The Chinese have been in America since at least the 1600s, back when California was a way station for the Manila galleons crossing the Pacific. They began to arrive in numbers from 1848 to 1882, from the California Gold Rush to the Chinese Exclusion Act. They were part of a Chinese diaspora in which millions fled the dying decades of the old, corrupt Qing dynasty in China. They went to South East Asia, Australia, the Pacific, the Americas, and South Africa. This post is just about the US bit.
Snapshot:
- Location: mostly the West Coast.
- Population: over 100,000 by 1880, about 95% male in 1900. Most came from Toishan (aka Taishan, fka Sunning) County in Guangdong province in the south of China. Very few Chinese Americans were then ABCs – American Born Chinese.
- Major cities: Chinatown in San Francisco, California.
- Language: Cantonese (not Mandarin) Chinese. Most could not speak English!
- Religion: Confucianism, ancestor worship, Buddhism, Taoism. Fewer than 20% were Christian – mostly those who had been converted in China by Protestant missionaries.
- Government: Were not allowed to become citizens and vote before 1898 (and then only if US-born). They would even lose the right to testify in court or make bail. But they could still sometimes effect change through protest and court cases.
- Economy: Chinese-owned businesses (restaurants, laundries, grocery stores, contractors), contract labour (coolies), prostitution, etc. Much of the money was sent back to China, where the dollar went farther and most of their families still lived – US immigration policy did not let most Chinese men bring over their wives.
Timeline:
- 1834: Afong Moy becomes the first recorded Chinese woman to arrive in the US. Chinese sailors were already a common sight in New York. She became a museum exhibit and later a P.T. Barnum sideshow.
- 1847: British banks cut off funding to warehouses along the Pearl River in Guangdong province. Trade within the province comes to almost a complete stop, throwing 100,000 out of work.
- 1848: Gold Mountain – what the Chinese call California after gold was discovered there. Some struck it rich, but most drifted back to San Francisco where many opened restaurants and laundries. White men considered cooking and laundry women’s work – but neglected to bring their women. That left an opening for Chinese men to make a living. By 1920 nearly half of Chinese workers worked in a restaurant or laundry.
- 1850-64: Taiping Rebellion in China leaves over 20 million dead.
- 1863-69: The Transcontinental Railroad built. The part from California to Utah was built by a workforce that was over 90% Chinese. Their experience in China with explosives and building things into the sides of mountains was invaluable.
- 1882: Chinese Exclusion Act – nearly all Chinese immigration is shut off.
- 1885: Tape v Hurley – California Supreme Court rules that the state has to provide a public education for children of the Mongolian race, not just those of the white, Negro, and Indian races. But schools could still be racially segregated.
- 1885: Rocky Springs massacre in Wyoming.
- 1887: Snake River massacre in Hell’s Canyon, Oregon.
- 1892: Geary Act: Chinese Americans have to carry ID or risk deportation. Cannot testify in court or make bail.
- 1898: US v Wong Kim Ark – US Supreme Court extends birthright citizenship of the 14th Amendment to Chinese Americans.
– Abagond, 2022.
Sources: mainly “The Chinese in America” (2003) by Iris Chang.
See also:
- Welcome to Asian American History Month 2022
- Manila galleons
- Settlement of Asians in the Deep South (1763 – 1882)
- Chinese Americans in the Deep South after 1882
- US v Wong Kim Ark
552
Compare this to Lim Inko – a Chinese convict who was banished to the Cape of Good Hope. His great-great-great-grandson was Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, President of both the Orange Free State and the South African Republic. He compiled the constitution of the latter.
LikeLike
So, you “Afrikaners” are mong(rels)ols. Why am I not surprised?
LikeLike
4.7% non-White admixture on average, which means that Afrikaners are technically “people of color”, and thus, cannot be criticized. Don’t blame me for this rule, I didn’t create it.
Black Americans are ~20% White on average. There’s far more of us in you than there is you in us.
LikeLike
My question to you is why do you hate the ~20% of you in us instead of hating the 4.7% of us in you?
“…Afrikaners are technically “people of color”, and thus, cannot be criticized.”
