and Pound may have both smiled wryly on learning that this august Cathedral apparently boasted a Jewish warden, Marsha Ra, who would earnestly explain to reporters that Pound “was giving anti-Semitic radio broadcasts while my people were being gassed.” Ra, a convert to Christianity, further insisted that Pound was “not representative of Christian values.” The New York Times later reported that it was Ms. Ra who organized, and was thus ‘underneath,’ the petition to block Pound’s inclusion. A panel of thirteen leading figures of contemporary literature was thus rendered obsolete by the activism and absurd moralizing of a middle-aged Jewish librarian.

To conclude, it is fairly evident that the struggle for cultural memory can involve more specific players, trends, and actions than the amorphous ‘neoliberal’ zeitgeist imagined by my colleague. Civilization, for all its greatness, is ultimately a fragile entity. It requires care, conservation, and occasional pruning. If our culture loses sight of its geniuses, we will be all the poorer for it — ideologically, spiritually, tactically, and culturally. We all have a duty to keep these figures and their work alive. Our ability to do so will ultimately determine whether there is life in our civilization yet, or whether, as Pound feared, there is nothing left but “an old bitch gone in the teeth.”

[1] A. Julius, T.S. Eliot, anti-Semitism and Literary Form (Thames & Hudson, 2003), 40.

[2] Ibid, 52.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/

‘WHO AM I?’

In the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta, the Buddha taught us to consciously use the framework of the five divisions of experience (the khandhas) as a tool for reflection, to bring attention to uncertainty, unsatisfactoriness and not-self. We use this tool to challenge the habits of self-creation and to meet and receive the flow of experience. We tend to think, ‘I am the body. I am the personality. This is my story. This is what I am. This is all that I am.’ Such beliefs are usefully explored and countered using the teachings on anattā.

One of the ways we can cultivate this exploration, this change of view, is to ask questions in meditation. In the space of the mind, when the attention is quite steady and focused, a question can be placed. When we hear a sound, we can ask, ‘Who is it that hears?’ When we feel a sensation in the body, we can ask, ‘To whom does this feeling belong?’ Or with memories, ‘Who remembers? Does this memory have an owner? What is it that recalls and labels this “mine”?’ When we ask questions like this, we are not looking for explicit, verbal answers. In fact, there aren’t any ‘right’ verbal or conceptual answers. Rather, posing these questions in a sincere and direct way is intended to illuminate the presumptions the mind makes. In that moment of posing the question, ‘Who knows this experience?’ something in the heart knows that the mind is not a person, that the awareness isn’t an individual. This awareness doesn’t have an age, gender or nationality. The labels we give ourselves – ‘I am a man, I am a woman, I am English, I am Sri Lankan, I am old, I am young, I am healthy, I am sick’ – are all just markers, conventional designations, convenient fictions.

While the mind may identify with such characteristics, we come to see them as habits of mind but not the essence of mind. This mind, this heart is not a person, not an individual, not an ‘I’.

This method of enquiry, of asking a question in meditation, is a very direct and straightforward exploration into the nature of experience. We bring the mind to as much quietness, stillness, and steadiness as possible and then drop a question into that open space: ‘What am I?’ When that kind of question is posed, we can notice a small gap, a hesitation before any conceptual answer arises. The wordless ‘answer’ to the question is what is realized in that gap, in the moment before a new ‘me’ has been conjured into being with an idea, a belief, a judgment, an assumption. That gap – that unformed, awake, open quality – is the point of this practice. In that moment, there is alertness, spaciousness, no sense of self. The mind is awake to its own nature: bright, radiant, pure, peaceful, perfectly simple.

We can also develop this practice throughout the course of our daily activities. As we are eating breakfast, we can ask, ‘Who is eating? What owns this flavour?’ When we speak with others, ‘Does that sound belong to someone?’ Or when we’re driving, ‘Where is there to get to (because wherever I get to, I am always here)?’ Even decision-making, ‘Who chooses?’ We can cultivate a quality of enquiry and investigation throughout the flow of the day, whether we are walking, standing, sitting, lying down, being quiet or being active. ‘Who is tidying the garden? Who is washing the dishes? Who is lying down for a nap?’ Even the simple activity of brushing the teeth can uncover our assumptions of ‘me’ and ‘mine’. When you’re brushing your teeth, ask, ‘Do these teeth have an owner? What makes this toothbrush mine? What happens to my ownership of this tube of toothpaste when the tube is empty?’ All around the planet, countless empty toothpaste tubes are buried in landfills, floating in seas and decaying in forests. Where is all the ‘my’-ness that once belonged to those tubes of toothpaste? Once they were ‘mine’, now they are not. As an empty toothpaste tube leaves the hand and enters the rubbish bin, how does it change from ‘mine’ to ‘not mine’? What happened? Did anything happen?

Beyond toothpaste tubes, we can reflect on other items that are much closer to home. Perhaps top on the list is our own body. We give it a name and we think of it as ‘mine’. What do we discover when we question the assumption ‘This is my body’? Consider the breath. If we are in a room together, you breathe in the carbon dioxide that I breathe out, and I breath in the carbon dioxide that you breathe out. My out-breath, which was partly your out-breath, is then absorbed by the trees, grasses and other creatures. All the carbon dioxide that was once ‘me’ is now part of countless other living beings that have absorbed it.

We shed, we acquire. This body is in an incessant state of change. The process never stops. So the statement ‘This is my body’ can really only be a convenient fiction. When we enquire more deeply, we realize that the labels ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘old’, ‘young’, ‘tall’, ‘short’, ‘healthy’, ‘sick’, ‘Buddhist’, ‘Christian’ don’t truly apply. They are all convenient fictions. Cultivating this change of view is one of the ways to support the breakthrough to reality that the Buddha pointed to.

A SAGE AT PEACE

As we develop this kind of investigation, this reflection – ‘What am I? Who is walking? Who is eating? Who is doing?’ – the point is not the repetition of these questions. The questions are just the means. The point of the enquiry is the resulting change of heart, that ‘Aha!’ when the transparent and empty nature of self-view is recognized. When the heart sees through the conceiving ‘I am’, that is when one is called a ‘sage at peace’30. The heart is free of agitation. It knows genuine coolness, freedom, peacefulness. There is nothing that can agitate or confuse it.

The Buddha teaches anicca (change, uncertainty, transiency), dukkha (unsatisfactoriness, incompleteness, unreliability), and anattā (not-self) as the basis for wise reflection. They are not articles of faith or concepts to believe in. Rather, they are tools we can use to examine the way our experience is held and understood. These reflections are ways of meeting the habits of the mind and helping to shift and reshape them.

In meditation, when the mind is steady, we can pay attention to the present and open the field of awareness, not focusing on a particular object. Awakened awareness can simplly receive the flow of impressions – thoughts, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, shapes and colours – within this mode of reflection, this mode of exploration, and ask, ‘Is this changing? Is it satisfying? Does it have an owner?’

As each form, each feeling, each perception takes shape within the field of awareness, watch what happens when those investigative reflections are applied. What happens when the illusion of a permanent, satisfying, personal identity is seen through, when the ‘I’ feeling is recognized as transparent and void of substance? ‘Aha!’ There is a change of heart, a freeing, a disentangling.

This is the point and purpose of insight practice (vipassanā) – seeing into the genuine nature of all things; seeing that everything (every ‘thing’) is simply a pattern of consciousness, a pattern of mind taking shape and dissolving. There is form but no substance, shape but no essence – it is a bubble, a mirage, a conjuring trick. When that recognition is actualized, watch what happens in the heart. What is the experience of the present reality when that illusion is seen through? There is a simplicity, naturalness, freedom, limitlessness – and a quality of ‘of course!’

THE UNANALYSABLE TATHAGATA - AWAKENED AWARENESS

This kind of practice helps the mind to see through and thus shed its sense of identity. But shedding identity can then leave us with doubts: ‘If I’m not a person, what am I? If I’m not a man or a woman, a monastic or a lay person, what am I? If my nationality, age and personal story are not real, who am I?’ When this happens, it’s important to remember that the practice is to let go of identifying with what we are not and let ‘what is’ just be what it is – awake, aware, peaceful, radiant, limitless, natural. As soon as we fall back into trying to define who or what we are, the thinking/conceiving mind creates limitation once again. Even identifying with highly exalted states – ‘I am suchness, that’s what I am,’ ‘I am the Dhamma,’ or even ‘I am nothing’ – any kind of ‘I am’ creates a false limitation.

In another of his deeply significant teachings on this theme, the Buddha said:

The Tathāgata (‘The one thus come, thus gone’) has abandoned any material form … feeling … perceptions … mental formations … consciousness by means of which one trying to describe the Tathāgata would describe him. He has cut it off at the root, made it like a palm tree stump, deprived it of the conditions for existence and rendered it incapable of arising in the future. The Tathāgata is liberated from being reckoned in terms of material form … feeling … perceptions … mental formations … consciousness … He is profound, immeasurable, unfathomable, like the great ocean.
(M 72.20)31

‘The Tathāgata’ is the term the Buddha used to refer to himself, and this Sutta is one of the few instances in which he talks about his subjective experience. I consider the term ‘tathāgata’ to also mean ‘the awakened awareness of our minds’, just as ‘Buddha-wisdom’ was described above (in Chapters 1 & 2). The quality of tathāgata (‘thus come, thus gone’) here refers to the nature of the ‘transcendent knowing’ attribute of our hearts as embodied in each of our lives.

SO WHAT EXACTLY IS IT?

It is. And there is no need, indeed no possibility, to define exactly what it is. That said, notice that the Buddha uses the adjectives ‘profound, immeasurable, unfathomable, like the great ocean’ to describe its presence. The analogy is apposite since, when we stand on some sea-shore and look out to the horizon there is for many people an apprehension of vastness, wonderment, power and mystery. What lies beneath the surface? What’s beyond the horizon? The mind goes quiet in a state of natural awe, that is potent yet peaceful. The great ocean definitely IS yet the conceiving mind cannot fully define what it is; its presence is immeasurable, both dangerous (to the ego) and intimately familiar (to the heart), our origin and yet beyond us… these are the qualities of the awake, aware heart that the Buddha evokes with these words.

Any definitions would have to borrow nouns and adjectives from the world of sound, sight, smell, taste, touch, conceptual thought, time, three-dimensional space, individuality. None of those qualities fully apply but we are offered that analogy of the ocean as a tiny hint. Even the best adjectives in a mythical grammar designed to refer to the numinous, the transcendent, will never be able to do the job completely. Words and concepts simply do not have enough dimensions to represent ultimate reality.

