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The following is the second chapter of a soon to be published book about the history of South Africa and the origins of Apartheid. The preface, the Introduction, and Chapter One were published in previous issues of the journal. The book is titled: Britain's Bastard Child. The author is Psychologist and Psychohistorian, Helene Lewis, who has been doing research for the book for the last fifteen years.
The book seeks to understand the psychohistorical factors that influenced the thinking and behavior of the European settlers who emigrated to South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries and came to be known as Afrikaners. The intergenerational transmission and re-enactment of trauma are seen as the pathway that led from the trauma induced by the Anglo-Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century to the establishment of Apartheid in 1948.
Social Darwinism was the context from which British Jingoism arose and the Anglo Boer War resulted. The British concluded that they were the fittest in the competitive struggle between the races and so would justifiably conquer and rule over lesser (sic) nations and groups.
John Atkinson Hobson, British economist, early socialist and war-correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in South Africa during the Anglo Boer War, wrote in 1902:
the Englishman believes he is a more excellent type than any other type; he believes he is better able to assimilate any special virtues others may have; he believes that this character gives him a right to rule which no other can possess.1
In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by the means of Natural Selection, and out of this grew a new way of looking at humankind. The concept 'survival of the fittest' became, according to America's most prominent social Darwinist (1880), William Graham Summer, 'the ultimate explanation and rationalisation for the world as it was', says Peter Watson, research academic and author, in his seminal book A Terrible Beauty (2004).2
Darwin's theory of evolution was extended to human societies as social Darwinism argued that humans, like plants and animals, compete in their struggle for survival. In layman's language: the law of the jungle rules. Despite the popularity of the Origin of the Species (a best seller in England) Darwin actually applied his...