You’re a comedian. “People of color” get blamed for everything wrong in society by “people of color” like you.
LikeLike
The 4.7% non-White admixture is not enough to adversely affect our phenotypes or intelligence.
It mostly comes from slaves, who lost their culture, so we don’t have undesirable cultural traits from our small number of non-White ancestors. (4.7% is approximately 3/64…Afrikaners have over 20 White ancestors for every non-White ancestor)
You still don’t look like us, act like us, or feel a bond with us, despite having 20% of us in you. Your bloodlines are far more diluted than ours…Afrikaners still genetically cluster with Europeans, AfrAms don’t cluster with Africans.
LikeLike
@ Paul Kruger
Wow… I thought you would like to have more (East) Asian genes/blood than 4.7%. Guys from your ideological camp oft say that East Asians (Japanese Chinese, Korean, etc) are the most intelligent people on the planet…
But in reality you would like to be less mixed to them… Go figure!
In reality, you don’t like intelligence, don’t you?
LikeLike
“You still don’t look like us, act like us, or feel a bond with us, despite having 20% of us in you.” Shows how little you know. Google these ‘black men’ who are the spitting image of the Nordic Aryan type: Walter F. White of the N.A.A.C.P, Charles W. Chesnutt and Jean Toomer(Nathan Pinchback Toomer). I’ll go on a limb here and guess they looked whiter than you. As for the ‘intelligence’ bit, I’d like you to explain how come Alexandre Dumas, his sons Dumas fils and Henry Bauër were great writers but non of their whiter relatives, the Labourets and the Davy de la Pailleteries produced nothing anybody cares to remember. The same can be observed for Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. I’m dying to hear your white intelligence explanation for these genealogical facts. For your edification, you might learn something from this podcast on the Dumas: (https://halfarsedhistory.net/2019/10/27/episode-70-four-generations-of-the-dumas-family/)
LikeLike
As for feeling a bond with you, centuries of music and other arts say that claim is bs, not surprising since that claim comes from a master bs artist like you.
LikeLike
“Afrikaners still genetically cluster with Europeans, AfrAms don’t cluster with Africans.”
Not true:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1172257
LikeLike
There also was a significant amount of Chinese immigration to Hawaii in the 1800s, although primarily when it was still an independent kingdom. Chinese immigrants to Hawaii were more likely to marry and settle down with their families.
LikeLike
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/living-between-chinese-south-africa
LikeLike
https://camissamuseum.co.za/index.php/7-tributaries/6-exiles-refugees-convicts/lim-inko-abraham-de-veij
LikeLike
@munubantu – most of the non-White admixture in Afrikaners isn’t East Asian.
@gro jo – what’s your point? That the very small percentage of AfrAms who are more than 3/4 White look almost fully White? The vast, vast majority of AfrAms don’t look like this.
I look pure Verwoerd White.
Dumas was 1/4 black at most. Pushkin was 1/8 black. Funny how Whites don’t need to resort to people who are majority non-White to make a point about their racial capabilities.
Machado de Assis was the son of a “black” Brazilian and a Portuguese woman. “Black” Brazilians are heavily mixed, so he was almost certainly less than half black.
Rap music doesn’t equal a bond between my race and yours. In fact, rap music is very anti-White.
@Solitaire – showing ancestry from a population =/= genetically clustering with them. Puerto Ricans show substantial ancestry from Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians, but, other than a small percentage of outliers, do not cluster with any of those groups.
Lim Inko’s great-great-great-grandson was a leader of two Boer Republics, which goes to show that a small amount of non-White ancestry was never an impediment in South Africa the way it was in America.
LikeLike
A mean of 0.69 to 0.74 translates to their African ancestry being over two-thirds to just under three-fourths. That’s a genetic cluster.
LikeLike
Having a double digit percentage of admixture from a extremely distant group is more than enough to pull you out of a genetic cluster…someone who was 3/4 White and 1/4 black wouldn’t cluster with Europeans, either.