In the above passage, the Buddha is talking about his own nature, but he is also talking about the nature of the awake mind, the quality of awareness at the very heart of experience for each one of us – ‘the Buddha in mind’ as Ajahn Chah put it.

In addition, we don’t have to define what we are because we already are it. The practice is simply about learning to be that, to embody that awakened knowing, which frees that heart from all limitation. As in the statement by the Buddha to Rohitassa that was quoted above:

One who knows the world reaches the end of the world. Having reached the end of the world, they do not hanker after this world or another one.
(S 2.26)

This passage is an illustration of one of the Buddha’s chief attributes, lokavidū, ‘knower of the world’. And when the Buddha in mind sees the world, in this way, this is the Dhamma knowing its own nature. As Ajahn Chah expressed it:

Where is the Buddha? The Buddha is in the Dhamma. Where is the Dhamma? The Dhamma is in the Buddha… Whether a tree, a mountain or an animal, it’s all Dhamma, everything is Dhamma. Where is this Dhamma? Speaking simply, that which is not Dhamma doesn’t exist. Dhamma is nature. This is called the ‘saccadhamma’, the True Dhamma. if one sees nature, one sees Dhamma; if one sees Dhamma, one sees nature. Seeing nature, one knows the Dhamma.32

Ajhan Amaro
Mind Is What Matters

Many apparently supernatural abilities sooner or later turn out to be due to hyperacuity of an existing sense system and in no way extrasensory ...

 On a February morning in 1966 Cleve Backster made a discovery that changed his life and could have far-reaching effects on ours. Backster was at that time an interrogation specialist who left the CIA to operate a New York school for training policemen in the techniques of using the polygraph, or ‘lie detector’. This instrument normally measures the electrical resistance of the human skin, but on that morning he extended its possibilities. Immediately after watering an office plant, he wondered if it would be possible to measure the rate at which water rose in the plant from the root to the leaf by recording the increase in leaf-moisture content on a polygraph tape. Backster placed the two psychogalvanic-reflex (PGR) electrodes on either side of the leaf of Dracaena massangeana, a potted rubber plant, and balanced the leaf into the circuitry before watering the plant again. There was no marked reaction to this stimulus, so Backster decided to try what he calls ‘the threat-to-well-being principle, a well-established method of triggering emotionality in humans’. In other words he decided to torture the plant. First of all he dipped one of its leaves into a cup of hot coffee, but there was no reaction, so he decided to get a match and burn the leaf properly. ‘At the instant of this decision, at 13 minutes and 55 seconds of chart time, there was a dramatic change in the PGR tracing pattern in the form of an abrupt and prolonged upward sweep of the recording pen. I had not moved, or touched the plant, so the timing of the PGR pen activity suggested to me that the tracing might have been triggered by the mere thought of the harm I intended to inflict on the plant.’

Backster went on to explore the possibility of such perception in the plant by bringing some live brine shrimp into his office and dropping them one by one into boiling water. Every time he killed a shrimp, the polygraph recording needle attached to the plant jumped violently. To eliminate the possibility of his own emotions producing this reaction, he completely automated the whole experiment so that an electronic randomiser chose odd moments to dump the shrimp into hot water when no human was in the laboratory at all. The plant continued to respond in sympathy to the death of every shrimp and failed to register any change when the machine dropped already dead shrimp into the water.

Impressed by the plant’s apparent sensitivity to stress, Backster collected specimens of other species and discovered that a philodendron seemed to be particularly attached to him. He no longer handles this plant with anything but the greatest care, and whenever it is necessary to stimulate it in order to produce a reaction, his assistant, Bob Henson, ‘plays the heavy’. Now the plant produces an agitated polygraph response every time Henson comes into the room, and seems to ‘relax’ when Backster comes near or even speaks in an adjoining room. (10) Enclosing the plant in a Faraday screen or a lead container has no effect, and it seems that the signals to which it responds do not fall within the normal electromagnetic spectrum. In more recent experiments Backster has found that fresh fruit and vegetables, mold cultures, amoebae, paramecia, yeast, blood, and even scrapings from the roof of a man’s mouth all show similar sensitivity to other life in distress.

This phenomenon, which Backster calls ‘primary perception’, has been substantiated by repetition of his work in other laboratories. (86) It raises awesome biological and moral questions; since thinking about it, I for one have had to give up mowing lawns altogether, but if it were to be taken to its logical limits we would end up, like the community in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, eating nothing but cabbages that have been certified to have died a natural death. The answer to the moral problem lies in treating all life with respect, and killing, with real reluctance, only that which is necessary for survival – but the biological problems are not as easily resolved.

If dying cells send out a signal to which other life responds, why do they do so? And why should such signals be more important to a potted plant than they are to us? Alarm signals are common to all social vertebrates at least. Sea gulls have specific calls that warn their breeding colonies of the approach of predators; ground squirrels and prairie marmots have an early-warning system that alerts their colonies to the danger of air raids by birds of prey. The function of the signals is so clear that those of crows and gulls have been recorded and broadcast across airfields to frighten these birds off the runways just before a plane is due to land. Very often the alarm is interspecific – terns, starlings, and pigeons feeding with gulls all take to flight at the sound of the gull alarm call; and seals dive into the water when nearby colonies of cormorants give notice of approaching danger. (69)

Alarm calls obviously have high survival value and work well across the species line, but not all species function on the same frequencies or even with the same sense organs, so there would be a strong natural pressure toward the evolution of a common signal – a sort of all-species SOS. Pressures of this kind seldom go unnoticed, and it would seem that Backster’s discovery could be nature’s answer to exactly this need. Presumably it would begin by a compromise signal being developed among groups of closely related species in response to a common predator. Then it would be to the predator’s advantage to be able to detect the signal and anticipate its effect on his prey, and finally both predators and prey would find the signal useful in giving warning of an avalanche or flood or some natural catastrophe that could affect them all.

The search of a signal accessible to all life would naturally narrow down to the lowest common denominator. All organisms consist of cells, and the existence of a system of communication among cells would provide the final answer. We have yet to prove conclusively that such a system exists, but the odds in favor of it get better all the time.

Man’s exclusion from this warning may be only apparent. I am beginning to suspect that unconsciously we are every bit as aware of the alarm as every pigeon or potted plant. It is a well-established fact that even in sleep we respond to certain significant sounds: a mother will sleep through the roar of a passing train but wake as soon as her child cries softly in another room.

Many mothers claim to know when something is wrong even before the baby sounds his audible alarm. They may be right and tuning in to the universal alarm, but many senses are known to be particularly acute immediately after childbirth, so they could be responding to ordinary stimuli that are very subtle indeed.

The male ostrich Struthio camelus has several hens, and each of them, in strict hierarchical order starting with the dominant female, lay five or six eggs in a hollow he scrapes out on the ground. The last of a large clutch, of twenty eggs, may therefore be laid three weeks after the first one, but all hatch within a few hours of each other about six weeks later. (330) This wonderful synchronisation is vital if the cock is to look after his brood effectively, and he ensures that it occurs by listening in to the eggs as they develop. By the sounds they make, he can assess their stage of development, and if one is too far advanced, he rolls it out of the nest and buries it for a while until the others catch up. Other eggs have parents less astute, and they synchronise themselves by listening to each other. Days before hatching, the chicks of most ground-living birds, which need to hatch and run off together almost immediately, break through the small shell membrane to gain access to the air space at the blunt end. They breathe this air, and the sound of their breathing can be heard by chicks in other eggs, who know by its rate how near to hatching their brood mates are. (91) In the Japanese quail Coturnix coturnix the rate builds up to three sounds a second, and it has been shown that an artificial click at this frequency accelerates the rate of hatching of all the eggs in a nest. The embryos in most eggs make little ‘pleasure’ calls in response to a change in position when the egg is held in the hand. These can be heard with a sensitive stethoscope, but it seems certain that breeding parent birds hear these sounds quite clearly and make the appropriate response to them.

In the 1880s two French scientists discovered a boy who appeared to be able to guess correctly the page numbers of books chosen at random by another person. The condition under which the boy operated best was with the experimenter standing with the light behind him and the book open between himself and the child. It turned out that the boy was able to read the numbers from the minute back-to-front reflections on the cornea of the experimenter’s eye. (221) These reflections were only one tenth of a millimeter high, but the child’s sense of sight was so acute that this was enough to give him the information he needed. This kind of sensitivity is very rare; it is unusual for anyone to be able to see so well, but supernormal does not mean supernatural. The boy’s sight was extraordinarily good, but a powerful sense of sight is a very natural phenomenon, and a vulture could probably do as well if it could be persuaded to try.

We have not yet been able to draw any hard and fast limits to the acuity of our senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Every new probe into their potential seems to push the limits of receptivity further and further out, and new spheres of perception are continually being discovered. Many apparently supernatural abilities sooner or later turn out to be due to hyperacuity of an existing sense system and in no way extrasensory, but there is one phenomenon that keeps cropping up and has yet to be explained satisfactorily in terms of the established senses. This is ‘thought transference’, or telepathy.

Lyall Watson 

Supernature 

Possession

 

Recent Philippine history has been aptly described as “four hundred years in a convent, followed by fifty in Hollywood”. But there is obviously more to it than that. Long before either Spanish or American colonisation, the islands of the archipelago were a patchwork of well over a hundred distinct linguistic, cultural and racial groups – many of which still survive.

Cagayan Valley in north-eastern Luzon is home to one such community – an Igorot or mountain people who are marked by Christianity and post-war developments, but nevertheless leave all the most important decisions of their lives to solemn rituals that involve animal sacrifice and lead to consultation with the spirits. Communion is accomplished by aniteras or female shamans who are now rare, but carry on like gently beating hearts in dying tribal life. It was to meet one such woman that I made the long journey from Bayombong up into the forests of the Cordillera. I spent several bewitching weeks living in the old lady’s compound, watching the daily work of weaving and basket making, taking part in the evening rituals of healing and spirit worship. It was an altogether magical time, but one I remember best for my involvement in what I can only think of as a kind of exorcism.

A child was brought to the aniteras suffering from a complaint like none I have ever seen. He was said to be ten years old, and from the right side he looked about that age; but from the left, he had the appearance of an aged and diseased dwarf. From the front, you could see a line running down the centre of his body, as though the Hollywood part of his heritage had spent long hours in makeup that morning, doing their best to make one half of his body look like something designed to be exhumed by Vincent Price.