LikeLike
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=ptb;c=ptb;c=ptpbio;idno=6959004.0009.012;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=ptpbiog
“Cluster” refers to the genes themselves, not to Europeans or Africans or Asians. If an individual has 74% genetic ancestry linked to West African populations, that means the individual has inherited multiple genes — a preponderance of genes — that cluster with genes found predominantly among West Africans.
LikeLike
You are genetically ignorant. Also, we will get our Boer Republics back soon. Just you wait…
LikeLike
@Paul Kruger, everyone else
Very interesting discussion!
Yes, it’s indeed true that the Afrikaners are indeed a very mixed people, and their genealogies prove it! Many of them can be traced several times over to relationships, marriages, one-night stands, and occasional rapes between white men and nonwhite women back in the early days in the middle seventeenth century. The first people to call themselves Afrikaners were often the children of such mixed relationships.
‘Tis also important to remember that the Afrikaners had several people groups from all around the world contribute to their gene pool to such a degree that it can be mind-boggling to most of the world. Heck, I like to say to others that in a lot of ways (and this is very true indeed) that the Afrikaner people are the primordial or original South Floridians. When you look at and compare South Florida and South Africa, you can’t escape the many similarities. Yes, there are differences (SA skews more conservative and Christian than SFL), but in the main, South Africa and South Florida are more the same than different. For one thing, South Floridians are very, very mixed and global. There are many instances of the races mixing each other (especially amongst the younger generations), and in point of fact, South Florida’s population contains many people whose ancestries you’d least expect to see—much less mix. An example out of my own life is that of my longtime friend Michelle Mihalko. She is of primarily Spanish (Basque and Galician) and Hungarian (mainly Budapest area) descent (father Hungarian, mother Spanish), though if you ask me (or even look at her, for that matter), you’d be inclined to say that she’s much more than that, and I would agree with you most heartily. Physically, while you can debate her Spanish features (some people I know say she looks more Spanish), she tends more towards the Asian in her features. When I first met her well over a decade ago in the late 2000s when I just began middle school (she’s older than me by a year), I actually thought she was Japanese! I personally believe that Michelle is much more than Spanish and Hungarian, and it’s safe to say that she has Asian roots. Basic white girl she most certainly is not. She’s mixed-race through and through.
By the way, a good novel that helps people understand SA and the Afrikaans people is “The Covenant,” by James Michener. It mainly tells the story of the van Doorn family through ten generations over a three-hundred-plus-year period, from the 1620s to the early 1980s (though the book itself spans over 14,000 years overall). You see their struggles with coming to terms with their roots and the embarrassment it entails. I’ll put it quickly like this:
In the middle of the seventeenth century, a Dutch-Indonesian seaman of twenty-three years of age named Willem van Doorn (the son of Amsterdam merchants) meets and develops a clandestine relationship with a Muslim servant-girl named Ateh, who works in his parents’ mansion as a maid. Willem and Ateh consummate their relationship, and on their arrival to the Cape of Good Hope in 1649 (Ateh is pregnant), Willem requests of the Lords Seventeen (the same group his estranged older brother, Karel, is a member of—Karel is older than Willem by ten years) permission to marry his Arab mistress, but is denied because she is not of the same race as him. After their son Adam is born the year of their arrival, they go onto have another child around this time, and eventually, the relationship ends and Ateh settles for an Angolan named Jango, and embarks with her new husband and the two children she had with Willem for a new life as a Trekboer on the open veldt, far away from the colony’s original boundaries (which are mainly centered around the immediate area of Cape Town and a few surrounding lands). Willem is actually placed on trial for his relationship with Ateh, and is punished by being drawn and quartered, which leaves him with a limp for the rest of his life. Anyway, he marries his sister-in-law Katje Danckaerts (her sister, Kornelia, is married to Willem’s brother), and with her has a son named Marthinus, the first “pure white” van Doorn born on South African soil. Marthinus grows up and marries another King’s Daughter (girls sent from Holland as brides to the colonies) named Annatjie, and with her has three children: Sarel, Petronella, and Hendrik—of these three children, Petronella and Hendrik are the most important to our story.
In process of time, the van Doorn children grow up, and in the same token, patriarch Willem grows old and dies in his sixties (a very advanced age for the time). His grandchildren become of age (including those unknown to him through Ateh), and they marry. Sarel marries Dutchwoman Geertruyd Steen (a King’s Daughter like his mother and grandmother were), while sister Petronella marries Arabian woodsman Bezel Muhammad, son of indentured servants from the Red Sea area brought to the Cape via Madagascar. As for Marthinus’s son Hendrik, he leaves the family home in the small hamlet of Trianon (which they founded) in 1702 for life as a Trekboer, joining in much the same life his granduncle did alongside his mother and stepfather after hear being made to leave Willem. While on the Trekboer life, Hendrik brings along with him his wife Johanna, and with her has a large brood of several children. One of these children is a son named Adriaan, also known as “Crazy Adriaan” because of his later habit of talking to a pet hyena named Swarts. Adriaan continues the Trekboer life as a single man, and eventually, he stumbles upon an attractive young lady named Zainab van Valck. Zainab—better known as Seena—is the daughter of rough-and-tumble outlaw and career criminal Rupertus “Rooi” van Valck, known for his rough temper, tough talking, and foul mouth. His ancestors were transported from Holland (Leopold van Valck, Sr. being the family patriarch) around a decade or so after Willem van Doorn’s arrival as punishment for their crimes to the Cape, and the family has been wreaking havoc ever since on the open veldt, harassing fellow Trekkers and picking fights with surrounding blacks. Rooi’s wife is the former Fatima Muhammad, known as the “dark wife” due to her strong Arab features and dark, deep brown skin. Unbeknownst to Adriaan is that his future wife is his cousin (first cousin once removed to be precise). How are they related? Easy. When Petronella van Doorn married her friend Bezel Muhammad in 1694 (over the concerns of her mother), she gave birth the next year to a daughter named Fatima, named in honor of her paternal great-grandmother in Arabia. Willem van Doorn is thus Fatima’s great-grandfather and Seena’s great-great grandfather. Of course, Adriaan (Willem’s great-grandson) is unaware of this. His father Hendrik never told him of his relatives on the veldt, but no matter, Adriaan marries his cousin anyway. Seena’s sister will also marry an important person surnamed Albertyn—very important later. Adriaan and Seena have many children, and as the generations pass, their descendants, though aware of their mixed roots, continually try hiding them, yet it comes back to bite them. Eventually, Willem’s fifth great-grandson Detlev gets the shock of his life when he discovers that a little girl named Petra is his cousin, as is Judge Leopold van Valck.
An interesting book. Read while you can!
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Paul Kruger, everyone else
By the way, Petra Albertyn is accused by her best friend’s mother (Mrs. van Valck) of being mixed race because of her Mideastern or Arab features. When a team of three Afrikaners (Messrs. op ‘t Hooft, van Doorn, and van Valck) and one Englishman (Dr. Adams) delve into Petra’s genealogy, they discover that on her father’s side, she is a descendant of Willem van Doorn through the marriage of a daughter of Rooi van Valck to someone Michener describes as “an early Albertyn” in the 1730s, right at about the same time her sister Seena married their cousin Adriaan van Doorn. Over the generations, the descendants of this other van Valck sister and her Albertyn husband absorb themselves into Afrikaans society, oblivious (like their cousins) of their mixed roots. Yet, even so, they are still reminded of them through physical features that come up prominently in each descendant, and it is interesting to note how each and every one of Fatima Muhammad’s descendants look something like her across the generations, and in point of fact, both male and female alike have something of an Arab tint to their features. In fact, Detlev’s grandfather Tjaart looked more like a Bedouin than a Dutchman, as did his great-grandfather Lodevicus the Hammer, son of Adriaan and Seena. Tjaart had Detlev’s father Jakob late in life with his third wife (Aletta Probenius) at the middle of the nineteenth century, so that means that there is a difference of almost an entire century between the births of Tjaart and his grandson, and as I recall, Tjaart died a very old man in his high nineties a few years before Detlev was born, so he never knew him outside of one photograph that is lost when British forces burn the homestead at Venloo in the Boer War (Jakob is a commando leader in the Transvaal at this time). Anyway, to get back to my point, I do not think that the last “pure white” van Doorn (Adriaan) could have realized the embarrassment his descendants would have as a result of his marriage to his cousin Zainab van Valck. As Zainab’s mother was the great-granddaughter of seaman Willem van Doorn—who himself was in an interracial relationship before marrying Katja Danckaerts—the fact that the Arab features she inherited from her father, Bezel, would have remained within the family for generations was more than likely not realized or cared about by otherwise uneducated Trekboers speaking a version of Dutch that would slowly become Afrikaans. I truly do not think either of the ancestors would have realized or cared about it one bit.