I can joke about it now, but the effect was truly horrible. The hair on the right side of his head was dark and glossy, while that on the left was dank and lifeless. One eye was clear and bright, the other squint and rheumy. Half his teeth were widely spaced and drawn out into fangs by the retreat of bloody gums, and the skin on that side of his face and down his left arm was covered in running sores. He walked slowly and with obvious pain, hunched with every other step over a left leg shortened several inches by a clawed foot. And when he spoke, which he did rarely, it was out of the twisted left side of his mouth in a snarl and in a language which nobody there understood. Nobody except me. I was astounded to hear, in amongst the deep-throated growl, a few phrases in clear and ringing Zulu – the one African language that I was able to speak when I was his age. The words were odd ones and inappropriate to that situation, but they left me feeling very vulnerable, as though I had just had my pocket picked.

The aniteras decided that the child was possessed by busao, an evil spirit – which, in the circumstances, seemed like the only reasonable diagnosis. And for three days she worked her wiles on the child, plying him with herbal potions, saturating him with ceremony and invocation. All to no avail. On the fourth night, however, she was otherwise occupied and the boy/dwarf was sitting on the ground next to a fire encircled by a group of elders, frightening me from time to time with occasional obscene twitches. The people and I were talking in reluctant Tagalog, which is no more their language than it is mine, just passing the time. Nobody was concentrating on the figure at the fire, he was not the subject of conversation and he was looking away from me into the flames. Then slowly, one by one, our gazes focused on him, the talk stopped, the air became almost heavy with condensed attention; and suddenly, as if by prearrangement, the old lady was there with us, standing tall on the edge of the circle. She hurled something into the fire, which flared up in a green blaze and she shouted very loud, very angry, a long quick string of words hurled directly at the afflicted boy.

There was a moment of silence, complete silence, then a terrible scream as the child threw himself down on the ground and began to thrash around violently. Again she shouted, and once more he screamed – a searing combination of pain and anger. It was a duel in sound, a pitched battle that raged and grew into a frenzy, and then stopped as suddenly as it had begun as the child hurled himself face down to the earth and lay still with one arm and shoulder in the glowing coals. For a long, awful moment nobody moved, and then the old woman stepped forward, gently lifted the body up and carried it away to her hut. And it was as though she took with it a great weight from our shoulders – a burden that we were not conscious of carrying, but that had been with us ever since the weird child had arrived.

The next morning, the boy was up early with the rest of the women, helping carry water. He looked straight at me for the first time and his eyes, both eyes, were clear. By that evening he was talking normally, in his own tongue, and walking with only the suggestion of a limp. And by the end of the week, his skin and teeth and hair, his whole appearance, were those of any other healthy, unmarked, active and attractive Filipino child.

I make no apologies for telling this story in such detail and without corroboration. I am not offering it in evidence, but as a starting point for a line of argument. Three things about it are of interest to me. The first is the laterality of the affliction – which, however it was caused, suggests at least a biological vector, involving just half of the brain. The second is the nature of the cure – which was both rapid and dramatic, suggesting the sort of catharsis that has mental rather than physical origins. And the third is the use of an unfamiliar language – in the presence of perhaps the only person out of fifty million in the Philippines who could have understood.

I am not claiming that the child was possessed. I discovered later that his problems had begun three years before when his mother was run over by a truck, killed and hideously disfigured as he was walking down the road with her – holding her right hand. There are, however, strong resemblances between this incident and several other accounts in the literature of what has been identified as demonic possession – most notably the case of fourteen-year-old Karen Kingston, who was cured of a similar affliction in North Carolina in 1974 by a group including three clergymen, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a general practitioner.276Karen’s problem also began with a murder. She watched her mother stab her alcoholic father to death with a butcher’s knife and retreated into a state of helpless shock, which turned gradually from withdrawal into ugly and violent deformity. She was sent to a home for retarded children and when orthodox medicine seemed incapable of preventing the transformation of this adolescent girl into a malevolent crone, an evangelical Baptist suggested exorcism. The ceremony began, in the presence of several clinical witnesses and nursing staff, with a minister addressing the child directly as though she were possessed by a devil. “In the name of Jesus, demon come forth! Leave! Leave!” And the girl responded in kind, in a deep voice. “This child is mine! Go away! Go away! Leave us alone!”

The rest of the treatment will be as familiar to those in our culture who know anything of the rites of exorcism, or have even seen the film of The Exorcist, as the tactics of the aniteras were to her Igorot audience. Events moved from blasphemy and poltergeist phenomena to a violent crisis precipitated by forcing the alleged demon to reveal its name. The moment that the symptoms could be gathered together into a separate identity, which chose the surprisingly undemonic name of “Williams”, Karen was free of it. And over the next three days, she regained her health and intelligence and control.

I gloss over these events in a paragraph, as though conversation and conflict with a demon were part of everyday experience, For most of us, of course, they are not. None of those present in North Carolina will ever forget what happened, any more than I can ignore the dramas I experienced in the Philippines. But to me the crucial aspect of both cases, is that events were clearly culturally determined. They followed the scenario appropriate to the circumstances, drawing on beliefs and expectations relevant to those involved. The cures remain mysterious, amenable one day perhaps to the liberal tenets of the fledgling science of psychosomatic medicine, but the process was essentially traditional and social. Which is why I believe it succeeded. I suggest that the clergyman who acted as Karen’s exorcist, also played the devil’s role – just as I somehow contributed a few words of Zulu to the Philippine performance. Neither of us was conscious of doing so, but I am convinced that at some saman level we were involved. We added social weight to an individual dilemma and helped move it to communal resolution.

Which brings me back to Adam Crabtree, the Canadian psychotherapist who is impressed with the way some of his patients behave during “theradrama” sessions. “I have often seen them,” he says, “operating from very little information, ‘become’ the person that they were portraying to such perfection that they even used that person’s characteristic gestures and peculiar phraseology.” He goes on to consider the way an actor experiences the enactment – “Often he has the sensation of being taken over and losing himself during the dramatization” – and suggests that this talent is more than just skill or telepathy. It involves the presence of the person being portrayed.67

I think he may be right.

Let me return, however, for the next step in the argument, to those Zulu phrases. Parapsychology has a name for the ability to use a language of which a person has no ordinary knowledge. It is called xenoglossy or “foreign tongue” and comes in two forms. “Recitative” xenoglossy is the utterance of fragments of a strange language, as one might parrot Latin phrases without having any idea of their syntax or actual meaning. And “responsive” xenoglossy, which is something far more intelligent, involving an ability to converse in the unknown language. The distinction is vital.124

It is possible to pick up a Serbo-Croatian dictionary and learn some words by rote. It is possible even to study the section in the front that deals with the rules of pronunciation and grammar, and acquire a rudimentary knowledge of these. But this will not immediately transform you into a fluent speaker of Serbo-Croat, able to talk your way around Yugoslavia. There is a gap between the theory and practice of any foreign language which requires just that – practice. You can read all the books in the world about cycling, but you still have to learn to ride by trial and error, by wrapping your muscles and your mind around the problem until the technique falls into place. Then it is yours for life.

The Filipino child was not speaking Zulu, he was practising recitative xenoglossy. There are many similar examples in the literature on spiritism – of mediums reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Greek or throwing in the odd word that turns out on later analysis to be Egyptian or even Hawaiian. Some of these borrowings can be traced to a phenomenon known as cryptomnesia or “hidden memory”, in which we dredge up information from unconscious areas without being aware of doing so. Early this century, for example, a spirit who called herself Blanche Poynings created some excitement in mediumistic circles. She appeared through a hypnotised woman and provided impressively detailed information about life during the time of Richard II and Henry IV. The case seemed to be one that provided evidence for survival, until it was discovered that there was a novel called Countess Maud which included the character of Blanche and all the historical detail; and the book had been read to the sitter as a child.81Latent memory of this kind clearly surfaces on some occasions, but it is far from being the whole answer. I cannot imagine any set of circumstances which could have brought a ten-year-old boy in the Cagayan Valley into contact with Zulu at any stage of his life. Nor am I disposed to assume that he was possessed by the discarnate spirit of a Zulu witchdoctor. It seems altogether more reasonable to assume that somehow, the mechanism is still far from clear, he was able to recite phrases that were familiar to me, borrowing them from my mind as I might purloin a word here or there from Serbo-Croat.

An outrageous conclusion? Perhaps, but there is some evidence for social leakage of this kind.

Alister Hardy once said: “I have myself become convinced of the reality of telepathy from two experiences I had many years ago, but they are anecdotal and of no scientific value; yet to me they are as important and as real as any observation I have ever made in natural history.” Both experiences involved a Mrs. Wedgwood in Lincolnshire, who entertained officers from Hardy’s regiment during World War I and claimed to be able to “see” things. On one occasion she suddenly said, “Oh, I can see your brother quite clearly. I can see him sitting at a table drawing what I think must be some engineering plan; on a large sheet of white paper I see him painting what seem to be squares and oblongs of red and blue.” What she described was exactly what Hardy himself had been doing all that afternoon, entirely on his own, preparing diagrams to illustrate a talk on military history. A year later, Hardy was working as a camouflage officer and spent hours painting a large sheet of white card with a vivid pink distemper and sitting, watching, waiting for it to dry before going out to dinner with Mrs. Wedgwood. Her first words to him were “Oh, what have you been doing? I see a large pink square on the table in front of you.”147These accounts, as Hardy said, are anecdotal. Many people have such experiences. I include his here partly because they are his, and partly because he was not only a great naturalist but an accomplished artist, someone with a good visual memory, on whom shape and colour made a strong impression. Strong enough, perhaps, to overflow.

Some of the best results in controlled tests on the transfer of information by apparently extrasensory means, come from the Ganzfeld or “whole field” technique, which tries as far as possible to reduce patterned sensory input. Subjects are put into a relaxed position, with halved ping-pong balls over their eyes, in diffuse light, to a background of unstructured “white noise”. This withdrawal of attention from the immediate environment seems to help in picking up weak signals.324 Someone in a dream state is presumably isolated in much the same way and there is a certain amount of evidence to show that sleepers are subject to telepathic impressions.380 But if I am right about broadcasts having particular biological relevance in crisis situations, then the leakage between organisms ought to be most marked when the transmission is strong – when the need is greatest. As it was for that Igorot child in the midst of his grotesque dilemma.