In any case, it must be stated that the fact of their mixed origins continues to haunt them for a long, long time. Even the strikingly gorgeous belle Johanna van Doorn (later, Krause, on her marriage to schoolteacher Piet) is described as the prettiest girl in the old Transvaal because of her exotic features when introduced in Chapter 10, I think. Petra’s very existence is the rock that breaks the thorn in the side of this family as they all realize that they are not as white as they say they are. The night after this bombshell decision, Judge van Valck asks his wife in bed after sex whether he truly is a white man, to which she replies in the affirmative because of his pink fingernails! Leopold can’t stomach what he and his wife have learnt, and it embarrasses them. He, his colleague van Doorn, and the little girl he voted to expel from the local white elementary school are all relatives thanks to a marriage between Willem’s granddaughter Petronella and her longtime friend Bezel Muhammad, son of intended servants from the land that is now Jordan. In Biblical times, Petra was an important and wealthy city cut into the rocks, and it literally means that in Greek. You can still go over to what is now Jordan and see this ancient city today. Also, the name “van Doorn” literally means “from the thorn” in Dutch, in the same way that “van Valck” means “from the falcon.” So in other words, little Petra is the rock that breaks the falcon’s thorn! Make sense? Michener truly knew what he was doing here! I also heard the book was banned in SA for a time because of this. Detlev and his family know that they are not pure Europeans, and this hurt pains them deeply—it really does!
LikeLike
“@gro jo – what’s your point? (You tell me?) That the very small percentage of AfrAms who are more than 3/4 White look almost fully White? (Try again doofus. They look fully white not almost.)The vast, vast majority of AfrAms don’t look like this.(Er, yes, captain obvious.)
I look pure Verwoerd White. (So you say.)
Dumas was 1/4 black at most. Pushkin was 1/8 black. Funny how Whites don’t need to resort to people who are majority non-White to make a point about their racial capabilities. ( Funnier still, how you skirt the fact that these 3/4, 7/8 types bested their 8/8 white relatives. I suspect that their 8/8 black ancestors contributed to their genius. In the case of Pushkin, I’m pretty sure that’s the case. His 8/8 black great grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6kn_gYCaWw ), was a fine engineer who spoke several languages. If you’re ever in the very white cities of Tallinn, Estonia, St. Petersburg, Russia, be sure to pay your respect to the shade of this great black African by visiting the coastal fortifications of Tallinn and the fortress of Kronstadt on the island of Kotlin near St. Petersburg. His 1/2 white son Ivan was a hero of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774. He was one of the founders of the city of Kherson, currently in the news due to the Russia-Ukraine(NATO) war! I get a kick out of racists like you talking nonsense.
Machado de Assis was the son of a “black” Brazilian and a Portuguese woman. “Black” Brazilians are heavily mixed, so he was almost certainly less than half black. (Based solely on your vast ignorance, of course. Like a broken clock, you may be right, but you haven’t explained how 1/2, 3/4 or 7/8 can be greater than 8/8. Try again.)
Rap music doesn’t equal a bond between my race and yours. In fact, rap music is very anti-White.” (Moronic as usual. Rap isn’t a tenth of what Blacks created. Wouldn’t surprised me to learn that you were conceived while your parents were doing the deed to music created by some talented black musicians.)
LikeLike
“Moronic as usual. Rap isn’t a tenth of what Blacks created. Wouldn’t surprised me to learn that you were conceived while your parents were doing the deed to music created by some talented black musicians.”
hearty chuckle … trailing off to small twitters
LikeLike
@All, Paul Kruger specifically
By the way, I forgot to add in my original comments that several prominent families are discovered by this team to have been descended from Bezel and Petronella Muhammad, as they had many, many children over the years of their marriage. I’d say that Petronella may well have continued giving birth into the 1710s, which is when her oldest child Fatima left the house to embark on her own Trekboer journey at the age of seventeen. Although I have many disagreements with Abagond on the issue of race, I think it makes good sense to post on “The Covenant” if he has read it, or at least on the Afrikaners. He could add “The Covenant” to his reading list.
LikeLike
@ Abagond
Do you have a post on South Africa?
LikeLike
@ Solitaire
No post on South Africa.
LikeLike
@ Everett F. Pomare
I’m not sure if I understood the core idea of your previous comments.
Are you are arguing that Afrikaners/Boers are actually mixed (even if only partially) despite the fact that in the present political climate they have appeared as some of the most prominent defenders of “Whiteness” worldwide or “White Supremacy”?
If this is the answer, then I must say that many if not most people who have given some thoughts on racial issues already knew that. This is indeed one of the main reasons why some scholars do not believe anymore in the purity of any race in humans, and tend to put in brackets the very idea of biological race.
But before anybody goes to romanticize this or that specific Afrikaner/Boer family, I want to remind you that in South Africa the truly officially recognized mixed people (according to the old racial classification ultimately encoded in the Apartheid books of law) are/were the so-called Coloreds. And one of the main motives for the law forbidden interracial sex or marriage was not so much to prevent Blacks to engage in that way with Whites but, indeed, to prevent Coloreds to do so. Coloreds were closer socially to Whites than Blacks, and something was needed to prevent them to “contaminate” the “pure” White genetic pool, or so went the idea. Blacks were too further away socially from Whites to present a real “racial danger” of said “contamination”.
But if you allow me to ask: Where did come your interest for mixing inside Afrikaner/Boer families? Do you belong to one such family? Or do you see in your own family’s history something similar to what happened in those South African families? By the way such stories are more universal than one can think!
See, https://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/sandra-laing-a-black-girl-born-to-white-parents/
Another thing that perplexed me for long and I have no answer yet is the fact that there are a few very influential families in Angola with the last name “Van Dunen” (sometimes “Van Dunem”). That type of surname seems clearly a “Dutch contamination” (cultural/biologic?) despite the fact that many of them are Black in appearance! Is this somehow related to the treks of Boers of past centuries? Up to Namibia and the frontiers of Angola?
See for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisca_Van_Dunem
@ abagond
In your post you said:
I find very fun how people in the Anglo-sphere always think of themselves as “the whole world”. In the Southern African region – a region encompassing countries like Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, etc (see the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Africa) – you could find Chinese minorities in some countries outside South Africa back in the seventies or before. For example in Mozambique there was an influential Chinese minority at that time and I remember clearly that the first large (for the time!) shopping center in Maputo (then called Lourenço Marques) was owned by Chinese families. Most of those families left the country after its independence. Today’s Chinese are a totally new group and come as a direct result of the growing influence of the PR of China worldwide and in Africa in particular.
LikeLike
@ Abagond
Perhaps it would be a good idea to have one on South Africa, if for no other reason as a place to redirect off-topic comments.
LikeLike
@ Solitaire
Okay. It will be my next post.
LikeLike
@ Abagond
Thank you!