The nearest laboratory equivalent to the real life situation is perhaps the technique of “sensory bombardment”, in which subjects are given a comprehensive audio-visual experience inside a wrap-around cinema screen equipped with quadrophonic speakers. The effect of this combined assault is so overwhelming that most subjects put up their own private censors and slip into an altered state of consciousness. And in the process, some of them seem to gain access to information not normally available to them. They make saman contact.

The English philosopher H. H. Price came, I think, closest to a description of what happens in his analysis of shared awareness as a “field of interaction”. Sama is not a thing or an entity and contact through it does not have an all or nothing character. It is not a kind of knowing, so much as a mixture of fact, feeling and expectation – a shared experience. “Telepathy,” said Price, “is more like infection than knowledge.” And once infection has taken place, once information has been transferred, its nature and future is governed by the recipient, who controls the course of the disease.

If the child in the Philippines had been able not only to use a Zulu phrase or two, but to make appropriate reply in Zulu to my questions, he would have been showing responsive xenoglossy. Which would have been even more dramatic, and a sound basis for arguing that actual possession was indeed involved. As it was, he made no response at all, but there are those who have apparently done so. In addition to the unexpected Arabic and Serbo-Croatian talents of Billy Milligan, which remain unresolved, there are several other examples.

In 1974, a thirty-year-old lecturer in public administration at the Nagpur University in India suddenly underwent a profound change in character. One day, Uttara Huddar was a quiet, single woman with modern tastes, whose home language was Marathi. The next, she dressed and acted like a married woman, spent much of her time in religious exercises, called herself Sharada – and spoke fluent Bengali. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, examined her in the company of Bengali experts, who not only declared her competent in the language, but doubted that anyone from Nagpur could speak it in the way she did, without any trace of Marathi accent. Uttara’s family insist that she never learned, nor had the chance to learn, Bengali. Yet she undoubtedly does speak it – at least during those periods, which may last from one day to several weeks at a time, when she appears to become Sharada and has to give up teaching.353A skill of this order, apparently acquired without the usual training and practice, deserves to be regarded as truly paranormal. I can see no way that it can be explained by telepathy, saman contact, social facilitation or access to a collective unconscious. Knowledge of, and active use of, a language are very different things. One brain might have access to the information in another, but it is very difficult to conceive of any way that a muscular skill could be transmitted. Speaking a strange language requires long and arduous training of the muscles of the tongue and lips and it is hard to see how such control could be achieved – even by a brain transplant. And yet … I could be underestimating our ability to adapt. There are at least two other well-documented records of people who appear to have suddenly acquired manual skills that require an equivalent degree of practice and control.

In 1961, following the death of her husband, a British housewife called Rosemary Brown began to play the piano well enough to give accomplished performances of difficult compositions. These were unknown to the world of music, but their style was familiar. So they should be, says Mrs. Brown, because the composers are Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven and Monteverdi, who “take over my hands like a pair of gloves”.34In 1968, following an outbreak of poltergeist activity in his family home, Matthew Manning realised that he was somehow responsible and began to exploit and direct the phenomenon. He produced “automatic writing” in a variety of scripts, including Arabic, and even more impressively – a portfolio of “automatic drawings” in the style of Dürer, Picasso, da Vinci, Beardsley and Klee. Although Manning has no appreciable artistic talent in his own right, the drawings are highly accomplished, done very quickly, always in the distinctive style of a particular well-known artist, but are not always reproductions of any known work. “It’s not me,” says Manning, “I simply switch on the energy.”234

The sudden acquisition of linguistic, musical and artistic skills presents a real problem for any explanation of the paranormal. They seem to rule out any possibility of telepathy or extrasensory perception – even of the more naturalistic saman kind I have been suggesting. Which would appear to leave us with just two other possibilities: true possession – the actual invasion of an alien entity; or reincarnation – which in the final analysis amounts to the same thing, except that the entity involved is dead.

I have philosophic and biological problems with both suggestions, and intend to deal with these later, but want first to take a closer look at the actual limits of the senses. They can be surprisingly elastic.

BEYOND SUPERNATURE.

 by Lyall Watson

Amongst the Afrikaners

 

(original title: The 'Niggers' of the Earth)

JUN 12, 2025
Note: In December 2011, I visited South Africa for two weeks to compose a journalistic piece on the state of the Afrikaner people since the end of Apartheid in 1994. That article eventually ran in a journal which is now out of print. But with Afrikaners in the news again these days, I thought it would be appropriate to republish this article, in order to provide context for the complex historical situation facing the “white tribe” today.

Below is the full article, republished in its entirety. —A.N.

VIVA AFRIKANER!

“If you’re out of luck or out of work

We can send you to Johannesburg.”

Though I am neither out of luck nor work at the time, these lyrics from the Elvis Costello song “Oliver’s Army” nevertheless keep turning through my head during my grueling 15-hour flight from Atlanta, Georgia, to the notorious South African metropolis in question.

When Costello recorded this pop-punk classic, a deceptively sweet-sounding jazzed-up calypso tune harshly critiquing British military imperialism, the name of Jo’burg was synonymous with the White Afrikaner Apartheid regime, then still clinging to power. Back in the 1980s, it seemed that everyone and his mother knew all about the odious ideology practiced by the ruling National Party of South Africa. Apartheid was held, in the court of world public opinion, to somehow be a uniquely awful practice, as bad, in its own way, as Nazism had been. It was viewed with such loathing that South Africa in effect became the nigger of the world: ostracized from trade, banned from the Olympics, shunned by right-thinking people everywhere.

Forget the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and other repressive, murderous Communist regimes (so we were instructed by liberal opinion-shapers), it was South Africa alone which truly deserved our greatest contempt. Apartheid, after all, was racial repression, dominance of Blacks by Whites, and therefore fascist, and therefore neo-Nazi, and therefore another Holocaust in the making, which must be stopped at all costs.

Cue the production of movies like Lethal Weapon II, A Dry, White Season, and Cry Freedom, egregiously simplistic cinematic morality plays with noble and magic Negro/White liberal heroes and hateful, mean-faced, invariably Afrikaner villains. Cue also Artists United Against Apartheid’s ridiculous protest anthem “I ain’t gonna play Sun City,” (“Relocation to a phony homeland/ Separation of families, I can’t understand” being among its resplendent lyrics.) And cue the faithful, unthinking, conformist allegiance of the sheeple towards the “respectable” party line.

THE APARTHEID YEARS

To be fair to the propagandists, Apartheid was a lousy ideology, deeply flawed in conception, and often brutal in practice. But these ubiquitous blanket condemnations lacked any saving sense of proportion, whereby one acknowledged that, compared to the rest of Africa, under various bizarre and ghoulish post-colonial regimes run by Idi Amin and other native-born dictators, Blacks actually prospered in Apartheid-era South Africa, and that repression in that country, while deplorable, was relatively mild compared with the tyranny of most Eastern bloc nations of the period.

The Afrikaners—descendants of the original White (Dutch, German, and French) settlers of the African continent and original creators of Apartheid as an official state policy following the victory of D.F. Malan over Jan Smuts in the 1948 election—have long absorbed my interest, for reasons that must relate in some way to the outcast status imposed upon them by self-righteous rock stars and international leftist activist celebrities of the Reagan-Thatcher era. I have a soft spot in my heart for such unreconstructed “niggers of the world”-types, who thumb their noses at the “consensus” of the imposed Zeitgeist, and are hated and pilloried ever after for their effrontery, which is invariably construed as some sort of hateful and repugnant term with a suffix of -ism or -ia (racism, sexism, nativism, homophobia, etc).

In the West today, no one is ostracized more than an alleged thought-criminal, who rejects the a priori tenets of political correctness, and who remains unmoved by ad hominem assaults upon his integrity stemming from his refusal to toe the party line. Though I don’t consider myself a cultural American Southerner, I always enjoy seeing Southerners proudly fly the “stars and bars” of the Confederate Battle Flag, in brazen, stubborn defiance of the edicts of their societal “betters.” As an English teacher and writer, I have actively opposed the culturally-Marxist linguistic scourge of “inclusive language,” which demands that we say “humankind” instead of “mankind,” or “fire-fighter” instead of “fireman,” as well as determinedly rejecting the designs of “diversity” czars who want to dethrone the “Dead White Male” Western canon and have us all reading crappy books written by semi-literate Aboriginal Eskimo albino lesbian hunchbacked cripples out of deference to a specious “inclusivity.”

For almost half a century, the Afrikaner presented a “nigger”-face to a Western world, growing more and more inured to militant modernist liberalism. The Afrikaner wasn’t simply a “racist,” who rejected multiculturalism for favor of thoroughgoing racial separatism; he was also a strongly religious sort of chap, as well. Now modern-day liberals can tolerate conspicuous manifestations of religious fervor, provided that they’re expressed by people who aren’t White, but anytime ethnically-conscious Whiteness and specifically Christian religiosity are combined, the militantly tolerant multiculturalist tends to get all in a snit.

After all—they whinge— weren’t Hitler and the Nazis Christians, as well? (They actually weren’t, but then you can’t expect a modern-day liberal, busy as he is with conscientiously correcting the prejudice and ignorance of his less enlightened neighbors, to be bothered with questioning his own numerous unfounded prejudices or addressing his often grievous historical ignorance.) The Afrikaners, being the “niggers of the world,” had won my sympathy nearly two decades ago, after their leaders caved to world pressure and dethroned themselves, King Lear-like, handing the kingdom over to their enemies.

ARRIVAL— ‘INTO THE FIRE’

Now, in December 2011, I am finally getting to meet my far-flung soulmates. On the generous dime of my benefactors at the National Policy Institute, I have jetted across the world, leaving the relatively safe confines of the good-ol’ U.S. of A. for the southern tip of the Dark Continent, to experience these “niggers” firsthand, now adrift in their formerly recognizable homeland, wandering like poor, homeless, mad King Lear through a gathering, apocalyptic storm.

These days, following the implosion of the Apartheid regime and the advent of true “democracy” in 1994, which has ushered in nearly two decades of rule by the Black-dominated African National Congress, Johannesburg is newly notorious… as the unofficial rape and murder capital of the world.