LikeLike
@Munubantu
Yes, the Afrikaners, though mainly white today, do indeed have a mixed root to them. If you read Hermann Gilliomee’s interesting (though biased) book “The Afrikaners,” you’ll discover and learn that the ancestors of the most influential group of people in South Africa today, nay, the people who literally MADE South Africa the nation it is today, were often mixed race people who were the children of interracial unions between (generally) white men and nonwhite women. The first people to call themselves Afrikaners were these mixed race children of such relationships, with their version or accent of Dutch becoming, in time, Afrikaans. Take a look at any of the birth and marital records of the old Cape Colony from the 1650s and onwards, and you’ll notice many, many marriages between white men and nonwhite women, and sometimes, even nonwhite men to white women. An example of this is the marriage of Frenchwoman Marguerite de Savoye (possibly a Huguenot) to an Indian named Christoffel Snyman. I often wonder if the marriage of Bezel Muhammad and Petronella van Doorn in James A. Michener’s “Covenant” was based on this marriage. I do know that he did lots of research for the novel, and had the help of South African Errol Uys. The story of the van Doorns is merely the story of one family (and two others, the Nxumalos and Saltwoods, representing the black and Anglo communities) and its struggles with coming to accept the truth of their origins. Note that in the novel, the main family are Afrikaners of Dutch, German, and Arab descent, with added dosages across the generations of English, French Huguenot, black, Spanish, and other ancestries along the way. Though the family identifies as white, they are very Middle Eastern in appearance, which is quite ironic when one considers that the little girl who is voted in as Colored or mixed race looks mot much different from the members of the van Doorn family, as does another young female character, twenty-year-old Colored coed Heather Botha. When Detlev and his colleague Judge Leopold van Valck discover that they are related to the accused little girl, they have the shock of their life, Leopold more so because he finds out that he himself is not as white as he thinks he is, having Middle Eastern roots via the wife of one of his ancestors, Fatima Muhammad, great-granddaughter of van Doorn family patriarch Willem van Doorn. Thus, not only is Judge van Valck related to Petra, he is related to his colleague, too. In bed the night of the event, he asks his wife whether he is truly white, and she says yes because of his fingernails! By the late 1970s, Detlev’s granddaughter Sannie tells her American suitor to NEVER reveal to anyone the truth of her family’s roots, for she too looks very Arabic in spite of her public claims to be purely Afrikaans (even though she’s half-English via her mother). A fascinating book!
Also, former President F. W. de Klerk had Indian forebears, as well as black ones. Paul Kruger was of German, Dutch, French, and Spanish ancestry, with added dosages of Indian and Arab roots (he descended from two Arab sisters). He also counted the black woman Krotoa as a forebear. It was through Krotoa that Kruger, de Klerk, Smuts, and many other Boer illustrados were related. Krotoa Goringhaicona was the wife of Dutchman Peter van Meerhof, and was the first recorded marriage at the Cape not long after Jan van Riebieeck’s arrival in 1652. Abagond should do a post on SA and the Afrikaners’ origins. He’d be surprised!
LikeLike
Abagond, if you’d like, I can write posts on the Boer Republics, the Great Trek, and some great Boer leaders like Pretorius and Kruger.
LikeLike
Abagond, let him do his thing. You invited him, the least you can do is let him speak his mind freely. It will be fun to try to find how much bs can be packed in 500 words a day.
Paul, I’m still waiting for you to tell me how 1/2, 3/4, and 7/8 whites can be so vastly superior to 8/8 whites.
To complicate your task, I’d like to know how 8/8 blacks such as Gannibal and Ambar(https://abagond.wordpress.com/2017/06/01/malik-ambar/) managed to surpass most 8/8 whites and Asians based on your claim of inherent white/Asian intellectual superiority!
LikeLike
@ Everett F. Pomare
Wow, this a this is a very interesting and revealing statement!
And one would be pressed to ask where were the … well, natives of the place when that herculean task of building a nation was taking place!
Food for thought.
It seems the same ideology all over again: Blacks in America HAVEN’T contributed to the building of America. Yes, Whites and … some mixed race individuals/communities did it! Blacks were, all that time, watching the Grand Work of half a millennium, being built, the USA. And suddenly they claim… well… things of the good life to enjoy!
*Note –
Actually some people claim that in Africa the White man didn’t erect anything without using intensively the labor of the natives. Maybe they know nothing about the truth! Just maybe…
An interesting test-case to the proposition of White resourcefulness would be Orania, because there they want to build something without the concurs of native hands. Ok, we will watch closely the process. Maybe in a few decades we will see a proof of concept.
P.S.:
I apologize to our dear host for contributing to the obvious derailing this thread. I stop here.
LikeLike
@ Paul Kruger
Pick one and email me 480 to 520 words. And any picture you want to go with it. I am at abagond at gmail.
LikeLike