For this reason, I—a nervous flyer—feel a strange combination of relief and apprehension as we touch down at O.R. Tambo (formerly Jan Smuts) airport. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire,” is a phrase that thrusts itself into my exhausted mind as I file out of the plane and shuffle through customs alongside my weary fellow travelers.

Of course, I am being (slightly) overly dramatic. Johannesburg is a very dangerous city, but—much lurid tabloid-like propaganda to the contrary— it isn’t exactly a war zone. If you exercise proper caution and avoid doing foolish or reckless things or traveling to obviously dodgy locations, you should be okay.

Still, one is immediately struck by the extent to which living and working units in the area are conspicuously fortified. Nearly every private residence and business location in the Gauteng province—an area which includes Jo’burg and its sister city Pretoria, as well as the notorious township Soweto—is a mini castle-keep, complete with a high palisades electric fence, with barbed wires curlicued across the top, and one security company or another advertised prominently at the front.

No resident of the area can simply visit a neighbor by walking up to his front door and knocking or ringing the doorbell; instead, you have to buzz in at the front entrance, and wait for your neighbor to trust that you aren’t a thief, a murderer, or a rapist, before allowing you to obtain entrance by activating the automatic gate.

One is tempted to wonder if this setup isn’t a hysterical overreaction on the part of Whites to the undeniably real crime problem in South Africa. But the more I talked to individual Afrikaners, the more I felt inclined to believe that these fastidious security precautions are eminently reasonable, even necessary.

TRUE HORROR STORIES

Indeed, it seems that everyone has a horror story of some form or fashion to tell, either of a family member or a friend, on a farm or in a city or in a sleepy suburban locale, who became a victim of an awful act of aggravated violence. . . A cousin of one man was relaxing in his home watching a rugby match on TV on a Sunday afternoon, when suddenly a gang of Black hoodlums entered; one of them made a run at his wife in the living room, and as he rushed to protect her, he was shot and killed… A woman’s uncle and aunt were savagely tortured and murdered in their home one night, and nothing was even stolen from the house. . . A fellow in his mid-30s relates that a friend of his once stopped to assist a group of young Black men on the roadway whose car had supposedly broken down; in so doing, he walked right into an ambush—the men attempted an armed robbery, and the friend was gunned down in the ensuing melee. . . Another man opens up about how his girlfriend was carjacked in broad daylight—she found herself set upon by four Blacks with guns at a busy intersection; fearing a gang rape, she left the keys in the ignition and fled in a panic…. A mother tells me of a girl who was suddenly attacked by a Black man with a machete, who hacked her to death without provocation on a dark street one night….

Then there are the less shocking, more numerous accounts of petty muggings here and there; ever-present “smash and grab” raids, whereby a criminal walks up to an unsuspecting motorist, shatters his window with a crowbar or other solid object, reaches in to snatch the driver’s purse or Blackberry from the dashboard or passenger seat; or simple home burglaries which take place while the homeowner is at work or out of town.

To be sure, Afrikaners and other Whites aren’t the only victims of crime—many decent, law-abiding Blacks have also been robbed, raped, and murdered—but there seems evidence to deduce that not a few native Blacks have turned on the Boer nation— their former rulers—with a particularly hateful ferocity. Indeed, illegal and nominally legal activity seem to stem from a similar motivation.

The ruling ANC government frequently changes the names of Afrikaans roads and locations in a transparent effort to punish the people who they felt oppressed them in the past, and imposes quite insane racial quotas upon businesses and social services—even to the point where, for example, prospective black doctors in medical school are held to far less rigorous standards than their White counterparts, in order to increase the representation of Black doctors (never mind, I suppose, how well they treat the sick!).

White farmers, meanwhile, are asked to cede ever more of their private property in the interests of agricultural affirmative action; meanwhile, farm murders continue apace in a steady, dreary campaign of terror.

The details of the murders and assaults of Afrikaner farm families are often upsetting in the extreme: children are raped; elderly couples are made to drink acid and set on fire; one hears of new, bloodcurdling attacks nearly every month. According to credible statistics, there have been nearly 2,000 murders of farmers and their family members since 1991, and the numbers, while fluctuating from year to year, show no signs of abating.

Many have become convinced that the government is in fact behind the murders, whether through deliberate manipulation or as a result of irresponsible, vindictive anti-White rhetoric and propaganda, creating an atmosphere of hate.

‘THE PURPOSE OF TERRORISM IS TO TERRORIZE”

In Pretoria, I speak with three representatives of the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU), who openly declare their strong suspicion that some governmental authorities are complicit in the killings. General director Bennie van Zyl notes that many of the murders seem to take place in areas where the ANC has agitated for a greater degree of “land reform.” (Under the stipulations of “Black Economic Empowerment,” or “BEE” policies, farmers are required to let their black employees have part of their land after a certain number of years of employment.)

“There is certainly a link between violent attacks on farms and land claims,” declares van Zyl. “In provinces where the land claims are big, the attacks are big.”

Bennie Van Zyl
Van Zyl draws a link between what is happening to Afrikaner farmers in South Africa and what has happened all over the continent from time to time when one tribe or group seeks to dispossess another, the most egregious recent example being the savage massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda in the mid-‘90s.

“It’s a pattern in the whole of Africa,” he says. “And I don’t think that the Western world recognizes this pattern. It’s very hard for us Afrikaners to understand it, and we grew up with those guys (the Blacks).” Using language that would make most North American and European Westerners, liberal or otherwise, blanch and titter as if they’d just heard a dirty joke, Van Zyl claims that in his view, it is simply a part of the African’s nature and mindset to conduct such murderous campaigns. “We (White Afrikaners) believe in God, but they (Blacks) believe in the power of their ancestors,” Van Zyl says. “We accept responsibility, while they replace responsibility. Their leaders want them to be perceived as a people with a deep-seated value system that attaches value to life, but the practice is very different.”

The world largely knows about the depredations of Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF Party in neighboring Zimbabwe. In that country, Mugabe’s forces have systematically forced the White farmers off of their land, bankrupting many and physically attacking others. As a result, a once relatively prosperous African country has turned into a blighted, impoverished scourge of a land.

When I ask if South Africa might become the next Zimbabwe, the representatives of the TAU respond that it’s already happening, simply in a covert manner. “It’s a case of a velvet glove covering an iron hand,” says TAU service manager Chris van Zyl.

I shed my liberal leftism long ago, in my undergraduate years, and today I call myself a moderate racialist, yet I find myself discomfited by the implication that Black Africans have some sort of natural proclivity towards ruthless violence. I also find it hard to accept that the ANC, incompetent and corrupt as it may be, has actually organized a murderous campaign against White farmers. I admit as much to these men, who in response own that not all Blacks are culturally depraved; many, in fact, are perfectly nice people.

However, they also ruefully note that the current ruling political party of South Africa—one of whose rally songs is “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer”—isn’t exactly falling over itself trying to make a priority of stopping the farm murders, or stopping Black-on-White violent crime in general.


Even if they aren’t directly complicit, these men maintain, the African National Congress has very little interest, if any, in protecting Afrikaners from harm.

“If there is crime, it suits the ANC,” says Bennie van Zyl. “The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize.”

SURREAL VIBES

During the time I spend in Johannesburg and neighboring Pretoria, the word “surreal” keeps leaping to mind.

It’s just hard to get a handle on this strange place. There is dire talk of continuing Black-on-White crime and even whispers of a coming Rwanda-style attempted genocide, an event supposedly predicted by legendary Afrikaner seer and mystic Nicholaas “Siener” van Rensburg, a kind of Boer Nostradamus who allegedly predicted the assassinations of Koos De La Rey and Hendrik Verwoerd, the advent of black rule in South Africa and the bitter blossoming of the deadly and virulent AIDS epidemic.

Though the Afrikaner nation is largely religious, spiritual devotion does not equate to superstitious credulity; not all buy into the “van Rensburg-as-prophet” notion. Yet there are mounting fears of a widespread, racially-motivated Krystallnacht-like “purge” against Whites taking place in the near future, whether provoked by official anti-Afrikaner ANC rhetoric, or merely as the result of uncontrolled mob violence following some galvanizing event (such as the death of Nelson Mandela) or mounting Black frustration over unemployment and poverty (which haven’t improved and have in fact largely worsened since Mandela’s election in 1994, but both of which are still commonly blamed on the “legacy of Apartheid” and White racism and colonialism).

Such fears of a looming mass slaughter strike me as lurid and overblown, even paranoid. Then again, this is Africa, where terrifying tribal violence has been, and continues to be, commonplace. It’s difficult to picture the world not intervening while Black mobs massacre Afrikaners in the streets all across South Africa… then again, “the world” largely didn’t intervene when Hutus slaughtered millions of Tutsis in Rwanda back in the mid-90s.

Nor has the “world” openly condemned the unrestrained violence against the South African farmer since the ascendancy of the ANC. But expectations of such impending horrors would be easier to digest if much of the country didn’t still strike this visitor as fairly “normal,” orderly, and familiar, in a modern, Western sense. You can, after all, find in this country all of the amenities most First Worlders have come to expect as their birthright. South Africa has posh shopping malls, hip coffee houses, state-of-the-art movie theaters (with stadium seating), fast food restaurants, and well-stocked gas stations (though they call them “garages”). It also has cable television, Internet service, and operational traffic lights (called “robots”).

Yet if you allow yourself to get lulled into complacency by all of this seemingly civilized Western-style prosperity, you might be in for a nasty shock. For example, if you spend too much time lost in thought at a red-lighted “robot,” you might suddenly find yourself carjacked, kidnapped, or sexually assaulted. This is a country where one is advised to run a red light in certain locations if possible, since to stop, that is to say, to obey the given traffic laws, means to make oneself vulnerable to property theft or bodily harm. It is a country in which many drivers plaster their vehicles with “Baby On Board” bumper stickers, not, as in America, in order to shame other motorists into driving safely around them, but rather to beg potential criminals to allow them to take their child out of his harness in the event of a carjacking!

I only have to imbibe this schizophrenia-inducing atmosphere—whereby, day after day, one hopes for tranquil normalcy while at the same time gravely fearing a sudden spasm of violent calamity—for a mere two weeks, and it nearly wears me out. One night I wake from ambiguously horrifying nightmares, gasping desperately for air, having been briefly assailed with some variation of cerebral shell-shock. If merely visiting South Africa produces such a reaction in a person, then how much more severe must be the psychic response to actually living here?

Dan Roodt
‘MY FIRST REALITY CHECK’

Dan Roodt, a distinguished writer and long-standing Afrikaner activist, meets me at an upscale “garage” halfway between Jo’burg and Pretoria. As we sit together and munch on our sandwiches, he reflects on what he calls this “extremely bizarre” set of contemporary circumstances in his country.

“In South Africa, we have the most violent peacetime society in the world,” Roodt says. “It’s almost like a low-intensity war. And there is always a risk that some incident could trigger riots and unrest.”

Roodt blames the “climate of hate” created by an ANC-dominated education system, which he holds responsible for much of the virulent racial antagonism raging among the country’s citizens today.

“South African Blacks are more anti-White than any population in the world,” he observes. “It’s a part of this whole ‘victim’ mentality. The ANC has created a fictional past ‘reality’ that feeds the present violence.”

By endlessly harping on the supposed evils of past White rule, and at the same time cynically playing on base tribal superstitions (President Zuma recently told voters that their ancestors would afflict them with sickness them if they voted against the ANC in coming elections), the present rulers of South Africa have “insured that they’ll never be voted out of office,” Roodt owns. At the same time, he says, many Blacks old enough to remember the Apartheid years will admit that, in many ways, things were better for them then than they are now.

“They (the Blacks) had jobs back then, and things were predictable,” Roodt says. “Social services were competent, unlike now,” he adds, noting the collapse of infrastructure and the graft, corruption, and incompetency that runs rampant among members of the current government.

Roodt is a lean, elegantly handsome, rather patrician-looking 54-year old man with a full head of thick silver hair and a gentle, unassuming, soft-spoken manner that seems in some ways at odds with his passionate, at times almost strident rhetoric. Like many Afrikaner intellectuals his age and older, Roodt began his academic career as a man of the Left, furiously critical of the National Party and its Apartheid policies, only later to take a severe Right-ward turn following the ascension of the ANC to power and the troubled times that followed.

“Our generation had the sense that our parents were conformists,” he says, recalling his turbulent adolescent years. “There was a sense of rebellion at the time. At our schools, some of the older teachers were bullies who abused their authority over us… Once I began rebelling against the way things were, I just went further and further.”

In fact, Roodt went all the way to Paris, France, in part to avoid being conscripted into the armed forces and forced to take part in the border wars South Africa was fighting against hostile Communist-backed neighboring regimes at the time. But he eventually became dismayed by the brazen ignorance and despicable malice displayed by many of his Parisian comrades-in-arms at the time.

“That was my first reality check,” he reflects. “These people I came to know looked at South Africa in a completely simplistic way.” Their perspective, in fact, was ludicrously “black-and-white”: that is to say, the Whites were brutal oppressors, and the Blacks were noble and righteous seekers of justice and liberation.

Roodt became irritated by such instances of typically leftist hive-minded groupthink, and he also began to resent how his home country got assailed with one economic sanction after another by country after country as the years rolled by. “Why should we be singled out for ignominy, when other countries have much worse human rights records?” he asked others at the time, never obtaining a satisfactory answer.

Then came the crucial turning point of his self-imposed exile from South Africa. In the late 1980s, Roodt was invited to meet with the cultural section of the African National Congress in a seminar set up by a certain left-wing “liberation theology”-minded church group in Germany. His experiences at this seminar led him to suspect that an ANC takeover would be disastrous to those of his ethnic and racial background.

“Even though I was still a trendy, liberal literary scholar, I felt a sense of rejection from the Blacks and Coloureds present,” he recalls. “That sent me thinking. On the way back from Germany, I realized that I couldn’t betray my own people to become one of these unreconstructed Communists.”

These days, Roodt is contemplating the best way to continue the struggle for Afrikaner self-determination. Among other projects, including forays into politics, he has alighted upon a (literally) novel concept: he is in the early stages of composing a science fiction manuscript, set on another planet in a distant future, that explains the contemporary clash of races in an allegorical sense. Through such an unusual format, Roodt said he hopes to open minds that are currently paralyzed by rigidly enforced PC dogma surrounding the issue of racial differences.

“I’m at the stage where I feel like I need to do something extraordinary to change people’s minds,” he says.

NEW HOMELANDS

Foremost among the goals of Roodt and others like him is to forge an authentic Afrikaner homeland, a place where the descendants of the historic “Boers” can feel safe and can be assured of their legitimate interests being protected.

Nearly everyone I speak with in Jo’burg and Pretoria said that they found the current state of things utterly untenable. Most fear creeping demographic disaster through massive emigration and low birthrates, continued economic disenfranchisement via relentlessly applied government-sponsored affirmative action and so-called land “reform,” and rising violence against their persons and property in the form of Black crime and terrorism.

Yet for all of the problems the 21st Century Afrikaner faces from without, his stubborn, individualistic streak hampers him from bonding with his kin and facing his enemies in a united front. An oft-heard, somewhat bitter joke I heard on several occasions from many sources, each independent of the others, runs thusly:

Q: What do you get when you put three Afrikaners on a desert island?

A: You get four different churches, and five different political parties.

Though there is much difference of opinion regarding which path to take out of the current quandary, there seems to be a general consensus that accepting the status quo indefinitely is a recipe for both individual and collective disaster, if not eventual ethnic extinction. Desperation hangs so thickly in the air that one can almost smell it. To many, it seems the future holds only the bleakest of prospects. Several hundreds of thousands of Afrikaners have emigrated from their home country to other places in the world since 1994—and even earlier, when the proverbial writing was on the wall that the Apartheid-era government was in its death throes.

Yet while many have left the country (and the continent) for such distant destinations as New Zealand, Australia, England, Canada, and the United States, and others have retreated within their heavily fortified homes behind barbed-wire fences and electric gates, hoping for the best while steeling themselves for the worst, a relatively small number of contemporary Afrikaners have opted to pursue a radical, risky, but potentially more rewarding course of action. Some, that is, have staked their hopes on the prospect of seceding from the current wreck of a “Rainbow Nation,” and constructing a kind of Boer ethno-state in its very midst, with the intention of reclaiming their genetic and cultural self-determination, and saving the Afrikaner identity from dilution and eventual extinction.

Currently, two such communities exist, though there is talk of more attempts to be launched in the near future.

KLEINFONTEIN

Kleinfontein is essentially a Pretoria suburb, located near “Diamond Hill,” the site of a legendary battle in the Anglo-Boer War. Orania, which has garnered much more national and international attention, can be found along an unassuming country road in the arid karoo of the Northern Cape. Both towns are 100 percent Afrikaner in ethnic composition, and the traditional Afrikaans language—an intriguingly uber-guttural tongue sometimes described as “bastard Dutch”—is proudly spoken and fiercely promoted.

The short-term game plan of both Kleinfontein and Orania, of course, is to peacefully coexist with the South African governmental powers-that-be, not to brashly declare themselves inheritors of a new nation, as if spoiling for a fight. One gathers, however, that the leaders of both communities are keeping a sharp eye on social and political trends and measuring their prospects for political independence in the near future, should present cultural deterioration continue apace.

Needless to say, the greater the peril that Afrikaners feel themselves to be facing in their day-to-day lives, the more attractive such radical living options will start to appear, and the more Afrikaners flock to places like Kleinfontein and Orania, the harder it will be for such communities to avoid being seen as dangerously insubordinate hotbeds of rebellion against good “Rainbow Nation” values. For now, however, both towns are basically left alone.

Kleinfontein is a fascinating and impressively-conceived, if dusty and somewhat hardscrabble little place, full of winding dirt roads and rambling country houses, protected by a pair of guards and a checkpoint at the entrance. A statue of Hendrik Verwoerd—former South African prime minister and fervent Apartheid organizer and promoter—stands at the center of the town square.

Verwoerd, who was brutally stabbed to death by a crazed Coloured man in the House of Assembly in Cape Town back in 1966, is an object of veneration to residents of both Kleinfontein and Orania, though both communities heavily reject the man’s policy of mandating racial segregation by law, if for no other reason than that it wound up making the Afrikaner spoiled and “soft,” reliant on other ethnicities to cook his food, clean his house, tend his garden, and otherwise perform his menial tasks.

The insistence that the Boer people need to relearn self-reliance was a constant refrain, one I heard emphasized by nearly everyone. One particularly mordant joke manages to reference both the fear of Black crime and apprehension that the modern-day Boer has lost the hardy, self-sufficient will that so characterized his intrepid Voortrekker ancestors:

Q: Who is an Afrikaner today?

A: Someone who’d rather get murdered in his bed than make it himself.

Kleinfontein’s founders hold that Gauteng is the most opportune province in which to establish a new Boer homeland, as the greater Pretoria region remains the place most heavily populated by self-identified Afrikaners. Still, even in Gauteng, the percentage of Afrikaners is quite low with respect to the general population. Country-wide, recent estimates are that Whites make up only 9 percent of the current population of South Africa—that is to say, around 5 million people in a country of over 50 million citizens (with the untold numbers of non-White illegal immigrants pouring in daily through the porous northern border, rendering the Whites of the country even more racially outnumbered). Of that five million, it’s estimated that around three-and a half million are of Afrikaner descent—the rest being chiefly British. With such dwindling minority status, Afrikaners zealous to maintain their heritage must take particular precautions.

ORANIA

With this perilous situation in mind, the founders of Orania planned ingeniously. They purchased land in the Northern Cape adjacent to the Orange River in the late 1980s, in sparsely populated country. Hendrik Verwoerd took pains during his lifetime to insure that the dry land in this area be irrigated; upon Orania’s establishment in 1991, its residents immediately began raising various crops and readying them for “export” to the rest of the nation, as well as to the world.

Today, Orania has grown impressively prosperous through sales of pecan nuts, alfalfa, wheat, maize, olives, apricots, and peaches, as well as through the manufacture of a diverse array of homemade products from jewelry to bricks to coffins. The population of Orania began quite small, but has grown incrementally through the years—now there are over a thousand residents, and many others who plan to move there in the future once they obtain the means and can obtain local work.

Kleinfontein and Orania are around the same size, but perceptions of late are that Klienfontein has stagnated somewhat, while Orania looks to be poised for ever-greater growth and development. It is difficult to tell if such perceptions are based on anything solid, or are merely indications that Orania’s founders and backers have run a cannier—and more ambitious— PR-campaign. In any case, I determine that my investigation of the current state of the Afrikaner nation would be incomplete without paying a visit to these mysterious and strangely alluring Oranians. I call ahead, book a room at a humble, rustic inn, rent a car, and one morning undertake my own “Great Trek” of sorts to a largely undiscovered country, seldom seen by American eyes.

MY ‘GREAT TREK’ TO ORANIA

The 350 mile drive from suburban Johannesburg to Orania proves to be exhausting. Partly this is due to the typical psychic discombobulation that inevitably ensues when a born-and-bred American driver suddenly has to get used to piloting a car with the steering wheel on the right hand side of the car instead of the left, and of having to stick to the left-hand side of the road, rather than the right.

But other factors don’t help, either. For one thing, even in the Jo’burg suburbs one is constantly set upon by vendors hawking their wares—newspapers, pamphlets, maize stalks, and all sorts of worthless knickknacks—at every stoplight. Occasionally beggars get into the act; there is indeed a strikingly formal manner to African-style begging—they cup their hands together, as if in prayer, and bow their heads humbly to you, looking as pitiful as a sinner before an angry deity. You learn early on to wave them away with a firm gesture of determined disinterest, scrupulously avoiding eye contact all the while.

Then there are the roads themselves. Major South African roads look like American freeways around the cities, but once you get further out, they begin to more closely resemble lesser-used and less-well kept American state highways, complete with potholes and sudden detours into desultory little towns full of cracked plaster and strewn rubbish.

Taking to the road in South Africa can be a challenge
The signage is often confusing, as well; for a while, I follow an arrow on a sign which seems to point towards the continuation of the road I want, but it actually steers me directly into a filthy, poverty-ravaged township. (When the road turned into dirt, I decide I must have misunderstood the where that arrow indicated that I go; I promptly whip a “U-ie” (as they call such a maneuver around here) and find, after returning to the spot of the mistake, that the place I needed to turn was just after the road I’d mistakenly taken.

Hopping onto the N-12 outside of Jo’burg, I then pass through Potchefstroom, then proceed south through Warrenton and Kimberley, in whose dingy city center I temporarily lose the trail again. I have to turn several more U-ies before I regain sight of the N-12; once again, I have been thrown off by ambiguous signage in the midst of a dizzying series of twilit intersections. I pause to purchase a “Zinger Burger” from a roadside KFC (the most popular American fast food chain in this country), and once more head south towards Hopetown.

Hitting this lonely stretch in the gathering dusk, I soon find myself utterly in the dark for a good couple of hours. Here in the karoo, the semi-desert terrain of the Northern Cape, towns are scarce, and this once major highway has essentially become a ragged country road. I grip the wheel, put my brights on when possible, and remind myself to “stay to the left, stay to the left, stay to the left.” Occasionally trucks pass from the other direction with a zoom and a whoosh, and I briefly hyperventilate at the friction of what seems to be a near-sideswipe. Finally, at Hopetown I turn left on N-396 and in forty kilometers, at 10 p.m. I arrive in Orania, where it appears the entire town has gone to bed.

MY ORANIAN ODYSSEY

John Strydom, the kindly if insistently industrious public relations officer of the town, escorts me through the rows of charmingly austere little houses and up a small hill, to where my accommodations have been prepared in a row of rooms still largely under construction. The wind whips madly through the lonely brush as I grab my suitcase and stagger into my spare but clean little suite, overtired and a bit grumpy and frazzled from the arduous trek I’ve just completed. Unlike the original Voortrekkers, I haven’t had to ride in a creaky ox wagon or fight off Zulu impis, but I still feel worn out and down for the count. I sleep well into the morning, but a buzzsaw from a nearby construction site provides a jarring wakeup call.

For the next three days, I explore Orania, talk with its residents and representatives, and take in the sights and sounds. Having arrived with no consciously preconceived notions, I find myself surprised just the same. It seems, in many ways, a very ordinary country town: clean, safe, possibly even a little bit dull.

Indeed, those seeking evidence of a weirdly sinister right-wing neo-Nazi cult in Orania are sure to emerge disappointed. I find the place fairly well bursting with friendliness and pleasant vibes. One is struck, in fact, by just how normal these people seem. They aren’t “freakishly” normal, in a 1950s Leave It to Beaver kind of way; they don’t look like they’ve emerged from any sort of a time warp or temporal anomaly out of a Twilight Zone episode; they don’t dress in ostentatious Victorian garb like characters in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, nor are they clad in unflattering prairie dresses and long patriarchal beards like dwellers of some unsavory polygamous settlement in the heart of rural Utah.

Instead, the Oranians wear contemporary clothes, sport modern hairstyles, listen to rock music and watch Hollywood movies. At the same time, they also seem focused on remaining apart from the larger society—indeed, it may be said that they practice a kind of voluntary “apartheid,” dedicated to “separate development” of a sort. Moreover, nearly all Oranians seem to be quite religiously observant, though not all belong to the same church. Many are Dutch Reformed, the historical Calvinistic faith of the Afrikaner nation; others are members of the Nederduisch Hervormede Church or the Gereformeerde Church, the more traditional-minded and austere versions of the DRC; still others are members of various conservative “house churches.”

But whichever church body they call home, the Oranians agree to disagree on certain matters of theological doctrine and pull together around issues they view as crucial to their contemporary survival. And they feel that they can only ensure their survival and the continuance of their beloved traditions if they unite around a common vision of the polity, one that lays emphasis on both culture and ethnicity.

There is much gloom and doom among Afrikaners today regarding their prospects for the future, but the architects of the Orania project seem to grasp instinctively that a message of grim, militant pessimism doesn’t sell well. The Orania campaign, thus, is to accentuate the positive. Posters around the town sing of Orania as a “dream come true.” The most prominent promotional photograph depicts five pretty, long-legged young girls, each clad in orange, leaping joyously into the air, alongside the perky proclamation “Welcome To Orania!”

The poster communicates youthfulness, vitality, innocence, even a kind of subtle (if wholesome) sex appeal. It causes the viewer to consider the town, not as a bitter refuge-spot for dead-enders, but as a fun place, where one can live free from care and dwell happily with one’s brethren, and maybe meet a potential wife or husband. And the pitch seems to be working: many do come to Orania, if only to stay temporarily. In addition to its export business of crops and commodities, around 30 percent of Orania’s draw comes from the tourist industry. There is a fancy spa and a chalet-style motel, and an upscale restaurant overlooking the Orange River, along with a camping site. Guests commonly spend a night or two in the middle of a trip to or from Cape Town to relax and recharge. Thus, news of the existence and mission of Orania continues to spread via word of mouth.

The overwhelming majority of the people I meet in Orania prove to be welcoming and warmly accommodating. The fact that I’m an outsider (“uitlander”), that I don’t speak the language, and that I’m there in the capacity of a journalist would all seem to be strikes against me. Orania has seen its share of newspaper and magazine writers over the course of its 20 year existence, and needless to say, most reporters have been of the “smirking liberal” variety—the type who are friendly and sympathetic to your face, take advantage of your sincerely offered hospitality, then proceed to write cruelly nasty articles about you. Despite the fact that the Oranians have no real reason to trust me, most are open with their thoughts, and only a rare specimen here or there seems in any way suspicious of my motives.

SEBASTIAAN OF ORANIA

Perhaps the most interesting person I speak with during my stay in Orania is a shy, retiring, rigorously intellectual 36-year old man named Sebastiaan Biehl. One would normally expect a man of his cerebral bent to be found in academia; in Orania, however, he works as a real estate agent. Biehl is an “uitlander” who, one might say, has gone native. He is from Germany, but he has found his calling, to dwell among the Afrikaners—one might even say he is an Afrikaner convert of sorts.

Sebastiaan Biehl
When I ask to confirm that he is German, he answers, “Yes, I was, originally.” But he now considers himself a thoroughly naturalized Afrikaner; he speaks Afrikaans as a first language, and has even published a novel, entitled Beslissing In Die Karoo, in Afrikaans. Biehl’s journey began two decades ago, when he began to correspond with a pen pal who lived on a farm in the Free State province. When he visited in the summer of 1992, he said, it had the effect of a “revelation.” Indeed, after working on his friend’s farm for a couple of months, he had the sensation of finally having found his place in the world.

“I felt like I had come home,” he recalls.

As a solitary, thoughtful lad, Biehl had long felt alienated from contemporary European mores. The erosion of faith in an increasingly secularized society had led, in his observation, to a culture that had grown “cold and immoral,” rife with social ills. Among the Afrikaners, Biehl says, he discovered “a deep-seated conservatism of the hearty sort,” and at the same time he experienced “a rebirth or a rejuvenation of faith.” When he returned to the country of his birth, he came to perceive ever more clearly that he didn’t belong there.

“I saw Germany with new eyes,” he recalls. “I found it superficial and materialistic and hectic and… godless. I couldn’t wait to get back to South Africa again. There was a feeling of freedom there, of wide open spaces. It was like stepping back in time.”

He went to college at South Africa’s Free State University in 1996, earning a degree in Political Science with a focus on History and Politics. Along the way, he changed his first name, adding an additional “a” to his given name of “Sebastian,” in the Afrikaner style. After college, Biehl settled in Bloemfontein, and then in 2005, after much soul searching, he opted to take up residence in Orania. He took a job as a realtor, though it had little relevance to his collegiate training, because he wished to choose a profession in which he could help his adopted hometown to grow and expand.

Biehl says he has absolutely no regrets about his radical lifestyle makeover. Though certain traits still mark him as an “uitlander”—he is, for example, a Lutheran in a community of Calvinists—he couldn’t be happier than to dwell exactly where he does. “Orania will always be where my roots are,” he says. “You have to pay a price if you want to be free.

I have business in Gauteng before I return to the States, so I leave Orania behind on an early Sunday morning while everyone’s at church, winding my way back to suburban Jo’burg. I opt, however, to spend an evening in the city of Bloemfontein to see the Women’s Monument, a site first christened in 1913, dedicated to the remembrance of the women and children who were rounded up by the British during the Anglo-Boer War and dispatched to concentration camps, where many thousands starved to death.

The main fixture of the site is heart-grabbingly powerful (see above). Before a massive obelisk, on a platform ten feet above the ground, there are three sculpted figures: a young woman bears a dead child in her arms, a desperately forlorn look upon her face; she is flanked by a middle-aged woman, who gazes into the distance stoically.

As I stand at the foot of this statue, I find myself tearing up a bit; the simultaneous torment and determined endurance on the faces of the two stone women somehow says everything one needs to know about the horrors of “total” war and its dreadful victimization of the innocent. During the Anglo-Boer war, the British resorted to horrifying atrocities in order to achieve domination over the scrappy Afrikaners; they slaughtered livestock, burned down farms, and doomed helpless civilians to sure, agonizing deaths. They weren’t the first ones to do such things—Generals Sherman and Sheridan, under the command of Abraham Lincoln, decimated the American South in much the same manner half a century before. Nor was the British army the last to go “scorched earth” on its enemies, as all familiar with the bitter history of 20th-century warfare, and the hardly less horrifying first decade of the 21st century, can attest.

But one cannot escape the sense that the British establishment of concentration camps represents some massively significant betrayal of ostensibly humane and “civilized” Western values, regardless of which side, the Brits or the Boers, had the more legitimate claim to political control over the Orange State and the Transvaal back in 1899. The Afrikaners suffered horrendously in this war, in manifold ways: physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Anger and bitterness for the wounds they endured at the hands of the British, in fact, still fester viciously to this day, over a century later.

THE VOORTREKKER MONUMENT

Three days after viewing the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein, I visit another important Afrikaner landmark, and I once again find myself emotionally shaken, moved beyond measure for reasons I barely understand. The Voortrekker Monument sits atop a hill in the outskirts of Pretoria.

It is an imposing, cathedral-like edifice— somewhere near 130 feet tall—which can be viewed from a vast distance. In some ways, the Voortrekker Monument is the architectural antithesis of the Women’s Monument. Completed and christened in 1949, it celebrates a major victory for ascendant Afrikanerdom just as the Women’s Monument commemorates the horror and humiliation of an ignominious defeat.

The year before the construction of the monument, in 1948, the Afrikaner-favored National Party, led by D.F. Malan, defeated Jan Smuts, long-standing incumbent prime minister of the British-led United Party. A half century after losing the Anglo-Boer War, the Afrikaner had at last seized the upper hand and taken control.

Afrikaners tend to view Malan’s electoral triumph of 1948 the same way that most of today’s Black population sees Mandela’s ascension to the South African presidency in 1994: it was a moment, following a great, decades-long struggle, in which they finally won what they felt to be their birthright. Crucial in building this victory was a canny campaign to celebrate the heroic valor of the Boer Voortrekkers of the previous century, who under the leadership of Andries Pretorius, won what they felt to be a miraculous victory over far-superior Zulu forces at Blood River in present day Kwazulu-Natal on December 16, 1838.

Prior to the battle, the Voortrekkers had suffered several terrible defeats on the veldt at the hands of Dingaan Zulu’s mighty army, including a notorious “sucker-punch” ambush in which Dingaan invited Piet Retief and various other Voortrekkers to his camp under the auspices of signing a peace treaty, before directing his troops to torture and massacre the unarmed White men. Following this grievous incident, Zulu warriors conducted numerous destructive attacks on Voortrekker laagers, killing around 500 men, women and children.

Reeling with grief, and facing the prospect of impending utter extinction, the bedraggled camp of devoutly Christian pioneers led by Pretorius turned to prayer. On December 9, they took a vow, declaring before heaven that if God granted them victory in the coming battle, they would forever commemorate the date. A week later, on December 16, the ragtag 480 Afrikaners turned away a fiercely invading force of Zulu impis numbering somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000, killing over 3,000 of their enemy and suffering not a single casualty in the process. It was afterwards hailed as Geloftedag, or “Day of the Vow.”

Geloftedag is still a holy day in the traditional Afrikaner calendar, a day to remember the bravery and dedication of one’s ancestors, as well as being a time to give thanks to the Almighty for his manifold blessings. It is like Thanksgiving, Veteran’s Day, Passover, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one: a time for unabashedly celebrating one’s national and ethnic heritage, while also engaging in solemn, sober spiritual reflection.

Geloftedag services are held in churches, parks, and other locations across the country, but the Voortrekker Monument is the largest and most publicized of all such venues. The building itself is an extraordinary enough place to investigate even on a quiet day. One ascends its massive staircase and walks along the length of its impressive exterior, scrutinizes its high stone walls flanked by massive statues of bearded Boers holding huge rifles, and one is filled with a sense of awe, as well as a kind of terror.

This is a structure designed to intimidate; there is an undeniably brutal quality to its beauty. If the Voortrekker Monument had a voice, it would be low, loud, and thunderously threatening. It is the sort of building that Leni Reifenstahl would have loved to use as a set piece. To call it an example of “Fascist architecture” may be misleading, since ideological affinities between National Party-led South Africa and Nazi Germany are quite tenuous, for reasons already mentioned. Still, just as the National Socialists in Germany chanted “Seig Hiel” at their rallies, the Voortrekker Monument unashamedly demands that we “hail” a glorious “victory” for the Afrikaner tribe in South Africa.

THE MIRACULOUS DEFEAT OF DIGNAAN ZULU AT BLOOD RIVER

If one objects that everything seems crudely simplistic and shamelessly triumphalist in tone, it could reasonably be retorted that all sites dedicated to national accomplishments and ideals—from Mount Rushmore to Trafalgar Square to the Arc de Triomphe—share this characteristically unselfconscious “hurray for our side” spirit of chauvinistic bravado.

Today, of course, in our politically correct “post-colonial” age, historically White nations are discouraged from indulging in such sentiments, thus lending the Voortrekker Monument a rather delicious air of ripe, forbidden fruit. The majestic interior contains a marble frieze which runs across the wall from one side to the other—a pictorial history is presented of the Voortrekker movement. We see the Boers leave the Cape and escape British tyranny to forge a destiny for themselves in the wilds of a savage and untamed continent. We see Piet Retief’s disastrous—and fatal—mistake of attempting to make peace with the double-dealing Dingaan. We witness Zulu impis preparing to kill Afrikaner women and children; the Black warriors brandish their spears before helpless throngs of terrified Whites. One old woman holds a baby in the crook of her left arm while she reaches out with her right hand and grasps the muscular arm of a Zulu; she looks up at him beseechingly, but he glowers back at her with pitiless hatred. A boy tries to shield his younger sister from attack by putting his little arms over her head; another boy picks up a musket dropped by his dead father, and takes aim at his attackers, thus presaging the ultimate triumph of frontier gumption and divine will in the miraculous victory of Blood River.

The final scene in the frieze is, indeed, a depiction of this famous battle, in which the embattled Boers routed an army 20 times their size. For a people that now view themselves as outnumbered and existentially imperiled, every day losing ground to their enemies, the contemplation of such an incredible past triumph must inspire the same sort of pride and reverential longing that an observant Jew must feel when he ponders the notion of the Red Sea parting at Yahweh’s command, saving the Israelites from certain doom.

DAY OF THE VOW

On Friday, December 16, 2011, I attend Geloftedag ceremonies at the Voortrekker Monument. It is a bright, brilliant day, and by 8 a.m., a large crowd has already gathered. Once more, as at Orania, I am struck by just how un-striking the gathered throng appears. Most are dressed in semi-formal attire, as one would for church, but many more wear jeans, shorts, and sneakers. Very few sport 19th-century period costumes, which is a bit of a disappointment. . . I’d expected to run across some colorful, brash, outspoken, feisty characters, but for the most part, this crowd just seems like a lot of orderly, peaceable, well-behaved White folks. I would almost call them “innocuous.” Aside from the penchant of many children to go barefoot (a unique Afrikaner cultural phenomenon) and the prevalence of the Afrikaans language, these people could be amiable, mild-mannered suburbanites sitting beside me at an Atlanta Braves game at Turner Field.

Still, the fact that so many of them went out of their way to attend this event must be important, and it’s quite possible that I, an ‘uitlander’ who doesn’t speak the language, am missing something. The people pack into both levels of the building, while some find shady places to sit outside; led by a keyboard player and a cantor, the crowd duly sings patriotic songs and Christmas carols from a shared program.

A smiling minister delivers a sermon in a friendly, personable manner—an Afrikaner friend later tells me that he emphasized the importance of acting for the glory of God, not out of a desire for personal gain. Though this pastor related his message to the Blood River battle and its aftermath, the content of the homily still sounds like standard evangelical boilerplate, like something one might hear delivered by some blandly handsome young preacher at a Baptist megachurch in heartland America. It somehow seems like a “lite” version of Afrikanerdom, a watering down of the fierce, uncompromising spirit which built this edifice over half a century ago.

But just as I began to fret that the Boer cause may have been rendered utterly toothless by modernity, I found myself witness to a moment of real, almost elemental power, which convinced me otherwise. Of course, this moment has to wait until all of the singing, and the speechifying, has ceased. Afterwards, the crowd gathers around a cenotaph, or plaque, located in the middle of the bottom floor. Some lean over the railing of the floor above, and peered downward. On the cenotaph reads the words “Ons vir jou, Suid-Afrika” (“We for you, South Africa”).

As the noontime hour approaches, a beam of sunlight shines through a strategically carved hole high above our heads in the roof of the Monument; the crowd buzzes excitedly as the circle of sunshine makes its way along the floor, before finally alighting on the cenotaph at exactly 12:00. Then the crowd suddenly stands, and in lusty, full-throated voices, belts out “Die Stem van Suid-Afrika,” the former national anthem of South Africa prior to 1994:

From the blue of our heaven

From the depths of our sea,

Over our eternal mountain ranges

Where our cliffs their answer give

We will answer to your calling,

We will offer what you ask

We will live, we will die, We for Thee, South Africa!

Following this impromptu performance, the crowd gives a hearty cheer, then several parents send their children to pose in front of the sunbeam as they take photographs. People are still standing in a circle, facing one another, and I feel myself in some ways witness to a nation facing itself, wondering what comes next.

It is grand and glorious to sing together, as if with one voice, of giving one’s life for one’s country, but what does one do when the song ends, and one recalls that his country, in essence, no longer exists?

It is a dire question that many in Europe and North America will no doubt be asking themselves in the coming years. Due to his immediate circumstances, the Afrikaner feels urgently compelled to ask it now. Whether he ultimately succeeds or fails to find the correct answer, we will find much to learn from observing the various steps he is currently taking to attempt to secure a proper homeland for himself and his children.

And if he actually manages to triumph, against all odds, and again emerges victorious, as his ancestors did at Blood River, then unreconstructed Westerners will find in the study of the Afrikaner’s present struggles an invaluable treasure, an ace that we can keep in the turbulent times ahead.

Andy Nowicki
https://substack.com/@andynowicki